All Episodes Plain Text
Jan. 24, 2023 - The Charlie Kirk Show
35:53
The Cowardice of a Nonpolitical Church with Eric Metaxas
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
Welcome Back to the Program 00:02:03
Hey everybody, Tana Charlie Kirk Show.
Eric Metaxas joins us to discuss his new book, Letter to the American Church.
Super important.
If you are a Christian or go to a church, you need to listen to this entire episode and text it to your pastor, especially if your pastor is silent and a coward.
Email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com.
Come to our upcoming men's summit at tpfaith.com/slash men's.
That is tpfaith.com/slash men's.
Email me your thoughts as alwaysfreedom at charliekirk.com and get involved with turning pointusa 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 campus.
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.
Brought to you by Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage.
For personalized loan services, you can count on.
Go to andrewandodd.com, the wonderfulandrewandtodd.com.
Welcome back, everybody.
Email us freedom at charliekirk.com.
One of the most important books written in the last year is a book by my friend Eric Metaxas, Letter to the American Church.
And we are here.
We've had Eric before on the program to talk about it, but we're going to do a whole other hour talking about the basic arguments made in this book and why the American church needs to awaken into action.
Eric, welcome back to the program.
It's my privilege and my joy, my friend Charlie.
Love you and what you're doing.
So grateful for you, for your voice.
I can't even, I'll stop now because I could go on for an hour just talking about how grateful I am.
The Silence of the German Church 00:08:59
People say, you know, why should I have hope?
You're one of the reasons, folks, you'd have hope.
That touches me.
And let it be known that I am wearing a tie and Eric Metaxas is not.
That just, I had to say that.
For those of you listening on podcasting, I am dressed up more.
And the first time in the history of Western civilization, I am dressed up more than Eric Metaxas.
Eric, why did you write the book?
Well, there's no way to say this, so you just have to say it.
When I wrote my Bonhoeffer book over 10 years ago, as I'm writing about what happened to Germany in the 30s, I'm getting this creeping feeling as I'm doing the research that that same thing is happening here in the United States.
I said, I don't want to believe this.
I don't want to see these parallels, but I could begin to smell this over 10 years ago.
And as time has passed, I have seen the horror of this unfold as reality.
And the basic thesis of the book, the new book that I write about, deals with that.
What I say, the reason I wrote the book is because it was the silence and inaction of the German church, specifically in the 30s, the silence and the inaction of the German church that allowed the rise of Hitler and an evil come into history that we can hardly process even today.
The parallels to what is happening today, because of the silence of much of the American church and the inaction of the American church, the parallels are as dramatic as anything.
When I really saw this, Charlie, I said, I got to write about this.
And I was going to publish the book myself.
I said, I just need to write this really short and to get it to Christian leaders so that they can see what I see.
But Salem, my publisher, met with me and they said, hey, we've got an idea for a book for you to write, Eric.
How about this?
And they basically described this book.
And I said, okay, I'm going to publish it with Salem.
But I thought this is a warning and it lays the blame, the nightmare of what we're all experiencing.
You talk about it every day.
How did it happen?
How is this happening?
Largely because of the silence of the American church, which parallels precisely the silence of the German church.
I don't just say it parallels it in that it exists.
I mean, the excuses that German pastors and German leaders in the church gave for being silent in the face of evil, for saying we don't want to get political.
We can't get political.
Every one of the excuses they give in the 30s is paralleled today.
So I wrote the book because I believe God wants us to save the republic.
And he says the church is responsible.
If the church will wake up and understand that its silence is allowing satanic evil to destroy America, if the church wakes up, America can be saved.
But right now, obviously, the church has been dramatically silent.
And it's why you and I do what we do.
Now, I want to unpack this, you know, point by point, but let's start with one of those that you mentioned.
Give us more example, more detail, more clarity into how the German church, what they were saying, for example, after Kristallnacht, after the beginning of putting Jews on trains.
Oh, before, no, this was way before that.
This is the key, actually.
I'm glad you brought this up.
It's way before that.
In 1933, 34, nobody is dreaming about Kristallnacht and about death camps.
