The Charlie Kirk Show - What Happens if We Do Nothing? LIVE from Redeemer Bible Church with John Benzinger
Aired: 2022-09-18
Duration: 01:24:22


=== Christian Perspective on Our Country (03:08) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey everybody, happy Sunday.
[00:00:01]  A pretty long conversation here where I talk in great detail about what is happening in our country from the Christian perspective.
[00:00:10]  Why should Christians care?
[00:00:12]  And I did this speech at the wonderful Redeemer Bible Church, sitting down with a phenomenal American, John Benzinger, great American.
[00:00:20]  And we talk about should Christians care?
[00:00:22]  What do we do?
[00:00:22]  Where are we at?
[00:00:23]  In our country right now, what happens if we do nothing?
[00:00:26]  Email me your thoughts as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.
[00:00:29]  Support the Charlie Kirk Show at charliekirk.com slash support.
[00:00:32]  Get involved with Turning PointUSA today at tpusa.com.
[00:00:36]  That is tpusa.com.
[00:00:38]  If you want to get our latest book, go to tpusa.com slash reset.
[00:00:42]  That is tpusa.com slash reset.
[00:00:46]  So check it out, tpusa.com slash reset.
[00:00:49]  Buckle up, everybody, here we go.
[00:00:51]  Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
[00:00:53]  Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
[00:00:55]  I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
[00:00:58]  Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
[00:01:01]  I want to thank Charlie.
[00:01:02]  He's an incredible guy.
[00:01:04]  His spirit, his love of this country.
[00:01:05]  He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
[00:01:12]  We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
[00:01:21]  That's why we are here.
[00:01:24]  Charlie, thank you.
[00:01:25]  Thank you for being here.
[00:01:27]  We are excited to have you here.
[00:01:30]  I don't know how many of everybody here knows everything about you.
[00:01:34]  So I just want to get.
[00:01:35]  I certainly hope not.
[00:01:38]  So just would wonder, you know, to get us started, tell us, like, where did you grow up?
[00:01:42]  Where are you from?
[00:01:43]  Wife, kids.
[00:01:44]  Yeah, so I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, refugee from Illinois.
[00:01:48]  Anyone else?
[00:01:50]  And moved here to Arizona a couple years ago.
[00:01:53]  Founder of Turning Point USA, which is an organization that some of you might be familiar with.
[00:01:58]  We fight for liberty and freedom on high school and college campuses all across the country.
[00:02:02]  And we believe the next generation should learn to love their country, not hate their country.
[00:02:07]  And we do that.
[00:02:08]  Thank you.
[00:02:09]  We do that every single day.
[00:02:12]  And I had a very interesting path, I guess you could say.
[00:02:16]  I didn't go to college.
[00:02:17]  It took a gap year.
[00:02:18]  It's been a gap decade ever since.
[00:02:21]  And which is the great irony of the whole thing, which is I don't go to college and yet I run a college organization.
[00:02:27]  So I'll let you figure that one out.
[00:02:29]  And actually, I just wrote a book about all of that, which we could touch on maybe a little bit later.
[00:02:34]  And so my wife is in Arizona here, and we got married in May of last year, and we just had a baby girl, which we are super thrilled about.
[00:02:44]  And the most important part of my biography is I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade at Christian Heritage Academy in the North Shore of Chicago.
[00:02:52]  Some of you might be familiar with that school.
[00:02:54]  It's actually founded by Wayne Grudem, who's a fellow Arizonan here, phenomenal Bible teacher and scholar.
[00:02:59]  Most important decision I made in my life was in fifth grade.
[00:03:02]  It has meant more and more to me as I got older.
[00:03:05]  And it really is the driving force of everything that I do.

