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May 25, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:52
THE POLITICS OF CHRISTIANITY Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 97
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Ron DeSantis busts the big tech monopoly.
George Will says that January 6th is the same as 9-11.
What's eating that guy?
And actor Kirk Cameron on The Politics of Christianity.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Two very important developments on the free speech front get to the heart of the matter.
What's the problem and what can be done about it?
Now, Project Veritas has a new expose and this is awesome.
This is two Facebook insiders who have come out and revealed their plan to suppress posts on Facebook.
To demote them, reduce their circulation, maybe cut them off altogether, that are critical of the vaccine.
Now, the idea here is to censor not just false posts.
Traditionally, we use digital platforms.
We're going after misinformation.
But no, in this case, they admit the posts may be true.
Someone could say, I took the vaccine.
I had a horrible reaction. This is what happened to me.
And Facebook's point is, it doesn't matter if it's true.
We're going to repress it and censor it anyway.
So this is, I think, a remarkable escalation and shows that what Facebook is doing here is it's trying to rig the debate.
It isn't trying to have it out over facts because they admit you could be making factual statements about the vaccine and yet you will be cut off.
This stuff is getting way out of hand.
And there are some people, including some people on the conservative and libertarian side who say, well, yeah, but it's not a violation of the First Amendment.
Facebook is, after all, a private company.
And I want to talk for a moment about the fact that free speech is not confined to the First Amendment.
Let's think for a moment about why we need free speech.
What is the point of free speech?
Well, there's a political point to it.
Free speech is necessary to have the arguments that make democracy work.
You can't have democracy without people being able to express their views.
So there's a political reason for it.
There's kind of a philosophical reason for it.
If you don't have free speech, you can't have debate.
If you don't have debate, you cannot arrive at the elusive quarry of truth.
So going back to Socrates and the discussions and arguments that he had on the streets of Athens, there's a philosophical need for free speech as the mechanism to arrive at truth.
But free speech is also personal.
We speak because we're able to say what we think.
We are able to say what we feel.
Our language is a part of who we are.
It helps to define the way we think of ourselves.
And of course, free speech is also social.
It connects us to each other.
It's a way of having community because you're able to relate through the important mechanism of language.
Now, here's my point.
Free speech can be just as threatened in the private sphere as it can in the government sphere.
Let me give a group of examples that I think illuminates this point.
A radical Islamic husband tapes his wife's mouth shut.
Now, he's not the government.
The First Amendment technically doesn't apply to him, but he's shutting her up all the same.
It's a deprivation of her free speech, her ability to speak at all.
Or let's say there's a mosque or synagogue or some kind of institution where, let's say, women or any other group is not allowed to speak.
Their free speech is being cut off.
Consider the abusive spouse, male or female, who forbids the other spouse to say anything.
I'm talking. You don't get to say a word.
That's a repression of free speech.
Think of the college professor who says to his students or to his class, I'm not going to allow any debate.
What I say goes.
I don't even want to take any questions.
Just repeat what I say on the test.
He is denying his students the right to inquire, to investigate, to raise, to speak.
And yet, this could be a private college.
This could be a private school.
Nevertheless, there is a repression of speech.
Think of BLM and some of its rituals where whites are not allowed to speak.
What is that doing? It's preventing whites from being able to participate in the discussion.
Now these are all private entities.
And so I want to come back to this point about free speech being bigger than the First Amendment.
The First Amendment protects against a certain kind of denial of free speech, direct denial by the state.
But now someone may go, well, wait a minute, doesn't Facebook have free speech?
Shouldn't Facebook have the right to say what it wants?
And that allows and that even means Facebook being able to repress people's posts.
It's, after all, their platform.
Now... There are two kind of problems with this.
First of all, Facebook certainly has the right to speak.
They can have a point of view, but if they have a point of view, they can't pretend that they're a neutral platform.
If they have a point of view, then they're more like a publisher.
They're more like the New York Times.
They shouldn't get special government protections because, after all, they are publishers and they have a point of view.
They have editorial judgments.
Of course, they can exercise them, but they also have to be accountable for them.
The other problem is that Facebook and Twitter and some of these digital platforms are monopolies.
And what that means is that they're denying people access to service.
Which, by the way, you can't even do in the private sphere.
You can't have a restaurant and say, I'm going to deny service to blacks and I'm a private company so I can do whatever I want.
You can't be a toll bridge and say to people, hey listen, I'm not going to let you pass because I just don't like the looks of you.
Of course, you have the alternative to swimming across the river.
No, it doesn't matter if you have a private toll bridge.
If you have a monopoly over that kind of crossing, you have to basically allow everybody to go by who's willing to pay the toll.
The problem with these digital platforms is they pretend to be like the phone company.
They're just neutral platforms.
They're encouraging further discussion and dialogue.
But imagine if the phone company would jump into your conversation and say, wait a minute, you know, you're spreading misinformation about the vaccine to your neighbors.
We're going to correct you.
We're going to cut off your phone service.
This would be outrageous. Nobody would allow that.
They'd shut AT&T down overnight if they attempted to do that.
Now, the good news is that Governor DeSantis is going out front on this.
He's a trailblazer on this, and he just signed an important piece of legislation which basically says that these digital censors are going to be accountable in the state of Florida.
