Eric Metaxas discusses his most recent book, Letter to the American Church, which argues that it s a betrayal of faith to stay silent in the face of tyranny. He also discusses why he felt God was calling him to write the book, and why he decided to speak out against the silence of the church today. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Dr. J.B. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Let s take care of ourselves, and let s not only ourselves, but the ones we love, and those we care about, and care about. Today's guest: Author, Speaker, Author, Radio Host, Speaker and Radio Host Eric Metaxos. . In this episode, we discuss: Why God is calling you to write a book, why God calls you to do so, and the consequences of writing a book about it, and what it really means to be a Christian in a world that s not just a Christian, but a Christian. What it means to write about God's voice. Why it s important to write something that s Christian, not only for Christians, but also for Christians and why it s good, not just for other people What does it mean to be an American church? And why God s voice matters. And how he s writing a letter to God in the world why he s calling us to write it what it s so much more than that, and how it s not enough, and how to be more than a Christian? And so on and so on, and so much so that we can we can be more like Him in the future, and not less than He s a Christian How he s a better version of Jesus in the rest of us? and more
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello everyone watching and listening.
00:01:11.260Today I'm speaking with author, speaker, radio host, and incorrigible Eric Metaxas.
00:01:17.380We discuss his most recent book, A Letter to the American Church, which argues that it's a betrayal of faith to stay silent in the face of tyranny.
00:01:30.020We parallel the rise of the wannabe arbiters of speech across history against those making themselves manifest today.
00:01:39.320And detail the responsibility to act against falsehood that's an intrinsic part of the Abrahamic tradition.
00:01:47.380Although increasingly non-existent in the American church today.
00:01:52.380So you recently wrote Letter to the American Church.
00:01:57.100I released a podcast a while back, or I guess it was just a monologue, which was Message to Christians.
00:02:05.940And so obviously, to some degree, we're thinking along parallel lines.
00:02:11.160Why did you think it was necessary to write a letter to the American church?
00:02:15.720What did you mean by the American church?
00:02:18.360And tell us about the letter and what the consequences of writing that was.
00:02:22.740That was 2022 that was released, right?
00:02:41.120And I have to tell you that some people know me principally as a writer, because I've written whatever, 14 plus books, many children's books.
00:02:50.560I do, of course, radio show, TV show, and so on and so forth.
00:02:54.960But almost everything that I do, I do for everyone.
00:03:00.720In other words, I'm trying to reach a broad audience, not just I want to sell more books, but because I feel God created me to speak to a popular audience, to a wide audience.
00:03:11.600This most recent book, which is my shortest book, Letter to the American Church, is the first time I have ever written something specifically only for those who claim to be Christians.
00:03:28.840Sometimes I thought to myself, well, I shouldn't say I thought to myself, I had a number of thoughts rambling around in my head that became increasingly highlighted in a way that I couldn't, I don't know how some people will take this, but I've never felt God called me to write something the way he did this book.
00:03:53.060In retrospect, all of my books, Bonhoeffer and so on and so forth, it's exceedingly clear to me that God's hand was in my writing them.
00:04:03.420But never have I felt a burning passion that I knew was God calling me to write this specific book.
00:04:13.280So it's a strange and unique thing in my experience.
00:04:16.340There's a, you know, if you think of the title, Letter to the American Church, it would be natural to think, what kind of hubris are we talking about here that somebody would dare to write Letter to the American Church as though he's some modern day Paul or something like that.
00:04:30.000But on the contrary, because I felt it was God wanting to say this, I had more humility than ever in writing it, thinking that I cannot get this wrong.
00:04:42.120I have to really be sure to take myself out of the way as much as possible to let God say what he wants to say.
00:04:52.240And I don't mean this in any mystical sense, but I was very sober-minded to write something with a title, Letter to the American Church.
00:05:00.060And the reason I wrote it in a nutshell is that in 2010, I came out with my longest book, a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was involved in the plot to kill Hitler.
00:05:15.540I knew when I was writing that book, I knew when I was writing that book, that it sort of, I could smell what was happening as I was writing that book, I could smell that in our future, in the West, not just in America, but in America specifically.
00:05:29.740And with the events of the last few years, let's say the last three years, it was impossible for me to avoid the thought that just as the silence of the church in Germany opened the door to hell on earth, which we now know because we know what happened.
00:05:58.840And of course I documented in my Bonhoeffer book and in this new book, Letter to the American Church.
00:06:03.080But the thesis of this book, Letter to the American Church, is that precisely as the German church was silent and precisely as that opened the door to hell, to every kind of evil, it is the silence of the church in America now, this minute, that is similarly opening the door to hellish things on a number of fronts.
00:06:31.920The parallels, the parallels are so marked, even the parallels of the excuses given by theologians and Christians in the 30s who said, we don't want to speak out against Hitler.
