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Dec. 14, 2021 - The Charlie Kirk Show
48:02
Exposing the Cultural Hijacking of America with Steve Deace
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Upholding Romans 13 00:12:19
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Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Steve Dace, author of an excited new book.
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Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
With us today is Steve Dace, and he's been with us before, and the episodes do really well.
And he's really smart.
He has a new book called Do What You Believe.
Steve, tell us about your book.
Thank you, Charlie.
I think the subtitle kind of says it all, or you won't be free to believe it much longer.
And I think that, you know, we needed an updated culture war battle plan because this has gone beyond culture war.
It has descended, I think, into a full-blown cold civil war now.
It's just, it's not the Soviets and the Americans from when I was a kid.
It's really now the left America versus what's left of America.
It's really authoritarianism, whether it's from the public or private sector.
As you watch major news outlets like the New York Times now, after playing class warfare most of my life, they're now just ripping and reading press releases from big pharma companies as news without any scrutiny or skepticism whatsoever.
So it's really authoritarianism, whether public or private.
And when you put authoritarians in the public and private sector together, what do you get?
Good old-fashioned fascism versus everybody else.
And I think you're seeing some of the old left-right Venn diagram is being violated by people like Bill Maher and Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan.
I think that a lot of people that maybe don't understand where people like you and I are coming from and don't fully agree still think that they ought to be allowed to be free.
And so this new paradigm, I think, particularly for Christians, requires a new level of culture war.
And, you know, I was years ago, I read Francis Schaefer's great The Christian Manifesto, but that was written for the 80s and the 90s.
And so, yeah, so this is my attempt to update that for the era in which we live now, because I think that we're way beyond let's just wait every two, four, six, and eight years and vote our way out of this.
I don't think that's that's going to suffice here.
So there's a lot I want to unpack with you, but let's start with the obvious question, at least for me, do what you believe.
Most people don't know what they believe.
We get into that.
We get into that too.
And, you know, there's an ancient kind of a stained glass window word known as hermeneutics.
And in modern parlance, we refer to it in a secular academic setting as epistemology.
And there is an epistemological nuclear winner in America.
A lot of Americans don't know what they know or why they know it or why they know it is true.
And I think that's true of a lot of Christians as well.
There was a Barna poll last year that showed a majority of Christians didn't know what the Great Commission was.
It's only the first fundamental command that Christ gives the church in the new covenant, for example, to go ye into all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
That's right.
Yeah.
And so this is what the prophet in the Old Testament means when he says, my people perish for a lack of knowledge.
That's right.
Or without a vision, the people perish.
That's right.
And so we have been, we've witnessed in this last generation, there's been a cultural hijacking that has taken place in the co-conspirators or in academia and pop culture.
And then ultimately, government has acted upon their success to then act authoritarian in response to that.
And a lot of America, and I think that's why you're seeing, you know, it's fascinating to me.
I look at Andrew Sullivan.
And when I first got into this business, it was to debate and defeat people like Andrew Sullivan and his ideas.
He's kind of the William F. Buckley of what I call the rainbow jihad.
He's the first respected intellectual in the history of the American gay rights movement.
And now when I look at his Twitter feed, Charlie, I would say conservatively, like half of what he tweets on issues, I could tweet.
How did this happen?
How did this occur?
And it's Sarah Silverman is now deflecting that she's not a racist for telling Joy Reed to stop telling things that are blatant lies because they hurt their own side.
This is what I mean.
It's not that we're dealing with a new truth or a different claim on the truth.
We live in an era of untruth, an era that lacks intellectual curiosity, that doesn't really want to know what really happened with the Las Vegas shooter, what the real motivations were, doesn't really want to know what really went down in Kenosha with Kyle Rittenhouse.
We don't want to be intellectually curious.
We don't want to be bothered by that.
We don't want to know if Jesse Smollett was lying or not, or if he's the first person to actually try to trust the Nigerians who emailed him.
No, we just want a particular narrative affirmed.
We want to be heavy-petted with it.
And as long as my narrative is being affirmed and satiated and is pleasuring me intellectually, that is good enough, whether it is true or not.
And that is a dangerous place, Charlie, for a culture to be.
