The Charlie Kirk Show - Why Christians, Conservatives, and Eric Metaxas Are 'Fish Out of Water'

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, special episode today with Eric Metaxas, best-selling author, wrote Bonhoeffer.

00:00:05.000 Dear friend of mine, you guys are going to love it.

00:00:06.000 We have a lot of fun.

00:00:07.000 We talk about Christianity, his story, and so much more in his new book, Fish Out of Water.

00:00:12.000 You're going to hear us talk about Mike Lindell and My Pillow.

00:00:14.000 And just a reminder, when you go to mypillow.com, use the promo code Kirk, K-I-R-K, promo code Kirk.

00:00:21.000 Help out, Mike Lindell.

00:00:22.000 Get a pillow, get a sheet, get something like that.

00:00:24.000 Mypillow.com, promo code Kirk.

00:00:27.000 Eric Metaxas is here.

00:00:29.000 Before I say here we go, email us your questions freedom at charliekirk.com and support us at charliekirk.com slash support.

00:00:36.000 Here we go.

00:00:38.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:40.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.

00:00:42.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:45.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:48.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:49.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:50.000 His spirit, his love of this country.

00:00:52.000 He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.

00:00:59.000 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.

00:01:08.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:16.000 Hey, everybody.

00:01:17.000 Welcome to this very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:20.000 I finally get to interview him, the great one, His Excellency.

00:01:24.000 I am honored to have him on the show, and he has a new book out, Eric Metaxas.

00:01:28.000 How are you doing?

00:01:29.000 Doing swell.

00:01:30.000 I'm talking to Charlie Kirk.

00:01:31.000 How are you?

00:01:32.000 This is fun.

00:01:32.000 It's always fun to talk to you, Charlie.

00:01:34.000 There's certain people that just cheer me up.

00:01:36.000 Thank you for being one of those people.

00:01:38.000 Yada, yada, yada.

00:01:39.000 It's always the same, but only you would understand that reference.

00:01:42.000 So actually, I thought of you yesterday when I was doing some podcast prep, and we were talking about Myanmar.

00:01:50.000 And I said, it will always be Burma to me.

00:01:53.000 Do you get the reference?

00:01:55.000 Jay Peterman catalog.

00:01:57.000 Well done.

00:01:57.000 See, this is why you're a New York Times bestseller.

00:02:00.000 Well, actually, now you don't know this, but the book that is launching today, which is called Fish Out of Water, a Search for the Meaning of Life, in here, I talk about meeting Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld with Seinfeld.

00:02:15.000 It's in the book, and it's true, and it's insane.

00:02:19.000 But yes, you and I are talking about Seinfeld.

00:02:21.000 People maybe didn't get those references, but right over there.

00:02:25.000 Yeah, I thought I was going to be a writer for Seinfeld, but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves.

00:02:30.000 No, it's actually right into it.

00:02:31.000 I want to talk about the book.

00:02:33.000 So it's The Fish Out of Water, The Search for Meaning.

00:02:36.000 It reminded me of Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

00:02:39.000 I've only read the title.

00:02:41.000 I haven't.

00:02:41.000 This is much better, much better written and much better jokes.

00:02:44.000 Franklin says nothing.

00:02:46.000 Probably more of a funny story.

00:02:48.000 He doesn't know how to tell a funny story.

00:02:50.000 No, this is called, it's called Fish Out of Water, A Search for the Meaning of Life, because it tells the story of my early years.

00:03:01.000 I was really not, it's not like I was like looking for the meaning of life, really.

00:03:07.000 I was like many people kind of drifting along, not sure what to think or who to take seriously.

00:03:13.000 I didn't want to be a religious fanatic.

00:03:14.000 And so avoiding people who were very religious.

00:03:18.000 And at the same time, after graduating from Yale, I floundered and went through a lot of real pain where I kind of thought, what am I doing with life?

00:03:27.000 And I was really in a place where God kind of had me cornered.

00:03:32.000 And so the end of the book, it's only the end of the book.

00:03:36.000 There's this epiphany where I, you know, you don't really know what's happening sometimes in life, but God is there and he wants us to know him personally.

00:03:48.000 And so looking back now and telling the story, it's just, it's kind of amazing to me, but it's not the kind of thing you could see while it was happening.

00:03:56.000 So I wrote the book from the point of view of myself at the time.

00:03:59.000 It's not like I look back and I comment.

00:04:02.000 I just tell it, you know, from the point of view of the person there.

00:04:06.000 I tell my memories and stuff.

00:04:07.000 A lot of it is funny because there's some insane, almost unbelievable stories, but they're all, every syllable is true.

00:04:16.000 And a lot of it is, you know, a little poignant and wistful.

00:04:21.000 So did you find the meaning of life?

00:04:25.000 I did.

00:04:26.000 I did.

00:04:27.000 I don't want to say too much, but you always hear these clichés, right?

00:04:33.000 Like you don't find God.

00:04:34.000 God finds you.

00:04:36.000 And I think that the story of my search for the meaning of life, it is like that.

00:04:43.000 And the ending of it, which, because it's not really a religious book, it's not a spiritual memoir.

00:04:49.000 It's a memoir, which I think of as a literary memoir.

00:04:52.000 There are notes of, you know, God and stuff through it, but just kind of like the way there are for anybody in life.

00:04:58.000 You meet people that are, but it's not until the end that God essentially takes the different strands of my life and weaves together something and blows my mind.

00:05:11.000 I mean, it literally changed me overnight.

