How the sexual revolution destroyed the family and upended Christian culture
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Summary
Jonathan Van Maren's new book, "How We Got Here," explores how we got here, and what we need to do from here in order to get a cultural restoration. In this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, Jonathan talks about his journey to becoming a voice for pro-life, and why it's so important to keep Christ in the culture.
Transcript
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I think the reason so many Christians feel gaslit is when we're like, hey, that's not the way things
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were, that's changed, that's different. We get accused of being reactionary, for noticing what
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is going on. These things need to be called out, and that all these little culture wars that seem
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disconnected are actually the result of the replacing of one value system with another.
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Hello, my friends. Have you ever wondered to yourself, how in the world did we arrive at this
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place? How in the world did we get to a place where we are mutilating young kids, where by the time
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they're five, we're giving them these drugs that will not enable them to live as adults sexually
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at all, and doing that in the name of helping them and loving them, and if we don't do that,
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the kids are taken away from you because you're abusing them. How in the world did we get here?
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How did we get to a place where we're killing a million children a year, and we're calling that
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a right and a good, and those who oppose it are jailed? How did we get here? Well, How We Got
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here is a new book out by Jonathan Van Maren, whom LifeSite fans know very well since the Jonathan
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Van Maren show runs at LifeSite News every week, and he is also the spokesman and main attraction for
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the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, probably one of the most influential pro-life groups in the
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nation. In fact, they are so influential that they go coast to coast in Canada arguing for life
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in a way that very few others do. They dare to say what most won't, and they're effective as anything.
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They're attractive to young people, and they're just stunning. In his latest book, Jonathan goes
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not only through how we got here, but also what we need to do from here in order to get to a cultural
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restoration. You're going to want to stay tuned to this episode of the John Henry Weston Show
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with our guest, Jonathan Van Maren. We are on the brink of global war, maybe even nuclear war.
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This could be the beginning of the long-foretold chastisement in which the living will envy the dead.
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Our only hope is Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, and people hearing the truth of Jesus Christ.
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And that's what LifeSite News is for. It's keeping Christ in the culture. It's bringing you the truth
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about the news, always. But the odds are against us. If you want to play your part, then head over
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to give.lifesitenews.com and support our Christmas campaign today. Thank you, and God bless you.
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Well, let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father,
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Jonathan, you have done another great work. In fact, this is, what, your sixth book now?
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What I love about you is you're an incredible activist. Like, you give activists a new name
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because you are out all the time, which is really, really beautiful. By way of you telling a little
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bit about yourself to people, you still have a family. You're a young man still with a young
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family. How do you make that work? Because there's a lot of us in this movement, and it's
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And so we've taken them with us on a lot of places. And now one of the things about a schedule
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where you're on the road a lot, you're speaking a lot, is when you're back, you can also just
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carve out the time. And so when I'm laying out my schedule, I prioritize my family first
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and foremost, because I think there was, I forget who said this. He said, you can't save the
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family. You can only try to save your family. And so they have to be your first priority.
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Beautiful. And you're a deep man of faith. Tell us about your faith.
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So I grew up in a Christian home. I was introduced to all of the concepts now that I seek to defend
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in the culture. While I was at home, I was surrounded by just really, really stalwart
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role models who would be embarrassed to hear me saying this. But they are, and they shaped
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my character. I always say that anything that I've done right is because of the example
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and influence of my parents. And anything I've done wrong is when I didn't follow the example
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and influence of my parents. And so it's one of the really simple stories. And it's one
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of the things I get into the book as well as intergenerational religious families are
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really essential. Those are what are under attack in our culture. But that is actually
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Everyone who reads the title of your book, How We Got Here, will be like, wow, how did we
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get here? Because it's insane. But they're also going to want to know, how do we get out?
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But let's start with how we got here. Give us that in a nutshell. How did, this is crazy.
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By now, this is a place where nobody believed we could get to, not even, people didn't even
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envisage what we're going through right now. No, no. That is the craziest thing. And the
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title of the book comes from the fact that I've been asked that questions more times
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than I can count. How did we get here? You mentioned earlier talking about the transitioning
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of children. If you had told me 10 years ago, and I've seen horrifying things, as have
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you. We work in the pro-life movement. You think you can't be shocked. But transitioning
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kids, like you couldn't even come up with that. And what's really important for people
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to understand is that we got here because a series of intellectuals and revolutionaries
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actually laid the intellectual architecture. They influenced the culture, and they brought
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about the sexual revolution. And the sexual revolution transformed virtually every Western
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culture in the West. And now the West is seeking to bring those values to the developing world.
