Valuetainment - April 05, 2026


“They Tried To Silence Me” - Atheist Turned Pastor REVEALS Death Threats Over His Beliefs

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Josh McDowell Jaden Ivey Devin Porter Jonathan Edwards Sean McDowell Wayne
“GREATEST Governor In The U.S.” - DeSantis TORCHES Woke Judge Over Soft Sentences “186K Is A HUGE Number” - March Jobs Report STUNS Experts Despite Iran War Costs

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

180.48

Word count

2,663

Sentence count

195

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with my good friend and long time Christian friend, Dr. Sean McDowell, to talk about the role of C.S. Lewis in shaping the modern Christian faith, and whether or not he could have been a lunatic.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 your uh evolution of you know going from the atheist to a you know christian yeah what role
00:00:06.480 did c.s lewis play you know with mere christianity or some of his other writings that he had what
00:00:12.320 role did he play he played a big role i mean mere christianity is a classic um and uh i recommend
00:00:18.240 anybody read that whether a believer or not a believer just someone who's checking out the
00:00:21.520 faith it's just a great great book c.s lewis wrote some wonderful wonderful stuff
00:00:25.780 So I enjoyed him.
00:00:27.960 You know, on a popular level, Josh McDowell.
00:00:30.760 Remember Josh?
00:00:31.560 He's a friend now.
00:00:32.320 And his son, Sean McDowell, is a fantastic professor at Biola University.
00:00:38.020 And my son is a professor there.
00:00:39.780 He has a Ph.D. in faith.
00:00:45.280 He's a Jonathan Edwards scholar, and he teaches spiritual formation at their seminary.
00:00:52.680 But Josh wrote some popular-level books.
00:00:54.440 there's a book written by a guy gosh what was his name um oh there's several books uh the agnostic
00:01:01.600 who dared to search that was that was an interesting book uh peter stoner peter stoner great name yeah
00:01:08.660 peter stoner sounds like an atheist name it doesn't it and he was owner peter stoner that's
00:01:13.600 right he was an atheist in in england and became a um christian after he investigated the evidence
00:01:19.100 for the resurrection and i read that book there was a famous guy at who made harvard law school
00:01:24.600 what it is which is the second greatest law school after yale but back in the 1800s who
00:01:29.880 investigated faith and became a believer and wrote a wonderful book on the reliability of the gospels
00:01:34.280 there's a lot of great stuff out there josh mcdowell did he josh mcdowell write a book called
00:01:38.640 tolerance no um he wrote a book called um the evidence that demands a verdict and more than a
00:01:45.200 carpenter on a real popular level yep yep um great guy still alive um and sean as i say his
00:01:50.940 son is doing great work he has a wonderful podcast that he does um so he's carrying on there's some
00:01:56.880 there's some wonderful there's a bunch of one of them i wayne cordero one day my yeah brings me in
00:02:01.420 oh wayne's a great guy i used to speak at his church yeah wayne from hawaii yes yes my pastor
00:02:07.600 brings me in he says i want to have breakfast with you pastor dudley rutherford i don't know
00:02:11.580 if you know who he is, he's in LA, big church, 20 plus thousand members.
00:02:15.400 And he introduces me to one of Wayne's book called leading on empty.
00:02:19.860 I think it's called leading on empty.
00:02:21.360 It says what men go through when they're in their forties, you know,
00:02:24.820 it's kind of like, man, I'm carrying the weight. I'm doing this.
00:02:27.460 I'm doing that.
00:02:27.940 You kind of need to go in to re-energize yourself for the next phase.
00:02:31.580 Because sometimes at that age, if you go through that phase by yourself, 0.98
00:02:35.000 you could do something dumb. You could do something, you know, and I was, 0.57
00:02:38.500 that was also a big book, but when it comes on to CS Lewis,
00:02:41.360 For him to be the, he was more from the philosopher's side, right, that he went there.
00:02:47.120 Chronicles of Narnia, he's written a lot of things that you would think.
00:02:50.820 But he did talk about those three things, the argument that kind of got me.
00:02:54.500 What role did that play where he says, Jesus is either, what is it, the liar, the lunatic, or the Lord, right?
00:03:00.420 I would add a fourth one, a legend.
00:03:03.240 He could have been a legend.
00:03:03.880 I like that because you said that earlier.