00:05:14.000 It was like, you know, a miraculous reveal that you're just speechless and you don't know what to do.

00:05:22.000 It was just God revealed himself to me in a way that was so personal.

00:05:26.000 I said, I do have to tell this story because people need to know God wants to reach us, but he's not a religious God.

00:05:32.000 He's the God of all of reality.

00:05:34.000 And so it's never what you think it is.

00:05:37.000 It's never, you know, so I've become very serious about faith, but it's really being serious about reality because it's not like some version of reality or this is my philosophy.

00:05:48.000 Like, who cares?

00:05:49.000 I want to know what is real and what is reality.

00:05:51.000 So the meaning of life, the reason I call it a search for the meaning of life, not a search for God, is I wasn't looking for God.

00:05:56.000 I was just looking for like, what's my, what's the point of my existence?

00:06:00.000 What's the meaning of my life?

00:06:01.000 And in the course of that, I discovered some other stuff.

00:06:05.000 So it's kind of, you know, I want it to be something that everyone, people who are not on the same page as we are politically or theologically, I wrote this book for them, to be perfectly blunt.

00:06:15.000 This is the kind of book you can give to somebody with whom you disagree on a lot of stuff.

00:06:18.000 And I think that because of the humor and the weird stuff and that, you know, I think people will track and will enjoy it just as a read.

00:06:25.000 You're a prolific author.

00:06:27.000 You wrote Bonhoeffer.

00:06:28.000 It's still selling in languages all across the country.

00:06:31.000 You wrote Miracles.

00:06:32.000 You wrote, I can't remember.

00:06:34.000 It's either In God We Trust or Last Best Hope or.

00:06:37.000 Oh, if you can keep it.

00:06:39.000 See, I get it confused with Prager's.

00:06:41.000 Anyway, phenomenal.

00:06:43.000 Dare you.

00:06:43.000 No, it's if you can keep it.

00:06:44.000 Yeah.

00:06:45.000 How dare I compare you to Prager?

00:06:47.000 That would be a terrible book.

00:06:47.000 Unbelievable.

00:06:48.000 He's much taller.

00:06:50.000 He writes Bible commentaries, who does things like that.

00:06:53.000 But this book, you've mentioned it's a labor of love, and it's somewhat of an autobiography.

00:06:58.000 Is that fair to say?

00:07:00.000 Well, it's a memoir.

00:07:01.000 It's not really a full autobiography.

00:07:03.000 It only goes up to around my 25th birthday, which was when I had this, you know, insane dream that totally, totally, totally blew my mind and changed my world forever.

00:07:14.000 I mean, you can't make that stuff up, you know, like there's no way you can make that up.

00:07:18.000 So, but it's a memoir.

00:07:20.000 I talk about the immigrant experience growing up as the son of European immigrants.

00:07:24.000 My mom and dad, who are still with us, thank the Lord, are, you know, my dad came from Greece.

00:07:29.000 My mom came from Germany.

00:07:30.000 They met in an English class in New York City. 1.00

00:07:32.000 And so trying to figure out who you are when your dad is Greek and your mother's German, you don't really fit in anywhere, which is why I say fish out of water. 0.98

00:07:39.000 I was a fish out of water.

00:07:40.000 I'm among the Greek community.

00:07:41.000 There's a lot of funny Greek stuff in there.

00:07:44.000 But, you know, I never quite fit in because we didn't speak Greek at home.

00:07:47.000 My mother wasn't cooking Greek meals every night.

00:07:50.000 And then when I got around the American kids, you know, in Connecticut, and I never quite fit in because my parents are European immigrants and, you know, we had this kind of European thing going on.

00:07:59.000 And then when I went to Yale, I was kind of a working class kid.

00:08:02.000 And so that was kind of a theme for me.

00:08:05.000 So it's about finding our identities.

00:08:07.000 And in the course of finding our identities, sort of whether you're witting or unwitting in the process, you're really trying to find out who you are ultimately, which is a way of finding God, so to speak.

00:08:22.000 And so it's kind of woven together.

00:08:24.000 But I think it's a good read.

00:08:26.000 And that's the best thing for me is that it's something I think people will enjoy reading.

00:08:32.000 Because I always want my, I don't want my books to be turgid and difficult.

00:08:36.000 I want them to be something that you kind of can't put down.

00:08:38.000 And I think there's enough funny stuff.

00:08:41.000 And again, it's all true.

00:08:43.000 So, and as Woody Allen said, well, he didn't say it, but he wrote it in one of his films.

00:08:48.000 Comedy is tragedy plus time.

00:08:49.000 So there must be a lot of tragedy in that book, Eric.

00:08:53.000 Yeah, it's, but it's totally true.

00:08:56.000 Like, there's stuff that happened to me that I look back on it.

00:09:00.000 But no, no, no.

00:09:01.000 But what I'm saying is like, this is only 25 years of my life.

00:09:04.000 But because I was very young in certain stories, it's funnier because I was so naive that I did things or didn't do things.

00:09:13.000 There's an insane chapter with this Italian guy on a train going through Italy. 0.84

00:09:19.000 People won't believe it. 1.00

00:09:20.000 Every syllable is true. 0.99

00:09:22.000 And I look back on it now and I think, Eric, you idiot, what like, why didn't you, if you read the story, you'll see, but it's, it's the naivete that I had back then, I wasn't, you know, as sophisticated as Charlie Kirk at that age. 0.99

00:09:38.000 Right. 0.99

00:09:38.000 And honestly, that to me becomes high comedy because it's true. 0.99

00:09:42.000 It's not like it was, I wasn't finding it funny at the time.