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And I think the reason the history is so important is not because names and dates are really important
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for everybody to realize. But because it destroys the myth of progress, so many people look at
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where we are and they have the sense of inevitability that this is just the way cultures go. Cultures
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rise, cultures fall, and we seem to be on the downswing at the moment. But it's important
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to identify the people who brought us to this point so we can respond to their ideas, we can
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recognize their influences, we can root those influences out, and then combat those influences
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in our family. So it's people like Margaret Mead, people like Alfred Kinsey, who will be more
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familiar to many of your viewers. People like John Money, people like Magnus Hirschfeld.
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These people began seeding ideas into the culture 50 years ago, 100 years ago. And now we're seeing
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the fruition of those ideas exploding onto the surface of our society. It is a revolution. And each of the
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individual things in our culture that we refer to as culture wars, right? Okay, now there's LGBT
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activism in country music. Now we've got to use our preferred pronouns. And now we see people who are
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male dressed in female garb on the plane. And we look at all these tiny changes. And I think the
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reason so many Christians feel gaslit is when we're like, hey, that's not the way things were.
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That's changed. That's different. We get accused of being reactionary. We get accused of a backlash
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or igniting a culture war for noticing what is going on. And so I'm hoping that by reading the
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history, people can feel emboldened to recognize that we got here for specific reasons, that these
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things need to be called out. And that all these little culture wars that seem disconnected are
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actually the result of the replacing of one value system with another. A value system based on
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scriptural revelation. Every Western country, whether Catholic or Protestant, was rooted in some
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fundamental shared principles to the principles of sexual revolution. And we see this playing out
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every day in our parliament, in our courts, and in our culture. And all these little culture wars are
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just manifestations of this huge value shift, this transfer that we see going on.
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So that's interesting. I think there's a general opinion that, you know, times just flow and we
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just go with the flow and there's people who felt this way. And so they got gained the ascendancy and
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then, you know, that's how it happened. So you're telling me, no, no, no, this was an actual plan. This was
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a developed project. We got to have one example of that because that, because for the most part,
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people, I think, think that, you know, they just, you know, I had an idea one day and it's good and
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people identify with that. And yeah, we've been treating the gays badly and we just got to. So
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how did we actually get that? Interesting that you ended that by saying, yeah, we treated, you know,
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we treated gay people badly. That's weaponized empathy, right? Because they essentially exploit
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your good and just feelings about not wanting other people to suffer and say, well, now you have to
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sign on to this entire agenda that includes the sorts of things you mentioned previously.
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There's many examples I could give. I'm going to give one because the example is both familiar, but
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there are aspects to this example that most people are unaware of. And that would be the example of
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Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who started off as a zoologist studying gall wasps. And then he went into the field
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of sexology. This would be in the early 1940s. He got together a team and he produced the two Kinsey
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reports, one in 48 and the second in 53, human sexuality in the human male and sexuality in the human
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female. And he claimed to reveal what everybody in America was actually up to. And he claimed that
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95%, 95% of Americans were by the standards of the law in 1948, sex offenders. The vast majority of
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them were unfaithful to their wives, used prostitutes, were unchaste prior to marriage. He said between 10 and
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37% of males engaged in homosexual behavior, which is the number of the gay rights movement used
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four years, despite the fact that even in 2016, the number of people who identified on the entire
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alphabet spectrum was still at 3%. So things weren't as bad in an era where you have parades celebrating
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the behavior, as he said they were just after World War II, when we were seeing a religious boomlet in
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almost every church-going community. And there's so many aspects to the Kinsey story. Of course, he
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mainstreamed this idea that sexuality begins at birth. And that's because he facilitated the abuse of over
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2,000 children. And that data was carefully tabulated in his book. You can take it out of
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the library and look it up for yourself. But table 34, if you're table 34, I almost didn't believe it
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when I first read about this. And so I got the book myself found table 34, truly chilling stuff. But to
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give an idea of how one guy, so why would this professor make such an impact on the culture is one
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of the major slogans of the 1960s is don't trust anybody over 30. A lot of listeners will remember that
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there was, you know, make love, not war. It is forbidden to forbid was the French slogan. And
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then don't trust anybody over 30. Now, keep in mind that the Kinsey reports were accepted as
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science. And so we needed to follow the data, we needed to follow the science. Even, you know,
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great Catholics like, you know, William F. Buckley accepted the results as true, but just said,
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even if nobody's following the law of God, the law of God remains the law of God, but accepted that
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this was true. And so what kind of impact do you think it would have when the American public,
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writ large, accepts this idea that 95% of people in that country are sex offenders at a point where
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American church attendance across all denominations is at its peak. An entire generation of young people
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were told and believed that everybody was lying to them, that most of their pastors and priests
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were sex offenders, that a huge percentage of their parents were. Even if, let's say, the churches
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were slightly better, even if you're saying half of the people telling you to live a chaste life,
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follow God's law, go to church, they're all lying to you. And so it was Kinsey who actually created a
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sense of malaise. When you see these revolts in the 1960s, they didn't explode out of nowhere.