=== Biblical Blueprint for Liberty (15:30) ===

[00:03:08]  Everything is about the Bible and God's plan and liberty, which is God's idea, not man's idea.
[00:03:15]  And I try to lace that into everything that we do at Turning Point USA and college campuses, on high school campuses, and what we do at TPUSA Faith, our radio show, our podcast, and everything in between.
[00:03:26]  And so, yeah, we're doing our best to try to fight for what we believe are God-given rights and principles.
[00:03:33]  And what I personally believe, and I believe there's more than overwhelming evidence, a nation that was divinely inspired into existence and something that has never happened before in human history, which is an experiment in self-government for the people and by the people, separation of powers, consent to the governed, independent judiciary.
[00:03:50]  These things are very rare to ever see implemented.
[00:03:53]  They're biblical in nature, derived straight from God's word.
[00:03:57]  And I believe we as Christians have a moral prerogative to make sure that civilization continues to flourish.
[00:04:03]  Well, thanks for that.
[00:04:04]  So I try to put myself into the shoes of people that disagree with what we're talking about.
[00:04:13]  And so like right now, if somebody's watching this and they just heard this audience clap at what you just said about the divine origins, the biblical origins of the country, and then before talking about teaching students to love their country and not hate it, some would listen to that and go, that's not what Christians are supposed to do.
[00:04:33]  Christians are just supposed to save souls, and that's it.
[00:04:36]  And so could you help us walk through that?
[00:04:39]  Sure.
[00:04:39]  What Bible are they reading?
[00:04:42]  Well, like, for example, Jeremiah 29, 7, the Lord is speaking to his chosen people, and he says, demand the welfare of the nation that you are in, because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
[00:04:52]  So are we going to disobey God?
[00:04:53]  That's God's teaching in Jeremiah 29, 7.
[00:04:55]  We are commanded to care about our nation.
[00:04:58]  Daniel fasted and prayed for his country.
[00:05:00]  Esther, Mordecai, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, all sorts of figures in the Old Testament sought to be counselors to secular government for God.
[00:05:10]  Not to mention, all throughout the scriptures, we see this struggle, this question of how should man be governed in the earthly realm.
[00:05:17]  Of course, we know that Christ is king and is the chairman of the board of everything we do in our life, but we have to form some form of government.
[00:05:24]  So our founding fathers wrestled with this question, and they didn't do so lightly.
[00:05:27]  So when they came with the three branches of government, they were inspired by Isaiah 33, which is God is the lawmaker, God is the judge, and God is the king.
[00:05:36]  That sounds like our three branches of government.
[00:05:39]  The founding fathers said very clearly that only God should have all three of those powers together.
[00:05:43]  We have to do our best to separate them into three different branches.
[00:05:46]  How about in the Declaration of Independence, where it mentions God four times, and it says explicitly the laws of nature and nature is God?
[00:05:54]  One of the most beautiful statements ever to be written.
[00:05:56]  And the Declaration of Independence that laid the framework for Western civilization as we know it to allow to grow and flourish.
[00:06:02]  But let's pretend none of that is convincing to you.
[00:06:04]  Let me just get straight to it.
[00:06:06]  Charlie, all they care about the gospel.
[00:06:07]  All right, eight out of ten, eighty cents of every dollar that is funding all Christian ministries nationwide comes from this country.
[00:06:15]  Why?
[00:06:16]  Why is this country the most benevolent, productive, entrepreneurial, wealthy country ever?
[00:06:21]  Charlie, I only care about saving souls in Kenya.
[00:06:23]  Fine, how are you going to fund it?
[00:06:26]  Is it the generous people of France?
[00:06:28]  No.
[00:06:29]  Is it the wonderful entrepreneurial backbone of the wonderful people of Brazil?
[00:06:34]  No.
[00:06:34]  It's actually private property-based entrepreneurial capitalism that is the funding mechanism of all the ministries that we love to support.
[00:06:41]  God bless them all.
[00:06:42]  But you need something to be able to buy airplane tickets, be able to give goods out in all this work that you're doing.
[00:06:48]  The world is a better place because of the experiment of America.
[00:06:52]  In fact, the kingdom of God has spread to more nations, more corners, more people have been able to give their life to the Lord because of the United States of America than any other country in the history of the world.
[00:07:05]  So yeah, I think we should care about America.
[00:07:11]  Yeah, but Charlie, I mean.
[00:07:17]  I mean, if God wants this country to be run by tyranny, well, then we should just submit to the tyranny that's happening, right?
[00:07:27]  Yeah, so that would be a misapplication of the teaching of Romans 13, right?
[00:07:32]  So Romans 13, written by Paul, important context before he was obviously imprisoned and eventually killed by Roman leaders, he says that you must submit to all of those in authority.
[00:07:44]  It's the longest writing in the New Testament when it comes to politics.
[00:07:49]  So if we were in communist China or if we were in North Korea, I would have a different approach to this verse.
[00:07:55]  But we actually were given a gift by the founding fathers.
[00:07:58]  And it's very simple, which we need to ask ourselves the question, who is the governing authorities in America?
[00:08:04]  The people.
[00:08:05]  So actually, it's the mayors and the governors and the congresspeople that submit to our will.
[00:08:10]  We don't submit to a mayor that says the church is not essential.
[00:08:12]  It's the other way around.
[00:08:14]  Romans 13 was violated by the mayors, the congressmen, the governors, all those people that decided to take our God-granted natural rights away.
[00:08:22]  The sloppy, civically ignorant way of reading Romans 13 is to say, you must listen to the mayor, but the mayor is not in charge.
[00:08:30]  You gave your power up to the mayor in an election when you elected them.
[00:08:33]  You're the sovereign.
[00:08:34]  It starts with we the people, not we the politicians.
[00:08:37]  That is a game-changing type of civilizational bedrock principle.
[00:08:42]  The founding fathers inverted the entire way government was done.
[00:08:45]  Before America, absent maybe a little Athenian democracy, a Roman republic that blew up, every single country in the history of the planet was an empire trying to take more lands, trying to subjugate more people, trying to get more people under their oppressive rule.
[00:08:59]  It was subjects, slaves, and serfs.
[00:09:01]  That's how you lived.
[00:09:02]  You fought other people's wars, and if you were lucky, maybe you were able to have children if they survived, you know, which was a very difficult process for thousands of years.
[00:09:10]  America changed everything.
[00:09:12]  They said, you're a citizen.
[00:09:13]  Whoa, what's that?
[00:09:14]  In Greek, it means co-ruler.
[00:09:16]  You're a co-owner of the nation.
[00:09:18]  Everything changed at that point, that you matter as an individual.
[00:09:21]  In the Declaration of Independence, they said so clearly, all men are created equal.
[00:09:26]  Where do you think they got that idea?
[00:09:28]  You think they got that just from reading secular poetry?
[00:09:31]  No, they got it from the Bible.
[00:09:33]  55 out of 56 signers, that very same document were regular church attending Bible-believing Christians.
[00:09:39]  There's only one that wasn't, poor guy.
[00:09:41]  If not, I could say they were all.
[00:09:45]  This nation was founded by the Black Robe Regiment, by Jonathan Mayhew, by John Knox, by Jonathan Edwards, by George Whitfield, by the sermons of a pastoral community that cared so much about fighting for liberty and self-government.
[00:09:58]  And then we come in the 21st century, some Christians, not all, and they say, no, I don't care about all of that.
[00:10:03]  You know what that tells me?
[00:10:05]  You are allowed to not care, which is fine, obviously.
[00:10:08]  But how privileged are we to be able to be indifferent because we're recipients of people that weren't indifferent?
[00:10:18]  We are the benefactors of people that cared.
[00:10:20]  And guess what?
[00:10:21]  Not just people, Christians.
[00:10:23]  Christians that cared enough to create an experiment in self-government.
[00:10:27]  And so, look, I reject all forms of apathy.
[00:10:30]  I believe the Bible is an anti-apathy document in every single corner, whether it be how you eat, how you treat your neighbors, how you raise your children.
[00:10:39]  The Bible is a blueprint of how to do everything.
[00:10:41]  And yes, how to care about politics and how to vote and what type of government we should live under.
[00:10:45]  So I can't remember your devil's advocate question, but I'm sure that helps out of folks.
[00:10:49]  Absolutely.
[00:10:54]  Yeah, John Adams was asked who were the most influential people behind the revolution, and he named four preachers.
[00:11:02]  And he said, those are the four men that had more to do with anything happening in the American Revolution than anybody else.
[00:11:08]  And then when you go back and read the Declaration of Independence and you go back and read the sermons 15 years before the revolution, you find that the entire Declaration of Independence is just sermon topics in the colonies 15, 20, 15 years before the actual Declaration.
[00:11:26]  Yeah, and the Declaration of Independence is such a beautiful document.
[00:11:29]  We don't teach it to our children anymore, where it says, when in the corseum and events becomes necessary, one people to dissolve the political bands that have tied them to the never deriving the equal station of power of which they derive the laws of nature and nature is God.
[00:11:42]  And it goes on to say, of course, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that all men are created equal.
[00:11:46]  I mean, these statements we take for granted.
[00:11:50]  But why was it that Thomas Jefferson was able to so eloquently put that?
[00:11:54]  It's because for decades prior, there were those activist preachers.
[00:11:58]  George Whitfield gave anywhere between 26 to 28,000 open-air sermons along the eastern seaboard.
[00:12:05]  So, yes, we celebrate 1776 and we should, but we forget that the soil was tilled by the American church, colonists that started to wrestle with the idea, how would God want us to live?
[00:12:18]  And they started to realize that God's orders and God's rules for life mattered more than King George.
[00:12:23]  That's a literally a revolutionary concept.
[00:12:27]  And with it was the outgrowth of Western civilization, of which we are able to enjoy and flourish in today.
[00:12:33]  There's plenty of malevolent forces that are trying to take it down.
[00:12:36]  And if I could just kind of go a little bit further, my patience wears thin when I have to hear from Christians that I don't care about such a civilization.
[00:12:46]  It is, and if I offend anybody, great.
[00:12:51]  It's historically ignorant.
[00:12:54]  You are so blessed that God allowed you to live in such a civilization.
[00:12:58]  And to say it means nothing to me or that doesn't matter to me, I believe it is the opposite of what Christ called us, which is to be good stewards.
[00:13:09]  It's the opposite.
[00:13:10]  It is to throw, it is to parable the talents of the person that just hid it away and did nothing with it.
[00:13:16]  And Christ had some of his harshest statements and teachings to people who do that.
[00:13:21]  But Charlie, Christians are just supposed to stay out of politics, aren't we?
[00:13:28]  I mean, we're just supposed to worry about saving souls.
[00:13:31]  And we should just stay out of it.
[00:13:33]  This should not be something that we are a part of.
[00:13:36]  Let the world burn itself down.
[00:13:38]  We'll just go, we'll just pull people from the fire and help them go to heaven.
[00:13:42]  Or we could put the fire out.
[00:13:46]  It's not either or.
[00:13:47]  I mean, no, I'm just joking around.
[00:13:50]  People always say, Charlie, the house is on fire.
[00:13:51]  I got to get the kids out.
[00:13:53]  Or you could put the fire out and make the country better and improve things, not just retreat to the hills.
[00:13:58]  And anyway, so let me address one thing you've said here that we shouldn't care about politics.
[00:14:02]  So I'm very clear about this.
[00:14:04]  The most important thing is advancing the kingdom of God and winning souls for Jesus Christ and doing that in every capacity.
[00:14:10]  That is the most important thing.
[00:14:12]  Number one.
[00:14:13]  Number two is to make sure you could do number one.
[00:14:18]  For Christians that still say this, and obviously you're doing a wonderful job playing devil's advocates.
[00:14:22]  It's really good.
[00:14:23]  You must get a couple emails here and there.
[00:14:28]  We just lived through a time where they called the church non-essential.
[00:14:31]  They kept strip clubs and cannabis dispensaries and liquor stores open.
[00:14:35]  They took Easter and Pentecost from us.
[00:14:38]  Suicide is up dramatically.
[00:14:41]  In-person worship is just finally coming back in some major cities.
[00:14:45]  And we're supposed to all of a sudden kind of say, ah, you know, politics doesn't really matter.
[00:14:50]  Politics came into the church.
[00:14:52]  This is what I always laugh.
[00:14:53]  People say separation of church and state.
[00:14:54]  Not in the Constitution, not in the Federalist Papers, not in the Declaration of Independence.
[00:14:58]  It's nowhere.
[00:14:58]  It's a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Convention, actually assuring them that the government wouldn't come after them.
[00:15:06]  But then I always laugh at people.
[00:15:08]  They say separation of church and state.
[00:15:09]  I say, okay, hold on a second.
[00:15:10]  Then why didn't you keep the government out of the church during the pandemic?
[00:15:16]  Why didn't all if it's true separation, then the church never should have been forced to close.
[00:15:22]  Fines, lockdowns, pastors being arrested.
[00:15:25]  If it was true, it was never separation of church and state.
[00:15:27]  You know what they're really saying?
[00:15:29]  They're saying Christians don't get involved in government.
[00:15:31]  That's all that they're saying.
[00:15:32]  Because for a variety of reasons, they're afraid.
[00:15:34]  They don't like it.
[00:15:35]  They know the power of what the church could potentially do if it actually rose up and got focused on it, which I believe it's in the process of happening.
[00:15:41]  But you do make an important question, though, right?
[00:15:44]  Which is, should we care?
[00:15:46]  And again, we must always be focused on number one.
[00:15:49]  I don't believe in political churches.
[00:15:51]  I don't.
[00:15:52]  I believe in churches that at times talk about political, cultural, and philosophical issues if it's consistent and harmonic with the word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
[00:16:02]  I don't believe in political churches.
[00:16:04]  I believe in churches that glorify God.
[00:16:06]  It's a very important thing that the political church is a pejorative that people throw.
[00:16:10]  They say, oh, that's a political church.
[00:16:12]  What do you mean?
[00:16:12]  What do you mean by that?
[00:16:13]  Do you mean that they're willing to speak out about the unborn, speak out about transgender issues?
[00:16:18]  If you consider that to be a political church, don't read Leviticus.
[00:16:21]  All right?
[00:16:22]  Let's just put it that way.
[00:16:23]  Because you're going to be offended.
[00:16:24]  Thought crime, okay?
[00:16:25]  There's 66 books in the library of the Bible, and you might be a little too focused on just the couple.
[00:16:33]  All of it matters.
[00:16:34]  It's all the inerrant word of God.
[00:16:35]  So to answer another question, though, which is, are there examples of people in the Bible that we revere that cared about government?
[00:16:45]  And as I mentioned, of course there are.
[00:16:47]  I mean, there's numerous examples of Old Testament prophets and thinkers inspired by God wrestling with what is the best form of government.
[00:16:56]  And this is another thing that Christians must understand, which is, you know, they always say, oh, you know, don't legislate my morality.
[00:17:02]  All legislation is morality.
[00:17:04]  Every piece of legislation is morality.
[00:17:06]  There is no such thing as an amoral piece of legislation.
[00:17:10]  If you find it, show it to me.
[00:17:11]  Everything's a moral claim.
[00:17:13]  I'll give you an example.
[00:17:14]  From slowing down in front of a school.
[00:17:16]  Why do we have such a law?
[00:17:18]  Because children matter.
[00:17:20]  That's why.
[00:17:21]  Because society has decided morally that going 45 miles an hour out of a school might endanger children, so we make it illegal to do so.
[00:17:31]  All laws are a reflection of morality.
[00:17:33]  The question is: do you want the secular humanist morality or the Judeo-Christian word of God morality to live under?
[00:17:39]  And so if you are just kind of agnostic to it, then how are we also being salt and light, which are two things that change the environment of which they are in?
[00:17:50]  Salt and light go to something that is a certain way and changes it to be completely different.
[00:17:56]  And so, look, I totally agree.
[00:17:57]  Politics is messy.
[00:17:59]  I get it.
[00:17:59]  Trust me.
[00:18:00]  So is everything else that human beings are involved in.
[00:18:02]  The church is messy.
[00:18:03]  Families are messy.
[00:18:04]  Business is messy.
[00:18:05]  What's the point?
[00:18:07]  The question is: do we have something to offer when there is cloudiness and murkiness?
[00:18:12]  And yes, we do.
[00:18:13]  And may I just suggest a couple?
[00:18:15]  In a time of total confusion and chaos, can the church all agree that men can't become pregnant?
[00:18:20]  Is this something that we could start on?
[00:18:24]  I hope so.
[00:18:28]  This is taught in public schools.
[00:18:30]  Well, Charlie, I don't believe we should get involved in such matters.
[00:18:34]  Only the gospel.
[00:18:36]  Okay, so which part of the gospel?