How? Number one, they're not allowed to censor any candidate for public office.
They're not allowed to censor anyone who's in public office.
But third, and I think most importantly, Florida citizens are going to be able to sue these companies.
And if the violations are egregious enough, the Florida State Attorney General will sue on their behalf.
So the idea here is to put these guys up against the wall to hold them accountable.
I'm quite sure this will all end up in court, as it should.
But the bottom line of it is, DeSantis is saying, enough is enough.
Now, DeSantis makes a point I want to highlight here.
And that is, he goes, these companies claim to be correcting misinformation.
And he looks at the example of the Wuhan lab.
He goes, they censored all kinds of people, took down their posts because they claimed that it was disinformation, it was conspiracy theory to talk about the origin of the virus being in a lab.
Now we know. That wasn't disinformation.
It was merely information.
There was an argument going on about where this virus came from, a legitimate argument.
And what did the digital platforms do?
They shut down that argument.
So they're not promoting information.
They're suppressing information.
They're not promoting debate.
They're suppressing debate.
It is long overdue that these digital moguls, these digital fascists, I want to call them, be held accountable.
There's a long way to go on this.
DeSantis is only taking the first step, but somebody has to take the first step so that the second, third, and fourth step can be taken next.
You know, I've been looking forward to this one.
I'm really happy to have actor and producer Kirk Cameron on the program.
Kirk, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for joining me.
It's kind of funny. I see you sitting outside.
Are you sitting in some sort of a fireplace or a campfire pit?
Where are you sitting? You know, I wish I was in Yosemite, California, but I'm actually just in my backyard.
And yeah, I've got a fire pit in my backyard and an American flag.
And this is where I've been spending the last 100 days live with tens of thousands of people for something called the American Campfire Revival.
And I'm hoping to call people back to the original American Covenant, those unknown sacred promises that our founders and forefathers and mothers made with God and one another.
I want to talk to you about that.
I'm actually kind of chuckling as I see you, because the last time we were together, this was now, I think, right before the election, if I'm not mistaken, in California in one of those megachurches, and there were all these pastors on the stage, and then you said, and now to do our concluding prayer, I'm going to call upon Dinesh, which totally took me kind of by surprise.
Why did you choose me to do that?
I've never been asked to do something like that before.
You know, good question.
And first of all, you were so gracious to oblige and to go ahead and to pray.
And for many of us, we've admired you.
We admire your intellect.
We admire your honesty.
And what many people I think are not as familiar with is what a deep man of faith you are and the beautiful way in which I've heard you express it.
And so while people are used to hearing pastors pray, they're professional religious people, and that would have been appropriate, I thought it was just refreshing to hear you speak in a category, in a lane, that not as many people are familiar with.
And I'll tell you what, the pastors in the room all went, whoa, my goodness, well, I feel like I just got schooled by Dinesh D'Souza on how to pray.
That was beautiful and powerful.
Well, I was very honored and moved to be able to do that.
Let's talk about the covenant that you mentioned.
We're 100 days or so into this Biden administration.
Do you see this administration as sort of violating some sacred covenant?
So say a word about what you mean by the idea of covenant.
It's obviously a biblical or scriptural term.
Are you talking about just a covenant with God or also a mutual covenant?
Well, so great word, covenant.
We don't use it in our lexicons today.
However, we think of the Bible, we think of the Abrahamic covenant, or we think of the covenant Moses made with God.
And then, of course, we talk about the new covenant with Jesus.
Well, when we make sacred promises with God or with one another, we can talk in terms of the marriage covenant, that sacred promise.
Well, our founding fathers and mothers understood that That it's this nature of sacred obligation and self-government that was absolutely necessary for a free society to flourish.
And so what I've been doing is learning about this.
I need to be a student who doesn't think he knows everything, who's not just going to turn on Fox News or CNN and get all my information there.
But go back and talk to the people that actually built this place and what you'll find is that they said faith and morality, character, virtue, self-government is absolutely essential.
If we don't do the right thing from the heart because we want to and we love our neighbor as ourself and we honor God with all of our heart, this whole freedom experiment's not going to work because people are going to just do the wrong thing and take advantage.
So I've been calling people to pledge to renew What I'm calling the original American covenant.
This is something that I made up and tens of thousands of people have been signing it as a family and it's affirming and dedicating and renewing and promising and committing to get back to those essential principles so that we can leave some freedom and prosperity for our children and our children's children.
Now, isn't the idea of covenant, in a sense, dependent upon two people who presumably are people of honor, because when you make a pact like this, it's sort of a sacred pact, right?
Yes. And it's also based upon the idea, well, Martin Luther King used the phrase, the beloved community.
So the idea of a covenant is to create a community.
And my question is, Is it the case that in the environment we're in today, the politics of division, people are being thrown off digital platforms, people are being fired for saying the wrong thing at their jobs?
It seems like we are very far away, even from the idea of being a community, let alone creating any kind of covenants.
It almost seems like we have to be on our guard because the other side is sort of out to get us.
Oh, my goodness. I mean, you know, you're...
You're saying the very thing that all of us know in our hearts is true.
We see it with our eyes.
We don't have to just believe a report about this.
We're watching it in our own families.
We're watching family members cancel one another.
