The Matt Walsh Show - May 16, 2018


Ep. 31 - Does Christianity Have Too Many ＂Rules＂？


Episode Stats

Length

21 minutes

Words per Minute

159.80995

Word Count

3,487

Sentence Count

258

Misogynist Sentences

4

Hate Speech Sentences

12


Summary

In this episode of the CarCast, I discuss why young people are leaving the church, and why the church should focus less on rules, chastity and abstinence, and more on identity and radicalism. I also talk about why rules and chastity are not the problem, but rather the way that the church has been liberalized.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the CarCast, everyone. So we were talking yesterday about the reasons why young people have left the church, and I gave my theory. My theory is that young people are leaving the church because the church has tried to be trendy and cool.
00:00:15.460 It's tried to appeal to the shallowest, most superficial aspects of young people rather than appealing to their deeper characteristics, and that would be their hunger for change and identity, their hunger for a cause to fight for a mission, their radicalism, their revolutionary nature, all that great stuff.
00:00:36.820 So it should be a match made in heaven, literally, between young people and Christianity, because Christianity is a radical revolutionary cause, right, to fight for.
00:00:46.900 But instead, we've watered everything down in an attempt to make it more palatable, but really what's happened is we've alienated everybody, including young people.
00:00:57.160 Now, I received a lot of feedback to that discussion, and I want some of it positive, some of it negative, as usual.
00:01:03.420 I wanted to address one objection, one email, because it represents, I think, a lot of the critiques that I read after we talked about this.
00:01:11.560 So I got one, I got an email from a guy, a fellow Christian, and he said that he agreed with much of what I said.
00:01:16.460 He agreed with the general argument for the most part, but he also thinks that the real problem, or one of the biggest problems, is that young people are really repulsed by the rules, the so-called rules in Christianity.
00:01:29.980 Especially the rules that govern their sex lives.
00:01:36.120 And he said that if churches would de-emphasize those things, de-emphasize the teachings on abstinence, chastity, especially the idea that sex outside of marriage is wrong, if we de-emphasize that, then we might have a better shot of bringing people in.
00:01:50.280 And this idea I've heard echoed by many other people.
00:01:54.720 Now, I have several objections to that objection, and I want to go through them one at a time.
00:01:58.740 So first of all, let's start with this.
00:02:02.260 Churches have de-emphasized those things, or outright rejected them.
00:02:07.340 And I find it fairly mind-boggling that there are still so many people who think that the church's main problem is that it's too conservative and too orthodox, and that it's too focused on rules, and that, you know, the biggest problem is all these Christians running around who are fundamentalists, and they're so focused on religious discipline.
00:02:25.380 I mean, where is that a problem?
00:02:28.400 Where are you meeting all these Christians who that's their biggest issue?
00:02:33.420 I mean, really, what are you talking about?
00:02:34.940 I have not noticed that the vast, vast majority of Christians that you meet could care less about the rules, could care less about the commandments, they make no attempt to follow them whatsoever in their lives.
00:02:48.060 And the vast majority of churches that you go to, they'll never talk about these.
00:02:52.880 They're not going to ever talk about sexual morality, chastity.
00:02:57.980 I mean, you think, look, with all due respect, as I said, I find it mind-boggling, this idea that,
00:03:04.940 there's a problem with Christians being too focused on chastity.
00:03:09.500 When do you ever hear anyone talking about chastity anymore?
00:03:12.800 It's extremely rare, and it's extremely rare, I'm just telling you, it's extremely rare to find a church that talks about these things.
00:03:21.160 Okay?
00:03:21.800 So, the point is, we have de-emphasized them, we have liberalized, and that's been one of the great causes of the problem.
00:03:30.200 Which means it cannot be the solution.
00:03:33.980 Second, I don't like the term rules to describe the teachings and commandments of God, because they're rules in the same way that gravity is a rule.
00:03:49.660 Okay, these things are inherent.
00:03:54.500 The moral commandments that you find in the Bible, call them rules if you want to, but they are not random, they're not arbitrary.
00:04:02.620 And calling them rules makes it sound arbitrary.
00:04:05.480 And I think people use that term on purpose.