00:06:46.160These are our reasons, dramatically similar parallels among many evangelicals and others in the American church today for why they are being silent on issues that they ought to be screaming about.
00:07:02.880Issues that you and others about the evil of the transgender lunacy and on and on and on and on and on.
00:07:14.220So I said to myself, I can't believe it, but the parallels are so dramatic to the silence of the church in Germany that I am just burning to speak this, hoping and praying that God in his grace would use it to wake up those who might be awakened.
00:07:36.880We know that some people will insist on sleepwalking to the abyss, they cannot be reached.
00:07:45.920But I know that in Germany in the 30s, there were many good pastors who got this wrong.
00:07:53.220Many good pastors who were fooled, deceived, who allowed themselves to be deceived until it was too late.
00:08:01.780Many of them woke up and then it was too late to do anything.
00:08:05.900So I wrote this book hoping to reach those specifically who call themselves Christians, who dare to call themselves Christians, with the idea that they would say, yes, I have been complicit in my silence, in my inaction.
00:08:23.100These excuses are not biblically based.
00:08:27.840Okay, so let me ask you, there's a lot there.
00:08:31.800So let me go through some of the questions that we might address.
00:08:36.280I'd like to know what you mean by God's hand, say, rather than your hand in your writing.
00:08:42.420And so that people can understand exactly what you mean by that and how that appears to you and how you distinguish your voice, let's say, from the spirit of inspiration.
00:08:55.060Then I'd like to know what events of the last three years that you think are particularly problematic, because there's no Hitler staring us in the face at the moment.
00:09:06.080So that's the obvious historical parallel.
00:09:11.960And you're on the Christian side of that war, let's say.
00:09:15.740You said, dare to call themselves Christian, which is an interesting phrase.
00:09:23.540So let's start with your description of some of the books that you've written is that they were inspired, you know.
00:09:32.380And my sense is that you can separate out an attempt to write a book for instrumental reasons from an attempt to write a book to put forth what you believe to be true, right?
00:09:46.680Now, they're mingled a little bit because you sort of have to select your audience.
00:09:51.180Although, when I wrote my first book, I was just—
00:10:46.000That happens, but that didn't happen to me.
00:10:48.560For me, it was—and it's a funny thing.
00:10:51.380It's like developing a muscle where you become increasingly sensitive to—you're able to use it.
00:10:58.080And I think literally over the decades, I've become more sensitive to—in other words, in the past, I think, you know, since I became a Christian, you know, rather dramatically in 1988, I have all—I wanted every moment God to use me, to use me in my gifts.
00:11:26.640Which are strange and various, which are strange and various, and I've always assumed that he would and that he was doing that.
00:11:38.060And in the various books that I've written and in the various things that I've written and in the various things that I've done, even in the jokes that I've cracked, that God is with me.
00:11:45.260But over the years, I've become a little bit more sensitive to these moments where I feel—I would say, you know, God is particularly in this.
00:13:33.880Well, I think that's akin in some ways to your claim that you're attempting to be directed by as close as you can manage to divine inspiration when you're writing.
00:13:45.620I mean, it is a set of axiomatic statements.
00:14:27.280Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:14:36.780And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:14:39.960With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:14:47.340Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:16:28.160There is something, I suppose, mystical about that intuition that there's a distinction between words that are false and words that are true.
00:16:38.780And it isn't easy exactly to describe how you know the difference.
00:16:42.380I mean, you know the difference the way you know the difference between truth and falsehood.
00:16:47.040If you do, in fact, know that difference and haven't clouded your mind up too badly.
00:16:51.160But it's no different than the instinct to know what's funny, if you're a jokester, as I am, to know the timing of why would it be funnier if I hesitate?
00:17:06.020If I stutter the phrase, why will it be funnier?
00:17:12.780The timing, all those things are instincts that we all develop in our various ways through life, or at least ideally that we would.
00:17:25.080It becomes, it doesn't feel conscious.
00:17:29.040It feels like something that it's an inner knowing, a sense of things.
00:17:33.960But, I mean, I've had numerous genuinely mystical experiences, miraculous experiences, but that's not what I'm talking about here.
00:17:46.640Here I'm talking about just what it is to be a writer, but as I say, it kind of became pointed with Letter to the American Church because of the seriousness of what I was writing.
00:17:56.860Well, okay, so let's turn to that now.
00:17:59.040Because of the seriousness of what you were writing, and you pointed specifically to the events of the last three years, and this is probably what will get this whole discussion cancelled on YouTube, by the way.
00:18:53.560Speaking as an American, it is profoundly anti-American.
00:18:56.900I think of the blood of patriots who died for freedom, for freedom of speech.
00:19:02.620So, it is, on the one hand, deeply offensive to me in that way, but as a human being, it's deeply offensive to me.