=== Calling Out Cowardly Churches (15:25) ===

[00:18:38]  Do you mean that the part where Jesus quoted Old Testament scripture?
[00:18:42]  Are you going to remove that?
[00:18:43]  Or how about the part where Jesus said on this rock, when we all say church, he said, on this rock, build my, it's actually a Greek word, ecclesia.
[00:18:49]  And thanks to Tyndale, who was actually killed for doing such an interpretation, killed by the Catholic Church at the time, we understand that ecclesia actually was a Greek equivalent of a political gathering.
[00:19:02]  Jesus said, on this rock, build my ecclesia.
[00:19:05]  And ecclesia was a place where all the Greek citizens in a local area would meet.
[00:19:10]  And there were two big words when they used to meet, two Greek words that meant eleutheria and isonomia, two Greek words that meant freedom and equality.
[00:19:20]  Wonder what country has that as two aims and ambitions.
[00:19:23]  So instead of not on this rock, build my church, it's on this rock, build my community gathering point, of which you all know the two unifying principles are freedom and equality.
[00:19:34]  That's a lot different than a lot of people would say.
[00:19:37]  So wait a second, Jesus was referenced, because he could have said, on this rock, build my synagogue.
[00:19:43]  On this rock, build my temple.
[00:19:45]  No, but he chose a secular term.
[00:19:48]  Why?
[00:19:49]  Maybe because Jesus did not want compartmentalized Christianity, he wanted comprehensive Christianity.
[00:19:55]  He didn't want to run to the hills and not care about what's happening in the world.
[00:19:58]  He wanted to bring the truth to all facets of human life.
[00:20:03]  So, when it comes to pastors encouraging people, encouraging Christians to stay out of politics, do we have any historical parallels to that?
[00:20:16]  Maybe around the 1930s Germany?
[00:20:21]  Yeah, I mean, look, you went there, so yeah, sure.
[00:20:23]  Okay.
[00:20:23]  I was wondering if there's anything.
[00:20:25]  Yeah, look, the most quoted verse of the Holocaust was Romans 13.
[00:20:30]  And this is the most important thing that people don't realize.
[00:20:32]  There were thousands of pastors that did nothing during the Holocaust.
[00:20:36]  And I know you're probably exhausted with Nazi reference.
[00:20:38]  Too bad.
[00:20:39]  Get over it, okay?
[00:20:40]  It happened.
[00:20:41]  In a country where there was a lot of institutional Christianity, mainline Protestantism was very well established in Nazi Germany.
[00:20:50]  It was not the majority belief, majority was agnostic, but it was 30 to 40% of the country.
[00:20:55]  And if you want to really all of a sudden challenge your view of what a political pastor is, go read Eric Metaxas' book on a Bonhoeffer.
[00:21:05]  It will challenge your belief to the core of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who did everything he possibly could to try to stop Hitler because he saw what was happening of God's chosen people that were being systemically murdered.
[00:21:17]  But the American, not the American, the German church at the time said, we're going to do nothing because it says in Romans 13, we must submit to Adolf Hitler.
[00:21:24]  Most quoted verse.
[00:21:26]  Now, I'm not saying that's what we're living through now.
[00:21:28]  I'm not making that.
[00:21:29]  I'm not saying that.
[00:21:30]  But I am saying that we're definitely on a trajectory of tyranny and the same sort of language is being reintroduced very, very generously.
[00:21:37]  And it's not just there, though, by the way.
[00:21:39]  It's country after country that we see where the church agrees to co-opt itself.
[00:21:44]  Another example would be Stalin's Russia.
[00:21:46]  You know, the Russian Orthodox Church was not shut down by Stalin, even though Stalin was an atheist who actually went to seminary and rejected it completely and wholeheartedly.
[00:21:56]  Stalin was very smart, though.
[00:21:57]  Stalin bought the church.
[00:22:01]  Stalin knew that if he could just purchase the basically the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, pay them off, have them loyal to the government, let them still worship, but don't get too rambunctious and never, ever, ever speak against the Soviet government, then just keep it in its place.
[00:22:19]  It's very smart.
[00:22:21]  Now, of course, we have no examples of American Christianity taking money, I don't know, from the CDC or from NIH or from being purchased by secular SOARs-funded nonprofits.
[00:22:32]  The American church, of course, is not for sale.
[00:22:38]  If you look at history, some of the great atrocities ever committed was not because there were no Christians, it's because Christians that were there did nothing.
[00:22:46]  So, since you went there, Charlie, can you can you be more specific about what you just said?
[00:22:54]  Christian pastors, Christian leaders being bought off in order to because here's the thing: Christians, like right now, we will get slammed for having an event that would geared more towards the right politically.
[00:23:11]  If we had an event, if this is the right, then we're messed up.
[00:23:14]  I mean, I've said nothing political.
[00:23:16]  No, I haven't.
[00:23:17]  Right, exactly.
[00:23:18]  But if we had the same event and we geared, moved it toward the left, we'd be cheered.
[00:23:24]  And there would be nothing about being political.
[00:23:26]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:23:28]  And I want you to put those two things together: being bought off and the move to the left in the evangelical church.
[00:23:34]  Since you went there, I think that's the thing.
[00:23:36]  Well, no, I think it's actually a great question for those of you that really study your Bibles.
[00:23:40]  If you're being persecuted, are you closer to the truth or further away from the truth?
[00:23:44]  There you go.
[00:23:45]  Okay, so you're right.
[00:23:46]  If we had Drag Queen Story Hour tonight.
[00:23:48]  Yeah, you know, we'd be celebrated by the Arizona repugnant and all these people, right?
[00:23:53]  We had all these, oh, they're so wonderful and they do a great job and they're so great.
[00:23:57]  Okay, wonderful.
[00:23:58]  Yeah, so you're right.
[00:23:59]  So, I mean, it actually should give you a little encouragement that you talk about such matters that people get up in arms.
[00:24:05]  But yeah, so look, at a more fundamental level that I think we need to explore is, you know, the labeling is so insane and so sloppy.
[00:24:14]  If I gave this same speech with these principles 30 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to identify my political leanings.
[00:24:19]  You wouldn't.
[00:24:20]  To talk about the brilliance of the founders and the historicity of the Declaration of the Constitution and all this.
[00:24:26]  But now it just seems as if it's become politicized and whatever.
[00:24:30]  I mean, you know, that's the kind of time.
[00:24:32]  Isn't there a warning over the Constitution right now that some of the language in this might trigger you?
[00:24:38]  So be careful when you read, like in the National Archive right now?
[00:24:42]  Yeah, that is true, amongst other things.
[00:24:46]  I mean, if they even teach the Constitution anymore in our schools, which is just terrible.
[00:24:50]  But yeah, look, I mean, to your point, American Christianity doesn't speak out about this.
[00:24:54]  There's three types of churches.
[00:24:55]  We should just talk about it, okay?
[00:24:57]  And American Christianity has become a business model, right?
[00:25:01]  Which is at times about more baptisms.
[00:25:03]  Unfortunately, it's more times than baptisms about bigger buildings and bigger budgets, right?
[00:25:08]  It's all about the three B's, right?
[00:25:09]  Mostly bigger buildings and bigger budgets, by the way.
[00:25:12]  And most pastors do not want to disrupt the business model, okay?
[00:25:16]  And talking about these issues mean that people might leave, they might stop tithing, they might stop offering.
[00:25:21]  And what an unbelievably coward disservice to the kingdom of God and to what God has given us in this country to work, well, I might lose somebody because they get upset that I say that there's men and women were created.
[00:25:38]  It's ridiculous.
[00:25:39]  Okay, so we have three different types of churches.
[00:25:42]  It's the three C's.
[00:25:43]  Let's start with the good.
[00:25:44]  You're in one of the good churches.
[00:25:46]  You're in a courageous church right now.
[00:25:49]  This is a great church and you are being led very well.
[00:25:53]  This comes at a cost and comes at a price, though, right?
[00:25:56]  Angry emails, people get upset, whatever, right?
[00:25:59]  There's a choice has been made, a line has been drawn.
[00:26:02]  Praise God that you have a leader to be able to guide you through it because, boy, is that necessary.
[00:26:07]  Okay.
[00:26:08]  The courageous churches are growing in number and they're also being blessed by the Lord with, ironically, more tithes, more offerings, and more attendance.
[00:26:18]  In fact, it's the churches that have taken a stand the last couple years that are flourishing and being blessed, and it's the ones that have gone completely off the reservation that actually are seeing a decline in attendance and tithing and offering.
