00:04:58.340But when we were growing up, it was an hour long. And the second half hour was Charles Schultz telling the history of the pilgrims, which, you know, is the Puritans.
00:05:08.020And we don't tell that history anymore on network TV. And so I wanted to bring that history back.
00:05:13.900You know, the providential nature of their journey. I mean, they travel thousands of miles across the channel.
00:05:21.520They make one stop that they don't think is inhabitable. They go to another place.
00:05:27.200So what are the odds that you stopped one time and would run into an indigenous person who knows your language and knows about Christianity and the Bible because Christians freed him from slavery and his name was Squanto?
00:05:41.180Those odds are astronomical, let alone that you would run into that person after you went to a place you never even intended to go to originally.
00:05:48.860That was the second stop you made. I mean, you can just see the divine hand of providence on this journey.
00:05:55.960You know, we're talking barely 100 people made this journey.
00:05:58.380Almost half of them died the first couple of years that they were here.
00:06:02.280One of them because of the harshness of winter and they experimented with socialism.
00:06:05.600I left that part out of the book for five-year-olds.
00:06:19.120We did about eight rounds of edits on this for a book that might be 3,000 words total.
00:06:23.760it was just so hard for me to wrap my mind around distilling it down, you know, to four and five
00:06:29.420year olds. But I'm very, very pleased with how it turned out. I've gotten a ton of great reaction.
00:06:34.560And people have sent me pictures of their kids reading it, them reading it to their kids.
00:06:39.540And then I didn't know this was going to happen, but there's been a subversive nature to this.
00:06:43.720People are telling me about their kids are reading it and taking it to school because
00:06:46.860the kids haven't been worked over yet. They don't know. They earnestly just think,
00:06:51.400hey, it's a great book about American history and it's really, the artwork is pretty and the story
00:06:55.940is good. So let me take it to my government school and show my classmates. And so I had no idea that
00:07:01.800I was going to create contraband for America's government school system, but very, very pleased
00:07:08.320and honored with how the project has turned out. And now my publisher's like, well, when are we
00:07:12.000doing the next one? So I got to come up with what that is. We have a successful pilot. This might
00:07:16.500now be a series so that's again it's called why thanksgiving the pilgrims started thanksgiving for
00:07:22.060the same reason they came to america because they loved god that's cool so that's that's actually the
00:07:26.660full title that's the full title yes that's cool that's a very puritan title by the way when the
00:07:31.780title is almost like a whole chapter you know then you know that you're in that puritan stream
00:07:36.880so very puritanical i left no debates i preemptively answered all follow-up questions
00:07:42.560as calvin would in his sermons right yeah and then no one no one left with any dangling participles
00:07:47.600if you were wondering if it was about you it's about you yes yeah that's great um yeah i think
00:07:53.120that's so important i think about you know it seems like there's been such for and this isn't
00:07:57.060new but for decades there's been such um such an organized you know effort to rewrite america's
00:08:04.320history um because it's it's i mean i get discouraged as a christian i know you get
00:08:09.040discouraged. We just had the midterms and the wave didn't materialize. It wasn't as bad as it
00:08:13.940could have been. There's still some things to be hopeful about. But there was a bit of a trickle
00:08:18.820and there's a million reasons why. Maybe it's, for one, we've made voting too easy. Maybe rigging
00:08:23.560or something in Arizona, I don't know. But part of it is because people, I keep thinking about
00:08:28.180John chapter three, right? That Jesus, he's the light of the world. He came into the world,
00:08:31.860but men love the darkness. And that's not to say the Republican party is rainbows and just
00:08:37.920christ-exalting oh it's rainbows biblical well yeah yeah you're right you're right yeah you're
00:08:44.340right it's rainbows today i mean we had a slew of republican senators essentially go do the full
00:08:51.040sodom right shake their fist at god and help the democrats use the federal government to declare
00:08:57.360open lawfare upon the church so right it is it is rainbows my friend you were describing you're
00:09:05.380Yeah, that's not what I meant, but you're absolutely right. But my point is to say that the Republican Party is by no means, and what you just pointed out just proves the point even more, it's by no means synonymous with the scripture. But as you and I have talked before, I think it's important for people to see that our two parties are wicked, but they're not equally wicked.