00:19:11.860As a Christian, it's offensive to me because I believe that we are all free to speak truth.
00:19:18.980So, the idea that we would be alive at a time in the West, where in places like Canada and America and the West, somebody would dare, would dare to be shutting down what you and I and most people know are perfectly wonderful conversations.
00:19:42.020We know that it's not like, well, yeah, I guess they had a point.
00:19:47.980And by my show, the Eric Metaxas show, was flourishing on YouTube, getting more and more subscribers.
00:20:00.820I'm very eclectic, so I'm, you know, some of it is comedy, some of it is serious discussions about faith, some of it is politics, some of it is I'm interviewing authors about their books.
00:20:12.300Two years ago, I dared to have Naomi Wolf, who was one of my classmates at Yale, a liberal feminist.
00:21:16.720They have an agenda, and they have tremendous power, which they are now using because, as we all know, they are scared to death of the truth.
00:21:28.800They are so scared that they're willing to look like the monsters that they are because they have nothing left to lose.
00:21:35.820So when we say, what are the parallels to Germany in the 30s, you don't suppose that in 1933, most people knew what was coming.
00:21:44.560Nobody could have dreamt of the death camps.
00:21:47.320I mean, they didn't discuss the final solution for another eight years.
00:21:54.720But people with eyes to see, people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, they could smell this.
00:21:58.520They said, if you follow the dots, they lead in this direction.
00:22:04.660The people who are seizing power now and being allowed to seize power now by cowardly people, by confused people, those people trying to seize power, when they get the power, they're going to use it for very wicked ends.
00:22:22.780Their presuppositions are the antithesis of our presuppositions.
00:22:36.180And the cultural elites, the globalist cultural elites today are working with the same presuppositions.
00:22:43.420They couldn't care less about the things that most of us would take for granted, the dignity of the human being, the sanctity of life, all of these things that people have lived for and died for.
00:22:58.020They are not only not interested in those ideas.
00:23:03.880And so there are, you know, some parallels that we can make and some that we can't make.
00:23:09.840But basically, we, you and I, have never seen anything like this in the West.
00:23:16.380And it's astonishing the speed at which these things have been happening.
00:23:21.460In the last week, YouTube took down my discussion about what is a woman and associated issues in that direction with Matt Walsh.
00:23:32.240And they took down a video that was a year old that I did with Helen Joyce, who's an economist, journalist, and a very credible person on the trans minor surgery scandals in the UK, which have resulted in the change of a number of UK policies.
00:23:51.020Not that podcast specifically, but those issues.
00:23:54.200But most relevant, as far as I'm concerned, they took down a discussion I had with Robert F. Kennedy.
00:24:00.720And the reason for that, in principle, was he veered into the vaccination criticism domain.
00:24:07.920And, you know, it's not like I walk arm in arm across the desert with Robert F. Kennedy.
00:25:26.980I can tell you something that's more despicable than that.
00:25:29.580I think that if you're whoring for money, so to speak, that there's actually something predictable and admirable about that.
00:25:38.460And let me lay the argument out, okay?
00:25:40.560Partly because if I know that you are actually motivated by money, and even if that's your single preoccupation.
00:25:47.400There's nothing wrong with being motivated by that, but you and I know that there are limits.
00:25:51.500If somebody says, you know, it's like that scene in The Third Man, if I know I can make a certain amount of money, Orson Welles' character, you know, if a few of those people disappear, who cares?
00:26:03.960In other words, this has always been the question, right?
00:26:07.380Somebody says, well, you can make a lot of money, but it's going to involve, you're allying yourself with people who are torturing and murdering and sexually abusing people.
00:26:42.280And that's what we're dealing with now with all of these globalist corporations.
00:26:46.480Well, I think it's worse on the YouTube front because they've left me alone up till now.
00:26:52.840And I think that what they're doing to buttress their ideology is actually counterproductive, at least in this situation on the economic front.
00:27:00.620The thing that frightens me about the YouTube ideologue types is that I think that they would act even against their own narrow economic self-interest and push their damage.
00:27:56.340How much money can Pfizer and company make?
00:28:00.060They don't give a damn about the side effects or the what.
00:28:04.140There are people who are in it for the money, and there's so much money that they're willing to look the other way.
00:28:10.740There are other people who are pulling the levers, other people that couldn't possibly need more money, whether it's George Soros or Bill Gates.
00:28:21.700So it's an amalgam of things, and we're dealing with all these things.
00:28:25.180We're asking the question, how does evil operate?
00:28:27.080That's how evil operates in every kind of way.
00:28:29.420And every single person has a choice whether to participate or to say, I refuse to participate.
00:28:39.280I would rather do the right thing and trust God with the results.
00:28:45.460And that's why in Letter to the American Church, I'm writing specifically to those people, Christians, who claim to believe in the God of the Bible, to believe that Jesus defeated death on the cross.