00:09:45.000 And in retrospect, it's insane.

00:09:48.000 So looking back at some of the lessons that are derived from this book without spoiling the book, we have a lot of young people that listen to this.

00:09:55.000 What?

00:09:56.000 Yeah.

00:09:56.000 What if you could go back and tell your 20-something, 20-year-old something something, your 20-year-old self-something, I guess is the way to word it.

00:10:05.000 Or there's a lot of young people, and we get this, Eric, a lot.

00:10:08.000 We get thousands of emails a week of students and young people that are honestly searching direction.

00:10:14.000 The academy has become a place absent of beauty or truth.

00:10:17.000 It has become an anger-filled rage postmodern just circus.

00:10:23.000 It's a joke, Charlie.

00:10:25.000 It has become a screaming joke.

00:10:27.000 It was always bad, but it has become a total parody of itself.

00:10:33.000 If you can't see that, you're not even trying.

00:10:36.000 It's become nothing that we ever dreamt.

00:10:39.000 As bad as it got, it has gotten worse.

00:10:41.000 So, yeah.

00:10:42.000 And look, that's, but actually, that's part of my story.

00:10:44.000 It's like here I am at Yale University.

00:10:46.000 I grew up with working class European immigrants who didn't go to college. 1.00

00:10:50.000 So I go to this place thinking they're going to teach me about life. 0.97

00:10:53.000 These are the elites.

00:10:54.000 These are the people who grew up with money and with all the, you know, so suddenly I'm among them.

00:10:59.000 And what I discovered was shocking.

00:11:03.000 In other words, here I am, not sure what my worldview is.

00:11:06.000 I wasn't like clearly a conservative or any kind of a Christian.

00:11:10.000 I didn't know what I believed, but I was suddenly surrounded by people for whom life clearly had no meaning.

00:11:17.000 They'd kind of settled on the idea that to think about meaning or truth or those things is kind of old-fashioned.

00:11:24.000 We don't believe in that anymore.

00:11:26.000 We kind of believe life has no meaning and we're kind of grooving on the rubble trying to have a good time.

00:11:29.000 We're Jacques Dr. People.

00:11:30.000 We're postmodern Yale's.

00:11:32.000 Come on.

00:11:32.000 What do you actually believe in this God?

00:11:33.000 Well, that's, but that's exactly, that's exactly right.

00:11:35.000 And I do, I met Jacques Derrida.

00:11:37.000 That's why I met.

00:11:38.000 Well, now I have to read it.

00:11:40.000 No, I'm not kidding.

00:11:40.000 You're not going to believe it.

00:11:41.000 I met you.

00:11:42.000 Jerry David, Jacques Derrida.

00:11:43.000 What do you force gump?

00:11:44.000 Like, I mean, you've been.

00:11:45.000 No, it's kind of weird.

00:11:46.000 I kind of met a lot of weird people.

00:11:48.000 I met Vincent Price.

00:11:49.000 Met Philistine Mandela and you know people and the Spanish Inquisition.

00:11:54.000 Besides that, you've lived a very uneventful life.

00:11:57.000 No no, there's an anecdote in here with Jacques Derrida.

00:12:00.000 I'm not making it up.

00:12:01.000 I did meet him and I escorted him.

00:12:03.000 Yeah, I held an umbrella for him.

00:12:05.000 I actually wrote a poem about it, but I didn't put the poem in the book.

00:12:07.000 The poem is on my website, but it's totally true and I but I confronted this at YALE that this I did.

00:12:14.000 I shouldn't say I confronted it, I bumped into it.

00:12:17.000 It confronted me, this Postmodern you know, post meaning world and coming from a working class family where my parents taught me and this is a big part of the book they taught me to hate communism.

00:12:29.000 They taught me to love freedom.

00:12:30.000 They taught me to love America.

00:12:32.000 They weren't really like big about it, it was just who they were.

00:12:34.000 They'd experienced the evil of totalitarian governments and and a communism.

00:12:41.000 My parents had lived this and so that was part of who I was growing up.

00:12:46.000 I mean, in the Cold War, I had no doubt that that's the evil empire.

00:12:49.000 That's evil.

00:12:50.000 And we're the good guys because we, even in the most basic way, believe in god, believe in freedom, believe in the sanctity of the individual and I I got that from my mom and dad, just from who they were.

00:13:00.000 So suddenly i'm at YALE bumping into people that they don't, they don't get, that they don't believe in good or evil, you know, they just don't know.

00:13:07.000 And that's when I got really puzzled and really like I wasn't just, I wasn't sure where to go, where to turn, and there's a couple of there's just some good stuff in here about what happened to me at YALE.

00:13:20.000 But then I graduated, just lost, like thinking I, you know, and what's interesting, and a lot of people who listen to you and know you, they won't have this problem.

00:13:30.000 But my problem was I bought into the demonization of conservatives and evangelical, serious Christians.

00:13:40.000 In other words, I was one of those people on the campus who I was not active in persecuting them, but I I didn't say anything. 1.00

00:13:49.000 I kind of went along with the crowd that says conservatives are like fascist jerks and uh, Christians are insane and they're you know. 1.00

00:13:58.000 I went along with that basically and by not saying anything. 0.99

00:14:02.000 And I graduated and suddenly I didn't know where I was and I had been trained to look down my nose at conservatives, to look down my nose at patriots and definitely to look down my nose at people who took the Bible seriously and when I think how that hurt me.

00:14:20.000 I was.