We're seeing relationships being split apart over issues that we know are coming from Propaganda machines.
And we, you know, it seems like we're being told more and more not to think for ourselves, but just to believe the narratives that other people give to us.
And so this idea of getting back to the one true source of information and fact and the one lens through which we can look and see the truth from the lies, and that is the truth of God and the truth of His Word.
This is the very essential ingredient for making our country work.
And I have to start in my own heart, right?
I've learned from my forefathers and foremothers in this country that the solution is an inside-out solution.
It's not coming as a solution on Air Force One, whether it's Trump or Biden or whoever the next guy is.
It's coming from the power of God first working in my heart and yours, and then it begins to gradually work its way out, kind of like the way leaven works its way through the whole lump of dough.
It changes my heart, then the goodness of God changes my marriage, and then my marriage can change the environment of my home, and now we can begin to heavenize our communities and our nation and the whole world.
That's the key, inside out.
And that starts with covenanting with God and with one another to do the right thing.
Let me ask you this.
I mean, that's actually very touching, and I agree with everything you said, but it seems to me that this is the very opposite of the strategy that's being deployed against us.
In other words, the strategy being deployed against us is from the top down.
It's very powerful people in government, in the FBI, in the media, in the digital media.
What makes you confident that a sort of bottom-up revival that is sort of one by one from the inside out, as you describe it, how is that going to somehow break this top-down monopoly that is trying to impose itself on us from above?
Well, the reason that I have confidence that that is going to work is because that's the only way that it's ever worked in history, from what I understand.
It's always a minority of people.
It's not the masses.
It's the few.
It's the faithful, often persecuted, usually outnumbered, who then catch the attention of God, who then moves on their behalf and turns the tide.
That was the case in nations all over the world, all throughout history.
And in fact, it's been the case here in this nation.
And we've seen a great awakening.
We've seen a couple of great awakenings.
And that's what I'm praying for, is revival.
That's why I've got this shirt. I don't think we're getting out of this top-down, totalitarian strategy apart from revival.
That is life flowing back into the hearts of individuals and And this life comes from heaven when we turn our eyes to the one who gave us life and who came to purchase our freedom by laying down his life for you and me.
When we come back in a moment with Kirk Cameron, we're going to talk more about this issue of revival in America.
I also want to talk a little bit about the politics of Christianity, and I want to ask Kirk what movie projects he's working on now.
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with actor and producer Kirk Cameron.
Kirk, in a sense what you were talking about I think is the example of the early Christians because they were a small group and they focused on I would say holiness and community and revival and they were persecuted and that's where I wanted to go.
Do you think that we might be moving into an age in which being a Christian Is going to be a badge of dishonor.
Is going to be something that makes us a target in a radical secular environment that sees Christianity not only as something to be marginalized, but as the enemy.
If history is an indicator of what we have to look forward to, then yes.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
We see revivals where Christianity became the dominant culture-shaping force in a culture that It became the air that they breathed.
It became the water that they drank, so to speak, and it provided flourishing for all people.
Even those who did not agree with the concepts of Christianity personally, they wanted to live in those cultures because that was the view that said that all men are created equal and that they're made in the image of God and they're not to be abused because they're different.
This is why everyone wants to come to this country.
However, If we remove God from the equation, something will fill the vacuum and ultimately it will be a totalitarian regime.
If we don't understand that, history tells us that those people of faith will become not only marginalized, but they will become demonized.
And we're seeing that happen in other countries all over the place, right?
I mean, look at what's going on in China with religious groups there.
Look what's going on and has gone on all throughout Europe.
Look what's going on in Canada.
We have friends who are ministers in churches being arrested, and people even in our country who are being called the enemy, and some of the descriptors are those evangelicals, those Christians, those people who propagate ideas that are dangerous.
And so this shouldn't surprise us.
You know, if you get arrested for your faith, you're not going to go down as...
You know, a good guy who was doing the right thing and got put in jail, you will be called a lawbreaker.
You will be called a criminal.
You will be called dangerous.
That's always how it is.
However, I think this is only happening because we in the family of faith have failed to apply the faith to all aspects of culture, including civil government.
When we divorce our faith from the responsibility to take leadership not only in our families and in our churches, but also in our school boards and in our city councils and in our state and national governments, then we will be ruled by our lessers.
People with worse ideas that long for power and control, and they will want to take those who are in opposition out first.
And that's always been the committed members of the family of faith.
It's always so striking to me that the left, you know, they use their megaphones of culture.
They use the media.
They use the digital platforms.
They use, of course, the kind of visibility of Hollywood.
Now, the church is such a powerful megaphone unto itself.
But it seems to me a lot of pastors, not all, because I saw a couple of exceptions on the stage I shared with you, but in general a lot of pastors are kind of scared to go down the political road.
They don't even apply the moral teachings of Christianity.
They're scared of their own, the man in the pew.
And my question is...
Are you calling upon pastors to step forward and be fearless in the way the early Christians are so that this megaphone can be used ultimately for the healing of the culture?
Absolutely. I mean, Dinesh, you know, we're cut from the same cloth.
This is absolutely what we need to be doing.
That's why... I mean, we could go down so many avenues here to talk about this, but it's interesting.