00:28:58.120Well, if you believe that, you are going to presumably behave differently because you believe that, because you have a difference.
00:29:06.800Okay, so you said something core there, you know.
00:29:33.160It's a decision to stake yourself on something.
00:29:36.080You will, you said, do the right thing and let God take care of the consequences.
00:29:42.980Okay, so my understanding of that is that I've been trying to conceptualize faith, I suppose, to some degree.
00:29:50.560And, you know, the atheist types and the materialists think that faith is the willingness to suspend disbelief in the service of a fairy tale.
00:29:58.880And I think that faith is something entirely different than that.
00:30:02.480I think it's the willingness to stake yourself on the truth in the faith that whatever happens when you tell the truth is the best thing that could possibly happen.
00:30:13.060And that's regardless of the short-term consequences, right?
00:30:15.780Because people lie because they want to manipulate the short-term consequences.
00:31:11.360If someone claims to believe in the God of the Bible, which I do, then there's no question that God requires of us to behave as though we believe what we claim to believe.
00:31:28.200And one of the theses of my book, Letters to the American Church, is that just as the German church drifted tragically in its conception of what is faith, so too the American church has drifted.
00:31:46.640In other words, they have adopted a kind of enlightenment rationalist view of faith.
00:31:54.700Faith is what I believe, which means what I believe intellectually.
00:32:16.740If you actually believe what the Bible says, what the Nicene Creed says, if you actually believe those things, you will behave as though you believe those things.
00:32:41.980So I thought to myself, that idea, Bonhoeffer wrote a book, The Cost of Discipleship, where he famously talks about cheap grace because the excuse given by the Germans, the theologians and pastors at the time was that, well, it's all about grace.
00:32:59.540It's less about what we do because Luther said, oh, we're not saved by our works.
00:33:08.900However, there is a little scripture in the epistle of James that says, faith without works is dead.
00:33:18.700In other words, if you're foolish enough to believe that you can have faith and not evince it in how you live, then you're a fool.
00:33:28.400Then actually, biblically, you have no faith.
00:33:31.180And so I think that that bad idea about grace and faith, which, you know, we get—and again, these are always, you know, these are good ideas taken to extremes, right?
00:33:41.240Oh, you know, faith is what I believe.
00:34:40.580It has to be integrated into every part of your life.
00:34:44.440And that's where we have drifted to this idea that people say, I can be against something in my mind, but I don't have to do anything about it.
00:34:54.680I don't have to live out my life heroically.
00:34:56.700I don't have to put my life on the line.
00:34:58.820I don't have to put my career on the line.
00:35:00.640If you believe these things, then, of course, you have to put your life and your career on the line.
00:35:06.260Otherwise, it's obvious you don't believe these things.
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00:36:19.120Okay, so the works issue, this is how I understand it.
00:36:23.660You tell me what you think about this, if you would.
00:36:25.780So what I thought Luther was trying to establish, and I think this is wise, is that just because you have the privileges of a king doesn't mean that you're, what, walking the road to the kingdom of heaven, right?
00:36:40.580The mere fact that you've been provided with, or perhaps even earned, that's more complicated, with a certain degree of material prosperity, isn't a signal message from God that you are on the right side of things.
00:36:56.160So you can't confuse works with grace or with redemption.
00:37:00.160And you can't assume that someone who's rich is a more moral agent than someone who's poor merely because they have plenty.
00:37:08.620So that's the point I think Luther was trying to make.
00:37:11.640I actually, I wrote a 450-page biography of Luther, and nowhere in my book do I touch on that idea.
00:37:20.760So I think it may follow from some of what Luther says, but I don't think principally, he, I mean, what you just said is an important point, but I don't get it from Luther.
00:37:34.900He doesn't seem to me ever to have worried about that.
00:37:39.320That doesn't seem to be on the list of things he was dealing with.
00:37:43.420Yeah, well, I could walk back my claim.
00:37:47.000I would say then that my understanding is that that's the underlying rationale of the Protestant claim, that you're not saved by works.
00:37:56.940It's more that the works themselves and their manifestation aren't inevitable proof of, what would you say, God's appreciation for your existence.
00:38:09.360Okay, the point, and I think my dear friend Dennis Prager and I would differ on this, and it came out in your conversation with him, but I think the idea, you know, one of the principal ideas of the New Testament
00:38:24.800and one of the principal things that Jesus was trying to say to clarify, you know, why many of the religious leaders of his time were off was that what you think your inner life is vital, is central.
00:38:46.940So if you write a big check to some wonderful charity, yes, it counts.
00:38:56.080It goes to help, you know, medical research for cancer in children.
00:39:02.620But if in your heart you only did it to impress some woman that you want to sleep with, God sees that.
00:39:12.280He doesn't just grade you on the externals.
