The Demons in American Life: A Panel Discussion with Eric Metaxas and James Lindsay LIVE from AmericaFest 2022
Thousands of pastors saw the danger of Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany, but failed to take action until it is too late. Christian author Eric Metaxas says we face a similar threat today, and Christian leaders are making the same mistakes. He joins Charlie and anti-woke lecturer James Lindsay live on stage at AmericaFest for a panel discussion on the demons haunting American life, and how just a few thousand people will make the difference in whether these demonic forces will triumph or be vanquished.Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Defining Wokeism with Charlie Kirk00:01:38
Hey, everybody.
Today in the Charlie Kirk Show, Eric Metaxas, a Christian, and James Lindsay, an agnostic, on stage with me talking about wokeism and the need for the church to rise up live from Turning Point USA's America Fest.
I encourage you to get involved with Turning Point USA today at tpusa.com.
That is tpusa.com.
Start a high school chapter or a college chapter today at tpusa.com.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
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.
That's why we are here.
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James Lindsay, Eric Metaxas.
Welcome, guys.
Hey, Charlie.
Good to be here, my man.
Hey, America Fest.
So, James, we have limited time for a very complex yet incredibly important topic.
What is wokeism and why must it be defeated?
The Marxist Threat to Faith00:05:00
Well, it has to be defeated.
That's easy because it's evil.
It's very evil.
It's destructive.
It's actually poisonous.
But what woke is means, let's get technical.
Sorry, y'all, if you thought this was going to be light work.
What woke is means is being awakened to a critical consciousness of the world.
That's literally what it means.
It means learning to believe that the world is made out of dehumanizing forms like racism and sexism and classism and ableism and disablism and fatphobia.
And oh my God, it goes on.
And that it's made out of domesticating modes like education, culture, media, et cetera, that grind you into believing that this is how it's supposed to be.
And you are awakened to this so that you can denounce it at every turn to destroy the world that exists so that a more perfect world might be born in its ashes.
So a more perfect world might be born if you abolish all of those things.
Yeah, you got to get the existing society out of the way, Charlie, in order to have room for the utopia.
Got it.
So this is a perfect segue to what I want to talk to Eric about.
That sounds really religious, though, James.
Oh, yeah.
This is dark, dark religion.
What kind of religion is this?
It's cults.
It's Gnostic and Hermetic cults that have been turned into politics and economics.
Social politics in particular.
So yeah, absolutely.
Gnostic and hermetic.
Eric, you wanted to chime in?
Because you know those are the same.
Let me cut to the chase since we don't have a lot of time.
It's satanic.
We have to be clear.
You know, James is the academic, so he's going to give us those granular details.
I'm going to cut to the chase.
Without any question, I don't say this to be cheeky, although I want to be cheeky.
This is satanic.
It is a project to try to kill God, to destroy God, to create a tower of Babel, to climb into the heavens of our own accord without his help.
And when we get up there, we can murder him and we can be God.
That is what Satan promised in the garden.
You see it all through history, certainly in the French Revolution and with the advent of Marxism and into the last century and into this century.
But we've never seen it as clearly as we're now seeing it.
They used to talk about it as this, it's this wonderful utopianist scheme.
You know, in 1968, it was flower power.
Now we see the vileness and the evil of it on display.
It is at war with everything that is good and beautiful and true.
But Eric, that is worthy of applause.
You wrote a book, Letter to the American Church.
It's a fabulous piece.
Why is it that most churches are putting up with this garbage?
Because they too are of their father the devil.
That's all I think.
I'm kidding.
Let's be honest, Charlie.
You know this is true.
The reason I wrote my book, Letter to the American Church, was because I saw horrific, undeniable parallels between the silence of the church in Germany on the lead up to Hitler taking power with the silence of the American church today with globalist, atheist, Marxist authoritarians trying to take power.
The silence is the same.
The naivete of the church in Germany in the 30s, we don't actually think that they knew they were doing evil.
They thought they were doing the right thing.
They said, we're not supposed to be political.
Romans 13, we just want to preach the gospel.
Let us preach our little gospel.
And the Nazis said, go ahead, preach your little toothless, idiotic gospel.
And when you leave that building on Sunday morning, you bow to the secular authority of the state.
That is exactly what they say to people who go to the official churches in China today.