00:04:07.560 They want it to sound arbitrary.
00:04:09.200 They want to make it sound like this is just something Christians came up with, or even something that just God came up with randomly,
00:04:15.060 just wanting to cramp our styles, I guess.
00:04:18.740 But that's not the case.
00:04:20.620 The moral laws of Christianity are inherent.
00:04:24.020 They can be found within human nature.
00:04:27.320 They are part of the nature of things, just like gravity, on a physical level, is part of the nature of things.
00:04:34.700 So, Christianity says that it's destructive and disordered to lust after women, to sleep around, to turn sex into a game, to be promiscuous, all that.
00:04:41.960 But Christianity isn't just giving its opinion.
00:04:45.080 It isn't just suggesting one possible way to live that's equal to all the other ways.
00:04:50.920 No.
00:04:51.860 It's telling you something that's just true.
00:04:55.360 And every person who's treated sex like a game, who has lived by lust and self-indulgence, whether Christian or not,
00:05:01.560 has suffered the misery and degradation that comes with that lifestyle.
00:05:05.420 Just as every person who jumps from a building has had to deal with the fact that gravity is going to assert itself.
00:05:12.320 And in the same way, those moral laws assert themselves, whether we choose to abide by them or not.
00:05:20.960 Third thing, you say that people don't want rules.
00:05:24.920 They don't want commandments.
00:05:26.960 They don't want to be told what to do.
00:05:29.800 I disagree.
00:05:31.740 Now, on the surface, that might be true.
00:05:33.740 Again, surface level, it's true that people don't want to be told what to do.
00:05:37.780 On a deeper level, I think people are starving to be told what to do.
00:05:43.960 They're starving for direction, for instruction.
00:05:47.060 They're starving for lines to be drawn.
00:05:50.280 They are.
00:05:50.720 However, I think when you go to someone and you say, do what you want, whatever you want, do anything that you want.
00:05:57.640 It's all equal.
00:05:58.660 There's no bad.
00:05:59.380 There's no good.
00:05:59.960 Everything's equally as bad, equally as good.
00:06:02.560 Anything you want to do, just go do it.
00:06:05.420 Now, they might be happy at first.
00:06:07.220 They might say, oh, awesome.
00:06:08.540 Great.
00:06:09.780 But in the end, they're going to be lost and confused and paralyzed.
00:06:15.840 In fact, tell somebody that, come back the next day.
00:06:18.880 You know what they're going to be doing?
00:06:19.760 They'll probably still just be standing right there.
00:06:21.960 They haven't gone anywhere.
00:06:23.900 When you've told them every direction is equal and nothing is better than anything else, it's like, okay, what's the point of going anywhere then?
00:06:33.480 It's kind of like, it's kind of a crude analogy here, but it's sort of like if you go to one of these chain restaurants where it seems like the menus of these restaurants just grow by the minute.
00:06:46.940 And so now you open up a menu and there are 6,000 things on it.
00:06:53.040 Every variety, there's Mexican food, Italian food, American food, everything.
00:07:00.300 And what happens?
00:07:02.160 You have no idea.
00:07:03.120 It's too many options.
00:07:04.000 You don't even know.
00:07:05.100 You have no idea what to – and then what do you do?
00:07:08.160 You end up asking the waiter, well, what do you think I should get?
00:07:12.820 You need some direction.
00:07:15.140 You need someone to help you.
00:07:16.920 Like just this is too much.
00:07:18.560 Too many options.
00:07:20.080 Give me some clarity here.
00:07:23.480 Give me some direction.
00:07:25.060 Give me some advice or something.
00:07:27.700 Don't just give me 6,000 options and say eat whatever you want, right?
00:07:32.040 So it kind of works that way morally in our lives.
00:07:37.640 There are two types of freedom.
00:07:40.060 Okay, there's the freedom of a life devoid of all meaning, of all purpose, devoid of direction, devoid of morality.
00:07:48.320 There's that freedom where there's no rules.
00:07:51.940 And then there's the freedom that you find in truth and in God.
00:07:59.020 There's the freedom that you find when you willingly surrender to the moral commandments that God has given us.
00:08:11.160 When you surrender to God.
00:08:13.780 So there's this freedom.
00:08:14.760 There's the freedom in pride where you say, I'm going to do whatever I want.
00:08:17.440 And then there's the freedom in surrender to God, saying, show me the way and I will walk it.
00:08:25.400 That's the freedom that we find when God has not only told us, but he's shown us.
00:08:31.980 Jesus Christ walked the path and he said, follow me.
00:08:37.660 He didn't say, just go do whatever you want.
00:08:39.560 Everything's equal.
00:08:40.360 Nothing's bad.