00:39:14.780He's interested in your heart, in the disposition of your heart.
00:39:19.100And so Luther, I mean, there's so much to Luther, but I think the issue is that Luther was making this distinction.
00:39:29.420What he was worried about was this idea that, you know, you go through the mumbo jumbo and the rigmarole of the church, and that's all that counts.
00:39:39.840And he was saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, it is your faith that counts.
00:39:45.900Right, and you're making an existential case in some ways for that faith, which is that it's not assent to a series of explicit propositions, but a mode of conducting yourself in the world.
00:39:56.940And part of that mode is that you say what strikes you as true.
00:40:05.820And if you do that, well, that's part and parcel of having a genuine Christian faith.
00:40:10.740Yes, it reveals that you, A, that you believe there's such a thing as truth, and B, that you believe that the author of that truth, who is God, is with you in this.
00:40:25.340In other words, you don't say, well, hey, I'm just going to do this because it's the noble thing.
00:40:29.800It's like, no, no, no, I believe in a reality where God is with me and only with me when I speak the truth and live the truth.
00:40:51.480I think it's the most accurate argument in some ways.
00:40:53.740But then you come to the next problem, which is, well, there's God and then there's you and you're just a confused human being.
00:41:01.440And so how the hell, how do you take steps to ensure that your judgment about what constitutes the truth is reliable even in your own eyes?
00:41:11.920Well, first of all, you have to want it to be, you have to care.
00:41:17.280You have to have enough humility to know that you could get it wrong and therefore to cast yourself on God and say, Lord, help me because I know that I'm a fallen, sinful human being.
00:41:47.960But to be cynical and not to try to get it right is really wicked.
00:41:53.280So this cheap grace you talked about, too, which, so I have this interpretation of, I'm sure it's not unique to me, but of one of the commandments, which is do not use the Lord's name in vain.
00:42:06.740And people like to think that means don't swear.
00:42:10.660And I think in a very trivial sense, that is what it means.
00:42:14.880But what it really means, as far as I can tell, is don't pretend to be doing the work of the divine when you're feathering your own nest, right?
00:42:22.580And I really see this as a particularly egregious sin of the times.
00:42:27.180Pride is a sin of the times, and so is deception, pride and lies.
00:42:31.440And, of course, I think those are the two canonical sins in some real sense.
00:42:34.680But this notion of easy moral virtue, almost everything I see on the ideological side appears to me to be an attempt to proclaim moral virtue and the accompanying status and perhaps even the pathway to redemption without doing any of the work at all.
00:42:53.700And I think the universities are terribly complicit in this because what they basically tell students is the secular equivalent, I think, of what you're complaining about on the Christian side, which is, well, you don't really have to be a good person, which, by the way, is a very difficult thing to do.
00:43:08.920And the consequence of not doing that is everyone ends up in hell, but you don't really have to be a good person.
00:43:15.700You just have to be against the right things.
00:43:19.040And conveniently, that'll require, you know, a little protesting on your part.
00:43:23.540And conveniently, it will enable you to, what would you say, see the devil in everyone else and not in yourself at all.
00:43:30.520And then you've paid your price and you can trumpet your moral virtue and away you go down the road.
00:43:36.260All of which is a satanic counterfeit of the truth.
00:43:43.880I was at Yale in the 80s and I saw this for the first time.
00:44:21.620But the thing is that that concept, well, I managed to avoid critical theory and all that, although I did once escort Jacques Derrida across a courtyard with an umbrella.
00:45:50.920But somehow, they have to cannibalize truth, and they have to talk about things like racism, and they have to talk about things like that's right and that's wrong, and we care about the marginalized.
00:46:04.300And, of course, what we want to ask is, excuse me, why do you care about those things?
00:46:10.760In other words, you say racism is wrong.
00:46:18.000If you don't get your values from the Bible, which says that we're all created equal in God's image, if you get your values from, quote, unquote, science and blind Darwinism, then who's to say that some people aren't more evolved than others?
00:46:33.660In other words, according to what you claim to believe, you have zero basis on which to make any claims about morality, about what's right or wrong.
00:46:52.820And everybody is kind of bullied into going along with it.
00:46:58.660Oh, OK, OK, but we ought to say, excuse me, you know, not only are you wrong about everything, you don't even have any basis on which to make any of these claims.
00:47:10.160So the idea that this was born in, you know, Derrida, Foucault, critical race theory, critical theory, Gramsci, this kind of bubbles its way through the decades until here we are living with madness on every front.
00:47:30.360We are to be pro-reality is to be a radical in this day and age.
00:47:35.640To be a revolutionary and a radical is to be pro-reality.
00:47:41.540So I've been doing a lot of writing and thinking about the biblical stories, well, for a very long time and very intensely recently.