[00:26:30]  So the first are the courageous churches.
[00:26:33]  The second are the cowardly churches.
[00:26:35]  Now, all of you probably know a cowardly pastor or a cowardly church.
[00:26:39]  Now, what if you say, Charlie, define it?
[00:26:40]  Okay, they said nothing after Roe versus Wade was repealed.
[00:26:44]  Could think of someone, I could think of a couple dozen.
[00:26:46]  There's your coward, okay?
[00:26:48]  By the way, there's worse things in the world than being a coward.
[00:26:51]  No, there are.
[00:26:52]  You could be evil.
[00:26:53]  I'm not saying being a coward is being evil.
[00:26:56]  I'm not saying it's good, but there's worse things in the world than being a coward.
[00:27:00]  Okay?
[00:27:00]  It's understandable to be a coward.
[00:27:02]  Okay.
[00:27:03]  Peter was a coward.
[00:27:05]  In the Bible, there's plenty of examples of being a coward.
[00:27:08]  We should love on the cowards.
[00:27:09]  I'm not kidding.
[00:27:10]  You should find the coward and take them out to lunch and take them out to dinner and challenge them and try to build them up to try to be able to find the courage that God gives them.
[00:27:21]  Cowardly people are an opportunity.
[00:27:23]  I mean that completely.
[00:27:24]  Maybe they need to know there's others.
[00:27:26]  They need community.
[00:27:26]  They need to see what the path forward is.
[00:27:29]  And that's the biggest group of people.
[00:27:31]  Charlie, we only do the gospel here.
[00:27:32]  We don't do any of that.
[00:27:33]  Okay, what parts?
[00:27:35]  What part of the Bible do you teach and do not teach?
[00:27:38]  Do you teach the part about obeying God and not obeying man?
[00:27:42]  Do you teach Jeremiah 29, 7?
[00:27:43]  Do you teach the part about Daniel disobeying government authorities and praying and defying it, which got him thrown into Lion's Den?
[00:27:49]  Do you teach Leviticus?
[00:27:51]  Do you teach the Ten Commandments?
[00:27:52]  Which parts of the Bible do you teach and not teach?
[00:27:54]  That's your number one question when they say we only teach the gospel.
[00:27:57]  Number one.
[00:27:58]  And then say, do you teach morality?
[00:28:00]  And they'll say, of course we do.
[00:28:01]  Okay, do you teach how morality then might affect people in your congregation?
[00:28:05]  For example, do not murder.
[00:28:07]  Do you maybe talk about how that might impact what's happening around you?
[00:28:10]  These are very important questions, by the way, that cowardly pastors will be very clumsy in answering because deep down they know you're right.
[00:28:17]  They just do.
[00:28:18]  I'm not saying you have to give 52 sermons a year about how, you know, the Bible inspired the Federalist papers, okay?
[00:28:26]  But maybe a mention once a quarter about something that's going on in the world to give clarity to your congregation.
[00:28:33]  And let me just add on this before I go to the third type of church.
[00:28:35]  What a disservice and missed opportunity.
[00:28:37]  I see this all the time.
[00:28:38]  Churches that seize on this are growing because you are being propagandized every day by secular culture on how to believe what to believe in the news, transgenderism, your kids are on TikTok, all this stuff.
[00:28:48]  And the pastor says, I'm not going to give you a clarifying biblical lens to make sense of what's happening.
[00:28:55]  You are abandoning your flock.
[00:28:57]  They're asking you for help.
[00:28:59]  They're asking you, like, hey, how do I think about this issue?
[00:29:03]  Oh, no, we don't do that around here.
[00:29:05]  My daughter thinks she's a man.
[00:29:07]  We don't do that around here.
[00:29:10]  You're basically saying, I don't love you enough to tell you the truth because I want my business model to continue.
[00:29:17]  Okay, that's a cowardly church.
[00:29:18]  The third, though, this is the one that I definitely kind of throw the little chin music, a little fastball, up and high, if you will.
[00:29:27]  Very little patience for these people is the complicit church.
[00:29:30]  Okay?
[00:29:31]  These are the people with the BLM flags and the LGBT flags.
[00:29:35]  And they're the pastors that are coming out that saying Jesus is a socialist or saying that Jesus is pro-abortion.
[00:29:40]  Okay, that's much worse than being a coward.
[00:29:43]  Okay?
[00:29:43]  That is then pervert.
[00:29:45]  Yeah, that's evil.
[00:29:46]  That's exactly right.
[00:29:46]  That's perverting the word of God for your own purpose, whatever that very well might be.
[00:29:51]  They're actually not the majority of the churches.
[00:29:54]  They're growing in certain areas, but it is the intentional perversion of the word of God for a secular, humanist, progressive, quasi-demonic political agenda.
[00:30:05]  And those churches need to be called out.
[00:30:07]  Those teachers need to be challenged.
[00:30:10]  And we need to continue to cross-examine them very publicly.
[00:30:14]  So three types of churches, courageous, cowardly, complicit.
[00:30:17]  Most are cowards.
[00:30:18]  We want to bring them into the courageous category.
[00:30:20]  We want to encourage the courageous.
[00:30:21]  We want to support the courageous.
[00:30:23]  And the complicit, we must draw the line in the sand and call them out what they are, which I believe the teachers that are complicit teachers are the exact false prophets that we are warned about in 1 Peter, and I believe they'll be treated appropriately.
[00:30:37]  Exactly.
[00:30:44]  So can you, we see it every day, so I'm not asking you to do anything that we don't already know a little bit about.
[00:30:51]  But can you paint a picture for just how serious the situation is right now, just nationally?
[00:30:58]  Yes, and let me also comment on something you also said earlier, which is it's a temptation for those of us that read our Bibles, and I believe we have to be very careful about this, which is it's the temptation of the overemphasis on eschatology.
[00:31:13]  Now, eschatology is the study of the end times.
[00:31:16]  And some of you here tonight are probably like, Charlie, this is all great and good, but Jesus is coming next Thursday.
[00:31:23]  I hope there's nobody here like that.
[00:31:29]  I speak at a lot of churches.
[00:31:30]  I hear a lot of different things.
[00:31:33]  And they say, things are not falling apart.
[00:31:35]  They're falling into place.
[00:31:37]  And by the way, you very well might be right.
[00:31:39]  Now, there's pre-trib eschatology, right?
[00:31:42]  There's post-trib eschatology, right?
[00:31:45]  I tend to be pan-trib, it's all going to pan out in the end, right?
[00:31:51]  I love the debates, I stay out of them.
[00:31:53]  I'm not a theologian, that's not what I do.
[00:31:54]  And you know, there's been phenomenal scholarship on all that have at it, right?
[00:31:59]  Here's what I will say, though: is that Jesus said, occupy till I come.
[00:32:04]  That the hour and the day is unknown.
[00:32:07]  If you are allowing your eschatology to be an excuse for inaction, that is not biblical.
[00:32:14]  It can be a comfort, though.
[00:32:15]  That is a difference.
[00:32:17]  Eschatology can be a comfort in the midst of conflict, meaning that you know there's a broader plan, you know that God is working sovereign in a sovereign fashion, so it could comfort you, but it should not allow you to be inactive.
[00:32:30]  It's a very important distinction.
[00:32:32]  And I get emails every so often, Charlie, I'm done.
[00:32:36]  We are homesteading.
[00:32:37]  I'm bringing the kids to northern Vermont.
[00:32:40]  And, you know, Jesus, and it always ends with like, Jesus is coming soon.
[00:32:45]  And I always ask, what is soon?
[00:32:50]  Right?
[00:32:50]  When is soon exactly, right?
[00:32:53]  And if you are going to act in a way where what would, what do you want to be caught doing basically when Jesus comes again?
[00:33:00]  That's the question I always ask.
[00:33:01]  What do you want to be caught doing?
[00:33:03]  Right?
[00:33:03]  And even more immediate, how do you want to explain the last week, right?
[00:33:07]  Were you running away and retreating when souls needed to be saved, right?
[00:33:11]  When young kids needed to be, you know, rescued from this insidious LGBT ideology, right?
[00:33:17]  When the massacre of abortion continued?
[00:33:19]  You want to be like, oh, I was homesteading.
[00:33:22]  Okay, great.
[00:33:23]  No, I want to be able to say, hey, I was in the arena.
[00:33:26]  I was messing up and doing all things, but I was in the arena.
[00:33:29]  I was not a spectator.
[00:33:30]  So I just want to kind of mention that, which I think is really important.
[00:33:35]  And I forgot the question.
[00:33:36]  What was the question again?
[00:33:37]  That's all right.
[00:33:38]  I'm going to ask another question before I get back to that one.
[00:33:40]  Sorry.
[00:33:41]  So when you and I were talking, you actually not only pointed to biblical figures, biblical heroes who had political influence.
[00:33:51]  I mean, we have the prophets.
[00:33:52]  I mean, that's the entire 16 books of the prophets in the Old Testament speaking against national sin going on.
[00:33:59]  And so the church is supposed to have a prophetic voice, but they're also historical heroes.