00:08:41.260 Nothing's good.
00:08:41.780 There's no sin.
00:08:43.020 He said, follow me.
00:08:44.580 And so when you follow him, you find true freedom.
00:08:48.360 Even if in this life, you're also going to find suffering and sacrifice and all that.
00:08:55.100 So that's the only true freedom.
00:08:56.800 That's where you can really be happy.
00:08:58.420 But in order to enjoy that freedom, you have to follow the quote rules.
00:09:03.900 Just as you have to follow the rule of gravity, you have to obey its dictates, respect it, understand
00:09:11.800 it if you want to enjoy skydiving.
00:09:14.940 Okay, skydiving with a parachute is controlled.
00:09:18.120 It's restricted.
00:09:19.740 There are rules.
00:09:20.880 If you want to do it, you've never done it before, you got to go take a class and they
00:09:24.200 give you all the different instructions.
00:09:25.800 You fill out forms, you do everything, right?
00:09:27.960 There are a lot of rules.
00:09:29.300 I've never been skydiving.
00:09:30.180 My understanding though is there are a lot of rules with skydiving.
00:09:33.620 And so there's, you know, you could do it that way or you could do it the free way
00:09:39.720 and you could really be free and you could skydive without a parachute.
00:09:43.800 One is fun and exciting.
00:09:45.880 The other is suicide.
00:09:48.440 So which way is actually free?
00:09:50.860 The one where you splatter on the pavement and die at the end or the one where you learn
00:09:55.720 the rules and you respect them and you follow them and you take the more controlled and
00:10:02.940 restricted approach.
00:10:05.160 Another example, I think we could look at marriage.
00:10:07.780 In modern times, you know, we've done away with all the roles, all the rules, all the
00:10:13.740 ideas, all ideas of duty and responsibility.
00:10:16.700 We've done away with the man's authority and headship in the home.
00:10:19.440 And now we say everything's 50-50.
00:10:21.000 There are no roles.
00:10:21.780 There are no rules.
00:10:22.480 There are no duties.
00:10:23.500 There are no responsibilities that anyone in particular is supposed to be doing.
00:10:30.260 Everyone just does everything.
00:10:31.960 Nobody leads.
00:10:32.760 Nobody follows.
00:10:33.620 Nobody's in charge.
00:10:34.640 Nobody, nothing, right?
00:10:36.120 There's no head of the home.
00:10:38.440 Now, and so this is supposed to be a free marriage, right?
00:10:43.040 A free and equal marriage where everyone just can do whatever they want.
00:10:47.560 Now, I ask you, has this led to happy and fulfilled marriages across the country?
00:10:53.460 I can't even say without laughing, even though it's not funny.
00:10:56.820 But it is, it's just the absurdity of this idea that it's actually worked out, right?
00:11:03.820 Do you think it's worked out?
00:11:04.820 Because I look across the country and I see divorce, I see, you know, unhappy and miserable
00:11:11.140 people in their marriages.
00:11:12.540 I see, I see an entire generation of people, my generation, who have almost given up on marriage
00:11:18.320 completely.
00:11:19.160 They take such a dim view of it.
00:11:21.760 So has this equal 50-50 free and open approach to marriage?
00:11:27.820 Has it worked?
00:11:28.700 No.
00:11:29.180 Instead, again, it's caused this paralysis.
00:11:34.840 People in relationships don't know what they're supposed to do.
00:11:39.280 They don't know who's supposed to do what.
00:11:41.200 Now, with gender roles, with those bad old ancient gender roles, people knew basically what they're
00:11:51.480 supposed to do in a marriage.
00:11:54.440 And within those, you know, within those parameters, there's a lot of freedom.
00:11:59.740 And still, there's a lot of diversity in marriages, and marriages can, you know, are all different
00:12:05.200 because there are different people involved in them.
00:12:07.820 But when you have this basic idea of gender roles, well, now at least you can get going.
00:12:13.640 You can go in one direction because you know where you're supposed to go, and you have a
00:12:17.500 general idea of what you're supposed to be doing.
00:12:19.880 But we don't have that anymore, so people don't know what they're supposed to do, how they're
00:12:23.620 supposed to relate.
00:12:24.740 And then what happens is competition arises, and they end up competing and working against
00:12:29.280 each other because they've rejected the roles, the rules that help them make their marriages
00:12:34.340 work and help them work with each other so that they can enjoy a happy and complimentary
00:12:39.560 and free marriage.
00:12:42.560 Fourth thing, and this point is related to all the rest that I've mentioned, but you
00:12:49.680 say that young people aren't interested in chastity and abstinence and sexual morality.