And that's what they're trying to do here.
And the horror, and this is a horror, is that many American church leaders have bought these lies and are unaware that they are ushering in satanic evil on par with what the silence of the German church ushered in in the 30s.
And that's why my book is written as a warning to the American church to say, I know that there are good people that are getting this wrong.
Those who can still hear these things, I wrote the book for them by God's grace.
If enough people will understand this and understand that we have an obligation before God to live out our faith, not to talk about it, not to say I believe it, but to live it out and to speak against evil.
If you're not doing that, it proves you have no faith, which if you think you're saved by faith, then you should be very scared by that.
James, you are agnostic, and yet you are nodding along with Eric saying that this is demonic and they want to replace God.
Help me understand that.
Queer Theory and Family Bonds00:02:49
Well, I mean, it depends on how deep you want to get into Marxism, but the idea was, in fact, to cast down God.
Marx saw this.
A lot of people don't bother to read Karl Marx, and most Marxists don't seem to have bothered to read Karl Marx.
Karl Marx believed that man begets himself and it's his job to find that out about himself and to complete himself.
And when man completes himself, guess how you're going to be?
So you're going to cast down anything like religion.
He says the criticism of everything begins with the criticism of religion.
This is the famous opium of the masses rant from 1844.
He says, what you're going to do is you're going to become aware that you are incomplete and that you can complete yourself through man's processes, through social processes, through becoming aware of the true nature of reality, which, P.S., he's the only one who knows what it is.
And then we're going to live in the kingdom.
We go forward to a Marxist from the 1960s or 1950s in this case, Herbert Marcuse.
He writes an Eris in Civilization explicitly, his book about grooming.
It's about sex, by the way.
He writes in this book, besides that higher culture is found through the love of boys, which is in there, page 211.
He also writes in that book that the way back into the Garden of Eden is by taking a second bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
So I agree with my friend Eric, despite my not knowing what his spiritual words mean in fullness.
And James, this entire agenda is to not, I mean, we have to focus on the metaphysical part of it, but let's focus on what you just kind of really went through quickly.
Grooming, war on children, queer theory.
This is a very real now threat that is widespread in our schools.
That's right.
What's happening in the schools is positively evil.
You just heard from Matt Walsh, we all heard how evil it is.
We all see how evil it is because we're not necessarily evil people.
And it's obvious to not evil people that messing with children, sterilizing children, putting them through double mastectomies, grooming them, hiding it from their parents, socially transitioning them, calling it gender-affirming care is all evil.
I said on this stage a year ago, queer theory opens the gates to hell.
You know what I was talking about now, don't you?
One year ago.
So this queer theory stuff, though, all ties back in.
For Marxists, it destroys the individual.
It severs you from knowing who you are.
So you become groomable into a political ideology.
It severs you from your family, which might pull you back out of the cult.
It severs you from your faith, which is going to look obsolete.
It severs you from your culture, which looks like it's old and needs to be destroyed, just like how Mao Zedong said, go out and destroy the four olds, including old culture, old ways of thinking, in order to bring in the new reborn era.
And so this is all exactly what you're saying, all exactly what you're afraid of, Charlie.
Raising Kids with Truth00:15:02
Eric.
Charlie.
We have to be clear.
Tucker, who was raised an Episcopalian, which is effectively Buddhist, right?
Tucker, because he's so smart and such a good man, you could hear in his talk last night, he gets this.
In other words, if you don't have a dog in the fight, you're just looking around, trying to make sense of where we are.
It's almost impossible now to see it as anything but a spiritual battle between good and evil.
And that is what is new.
In other words, we could have talked about this in political terms, in all kinds of terms in the past, but the evil has become more evil, more pronounced.
That's to me the joy of the advent of Donald Trump.
He flushed the birds out, to use another Tucker reference.
He flushed the pheasants out.
And we now see what was there all along.
And so all kinds of people, whether it's James or Tucker, who would not ordinarily see things along a spiritual spectrum, you really can't help but see it.
And if you see it along a spiritual spectrum, that's when you say, okay, God calls his church, those who dare to call themselves Christian.
If you don't call yourself Christian, you're out.
God is saying to the people who dare say, I'm a Christian, I believe Jesus died on the cross for me and rose from the dead, defeated death.
Oh, you believe that?