So I want to focus obviously on the Christian element of this because that's really who you're writing this for, if I'm not mistaken.
Sure.
And there's a whole aspect to this where you're going to get a lot of pushback from institutional Christians who, you know, there's a lot of different reasons why they don't want to do anything.
They don't want to lose membership or ties and offerings, which is a ridiculous excuse.
They don't want to lose social media followers, which of even worse excuse.
Or some are so focused on eschatology, study of the end times that they say, what's the difference?
Jesus is coming next Thursday.
And then there are some people that say, well, then what do I do?
And obviously this book, Do What You Believe, or It Won't Be Free Much Longer by Steve Day.
So you should all pick up a copy right now is so incredibly important.
So I see you mentioned Romans 13 in chapter one, which I'm glad you do.
I'm going to give you my own take on Romans 13, which is spicy and interesting and new.
Not new.
Rob McCoy, my pastor, and I came up with it.
You do a great job unpacking it.
But I think that some people get it wrong.
And I think you get it really spot on.
I would just add a level where it says that in Romans 13, it says that let every person be subject to the governing authorities.
Well, the people are the governing authorities in this country.
So the governing authorities must be submissive to us, right?
So I was at a church in Texas.
That's why you did a great job with this.
And the pastor, I'm not going to say his name.
You and I would both know who it is.
And his congregation, it was a Q ⁇ A part and I was doing a question answer.
Have we gotten the audio from that one yet?
I don't think we've gotten it yet, Connor.
No.
Anyway, it was this back and forth.
And the congregation said, well, our pastor says we must obey local city governances because of Romans 13.
And I said, well, who's in charge according to the U.S. Constitution?
They said, well, we are.
So why didn't your pastor tell you that?
You see, under the Constitutional Republic, it's the mayor and the congressman and the senator.
They are not the sovereign.
Talk a little bit about Romans 13 because Romans 13, I'm glad you start with it in chapter one, was the number one most quoted verse in Nazi Germany.
It's the most quoted verse now for Christian inaction.
And it is the least understood yet most cited political verse in the entire Bible, please.
If you know the background of the Declaration, Romans 13 was a stumbling block to getting the Declaration passed.
You had Jonathan Mayhew.
Yeah.
Most of the colonies, I think except for Rhode Island, were settled by a specific denomination of Christianity.
And so you had a heavily or heavily quicker influence in a place like Pennsylvania, for example.
They come out of a tradition known as Anabaptism post-Reformation.
And these are your Quakers, your Mennonites, these are the folks that kind of retreat from society to live out their faith without civic or civil entanglements.
And we see that even in our modern times today.
And so they debated amongst themselves, some of these various Christian traditions.
Are we not sinning in violation of Romans 13 if we rebel against England?
And this is why Jefferson frames this argument.
He says, hey, we're appealing to the supreme judge for the rectitude of our actions, meaning judge our motivations.
That's what he means by rectitude.
Is what we're doing righteous or not?
And the case is made in the declaration that the king has violated the laws of nature and nature's God.
That's right.
That he is in violation of the highest law, the law of God.
And therefore, if they obey the king, they are obeying men and not God.
And they have now a, they have exhausted all peaceable means to bring the king back into righteousness.
He refuses to repent.
And now they are faced with a conflict because if they continue to obey these unlawful, what they viewed as unbiblical mandates, then they are now sinning.
They are now violating the kingdom of God in order to obey the kingdom of man.
And it was this hermeneutical connection that eventually brought the rest, brought those colonies that were resistant to revolt online.
In our day and age, we shouldn't have to wrestle with that whatsoever because of what you just articulated.
The Constitution begins with we the people in order to form a more perfect union.
So therefore, the people were not made for the constitution.
The constitution was made for the people.
Similar to when Jesus says the Sabbath was not made for man.
Man was not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath was made for man, that it was there to bless us, not to hold us hostage.
Okay.
This is about us.
It's about the will of the people.
And if you won't violate, if you violate that, then you are actually violating the rulers.
We're the ones upholding Romans 13 here.
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Honoring Caesar Completely 00:08:16
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But even beyond America's particular civic arrangement, there remains the point that if what Paul meant, you know, I know we live in an era of philosophical reconstructionism or reductionism, that we can determine and throw out things that people write that we don't like, or we can redetermine what they thought they meant.