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You see Berkeley and the Paris riots in 68. These people were groomed to revolt by intellectuals,
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and their mistrust of the generation of people who taught them Christian values was based on the
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idea that they were told all those people were lying hypocrites and were still living with the
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consequences today. It's stunning because in Kinsey's example, he paid a pedophile to do the
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abuse of children as tabulated, and it's horrific. Also, though, he, in terms of his study, did it at
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the prison. So give us a little bit more of that, how he falsified the so-called research.
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So if we're going to get into detail, Kinsey presented himself as a very normal sort of middle-class
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Republican and a very normal heterosexual marriage. The reality is that he was a voracious bisexual who
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was shooting illegal porno movies in his attic. He was working with Wardell Pomeroy, who we don't
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have time to get into him, but suffice it to say he was a pervert, and that's putting it kindly,
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actually. And when he embarked on this project, he was actually seeking to persuade the American public
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that normal wasn't normal, and that we needed a new definition of normal. And so it's really
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interesting. So as you say, to get his research on the common sexual behavior of Americans,
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he went to prisons. He interviewed hundreds of sexual psychopaths. He went to the New York
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gay underground. In fact, so few ordinary American women would talk to him about their sex lives,
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surprisingly, that he reclassified prostitutes and anyone who had cohabited with a male for six months
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as Susie Homemaker in his data. Even that didn't give him the results he wanted, so he junked three
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quarters of his own data. And if you want to know how bad it is, the Kinsey Institute at the University
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of Indiana holds all of his research for the purposes of continuing his work. They won't
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release most of their files, most notably the data that created Table 34. And so he did what many of
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these sexual revolutionaries did, is he created data and he created science to reach the conclusion
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that he gave in one pithy sentence in front of the cameras, where he said,
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unless we are going to imprison 95% of the American male population, it is time that we changed our
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laws. That was his conclusion. So out of falsehood and lies, out of worse abuse, comes a seed to plant
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which results in just a horrific culture change. It's so hard to believe, yet the evidence is there.
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For that, I think a lot of credit is due to Judith Reisman, who was the one who discovered Table 34
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as a student of Kinsey's, and then was persecuted for her. She's passed away recently, but...
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She was on the My Life Site podcast before she passed away.
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Indeed. Real hero, but suffered for pointing this out, but actually went all over the world to try
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and expose this. Undoing the stuff that was done, I could use other words, is very challenging, though.
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What I'm seeking to do, especially with this book, is to empower Christian communities to recognize the
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lies they're faced with. Because in 2024, you are faced with lies every single day, and we are othered
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all the time, including by our Prime Minister, right? He says that being pro-life is un-Canadian. His
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words, not mine. He says opposing the LGBT agenda is un-Canadian, that we're all somehow foreign
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American far-right imports. Well, I was born in Seattle, so maybe I am a far-right American import.
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But the point still stands. I think that a lot of people, when faced at college, at university,
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in the culture, in their workplace, by the entertainment that they watch, the mainstream
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culture has become anti-Christian. And as a result, we need to recognize, no, we can trace our genealogy.
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And let's look at their genealogy now. So how did we get drag queen story time? Wait a second. It
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keeps on ending up with pedophiles. It ends up with Hugh Hefner, who called himself Kinsey's
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pamphleteer. Kinsey was the one who inspired him to start Playboy, which turned into the porn
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epidemic that we see now, sweeping both the culture and the church. And one of the greatest
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tools the LGBT activists and the abortion activists have at their disposal is this myth of
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progress, this myth of inevitability. Like, you can't fight us. This is, we are on a historical
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march, which is why at all of their marches, they have wrong side of history, right? You're at the
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wrong side of history. Like, I'll take 2,000 years over 30. Like, I don't know which side that they
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claim to be on. But this, it is a really powerful myth. It's something that we need to respond to so
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that people have the context for where we are. Basically say, on the back of the book, that what
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I'm trying to do here is giving people a cultural map and saying, you are here. So they know how we
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ended up here. And they have the courage to recognize that when somebody spouts off some idea
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about the necessity of sex education, that comes from Alfred Kinsey. That comes from John Money.