00:14:20.000 I bought the lie, and many people today have bought the lie that anybody who takes the Bible really seriously must be half nuts.

00:14:27.000 Anybody who, you know, believes in god and country, they must be nuts. 0.84

00:14:31.000 I bought that lie and so I bring that perspective in a way.

00:14:34.000 I'll tell you I wrote this book for people who don't agree with me, as you know.

00:14:38.000 I'm hoping people who do agree with me will buy the book and give it to those people and say, just see what you think of this, because this is not uh, an apology for the conservative worldview or for faith, it's just a story.

00:14:50.000 And just see if you track with it, see what happens, because it's just my story and I I really do feel, speaking to young people today, if you understand That being a conservative is not just the right worldview, but it's going to help you and other people.

00:15:08.000 How can you not care about these things?

00:15:10.000 How can you say, oh, I don't want to bring that up because somebody might look at me funny?

00:15:13.000 And that goes double for the Christian faith.

00:15:16.000 I say to people, God is real.

00:15:18.000 The only reason conservatism even makes sense is because of God.

00:15:21.000 So you can blow off God, but you're being intellectually dishonest.

00:15:24.000 The God of the Bible is the one who determines reality, and conservatism is a response to reality, whereas the utopianist leftist view is not a response to reality.

00:15:35.000 It's kicking against the goads of reality. 0.97

00:15:37.000 And I guess finally, you know, I would say that today, the one thing we have today, which we did not have when I was a young man, is today we have people who talk about being Christians who are woke, foolish young people. 0.91

00:15:51.000 They are very confused about what the Bible says about things. 0.88

00:15:56.000 And they have a kind of angry, leftist, puritanical streak.

00:16:03.000 We all know this.

00:16:04.000 And that, you know, that kind of feeds the mobs of the French Revolution and any utopian, anything that puts something in place of God as a religion.

00:16:11.000 And there are a lot of people who call themselves Christians who don't understand what Christianity has been historically, who don't love America, who don't.

00:16:20.000 And that to me is tragic.

00:16:21.000 And we need to try to love those people, not just argue with them, but understand that I was one of those people.

00:16:29.000 I was just drifting.

00:16:29.000 I was just lost and I didn't know where to turn.

00:16:32.000 And they're in pain, those people.

00:16:34.000 A lot of them, you know, maybe not yet, but they will be.

00:16:37.000 So we have lots of people that listen to us that admit they're kind of drifting.

00:16:41.000 Our program, I think, does some good for them, but they have gone through such incredible indoctrination for years that they almost are conditioned not to believe that God is real, that the creator, a creator wants to, our creator wants to come in a relationship with them.

00:17:00.000 What do you think young people can do to kind of jolt themselves back into a sense of direction?

00:17:06.000 I think that you cannot have direction without meaning.

00:17:09.000 Obviously, you talk about that.

00:17:11.000 But specifically, what do you think is missing most with this generation of young people?

00:17:17.000 Well, first, you said they're almost conditioned, and I would say they are totally conditioned.

00:17:25.000 You know what it is?

00:17:26.000 It's hard for us to imagine.

00:17:28.000 It's kind of like if you're in a movie and somebody says, like, you know, everybody there, they're all pod people.

00:17:33.000 They're all aliens.

00:17:34.000 They're all what?

00:17:35.000 You'd be like, come on, what are you talking about?

00:17:37.000 What are you talking about?

00:17:38.000 That's effectively where we are in life.

00:17:40.000 In other words, the truth of God is sort of shocking.

00:17:45.000 And it takes time to wrap your head around it.

00:17:48.000 That we're in an eternal battle.

00:17:50.000 God is real.

00:17:51.000 Hell is real.

00:17:52.000 There's right and wrong, whatever.

00:17:54.000 It's really easy to drift along with the American zeitgeist that says, you know, everything's cool and it's not.

00:18:02.000 And so when you say, how can you shake people?

00:18:05.000 I think ultimately God has to do that.

00:18:09.000 But I would say I was not exposed to anybody who was, you know, reputable or intellectually impressive, who was serious about his or her faith. 1.00

00:18:26.000 I had the, I bought into this lie that it's only like these jugheads who, you know, they're not that bright and they're not that philosophically astute and they bought into this stuff. 1.00

00:18:37.000 I hadn't encountered, you know, C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton or whoever. 1.00

00:18:43.000 There's a million books by a million people.

00:18:45.000 Those people didn't exist.

00:18:46.000 They were kept from me.

00:18:47.000 So I was conditioned.

00:18:49.000 And that happens in the academy.

00:18:51.000 It happens in college, but it also happens in the culture, the culture.

00:18:54.000 And now we're seeing it in spades with, you know, Twitter and Facebook is shadow banning me, whatever.

00:18:58.000 They're basically saying, we don't want to hear that stuff because it cuts against the narrative.

00:19:02.000 Well, that's been going on forever.

00:19:04.000 If you turned on TV in the 70s, the 80s, when I was growing up, you would never see anything that I have seen since I came to faith.

00:19:12.000 Since I came to faith, I've met these unbelievable people.

00:19:16.000 I've interviewed some of them at Socrates in the city, scientific geniuses who are more sure of faith in the Bible than we are.

00:19:24.000 These are the smartest people on the planet. 0.53

00:19:26.000 Those people have been whitewashed or airbrushed out of the culture in a Stalin-esque way.

00:19:35.000 They don't exist.

00:19:36.000 So when I started bumping into them, I thought, how is it possible that I've gone through most of my life?