But, you know, we know what Paul's words mean by how he lived them out.
If Paul really meant that in Romans 13 to do every cotton pick and thing a king tells you to do, why did Nero cut his head off then?
If he was that compliant, if he was that willing to do whatever the state said, why did he live his last few years under house arrest until he was decapitated by Nero?
Clearly, that's not what he meant.
And Peter reasserts something similar later in the New Testament in one of his epistles.
Well, if he also meant total subjugation to the state, even when it comes to the actual living out and preaching of the gospel, then why was he crucified upside down?
So clearly, there is a line somewhere.
When the Roman government executed Jesus, now we understand theologically as Christians that Christ died as a sacrifice for our sins, that we were the ones, all of us who have ever lived and sinned, we are the ones that killed Christ.
He is the sacrifice, the atoning sacrifice for us.
But in the pagan Roman mind, what was the charge?
When the religious leaders say he's claiming to be a king, and we have no king but Caesar, he's charged with sedition or leading a revolt.
That's why they put a sign over his head on the cross that's corrupting the minds of the youth.
Yeah, that's right.
Yes, that he's the king of this is not that he claims to be the king of the Jews.
They viewed him as a civic threat.
They understood what he represented.
So clearly, there is a line that you render under Caesar's, that which is Caesar's and render under God that which is God's.
Paul in Romans 13 is more hermeneutically fleshing out that teaching of Christ.
And there's a key phrase in Romans 13 that we often forget: give honor to whom honor is due.
What does that mean?
It means that there are certain things that Caesar could demand that he is not due, that do not belong to him, that belong to jurisdictions above him.
He is not to receive that honor.
Now, short of that, are we to be peaceable, the best model citizens possible, short of being forced to violate God's law?
You bet we are.
All right.
But when we are called to violate God's law, then that is when we resist.
Paul lived that out in his own life.
That's his own life's end testimony.
St. Peter did the same thing.
And then we created a system through our founders where we wouldn't be faced with such choices, ideally, because ultimately the people rule here and not a ruling class.
Yeah, it's not even a question in America.
Australia, you have to go through a little bit deeper of a reflection, but it's very simple.
If you go back to the Greek of what was written in Romans, it was this idea of the sovereign.
You must submit to the sovereign.
And the founders solved that problem for us.
And Romans 13 was the big hang-up of the Declaration because we know that 55 out of 56 of the signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing, regular church attending Christians.
And Jonathan Mayhew was the leading pastor who inspired the American Revolution.
He famously said, he said, obedience to tyrants is disobedience to God.
It was this kind of incantation.
And also the framework of Whitfield and Edwards and many others, and you mentioned Rhode Island well before that, Roger Williams helped kind of lay this foundation of what eventually became, you know, the freedom-loving, liberty-demanding people of America.
So let me ask you about that.
There's an aspect of this that I think that is hotly contested within Christian circles.
And they say, Steve, I hear you.
Things are falling apart.
You know, we got men who think they're women and women who think they're men.
We got abortions on demand.
We got pedophilia on our screens, but the problem is one of the heart.
And politics is not for us.
What we need to do is just preach the gospel.
And I might vote, but come on, a culture war, Steve.
Where does it say in the Bible to do that?
We are to occupy until he comes.
We are called to disciple the nations, teaching them the commands that Christ has given us, a new covenant, a new way to live.
Now, I am someone, as you may well know, I've been pretty critical in the pre-Trump era of how cozy to completely sold out to being mouthpieces for the Republican Party some well-known Christian conservative leaders and clergy were.
And I think what's happened is, you know, I'm Gen X. My generation is now taking over the pulpits.
And I think you're seeing a lot of the men that are taking those pulpits over, they don't want to be mascots for the Republicans, especially in the current state of a party who often doesn't fight for us and defend us unless we put a gun to their head anyway.
So what's the point, right?
But now we've kind of gone the other way to becoming completely passive aggressive about it at the exact same time, along the lines of what you're talking about.
And to me, I just think that when you look at the, when you, when you see the arc of God's interaction with his people and what he commands, this, this teeter-tottering of going back and forth to extremes, that's actually not a fruit of the spirit.