=== Christians Behind Historical Truths (14:14) ===

[00:34:04]  You mentioned one in Tyndale.
[00:34:06]  We have Luther.
[00:34:07]  I mean, here we have people that many Christians look to and go, those are heroes.
[00:34:12]  John Knox and John Calvin, like these are heroes.
[00:34:15]  These are people that we put their pictures on our walls or we look back at history and go, man, I wish I could have an ounce of their courage.
[00:34:22]  But what did their courage lead to?
[00:34:25]  Well, yeah, I mean, look at Luther.
[00:34:26]  I mean, Luther was a rebel.
[00:34:30]  And not just a rebel.
[00:34:31]  I mean, it was a rebel with a cause.
[00:34:34]  I mean, Tyndale in particular is a very interesting one.
[00:34:37]  If you've never studied Tyndale, you don't know who he is.
[00:34:40]  You have the King James Bible thanks to Tyndale.
[00:34:43]  So Tyndale was hunted down, literally, for deciding to translate the Bible for the common folk.
[00:34:50]  I believe Tyndale is the least appreciated figure that led to the birth of Western civilization, America, and the commoner being able to get in a relationship with Jesus Christ.
[00:35:01]  And so what Tyndale did is he rejected, not rejected, he questioned and was skeptical of some of the Latin translation that the Catholic Church had.
[00:35:11]  So he got his hands on a Bible and he said, wait a second, I'm a little bit skeptical here.
[00:35:16]  So he went to original source manuscripts to the Koigne Greek, taught himself Koigne Greek.
[00:35:21]  You didn't have all these websites back then where you could learn Koigne Greek, okay?
[00:35:25]  And he literally became a master to be able to get back to what was it, what was it really saying?
[00:35:32]  Also, obviously going back to the Hebrew in mostly the Old Testament, but the New Testament is written in Koine Greek, spoken in Aramaic, but translated and written Koine Greek.
[00:35:42]  This was not a small piece of rebellion.
[00:35:45]  This was an act of treason against the government to do.
[00:35:49]  But he believed that everyday normal people, in particular his native country, Lil Bias, Scotland, wanted, you know, needed it, that everyday people needed to have a relationship with God.
[00:36:00]  So he gets this done.
[00:36:01]  He pulls it off, and it changes the world.
[00:36:04]  Because all of a sudden, people start reading the word of God, and the word of God never returns void.
[00:36:08]  And people start all of a sudden being like, wow, I can give my life to the Lord individually, right?
[00:36:14]  And it gave the Protestant Reformation the jet fuel to continue.
[00:36:20]  And of course, there were all these other things that happened, the advent of the Gutenberg press and the ability to mass produce Bibles.
[00:36:26]  But without Tyndale translating it, that was the missing piece.
[00:36:30]  And so how did Tinsdale die?
[00:36:32]  Tyndale died.
[00:36:32]  They crucified him, literally.
[00:36:34]  They set him on fire.
[00:36:35]  That's right.
[00:36:36]  Yeah, that's right.
[00:36:38]  Even not as brutal, but...
[00:36:40]  For translating the Bible into English.
[00:36:42]  That's right.
[00:36:43]  75% of your English Bible is Tyndale.
[00:36:47]  Like what you have right now is Tyndale, 75%.
[00:36:51]  And I can't remember it.
[00:36:52]  Boy, two years ago, I would have.
[00:36:53]  His final words before he died was something like, it was after the king or something was very sharp that he said before he died that was prophetic.
[00:37:02]  I'll remember it or someone will look it up.
[00:37:04]  Tyndale's last words was just beautiful.
[00:37:06]  Anyway, so this idea that the Christianity that we enjoy was just created by rule followers is just not true at all.
[00:37:16]  Now, we have to be careful, you know, what rules we break and how we break them.
[00:37:19]  That's where the Holy Spirit comes in and praying and fasting comes in.
[00:37:24]  But there's multiple examples.
[00:37:25]  I mean, we obviously mentioned Bonhoeffer and the founding fathers and so many others, not to mention, you know, George Washington, who was a godly man who prayed and fasted for his nation, a stoic figure filled with wisdom and godliness that was the father of our nation.
[00:37:42]  And there's so many things that happened, the founding fathers did, inspired by biblical Christianity, that we just totally and completely take for granted, not the least of which should be, why did we all of a sudden decide to abolish slavery?
[00:37:56]  Slavery was the norm.
[00:37:57]  It was everywhere.
[00:37:59]  Nine out of 13 colonies by the time the Constitution was ratified in 1787 abolished slavery.
[00:38:05]  Thomas Jefferson wrote extensively in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, admonishing King George for bringing the slave trade to America.
[00:38:12]  Benjamin Franklin, who was called a deist by some people, he might have had a conversion to Christianity at the end of his life.
[00:38:18]  It's not proven, but his best friend was Whitfield, who was a pastor, so it makes you think.
[00:38:22]  He chaired the first anti-slavery convention in the world in Philadelphia in the year of 1775.
[00:38:28]  The question should not be, why was there slavery?
[00:38:30]  And we should hate them for it.
[00:38:32]  It should be, why did we actually start the process to get rid of it?
[00:38:35]  You know, there's more slaves today in the world than any other time in human history.
[00:38:39]  The idea of human beings owning human beings, tragically, unfortunately, was the norm before America.
[00:38:45]  And guess what?
[00:38:46]  It was also the British force, which was literally led by William Wilberforce, a Christian leader who abolished the British slave trade, actually before us technically, and cut in line while we were simultaneously struggling with the exact same thing.
[00:39:00]  And so, look, there's a multitude of examples.
[00:39:03]  But here's something, and this is why you ought to be careful sending your kids to government schools.
[00:39:07]  If you see something historically noteworthy, a Christian was probably behind that.
[00:39:13]  Probably.
[00:39:14]  Or something that was inspired by the Judeo-Christian moral construct.
[00:39:18]  Very rarely does a secular atheist do something that is worthy of a triumph or a celebration.
[00:39:26]  Very rarely.
[00:39:29]  Well, Charlie, I wish you had conviction about this stuff.
[00:39:35]  This is my watered-down speech, just so we're all clear, okay?
[00:39:38]  This is my church speech.
[00:39:39]  You guys should come to a college campus and you'll have a lot of fun.
[00:39:42]  And by the way, the message never changes.
[00:39:43]  It's just a matter of intonation.
[00:39:46]  Let's put it that way.
[00:39:47]  Tyndale's last words were prayer that God would open the king of England's eyes.
[00:39:52]  There you go.
[00:39:52]  And so here he is.
[00:39:54]  And he did.
[00:39:54]  The King James Bible ended up being published like 20 years later.
[00:39:57]  King James.
[00:39:58]  Yeah, in 1613 or something.
[00:39:59]  Exactly.
[00:40:00]  That's what I was forgetting.
[00:40:01]  Thank you.
[00:40:02]  So I have a question here from a young girl in our audience.
[00:40:08]  So, but I think you've been doing it, but just in general, you're known for giving people answers.
[00:40:14]  You're known for taking objections.
[00:40:17]  And so this question is kind of a general one, but how do you give biblical, conservative answers to those you disagree with?
[00:40:24]  Like, it's a broad question, but just in general.
[00:40:28]  I mean, look, I struggle with it at times, right?
[00:40:30]  You have to do it lovingly, but also full of grace and full of truth.
[00:40:34]  But look, let's learn from the best communicator ever, Jesus Christ.
[00:40:37]  He asked questions.
[00:40:39]  And so if you find someone who you disagree with or you find someone that doesn't share your views, just ask questions.
[00:40:45]  Where do you get that from?
[00:40:46]  What's your basis for that?
[00:40:47]  What is good?
[00:40:49]  What is the definition of good?
[00:40:51]  Is it your opinion or is there a moral objective standard?
[00:40:53]  So all these things are helpful, right?
[00:40:55]  Instead of telling people something, ask questions.
[00:40:57]  Put them on a journey towards learning.
[00:40:59]  That's at least my experience the best way to do that.
[00:41:02]  Now, I'm sure you'll see a multitude of YouTube videos of someone that isn't that sweet in asking a question, which is if someone on a college campus comes and they're just full of venom and hatred, we have fun.
[00:41:15]  Let's just put it that way, okay?
[00:41:17]  And again, it's all about if they're insulting you and all this, then okay, then we're going to have a little bit of a back and forth and let the best ideas and the better communicator win.
[00:41:29]  So it's all about who you're dealing with.
[00:41:31]  And I really believe this, and I believe you have to be discerning, but it's whether or not you're dealing with somebody in good faith, too, right?
[00:41:37]  If somebody is just trying to be a troll and if they're just trying to waste your time, I'm a big believer in just walking away.
[00:41:43]  I am.
[00:41:44]  And I know some people might disagree with that, but if someone is just trying to irritate you and not really trying to learn, then just say, forget it.
[00:41:53]  It's not worth your time.
[00:41:55]  Pray that the Lord moves their heart or moves them towards conviction.
[00:41:58]  But if they're just trying to make a mockery after a couple minutes, you see that, your time is much more valuable.
[00:42:03]  There's a lot of people that need your serious focus than just people that are there trying to waste your time.
[00:42:07]  But, Charlie, we're supposed to be so winsome, though, aren't we?
[00:42:14]  100% of the time.
[00:42:17]  Again, I always ask, what Bible are they reading, right?
[00:42:20]  You know, in the book of Luke, you know, somebody said to me the other day, they said, Charlie, Jesus came here to unify.
[00:42:27]  And I said, so what's your verse for that?
[00:42:31]  And they said, oh, it's just obvious.
[00:42:32]  I said, no, no, like, show me, what's the verse?
[00:42:34]  Chapter and verse.
[00:42:35]  Yeah, chapter and verse.
[00:42:36]  No, that sounds good, right?
[00:42:37]  That's very Eastern, like Buddhist.
[00:42:39]  Yeah, unifying.
[00:42:40]  Where does it say that?
[00:42:41]  He came to unify the body of Christ.
[00:42:43]  That's true.
[00:42:44]  Unify the church.
[00:42:45]  Where does it say he came to unify the world?
[00:42:48]  Jesus said explicitly, I did not come here to bring unity, but division.
[00:42:54]  I will turn siblings against one another, father against son, mother against daughter.
[00:42:59]  It's a very harsh teaching, very hard for some people, but it's right there.
[00:43:04]  It's biblical.
[00:43:05]  So, again, unity in the body of Christ.
[00:43:08]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:43:10]  Unity in the world?
[00:43:11]  No.
[00:43:12]  Truth by definition divides.
[00:43:15]  It has to.
[00:43:17]  And when we understand the spiritual dimension, when you're dealing with a usurper, a deceiver, which is a very real spiritual being of Satan, which again, some churches decide not to talk about Satan ever, right?
[00:43:31]  It's always like this one-sided equation as if there's not, it's not, we're not dealing with these very demonic spiritual dimensions that are always trying to bring us down.
[00:43:41]  Then we have to understand that you say something true, you will all of a sudden receive backlash and you'll receive spiritual opposition from the deceiver who hates truth itself, which is Jesus.
[00:43:51]  Jesus is truth.
[00:43:52]  He didn't just say true things, he was truth himself.
[00:43:55]  And so, yeah, look, to answer your question, be winsome all the time.
[00:43:59]  Jesus went into the holy temple and threw around tables because they were changing money.
[00:44:08]  There's a time for truth and there's a time for grace.
[00:44:12]  You must be 100% of those, hopefully all the time.
[00:44:15]  I never think you should be unfair.
[00:44:16]  I never think you should be unruly or any of those things.
[00:44:18]  But this idea that we must be passive when evil is happening in front of you is not biblical and it's not Christ-like.
[00:44:26]  But, Charlie, seriously, if the world likes us and thinks that we're great, then they're going to like Jesus, right?
[00:44:38]  No.
[00:44:40]  No.
[00:44:41]  If the world likes you, you got a problem.
[00:44:43]  And I mean, just read James 1.
[00:44:45]  It is a guarantee that you're going to be persecuted.
[00:44:48]  And you could see this.
[00:44:50]  Every pastor that has whacked theology, those are the ones that get on Oprah and they're the ones that get all of it, right?
[00:44:58]  Oh, you know, I'm not saying that there's one way to God.
[00:45:00]  There's multiple ways to God.
[00:45:02]  Book deal, Barnes and Noble, all this stuff.
[00:45:05]  So strong theology will give you condemnation from the world.
[00:45:09]  Now, this is important.
[00:45:10]  You shouldn't try to seek condemnation to be just like unruly and unpleasant.
[00:45:15]  But when it comes your way, inevitably, don't act shocked, okay?
[00:45:19]  That's what I always get.
[00:45:20]  People say, I'm just, I'm so nice.
[00:45:22]  I'm just so, I'm going to try to be so good, and I receive nothing but backlash and all this.
[00:45:27]  Let me just be very clear, okay?
[00:45:28]  If you say there's two genders and if you believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and you believe that life begins at conception, you're not going to have a lot of friends in the media, in the culture, or in all of that, okay?
[00:45:38]  It's impossible.
[00:45:40]  Yeah, even in family.
[00:45:42]  Yeah, exactly right.
[00:45:42]  It's okay.
[00:45:43]  That's fine.
[00:45:44]  But you have friends here in the family of Christ, which, you know, is honestly eternally much more important.
[00:45:50]  So, look, this is an equation that I hear where people say, yes, if they like us, then they're going to go bring themselves to Jesus.
[00:45:57]  So let's actually test this out, right?
[00:46:00]  So we've had a multi-decade test of watered-down Christianity.
[00:46:03]  For multi-decades, we were told, I'm going to be loved by the culture.
[00:46:07]  I'm going to go do the movies.
[00:46:09]  I'm going to go minister to NBA players.
[00:46:11]  I'm going to go dress like a gangbanger or like whatever, right?
[00:46:15]  And everyone's going to love me and therefore they'll love Jesus.
[00:46:18]  Is America less Christian or more Christian now?
[00:46:20]  Less.
[00:46:20]  Far less.
[00:46:21]  Are young people more Christian or less Christian?
[00:46:24]  Less.
[00:46:25]  Are young people demanding more truth right now?
[00:46:28]  Or are they wanting to actually, young people are going more towards, like, just give me the truth.
[00:46:32]  We have the most suicidal, alcohol-addicted, drug-addicted, miserable, anxious generation in history.
[00:46:38]  And the prevailing genre of Christianity is the watered-down form of Christianity.
[00:46:43]  So we've run the experiment, and it has shown that it actually has created America to be less Christian.
[00:46:49]  Here's the thing: the world will never actually love Jesus because it's at odds with what the world actually is.
[00:46:56]  Because you have to understand who runs the world.
[00:46:59]  The prince of this world is Satan.
[00:47:01]  God called, God, I'm sorry, Satan.
[00:47:04]  Paul called Satan the God of this world.
[00:47:07]  Jesus called him the prince of this world.
[00:47:09]  So by definition, this principality that we are in is currently being governed by the evil one.
[00:47:18]  So if that principality starts to give you approval and you're like, yeah, and kind of, I'm going to do this kind of bait and switch, and that's going to get them to give their life to the Lord and all this.
[00:47:27]  Like, okay, if you water down everything and they become a member of your church and then one day they open up the book of Deuteronomy and they have a question like, well, I didn't know you guys have in your book that, you know, that homosexuality is wrong.
[00:47:41]  Well, then you have to do what Andy Stanley does, right?
[00:47:43]  Who's, you know, calls himself a pastor.
[00:47:45]  Sorry if I'm going to get you in trouble here.
[00:47:47]  I apologize, but I have to do this.
[00:47:48]  He calls himself a pastor in Georgia.
[00:47:51]  And, you know, he says that, quote, the Christianity is not just about the accuracy of the Bible.
[00:48:01]  It's about the testimony of just Jesus of Nazarene.
[00:48:05]  He says we should de-emphasize the Old Testament and just focus on the four, you know, the four gospels.
[00:48:12]  This is Andy Stanley, which I always ask the question: why did Jesus quote the Old Testament so much?