00:47:49.220And I've spent many, many hundreds of hours, I suppose, thinking about the story of Cain and Abel, which is a story that never ceases to terrify me right to my core.
00:47:59.520And what you see in that story is the story of two principalities making themselves manifest in some way for the first time, right?
00:48:10.800So you have Abel, who makes the proper sacrifices, who dedicates himself to God, who looks upward and does what's actually necessary and true and reaps the benefit as a consequence.
00:48:21.880And then you have Cain, who, you know, he's not so much into the sacrifice thing and his sacrifices are second rate and he's trying to pull the wool over the eyes of God and that doesn't work out very well.
00:48:33.200And so then he calls God on God's misbehavior and says to him, I don't know what sort of cosmos you think you've hacked together here, but I'm busting myself in pieces and all I get is misery.
00:48:56.960And I think that's exactly what's happening today is that what we point to as Marxism is just the most recent rational manifestation of the eternal spirit of Cain.
00:49:31.820Well, but the thing is, what you just said, I don't remember your phrasing, but it's the same thing over and over and over again.
00:49:41.600In other words, we're talking about human nature, right?
00:49:43.460And in fact, you see this happen even earlier in Scripture than Cain and Abel, when Adam and Eve make for themselves aprons of fig leaves, right?
00:49:55.320In other words, that's the first religious act.
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00:52:22.780Which apparently aren't a very good covering.
00:52:24.880I talked to Matthew Paggio about that, and fig leaves turn out to be not exactly the sort of leaf that anyone with any sense would ever use to cover themselves.
00:52:35.020So it's a pathetic attempt as well as a deceptive attempt.
00:52:38.680Well, I didn't know that, nor is it relevant, but since it's your show, we're going to let that ride.
00:52:46.580Let me tell you why the fig leaves are insufficient.
00:52:49.560God then, this is just an amazing thing.
00:52:52.840You've probably seen this, but I'm fascinated by this, that in the first few verses of Genesis, it shows Adam and Eve doing something to sort of fool God.
00:53:28.120Innocent animals had to be killed, and blood had to be shed in order that they could be covered, which is, of course, a prefiguring of the sacrifice and the death of Jesus.
00:53:44.000You think you can cover these mistakes on your own with these little religious acts and things, and God says, no, no, no, you don't understand the depth of the horror.
00:53:54.960Blood, innocent blood has to be shed to cover what you have done.
00:54:01.600And, of course, when you refer to Cain and Abel, it's the same kind of thing.
00:54:04.800I'm trying to do this and this and this, and God says, no, this is what's required.
00:54:14.280And there are also sacrifices that involve blood.
00:54:17.380So imagine where we are today that you have people—I mean, they've effectively created a false religion, which is particularly horrifying and wicked.
00:54:29.200It's almost like a—you know, we're seeing it now with the sheer lunacy of the pride juggernaut, you know, that everybody has to be bullied into agreeing with whatever it is.
00:54:50.420If you don't say Heil Hitler loud enough, people will look at you funny.
00:54:54.320Um, why—you seem to say Heil Hitler with some trepidation.
00:54:59.500Perhaps—perhaps you don't like the Fuhrer.
00:55:02.060Uh, you know, in other words, if you don't heartily express, uh, your enthusiasm and approval of X, Y, and Z, people look at you funny.
00:55:12.160And so if you don't have any, um, connection to God or to truth or to reality, then you, you look around and go, oh, what, what, what do I need to do so that people won't look at me funny, so that I might not lose my job or lose my friends?
00:55:33.960And so that's, again, you know, you see this all through history, uh, but the reason I wrote Letter to the American Church is because, you know, it's my thesis that Christians have no excuse, uh, in this.
00:55:51.520You claim to believe in the ground of all being.
00:55:54.560You claim to believe in the God of the Bible, that he, you know, not just died for you, but literally bodily rose from the dead and defeated to death.
00:56:02.840If you believe that, which you claim to, you will behave differently.
00:56:08.480You will behave fearlessly as martyrs and others have throughout the centuries.
00:56:17.400And we've been kind of drifting along with everything, you know, pretty fine.
00:56:20.920We kind of thought like, well, we don't, we don't actually have to give our lives or, or maybe lose our jobs or whatever.
00:56:26.100You have a lot of pastors, um, you know, to put this even, uh, more pointedly, who they're worried about maybe losing their 501c3 tax deductible status by saying something vaguely political from the pulpit.
00:56:41.640And I thought, what kind of cowards can you be?
00:56:48.200You're supposed to care about people out there, not just in your congregation, but out there in the world.
00:56:52.560So that if you were alive in slavery times, you would be speaking against this satanic abomination of the slave trade as Wilberforce did, uh, and against slavery as people did.
00:57:03.700And when people say, oh, you're being political, just stick to theology, you'd say, excuse me, what kind of theology do I have?