That's actually more of a reactionary, ungenerated sort of a pagan mindset that we represent a new way.
We don't have to fall into false choices.
It's not a choice between being a mascot for a Republican party, for a political party that frankly, most days isn't worth selling out to anyway, or we just passively, aggressively let this thing go to hell.
The answer is simple.
No matter where we're at, whether we are politically engaged, whether we serve in a ministry formally, whether we are at a blue-collar job, whether we are a business mogul, whether we're doing a podcast, what is the point and purpose for why we're doing those things?
Sola de Gloria for the glory of God.
Do you glorify God by keeping silent when the Pennsylvania women's team is replaced by men who weren't good enough as men, but are now allowed to recategorize themselves as women and now dominate women?
Does that glorify God to not call out that distinction?
Do you really believe, stop and think for a second?
Stop it.
Paul, who on the streets, on the streets of Ephesus, confronted Simon Bargesus, the local sorcerer.
Actually, I don't think it was Ephesus.
It was somewhere else.
But in the middle of the man who had completely bedeviled the town with his sorcery and in front of this and in front of the townsfolks looked at him and said and called him a son of the devil.
Do you believe that if St. Paul were alive today, he'd have nothing to say, nothing to say about the gender bending that is going on.
He'd have nothing to say.
A man who used his Roman citizenship, by the way, in order to recreate for himself a trial that gave him a platform to preach and teach the gospel.
You think he would not use his American citizenship for similar means and similar purposes.
Why are you here?
What is the purpose of your citizenship?
Why did God, why did God plant you here?
He didn't expect you to bloom.
He doesn't want you to engage the process whatsoever that is invading the moral and spiritual space that the church is supposed to occupy.
Not to mention the first thing God did when he created his own people is he gave them a covenant and formed a formed a form of a government, a direct theocracy.
So this idea that God has nothing to say about these areas whatsoever and doesn't want his people to, I'm all for not being a mascot.
That's, hey, David was God's anointed.
God still sent the prophet Nathan to him to call him to account.
Conflict in the Woke Church 00:11:40
I'm all for that.
All right.
But the idea that the opposite or the antecedent or the or the antidote to not becoming sold out mascots that tarnish our witness for a political party, whether it's Jim Wallace for the Democrats or somebody else for the Republicans, that the answer to that is to therefore passive aggressively, laissez-faire, just let the pagans have the most influential arena in any culture.
I just don't see how you can make a biblical case for that on any level whatsoever.
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Yeah, the case comes from a variety of three different categories, right?
So one is the complicit church where they think the Bible is a series of allegories and poetry and that we must always be changing the Bible to the times, which is a thing that some pastors are saying.
Like, oh, the Bible doesn't speak that clearly about adultery or the Bible, who says homosexuality is wrong in the Bible, like things like that, right?
And that's like the woke church.
Then there's the complacent church where they just kind of sit around and they don't do much, but and they never really preach anything that definitive.
Great music usually at those churches, you know, really good coffee and fellowship, phenomenal car parking operation.
And that's about it, right?
It's just kind of like we got a great youth ministry and we will never say anything that will offend you.
That's like basically the whole thing.
And those churches are extremely popular, as you well know.
Then there is the courageous church, and you and I know many of these pastors that have, especially during the Fauci virus lockdowns, they deserve a lot of credit.
People like Jack Hibbs, people like Rob McCoy, people like James Cadiz, people like the Barnett family here in Phoenix.
I could go through it.
I've dealt with a lot of these churches.
I've spoken to over 100 of them in the last year and a half.
Phenomenal people.
But the question really is, though, you know, for let's start with the complacent church.
A lot of them say the answers aren't totally clear here, Steve.
You know, let's take political parties out.
They say the most important thing is we just need to preach the gospel.
I don't really want to get involved in this stuff.
It's messy.
It's divisive.
And aren't we here to bring people together?
Jesus said, I didn't come to bring peace.
Do not think I came to bring peace, but a sword.
Luke 15.
Yeah, husband against wife, father against son, mother against daughter.
There is no way.
I mean, what is the cross?
It is an intersection of two beams.
Okay.
There is no way to do this without some form of conflict.