You're right. Ministers within the church have got a sphere of sovereignty to speak on the issues of faith and truth and morality, which ultimately will shape the culture.
Somebody's values will shape the culture.
And those who are in opposition to our values are smart.
They're using all of the megaphones available to them because we have abandoned those.
We have failed to get into politics and failed to have large networks and media companies.
And that's beginning to change.
And so I'm thankful for that.
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say.
And so now we're beginning to see people of faith saying, wow, we've really dropped the ball.
We need to catch up and begin to do what you're doing with this podcast, Dinesh, and what other people are doing.
I just watched the movie Gladiator the other day.
I can't believe it. I'm ashamed to say it's the first time I watched it.
I watched it with my son.
And one of the things I found very striking was how the emperor had controlled the masses through fear and a vision of greatness for Rome.
However, he became very nervous when the people's minds and hearts began to shift and have compassion toward Maximus the Merciful.
And he wasn't able to do whatever he wanted.
He couldn't kill him because he was afraid that the people would turn against him.
It's like the lion and the lion tamer analogy that you gave that day at church.
If the lion only knew that he was far more powerful than the lion tamer, he wouldn't cower.
He wouldn't obey. And if the church could only understand that the family of faith collectively, if we will just roar, if we will just stand for what we love and what we believe in, then the opposition would be no match.
But the lion tamer, the emperor knows this and so they continue to pump out fear and just enough to keep us satisfied and pacified so that we don't test it.
And that's what I'm praying for is revival and an awakening of people to who they really are.
And that is we the people of the United States full of faith and love for people.
Look, I love the fact that you've been speaking out and using your platform to do that.
My question is, you came of age, at a young age, in Hollywood, in a totally different environment.
And my question is, were you drinking like a different bottle of water than everyone over there?
In other words, how did you turn out so differently than what we associate to be this kind of...
Promulgation of decadence and immorality and push the envelope, and you just don't seem to be one of those kinds of people.
And my question is, say a little word about sort of how you discovered Jesus and what made you not only a Christian in practice, but an outspoken one in the manner that you are.
Aha! Maybe you shouldn't speak so quickly because after all, I am an actor.
I could be faking this whole nice guy thing.
Yes, that's true. That's true.
You could be playing a role.
You could be auditioning for Jesus in Mel Gibson's new movie, The Resurrection.
That's right. That might be why I'm growing this beard.
Listen, I would say that it's true.
I am a bit of a Hollywood prodigal.
I've sort of strayed from the decadent values of my Hollywood family.
However, I'm very grateful for that.
It's not something I ever set out to do.
When I was 17 years old, a pretty girl took me to church, and I heard the message of the gospel, which captivated my mind.
It captivated my heart.
I didn't believe in God, but I heard a message that made me think, maybe...
We're not here by accident.
And maybe the universe and the beauty of a sunset and the birth of children and my strawberries and tomatoes growing here in my backyard are not just It wasn't a happenstance, an accident, but perhaps it was designed by a brilliant,
loving creator. And when I heard the message of the gospel, the sacrifice that was made so that I could be made right on the inside and understand who I am and why I'm here, it made me start to read the Bible, and that began to change my trajectory.
Not only personally, but it made me want to live a life of integrity where my private life and my private aspirations to want to honor God and care for other people translated into my career.
And that's why I began doing things like Fireproof or Way of the Master or Monumental and the things that I'm doing now.
My faith guides me as a father, as a husband, and as an actor.
So call me crazy, but...
You know, it's been 30 years and I'm still married.
We've got six kids and you haven't seen me on, you know, the tabloid covers with a gun in my hand and a mugshot, having been picked up for selling cocaine.
And I attribute that to not me finding God, but God finding me in Hollywood.
That's amazing. Hey, I do want to mention in closing, you're working with the Kendrick brothers on a new film.
Do you want to say a word about that and let us know what to look for or look out for?
Sure. So I just finished filming a brand new film, as you said, with the Kendrick brothers.
Those are the guys who made Fireproof.
They made Courageous and War Room.
And this is a movie based on a true story.
And it's all about the value of life in the womb.
And about the beauty of adoption.
Based on a true story, it's an emotional rollercoaster, has lots of action and humor.
It's coming out in the theaters this time next year, and I think you're really going to love it.
Can't wait. Kirk, thanks for joining me on the podcast.
This has been terrific. It's an honor to speak with you and to be on the show.
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.
What is up with George Will?
This once prominent columnist in a recent interview with George Stephanopoulos made the amazing assertion that January 6th needs to be seared or emblazoned on the American mind and conscience in pretty much the same manner as 9-11.
Listen. I would like to see January 6th has burned into the American mind as firmly as 9-11 because it was that scale of shock to the system.
Is this guy like lost his marbles?
I mean, when I think of 9-11, here are some images that are burned on my mind.
Buildings falling down.
People jumping out of windows.
Charred remains.
No airplanes in the sky.
An eerie calm. And quite frankly, when I went to go on Bill Marshall, an empty chair for Barbara Olson.
Why? Because she couldn't be there.
Why? Because she was killed in 9-11.
Now, what...
What bespectacled fool, what owlish idiot, could take that, almost 3,000 people dead, and compare it to January 6th?
Where is the moral equivalence, George Will?