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Not only is it good that you oppose that, but we should. The whole thing needs to be thrown out.
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It has rotten and poisonous roots. And we should be able to lay that out. And a lot of people,
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I do think we're in a very weird period now. It's kind of a pregnant widow moment. The old age has
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ended and the new age has not yet been born. And we're in this middle period now where we don't know
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what the West is going to look like next. And this does provide us an opportunity to speak truth to
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people who increasingly recognize that they've been lied to, that the establishments have their
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own interests, and that there's nothing that we are told very frequently by a Justin Trudeau,
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by a Keir Starmer in the UK, by a Joe Biden or whoever was actually writing his lines.
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We can't believe what they're saying. And people recognize that things are going wrong. Ordinary
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sane people are saying, oh, wait a second, I signed on to Pride. And now they're talking about
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castrating little kids. So what went wrong and where? And we can say, don't pull back to LGB.
00:16:48.680
Let's walk this all the way back. I find that people are really open to these conversations.
00:16:53.640
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Very interesting. Now, one guy doing one study, that's even if he's evil as heck, that's not going
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to affect everybody. How is this moving forward? In fact, there's all sorts of, there's not only Kinsey
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studies. There's all sorts of studies that also do that, but it's related also to funding. Because
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we watched with a lot of the research right now, one of the things I think the whole wide world
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realizes now is the whole pharmaceutical industry is run by moneyed interests. And there's a lot of
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money in it. We just saw Gates saying how his investment into vaccine is turned back 20-fold.
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Wait a minute, what? Moneyed interests with these foundations also played a part. Do they play a
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part in this? Yeah, very much so. So two responses to that. First, the people who funded the Kinsey
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Reports, it's the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation. And they funded all kinds of stuff at
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the same time. So it was both their families, but also a lot of people working in their organizations
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who specifically wanted to join their organizations in order to choose who got the grants.
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So there's that. Another thing people need to realize about data is that polling is usually not
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taken to reveal public opinion. It's taken to shape public opinion because people have a herd instinct
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and they don't want to be the only guy on their street who doesn't sign on to X. And so just to give
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you an example, right now, they're trying to push for the legalization of assisted suicide in the
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United Kingdom. So Canada serving as sort of a cautionary tale, a canary on the coal mine. We'll see how
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that goes. Maybe we'll know by the time this show airs. But what's really interesting is that the
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number one thing dying with dignity and the MPs pushing this, like Kim Ledbetter, are saying is
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between 60 and 79 percent of the UK public support is the government must move. And so a response poll
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was done just first asking them if they supported it and then telling them three things about what was
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actually going to happen if the bill was passed. And guess what percentage that dropped to after they
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found out? Three things. 11 percent. 11 percent. So this poll, you know, between 60 and 79 percent is
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garbage. But the reason they took that poll was not to gauge public opinion. It was to shape public
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opinion. When people were actually given the information, it plummeted, which it teaches two
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things. One, do not trust data that you're blindly handed because this data is being commissioned by
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people with an agenda. Second of all, we should be hugely encouraged by the fact that when people are
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given some really basic information, they can change their mind, which places the task. This is
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where the activism comes in, is reaching out to people and getting that real information in front
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of their eyes. One of the things with what you do in particular is CCBR has been criticized a lot for,
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but also incredibly effective for. You do put out what happens. And with the abortion thing, you show
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the photos, the pictures, the reality of abortion in a way that you're criticized for. What do you
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think is really the basis of that criticism? I know there's good arguments for it. What's the
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other's opinion? Even pro-life people say, oh, you shouldn't do that. Pro-life people don't do it
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for two reasons. One of them is it's people in good faith who think, oh, it seems kind of mean.
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Again, it's exploited empathy because abortion activists, whenever a pro-lifer says, I don't really
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support that. See, even your people don't really like this tactic. And their empathy is exploited
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in favor of covering up the truth about abortion. So there are plenty of people in good faith who
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are just like, well, I'm just, does this hurt or does this help? And I have all the time in the
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world for those people. I'll answer all of their questions. I'll lay out our stories. I'll show them
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baby pictures. I'll explain why we do it. And then there's other people, and we see this a lot.