There simply is not.
That doesn't mean we have to be unnecessarily douchey.
That doesn't mean we have to go out of our way to be jackwagons.
That doesn't mean that when we show up, the immediate response from the pagans is, hey, the jerkster called and they're all out of you.
Okay.
It's a signboard reference for all of you Zoomers out there.
Not that there's anything wrong with it.
Yada, yada, yada.
Continue.
Amen.
But the idea that this is unavoidable, that there is some secret incantation tone, some way of doing this.
We understand that our, you know, Paul says that the entirety of the New Testament, of the gospel, and all of the teachings that follow herein are all predicated on if Christ be not raised, then our preaching is in vain and we're all still dead in our sins.
Raised from what?
Murder, crucifixion, from being tortured beyond recognition and then being nailed to a wooden cross to die of asphyxiation in the heat of the desert sun.
All right.
That is a bloody, bloody, disgusting process.
There is nothing neat.
There's nothing chill.
There's nothing pressed and folded and seamless about that transaction whatsoever.
So the idea that you are going to be able to preach that message in a way that doesn't alienate, that doesn't, that doesn't push people away, that is non-confrontational.
If you think you can do that, then either A, you have fooled yourself into believing you're nicer than God, or B, you're not actually preaching that message.
Well, yeah, and it doesn't tell us to be nice, unfortunately.
Some people wish it did.
It doesn't mean that it tells us to be mean, but Luke 15 is one of the harshest verses in the entire Bible.
And it says exactly what you said.
It says father against son, brother against sister.
I'm paraphrasing, but I did not come here to unite.
I came here to divide.
And Jesus spoke very clearly about the consequences of eternity and also the consequences of rejection.
Even in the most feel-good verse in the discourse at night with Nicodemus, which is one of the most famous, most quoted verses ever in John 3, Nicodemus is like, wait, what do you mean you could be born again?
Like you'd be born once and then born again.
This is where we get the, you know, the, you know, the framing of born again.
And Jesus says, no, you're born obviously by water and then you're born again by blood.
Basically, you're born again when you accept me.
But then Jesus goes on to say, and we all know John 3, 16, for God so loved the world, for God so agape the world.
But in 17, 18, it goes on.
By the way, the reason I did this is so that you don't perish and that you don't burn.
It's like, oh, really?
And so I totally agree with you.
I think that Christianity has become an extension of American corporate culture in some ways in how it is.
To the point, I've seen churches that have boards of directors now and don't even have elders anymore.
Yeah, that's right.
That's correct.
And so I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and I won't say any names, but two of the kind of mega churches models, one in particular, I will say Willow Creek, which is I grew up kind of going to that church passively, you know, maybe a couple times a year, largely because, Steve, it was a spectacle.
I mean, you could not go if you lived in that area, right?
It's an auditorium with 15,000 seats and they run it like a machine and great car parking, might I add, awful politics, but great car parking.
And, but so I saw that firsthand and it always bothered me kind of how they were expanding and almost like a private equity firm like absolving other churches and stuff.
But I suppose a question I have for you, Steve, as you write this towards Christians is how much of this is directed at the pastor in the church?
And then how much of your kind of, you know, do what you believe book is also directed at the actual regular church attendee?
The answer is yes.
That ultimately, one of the, one of the things that pieces of feedback I've gotten the most since I've moved from sports to news talk broadcasting, well, it was radio back then, but now it's just podcasting, everything else, 15 years ago, is why don't I hear this more in church?
Or pastor that have come up to me and said, your show has prompted me to get questions from my congregation that I have never gotten before.
And to me, I think that there's a symbiotic relationship here.
I believe in the priesthood of every believer.
I also, though, at the same time, believe there is nothing other than the risen Lord himself.
I don't think there's anything that the enemy is more threatened by than one bold man standing in a pulpit with his Bible open, letting it rip.
And that's why those pastors will be attacked spiritually, but continue.
Yes.
The local church, the local church is the weapon of mass.
The scriptures in the local church are the weapon of mass destruction in God's economy.
And then in a New Testament, where we're now not a nation state as we were in the Old Testament, in the old covenant with Israel, but we are now a house of prayer that is open to all nations, as Jesus quoted from the Old Testament when he tore over the money changers in the temple.