00:12:55.400 Once again, that is only on the surface.
00:12:58.160 On the surface, yeah, they're not interested.
00:13:00.520 Let's look at a deeper level, though.
00:13:02.660 Deeper level, we can see that the alternative has not been a great success.
00:13:08.640 Modern sexuality, like modern marriage, unsurprisingly, the two are linked.
00:13:12.760 Modern sexuality is a disaster zone.
00:13:15.000 It's a catastrophe.
00:13:16.140 Disease, abortion, unwed pregnancy, porn addiction, the sexual revolution has been a catastrophic
00:13:23.140 failure.
00:13:25.740 People are not happy.
00:13:28.340 Find me someone my age, 31, 32, who's been sleeping around and dating frivolously for the
00:13:35.460 last 10 or 15 years or longer, and yet is happy and satisfied and content and not lonely at
00:13:45.420 all.
00:13:46.260 Find me someone like that.
00:13:47.640 You can't.
00:13:49.260 They're all miserable.
00:13:51.440 All the people that have tried it this way, they've followed the ideas of the sexual revolution.
00:13:56.820 They've wanted to be free, sexual freedom.
00:14:01.740 I mean, look at, you know, we had a baby boomers came along, my parents' generation, and they
00:14:06.780 said, I want sexual freedom.
00:14:08.380 And what do we end up with?
00:14:11.280 Disease, abortion, death, divorce.
00:14:15.160 I mean, all these, that's what freedom has gotten us, is destruction and despair.
00:14:21.660 People are unfulfilled in their romantic lives, and worse than that, they feel violated.
00:14:28.900 What do you think all this affirmative consent stuff is about?
00:14:32.320 You have women who, they have sex consensually, and the next day they claim that they were
00:14:36.680 assaulted because they volunteered to do it, but they volunteered and they had reservations,
00:14:43.540 and they didn't, it was unspoken reservation.
00:14:46.080 And there was something in the back of their mind telling them, no, this isn't right, don't
00:14:49.960 do this, but they did it anyway.
00:14:51.900 Now, what does that stem from?
00:14:55.180 They feel violated because they were violated, though they offer themselves up to be violated.
00:15:02.900 They feel degraded because they were degraded, though they were willing participants in their
00:15:07.760 own degradation.
00:15:08.920 They wake up feeling used because they were used, though they allowed themselves to be
00:15:13.980 used, which makes them feel even worse because now there's guilt.
00:15:18.240 And nobody can really be happy with that.
00:15:21.080 You see, what we've done is you find this over and over and over again, where somebody
00:15:26.520 comes in and they get rid of the rules, they get rid of the moral, any sense of morality,
00:15:31.760 they get rid of all that.
00:15:32.840 And then catastrophe and disaster soon follows.
00:15:35.700 And so then they try to make new rules.
00:15:39.020 The whole idea was to get rid of rules, and now they're making new ones.
00:15:41.740 And the new ones are even more restricting and weird and bizarre and confusing than the
00:15:46.220 old ones.
00:15:47.020 And so what's happened is we got rid of all of the moral laws and any sense of sexual
00:15:54.420 morality.
00:15:54.860 We've tossed out the window.
00:15:56.520 The only thing that we've left is consent.
00:16:00.300 That was the one last thing.
00:16:02.580 Now, consent was already embedded into Christian sexual morality.
00:16:07.460 Consent was part of it.
00:16:08.960 Christianity has always been against rape, very clearly.
00:16:11.640 Um, so that was already part of it, but there was more to it because Christianity recognizes
00:16:18.020 that, yeah, you have to consent to a sexual act, but that's just, that's just the beginning.
00:16:23.920 That's, that in itself is not enough.
00:16:25.660 You could consent to a sexual act and yet still be harmed by it physically and spiritually.
00:16:32.180 And so there's gotta be more than just consent.
00:16:35.380 But, um, what our culture has said is no consent's all that mattered, but what have they found?
00:16:40.320 They found that Christianity was right.
00:16:42.480 There's gotta be more.
00:16:43.900 That's consent is not enough because people are consenting to sex and yet they still feel
00:16:48.640 awful and guilty and empty and ashamed the next day.
00:16:52.260 And so what our culture has tried to do is they've tried to take consent and use it as
00:16:58.560 the raw material to build this whole new sexual ethic.
00:17:02.960 And they've turned consent into this like calculus, um, this impossible to understand calculus, whereas
00:17:09.420 it should be pretty simple.
00:17:10.780 It's consent.
00:17:11.520 If you, did you, did you participate in the act willingly?
00:17:14.480 If you did, then you consented.
00:17:16.000 If you were forced into it, you weren't, you didn't, you didn't consent really simple.