Nobody.
So the church in Germany said, why do we need to speak up?
You know what?
The pendulum swings.
You know, Hitler will be in there for a little while.
We can't get political.
We can't take sides.
We've got Nazi friends.
I don't want to lose people in my congregation.
We are going to be silent.
It was because of their silence in the beginning, before any of this stuff happened, that led to these things happening.
So I want to be clear.
What was the excuse they gave?
They all said, number one, the church can't be political.
The church shouldn't be political.
Romans 13, it's very clear.
We don't go there.
We stay in our theological lane.
We, quote unquote, we just preach the gospel.
Total garbage, theologically nonsensical, unbiblical.
But they all bought into this and it gave them an out.
They said, yeah, yeah, that's not our job.
We're just going to, we're just going to skip that.
It was because of that theological error, which again, just to be clear, is from the pit of hell and allowed evil to triumph.
But it silenced the church at the precise time in the beginning when the church could have affected not just change, but could have really been, would have been the only institution in Germany that could have stood against the wicked, the evil of the Nazis.
The church really was poised in Germany with tremendous cultural power, precisely the way the American church is in this nation.
And Bonhoeffer said, let me finish here saying, Bonhoeffer said, the church is the conscience of the state.
He knew if the church speaks up, these evil things won't happen.
The church was silent and we know what happened.
So Joram Hazzoni was on our program and he made a very interesting observation that at the founding of the modern German university, their mission statement, both privately and publicly, was to discredit and destroy the Bible's influence over Germany and of the West.
That was the reason why he believed the secular university.
That's really what they focused on.
Walk us through the ideological or philosophical underpinnings in the 20s and 30s, 1920s and 30s, that then started to seep into German Protestantism.
Because this was mainly, I mean, Germany was not a largely Catholic state, correct?
Oh, no, Germany was largely Lutheran.
There's no question about it.
I mean, Luther, about whom I've written a book, Luther was Germany.
I mean, he was kind of like, you know, practically the George Washington figure, except he's a theological figure, right?
And they were so, I mean, this is, again, this is the danger is that when you think everything's going really great, you take your eye off the ball.
So one thing we have to understand, and this is what Bonhoeffer saw, was that Germans had become so culturally Christian, had become so comfortably Christian that they forgot what it was to actually be a Christian.
And they just thought, you know what?
The church and state get along.
We've never had a problem.
They didn't have the history that we have in this country of separation of church and state.
So, you know, when the Kaiser was in power, Kaiser was pro-Christian.
Everything was great.
So once Hitler comes into power in 1930, early 33, they are not ready for what happens if the state goes to war against the church.
This is really separate from what you asked, but just so people can frame it, what happens if the state says, you know what, we're going to control the church.
We're going to make the church do what we want it to do.
We're going to force it to stay in its quote-unquote theological lane.
They can't say anything that will affect the Third Reich, that will affect our government policies.
In America, we would know wrong.
The church is the church.
The church is separate from the state.
But in Germany, that was one major, major problem that they had.
So I want to say that first.
Your question of what had been happening, it's kind of complicated, Charlie, because, you know, when we talk about the church, we understand we're talking about many churches, right?
I mean, there were some people that are on fire for God.
There are other people that are just going through the motions.
I think that because Germany was so wedded culturally with Luther and the Lutheran church, that it was very easy for anybody who thought, I'm a German, I'm a Lutheran.
What more do you want from me, right?
I'm done.
They didn't understand that for the church to be the church, God always calls his church, his people, to be active, to be vocal, to be soldiers for love and goodness and truth, not simply to attend some service on a Sunday morning and to get dressed up and whatever.
So the church was playing church.
The church had been lulled into this idea that, you know, it's not our job to get involved in that other stuff.
Bonhoeffer understood, no, no, no, that is precisely your job.
You're being cowardly.
You're being confused.
Let me clarify.
The church is the conscience of the state.
And if the church doesn't speak up now, this was in 33, God will hold us responsible for what happens.
Hey, everybody, Charlie Kirk here.
It's not unusual to ignore danger and simply hope that will go away.