Now that the world is not separated any longer between Jews and Gentiles, but there is nor slave nor free.
There is neither Greek nor barbarian, male nor female, not in a binary sense, but in a stationed sense, standing in society.
All those mechanisms are now removed.
And now you've got the most diverse movement in the history of the world.
Something like over a thousand languages have either been spoken with Christianity or the Bible's been translated into.
And so that unity comes around what?
And that is the worship and observance of Christ as the Son of God, as God, and therefore his word as essentially eternal law.
And that ultimately requires an anointed authority that we recognize beyond even the best of small groups.
That requires an anointed authority that we recognize because the creation was made on headship.
That's why when you look at studies, if mom takes the kids to church without dad, when the kids go up, they're grow up, they're often very, sadly, not likely to continue going to church.
But if dad goes, the odds that they will go to church increase exponentially.
The creation operates on headship.
There must, and headship, by the way, for the guys out there and for the ladies, does not mean authority.
It means responsibility in God's economy.
God is the authority.
When the man is the head of the home, it doesn't mean his word is law.
It means he is responsible for the upholding of God's law within that home, and he will be held primarily accountable if that home fails.
That's what it means.
And because there must be order.
And so there must be a chain of command.
Responsibility in God's Economy 00:02:40
All right.
And so this is where when you've got a man anointed standing there preaching, that's why you need that.
And this is the mistake that I think we've made in a political sense.
You know, we look at the Republican Party, for example, and we look at how principled and conservative and activated the grassroots is.
And we're like, we don't understand why we don't get more done in Washington.
Jesus said, beware of the yeast of the Pharisees.
The creation operates on headship.
As long as people like Mitch McConnell are your proxies, it will not matter how principled you are.
Okay.
You'll be stifled by the head, by what's at the head of the operation.
Similarly, the people within the congregation can be very, very motivated to go and do righteous things for the kingdom of God.
But if the pastor doesn't give them that charge and is complacent, they'll never receive that calling fully the way that will most motivate them.
That's why it is about who ultimately is in charge here.
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So let's get to the practical.
What can people do?
What do you tell people to do?
Obviously, do what you believe, but what are the practical steps here?
Checking Your Motivations 00:13:04
The first most practical step is we have to check our motivations, not worry about our tone, but our motivation.
Not even worry about our message.
What's our motivation?
That if our motivation is right, you know, the same Paul that, as I cited earlier, says to Simon Bar Jesus, the sorcerer, you're a son of the devil, also says, though, to rebuke softly using words of love seasoned with salt.
I don't know, man.
To my human finite brain, calling somebody a son of the devil in front of their neighbors doesn't seem like words of love season.
Especially back then.
It seems pretty salty.
All right.
But what's Paul's motivation in both cases?
Truth.
Yes.
Truth and love.
Yes.
That love is a motivation.
I think we think of love as a feeling, as a sentiment or an action.
It can manifest those ways, but ultimately it is a motivation.
What is our motivation?
Love.
The reason we communicate truth.
Jesus says, for this reason, I came into the world to testify to the truth.
And in that same gospel in John, he says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that that testimony of truth was given for love, that as you said in John 3, 17, that God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but so that through him the world may be saved.
Okay.
And so what is our motivation?
When my daughter Zoe was young and she never wanted to stand still, one day in the grocery store parking lot, one day in the middle of the winter, it's cold.
I want to get the groceries in there and I don't put her in her seat yet.
So I say, sweetie, stand right here and give daddy just a second to put the groceries in.
I look over my shoulder three seconds later and I see her out of the corner of my eye dart, take off for the parking lot.
It's icy.
Now, I suppose I could have been nice and said, Zoe, sweetie, daddy loves you.
Please come back.
Please come back.
I don't want anything bad to happen to you because, you know, if I yell at her or if I'm cross with her to get her attention, people might think I'm being mean to my daughter.
They might think something is bad.
And I certainly don't want to give them the wrong impression.
I want to show them I'm nice at all times.
So I'll take this very passive, nice approach and then watch as Zoe maybe gets hits by a car and never gets back into my car.
But you were nice.
But I was nice.