And in a certain way, I feel this a little personally because there was a time when I respected George Will.
George Will, Bill Buckley, these were part of the icons of the right when I was kind of coming of age politically in the 1980s.
And yet, even then, I noticed something odd about George Will.
He was always the left's favorite conservative.
And this is, by the way, why he was always on these mainstream left-leaning outlets.
He had a regular column in the Washington Post.
Meg Greenfield, the editor of the Washington Post, of the editorial page, fawned over him.
He was a regular on ABC News.
And I think to myself... What is it about the political opposition, about the left?
Because even then, the media was on the left.
Why do they love George Will so much?
And I finally sort of figured it out.
And I want to give two examples from the Reagan years that clarify the point.
George Will always tried to figure out what is the most important thing for the left.
And then he would sell out on that.
He'd be reliably conservative on everything else.
But on the one issue that mattered the most, he would sort of concede to the other side.
So, for example, at a critical point in the 80s, Reagan was pushing tax cuts, the centerpiece of Reaganomics.
And here's George Will.
I think tax cuts are very irresponsible.
They're going to contribute to the deficit.
They will ultimately—they're burning the brand of the Republicans as the party of fiscal responsibility.
So on the issue that the left cared about, they were trying to torpedo the Reagan tax cuts, Will takes their side.
He's reliably conservative on everything else, but on the thing that matters, he surrenders.
And then a little bit later, Reagan proposes missile defenses, by the way, which were critical to bringing the Soviet Union down.
But George Will, again, missile defenses, oh, those are never going to work, as if George Will even knows.
But he takes these positions at critical times.
He gives in to the other side.
He's, in a sense, the predecessor of people like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney, who are the tame opposition that the Democrats love.
Democrats really don't want an opposition.
They want a fake opposition.
They want an opposition that puts up a kind of pretend fight and then throws in the towel before the bell rings.
And that's George Will.
That's why he's always been their favorite.
That's why, in a sense, this kind of spectacular irresponsibility that he's doing now in his dotage is only a kind of continuation of a political opportunism that has characterized his whole dishonorable career.
Debbie and I have gotten to know Dr.
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Don't forget to use discount code AMERICA. We are so familiar with the pomposities of the left, their cliches, their authoritative assertions, and we sometimes don't think about them.
We are so used to hearing them that we kind of assume that there must be truth to them.
And yet I think one of the critical skills we need to develop is to scrutinize what they're saying and recognize how absurd, how preposterous, how unhistorical and illogical what they're saying truly is.
Just looking at a column written by Matthew Dowd.
By the way, Matthew Dowd has worked for both Republicans and Democrats.
He's sort of one of these Washington establishment types.
And he has an article where the title kind of tells you the whole story.
Us white male Christians need to step back and give others room to lead.
Now, the core of his argument, and I'm not going to read the kind of critical line...
Because it's delivered with the kind of know-it-all aplomb that is intended to make you go, oh yeah, that's obviously true.
Here we go. In the great span of world history, he writes, nearly all change and progress has come from an underserved and out-of-power group pushing, prodding, and pounding on those who hold power to expand it to include a wider and more diverse population.
I want to think for a moment, is that even true?
Is it true that in the great span of history, nearly all change and progress has come from marginalized out-groups pushing and demanding this kind of change?
Well, let's start with some important change occurring in non-Western cultures.
The Hindus invented the number zero, obviously a critical advance in human civilization.
Did this come about by sort of lower class Hindus saying, you know, give us zero!
We demand zero!
We're not leaving until we get zero!
No, some clever mathematician...
Thought about zero, and there we have it.
The Chinese invented the compass.
They also invented printing.
Those inventions, when they came to the West, had a transformative impact.
Who can deny that they've contributed to progress?
Now, were there marginalized peasants who organized rallies or sit-ins?
We want printing.
Please invent the compass.
No, none of that happened.
Progress occurs in a completely different way.
Think about the invention of philosophy.
The invention of philosophy on the streets of Athens.
That didn't come about by any marginalized groups doing anything.
The rise of Rome, which brought laws and aqueducts and the concepts of citizenship.
The rise of Christianity and the spread of it, which came through the conversion of the Emperor Constantinople.
The Renaissance, the great advances in literature and painting, which came really through the economic sponsorship of the Medici family.
Think of Newton's theory of gravity and all the inventions that came out of that, from man's ability to go to the moon.
Even think about political events.
Think, for example, about the Civil War.
The Civil War was a white man's fight.
Yes, there was a black regiment, but by and large, these were whites in the north fighting whites in the south.
Why? Because the slaves were not in a position to get their own liberation.
It had to be, in a sense, done by somebody else fighting and dying on their behalf.
Even the Civil Rights Revolution, we think about, was it the case of marginalized groups pushing?
Not really. Because when you think about it, if there was an intellectual argument against segregation being made by Martin Luther King, where was the intellectual argument on the other side?
Who would you identify as the champion of the segregationist cause, telling Martin Luther King, you fool, you don't know what you're talking about?
Think about it. There was none.
Why? Because the segregationists at that point were in retreat.
Martin Luther King had favorable media coverage.