00:19:41.000 I never heard of, you know, again, C.S. Lewis is usually the easiest one, but there are a host of books and things that I read.

00:19:50.000 And I like to have a lot of these people on my radio program today to introduce people, but they're these amazing scientists, these amazing thinkers, historians, and on and on.

00:19:58.000 I was not exposed to them.

00:20:00.000 Yes.

00:20:00.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:20:01.000 Vichelle Mangalwadi.

00:20:02.000 That's right.

00:20:03.000 He, I mean, there's so many, though, and they were utterly non-existent in the culture and in college for sure.

00:20:13.000 You didn't even look at that stuff.

00:20:15.000 But it goes beyond that, Charlie, because also in many churches, they don't exist.

00:20:19.000 Many churches are kind of happy-clappy.

00:20:21.000 They're not really feeding the ideas.

00:20:24.000 We need to know this is true.

00:20:26.000 This is not just what my parents do, or it's just kind of, it's good.

00:20:29.000 It's good.

00:20:30.000 Who cares if it's good?

00:20:31.000 It's true.

00:20:32.000 It is right and true.

00:20:34.000 That's what, you know, we need to understand that that is true.

00:20:37.000 But I'll say this to scare people.

00:20:41.000 Not only is hell real, but like the devil is real.

00:20:45.000 And if you ever encounter evil, you will run to Jesus.

00:20:51.000 Most people have never encountered evil.

00:20:53.000 We live in kind of this happy, successful society.

00:20:55.000 Even at its worst, everything's great.

00:20:57.000 If you encounter real evil, you will run to Jesus because you will understand he is the antithesis of that.

00:21:05.000 He is a goodness that I can't even look at.

00:21:07.000 He's so good.

00:21:08.000 The love and goodness of God is unbelievable.

00:21:11.000 And I think that dealing with evil, understanding that there are dark forces, and I don't just mean socialism, although, of course, it's at the root of all that stuff.

00:21:21.000 The dark forces are at the root of all bad political ideas, but the dark forces themselves, the satanic evil, we don't talk about that.

00:21:29.000 And I want to say to people, that is real.

00:21:33.000 And that was part of my story is bumping into actual evil.

00:21:37.000 I made the mistake of watching The Exorcist when I was like 17 years old.

00:21:41.000 And it was so horrifying that briefly I turned toward God, but then there was no follow-up and I kind of drifted away.

00:21:49.000 But if you see real evil, you'll understand I want God.

00:21:52.000 I don't just want to have pleasure. 1.00

00:21:53.000 I don't want to be like an idiot just having a good time. 0.99

00:21:56.000 People need to take that seriously. 0.98

00:21:57.000 And by the way, if you don't take it seriously, you know, to guilt trip people, there are millions of people around the world that are depending on us in America to live out the truth.

00:22:08.000 And if you kind of take a pass on that, you know, you're, you don't care about those people.

00:22:12.000 If you care about people around the world who don't have any kind of liberty or even possibility of thriving, then, you know, where are you coming from?

00:22:22.000 And I think growing up is part of that, realizing that I've got to choose in this battle.

00:22:28.000 Where do I stand?

00:22:29.000 What is true?

00:22:30.000 And as I say, in some ways, my parents helped me to see that.

00:22:32.000 They laid a foundation, but I almost really missed it because as I say, I went to Yale and I just got in with a crowd that didn't even give it the time of day briefly.

00:22:44.000 So I want to focus on something you mentioned that is a big focus of mine lately.

00:22:50.000 And I come from the political world as a Christian looking into the Christian world, whereas most people are in the Christian world looking into the political world.

00:23:00.000 Right.

00:23:00.000 And so I am still learning and still trying to understand the Christian world.

00:23:08.000 And I'm struggling with a lot, Eric.

00:23:10.000 I really am. 0.99

00:23:12.000 And I am so stunned at how weak Christians are, especially in America, about how social justice they have become. 0.98

00:23:20.000 That's JWBLM Incorporated woke. 0.99

00:23:23.000 I'll use an example.

00:23:24.000 A church you and I both spoke at in the fall is Calvary Chapel San Jose Mike McClure.

00:23:30.000 He has remained open.

00:23:31.000 You're scheduled to speak there again, I believe, later this month.

00:23:35.000 And he has remained open since last spring.

00:23:38.000 He is facing $1.7 million in fines.

00:23:41.000 The bank threatened to pull his note.

00:23:43.000 No other church around him is supporting him.

00:23:46.000 And very few churches in the country are even aware that a pastor is fighting the government for the ecclesia.

00:23:52.000 And so I'm just looking around and I see, for example, in just the Houston general area, billions of dollars in buildings, hundreds of millions in dollars for Christian Incorporated.

00:24:03.000 Yet here is Mike McClure in San Jose, which is just basically the same as doing a mission trip overseas, considering the Christian to citizen ratio in San Jose is probably lower than most totalitarian dictatorships.

00:24:16.000 And yet most people are not supporting him or even aware of it.

00:24:20.000 In conservative world, Eric, when an example, one of our turning point USA kids gets in a controversy on campus.

00:24:26.000 That person's on Tucker Carlson the next night or Sean Hannity show doing a full media circuit.

00:24:31.000 There's articles written everywhere.

00:24:32.000 There's donations coming in.

00:24:34.000 We congregate together.

00:24:35.000 We have a mobilized action.

00:24:37.000 We're calling donors.

00:24:38.000 In the Christian world, when a pastor decides to open their church, there's crickets and pastors come out against him.