00:03:05.360 Yes, yes, and that's a popular objection these days.
00:03:08.340 Oh, it was legendary.
00:03:09.620 Over the time, he gets bigger and bigger.
00:03:11.380 And he was eight feet tall.
00:03:13.660 Yeah, right, right. 0.85
00:03:14.980 So, yeah, is he a liar?
00:03:16.580 Well, could have been.
00:03:17.640 Could have been.
00:03:18.880 Is he a legend? 0.91
00:03:20.540 Or is he Lord or a lunatic? 0.99
00:03:22.780 Would he have been crazy? 0.93
00:03:23.560 I interviewed a psychologist about Jesus.
00:03:27.720 Could he have been crazy?
00:03:29.040 And he set me straight on that.
00:03:31.060 What did he say?
00:03:31.680 He said, first of all, the teachings of Jesus.
00:03:34.500 You ever read the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, the Beatitudes,
00:03:38.860 the most brilliant insights into human nature.
00:03:42.080 These are not the words of a crazy guy.
00:03:45.640 And besides which, the way in which we document his identity of being the Son of God
00:03:50.920 is through the resurrection, and that's irrelevant.
00:03:54.620 His mental health is not relevant at the time of that.
00:03:58.920 But so, yeah, you go through those options and you see that Jesus is who he claimed to be.
00:04:10.020 That was my conclusion.
00:04:12.440 It was not something I was seeking.
00:04:14.120 I wanted to rescue my wife from this cult.
00:04:15.700 But you know what?
00:04:16.500 I'm from the old school of journalism.
00:04:19.560 I can't speak about contemporary journalism.
00:04:22.380 Back in my day, I got a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, which was the first and I believe the best journalism school.
00:04:28.120 and we were taught to try to tell both sides and be objective as possible.
00:04:33.280 When I was an atheist at the Chicago Tribune, I was very pro-abortion.
00:04:39.100 As an atheist, I helped arrange an abortion for a young woman I knew as a friend
00:04:44.860 at the University of Missouri who got pregnant, and she came to me and said,
00:04:47.820 Lee, what do I do? I'm pregnant.
00:04:48.880 I said, don't worry about it.
00:04:50.380 Abortion is legal in New York.
00:04:51.820 I'll take care of it.
00:04:52.620 We'll get the money together.
00:04:53.580 I'll set it up so no babies in your way. 0.99
00:04:55.180 You get rid of it.
00:04:57.340 Wow.
00:04:57.880 Yeah.
00:04:58.120 But you know what?
00:04:59.900 Even though at that time I was very pro-abortion,
00:05:02.460 I covered a lot of court cases involving the abortion issue.
00:05:06.520 It goes Supreme Court back and forth through those years.
00:05:10.140 If you read any of my articles, you would not know where I stood
00:05:13.500 because I was taught you tell both sides.
00:05:16.600 You quote both sides.
00:05:17.760 You present both arguments.
00:05:19.120 That's my role as a journalist.
00:05:20.960 Today, you get a lot of people, you say, why are you going to journalism?
00:05:23.900 I want to change the world.
00:05:25.780 No, that's not your job to change the world.
00:05:28.200 Your job is to tell the truth, is to tell both sides,
00:05:31.380 report what's going on accurately.
00:05:32.460 Who does that today? 0.97
00:05:34.060 Who does that today? 0.97
00:05:35.220 Who do you go to?
00:05:36.220 Like, is there any source you go to?
00:05:37.620 You know what I do?
00:05:38.460 I try to go to multiple sources,
00:05:40.740 figuring I'm going to kind of reach a mean that'll, you know.
00:05:44.180 So I like the Wall Street Journal.
00:05:45.940 They're pretty good.
00:05:46.760 Me too.
00:05:47.040 It's my number one.
00:05:47.900 Yeah, that's going to be my number one.
00:05:49.960 I bounce back and forth on television between CNN and Fox News.
00:05:55.920 I'll listen a little here and a little there and try to catch something.
00:05:58.620 I subscribe to the Washington Post and the New York Times, not because I trust them, but because I want to know what they're saying.
00:06:07.320 I don't trust them.
00:06:09.020 I guess I don't trust them anymore.
00:06:11.920 They have become advocates.
00:06:13.700 They become people who are trying to promote a cause.
00:06:17.160 And that's not what I'm interested in.
00:06:19.120 I'm interested in somebody telling me what is going on.
00:06:21.660 Give me both sides.
00:06:22.540 Tell me the truth.
00:06:23.900 Yeah, it's tough.
00:06:24.500 I mean, listen, today it's not easy to sit there and, you know, see who to trust, what they're going to be saying.
00:06:31.020 It's such a great time for propaganda and confusion.
00:06:34.040 You know how they say the fog of war?