Faith Leaders Must Speak Up 00:05:07
But friends, the coming food shortages are not a joke.
Experts are saying they'll last weeks, even months.
Problem is, most people have only one week's of food at home.
That's why the prudent thing to do is to get emergency food right now while you can.
So go to preparewithkirk.com and you'll save $200 on a three-month emergency food kit from MyPatriot Supply, the nation's largest preparedness company.
Be sure to get at least one kit per person in your family so you don't run out.
Since you'll save $200 per kit stock up today, tomorrow might be too late.
These kits are in stock and shipping is free.
Everything arrives in unmarked boxes for your privacy.
Get your emergency food today and sleep better tonight.
Go to preparewithkirk.com.
They're a fabulous company.
My family uses them.
We are prepared for what is coming next.
Things might start falling apart very soon.
Are you prepared?
Go to preparewithkirk.com.
Eric, let me play a piece of tape here.
This is cut 25.
This is Beach Kiley telling Sky Jethaney: Gender has impacted our understanding of God.
There's got to be an evolving conversation about gender and how that plays into our understanding of God.
This is, these are faith leaders.
Play cut 25.
I sense that folks younger than us have increasing awareness around how gender has impacted our understanding of God and our language around God and even our roles in society.
And I think there's going to be an evolving conversation about gender and how that plays into our understanding of God.
Now, I'm not sure if she's a pastor, but she is on staff at a church in Raleigh, North Carolina.
I think she's also on weed, Charlie.
Just point a theological point.
When you play that for me, I just can't, but you have to understand it's so painful for me to listen to that because Skye Jethani, you know, a couple of years ago, I considered him a friend.
You know, we're on the same side of things.
We believe in Jesus.
The madness that has entered the church, it's just, let me be really clear.
You said, why did I write the book, Letter to the American Church?
I wrote it to reach people who don't know what they think.
When they hear something like that, this is Christian pastors and leaders, and they go, oh, yeah, maybe I need to play ball.
I need to hear more about this.
I want to say to them, nonsense.
These people are importing insane ideas.
And if you care about your congregation, and by the way, if you love your neighbors who live in your community, you need to stand against this.
This is, it's not just nonsense.
It's dangerous.
And when the church, I mean, because look, there are three kinds of churches, right?
They're brave churches like our, you know, our friend Rob McCoy.
And there's a number of churches that they're brave.
They're talking about stuff.
Then there are crazy places like what we just heard.
It's crazy.
The reason I wrote the book is to reach those in the middle who are being silent.
They might not agree with what we just heard, thank the Lord, but they're also not disagreeing with it publicly.
They're sort of stepping back and saying, you know what?
I don't want to get involved in that.
My argument in this book is it is the role of the church.
It is God's command to the church.
You need to speak on all of these issues from a biblical point of view.
And if you're not crazy like the woman that we just heard, but you're simply silent, you're equally guilty because that is how the crazy people are taking over the culture.
The silence of good pastors, the silence of pastors who might not agree with what we just heard, but say, well, she has a point.
That's why I wrote the book.
So, Eric, I want to challenge on one thing, which is I would prefer some churches to remain silent than say this, play cut 26.
We give praise to the great one, the one who was identifiable as God.
I am what I am, you say, the great they, the incarnate he and she, the God of trans beings.
You shadow, you shatter all stereotypes, making every single person male and female, male and female, intersex, non-binary in your image.
spectrum rainbow god who put your promise for non-violence in the symbol for clear love before humanity knew because you knew i would rather her be quiet than say to the great trans being rainbow god charlie let me tell you something the fact that nt right is sitting behind her having to listen to that i mean i don't know what to make of it again i want to be clear when i talk about the church being silent,
Why So Many Pastors Stay Quiet 00:11:36
okay?
This actually, this brings me right into something that at some point in this conversation, I would talk about.
In my book, Letter to the American Church, there's a chapter called 12,000 Pastors.
Okay.
Ready for this?
The chapter 12,000 pastors says that in 1933, when the Nazis tried to take over the church, a number of heroic pastors said, no, we see what's happening.