00:24:44.000 How are we supposed to make sense of this?

00:24:45.000 Why are Christians so weak? 1.00

00:24:48.000 This is complicated. 1.00

00:24:50.000 I mean, in my Bonhoeffer book, I saw this happen in the 30s in Germany, right?

00:24:56.000 Good people looked the other way because it was too steep of a hill to climb right now.

00:25:04.000 We're going to wait this one out.

00:25:06.000 We're not going to die on that hill.

00:25:08.000 That's human nature.

00:25:10.000 We're all, you know, sinners. 0.71

00:25:14.000 We're all cowards in some ways.

00:25:16.000 And to really be courageous when other people aren't being courageous, it costs us something.

00:25:21.000 And I learned that in the last whatever number of months standing up for Trump and this election fraud, which I saw, I just thought, how come everybody in America is not screaming?

00:25:31.000 This is not okay.

00:25:33.000 You and I have had many conversations about it.

00:25:35.000 Yeah.

00:25:35.000 Yes.

00:25:36.000 And a lot of people were quiet.

00:25:37.000 And I thought, how the heck can you be quiet?

00:25:40.000 This is like evil.

00:25:42.000 I mean, look, if this guy won, show me your cards.

00:25:46.000 Like let everybody see that this was on the up and up.

00:25:49.000 And because you're not doing that, because you're doing the opposite, you're making me very suspicious.

00:25:54.000 In fact, I know you're hiding something.

00:25:56.000 Well, many people I just felt just kind of look the other way or they're like, well, I don't want to get into that.

00:26:03.000 That's our nature, right, Charlie?

00:26:06.000 And I think that in the church, the biggest lie, and I bought into this for years, is that we want to be friendly to everybody.

00:26:14.000 We want to, because we believe in evangelism, and we want to be there for people who are on the other side politically.

00:26:22.000 Now, that's true, but there are times when you have no choice but to fight.

00:26:27.000 Bonhoeffer saw the moment and he said, now I'm going to fight and I'm going to try to get the church to fight with me.

00:26:36.000 They didn't get it.

00:26:37.000 They got it too late.

00:26:38.000 And then they thought, oh, if we had fought when he told us now is the time, we wouldn't be here.

00:26:44.000 That's where the American church is today.

00:26:45.000 You've got a lot of people thinking, not yet, not yet.

00:26:48.000 I don't want to be labeled a conspiracy theorist or I don't want to be labeled. 0.99

00:26:52.000 That's really gutless and it's sad and it's pathetic. 0.97

00:26:54.000 But I listen, I think God is the one who's going to deal with this. 0.99

00:26:57.000 God is going to deal.

00:26:58.000 A lot of these megachurches and places that have been shy about this, you know, you want to kind of ask them, what gospel is it that you're preaching?

00:27:07.000 Like what problem are you feeding your people?

00:27:10.000 When evil comes, when government comes and wants to find you and do these things, what fake God are you going to turn to?

00:27:20.000 What happy, clappy God are you going to do?

00:27:22.000 God is real.

00:27:23.000 And he's looking at us right now.

00:27:26.000 And I really do think that this is something that some people aren't going to learn.

00:27:31.000 They're going to get it wrong.

00:27:32.000 But I never dreamt until the last four years, roughly, that I would see so many so-called Christians not understand that we're in a battle.

00:27:45.000 There's good and there's evil.

00:27:47.000 And you've got to figure out how you want to, how you want to go.

00:27:51.000 And if you say, well, I don't like that guy.

00:27:53.000 He's got a lot of tattoos.

00:27:54.000 It's like, well, here's your choice.

00:27:56.000 There's the guy without the tattoos and there's a guy with the tattoos.

00:28:00.000 Now you've got to pick one of those guys.

00:28:01.000 You cannot sit on your hands.

00:28:03.000 You're going to pick one of those guys.

00:28:04.000 And if you don't pick the guy that you hate, the other guy is going to win.

00:28:10.000 You're going to have to figure this out.

00:28:12.000 There is no third option.

00:28:14.000 A lot of people are sitting on the sides.

00:28:15.000 They think, I don't need to get into the battle right now.

00:28:18.000 And the fact is you are in the battle.

00:28:19.000 If you're not fighting, then you're allowing dark forces to win, which is what is happening.

00:28:25.000 And so that is one component of it.

00:28:27.000 A lot of people say the church should not be involved in politics. 0.98

00:28:30.000 Christians will stay out of it.

00:28:31.000 And you and I have talked about why that's wrong from a biblical nature extensively. 0.99

00:28:36.000 However, Eric, it's very interesting.

00:28:38.000 The people that are in the middle use that as an excuse, never use that as an accusation against churches that go woke or liberal.

00:28:45.000 For example, many of these mega churches say they're only, a lot of the megachurches say, well, we're not a political church, but they have problems with really churches becoming conservative, not churches becoming liberal.

00:28:57.000 I have recently got into a, I guess you could call it a Twitter feud, and it never meant to be anything personal against the rapper Lecrae, who allegedly people like his music.

00:29:10.000 I saw that actually this morning.

00:29:12.000 I totally forgot.

00:29:13.000 Yeah.

00:29:14.000 And so he responded to me and just based, and I don't want to mischaracterize it, but I basically said, how does no one see how this is not racist and white supremacist for a white guy to say a black guy shouldn't be allowed to perform at church?

00:29:27.000 And of course, nothing that I said was racially motivated or charged.

00:29:30.000 I just don't think he should be able to perform at church because he endorsed the murder of children, right?