00:09:22.620And when you have one party that their platform essentially is you can have your sin, you know, and the other part party is you can have some of your sin, you know, and so but like you can have your sin.
00:09:34.780So Jesus came into the world as light, but men love the darkness, right?
00:09:37.900Like cockroaches, you turn on the light, they scatter under.
00:09:40.400And I feel like there's just so much of what we've seen and been, you know, just disappointed by in this last week with the midterm election, all these kinds of things.
00:09:48.360Sometimes it feels impossible that our nation would actually exalt Christ again.
00:09:52.620But the key word is that last word that I said, knowing our history, to know that what
00:09:58.460we're striving towards is something that actually has occurred in this land before, that it
00:10:03.940wasn't just a bunch of deists, that there were actually, George Washington, I believe,
00:10:07.800by looking at first sources that he would qualify as an evangelical Christian and knowing
00:10:13.680that these things have happened before gives you a sense of hope that they can happen again.
00:10:26.220And when you tie this into the story of the pilgrims, and Joel, just to show you just how Romans one of a nation we are, how much of, we're not even rebellious now.
00:10:45.340Let's test the boundaries here and go through an extended pubescence and have the season of sowing our wild oats before we have a family and come back to reality.
00:10:57.040You're dealing with a country right now where the average 25-year-old male is more likely to be living at home with a parent than in another home with a woman and a child.
00:11:36.960And if you look at the history of the Puritans, remember what they were rebelling against. They weren't fleeing Islamic hordes in Asia Minor, future modern day Turkey, you know, invading the seven churches of that area.
00:11:53.360They weren't fading, they weren't evading the Islamic hordes in Lebanon, one of the original Christian colonies in the first couple of centuries.
00:12:05.180This wasn't, let's get it, you know, the Druids have come over the wall.
00:12:09.040The Visigoths have come over the wall.
00:24:15.100All throughout human history, the spirit of the age, which is one of the references that the Bible uses to the demonic manifestation of influence within a culture.
00:24:28.040All throughout human history, there has never been a period of time that the spirit of the age did not attempt to manifest itself politically.
00:24:34.480Whether we're talking about kings that call themselves Baal, Peor in the Old Testament.
00:27:46.440One of the things, one of the biggest problems, this is the core problem is we just don't have enough Christians and are not truly born again, regenerate Christians.
00:27:54.020So we need preaching because the gospel is the only power of God for salvation.
00:27:58.120So we just, we need some good old, and I'm talking old-timey preaching where people claw
00:28:02.460into the pews in front of them, sinners in the hands of an angry God, Jonathan Edwards
00:28:06.200They claw into the pews out of terror of God's judgment that he's a thrice holy God and that
00:28:10.600he will not by any means pardon the wicked except lest they believe, repent of their
00:28:15.520sin and believe upon the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:28:17.220Because the people who claw into the pews are the ones when they're offered the free
00:28:20.160grace that's found in Christ alone, claw into Christ and they never let them go.
00:28:23.240So we need preaching and regeneration. We need teaching. The Christians that we do have, we don't have enough, but the ones that we do have are reading the Gospel Coalition and this third wayism where it's like, well, over here we have the sanctity of life, but over here we have caring for the poor. And it's this false dichotomy, right? And then what's said is, well, both are bad. And it's implicitly said they're equally bad, aka you can either not vote at all, just not be involved, or you could really go either way. And really, if you want to be a good person, you should vote Democrat.
00:28:52.940at. So we need some teaching. And then last training, we need Christian schools. We used
00:28:57.660to have them. They were called the public schools. There was Bible classes in the schools, Christian
00:29:02.000flags in the school. That's why Catholics started their schools because the American public schools
00:29:05.940once upon a time were Protestant schools for the most part, but that's just not the case anymore.