I'm also a pretty crappy dad.
Instead, what I did is I acted immediately.
I took initiative as the sovereign in this situation, as the father.
And I yanked her from the back of her hoodie with reflexes I didn't know that I had, frankly.
All right.
I grabbed the back of her hoodie and yanked her neck first out of traffic because that's all I could get a hold of in order to stop her from an oncoming car.
Now, if you had no idea the context of that action, if you were just walking out of the grocery store and saw me yank my toddler daughter by the back of her hoodie, you might think, hey, that's a terrible father.
I don't, but you don't know the full context of this action.
Instead, what I did is I saved her life that day in that parking lot.
You see the analogy I'm drawing here.
Yes.
Because what was my motivation?
If my motivation was I was angry with her and that's why I yanked her hoodie, then that would be bad.
If my motivation was I love her and I want to save her, I don't want her to die.
I don't want something bad or tragic to happen to her.
And then I committed that action for that reason, then my action was good.
We've got to begin with what are our motivations?
To me, a great articulation of this is actually in the lion, the witch in the wardrobe.
When Lucy goes to Mr. Beaver the night before they're about to meet Aslan, the Christological figure in the story, and Lucy is scared and she goes to Mr. Beaver and she asks, is Aslin safe?
And Mr. Beaver says, oh, no, sweetie.
He is a roaring lion after all.
He is not safe, but he is good.
We don't have to be safe, but we do have to be good.
And only humans can tell good from evil.
Animals can tell pleasure from pain.
I love that story with your daughter.
I tell a different one when it comes to love because we have love all wrong.
You know the four different types.
There's more than that of Greek love, agape, phileo, storge, and eros.
And we conflate them all together.
People think love means being nice.
And that's actually not proven anywhere.
And now it's hard.
It's not always easy to articulate this.
The best example I have is that truth is actually the highest form of love.
And so the reason you yanked your daughter back is because there was a metaphysical and Newtonian truth that your daughter hitting a car doesn't end well, right?
That's something that that's just, that's true.
When I went to go, I can't stand the dentist.
I think they're, they're all kind of medieval torture people.
And I met a good one, thankfully.
She was so amazing.
And but so I was in a, what you could call it, I guess a, she was giving me, not an analysis, she was giving me, she gave an x-ray and she went through the whole thing and she said, okay, you're going to need to have wisdom teeth surgery in the next 10 days or else, you know, this infection could go to your brain and you could die.
And I said, no, no, no, there's got to be another way.
Right.
And I didn't like her.
That was a mean thing to tell me.
That was an insensitive thing to tell me.
But she, as a brother to a sister, fileed me enough because she's actually a conservative Christian that she's like, okay, well, I like what you're doing so much that if I don't tell you this, you could die.
Not what I wanted to hear, by the way, at all.
And the not very affirming.
No, it was not affirming.
It was harsh.
It was in some ways brutal, but it was the most loving thing, not eros, not romantically loving, not self-sacrificial loving either.
It's not like she's like, hey, I'm going to go take the tooth infection for you.
Like, you know, that would have been agape love.
And it was instead, it was, hey, I care for you so much.
I need to tell you something you don't want to hear.
Right.
We don't talk about that sort of love anymore.
And so at all.
Let me ask you about this.
And we can go a couple of minutes over if that's okay with you, just because I enjoy this.
If that's all right.
I don't know if you have time restrictions or not.
Why should Christians care about America?
That's another criticism I hear a lot.
This is just another nation.
It's like every other.
It's going to crumble and fall.
Let it happen.
I certainly don't believe in nationalistic idolatry.
You know, to me, the flag, we get misty-eyed when we hear the flag and we hear the drums or when we see the flag and we hear the drums because of what it stands for.
And if we, if we do lose those things that it stands for, then you can sink into idolatry where this is just nostalgic, nationalistic, jingoistic fervor.
But what it really means that differentiates it from every other place on earth has been lost.
So what is the point?
And this is where I love Chesterton, GK Chesterton, the great British Christian theologian, his observation that America is the only country that was ever founded upon a creed.
And that creed is the mission statement to the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
All right.
And those are imbued by the laws of nature and nature's God.
That creed, that creed rests on as sort of a civic application of our own belief system.
