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Nov. 15, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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MARICOPA MADNESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep457
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Coming up, I'll reveal the voter suppression in Maricopa County that seems to be responsible for Carrie Lake's shocking loss.
I'll examine Mike Pence's bizarre allegation that Trump endangered him and his family on January 6th.
What? Hispanics are tilting GOP? And I'll argue this is because conservative Hispanics have figured out which political party they belong in.
And Dennis Prager joins me.
We're going to talk about the wisdom of the Hebrew Bible and his new book, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
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There are several developments in connection with the midterms that I want to talk about.
Very shockingly, Carrie Lake has lost her race in Arizona for the governor.
And Katie Hobbs, who didn't debate and didn't campaign and was acknowledged even by her own side to be a lackluster candidate, somehow pulled it off by, what, 20,000 or so votes.
This makes absolutely no sense.
Polls actually showed Cary Lake leading by 10 points.
In fact, the whole slate, including Abe Hamade for Attorney General, Mark Fincham for Secretary of State, all of them were leading.
And it looks like Fincham has lost.
Hamade, I'm not sure.
Cary Lake has lost.
And the question becomes, how is this really possible?
What's really going on here?
I don't know if I have the full story.
One part of the story is voter suppression by the Democrats and by the left, and perhaps by Katie Hobbs, who after all is overseeing the election.
You have this bizarre spectacle of Katie Hobbs as Secretary of State overseeing an election in which she's the candidate.
Debbie goes, this is like being the referee and the quarterback in a game at the same time.
But another way to look at it is, here's Katie Hobbs.
She's the judge of a beauty contest in which she is herself a contestant.
It's profoundly stupid.
It erodes confidence in the process.
And all of that is becoming an even bigger and more urgent question now.
There were all these technical glitches with tabulators in Maricopa County, the largest county, by the way, in the state.
And lots of people, estimates vary, but something around 20% of people who show up to vote are not able to vote, at least not able to vote right then and there.
They have to go elsewhere or they are blocked from voting because the tabulators aren't working.
So what is this, if not a kind of blocking of the vote?
Now they claim it was a technical glitch.
These things do happen.
But the reason it's so significant is that Carrie Lake had been telling her voters, vote on election day.
In fact, this is a kind of a Republican mantra.
Trump said something to the same effect in 2020.
It's a mantra that, by the way, I think needs to be reconsidered.
Debbie and I have talked about on the podcast whether Republicans should embrace early voting.
Because think about it. If you...
If you say to your own side, only vote on Election Day, this is kind of like saying we're going to play this football game, but only play in the fourth quarter.
The last quarter is the one that really matters.
Save all your energy.
That's when we're really going to move the ball.
Well, if the Democrats figure, well, let's think of some ways we can sort of slow things down in the fourth quarter.
Let's think of some ways we can put some glitches that conveniently show up.
And then we have ruined the entire game plan of the other side.
And in a close election, that's more than enough to make up the difference.
Now, our friend Harmeet Dillon is in Arizona with an army of lawyers.
Republicans have, this time, much more than 2020, are kind of on it.
I expect there's a lot of litigation that's going to come out of this.
I hope it's not simply one of those, let's fix things the next time, but go to a judge and basically say, look, if you find that there was enough voter suppression that could have made the difference in this election, then you have to redo the election.
You just have to set a new date, almost like the runoffs in Georgia, and redo the Arizona election.
We'll see. I'll be watching closely to see what happens there.
Now, let me turn to the overall picture.
Republicans have been picking up seats, one after the other.
Now, when I say picking up seats, this is in the 25 or so races that hadn't been called that are all close.
But it looks like Republicans are now at latest count, and this was when I looked last night, just one seat away from having a confirmed House majority.
And that is with another dozen or so races uncounted.
Let's assume Republicans win half of those and lose half of those.
That means Republicans will end up somewhere with a five, six, maybe seven seat majority in the House.
It's still something and it's important.
But it's not, of course, what we had hoped for.
Let me turn also to the statement by Mike Pence where he says that, quote, reckless Trump endangered me and my family on January 6th.