00:29:10.200We need to start good, strong, robust Christian schools. And so that's what I've been telling
00:29:14.360people. This is the way forward. This is what we got to do. But you've got some great stuff. I saw
00:29:19.780you on twitter you said you know what i'm probably going to do a little less politics and a little
00:29:23.420bit more theology because you were feeling some of the same things that i've been feeling that we
00:29:26.740just we need some christians in here do you have any more takeaways from this last election trump's
00:29:32.260announcement everything that's going on in the political world what can christians do what do
00:29:36.400we need i think we have to remember that for 1700 almost 1700 years between christ's ascension
00:29:45.840and when the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Christendom endured and survived countless
00:29:53.280martyrdoms, countless persecutions, countless tyrannies. It didn't have a U.S. Constitution.
00:30:00.360It didn't have a Republican Party. It didn't have hacktastic politicians. It didn't have the right
00:30:06.440to vote. How did it endure? And it endured in my, to me, when I look at church history,
00:30:13.080well first of all it endured because upon this rock I will build my church and not even the
00:30:18.200gates of hell will prevail against it because it is the bride of the ruler of gods of all creation
00:30:23.940so that's the meta-theological answer okay but then but then how did did did how did Christ work
00:30:31.840out his royalty within that statement what did it look like to us in an earthly realm two things
00:30:38.920One, everything that you just said, everything you just said, but two, Christians learn the art of the word no, whether it's the monk who came out of the stands in the Colosseum and pleaded in the name of Christ, stop, and then got murdered on the floor of the Colosseum that day.
00:31:07.140but his murder so shocked the people that that was the last, that was the end of the Gladiator
00:31:11.860games. Whether it's Polycarp saying all these 80 years of my life, my Lord has been faithful to me.
00:31:20.560How do I deny him now at the end? Whether it's a black Baptist seamstress who just used the word
00:31:26.860no on a bus one day and sparked the civil rights movement on and on and goes the use of the word
00:31:33.320no, we will not comply. When we will give Caesar the tribute he deserves for the paving of the
00:31:41.420roads and the civil defense. When Caesar asks for my worship, when Caesar asks for my ethics,
00:31:48.720those don't belong to you. That is not the jurisdiction of the state that Christ gave to you.
00:31:55.020I serve God and not man. I fear God and not man. Yes, you can put me in the stockade. You can put
00:32:01.020me on the gallows. You can draw and quarter me. You can drop me in a vat of acid. He can cast my
00:32:05.820soul into hell. So no, my answer is no. And I think now that we're no longer in an era that
00:32:14.440we can trust these institutions largely founded in our belief system to defend us as the default,
00:32:20.280as the benefit of the doubt on a very individual, granular, molecular level,
00:32:26.600We're going to have to learn how to say, no.
00:33:13.180In your heat at home, all right, you know, while following the lower third on Fox News on your satellite dish all the get out of here, man, okay?
00:33:52.920When they ask me to do something that God largely doesn't prioritize or is silent on, as long as that doesn't violate my conscience, I'll happily take part in the community ritual.
00:34:05.900When they ask me to do something that God says, don't do that.
00:34:37.500But he also wrote a book that you can pick it up and you can read and seeing what God forbids and seeing what God, what is God's no for my life and being able to sketch that out and get that squared away and then being able to say, okay, so then these are the bounds, right?
00:34:53.920The fish, you know, I need to be liberated from this prison and oppression of water, you know, and one day it swims as fast as it can and it jumps out of the water onto the land and dies, right?
00:35:03.660The thing that it thought was imprisoning it was that that was the proper context that God determined and created.
00:35:09.700That's where the fish was free, actually, was the water.
00:35:13.120And so being able to say this is the no, I think that's fantastic.
00:35:17.040The one thing I want to add to that is just I think that primarily men say no.
00:35:23.320I think that's part of how God's designed us is to be defenders, to be protectors, to be providers.