Okay, now you need to live that, or I know you don't believe it.
And the evil that is coming into our culture now, let's face it, this is God's judgment on the church.
If the world goes to hell, it is those who claim to believe in Jesus who did nothing and said nothing.
There are plenty of pastors and Christian leaders that are being silent in the face of evil.
Their silence is absolutely no different than the silence of the Germans and the rise of the Nazis.
But their excuses are also exactly the same excuses.
So in the book letter to the American Church, I kind of explain why they believe these lies and these excuses and why Bonhoeffer spoke against them and tried to clarify that you're getting this wrong.
And if you don't get this right immediately, we're in big trouble.
Clearly, they waited and waited, and they waited just too long.
And when many of them woke up, they realized we have no voice, we have no power, the church has been crushed, and the forces of evil have won.
That will happen in the United States if the American church does not wake up.
So, and James, is that an over-exaggeration?
I'm not saying, I mean.
Maybe it's just an exaggeration.
No, exactly, over-exaggeration.
Is that meaning is are we being too alarmist, James?
I mean, come on, I hear from pastors.
Sometimes I talk to the wokeys.
There is one pastor here that went to the media and said, look, I think that what Turning Point USA is doing is wrong and TP USA faith because we should have racial reconciliation and that Jesus would have done this and that we should have white privilege seminars and that we need to love, you know, the disadvantaged and all of these things.
James, what will a country or the church or the civilization look like if we embrace these ideas?
I mean, it's a catastrophe.
I couldn't tell you for certain how bad it's going to be, but every example so far has been horrible.
This one will be worse.
This one will be worse.
The atrocities of the 20th century cost maybe 100 million lives.
This will go into the billions if they get their way.
This is what we're up against.
And when we talk about the infestation or the weakness or whatever other pieces, because both are happening, it's not just that we have naive pastors, naive theologians.
We have double agents.
We have infiltration into these institutions, your seminaries, your churches, your pulpits.
And they are preaching this false gospel.
They're using the exact language that you were saying.
They're saying, oh, love thy neighbor.
What's it mean?
Slap a mask on.
Don't see your mom while she dies.
This is love thy neighbor because we have to protect for the greater good.
We're all in this together.
That's what Jesus would have wanted.
They are doing this intentionally because they know that the church should be the strongest and last defense against evil.
And if they can corrupt it from within, it cannot be a defense against evil.
They know this.
And that is exactly what the Nazis knew.
The Nazis knew that there were enough pastors.
Hitler sneered at them.
He said they're just, they're meek.
They'll do as they're told.
And he took advantage of that.
And they did as they were told.
And he was able to take power.
And, you know, for those people, and there are many in the church who've bought this lie that we're not supposed to be political.
And then there are other people that just defeat us and they say, well, America has run its course.
Charlie, you mentioned this yesterday in your talk.
The idea that empires have an arc of about 250 years and we're just, ladies and gentlemen, this is not an empire, okay?
Lincoln called us God's almost chosen people.
God chose this nation in a way that he has never chosen another nation to be a beacon of freedom for the whole world.
So when you compare us to any other empire or whatever, it doesn't work.
There never has been a nation founded on God's principles whose founding documents reference God and say that he is the one that gives us our rights.
So the idea that, well, there's nothing we can do, particularly if the church does nothing, we will go to hell very, very swiftly.
But I believe it is God's will.
I believe this firmly, that we're in a tremendous battle.
We have to live self-sacrificially, but that if we do that, God will give us what Lincoln called a new birth of freedom.
There will be revival and reformation, and the whole world will be blessed, not just the United States of America.
That's the role he's given this nation.
So James, let's talk practically with the time we have remaining.
How do we defeat this?
There are people in our audience right now.
They're going to colleges and they have to be told men and women are basically the same.
I went to University of Texas, Austin.
I could play some of the clip, but we're not going to.
Where people were telling me that men can become pregnant.
People are paying for this.
They're going into debt for this.
They go to a church.
They send their kid to a local school.
It's happening in their school board.
They're giving their kids TikTok, which, by the way, if you love your child, you should make sure they never access TikTok.
There is no argument to have that poison.
And if your child has TikTok, they'll be more likely to commit suicide, have depression, anxiety, be on psychiatric medication, or become trans.
Correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
That's absolutely correct.