I think this is relevant in part because Trump has a big announcement today.
I'll be discussing that on the podcast tomorrow.
But what is this coming from Mike Pence?
First of all, I've seen the video of Mike Pence and his family inside the Capitol.
And while I'm sure there was some unease because of the uncertainty of what's going on out there, nobody looks particularly freaked out.
They're continuing having animated conversations.
At one point, I think Mrs.
Pence steps up and closes the drapes.
But she doesn't seem flustered in any way.
And the second point of it, I mean, I grant there was irresponsible rhetoric that some people indulged in about Mike Pence.
Some crazy people hang Mike Pence.
What was it? Lin Wood put Mike Pence in front of a firing squad.
Yeah, that's not Trump. That's Lin Wood.
By the way, what happened to that guy?
He sort of disappeared from the face of the earth.
Some people suspected from the beginning he was some sort of a democratic plant.
I'm not really going to go down that road.
But it seems to me that that irresponsible rhetoric was Was bad.
And yet, interestingly, here is Mike Pence, I think, wrongly trying to put the blame on Trump.
Trump is not the culprit here.
The culprit to the degree that people said things that should not have been said came from the outside, came from people who are unaffiliated with Trump.
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But now... Dinesh Dinesh Republicans, as I speak, are on the very verge of getting the House majority.
In fact, right in the middle of doing the podcast, I was just looking online and I see that it looks like Lauren Boebert, who, by the way, was in a really close race today.
For her seat in a Republican district.
Looks like she will pull it out and win.
The race is pretty much over.
And it could be very well Lauren Boebert who gives the GOP the majority.
Now, there's going to be probably five or six more seats coming our way.
And this raises the question of who's going to be the Speaker.
Now, Kevin McCarthy is feverishly rounding up the votes.
But it looks like there's a rebel faction that could block, delay, perhaps even deny him the Speakership.
And I think that's actually appropriate.
Now, kind of amusingly, there's been some talk about Trump being the Speaker of the House.
And Technically, that is a possibility in the sense that there's nothing in the rules that says that you have to even belong.
You don't even have to be in the House to be the Speaker.
I mean, I guess Debbie could be the Speaker, or me.
Now, with Trump, I think we all know it's not going to happen.
Why? Because, well, today, I expect—I'm not certain of it, but I expect— Debbie and I were invited to be there, but we're not going to be there at Mar-a-Lago.
Danielle, my daughter, is, and her husband, Brandon, I think will be in the audience.
And obviously, we're expecting Trump to announce a run for the presidency.
So obviously, he's not going to be in line to...
I'd like to see some people give Kevin McCarthy a run for it.
And I also think that the conservative faction, the Freedom Caucus, should, even if Kevin McCarthy makes it, extract very specific concessions and agreements from McCarthy as a condition for supporting him.
Interestingly, Marjorie Taylor Greene is supporting him.
I think she thinks that he's the best way to keep the House unified, which is of course important when you have a very narrow majority.
Very briefly, there could be also a debate about who is going to chair the RNC now.
To me, Rona McDaniel is a complete dud.
She's lost essentially three elections in a row, 2018, 2020, 2022.
I mean, who possibly would even want to continue with that kind of a dismal record?
There's been some talk about Lee Zeldin who lost narrowly in New York for the governor.
Lee Zeldin running, which I think would be an excellent idea.
I saw Matt Schlapp, the founder of CPAC, tweeting out today that maybe his wife would be a good candidate.
Some people have suggested, I think this is a long shot and it's not going to happen.
Scott Tressler, the activist who probably logs more miles and works harder for the GOP than anyone else and yet has never, he says, even been contacted by the GOP establishment, which is itself kind of a scandal.
So my position in the RNC leadership at this point is pretty much anybody but Rona.
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Feel the difference. There are not a lot of bright lights in this midterm landscape, but one of them surely is the steady movement of Latinos toward the GOP. Now, this is not a movement that has been completed.
It is a movement that is underway.