He had the sponsorship of the authorities in Washington, D.C. Even before Martin Luther King, when they were desegregating the schools, Eisenhower, the president, the Republican president, sent in the 102nd Airborne and told the local segregationists, step aside, this black kid is going to attend this public school.
The bottom line of it is this wasn't merely a case of outsiders pushing in.
This was a case of the establishment, you might say, taking a position.
Think about the defeat of Nazism.
The defeat of communism.
None of this produced by marginalized groups.
It was produced by very powerful groups saying, hey listen, Soviet Union, you can build missiles, but we can build more missiles.
Or listen, Hitler, you can amass massive power, but if you do, we will amass greater power on our side to smash you.
So the bottom line of it is when we look at the great sweep of human history, yeah, there are occasional cases where outsider groups are able to sort of push their way in, and there's nothing wrong with that.
But what I'm getting at here is a supposedly intelligent person making a generalized assertion about change and progress, which when you test against experience, you realize, no, actually in most cases, change and progress, at least progress for the better, does not occur that way at all.
As leftist pressure mounts for student debt forgiveness, more stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, these Biden people are really going bonkers.
The question comes to mind, who's going to pay?
What's the economic impact?
Clearly the Biden guys think they're playing with monopoly money.
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Absolutely no sense of fiscal responsibility.
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I'm really happy to be joined on the podcast by none other than my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, author of The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America.
We're here to talk not so much about abortion today, but critical race theory.
And I wanted to have you on, Danielle, because With critical race theory on the surface, it appears like this is a whole doctrine that seems to echo the themes of Christianity.
In other words, you hear a lot about the good and the evil, the sort of sharp dividing line between the two.
I see people like taking a knee, which of course is very similar to...
Going down on your knees, genuflecting, which people do sometimes in church.
This whole kind of liturgy of self-abasement.
It's almost like the old monks.
I see whites self-flagellating themselves like the monks in the old days.
I'm evil! I've got to purge myself of my sins.
And I say to myself, is this whole thing a kind of twisted version, do you think, of Christianity?
Absolutely not.
Critical race theory is really counter to everything that the Bible preaches because the core tenet of critical race theory is that everything revolves around race.
So your key identity lies in your race, whether you're white or you're black, and there's nothing you can do to change that.
So if you're black, you're always the oppressed.
And if you're white, you're always the oppressor.
So that's not what the Bible teaches.
The Bible is about redemption.
And in critical race theory, It's non-redemptive.
So no matter how much repentance you do, you can never become the oppressor if you're the oppressed.
You can never reverse those roles.
If you're the white person, you always have to be guilty for being white, for example, even though there might be nothing that you did wrong.
Let's start by putting that into slow motion, because you've actually raised like four or five key themes.
I want to highlight them one by one.
The first one is, you are your race.
Now, people are so used to thinking of that, they'll think, well, I'm black, what else do you want me to be?
My question is, what is it about kind of embracing your identity and seeing your race as central?
What is there about that, that violates the spirit or the letter of the Bible?
Well, the Bible talks about how there's no Jew or Gentile.
Jesus didn't come for one race.
He came for everyone who accepts him.
And so I think that this idea that everything revolves around race, it's obviously a liberal ideology.
It's pushed by Marxists.
Jesus doesn't talk about power, this power struggle, in the same way that the left does today.
Which makes everything about race and hierarchy.
And for Jesus in the Bible, it's really about not making the power in terms of only rooted in race.
In true power, God has all of the real power.
And as far as the power that we have, it's the power to live according to His will.
So they interpret power completely differently than the Bible does.
Let's talk about this idea of collective guilt, collective shame, collective obligation, collective victimization.
Now, I assume that you can have collective victims, right?
The Jews were collectively the victim of Hitler.
So there's nothing wrong in talking about a group being targeted on the basis of race.
But what's interesting to me is that today, we're not talking about the victims.
We're talking about the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the victims.
So in other words, there's a sense here of sort of victimization passed down, and even more invidiously, of the victimizer status passed down.
So all kinds of people who had nothing to do with these original crimes, have no personal culpability for them, are drawn into them, And are asked to sort of repent for something that they didn't do.
Isn't that a flagrant betrayal of the fundamental biblical core that you're accountable for yourself?
You're your own soul.
You repent for what you did.
You're not repenting for other people's sins.
The only person paying for other people's sins is Jesus on the cross, right?
Exactly. And it's not even enough to them if you apologize, if you repent of something, if you Are not racist.
That's not enough for them.
They have an agenda that's always on the offense.
So they want to make it perpetual, where even throughout the schools, throughout politics, throughout everything, it's always about how can we use race to our leftist ends.
So there's never an end to it.
It only continues in their direction to use it for their political goals.
And is that because if there were an end to it, in a sense, their politics would grind to a halt?
In other words, the whole business of transferring wealth and transferring privileges and resources, and not to mention the middleman industry of race activists who sort of live off of this, there's no way they can allow that to end.
It's kind of like a guy who wants to make his own job obsolete, right?
He's going to oppose every measure that puts himself out of business.
Right, and the Democratic Party has really made their entire constituency, they've put it all together, based on race.
And a lot of the time, their ideas wouldn't even get through if they weren't constantly using racism as a way to divide people, as something to throw At people on the right, even though most people don't even probably believe a lot of the things that they're saying, but they want to force it on you.