00:35:28.740um my wife so we've been married now um coming up on eight years and uh she was horrible at saying
00:35:35.900no and she she would she you know she admits that she would be you know she'd be like yeah
00:35:40.520joel's right um and i had to really disciple her in the art of knowing you know um uh telling people
00:35:47.660know what to say no to and i mean it it it was horrible for her at first because i'm saying i'm
00:35:52.220like i'm sorry sweetheart we're saying no to this no we're not going to go to uh 15 birthday parties
00:35:56.220this way. No, we're not going to, you know, like we're saying, no, we're saying, no, we're saying
00:35:59.680no. Um, and, and that was really hard for her, but, but it freed her. And, and here's the thing,
00:36:04.900she got better at saying no, but she also doesn't have to be a master at saying no. Cause she's got
00:36:08.620me. Um, and, and I, I just think that one of the things that, that, that progressives do that
00:36:13.480liberals do is they've beaten conservatives at, at stealing the hearts of women at, at, and because
00:36:19.200they've gotten really good at storytelling. I thought, why are they so much better at
00:36:21.920storytelling? And I think it's the facts over feelings, which I get the sentiment. That's true,
00:36:25.820But I think the facts over feeling mantra is like, we've got the pie charts, we've got the graphs, we've got like, we actually have the truth on our side. So we don't have to be elaborate and good storytellers. But good storytelling appeals to people, period, but especially women, the way that I think God has wired them and designed them.
00:36:43.920And we just saw, you know, all the single ladies, all the single ladies really came out, you know, as a voting bloc, not an ethnic voting bloc, not poor or rich, not an economic stat, but gender, single women came out in full force for Democrats.
00:36:59.580And I just feel like one of the things that we need and saying no and holding the line and these kinds of things is men have to win the hearts of their wives.
00:37:07.640We have to win. Fathers have to win the hearts of their daughters.
00:37:10.180And we need to do it by teaching them the facts over feelings.
00:37:13.040But we also need to do it by showing them glorious stories once more, showing them like you hear a story of this person, this poor person coming up in a caravan that just wants, you know, freedom in America.
00:37:23.360And, you know, and there's only 13,000 of them that want to cross over.
00:37:26.420And, but there's another part of the story, but we just give the pie chart, but we need to, like, how do we tell that story that shows, that shows that this actually leads towards destruction and this actually preserves life. And I don't know, any, any thoughts on storytelling? Do you think I'm off there or is there, there a better way that you would say that?
00:37:44.240No. I mean, I think this is the third question in a row that you've asked me that I thought you probably gave a better way than I was going to give you.
00:37:50.680Okay. All right. Well then I know you're running out of time. So any final thoughts?
00:37:54.260Well, first of all, you're talking to a guy that has a movie coming out next year about a book he wrote.
00:38:01.420Oh, good. Well, there you go. That's what we need.
00:38:04.780Yeah, with the intent of trying to retell good storytelling again.
00:40:05.960The best myth, the best legend of all, the best story ever made is the one that's true.
00:40:11.120we like that that is such powerful artillery that we have in you know on our side and we we need to
00:40:18.220use it and and one other thing that i thought was just talking you know how people used to tell
00:40:22.740stories back in the day um you knew who the bad guys were because they were orcs you know what i
00:40:27.360mean like like they they looked like bad guys i think that's part of the part of the problem right
00:40:32.240now is the bad guys just they they look they they use the storytelling all those kinds of things to
00:40:37.380look altruistic to look like oh look at how empathetic this person is and and and they've
00:40:42.380really done a good job at taking the few good guys that we have and making them look like monsters
00:40:46.920and racist and this kind of and i i think that good storytelling one of the reasons we needed
00:40:52.100is because again the pie chart's just not going to do it we need to be able to cut through
00:40:55.300and and and rip off that mask and say um this dude's an orc he's an orc wearing elf skin you
00:41:02.660know what i mean like like look at him he's literally he's got blood coming out of his mouth
00:41:05.660You know, like from the last person's head that he ate, you know, and, and, and this person is not, um, you know, this person is beautiful.
00:41:12.420And so to be able to take truth, it's not just truth and falsehoods, it's beauty and ugliness.
00:41:18.260I think we need to make falsehoods ugly again and truth beautiful again.
00:41:22.880So how can people follow you, Steve, um, and keep up with you and, and what should they be looking for?