00:06:35.680 It's like the fog of everything today.
00:06:37.700 That's a very good point.
00:06:39.120 You're absolutely right.
00:06:40.120 It's the fog of everything.
00:06:42.620 And, you know, now, having been trained in journalism and law, I have some skills that I can kind of cut through some of the—
00:06:49.380 How do you do that?
00:06:50.000 Well, you know, it's because I was there.
00:06:53.440 So I know how to, if you want to tell a story to present one side, I can pretty much spot it.
00:07:00.420 You know what I mean?
00:07:01.520 There was an article in the Denver newspaper recently, or on television, and it was about transgenders in women's sports.
00:07:10.100 And they interviewed this one guy who was very, he was a coach, and he was very in favor of having men in women's sports.
00:07:19.340 And I thought, huh, that's interesting.
00:07:22.060 I wonder who that guy really is.
00:07:24.780 And as you dig down, which was not disclosed at the time, when you dig down, you find that, oh, he's part of an advocacy group that promotes transgenders involved in women's sports.
00:07:34.580 That's not hard to.
00:07:35.100 So you go a little bit deeper to see what the writer is about, what their background is about.
00:07:39.300 Yeah.
00:07:39.520 You look at who the writer is.
00:07:40.720 You look at, are they telling you something that your antenna go up and say, wait a second.
00:07:46.180 That's kind of unusual that a coach would say,
00:07:48.800 oh, I have no problem with men coming into my women's sports and playing. 1.00
00:07:52.220 Really? Who is this guy?
00:07:54.160 So, you know, you try to discern.
00:07:56.680 You try to cut through the stuff.
00:07:58.000 It's not always successful.
00:07:59.220 Did you see the story about this NBA player, Jaden Ivey?
00:08:03.080 Did you see this story in the last couple days?
00:08:05.180 No.
00:08:05.660 So Jaden Ivey is this.
00:08:07.360 I'll let you, Rob, if you want to play this clip.
00:08:09.340 He plays for the Chicago Bulls.
00:08:11.520 He used to be with the Pistons.
00:08:12.520 He was the backcourt in the Pistons, pretty strong guy.
00:08:16.040 He had a good season last year, 17 points, four assists, four rebounds,
00:08:19.080 had a bad injury, goes to the Bulls, you know,
00:08:22.600 becomes a Christian, even more devout.
00:08:25.240 He starts openly talking about it.
00:08:27.580 And he makes this video just a couple days ago
00:08:30.920 and shares this about LGBTQ, the fact that NBA supports it.
00:08:36.060 The next day, the Bulls drop him.
00:08:38.100 Rob, if you want to play this clip, go for it.
00:08:39.660 that the world can proclaim lgbtq
00:08:45.260 right they have they have they proclaim pride month and the nba they proclaim it 0.98
00:08:57.660 they they show it to the world they say come come uh come join us for pride for pride month
00:09:07.560 To celebrate unrighteousness
00:09:11.300 They proclaim it
00:09:15.640 They proclaim it on the billboards
00:09:22.560 They proclaim it in the streets
00:09:25.160 Unrighteousness
00:09:26.940 So how is it that one can't speak righteousness?
00:09:33.480 How is it one night, how are they to say that, man, this man is crazy?
00:09:41.400 Because of this, he gets fired.
00:09:42.880 I had not heard of that.
00:09:44.400 That is unbelievable.
00:09:45.320 You know, in law school, my specialty was First Amendment law.
00:09:49.180 I used to teach First Amendment law at Roosevelt University.
00:09:53.300 First Amendment is foundational in our nation, absolutely foundational.
00:09:58.580 And what are we seeing?
00:09:59.780 We're seeing censorship, whether it's overt or covert.
00:10:04.400 We're seeing people whose opinions, like his, that's a legitimate opinion to have as a follower of Jesus,
00:10:09.900 that this is not biblical and so forth.
00:10:11.980 He should be allowed to express that without consequence in this country.
00:10:16.640 Not anymore.
00:10:18.700 There's these attacks on people.
00:10:20.620 I've been working with the FBI for the last couple of weeks because someone's trying to kill me because of the stands I take.
00:10:28.420 And, yeah, there was a credible threat on my life.
00:10:31.280 And so we've been working together, and I think the time has passed.
00:10:34.920 I think it's over.
00:10:37.280 Do you know who the individual is?
00:10:38.720 No, they never caught him.
00:10:40.240 But they provided protection for me at various events
00:10:43.700 because the threat was they were going to shoot me at my next speaking event.
00:10:47.000 Oh, they made it clear.
00:10:47.980 Oh, yeah, made it clear when and where.