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It's like, well, I'm a Christian, but I'm not like those Christians over there. And at a time where
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we're all being forced to draw our lines, where there's plenty of, you know, formerly Christian
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churches with pride flags outside. I believe that the day is coming and it very, very soon will
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arrive in every Western country where every church is going to be forced to kind of make a decision
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about where they stand on these issues. And a lot of those people don't want, they want to be pro-life,
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but they don't want to be anti-abortion. They don't ever want to be negative. But do you know what?
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The abolitionists just weren't just happy and healthy slave families. They were anti-slavery. And I'm not
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just pro happy and healthy babies. I'm very specifically anti-suctioning them to death because I've been
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through dumpsters behind clinics. I've held baby body parts in my hands. And it is an experience
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that will radicalize you forever because it teaches you that abortion is not about a what,
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it is about a who. And if we ever forget that abortion is about a who as pro-lifers,
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then we've already lost the argument. Because if we're not talking about the murder of children
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created in God's image, then who cares that I'm wasting my life if that's not what we're talking about.
00:22:02.120
You said something there. It might seem off topic, but it's not. It's very,
00:22:05.000
very important. This is crucial because we're dealing with a divisiveness that's intentionally
00:22:11.820
caused, but it's everywhere among good people. And that really, I mean, I've seen it unfortunately
00:22:20.060
in what I've been doing for almost three decades now, but the need to actually sit down with one
00:22:25.720
another in vivo and explain and talk to one another before we spout off on some social media
00:22:31.880
somewhere. I'm not like him. What a radical, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we're doing this
00:22:35.900
mostly to those on our side. It's stunning. I'd love to hear your take on that.
00:22:41.220
Well, yeah, you're getting at the heart of something is the left always sort of bands
00:22:44.160
together and they're willing to recognize we need to take back increments. And we seem to do the sort
00:22:48.240
of Mexican, the circular Mexican firing squad very, very often where we're judging people for their
00:22:52.900
level of commitment here or there. I divide everything into two sets of questions. Are these good faith
00:22:57.600
questions or bad faith questions? And there are a lot of good people who are understandably
00:23:01.640
confused because we live in an incredibly confusing age, right? The one, the one philosopher I quote in
00:23:06.320
the book calls it liquid modernity. Everything seems up for grabs, right? All boundaries are being
00:23:10.360
taken down and we're being caught by a flood of this. A lot of older Christian people have their kids go
00:23:14.540
off to university, come back and confront them with questions that they don't know how to answer
00:23:17.680
because these things didn't exist when they were young. And so people who have good faith
00:23:21.440
questions, I have like, well, we need to sit down. We need to walk through these things. We need to
00:23:25.760
recognize that we are really all in this together. On the other side, though, you have bad faith
00:23:29.480
questions. And the purposes of those questions are to move the ball in the other direction.
00:23:34.400
And so there will be people who say what the church needs to do is to understand that, you know,
00:23:39.640
same sex attracted people have often been badly treated. We need to understand this
00:23:43.280
in order to react to them in a pastoral and Christian fashion. Agreed. But who is saying that
00:23:49.220
matters, right? Because there are people who are going to be saying that, but their version of pastoral
00:23:53.480
care is going to be pushing in the direction of bit by bit, trying to change things, to hollow out
00:24:00.020
rules, and to push us towards normalization and then acceptance. But there's other people who are
00:24:05.700
saying this because, no, I recognize that God's law is God's law. On the other hand, like, it is true
00:24:10.660
that we need to be Christ-like, that we need to have compassion, that we need to have empathy.
00:24:14.620
And so on that side, I always say, well, who is asking the question? And we don't need to name names.
00:24:18.700
You cover many of these specific people on LifeSite. You write about them a lot yourself.
00:24:23.560
And so we all know who we're talking about, but that's really important. If it's, you know,
00:24:27.020
the lady next door who's saying, what about this? You know what? Let's sit down. Let's have a cup
00:24:30.240
of coffee. Let's talk for an hour. If it's, you know, a specific person who's in pastoral ministry
00:24:35.020
and is supposed to be projecting clarity and isn't, that's a completely different question.