And that is all part and parcel.
All this trans stuff, just before we get to the practical, really, I know we're short on time, but I want to be very clear.
When I said Hermetic earlier, the goal in the Hermetic faith as an old ancient esoteric occult, whatever you want to call it, religion, is in fact to remember first that you are the third person of the Godhead, you are God, and that you are to ascend to the realm of the self-begotten.
What do you do when you transition?
You envision yourself as you think you were supposed to have been made until a doctor assigned your sex at birth.
And then what do you do?
You beget yourself until the spiritual transformation happens.
How does that happen?
By social construction.
Everybody accepts it.
Everybody's forced to call you whatever pronouns you make up.
Everybody's forced to call you by your new name.
They're forced to reify your new identity, your self-begotten identity.
So when I say this is a cult, I am not kidding.
I'm not exaggerating.
I'm not just being cheeky.
I can go deep on this.
How do we beat them, James?
How do we beat them?
We have to beat them by telling the truth about them.
It starts there.
It starts there.
We can't pussyfoot around.
We had Eric a moment ago talking about how we have all of this mistake.
We're not talking about it in terms of a fight between good and evil.
This is correct.
Marx tricked the world.
The devil tricks the world by making you think he doesn't exist.
What did Marx do?
He made what 150 years of every academic on earth believe that he didn't give us a poisoned theology.
He gave us an economic theory.
So let's talk about it in terms of economics.
When you talk about it in terms of economics, you miss the damn point and people go to hell.
It's that simple.
So you have to get clear.
You have to tell the truth.
And then you have to start getting local, legal, protect your kids, protect your kids, and then fight like hell to fix the schools.
That is number one.
We stop all this mess, these elections, this other stuff.
We fix all this mess.
And in five years, everybody going through these schools right now comes out broken, messed up, and does it again with even less ability to fight back.
We must save our schools.
So if you are a parent, get involved.
Get to know who's on your school board.
Get on your local school board.
Volunteer for committees.
Get into your kids' backpack and find out what their lessons are.
Try to argue that there needs to be less technology in schools.
It's not just TikTok.
They've got a Chromebook.
It's brainwashing them.
It's made to start doing that through nudging and AI friends and chat bots.
Go practice with your chat GPT.
Teach it how to brainwash kids better.
Isn't it fun?
He, he, he, it told a story.
Think about what you're doing before you do it.
These are utterly crucial things, but you must get involved locally.
You must, if you're in a church, take a stand and demand your pastor takes a stand or leave.
Find a better one.
Make a better one.
And the same thing has to be demanded in your secular community around you as well.
That's what you have to do to fix this.
And folks, just so you understand how bad things are in the church in America today, okay?
Now, I get invited to churches where the pastors are heroes, like whether it's Rob McCoy or Jack Hibbs.
There are a number of churches around this country where they have been heroic.
And by the way, when they speak about this kind of stuff, real people who normally don't go to church think, you know what?
I think I'll go to that church because they are dealing with what I'm dealing with in my life.
They're relevant.
They care about me and my problems.
And the churches that are afraid to talk about this because they're afraid they're going to lose somebody's tithe.
They're going to lose some people.
Those churches are struggling to stay open.
Praise the Lord.
That's called the free market.
But I want to say, if you want to know how bad things are, when I wrote my book letter to the American church, I submitted to the publisher.
That day I got a book in the mail from Zondervan, a Christian publisher.
The book was written by Charles Stanley, huge mega church pastor in Atlanta.
And the book effectively argued precisely the opposite of everything I say in my book, using scripture verses and misunderstanding of history and basically advocating that the church avoid the culture wars, avoid getting involved in these things.
Just stick to the gospel, you know, just like the Chinese communists want you to just stick to the gospel.
And I read the book because I felt obliged to understand how somebody could think this.
And it was a mess.
It's a horror.
I don't know, Andy Stanley, but here's where it gets very bad.
I went to the Amazon page.
There was a big, happy blurb from Jim Daly, the head of Focus on the Family.
And I want to say, if you've ever given money to Focus on the Family, you need to write a letter to Jim Daly and help him to understand he's a good man.
I will tell you, he's a good man.
He's getting this wrong.
There are many good men and women getting this wrong.
They need to understand that there will be consequences if you get this wrong.