We need to write this thing called the Barman Declaration.
We need to make very clear we will not allow the Nazi state to take over the church and to tell us what to think.
So I think maybe something like 6,000 pastors out of the 18,000 in Germany signed that document.
By 1935, two years later, the intimidation, the bullying had been so strong that only about 3,000 of the 18,000 pastors were willing to stand with the Barman Declaration, to stand for what the Bible says.
Okay.
Why am I telling you this?
Because on the other end of the spectrum, there were 3,000 like the woman you just heard.
Yep.
Completely crazy.
Okay.
But it's the 12,000 in the middle, the 12,000 who said, we're not going to take a position.
We're going to be quiet.
It is the cowardice of being neutral.
And that is where most churches are right now.
I want to talk about relieffactor.com.
I want you guys to check out relief factor.com, 100% drug-free, knee pain, back pain, joint pain, elbow pain.
Check out Relief Factor Energy.
Help makes your body make nutrients readily available.
Relief Factor Sleep.
I know a lot of you are probably having trouble sleeping.
Relief Factor Sleep could be the best solution for you.
Everybody goes to bed.
Not everybody sleeps.
We're all about helping people live lives that are filled with connection, exploration, passion, and emotion.
That is what his life is all about.
Make sure you guys are sleeping well.
It's a major part of life.
Check it out right now.
ReliefFactor.com, relief factor.com.
So, Eric, you were talking about this middle 12,000 pastors.
Is that right?
Yeah, when you said to me in the first question, why did I write the book?
It's because in the middle, in Germany, in the 30s, okay, remember I said we had 3,000 of these 18,000 pastors that were, they were willing to stand for God's truth against what the Nazis were trying to do and take over the church.
On the other end of the spectrum, you had their equivalent of the woke crazy people, okay, in the church.
But in the middle, Charlie, this is the key.
It's why I wrote the book.
There were 12,000 of the 18,000 who said, you know what?
We're not going to take a stand.
We're going to be quiet on that stuff.
We were going to kind of want to see which way the wind blows.
We don't want to get in trouble.
So to me, that is dramatically precisely what we're seeing in America today.
In other words, you've got folks like the ones that you, you know, you played those clips who are just.
We have more.
Don't worry.
We got more.
Yeah, thank you very much.
They're sold out to the looniness, right?
But what about those who are being quiet?
What about those who are not denouncing what the crazy people on that side?
In other words, in Germany, you had 3,000 pastors standing heroically and speaking against the madness.
And on the other end of the spectrum, you had 3,000 pro-Nazis, okay?
But in the middle, you had the 12,000 who said, we're nice guys.
We don't want to be political.
So they would not join the 3,000 heroes.
They let them hang out to dry.
That's exactly what's happening in America.
The garbage that you were playing and that is out there.
If you have a pastor or a Christian leader friend who says, you know what, I don't want to get involved.
I don't want to go up against that.
Not only are they wrong ideologically, but they are allowing evil to happen.
And so I wrote this book to reach those who are thinking that they can take the safe middle path.
You know what?
I'm not going to, I don't want to get as political as Charlie Kirk or Eric Metaxas.
You know, I'm just going to, I'm going to stand over here.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, if you are not fighting this, if you claim to be a member of the church, to believe what the Bible says, and you're being silent on socialism, you're being silent on transgender lunacy, you're being silent on Black Lives Matter, which is destroying, it's a Marxist organization, destroying communities of color.
You're being silent on that stuff because you're afraid that you might get, you know, somebody might look at you funny or call you a name.
You claim to believe what the Bible says.
You claim to believe Jesus defeated death on the cross and you have no fear.
That's what God expects of us to live out our faith.
And it is because of the silence and that fear that is happening in America now that we are seeing this utter madness, which by the way is affecting everyone.
And it's the responsibility of those who claim to be Christians to speak against it.
Cut 28, a progressive Lutheran says the Great Commission is fake and racist.
Play cut 28.
Over the course of many years of study, I have come to believe that the so-called Great Commission is anything but the gospel.