00:10:49.280 Was it in an email?
00:10:49.700 Was it in a message?
00:10:50.520 It was a message through my website.
00:10:52.800 Unfortunately, my website is pretty rudimentary, and I can't capture.
00:10:55.860 I don't capture the whole IP address because I'm cheap and I didn't want to spend the money on a nice website.
00:11:02.100 And so they tracked them down a little bit, but they've not identified them.
00:11:06.320 But I got extra security when I was speaking.
00:11:09.680 But, I mean, what am I saying?
00:11:11.440 What am I saying?
00:11:12.300 Am I saying something outrageous?
00:11:13.920 No, I'm saying the evidence points toward Jesus being the unique son of God.
00:11:17.160 Here's what I said that I think got me in trouble.
00:11:21.220 The Koran, you have the Koran and you have the Bible.
00:11:24.260 I read the Koran.
00:11:25.180 I read the Koran when I was a spiritual seeker.
00:11:27.040 I want to know maybe Islam is the way. 1.00
00:11:29.580 And I saw three things in there that contradict Christianity very clearly.
00:11:33.840 Number one, it says in Surah 4, 157, Jesus didn't die on the cross.
00:11:38.200 Well, if he didn't die on the cross, there's no resurrection.
00:11:41.740 Secondly, the Koran says that no one can bear the sins of another. 0.68
00:11:45.560 Well, that takes away the atonement, which is the foundation of Christianity.
00:11:49.060 And third, it says God does not have a son.
00:11:51.800 So, okay, they're allowed to believe that and proclaim that and preach that.
00:11:57.140 But if those three things are true, the Bible is false.
00:12:00.960 So either both books are false or one of them is true, but they cannot both be true at the same time.
00:12:07.460 That's all I said that I think triggered this whole thing.
00:12:10.420 And so the individual that came to you, did they know if he was Muslim or not?
00:12:14.340 They don't know for a fact, but it was right after I expressed this on a podcast.
00:12:17.800 I got it.
00:12:18.340 Who knows?
00:12:19.760 It could have been an atheist.
00:12:20.520 They get mad that I left.
00:12:21.800 Yeah, and I want to go to that.
00:12:23.040 It's a perfect transition into that.
00:12:24.420 But just to get past this, the criticism for this story about Jaden Ivey
00:12:29.200 is that there's another NBA player called Kevin Porter.
00:12:32.800 Now, Kevin Porter gets charged with assaulting a girl, strangulation, I believe,
00:12:42.160 if I'm not mistaken, Rob.
00:12:43.260 Can you fact check?
00:12:44.000 Yeah, strangulation.
00:12:45.020 Wow.
00:12:45.620 And he pleaded guilty, just pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault.
00:12:49.440 And when he did this, this was just two years ago.
00:12:52.740 Yeah.
00:12:53.300 The NBA just came a four-game suspension.
00:12:55.460 Four-game suspension.
00:12:56.500 That's it.
00:12:57.340 The NBA gave a four-game suspension.
00:12:59.940 And this other guy, he's questioning why five months, and he gets five.
00:13:05.380 So this is where the criticism comes,
00:13:07.120 and this is why I believe the NBA is the worst product out of all the four sports that we have.
00:13:11.380 You know, what have we got in England these days?
00:13:13.860 I mean, you talk about the law.
00:13:15.220 Now, they don't have a First Amendment.
00:13:16.600 They don't have a First Amendment in England.
00:13:18.300 It's important to understand.
00:13:19.740 They claim they do.
00:13:20.580 They definitely do.
00:13:21.320 You and I both know they don't.
00:13:22.620 That's right.
00:13:23.340 And it is dangerous now to have an opinion that violates the standard viewpoint of the culture.
00:13:32.220 It's just unbelievable to me where that nation has gone.
00:13:35.860 And there's places in Europe that are similar.
00:13:38.440 Hi, I'm Lee Strobel, atheist turned Christian, author of several books,
00:13:42.520 including The Case for Christ and Seeing the Supernatural.
00:13:45.820 You might have questions about faith,
00:13:48.200 about how we know that Jesus is who we claim to be
00:13:51.220 and that there really is a realm beyond what we can see
00:13:53.800 and touch and put in a test tube.
00:13:56.100 So I'd love to chat with you about that.
00:13:58.000 Just go to Manect and then we can connect
00:14:00.360 and talk about these matters of faith
00:14:02.660 that are so important to our lives.
00:14:09.240 If you enjoyed this video,
00:14:10.500 you want to watch more videos like this, click here.
00:14:12.240 And if you want to watch the entire podcast, click here.
00:14:15.320 We'll be right back.