They want to cancel you and make it so that their woke ideology is forced on you.
Because if it wasn't forced on us, a lot of people wouldn't even follow it.
You mentioned the key word divide.
Isn't it true that this politics of division is...
I mean, going back to Marx, right?
The proletariat on the one side and the capitalist class on the other.
Now we have a racial version of that.
But the politics of division seems intrinsic to all this, so far from creating a single kind of beloved community, to use Martin Luther King's famous phrase, the idea here is to drive a wedge, right?
To make people into your enemies, to treat them as they're the evil ones, and isn't the Christian idea, by contrast, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart?
Absolutely. And they have no goal of actually bringing about peace, of actually loving your neighbor or any of those things.
Their goal is to actually out your neighbor.
Say your neighbor's racist.
Tell them that they showed up at the Capitol.
You know, they don't follow anything as far as actually bringing about concrete change.
If they really cared about a lot of these minority communities, they would want school choice.
They would want to make it so that people have more opportunity They wouldn't constantly be focusing on division, but they thrive on division, and oftentimes that's the platform that they run on in order to win elections.
We're going to come back in a moment, and I'm going to talk more about why Christians get sort of suckered into this.
They think of critical race theory as somehow congruent with, maybe even an expression of Christianity.
So I want to ask you about that when we come back.
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I'm back with Danielle D'Souza Gill, author of The Choice, and we're talking about Christianity, critical race theory.
You were saying a little bit earlier, Danielle, that the tenets of critical race theory are very antithetical to Christianity.
No sense of redemption, no sense of salvation.
And of course, I'd add to this the viciously anti-Christian, anti-family remarks that you hear from, for example, the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, some of the critical race theorists themselves, and yet there are Christians who feel like...
This is sort of the new thing to embrace.
It's been a divisive issue in a number of the churches.
I think you've been telling me about your church where there's a little bit of tension around this issue.
My question is, what is it about this that draws Christians into it?
And then we're going to talk about one prominent Christian who seems very much to be suckered by all of this.
Well, oftentimes there are people on the left who make it their goal to say, how can I explain how critical race theory or anti-racism goes along with Christian doctrine?
And they really make it their goal to say to other Christians things that make them feel guilty, that make them feel like a bad person if they don't support religion.
Black Lives Matter, the organization.
And a lot of the time, our side doesn't make it a goal to really get across our message of saying, this is why it's wrong.
This is why it doesn't align with the Bible.
We often say that, you know, we shouldn't be too involved in politics.
A lot of right-wing pastors, at least, don't Bring politics into the pulpit, but a lot of left-wing pastors do.
In fact, they make their entire sermon around politics.
They fly, you know, rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter flags, and they have signs that are all about politics on their churches.
But a lot of right-leaning churches don't do that.
They really stay away from politics.
So I think that they've been just making a really concrete effort to make their arguments, and we haven't done that in the church setting very often.
How does Christian teaching, the theology of Christianity, doesn't seem by itself political, right?
In other words, you confess your sin, you ask God for forgiveness, you accept the free gift of salvation.
In and of itself, that doesn't seem political.
Where does the politics of Christianity come from?
In other words, is it the morality of Christianity that leads to politics?
How do you think about the relationship between Christianity and politics?
Well, when we look at things today, I think we just have to think about how can we apply what we learn from the Bible to how we live today.
It's not something that goes into another category.
Our faith would influence everything that we do.
So when we look at the platform of the Democrats and the platform of the Republicans, we'd see that Republicans are pro-life, for example, and that aligns with the Bible.
We'd see that they are the ones who defend religious freedom and they are the ones who want churches to be able to be open.
They want people to be able to express their religious views.
The left oftentimes tries to cancel them and make it so that they can't.
If we look at other issues like the family, the right is really in favor of that.
The left is constantly trying to break down the family and make it so that the new family is the state or the community or the person to turn to as a social worker.
Or even, let's say, if you wanted to get an abortion, talk to the abortionist.
Don't talk to your parents.
And so the left is really trying to break down the family.
And even if we look at things like Protecting our Second Amendment right.
All of these things, I think, go back to the fact that that's to protect us from the government.
And the left, I mean, their status, so they would see it as, you know, these weapons are going to be used to somehow go towards crime.
But in fact, we need to protect ourselves from them.
And so we're for these individual protections.
It's part of what you're saying that they, in a sense, divinize the government.
The government becomes the deity.
That's the thing they want people to have their full allegiance to.
And the church is kind of in the way of that.
And even God is in the way of that.
So their doctrine is...
It has a sort of deity, but the deity is the state.
Exactly. I think that they want everything to be controlled by the state and always imposing their woke ideology, their confiscation of wealth, their...
Let me ask about, you know, Tim Keller, a very prominent pastor, author of a very good book called The Reason for God, an important work of Christian apologetics.
Recently, he wrote an article in the New York Times in which he basically said that Christianity is not captive, shouldn't be captive of either party.
And this, to me, was a kind of surrender, because kind of what he was saying is the Christian is suspended in a kind of look left, look right mode.
So I want you to analyze a little bit.
I guess what he would say is that the Bible does talk about the family and the preciousness of life, but it also talks about the poor, and therefore, there's part of the liberal agenda.