=== Challenging the Greatest Generation (13:32) ===

[00:48:18]  How are you supposed to understand any of that?
[00:48:20]  So long-form answer of way to say that that's complete nonsense.
[00:48:24]  Don't try to invite the criticism, but when it comes, don't be shocked, surprise, and embrace it.
[00:48:32]  So can you paint a picture now of the national, just the state that we're in right now?
[00:48:38]  You did that.
[00:48:40]  Yeah.
[00:48:40]  Look, we're in a mess.
[00:48:41]  Okay.
[00:48:41]  I mean, there's no doubt.
[00:48:44]  We're in a total mess.
[00:48:46]  And I mean, how much time you got?
[00:48:48]  What topic, right?
[00:48:49]  You want to talk about the border?
[00:48:51]  You want to talk about CRT?
[00:48:52]  You want to talk about gender confusion.
[00:48:55]  What I'm doing is I'm getting ready for the next question is what should, how should Christians respond to what is going on?
[00:49:02]  Sure.
[00:49:03]  Okay.
[00:49:03]  So let me try to narrow the mess, which I think it's actually more helpful this way.
[00:49:11]  We have a case of Alzheimer's right now as a nation.
[00:49:14]  And anyone who's ever dealt with someone with Alzheimer's, one of the hardest things to see.
[00:49:19]  It is a very, very, very terrible thing.
[00:49:23]  And we have that as a country.
[00:49:24]  We don't know who we are, where we came from.
[00:49:26]  We don't know our history.
[00:49:27]  We don't know our name.
[00:49:28]  We don't know our founding principles.
[00:49:31]  And we're in complete and total societal, civilizational, moral, religious, and spiritual confusion.
[00:49:38]  That's where we are right now.
[00:49:40]  And so I believe that impacts all the other issues.
[00:49:43]  So if you can't tell me what America is, why we are here, then how on earth are we going to go about fixing it?
[00:49:50]  So that's the most important thing.
[00:49:52]  So what exactly is America?
[00:49:54]  America is an experiment in self-government, spired by the Bible, thanks to courageous Christians, that believes that one person, one party, one group of people should not be able to have the power over others without their consent.
[00:50:08]  You believe power should be separated.
[00:50:09]  You believe in independent judiciary.
[00:50:11]  You believe in checks and balances.
[00:50:13]  You believe in private property rights, all of which are biblical values.
[00:50:16]  But more than all of that, there's a spirit, there's an Americana spirit that makes us, in my personal opinion, different, which is Americans have always stepped up to a challenge when there's one in front of us.
[00:50:26]  Always.
[00:50:26]  Is that we don't complain when there's problems.
[00:50:28]  We have the French for that, right?
[00:50:33]  We don't just retreat to our villas.
[00:50:35]  That's what the Italians are for.
[00:50:38]  We don't retreat.
[00:50:39]  That's the French again.
[00:50:43]  Instead, no, Americans step up to the challenge.
[00:50:46]  And there's an uncomfortable truth behind this at times.
[00:50:50]  And this is why I believe the Bible, you know, you need to read the parts about warfare, because at times, things can get a little messy to defend good.
[00:50:58]  Sometimes you got to all of a sudden kind of get into the game a little bit.
[00:51:03]  Remember, Paul used the imagery of the armor of God for a reason, okay?
[00:51:07]  He didn't use the sewing kit of God.
[00:51:11]  But you got to get into combat and be willing to do something about it, which is this: which is all of us are able to go home tonight and still enjoy the last gasp of a free and civil society because of a couple generations ago, the greatest generation that was willing to step up and face evil and exterminate it from the planet.
[00:51:31]  And to be consistent, if a Christian pastor says we shouldn't get involved in politics, we shouldn't care about it, then what they are doing, and you should challenge them on this, is they're saying the greatest generation was wrong to go away to go to war in the Asian and the European theater.
[00:51:46]  That's what they're saying, because that was a political move.
[00:51:50]  When they stormed Normandy Beach, that's a moral and political move, saying that's evil, and we're going to sacrifice and we're going to do what's necessary to stop it.
[00:51:59]  Pastors that say don't get involved in politics are basically saying the greatest generation was wrong.
[00:52:04]  That's what they're saying.
[00:52:06]  And they don't want to say it out loud.
[00:52:07]  And it's kind of the final complete.
[00:52:09]  You had a second part of the question you wanted to ask?
[00:52:12]  Well, no, I want to build off of the Alzheimer's thing because I think it's definitely Alzheimer's, but there's also a sense of fear of losing my comfort.
[00:52:22]  Oh, yeah.
[00:52:24]  So I'm comfortable in my Alzheimer's.
[00:52:26]  I'm comfortable in my ignorance.
[00:52:28]  And if I actually did start to try to say something, it's like you said earlier, people are going to get mad at me.
[00:52:35]  People are going to leave the church.
[00:52:37]  People are going to, family members will disown me, all of these things.
[00:52:41]  And so at that point, the question becomes one of comfort or courage.
[00:52:46]  Yes.
[00:52:46]  Right?
[00:52:48]  So we should have comfort in Christ, but not comfort in the world.
[00:52:52]  It's really interesting you pinpoint that word comfort.
[00:52:55]  It's been actually a fascination of mine the last couple of months.
[00:52:58]  There's a secular book that's written that has biblical truth all throughout it called Comfort Crisis.
[00:53:03]  It's a phenomenal book for any young person you have right now that might be dealing with depression or anxiety.
[00:53:07]  It's not a biblical book, but all throughout it has biblical truth.
[00:53:10]  And the argument that he makes, he makes it from a Darwinian point of view, but you could easily change it to that of a creation point of view, which I believe, which is he thinks we evolved to be it.
[00:53:19]  But I believe that God created us to not be comfortable.
[00:53:24]  That actually comfort kills us.
[00:53:26]  That it's bad for the soul, that it's bad for our body, it's bad for our mind.
[00:53:31]  That waking up every single day and having three meals you don't have to think about in your air-conditioned car, right, not having to work for any form of pleasure, I actually think it's deteriorating our mind, body, and soul together.
[00:53:44]  And so there's kind of parlay that theory and that thesis of which Michael Easter writes in the book Comfort Crisis to what you say, which is, is that also the same thing as being comfortable in relationships and just comfortable not to offend?
[00:53:58]  The answer is absolutely yes.
[00:54:00]  I actually think the most miserable people are people that prioritize comfort over everything else.
[00:54:06]  I think it actually tortures you.
[00:54:09]  The freest people I know, the happiest people I know, the people that are closest to the Lord, that are most joyful, are the people that are always doing something adventurous and risky and pushing forward for the kingdom of God.
[00:54:21]  I mean, you read Acts.
[00:54:23]  I mean, Paul was on like a scenic missionary.
[00:54:26]  The guy was all, it wasn't like it is today where you could just fly around.
[00:54:30]  He was in Athens.
[00:54:31]  He was in Thessalonica.
[00:54:32]  He was in Corinth.
[00:54:33]  I mean, this guy was doing things.
[00:54:35]  You think he was comfortable?
[00:54:38]  No, I mean, the gospel of Jesus Christ, as we know it today, was made possible by people that were constantly not caring about comfort but caring about courage.
[00:54:47]  I think that's a really insightful point that you focus on.
[00:54:50]  But boy, this is the great irony and the paradox of everything I just said about the greatest generation, though, right?
[00:54:56]  They were such a great generation that they created a civilization that allows us to be comfort without effort.
[00:55:02]  Isn't that the great paradox?
[00:55:03]  They were so great, they're almost too great that we haven't had to really do anything of meaning that is above and beyond us for the last 60 or 70 years.
[00:55:12]  I'm not saying you've done nothing.
[00:55:14]  People have served in wars.
[00:55:15]  Thank you for your service, police officer, all this.
[00:55:16]  But let's be honest, what they did in a short period of time was civilizationally so beyond heroic versus anything that's happened in the last 70 years.
[00:55:24]  It was so beyond, it was so unbelievable that we've kind of been able to be at homeostasis for the last 70 years.
[00:55:30]  And now we have to ask the question: does that mean I might have to miss Sunday night football?
[00:55:37]  And you're right.
[00:55:38]  That does worry people.
[00:55:40]  The retreat from comfort is something that makes people very worried.
[00:55:45]  So I'm imagining somebody right now that would say, okay, this is so uncomfortable because this is Christian nationalism.
[00:55:53]  That's what this is.
[00:55:54]  And that's wrong.
[00:55:55]  And so this is all wrong.
[00:55:57]  How would you, this is the big moniker.
[00:56:00]  This is the slander that's being labeled on all Christians who would say anything like, I don't know, the Bible and the Declaration.
[00:56:09]  There's a ton of it in there.
[00:56:11]  Yeah, they use this slander intentionally because they, look, the left is very smart.
[00:56:16]  And now I am going to get a little political in the last 30 minutes.
[00:56:19]  The left, the secularists, the progressives, whatever you want to call them, they're very smart in one way.
[00:56:24]  They could do math.
[00:56:24]  I know that it's kind of hard to hear this at times, but they know this.
[00:56:30]  The greatest untapped political asset that has yet to be mobilized is the American church.
[00:56:34]  And they are terrified that if the American church did exactly what it did in the 1980s with Falwell and others, did what it did with Billy Graham, they know that they'll be displaced from political power at every single level of government very quickly.
[00:56:48]  They know that.
[00:56:49]  They've done the numbers.
[00:56:50]  There's 85 million evangelical Christians in America.
[00:56:55]  Only half of them are registered to vote.
[00:56:57]  And only half of them vote in elections.
[00:57:00]  So it's about 25 to 30 million.
[00:57:02]  That's a lot of people, right?
[00:57:04]  But they've done the math.
[00:57:06]  And all of a sudden they're like, Christian nationalism is the worst thing ever.
[00:57:08]  What they're trying to say is they're trying to stop what they see is the last gasp of the guardians of Western civilization, the very group of people that actually founded the country, caring so much to actually go and vote and mobilize and do things.
[00:57:21]  So they're trying to preempt it.
[00:57:22]  I don't even know how to properly respond to the Christian nationalist argument because they're trying to say it in a pejorative way.
[00:57:28]  But if I take those two words independently, those are two very important things that I totally support.
[00:57:33]  Christian.
[00:57:34]  Okay, I'm a Christian.
[00:57:35]  I'm a Bible-believing Christian that believes in the inerrancy of scripture.
[00:57:37]  I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins and rose from the dead, and he's on his throne.
[00:57:42]  Yeah, I'm a Christian.
[00:57:44]  Okay, a nationalist.
[00:57:45]  Do I love America?
[00:57:46]  Of course I do.
[00:57:48]  And you actually, you didn't call me a nationalist Christian.
[00:57:50]  You call me a Christian nationalist of the order's right.
[00:57:54]  And so, but again, people are like, I don't like the word nationalist.
[00:57:58]  Okay, it's been so completely smeared by everyone in the corporate media and all this.
[00:58:02]  What does it really mean?
[00:58:03]  It means that you love your nation and you want the priorities of your fellow citizens to be put above that of international interests and crony self-dealing, and you believe that there's a social contract in place to look after your nation.
[00:58:17]  That's what a nationalist is.
[00:58:19]  Okay, how is that different than Jeremiah 29, 7?
[00:58:22]  Demand the welfare of the nation that you are in because your welfare is tied to your nation's welfare.
[00:58:27]  Oh, my welfare tied to nation's welfare, demand it, Lord speaking, Jeremiah 29, 7.
[00:58:31]  Okay, that's pretty simple.
[00:58:32]  So if you get the order right, that's the way.
[00:58:34]  But what they're really saying is, this is the scary group of Christians that are going to put their morality into government.
[00:58:40]  Wait a second, our morality, wait, you mean the, like, let's be very clear: the morality that we put into government is this: that nine-year-olds shouldn't be able to get gender mutilation surgery.
[00:58:51]  The morality that we'll put into government is pornographic curriculum should not be in public schools, that the unborn need to be protected.
[00:58:59]  If that's all of a sudden legislating morality, then buckle up, I suppose, because I will do that enthusiastically.
[00:59:08]  And if you think that the Bible is, you know, the Bible is the source of that, but it's all kind of a very big fear and scaremongering campaign.
[00:59:14]  I'm not phased by it.
[00:59:16]  I know, I see what's happening here.
[00:59:18]  And I'll just kind of talk a little more politically for a second, and this might turn some people off, but that's okay.
[00:59:23]  Which is the church is the only institution the American left has not completely taken over.
[00:59:30]  Corporations, academia, government, FBI, and all of this.
[00:59:35]  And it's the church built this country.
[00:59:38]  The church has saved this country at every single corner in turn.
[00:59:41]  Billy Graham, who I consider to be the great evangelist of the last 100 years, gave a sermon where he said socialism, collectivism, and communism is Satan's religion.
[00:59:51]  If Billy Graham is willing to say that, I think every other American pastor should be willing to say that right now.
[00:59:56]  If the church decides to wake up and rise up, the country could be realigned politically in a matter of days.
[01:00:04]  So what's keeping that from happening right now?
[01:00:06]  Yeah, those three buckets, right?
[01:00:08]  So most are cowardly business model type stuff, right?
[01:00:11]  Because I think it's interesting, right?
[01:00:13]  So one of my hearts for American Christianity is to actually make churches smaller.
[01:00:19]  Now, I know this is a provocative thing, right?
[01:00:21]  And I'm not trying, and you might disagree with this and all that.
[01:00:24]  I think that, you know, churches that are 500 to 1,000 people is like that perfect sweet spot.
[01:00:30]  I really do.
[01:00:31]  You guys can feel the disagree because I think massive, massive, massive churches, it can work, right?
[01:00:37]  You know, I go to Dream City Church.
[01:00:38]  They do a phenomenal job, you know, up in the North Valley and all that.
[01:00:42]  But largely, the big business model that is massive corporate Christianity, there's a couple others in the valley that I won't mention.
[01:00:50]  The incentive structure is to not care about truth.
[01:00:54]  It's to care about putting people in seats and getting tithes and offerings and just sustaining your own size.
[01:01:01]  So I am generalizing because there's exceptions to all rules, right?
[01:01:04]  I mean, John MacArthur's church is big and Jensen Franklin's church is big.
[01:01:08]  But large in part, you end up getting more Andy Stanley's and Rick Warren's when you start to corporatize your Christianity.
[01:01:15]  It's a general rule.
[01:01:17]  So I think just as a practice of that, and then also it's, and I know this has been a recurring theme, but it's, it's been, there has not been up until COVID, up until the lockdowns, all of these things that happened, the church has not necessarily felt threatened.
[01:01:30]  So most pastors felt like they could just kind of skate by.
[01:01:34]  And not to mention, how about CRT in the church and postmodernism and all these things?
[01:01:39]  The church is now under direct attack.
[01:01:42]  And so I think it is a time where the church is and can wake up from it, but it's why is it not happening?