00:57:10.380What kind of gospel am I preaching if I don't care about people who are suffering horrors, if I, if I'm silent?
01:00:38.620In other words, the idea that you would, you know, sell your soul for a mess of pottage, to go back to your Cain and Abel reference, it's an amazing thing.
01:00:48.460And I think if we're honest, we know we are all guilty of that to some extent.
01:00:54.680But to the extent that you are aware of your guilt, you want to wake up others.
01:00:58.940And that's what I am hoping to do is to say, folks, those of you who claim to be Christian, this is, again, I write all of my books for everyone.
01:01:10.760And I can make the case for why I believe in the Christian faith.
01:01:14.520But I'm talking in this last book, Let's See the American Church, specifically to those who already claim to believe this.
01:01:19.540And I say, listen, if you believe this, you're on the hook for actually leading the way in showing people what courage looks like, in showing people that, no, no, no, there is this thing called truth.
01:01:36.300And we are made to speak truth and to act truth.
01:01:41.740And we believe that, you know what, even if I lose my life, I don't lose my life.
01:01:49.040But, you know, Bonhoeffer, famously, when he was being led to the gallows, you know, he knew that he says, you know, this is the end.
01:02:46.820If you care about them, and by the way, God commands us to care about them and to love them, then you will speak up for them.
01:02:56.080If you don't, you're not loving them, and God judges you as guilty, and he will hold you to account because you claim to believe in the God who says you're supposed to care about them.
01:03:06.200So that's one issue, one very dramatic issue today.
01:03:10.140You know, there's also, there's a line, I was just writing about this the other day, about stripes.
01:03:17.260So Christ says, if you do not know and you transgress, it's something like that, you will be punished with a certain burden of stripes.
01:03:25.460But if you know and you sin, then you will be punished much more harshly.
01:03:29.820And this is the situation the Christians you're addressing actually should find themselves in.
01:03:34.720Because they've already made this claim to know, right?
01:03:37.420They've already made this claim to faith and are attempting to accrue the status that goes along with that.
01:03:42.180And some of them actually do know, you know, that they need to tell the truth or else.
01:03:46.700And the notion there is that if you do already know that and you still lie, you're going to be punished much more harshly than those who lie who are also ignorant.
01:04:00.500I certainly saw that in my clinical practice.
01:04:02.640Because it's partly because if you lie, there's a sin there, obviously, because you go off the path.
01:04:07.880But if you know you're lying and you're transgressing against your own moral code, then not only are you lying in the moment, but you're betraying your innermost self, right?
01:04:17.920You're betraying your ultimate core in the most real sense.
01:04:21.340And you are absolutely 100% going to pay for that.
01:04:54.380I was, you know, I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church and I had a vague faith.
01:04:59.680At Yale, which is extraordinarily, was then, and of course is now dramatically more secular, hostile to genuine biblical faith, hostile to the ideas, the American ideas of freedom and so on and so forth.
01:05:16.180So I, you know, foolishly drank that Kool-Aid and drifted into genuine agnosticism and I was dramatically lost.
01:05:28.520I was really, you know, I wasn't some proud atheistic sinner.
01:05:33.400I was just lost and ultimately, we could talk about this later, but ultimately I found myself horror of horrors moving back in with my parents, my European immigrant parents who had worked menial jobs to put me through Yale University.
01:05:51.900And they're kind of looking at me like, well, so why are you back here again?
01:06:12.980And in that misery, I met someone who began to share his faith with me.
01:06:19.360And I was initially hostile or at least not wanting to hear it for many, many months.
01:06:26.220And long story short, around my 25th birthday, I had a dramatic, miraculous dream in which, in a nutshell, God spoke to me so unequivocally that there was no going back.
01:07:30.360But I have to say a couple of things for background so you get the vocabulary.
01:07:37.700Number one, grew up as the son of immigrants.
01:07:42.300My father from Greece, you know, very, like most Greeks, inordinately proud of being Greek and wanting to raise his kids in that tradition.
01:07:55.300And so that was a very important part of my growing up, that I am Greek, that this is my identity.
01:08:34.400So, but the early Christians adopted that symbol of the fish as a symbol of the Christian faith because the word fish is an acronym for Isus Christos Theos Imon Sotir.
01:08:47.660Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior.
01:08:51.240So they used the symbol of the fish because to them, the symbol of the fish meant ichthys, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior.
01:08:56.920So it's the secret symbol of the Christians.
01:08:58.160And my father was, you know, thrilled to tell me that's a Greek word and that's where that comes from.
01:09:04.100And so I always associated that fish with Christ after I saw that.
01:09:08.240So, again, this is by way of background.
01:09:09.900Fishing was very important to me growing up also.
01:09:12.520I should say that, you know, if I had a hobby other than, like, watching sitcoms, it was fishing.