00:24:38.540
One of the things that everybody's wondering is, okay, now what? We know we're in the worst
00:24:44.740
time. We, well, at least we've never seen this before. Yes. We got here through these
00:24:50.600
machinations, which is covered in here. You need to read it and find out, but it's in a lot
00:24:55.020
of different areas. It's not only in science. It's not only in finance. It's also in, which
00:24:59.720
you might call it, well, it's academia of all sorts, psychology as well. But where do we go from
00:25:05.420
here? Like, is it completely hopeless right now? Even, but it does seem there's some hope.
00:25:09.740
Like, I mean, we just saw this, like a revolution in the United States with the rejection. The stats
00:25:17.580
show one of the major issues was the very issue that's so avant-garde right now. The trans issue
00:25:24.260
was one of the issues that drove people away from Kamala Harris. Yes. So it seems like there's hope
00:25:29.880
on one hand, but on the other hand, even Trump is pushing the IVF and the LGBT agenda and abortion,
00:25:36.560
at least in early stages. Where are we at and how do we do anything?
00:25:40.300
There's a couple of answers to that question. I think the first one, and I cover this in the
00:25:43.580
last chapter of the book, that's really important, is that a lot of people look at, say, activists
00:25:48.460
or journalists like yourself and think, I got to be doing that or I'm not changing the world.
00:25:52.160
But one of the number one things we need to recognize is that the culture that we refer
00:25:57.020
to, the mainstream culture, is essentially dead and it's rotting and it's infecting everybody
00:26:01.780
else. And we're not going to retake that culture. What we need to do is preserve the
00:26:05.560
culture that mainstream culture replaced. That is what we need to preserve. Like the
00:26:10.060
monks did in Skellig Michael. You know, we need to create these communities that function
00:26:13.520
as arcs where we take responsibility for our kids' education, whether that's homeschooling,
00:26:17.380
classical schooling, a private Christian school that's not part of the state system. We can't
00:26:21.440
send our kids off to the pagans to teach all week and then expect them to come home as
00:26:25.520
Christians. It's not realistic in today's day and age. And it's also dangerous considering
00:26:29.260
the gender ideology in schools. And we need to recognize that communities need to be
00:26:33.080
physical. That we need to have communities where we're covering education, where places
00:26:37.580
where Christians can get together, that they can actually speak with each other, have community
00:26:42.140
together, have community events together, where they can band together and ensure the
00:26:46.020
protection of the elderly and the vulnerable. And our euthanasia regime in Canada may be coming
00:26:49.980
to other countries as well. There's a series of things that we need to do. And I think that
00:26:54.160
giving up on taking back the mainstream culture is one of those things. So that's one of the
00:26:57.880
things that I'll say about Daily Wire. They'll often say, we're going to take back
00:27:00.480
the culture. And I'm like, well, the culture is dead. If you're talking about, you know,
00:27:03.880
recovering the previous culture, you know, now I'm listening. Like Anthony Eslin said,
00:27:09.480
you know, the classics are the great unused artillery of the culture wars. We don't have
00:27:13.380
to recreate a culture. We can just go back and pick up the one that we abandoned and work
00:27:17.440
from there. To give a little bit of a glimmer of hope, which we're seeing so many interesting
00:27:23.180
things going on in this liquid modernity period that we're in, is we talked about how the ideas
00:27:27.480
of people like Magnus Hirschfeld, who first put forward the idea that gender needed to break out
00:27:31.980
of the binary. And everybody thought he was insane for like 80 years. And now, lo and behold,
00:27:36.360
your kids are learning Magnus Hirschfeld at school 100 years after he's been dead.
00:27:40.160
We're seeing all of these questions being asked by people who were once part of the new atheist
00:27:44.240
movement that kind of shaped my university experience, because they're recognizing that the
00:27:49.280
branch they've been sawing off so vigorously for so long is starting to crack. And they don't like
00:27:53.940
what the alternative looks like. So you've got Richard Dawkins trying to pretend he's a cultural
00:27:57.660
Christian, right? Which, you know, if things weren't so bad, I'd get schadenfreude. I don't
00:28:01.700
have it because things are really bad. But when Dawkins is noticing it, you know, okay, things are not
00:28:05.920
going well. I interviewed Neil Ferguson, one of the world's most renowned historians. And he said,
00:28:11.520
like, I struggle. I got brought up in an atheist home. I struggle to accept Christian premises,
00:28:16.720
but people need to go back to church. We need to reacquaint ourselves with these value systems.