00:29:35.000 That's a basic thing.

00:29:37.000 He doesn't see it that way.

00:29:38.000 However, Lecrae, who is still on K-Love, despite, so this is interesting.

00:29:43.000 I called out K-Love.

00:29:44.000 K-Love did not.

00:29:47.000 K-Love got a lot of calls from people because they said, oh, no, Lecrae is not part of our network.

00:29:52.000 They literally have a webpage on Lecrae on K-Love.com.

00:29:55.000 So that goes to show how corrupt they have become.

00:29:58.000 Anyway, so you have a lot of things going on here.

00:30:02.000 First of all, I think, I mean, I have met Lecrae a number of times.

00:30:08.000 I think, you know what it is, Charlie?

00:30:10.000 And this is where we have to have grace.

00:30:11.000 There are a lot of people that are, they're straight up misled.

00:30:15.000 In other words, I think that this is kind of the problem is that the left is so vicious and belligerent that if you hesitate, they are, you know, you're dead.

00:30:30.000 Like you have to agree with them.

00:30:31.000 You have to, whatever.

00:30:32.000 And so the pressure being put on people like Lecrae, I'm not at all surprised in some ways that he would be confused about this or whatever.

00:30:43.000 I think he's a really good guy living, but we're living in really tough times and the pressure on somebody like that is horrifying.

00:30:51.000 You know what he did?

00:30:51.000 He went and did a campaign event for Raphael Warnock.

00:30:55.000 Well, no, look, obviously, you know where I stand on that, but I'm still saying that it's kind of no wonder because I really think that there's so many people that they really know not what they do.

00:31:10.000 They don't understand that this is about killing the unborn.

00:31:16.000 They don't understand who somebody like a Warnock really is or whatever.

00:31:19.000 Or everybody around them is telling them, no, no, no, he's cool.

00:31:22.000 He's cool.

00:31:23.000 It's okay.

00:31:24.000 And so I think it's correct.

00:31:26.000 My issue is when you mention Calove or whatever, the fact that they're not willing to take a stand that would matter.

00:31:34.000 In other words, that would say to somebody like LaCrae, listen, there's a price to be paid on either side.

00:31:40.000 Like you don't want to tick off the woke people.

00:31:42.000 Okay, that's fine.

00:31:43.000 But if you tick off these other people, you're also going to pay a price.

00:31:46.000 That to me is the issue is that we typically don't make people pay a price, which is why I've been so outspoken and enraged about the Mike Lindell thing.

00:31:54.000 All of the stores that have said we're going to throw him out, Kohl's, HEB stores, Wayfair stores, and Bed Bath and Beyond, no one should ever spend a penny in those stores ever again.

00:32:10.000 They should understand that if you want to play this game, you are anti-American.

00:32:15.000 That's number one.

00:32:16.000 And I will not shop in a store that is anti-American.

00:32:19.000 It's one thing to be un-American that is anti-American.

00:32:22.000 And they need to understand that if you do that in America, you're going to pay a price either way.

00:32:27.000 So you choose.

00:32:28.000 But typically, conservatives, Christians, they say, oh, I don't want to get involved in a boycott.

00:32:34.000 I love everybody. 0.99

00:32:35.000 You know, this blather. 1.00

00:32:36.000 It's just stupid. 1.00

00:32:37.000 Of course, you shouldn't shop in a store that has abrogated religious liberty, that has abrogated free speech. 1.00

00:32:44.000 These people are making money off of effectively Marxist ideas.

00:32:49.000 You can't let them make money.

00:32:50.000 You have to make them understand that in America, we play by these rules.

00:32:55.000 We need to let them know if you behave like that, you're going to pay a price.

00:32:59.000 And I ask everybody listening, those stores, remember Kohl's, Bed Bath and Beyond, HEB, and Mayfair, Wayfair.

00:33:07.000 They have done a terrible thing and they need to apologize to Mike Lindell.

00:33:10.000 Otherwise, never, never go to them again.

00:33:12.000 Well, and some of these stores, HEB, is owned by our own by conservatives.

00:33:17.000 It's amazing.

00:33:18.000 And yet they do whatever they want to do with no recourse at all whatsoever.

00:33:26.000 Are you guys sick of all the cancel culture?

00:33:28.000 Stand with one of the fighters, Mike Lindell, right now.

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00:34:26.000 He's a good American.

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00:34:28.000 Go to mypillow.com, promo code Kirk. 0.99

00:34:34.000 But Eric, I guess what I am confused about, which is what inspired the whole thing, is that just how indifferent Christians are to the downfall of the country, maybe I'm being too harsh on them. 1.00

00:34:46.000 Maybe I should just judge them as normal people. 0.99

00:34:49.000 But your Bonhoeffer book is very instructive. 0.57

00:34:52.000 And it goes to show that maybe there isn't a difference to how Christians should act. 0.55

00:34:57.000 Well, I really think the issue, Charlie, is that we got to know we're no different than the Germans in 30s Germany.

00:35:05.000 If you think we're better than them inherently, you're a racist, right? 0.56

00:35:10.000 Everybody's a sinner.

00:35:12.000 So what happened in Germany, anybody who thinks like, well, I wouldn't have been one of those people or I wouldn't have shouted crucify him, of course you would. 0.88

00:35:19.000 If you don't get that, you obviously aren't any kind of a real Christian because the first thing you'll understand is you are one of those people.

00:35:26.000 And it's only by the grace of God that you wouldn't be.

00:35:29.000 And in Germany, what happened?