Indeed, I have come to believe that this particular ending to the gospel, according to Matthew, may be the source of the systemic racism which permeates not just the church, but also all of the Western cultures and institutions, which arose out of what history has dubbed the Holy Roman Empire.
Now, Eric, I play this.
Is that a high-talking man?
It's a Lutheran priest or whatever.
I mean, is it a priest or a pastor?
I don't know the terminology in Lutheran thought, but the reason I keep playing these, Eric, is not only do we have to deal with the neutrality, but the woke elements of Christianity, they're no longer worried about state.
They're not debating whether or not to be silent.
They are more forceful and aggressive than ever.
No, Charlie, I mean, that's exactly my point in the book is that whenever somebody says, uh-uh, be quiet, you're being political, you'll notice that the people on the left are being dramatically political, insanely political, pro-abortion political.
They are absolutely crazy.
So this idea that there's some safe middle path is utter nonsense.
If you are silent in the face of what you just heard and in the face of what's going on in the country, again, we know that there are crazy people in the church, but the idea that, you know what, I'm going to take a pass.
I don't want to criticize what that woman said.
She has a point.
If you are not vocally standing against that, you're part of the problem.
And I want to say it again.
The reason I wrote the book, Letter to the American Church, is because we know what happened in Germany when the middle, when the good guys in the middle said, we're going to take a pass, we're going to be silent.
When you are going to a church or tithing to a church or part of a community that is silent in the face of the evils that we see, whether it's transgender, all of the stuff that we see, the madness that we're seeing, it is because of the silence of the church in Germany that Hitler was able to crush the church and to destroy innumerable lives.
That satanic evil was unleashed because of the silence of the church.
And it is the silence of pastors today.
whose churches, by the way, are shrinking because they think that they're going to cling to people by avoiding these issues.
Just the opposite.
When you deal with these issues and speak the truth, your churches will increase in number.
Everywhere I go and you speak in these churches, their numbers are increasing because they're daring to speak about what everybody wants to hear about.
Everything is going crazy.
What does the church say?
When you speak about that, you're serving your congregation and you're doing what God calls you to do.
Well, then let's talk about the how.
Let's talk about both the how from the person who attends church to also the how of the elder board and the how of the pastor.
And so let's first talk about the how of the pastor.
I'm sure a pastor is listening to this right now and like, okay, fine, Eric, what does that mean?
Stand against, do this.
What is the, what does the model look like, Eric?
I mean, are you expecting sermons, seminars, workshops?
Because I hear this from pastors all the time.
They're like, yeah, I'm willing, but I don't know how.
Well, you know, this is because I'm a writer and because I wrote this book, the first thing I would want to say, frankly, is read this book because I want to give you the biblical reasoning behind what I'm saying.
In other words, before we even talk about what you're going to do, you need to be convinced that what I'm saying is right, that what I'm saying is biblical.
And so I try to give the biblical foundation for why being silent and saying, oh, I'm not going to be political or I'm not going to go here.
I'm not going to go there.
You need to understand how that's biblically wrong.
And I wrote the book, Charlie, to convince those people who might, they're not where we are, but I know that there are many, many, many pastors out there.
They're looking around and they're afraid.
And I wrote this book to galvanize them.
So the first thing, obviously, I would say, having written the book is please consider what I have said, because I'm convinced that an open-minded person reading what I wrote, and it's the shortest book I ever wrote, will say, you know what?
I'm not hearing this.
I hadn't thought of that.
Eric has a point.
Biblically, I can't be silent.
So the first thing is to reason with people.
But then when you say what it looks like, it's going to look different in every church.
Not everybody is going to be as political as our friends, Jack Hibbs and Robert.
Robert Boyd and others.
There's some people that they don't know how to do that.
And you know what?
That's fine.
As long as you understand God calls every one of us to take a risk, to stick our neck out, to speak the truth.
I mean, you know what the perfect example of this is?
When Roe v. Wade was overturned, the lack of celebration in many churches, the lack of declaring what we have prayed for for 50 years has happened.
That tells you that people are cowed.
They are fearful.
They are afraid of the zeitgeist.