01:09:30.580So, basically, around this 25th birthday, if you'd said, who are you, you know, in your guts, it was, well, the Greek background and my family was vitally central to who I was.
01:09:44.940Secondly, this idea of fishing, this was my main, my only hobby, the thing that I did when I had time.
01:10:00.300I realized, even somewhat at the time, because I'm trying to figure out the nature of reality, by reading these great novels in the Western canon, I'm putting together these pieces to figure out what is the nature of reality, what is the meaning of life.
01:10:12.720And I was actually doing that without doing it particularly intentionally.
01:10:17.240It was just instinctively the life of the mind.
01:10:20.180And I came up, and I have to say this so then the dream will make sense.
01:10:23.260Because I came up with, you know, as only a pretentious undergraduate could do, I think I've got it figured out, that it's kind of like a literary trope.
01:10:39.360And what all religions, world religions, mean to do is, so this is where it becomes Freudian and Jungian, and you must forgive me, but the idea of a frozen lake, I thought this is a perfect image for what religion tries to do.
01:10:55.260You have this ice on the top of the lake, which is like the conscious mind.
01:11:03.160And our goal is to drill through the ice to touch the water, which is the collective unconscious.
01:11:11.780We want to touch the divinity, the Godhead.
01:11:15.060Again, Jung's idea, not the Bible's idea, but this idea that that's what God is, the collective unconscious.
01:11:22.380So I had this image that I developed, you know, as an undergraduate.
01:11:26.300Like, okay, so that's what all religions are trying to do.
01:11:28.160They're trying to drill through the conscious mind to touch the other side, to touch the collective unconscious, which is the kind of new age idea of the divinity, the Godhead, whatever that is.
01:11:37.400So I bring all of this, you know, into my 24th year, and around my 25th birthday, have this dream.
01:11:44.260In the dream, I'm standing on a frozen lake, Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Connecticut.
01:11:50.240I'm ice fishing with friends, and I look at the hole in the ice, and I see what you never see if you're ice fishing.
01:11:59.060I see a fish pointing its snout out of the hole, and I look at it, and I reach down, and I lift it up by the gill because it was a pickerel or a pike.
01:12:09.360They have very sharp teeth, and you'd never lip land a fish like that.
01:12:11.940So I pick it up, and in the dream, I lift it up, and it's a large pickerel or pike, and anybody who knows that fish knows that it has a kind of bronze coloring.
01:12:24.140But on that glorious winter day, the sun was shining brightly.
01:12:52.940It is a golden fish made of gold like in a fairy tale, but it is alive, a living golden fish.
01:12:59.340And in that moment in the dream, God effectively drops this into my head like in paragraphs.
01:13:08.200I knew this is God saying to me in this dream, you wanted to drill through the ice to touch inert water, to touch the collective unconscious, the divinity, the Godhead.
01:14:34.200And when I was in the dream holding this fish, I was flooded with joy because what I had believed, you could not know that the Bible is true, that Jesus is God.
01:32:27.900And you realize, well, God is asking you just to try to get it right.
01:32:32.880You might not get it right, but you have to try.
01:32:35.020And to not try and just to cover your rear end ends up being wicked because people are going to suffer because of your silence.
01:32:45.540People are going to suffer because of your inaction, your passivity.
01:32:49.020And trying to paint it along some religious lines makes you even more guilty because you're trying to give this religious excuse for something that is at war with God himself, with his purposes.
01:33:03.980Yeah, well, okay, two things, three things.
01:33:09.360Second, you're definitely a crazy bastard.
01:33:11.900It's no wonder they canceled you off YouTube.
01:33:14.060So, oh, well, and they'll probably do it again as a consequence of this bloody talk because we should have annoyed the trans activist narcissistic psychopaths enough so they'll come out of their hidey hole and bite again.
01:33:26.440And then, well, we probably annoyed the vaccine people and probably annoyed all the Christians or pseudo-Christians.
01:33:33.560And then, of course, the atheists just think we're completely off the bloody wall.
01:33:38.440I'm going to bring Eric over to the Daily Wire side because we're not on the dark side enough yet, so we might as well go there.
01:33:46.140And we're going to talk a little bit about how his ideas developed, how they made themselves manifest across time.
01:33:53.040We did that a little bit with his description of his quite remarkable dream.
01:33:56.780And so if you people who are watching and listening are inclined, you might want to head over there.
01:34:01.640It's not such a bad idea to throw a shekel, so to speak, the Daily Wire way at the moment because YouTube has decided to go to war with us and them, let's say.
01:34:12.240All the people at YouTube are under heavy or at Daily Wire under heavy attack from the YouTube folks at the moment, including me.
01:34:19.360And my suspicions are that the dim-witted authoritarian cowards hiding behind this have taken three bites out of me and decided the taste was pretty good and that they'll continue with this.