And we need to understand it is that bad that someone that we would think of shares our values is saying, yeah, I'm all on board with silence in the face of evil.
Let's just stick to our little gospel.
That idea is fundamentally wrong.
It has led us to the horror where we find ourselves today.
And unless we repent, what happened in Germany in the 30s will be nothing compared to what will happen because of the silence of the American church.
It's so incredibly important that you get involved, that you do something, that you figure out what you can do, and you do it.
Protecting your kids, I just pleaded with you.
It's very, very, very key to this.
You must protect their minds.
You must raise them with truth.
You must raise them with courage.
But you also have to have that courage and you have to find that truth if you're going to do it.
You have to be able to cut through the BS.
There's good men and women all over this country who are like, yeah, but I don't know.
Maybe it's okay.
It's not okay.
It's not something we can go with part way.
This is among the greatest evils that's ever been visited upon humanity.
And if you don't understand that, then you don't understand what you're dealing with.
So you absolutely must be willing to stand for truth, which is good, and goodness, which is obviously good.
And you must stand for those things bravely.
It's like if you look back at C.S. Lewis, you look back at Narnia, right?
What does he say?
Is Aslan dangerous?
Oh, of course he's dangerous, but he's good.
That's what you have to be.
Dangerous, but good all the time.
I'm going to let Eric with the final word, which is a very dangerous thing.
But you see evil, you expose it.
You see a child that is being manipulated or indoctrinated, you stop it.
You don't allow it to continue.
Whether it be a grandkid, whether it be a neighbor, we need more people homeschooling.
We need more kids being mentored.
This room, I'll see the same, I'm going to keep on saying this.
This room can change the country.
If 11,000 people over the course of four days go back to 50 states and become super activists, run for school board, run for state legislature, start a new school, start a new church, pressure an elder board, start a social media channel, pray and fast for your nation, whatever it is.
Do a little, do a lot.
Maybe you have a lot of time, maybe you have no time, maybe a lot of money, maybe you have very little money.
It doesn't matter.
Do your part.
By the way, the scriptures are clear about this with the widow's might.
If you have a little and you give a lot, you'll be rewarded more than the person that has a lot and gives a little.
So, whatever you're able to do, do what you are called in that moment.
And you might say, Charlie, I've given everything I possibly can.
No, you haven't.
You can always do more.
And these evil people have entrenched in our society in a remarkable way.
Eric, final word.
I mentioned my book a few times.
It's called Letter to the American Church, but the original title of Letter to the American Church was Faith Without Works is Dead.
Living Out Your Faith Now00:02:39
Because we have a lot of Christians in America who they talk about faith, And, you know, God says, Yeah, faith.
Is your faith real?
Because faith without works is dead.
If you are not living out your faith self-sacrificially, if you are behaving as though you're afraid of death, you're afraid of getting canceled.
God knows and the devil knows you don't believe what you claim to believe.
So the question is: we have a moment in history now, we get to live out our faith.
If you don't live out your faith, you're either calling God a liar or you are just pretending there's some safe third religious way.
I can just be quiet and do what I want to do.
God has given us a privilege, folks, that live in a moment in history right now where what you do matters.
And if you have very little money and you give a dollar, God will bless that dollar infinitely because we're talking about God and it's not about money.
It's about whatever you have.
You have a voice, you have power, you have freedom.
God has given you these things for His purposes in this generation.
If you don't use them for His purposes now, knowing that, by the way, you cannot out give God.
When you use what you have, yes, you'll be attacked.
Yet, listen, I have been sued.
I've been wiped off of YouTube.
You know, my answer to that is praise Jesus.
Praise Jesus.
Because how is it possible that we could be counted worthy to have these little things happen to us?
We know God has our back.
All He's looking for is people who actually believe what they claim to believe.
This is a season in American history.
We get to live out our faith.
The Lord is looking to His people to show that they believe what they claim to believe.
If they will do that, it will change this country and the world.
Praise the Lord.
God bless you.
So, Eric just told you to live your faith.
Let me assure you to bring you down here: the communist is living their faith.
The communists are living their faith better than you are, and that's why we're in this mess.
Thank you.
We're going to win if we act.
God bless you guys.
Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email me your thoughts as always: freedom at charliekirk.com.
Thank you so much for listening, and God bless.
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.