You know, somebody's going to look at me and say, oh, you're a conservative.
You're this, you're that.
That fear is not of God.
And I want to be really, really clear that, you know, people are always bringing up like, what's the most dramatic scenario?
Or you want me to be, you know, telling people that they should vote for Donald Trump from my pulpit?
Well, I'm not going to do that.
Well, guess what, folks?
We're not telling you to do that.
But what we're telling you to do is to have courage, not to be afraid.
I mean, let's be blunt.
When people say you're not supposed to, in the book, I explain how we got to this place that so many churches think it's right not to be political.
501c3, I don't want to lose my tax exempt status.
And you think, well, where did that come from?
That came from one of the most corrupt politicians in the history of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Johnson Amendment.
And how did I learn about the Johnson Amendment?
From Donald Trump, not from a fellow evangelical, from Donald Trump, who smartly looked into this and said, Oh, that's why all the evangelicals are silent and afraid and cowering because of the Johnson amendment.
We need to get rid of that.
Everybody needs to understand what Johnson did, not only was that wrong, but the silence of the churches in 1954 when Johnson did that, that they said, Oh, okay, we're not going to be political.
We'll take that deal.
Well, we like we like our tax exempt status, so we're going to keep our mouths shut on anything that might be construed as political.
Some pastors will say, But the gospel is greater than all of this.
We shouldn't distract ourselves with the things of this earth.
God Calls Us to Act Now 00:08:05
I hear it all the time.
Yeah, that's nonsense.
I'll explain why.
There's no such thing as the pure gospel.
If somebody brings up slavery, okay, in the days when slavery was legal in parts of the United States, there were pastors who said, Oh, I don't want to speak on that because that's political.
Now, we now would say, What a coward, because the Bible commands you to denounce that as evil.
There are always going to be people that are going to be afraid to talk.
And what they're going to say, they said it in Germany in the 30s.
That's what I write about in my book.
They're saying it today.
That's political.
I'm here to tell you: truth is not political.
Truth is truth.
And you need to stop being afraid of being quote unquote political because the reality is that truth, God's truth is God's truth.
And by the way, if you want this kind of Christianity, you can have it in China.
In China, the government will let you go in that building, do your little weird rituals, and then when you come out, you bow to the secular authority of the state.
That is what silence in the face of evil from the American church today has led to.
And we need to understand it's not only not biblical, it is not God's will for us today.
It is his will that we speak on when we do not speak out or correct other pastors, and I'm going to help build out the how as well.
You get well-known, well-published pastors that just say this heretical nonsense, like Matt Chandler, who I'm told is a very nice person.
Play cut 29.
The entire experience of my life has been one of I can easily find people that look like me.
Almost all my understanding of what made America great is because of efforts and the work ethic of people like me.
But what happens in that kind of upbringing, which is fine, is that there were some lenses put over my eyes.
I have grown up with this invisible kind of bag of privilege, this kind of invisible toolkit that I can reach in there at any given moment and have this type of privilege that a lot of other brothers and sisters don't have, don't possess.
I could continue going.
I mean, this is a fight that we need to be aggressive at, Eric.
These heretics need to be a good thing.
Again, you're proving my point.
No, of course, Eric, of course, I'm proving your point.
Right.
Is for pastors like that.
He's not an evil man.
Matt Chandler is not a bad guy, but he has drunk enough of the Kool-Aid to be mouthing this stuff so that he sounds like he's hip and he gets it.
And the young people will say, oh, he gets it and whatever.
He is buying into ideas that are evil.
They're demonic at its core.
But well, yes.
But I guess my point is that I wrote the book for folks like him because there are plenty of people in the middle that they wouldn't describe themselves as crazy woke, but they're going along just enough instead of speaking against it.
Somebody like Matt Chandler, there are others, there are tons like that, that they think they can have it both ways.
And why I wrote the book was that's what they thought in Germany in the 30s.
They really thought we don't need to go against that.
We're just going to kind of go along to get along.
The most dramatic example of this, frankly, I mentioned Andy Stanley.
He wrote a book saying exactly the opposite of what I say in my book letter to the American Church, exactly the opposite.