Maybe it talks about fighting racism or overcoming discrimination.
To him, he sees biblical principles, apparently, on both sides of the aisle.
How would you analyze and respond to that?
I think his argument is that, oh, you know, Christianity can never be put into either box, but I think we'd have to look at it as, well, look how radical The Democrats are.
Look at what their platform actually is.
Now, if their platform was really similar to the other side, if what they were saying is, we are against abortion as well, both sides are against that, but we think that we should go about it this way and they think they should go about it that way, Then that would be something we could maybe discuss in more detail.
But he's acting as though both sides have the same principles and they don't have the same principles.
They have completely contradictory principles when it comes to life and death.
Seems to think that that's arbitrary.
I mean, the Bible has innumerable passages about the poor, but as far as I know, there's not a single passage that turns over the responsibility for the poor to the state.
I mean, I'm not aware of any place where Jesus says, listen, you don't have to do any charity, because, you know, there's Medicare.
So, in other words, the idea here is that we have moral responsibility to people in our community through churches and through charitable associations and through personal generosity.
So, there might be, I mean, I think a kind of blindness to the distinction between people assuming this responsibility and the coercive arm of the state, which is a whole different matter.
Exactly. I think for the left, the state is their church.
So they would see it as, we have to force you to donate to this, and then that money can be used for their chosen causes, as opposed to saying, oh, I'm going to choose to donate to my church, which does things that I believe in.
They want to stop all of that.
Yeah, I think at the end of the day, and I'm thinking now actually a little bit about Pope Francis and what, you know, this guy seems such a departure, for example, from Pope Benedict or even Pope John Paul II. Those popes, I think, saw themselves as the Church's missionary to the world.
And this guy sees himself as the world's missionary to the Church.
In other words, bringing secular principles to transform the Church, instead of bringing divine principles to transform the world.
Daniel, thanks for joining me. This was actually very interesting and kind of gets to the heart of the matter.
I've been discussing on today's episode the politics of Christianity, both with actor Kirk Cameron and with my daughter Danielle.
And one of the central Christian ideas, one I want to focus on, is the idea of sin.
Sin is a kind of violation, and we typically think of sin as bad stuff that people do.
But I think that when we think of morality, morality is actually more than the things you ought to do or not to do.
Morality should be seen, I think, in a broader sense as how it is good to be and also what it is good to love.
So this brings our conduct into this wider perspective of morality as a way of being.
Now, what is that way?
What does living the moral life mean?
Well, for a Christian, the moral life is living God's way, living out God's plan for us.
And so, this brings up a kind of startling idea of sin.
Sin isn't just a kind of list of bad things.
I know that people talk about the seven deadly sins, and in fact, in the Christian tradition...
This concept of the seven deadly sins goes all the way back to the early Christians.
It was, I believe, a 4th century monk who first proposed a list of sins, and then they were modified by the early church into the seven deadly sins as we know them.
It was the philosopher and theologian Aquinas who, in a sense, consolidated these into the deadly sins, and And Aquinas called them mortal sins.
And by mortal sins, what he means are these are the sins that sort of kill off the soul.
These are the sins that are grievous enough that they cut you off, that they cut you off from God.
But I think in a broader sense, sin isn't just the bad stuff that we do.
It isn't just these seven things.
Sin is really anything that departs from God's plan for us.
If God's way is this and we choose to go another way, think in fact about the fall.
God gives Adam and Eve an instruction.
Eat from any tree, just don't eat from that one.
So eating from that one is sin.
Why? Is there anything wrong with the tree?
Not necessarily by itself.
But God's way is not to do that.
And so if you do it, you are sinning.
Now, Interestingly, when I was studying Dante's Divine Comedy with a professor at Dartmouth, he raised an interesting point.
He asked the class, he goes, what is the one thing that everybody who is in hell have in common?
And most of the students were like, they're sinners.
And Professor Hollander said, well, that's not entirely right.
If they were sinners, that wouldn't be enough because we're all sinners.
So what is it that distinguishes those sinners from the sinners who are in heaven?
Well, it's the idea that they repented of their sin.
They're sinners who regretted departing from God's way and choosing their own way over God's way.
It's a very interesting scene in the Purgatorio, the kind of second of the three-part Dante Divine Comedy, where there's a guy named Manfred who comes up to Dante.
And this guy was a notorious killer.
He was a soldier. He murdered a whole bunch of people on the battlefield.
And you would expect him to go straight to hell.
And when he comes up to Dante, he actually doesn't really say anything.
He just smiles. He just smiles.
And people have wondered, what does that smile mean?
Why would this guy smile?
And most Dante scholars think that the reason he smiled is because he's sort of saying, hey, Dante, you probably didn't expect to see me here.
And here's purgatory, which means that Manfred is actually on his way to heaven.
Yes, he has to do some penance in purgatory, but in the end he will join the realm of the blessed.
Why? Not because he wasn't a sinner.
He was actually a horrible sinner.
But it turns out at the very last moment, just before he died, he sort of reached out his hand to God and essentially he asked God to come into his heart.
And the amazing thing in Christianity is that is all it takes.
That's enough. Even after a life of terrible sin, if you turn around and say you're sorry and accept the free gift of salvation, that is the only passport that you need to get into heaven.
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