00:35:32.000 I have to say, God used Bonhoeffer prophetically.

00:35:36.000 And usually the prophets, people don't listen to the prophets.

00:35:39.000 So in America today, I want to say this is often an issue of bad theology.

00:35:45.000 So here's what I say.

00:35:47.000 And what I wish I could have said in Germany in the 30s is like, listen, folks, you talk about you just want to preach the gospel.

00:35:53.000 You don't want to get political. 0.99

00:35:55.000 That is garbage. 1.00

00:35:56.000 You need to understand that is idiocy. 1.00

00:35:58.000 There's no such thing as only preaching the gospel. 1.00

00:36:02.000 The gospel inevitably bumps into politics.

00:36:05.000 If people are being tortured for their faith, if people are being enslaved, if people are being sent in boxcars to death camps and you say, well, I can't get involved in that because that's political.

00:36:16.000 You have no faith and the gospel you believe in is fake.

00:36:20.000 The gospel drives us.

00:36:21.000 This is real justice issues to say when I see something wrong, somebody getting beat up in the street, if I don't do something, you know, the Good Samaritan, this is like the most basic parable.

00:36:33.000 We need to be the ones.

00:36:35.000 When we see something, we try to help.

00:36:37.000 We try to do the right thing.

00:36:38.000 So if you don't do that, when your country is going to hell, you've got bad theology on what I just said because you think like politics is separate from your faith.

00:36:47.000 It is not, number one.

00:36:49.000 Number two, you don't really get to make that choice for everybody else.

00:36:53.000 If you want to suffer, that's one thing.

00:36:56.000 But if you elect somebody with socialist policies, you are punishing the poor. 0.98

00:37:01.000 You care about the black kid in the ghetto. 0.93

00:37:03.000 You claim to.

00:37:04.000 You are hurting that kid because you have either elected somebody who's going to enact policies that are going to harm that community, or you didn't vote at all and allowed that person to get elected.

00:37:18.000 You're on the hook.

00:37:19.000 And if you care about people around the world, you have to care about America being free and strong.

00:37:24.000 We noticed that China, the second Joe Biden got in office, they understand, well, now we're going to have some fun because we don't have Trump to deal with. 1.00

00:37:35.000 So we're going to persecute our Uyghur Muslims even more. 0.99

00:37:38.000 We're going to persecute our people. 1.00

00:37:40.000 We're going to persecute Taiwan, Hong Kong. 0.99

00:37:43.000 We are going to flex our muscles now.

00:37:45.000 Ladies and gentlemen, that's because of us.

00:37:48.000 We allowed that to happen.

00:37:50.000 If we are not strong in the mold of Reagan or Trump, evil around the world is going to harm people.

00:37:56.000 And God judges us for that because we have a voice.

00:38:00.000 We have an ability to vote.

00:38:02.000 We have an ability to do something.

00:38:03.000 So when somebody says, well, I don't care, you don't understand that God expects us to care.

00:38:11.000 I mean, it's the famous quote that Bonhoeffer supposedly said, although nobody can find it.

00:38:16.000 So I'll take credit for it.

00:38:17.000 I don't care who said it, but it says, silence in the face of evil is itself evil.

00:38:22.000 Not to speak is to speak.

00:38:24.000 Not to act is to act.

00:38:25.000 God will not hold us guiltless.

00:38:27.000 You cannot pretend that people in China don't exist.

00:38:32.000 The kid in the ghetto doesn't exist. 0.95

00:38:34.000 You're just cool with everything burning down because everything will be fine for you.

00:38:38.000 That is selfish, it's fundamentally unbiblical, and that terrible theology has crept into the church. 0.55

00:38:45.000 And anytime I get a chance to talk about it, I'm uh I'm grateful.

00:38:48.000 So, thank you for letting me bring that up because it's people honestly, Charlie, they don't realize, they just don't realize what's uh what's happening.

00:38:56.000 So, we have to keep talking about it.

00:38:57.000 And I, I think, I, I, I don't know if I said it earlier today, but you know, the memoir that came out today, Fish Out of Water, when I talk about my parents growing up, they just told me these stories of growing up in Europe where there was evil, there was communism.

00:39:16.000 So, that became part of me.

00:39:17.000 So, I think it's part of the reason that I see these things.

00:39:20.000 Whereas, your average American, we've all had it pretty good over here.

00:39:24.000 We don't understand like there is real evil.

00:39:27.000 Communism is evil, it is really hurting people horribly.

00:39:31.000 We need to wake up to it.

00:39:32.000 So, if I can help, you know, a handful of people wake up to it, I just feel like my what my parents lived, they taught me.

00:39:40.000 You don't want to go through that, and you don't want your neighbors to go through that, you don't want anybody to go through that.

00:39:44.000 And if you drift, uh, you're going to go there.

00:39:47.000 That's where you go if you don't protect liberty and understand liberty and live these things out.

00:39:53.000 So, there you go.

00:39:54.000 Well, very good.

00:39:55.000 Eric, thank you for joining our program and Fish Out of Water.

00:39:59.000 Check it out, everybody.

00:40:00.000 God bless you, Eric.

00:40:01.000 Thank you.

00:40:01.000 God bless you too.

00:40:02.000 See you soon, man.

00:40:06.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:40:07.000 If you want to get involved with Turning Point USA, go to tpusa.com.

00:40:11.000 Email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.

00:40:14.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

00:40:16.000 God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - February 03, 2021

Why Christians, Conservatives, and Eric Metaxas Are 'Fish Out of Water'

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