00:17:19.500 But now we've tried to take consent and find a way to use it.
00:17:24.620 So as to in some way, still protect the dignity of, of women.
00:17:30.360 So that even if, so that there could be a situation where they volunteer to do it, yet they
00:17:35.040 didn't consent because they're going to feel violated afterwards.
00:17:38.180 And so it just becomes very confusing.
00:17:39.800 It's not so confusing if you go back to the Christian sexual morality, which says that sex
00:17:47.600 is a sacred thing.
00:17:49.160 It's a beautiful, wonderful, precious thing.
00:17:51.740 And it has to be protected.
00:17:53.640 It's also very powerful.
00:17:55.460 It's powerful because sex can create a whole other person, which is pretty incredible.
00:18:04.260 It's also powerful on a spiritual, emotional level where you, no matter what you try to
00:18:10.180 say, you know, when you, when you offer yourself up to somebody like this and you are with someone
00:18:17.740 in this, in the most intimate way imaginable, your whole being gets wrapped up into it as well.
00:18:25.460 And so their emotions get involved in all this stuff.
00:18:29.020 And there's this kind of this bond that naturally and automatically forms.
00:18:35.440 Christianity recognizes that.
00:18:37.740 And so it says, okay, this thing, it's not because we hate sex.
00:18:41.180 No, it's because we understand, we understand how powerful and wonderful this thing is.
00:18:46.200 And so we have to respect it and reserve it for the, the protected parameters of a committed
00:18:56.860 and loving and devoted marriage.
00:18:59.900 Christianity says that any other arrangement leads to despair, misery, and destruction.
00:19:05.940 And the world has proved this correct.
00:19:08.960 The last 60 years of American history have been one long case study proving Christian sexual
00:19:14.980 ethics.
00:19:15.580 Correct.
00:19:16.620 You don't have to take my word for it.
00:19:18.360 Just look at the culture.
00:19:20.440 Look at what's happened.
00:19:22.440 So no, it's not, it's not Christian.
00:19:24.140 Christianity doesn't hate sex.
00:19:26.260 Our culture hates sex.
00:19:27.940 It has turned it into this meaningless, empty thing, like just a recreational activity and nothing
00:19:34.760 more, like a, like a greeting between people, like it's just shaking hands with a person
00:19:38.960 that's having sex.
00:19:40.080 That's what our culture has done.
00:19:42.140 They hate and are afraid of what sex, sex actually is.
00:19:46.920 Whereas Christianity embraces it in its totality and says, this is a good thing that comes from
00:19:53.720 God.
00:19:55.020 It's so good.
00:19:55.980 In fact, that you, you can't just give it away.
00:20:00.660 You can't just let it be used.
00:20:02.540 It's got to be protected like anything else that's precious and valuable and personal and
00:20:10.240 intimate.
00:20:10.960 You protect it.
00:20:12.480 You don't just give it to anybody.
00:20:14.900 This is why Christians believe or should believe in saving it for marriage.
00:20:18.060 Now, Christian teachings, especially in the area of sex, are difficult to follow.
00:20:24.320 But as Chesterton, maybe it was C.S. Lewis, Chesterton or Lewis, one of those guys, said that
00:20:30.000 Christianity has not been tried and found wanting.
00:20:32.760 It's been found difficult and left untried.
00:20:35.700 So we have here an essential choice between the difficult but better thing or the easy
00:20:40.560 but worse thing.
00:20:42.000 And I like, I like that matchup personally.
00:20:45.300 That's a compelling argument.
00:20:46.680 I like that argument.
00:20:48.280 That matchup between difficult, better, easy, worse.
00:20:53.600 That's good.
00:20:54.420 I like our chances of winning that argument.
00:20:56.980 But if we're going to win that argument, we have to make it first.
00:21:01.000 And so you say, oh, no, the church needs to back away from sexual morality, all morality.
00:21:07.700 Don't talk about it.
00:21:09.000 I say we should do the exact opposite.
00:21:12.680 We should be talking about it a lot more.
00:21:14.340 Because people need to hear this and they want to also, even if they don't know it, because
00:21:22.100 they're not happy with the other way.
00:21:24.680 No matter what they claim, they're not happy with it.
00:21:27.260 They want to find happiness and fulfillment.
00:21:29.220 Here it is.
00:21:30.420 We got to tell them about it.
00:21:31.760 We can't be afraid to tell them.
00:21:33.640 We can't be ashamed or embarrassed.
00:21:37.240 We're not the ones who should be ashamed or embarrassed of this belief system because
00:21:42.660 it's right and it's true.
00:21:44.960 All right.
00:21:45.600 Thanks for watching, everybody.
00:21:47.280 Have a great day and Godspeed.