It's a theological mess, an historical mess.
It's a nightmare, but it's going to mislead tons of people and Christian leaders into thinking, oh, yes, here's the biblical reason for me to do nothing, to say nothing, to avoid the political, and to just let this evil kind of wash over us.
You know, it's not my job to deal with it.
Nonsense.
But the worst thing, Charlie, and I got to tell you, you want to talk about good guys getting it wrong.
I go to the Amazon page for this horrible book, huge endorsement by Jim Daly of Focus on the Family.
And I thought, what?
This is a good guy.
I've known Jim for years.
He's endorsing this.
In other words, there are people that are good people that are getting this wrong.
And I wrote this book to try to reach them.
I know there's tons of pastors around the country just like that who are basically saying, you know what, I believe we shouldn't be divisive.
I believe we shouldn't be too political.
And they are going along.
And it is because of their silence in the face of evil that evil is triumphing right now.
Everything we're seeing that you talk about and I talk about every single day is happening because of the silence of pastors, the silence of good Christian leaders.
I'm trying to reach the good Christian leaders in the middle and to help them understand why they've got to speak and understand is what God is asking you to do.
It's not what I'm asking you to do.
It's what God is asking you to do.
And he used Bonhoeffer to try to wake up the church in Germany.
They didn't listen to what he had to say.
So I'm thinking, does what Bonhoeffer say cannot wake up the American church today?
That's why I wrote the book.
That's what's in the book.
And finally, let's talk about the people who are not pastors.
What can those in the audience that have influence over a pastor, a relationship, what can they do?
Well, again, I would say, first of all, if you're going to a church that's guilty of this, you know, you can give the pastor a copy of my book and forgive me for promoting the book, right?
But I'm saying, like, I want to reach those folks.
But if they refuse to do this, if you're going to a church where they have just said, we will not talk about whatever, go down the list, I would be sure to leave that church.
So that's really my main advice is that, you know, try in a loving way to persuade them.
But if they're not there, do not tithe.
Do not go there.
Do not support that community because we're in a war and God will hold you responsible, not just your pastor.
Each one of us, we are the church.
God is calling us to do what the German church failed to do.
And when the German church failed to do it because they had a million theological reasons, we saw that the evil that was unleashed is just beyond anything we can dream of.
We see that happening in America now.
We are only in 1934, 35.
We're only in the beginnings of it.
And if the church doesn't wake up, and you and I know, Charlie, I want to make a documentary film based on this stuff.
If the church doesn't wake up, it's over.
God appointed the church in Germany to speak up.
They were silent.
He appointed the church in America right now to speak up.
Many of these pastors are being silent.
You know who they are.
You know who's being brave out there.
So we're living in an impossibly important moment.
And I just feel like I've never, ever wanted to write a book like this, but I felt an urge literally.
I felt God calling me to write this, to say these things, because he doesn't want America to go the way Germany went.
He doesn't want the American church to continue to make the errors that the German church continued to make that destroyed that nation and destroyed Europe and millions of lives, literally.
So kind of important stuff.
I'll add to this, if you're a pastor, it's okay to go read 10 to 15, 20 books about what's going on politically.
Listen to our program.
Some of these pastors are afraid to speak out because they say, oh, there's really not a big deal.
I mean, you're wrong.
Let me just say this.
I'm not going to get into a theological debate with you, but you have to educate yourself.
Go read some Thomas Soul, okay?
Go read some economics books.
Go read something about what's happening in culture.
Go read some Christopher Caldwell.
Go read some Milton Friedman.
Go read some history books.
Because some of these pastors are so incredibly economically and historically and philosophically illiterate.
I'll be honest.
And they say, well, you know, it's not as if anything we're living through is, you know, different or exceptional.
And your book is right on the pulse.
Letter to the American Church.
Right at time.
God bless you, Eric.
Great job.
Thank you.
Thank you, my friend.
Everyone, check it out.
Go buy a bunch.
It's really important.
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.
All right, these four radio ads, and then let's have Spencer come in, okay?
For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to CharlieKirk.com.
Export Selection