=== Defining Biblical Citizenship (03:48) ===

[01:01:51]  Because it's comfortable to do nothing.
[01:01:54]  It is.
[01:01:54]  And it is going to be our comfort that kills us if we don't.
[01:02:00]  That's so true.
[01:02:01]  That is exactly right.
[01:02:02]  So is there a connection between Christianity and citizenship in the Republic?
[01:02:08]  Is there, like, how do those two things go together?
[01:02:11]  Or do those two things go together?
[01:02:12]  And if so, how?
[01:02:14]  Yeah, that's a fabulous question.
[01:02:15]  So we at TPUSA Faith, we put on a forum called Biblical Citizenship.
[01:02:19]  I encourage you guys to check it out.
[01:02:22]  We'd love to partner with you guys, maybe do a couple sessions here on weeknights where it talks about what is biblical citizenship.
[01:02:28]  Does it talk about it at all in the Bible?
[01:02:30]  the need to actually care about your nation, the need to be a citizen.
[01:02:35]  So I said this earlier, but let me ask you, kind of, let me just kind of reiterate this.
[01:02:39]  Citizen comes from a Greek word that means co-owner or co-ruler.
[01:02:44]  Most people on the planet today are not citizens.
[01:02:47]  They're subjects, serfs, or slaves.
[01:02:49]  A citizen has rights.
[01:02:51]  So the question should be, who gives rights?
[01:02:54]  Well, God gives rights.
[01:02:55]  A government does not give rights.
[01:02:57]  This is one of the most amazing just kind of leaps forward of the American Revolution that Thomas Jefferson hit perfectly, which is where do rights come from?
[01:03:06]  He very well could have described it as an abstraction in the Declaration of Independence, but he said the laws of nature and nature's God.
[01:03:16]  That's a very, very big deal.
[01:03:18]  He's saying that your right to speech, your right to property, you as an individual are granted from God itself.
[01:03:25]  It's a vertical relationship.
[01:03:27]  And that is stemmed, of course, from a philosophical and religious and theological belief from the Protestant Reformation that you don't have to go through conduits, that I can deal directly with God.
[01:03:37]  You kind of see the similarities and the synergies where all those things start to percolate.
[01:03:42]  But citizenship requires being aware of the nation that you are in.
[01:03:46]  It requires you to be informed.
[01:03:49]  It requires you to care and to be invested and, of course, vote and all those different things.
[01:03:54]  And it requires you, the best way I could say it, being a citizen, a good citizen, is the equivalent of being a good steward, is what it is.
[01:04:03]  And it also is being invested in the passing down of values, traditions, and customs to the next generation.
[01:04:11]  And so biblical citizenship, the idea of biblical citizenship that you could wrestle with is what does God want for me when it comes to the citizenship context and from this kind of context here.
[01:04:22]  And we answer all that questions.
[01:04:24]  It's a longer kind of speech to give.
[01:04:26]  But the long and short of it is God hates tyranny.
[01:04:30]  It's a very simple truth, okay?
[01:04:32]  He doesn't want you to live in a tyranny of eternal sin in hell.
[01:04:35]  That's not his heart for his people.
[01:04:37]  He doesn't want people here on earth to live under tyranny.
[01:04:40]  He rescued God's chosen people from tyranny in Egypt, right?
[01:04:44]  Liberty, God's idea, not man's idea.
[01:04:46]  So what is tyranny?
[01:04:47]  The tyranny is the domination of a people irrationally without their consent of a smaller group of people.
[01:04:54]  Put simply, more plainly, it's the few ruling the many, not the many ruling the few.
[01:05:00]  The idea of the many ruling the few is a biblical concept.
[01:05:05]  Why?
[01:05:05]  It means that every single person matters.
[01:05:08]  Why?
[01:05:09]  Because you're all image bearers.
[01:05:12]  That's the leap forward.
[01:05:14]  Before Christianity, you were not an image-bearer.
[01:05:17]  You were a specimen that could be owned, bought, sold, transported, taken advantage of.
[01:05:23]  But if you're made in the image of God with dignity and worth, if you are not just a mind and a body, but also a soul, then that necessitates a different legal construct.
[01:05:33]  That means that you have the rights of due process, to own property, to protect yourself, and to speech.

=== The Great Reset Conspiracy (08:37) ===

[01:05:39]  You see how all those things all of a sudden come together?
[01:05:42]  But if you believe that you're just, and this is the secular humanist view right now, by the way, that kids are learning in schools, which again, if Christians don't weigh in on this, the secularists win these arguments, right?
[01:05:52]  If you don't believe there's a soul within you, if you're just a mind and a body, then why should you not be able to exterminate them?
[01:06:02]  Why not?
[01:06:03]  It's just get rid of them.
[01:06:04]  They're polluters.
[01:06:05]  They're making the environment dirty.
[01:06:07]  There's nothing special about them.
[01:06:08]  We can always create more if we need them, as if we're nothing more than ants.
[01:06:12]  But whoa, if you're an image bearer with a purpose and a plan and design by the sovereignty of God, that all of a sudden you have a retreat and you treat that being completely differently.
[01:06:23]  You remove Christianity.
[01:06:25]  There is no reason not to commit genocide.
[01:06:28]  Or let me say that again.
[01:06:29]  If you commit, if you remove Judaism and Christianity, geo-Christian values, there's no reason not to do it.
[01:06:35]  And you might say, what about Hinduism and Buddhism and all of this?
[01:06:38]  I'm not getting into that, okay?
[01:06:40]  Let's just be very realistic with what here today.
[01:06:43]  If there is no belief in God, then right and wrong is merely an opinion.
[01:06:49]  So, on that note, I'm going to upload me no.
[01:06:53]  On that, yeah.
[01:06:54]  No, let's go from the firing pan into the fire now.
[01:06:57]  Oh, okay.
[01:06:57]  Because there is a well, this would be considered a conspiracy, right?
[01:07:03]  But there's a global movement called the Great Reset, which is pushing this, what you just said, everywhere, all over the world.
[01:07:12]  It's fast-moving, it is being dominated, it's dominating governments all over the world right now.
[01:07:19]  People are rising up against it.
[01:07:21]  It doesn't matter.
[01:07:22]  It's still going.
[01:07:23]  And so, speak to that, because I know you're doing a conference next weekend on this subject.
[01:07:28]  This is not a conspiracy.
[01:07:30]  It's only conspiracy theory if it's false.
[01:07:33]  So, yeah, I mean, by the way, the term conspiracy theory is actually a CIA term that was introduced to the American Zeitgeist as a way to try to suppress ideas and questioning authority.
[01:07:45]  You should just take five minutes tonight and just study the origin of the term conspiracy theory.
[01:07:51]  It's very interesting.
[01:07:52]  Now, I will say, there's some wacky stuff out there that isn't true, okay?
[01:07:55]  Let me, I hear it all the time, but there's also things that I was told that were conspiracy theories that ended up being 100% true.
[01:08:02]  You might say, oh, Charlie, name one example.
[01:08:05]  Okay, how about Bill Clinton flying on an airplane with underage girls to a Caribbean island alongside a member of the royal family?
[01:08:14]  So that happened, okay?
[01:08:15]  And that used to be called a conspiracy theory.
[01:08:17]  Okay, so yes, kind of one thing on this.
[01:08:21]  Next Friday and Saturday, if you're at all interested and this topic intrigues you, we have a very short summit happening at the Arizona Grand Hotel all about the Great Reset.
[01:08:31]  So we do a lot of events at Turning Point USA.
[01:08:33]  We host our annual convention in December.
[01:08:35]  We have like 10,000 people come.
[01:08:36]  You should all come.
[01:08:37]  This is a different type of event.
[01:08:39]  This is educational.
[01:08:40]  It's not a rally.
[01:08:41]  We're going deep, very deep into the origins of the Great Reset and what you can do about it.
[01:08:46]  World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, who's that sinister-looking bond villain up there.
[01:08:54]  Again, if I was a globalist, I would not have a German run my operation.
[01:09:03]  A German who talks in a very deep, Germanic bond villain accent.
[01:09:09]  Up there's Bill Gates and Trudeau as well.
[01:09:11]  We believe there's a global game going on to destroy American sovereignty, to try to get in the way of our private property rights, to try and deteriorate the American currency.
[01:09:21]  And it's all about defeating the Great Reset.
[01:09:23]  What's hilarious is that they say the Great Reset is a conspiracy theory.
[01:09:27]  On the desk where I do my show every single day, and I have it just kind of referenced, is the book by Klaus Schwab.
[01:09:35]  It's a book called COVID-19, The Great Reset.
[01:09:39]  They published a book called.
[01:09:40]  It's actually their new strategy, which is brilliant.
[01:09:43]  It's called Hiding in Plain Sight, where they publish all the crazy things they're going to do.
[01:09:47]  And therefore, people don't pay attention because they would think that if it's really that bad, they wouldn't publish it, even though it's right in front of you.
[01:09:53]  And they say that they're going to try to turn you on the robots and all this crazy stuff.
[01:09:56]  You think I'm kidding?
[01:09:57]  It's part of it.
[01:09:58]  Transhumanism, you know, the mind manipulation.
[01:10:01]  It's all there.
[01:10:02]  And so I think that every Christian needs to get properly educated on this topic.
[01:10:06]  If you guys are interested, you guys go to tpusa.com.
[01:10:10]  We'll give you a discount.
[01:10:11]  If you guys can't afford the ticket, that's fine.
[01:10:13]  We have Steve Bannon coming.
[01:10:14]  We have James Lindsey coming.
[01:10:16]  We have Michael O'Fallon coming.
[01:10:18]  We have all sorts of great speakers coming.
[01:10:20]  You'll learn a lot.
[01:10:21]  It's next Friday and Saturday, and it'll be highly educational.
[01:10:25]  And if I could just kind of talk more broadly on that and less about the event, which is, look, the World Economic Forum, the Great Reset, they've come forward with some very specific promises and things that they think the world will look like by 2030.
[01:10:37]  You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
[01:10:39]  Western values will be brought to a breaking point.
[01:10:42]  America will no longer be the world's superpower.
[01:10:44]  Almost everything that is happening in our world today should be viewed through a lens of the World Economic Forum.
[01:10:49]  There's a bigger game happening than what's happening in Washington, D.C.
[01:10:53]  I think you'll find it actually encouraging and liberating to know what's happening, what they're doing, why they're doing it.
[01:10:59]  So you guys could check it out.
[01:11:01]  Happy to expand on that more.
[01:11:03]  No, that would be something that if you're able to do it, you really should go to that.
[01:11:08]  You know, we had James Lindsay and Michael O'Fallon here back in June.
[01:11:12]  If you weren't able to go to that, you should go to this.
[01:11:15]  If you were able to go to this, you know how helpful that was.
[01:11:19]  And so it is critical that you get educated on this.
[01:11:23]  Last more, two questions.
[01:11:25]  One question is: what will happen if Christians don't fight?
[01:11:30]  What if we don't stand against this?
[01:11:32]  What if we do just say, other people will take care of this?
[01:11:36]  I can sit this one out.
[01:11:37]  There's all kinds of controversies.
[01:11:39]  People like Charlie get us fired up about everything.
[01:11:42]  We can't be fired up about everything.
[01:11:43]  And so I'm just going to wait for the really big thing.
[01:11:46]  That's the fight I'll get in, but it's not this one.
[01:11:50]  Yeah, I mean, if we do nothing, there will be a body count that will make the 20th century look like child's play.
[01:12:01]  I just want that to sit over the room.
[01:12:06]  Now, why is that not just speculation?
[01:12:14]  Let's remember what we just lived through.
[01:12:16]  We just lived through one of the great manipulations of truth and perversions of reality in front of us.
[01:12:24]  I mean, look how our world has changed, and we largely allowed it to happen.
[01:12:29]  We have a generation of teenagers where the leading cause of death is them killing themselves.
[01:12:34]  We have a generation of young people that have speech impediments and development because we've thrown masks on them.
[01:12:41]  We've completely inappropriately thrown, you know, a vaccine on eight, nine, and ten-year-olds, not even knowing what the side effects could potentially be.
[01:12:50]  And so, I mean, that was just a trial run.
[01:12:53]  Charlie, it's a conspiracy.
[01:12:54]  They said it's a trial run.
[01:12:55]  Read the book.
[01:12:57]  They said this is phase one.
[01:12:58]  Just read it.
[01:12:59]  Go buy it yourself.
[01:13:00]  It's 20 bucks.
[01:13:00]  COVID-19, the great reset.
[01:13:03]  They talk about depopulation openly.
[01:13:05]  You know that, right?
[01:13:07]  Openly.
[01:13:08]  They say that we have two times as many people in our world.
[01:13:12]  We have seven and a half billion people.
[01:13:14]  Do the math.
[01:13:15]  They say that human beings, many of them say this, are parasites and polluters.
[01:13:20]  And that climate change and environmentalism, you know, climate change is the greatest thing.
[01:13:24]  Environmentalism needs to be held sacrosanct.
[01:13:27]  Just read their literature.
[01:13:28]  It's all publicly available.
[01:13:29]  And so, look, 100 million people were murdered in the 20th century.
[01:13:33]  I will repeat that.
[01:13:34]  If we do nothing, there will be a body count that makes that look like child's play.
[01:13:39]  And I don't know how they'll do it, but boy, they're willing to do anything.
[01:13:43]  Lock us down, lie to us, pervert us, try to pervert the truth, go after dissident doctors, shun us on social media, call us all conspiracy theorists, raid apartments and homes of political dissidents.
[01:13:58]  They're playing a ballgame here, right?
[01:14:01]  So, yeah, maybe, maybe you want to do nothing.
[01:14:06]  I'm not willing to face God and tell him I did nothing.