00:28:20.120
It's the foundation of society. His wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, recently announced that she's becoming
00:28:25.420
a Christian again. She hasn't even picked her denomination. She's still figuring it out.
00:28:28.880
But she says, like, I believe in the crucifixion, the resurrection, substitutionary atonement.
00:28:34.300
You've got Charles Murray, who was sort of like crucified for his book, The Bell Curve. He's one of
00:28:39.080
the scientists who got ostracized from the academy. He, again, he's an agnostic, but he says,
00:28:44.560
short of a religious revival, America won't survive. Douglas Murray is now calling himself
00:28:49.080
a Christian atheist. So the way I put it in the book is we're at this period now where there is
00:28:54.260
now a lot of intellectuals who hated Christianity five minutes ago, and were very vocal about it,
00:28:59.000
who are willing to say, we need Christianity. And I wonder how far we are from some of them,
00:29:04.460
like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, saying, actually, we need Christ. Because they're recognizing that this was
00:29:09.260
the social glue that held it all together. And they're recognizing that if I've got a pick between
00:29:12.860
Magnus Hirschfeld and Augustine, maybe Augustine's the better way to go.
00:29:17.220
So we don't know. They're planting seeds now. We are in a time of fascinating discussions,
00:29:22.400
right? You know, Jordan Peterson, we who wrestle with God. I wish he'd stop wrestling.
00:29:27.260
Because when you stop fighting is actually when, you know, when you discover the truth.
00:29:32.300
But we'll see. We'll see. There's a lot of interesting signs of growth. And, you know,
00:29:37.200
rotting empires make good fertilizer for a revival in the long term.
00:29:40.560
Indeed. I think what you said about the small Christian communities, if you can call it that,
00:29:45.500
because that's what it's called in Africa. Africa has this thriving thing. You find these
00:29:53.460
pockets of faith and they're real sincere. You go to mass in Africa or to a church service,
00:29:58.640
and there's tons of people and there's tons of men and young kids. Now, they have many more young
00:30:02.880
kids than we do. But there's also this vibrant faith that's just not, for the most part, seen.
00:30:10.440
And I've been to a number of countries in Africa where it's fairly similar, not South Africa. That's
00:30:15.420
different. But in, you know, Kenya and Rwanda and Tanzania, there is this beautiful faith.
00:30:26.360
And I asked a few of the bishops there, I said,
00:30:28.500
what is this? We don't have this at home. And a few of them said to me the same things,
00:30:35.180
small Christian communities. And it's almost exactly what you described. They actually bring
00:30:40.580
it down. Not only is it a church unit or that's too broad. For them, it's like 10 families. And
00:30:46.600
they work within that 10 families. They support one another. They make sure they're getting the
00:30:50.540
right education there. The church still has a strong education foundation. But they do basically
00:30:55.780
healthcare for them. They make sure the widows are taken care of. This is basically back to what
00:31:01.560
you read in the early Bible about how they supported one another. That kind of thing.
00:31:05.960
Do you see that ever kind of catching hold here?
00:31:10.260
I think more and more it is. And I profile a few of those communities in the last chapter of the
00:31:15.840
book. I think like Barry's Bay is a good example. You've got a college. You've got a lot of families.
00:31:20.760
You know, when there's an event, people just show up from across the church. There's a lot of big
00:31:24.180
families still. Everybody's committed to teaching their kids, teaching their kids themselves or making
00:31:28.220
sure they get a genuine education, not state education. I actually covered Steubenville as well.
00:31:34.760
There's all kinds of interesting projects where people are, you know, one thing that I noticed
00:31:37.880
there, they rented a big shop downtown. It was like $5 a month for anybody to use this shop. So
00:31:42.380
it's a communal area. People can use practical skills. Somebody from the community can come in
00:31:46.980
and they're around all these people who have Christian beliefs and you get the opportunity to
00:31:50.680
talk with them, which is something Aaron Wren calls pre-evangelization. It's just they see what
00:31:55.000
you're doing and think, oh, I'm attracted to that. So we do see these communities popping up. And I
00:31:59.440
think that Rod Dreher probably started talking about this first, but he was describing something
00:32:04.220
that had been happening for a long time. And so I do have a lot of optimism that these communities
00:32:09.940
not only exist, but are increasingly the model that people are looking at. And, you know, there was a
00:32:15.400
study that came out from Laurier University a couple of years ago that the only growing churches in
00:32:19.780
Canada are traditionalist churches. Because why bother to get up early on a Sunday morning if it's just
00:32:24.120
going to be, you know, Pastor What's-Her-Face talking about the LGBT thing, right? Then you
00:32:29.560
might as well just go to Pride in June instead. So I do think that the new model very much is that
00:32:35.540
people know that it's necessary. They know that they need that kind of security and they know they
00:32:39.720
need that kind of community. I think those communities are going to end up being the future.