That's right.
And so therefore, a failure to defend it on that level.
I'm not an America, love it or leave it kind of guy.
I am, but that's okay.
So I used to be the last few years of fighting my own government, fascist and COVID has broken me of it.
But believe me, I grew up a child of the 80s, man.
I wasn't a we're America bitch kind of kid.
Okay.
You know, and the last 21 years or 21 months, it seems like years of watching my own government.
You're right.
That's a good point.
I feel like a visitor in my own home.
You're right.
Yes.
Yes.
I'm starting to learn why it's all opponents of the Constitution, foreign and domestic.
We're starting to figure that part of it out.
Okay.
But ultimately, that creed is based on our belief system.
The idea, and it's and next to the church itself, when this country has observed this creed, and it hasn't always done so.
That's why we have legacies of slavery and Jim Crow and things in the past that we've had to, we've had to confront.
But when this country lives up to that, it has done more good east of Eden than any institution on this planet other than the church itself.
Okay.
Now, there might be a chasm between the church and a country.
I would agree with that, but still second place.
And to me, that is worthy of, and what does it mean to be a conservative?
To me, conservatism is not an ideology.
It's an observational science.
I am looking at history and observing what is true, best, and beautiful for the human condition and attempting to conserve that for this and future generations.
And the creed that this country was, was founded upon is one of those things, Charlie, that is worthy of conserving because of the amount of good that it has done in this world, the lives that it has saved, the cultures that it has brought back from the brink is worthy of conserving that for as long as there's life in that creed.
I think that we have an obligation really to the credibility of our own witness to the world.
Because here's the thing, the rest of the world sees this as a Christian nation.
Whether that is true or used to be true and isn't anymore, or maybe it was a nation inspired by Christianity, but it wasn't specifically a Christian nation.
Whatever those academic theories we posit and want to debate now, just about anywhere else outside the world, especially the or outside of this country, especially the pagan world views this as a country heavily imbued and inspired by Christianity.
So the idea of now at the time that the world is watching as it is invaded by wokeism and trainingism and all the various crazy paganisms attacking us now.
And so now, now that there's a great trial where we can show up in front of a watching world and reintroduce them, reintroduce them to the laws of nature and nature's God, that we have a chance to show them what a biblical worldview really means and really does.
We've got a Mount Carmel moment here with the prophets of Baal.
Now we want to back away from that opportunity in front of that large cloud of witnesses and say, not our fight.
I just don't see that that lines up with the spirit of what the Bible has to say about where we are in the world.
Amen.
Jeremiah 29, 7.
Demand the welfare of the city or the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to the nation's welfare.
And that's the Lord speaking in Jeremiah 29, 7.
He calls for you to care about the nation you're in.
And just put more simply, this is our home.
I don't have to go into some long kind of moral argument of why you should defend your home, especially one that has such a beautiful history, tradition, and exceptionalism.
And then you also look at the people that are, it'd be one thing if the people that are like trying to change the country were kind of morally superior to the people trying to keep it incumbent.
We're dealing with degenerates here.
And we don't have to joke around about it.
This is paganism.
No, exactly.
It'd be one thing if like the people that like, you know, we should stop having America the way it is and get back traditional marriage and get rid of abortion.
I'd be like, we got some arguments here.
Instead, you got the people that want to destroy the country that believe in drag queen story hour and sexual education for eight-year-olds and sex trafficking children.
You're like, you know what?
I don't have to go into some sort of long dissertation about this.
Your entire worldview is evil and I'm here to stop it and destroy it.
Like it says in Romans, love what is good and hate what is evil.
All right.
Very good, Steve.
Anything else in closing?
I would just add this.
If there's nothing godly or biblical about the creed that America was founded upon, then why is it such is it under such attack by the enemy?
If there's no value there, if there's no righteousness there, if it's not a restrainer against evil in the world in any way, shape, or form, and it has no, no eternal significance at all, then why does the enemy devote so many resources to unraveling it?
That's the question for every apathetic, complacent, or complicit pastor out there.
Do what you believe by Steve Dace.
Got to come back on soon.
Thanks so much.
You bet, brother, anytime.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us your thoughts.
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Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
God bless.
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