=== Balancing Masculine and Feminine Society (05:03) ===

[01:14:17]  So, any words specifically to the men in the audience?
[01:14:22]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:14:24]  First of all, we do believe in men and women around here, which is encouraging.
[01:14:29]  No, it's amazing.
[01:14:33]  I'll speak to young men first, young being like under 30.
[01:14:39]  But we could go under 40 or whatever you guys want, whatever sliding.
[01:14:43]  Young is a relative thing, right?
[01:14:47]  Yeah, it's actually when I say it, when I say that it's fun to be around people that believe in men and women, I speak at campuses all the time.
[01:14:53]  I spoke at Boulder in Berkeley back to back this last spring.
[01:14:57]  By the way, the same message that you hear tonight, just a lot more fun sparks, as you could imagine.
[01:15:02]  And yet they don't believe in men and women.
[01:15:04]  It's all a construct.
[01:15:06]  So just read Romans 1.
[01:15:07]  It's like word for word, if you know what I mean.
[01:15:11]  So yeah, to the men out there, for young men in particular, look, we have a men's summit that we do at TPUSA, and it's growing really well.
[01:15:19]  We have a women's summit as well.
[01:15:20]  So our women's summit we've been doing for seven years.
[01:15:22]  And it's hilarious, right?
[01:15:24]  We do this amazing summit, and like 2,500 young ladies come in their dresses.
[01:15:28]  It's all pink.
[01:15:29]  It's all great.
[01:15:30]  And, you know, if Kaylee Mackinen, it's all this.
[01:15:32]  Our men's summit is out in the woods.
[01:15:33]  You know, we fast them, no cell phones, learn how to pitch a tent.
[01:15:38]  You know, we like physically abuse them.
[01:15:41]  It's great.
[01:15:43]  And by the way, the men's summit and women's summit should be that different, okay?
[01:15:48]  It should be that way.
[01:15:50]  Because for more ways than one.
[01:15:53]  So look, for the men out there, young men in particular, chances are that if you're listening to this, you're probably addicted to something that you know that's not good for you.
[01:16:02]  Stop doing the thing you know that's not good for you.
[01:16:05]  And this is, we have the most addicted generation ever, whether it be addicted to pornography, addicted to drugs, addicted to video games.
[01:16:12]  We have the most depressed generation, I believe, for a lot of different reasons, but for a misdiagnosis of dopamine deficiency, a topic of which has become a fascination of mine over the last year and a half, something that I personally have seen the problems of the overstimulation of dopaminergic receptors in the brain.
[01:16:31]  This might be all nonsense to you.
[01:16:33]  However, I see at least 10 young men nodding their head because they know exactly what I mean.
[01:16:38]  We have participated in the largest open-air drug experiment in the history of the species to give every single young person a phone, which basically completely destroys their neurological impulses and creates an anxious, depressed generation.
[01:16:51]  And we just then throw psychiatric medication at them of Ritalin, benzodiazepines, Xanax, and all these things.
[01:16:57]  I am not doubting that some people need these interventions, but I think we are way over-medicated in our country.
[01:17:03]  And we just go directly to these medications and it causes all these other issues and all these other problems.
[01:17:07]  So for young men out there, I guess my message is really clear.
[01:17:10]  There's a beautiful life in front of you.
[01:17:11]  Stop doing the thing you know that's good for you.
[01:17:14]  I'm not trying to moralize or try to say anything.
[01:17:16]  But honestly, if you are a young man, in particular, a young white man in America, you hear a lot of depressing stuff all the time.
[01:17:24]  When I talk to the young men at Turning Point, they just say, Charlie, I can't get out of it.
[01:17:28]  Everywhere I turn, it's something that is just overwhelmingly negative and all this.
[01:17:32]  And so be a leader in your community and try to create a beautiful and meaningful life.
[01:17:37]  And then just men in general, we got to start to rise up and start to push back against the mass feminization of our country.
[01:17:45]  So there.
[01:17:48]  And so this is where I really start to make friends.
[01:17:55]  God created both man and woman, but also the masculine and the feminine.
[01:17:58]  A society needs both.
[01:18:00]  If a society gets too masculine, it gets too aggressive.
[01:18:04]  It gets too singular focused, right?
[01:18:07]  And it becomes too dictatorial and totalitarian.
[01:18:11]  Okay?
[01:18:12]  We know what happens when a society gets too masculine.
[01:18:15]  Think like Mussolini, okay?
[01:18:17]  But we never talk about what happens when a society gets too feminine.
[01:18:21]  What does that look like?
[01:18:22]  France.
[01:18:23]  Yeah, France, exactly.
[01:18:28]  Exactly.
[01:18:30]  Too emotional, right?
[01:18:33]  Can't make up their mind about anything.
[01:18:35]  Now, this is not an insult towards women.
[01:18:37]  It is true.
[01:18:38]  When a society gets too feminine, all of a sudden you go out of balance out of whack.
[01:18:43]  And you lose heroes to step up and do the dirty work that's necessary to get bad guys off the streets.
[01:18:51]  And to step up for people that can't defend themselves.
[01:18:54]  Now, I'm not saying that women can also do that.
[01:18:57]  But when I say that we became too feminine, most women were the ones that enthusiastically applauded because deep down, most women want to be led by godly men.
[01:19:06]  And they are sick and tired of being told all the time that just kind of become a boss babe or whatever the newest thing is.
[01:19:16]  It's a balance.
[01:19:17]  We both need each other.
[01:19:18]  It's necessary.
[01:19:19]  It's important.
[01:19:20]  It's beautiful.

=== Resources to Help Candidates (03:56) ===

[01:19:21]  It's good.
[01:19:22]  We are way out of whack.
[01:19:23]  We are way too feminine as a culture.
[01:19:25]  And we got to get back into that place of homeostasis or equilibrium.
[01:19:29]  So if somebody's sitting here now and going, man, I really want to learn about America, the founding principles, things like that.
[01:19:37]  Are there books?
[01:19:38]  Are there organizations?
[01:19:40]  Are there authors that you would recommend people here would be say, yeah, you need to read these people.
[01:19:44]  So yeah, just a couple action items, and I'll kind of connect this kind of more broadly for everybody.
[01:19:49]  So first of which is Turning Point USA.
[01:19:51]  If you're a high school or college student out there, get involved with our work if you're interested.
[01:19:55]  Our headquarters is right down the street.
[01:19:56]  It's tpusa.com.
[01:19:58]  We also have tpusa faith.
[01:20:00]  You guys can stay involved and engage with that.
[01:20:03]  The work we're doing, I think, is some of the most important work for everything that we've talked about tonight.
[01:20:08]  In addition, every morning from 9 to 12, I host three hours every single day.
[01:20:13]  Anyone listening to the podcast here?
[01:20:15]  Oh my goodness, it's awesome.
[01:20:16]  That really touches me.
[01:20:17]  So yeah, we do three hours every single day, also on Real America's Voice, and it's also on local radio, AM960, every single day.
[01:20:26]  One way that you guys can help me tonight, it's free of charge.
[01:20:30]  We're constantly under social media censorship and under big attacks.
[01:20:34]  If you guys would consider subscribing to our podcast, every single phone has a podcast app.
[01:20:39]  It really does help.
[01:20:40]  You open it up, you type in Charlie Kirk Show, it's free of charge.
[01:20:44]  We're constantly under censorship threats.
[01:20:46]  So when people go independently to subscribe, it helps a lot.
[01:20:49]  I think we have a QR code for that, if I'm not mistaken.
[01:20:52]  If you don't know how to subscribe to a podcast, I saw a seven-year-old running around here somewhere that would be more than happy to help you with that.
[01:21:00]  That is the QR code.
[01:21:02]  If you guys are interested or able, it does help us.
[01:21:05]  We do three podcasts a day, always from a biblical perspective, giving you the news of the day, hard-hitting, unapologetic.
[01:21:13]  I think we have some great guests with that.
[01:21:15]  In addition, I also want to make sure you're all aware of a library of resources of an organization that we have partnered with, which I consider to be the best college in America, Hillsdale College.
[01:21:27]  Hillsdale is spectacular.
[01:21:29]  We have a partnership with them that is all free, zero, no money at all.
[01:21:33]  It's charlie4hillsdale.com.
[01:21:36]  It's extremely easy to remember, and you will find a library of tailored online courses just for you: Constitution 101, courses about Winston Churchill, all about American history, courses about the book of Genesis, courses about David, courses about Aristotle, courses about almost every topic you could imagine.
[01:21:56]  There's 32 of them and growing.
[01:21:58]  That's charlie4hillsdale.com, free of charge.
[01:22:01]  And maybe you're a homeschooler, maybe you're not.
[01:22:03]  It's a great content just to flip on the radio.
[01:22:06]  Maybe you have a 20-minute drive.
[01:22:08]  A lot better than just listening to music.
[01:22:10]  You could learn something.
[01:22:10]  You could do it.
[01:22:11]  That's CharlieForhillsdale.com.
[01:22:12]  But let me just kind of finish with one greater call to action than all those little particular things, which is my heart for coming tonight was really just to try to convict you, to have all of us continue to change our posture, change our posture from a passive to an active.
[01:22:28]  Now, I'm not going to give you a long grocery list of things to do.
[01:22:32]  Instead, if you pray and fast for your nation, if you ask God, hey, use me as an instrument right now in this time, he will answer your prayer.
[01:22:41]  It might be helping out a certain candidate.
[01:22:43]  It might be knocking on doors.
[01:22:44]  I don't know what it might be.
[01:22:45]  But you need to open your heart to be willing to be used and to contribute just a little bit of your time and your energy and your resources.
[01:22:54]  Remember, the most important thing is proclaiming the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ.
[01:22:58]  The second most important thing is to make sure we can do the first thing.
[01:23:01]  And if we don't do the first thing, we are all going to be sharing our theological differences on eschatology from prison.
[01:23:09]  We need to narrow in and unify the body of Christ and say this moment is about liberty and, of course, most important, the gospel of Jesus Christ.

=== Unifying for Liberty and Gospel (01:04) ===

[01:23:17]  But there is a multi-dimensional pincer movement happening right now against the church, against biblical values, against Western civilization.
[01:23:24]  And only the American church, only you, is what stands between it.
[01:23:29]  That's it.
[01:23:29]  Everything else has been vacated.
[01:23:31]  Every other secular institution has been captured.
[01:23:34]  It is the forces we've talked about and the church.
[01:23:38]  And it has yet to be written what will happen.
[01:23:42]  But if all of us rise up and commit ourselves to this action, I believe that we're going to see results like we've never seen before.
[01:23:48]  And I believe that will be us being obedient to God and to his will in this critical, important time.
[01:23:55]  Amen.
[01:23:55]  Thank you, Charlie.
[01:23:58]  God bless you guys.
[01:23:59]  Thank you so much.
[01:24:06]  Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
[01:24:07]  Email me your thoughts.
[01:24:08]  It's always freedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with TurningPointUSA Today at tpusa.com.
[01:24:13]  Thanks so much for listening.
[01:24:14]  God bless.
[01:24:18]  For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk dot com.