00:32:43.660
And one of the reasons it's so important, I think, to have these communities to educate our kids
00:32:47.760
ourselves for years, and you've probably been hearing this for years too, right? Like,
00:32:50.760
we have more kids than them, so they're going to die off and the future belongs to the
00:32:53.540
religious. Because we have lots of kids and they don't. And we didn't recognize too often
00:32:58.140
that if we sent our kids off to state schools or state universities, there's two ways you can grow
00:33:03.460
your group, right? One is by reproduction and the other one is by evangelization. And we need to
00:33:07.640
recognize that essentially these are sexual evangelicals and that they can steal their kids
00:33:13.900
that way. I remember talking at a pro-life conference recently to a Catholic mom of nine
00:33:17.580
kids. Two of her kids identify as transgender. Because, you know, between the internet and
00:33:23.020
school, they got access to her kids. And so we need to be so incredibly careful that our
00:33:27.520
communities grow, especially because we need to retain our own members.
00:33:31.080
Last word, because I think it's not only for kids, but it's also for ourselves, both for
00:33:37.100
maintaining the faith, but also for friendships that are same.
00:33:41.320
So there's a couple of things. The first thing is, like Anthony Eslin said, the classics are the
00:33:45.640
great unused artillery of the culture wars. There's a lot of talk about we need to rebuild this
00:33:49.500
culture. We need to create a subculture. Like we got a lot of stuff already that we need to
00:33:54.180
re-familiarize ourself with. We need to train our brains off of TikTok and YouTube and all these
00:33:59.340
things that we all struggle with to one extent or another. For me, it's Twitter because I'm a
00:34:02.400
political junkie. And retrain our brains to sit down and engage with the great heritage that we
00:34:07.340
actually have. We were given an inheritance and we can pick that inheritance back up and re-engage
00:34:12.720
with that. I think that's so important. And then I think when it comes to the instinct to argue and
00:34:17.880
to debate with people, I want to emphasize that I understand that instinct because when it feels
00:34:23.420
like everything that we treasure is under attack, the instinct to anything that looks like compromise,
00:34:28.780
anything that looks like caving, anything that looks like a one millimeter in the wrong direction,
00:34:34.040
because we're almost, we got PTSD from 20 years of rapid cultural change. It's like slam the door
00:34:39.880
on that guy's fingers, right? Call it out immediately. But instead, I think we need the discernment to
00:34:44.760
recognize the difference between questions asked in good faith by people who just genuinely want to
00:34:50.600
know the truth and don't have an agenda with those who are asking questions in bad faith for the
00:34:54.980
purposes of furthering their own agenda. And we need to, we just need to recognize that a lot of
00:34:59.500
times we get really angry at people. And this is not to say that we're not arguing about things that
00:35:03.420
are worth arguing about, but the way we argue about those things and the way we approach those
00:35:07.180
conversations should be shaped by how that person is coming to us. Whereas then there's other people,
00:35:11.920
if they have an agenda, those people need to be called out because I think I, this is something I
00:35:16.760
follow in my own writing. When I'm talking to somebody on the street, who's really upset and very
00:35:20.960
pro-abortion, I talked to her very differently than Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition of
00:35:25.640
Canada, whose job is to defend, you know, abortion all day long. She needs to be treated like somebody
00:35:30.980
who's championing the murder of children. This other person needs to be treated as a wounded person
00:35:35.920
who's been groomed by a culture of death and instead needs for us to engage with her with charity and
00:35:40.500
compassion. Absolutely beautiful. Jonathan Van Maren, keep up your amazing work. Thank you so
00:35:44.920
much. God bless you, my friend. How We Got Here by Jonathan Van Maren. You can pick it up wherever
00:35:50.020
good books are sold. God bless you. And we'll see you again next time.
00:35:57.960
Aloha, everyone. This is Jason Jones for Lifeside News. We hope you enjoyed this video. For more content
00:36:03.880
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00:36:10.540
to date with the latest news on life, faith, family, and freedom. Thanks for watching and may God bless you.