If you look, for example, at Florida, heavy Latino vote for DeSantis.
And interestingly, he seems to have won Latinos kind of across the board.
With Greg Abbott in Texas, the results a little bit more mixed, but Abbott got a decent share of the Latino vote.
If you look at the Rio Grande Valley, a special interest of Debbie's in mind because Debbie grew up there.
We have three Latina Republicans running, Cassie Garcia and Mayra Flores, who is in Debbie's own district where her mom lives, and then Monica de la Cruz.
And only one of them, Monica de la Cruz won.
But the other two actually came really close.
Cassie Garcia was edged out, by the way, by a fairly conservative Democrat.
Is that the guy's name, Henry?
Henry Cuellar. And Mayra Flores, I mean, this is a district that used to go easily 60-40, 20-point difference or more, even more.
And Mayra got, what, 43 or 44?
Yes. And so the other guy, so there's still a 10-point gap, but the point is the gap is narrowing.
Now, what's really happening here is very interesting.
What's happening is that conservative Hispanics, and it turns out there's a decent number of those, are becoming more Republican.
Admittedly, liberal Latinos are becoming more democratic, which is hardly a surprise.
But the significant thing is that there was this anomaly of conservative-leaning Hispanics who are voting democratic.
And this is historical.
This is very similar to the South having been democratic really for two generations, three generations.
It's similar to the fact that working class people used to habitually vote democratic but are now kind of waking up and moving toward the Republican Party.
So what's really happening is that conservative Hispanics are saying basically, wait a minute, I'm for upward mobility.
I'm for lower taxes.
I own a small business.
I believe in family values.
I don't like this idea of abortion on demand.
I don't like this idea that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man.
So when I really look at this kind of menu or ensemble of positions and values, I really don't align with the Democratic Party.
So kind of why have I been...
It makes no sense for me to vote Democratic.
I'm voting to undermine the very...
Yes.
Yes. As you know, going back to 2016 and before, the left has always tried to portray the Republican Party as racist, as the party of white supremacists, as the party of the white people.
It's a graying party of older people.
None of this is really going to be true.
And I think the left is waking up to the fact that You know, more and more blacks, particularly black males, are now trending toward the Republicans.
With Hispanics, you could see in the future elections where Republicans get 30%, 40%, 50%, maybe even in certain places 60% of the Hispanic vote.
So, what we're seeing, and I think this is overall a good thing, kind of a racial depolarization.
And by that I mean, it was a little more obvious going back now, probably 10 years or more, that if you were white, you could reasonably be expected to lean Republican.
And if you were a minority, you could reasonably be expected to lean Democratic.
And now that's no longer the case.
You have lots of liberal whites, even affluent liberal whites who are voting Democratic, and you've got more and more working class blacks and Hispanics who go, you know what, I'm giving the Republican Party the first look.
I might vote Republican for the first time this time.
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There is a senior agent, an FBI agent in the San Francisco Bureau.
His name is Elvis Chan.
Yeah, I'm not kidding.
His first name is Elvis.
And that's strange enough.
I guess his parents were fans of Elvis.
But his last name is Chan.
In any event, this guy is the lynchpin.
He's the key for FBI involvement and, in some ways, Biden administration involvement in digital censorship.
Why? Because he's located in San Francisco.
He has deep connections with the 300 or so Silicon Valley companies and platforms that are based in San Francisco.
He has constant dealings with them.
He evidently was actively involved, not solely involved, but actively involved in the suppression of the Hunter Biden story.
And this guy has been sort of, let's call it, in hiding.
And by hiding, I don't mean literally in hiding.
I mean that the government is trying to shield him from coming forward and testifying.
Now, yesterday I had on the podcast Representative Ken Buck of Colorado who talked about a lawsuit that has been filed by the Attorneys General of Louisiana and Missouri.
And the purpose of the lawsuit is to ferret out information about the full extent of the FBI's and the Biden administration's collaboration with these big tech platforms.
And so, as part of that lawsuit, the plaintiffs demanded that this guy, Elvis Chan, come forward and testify.
Now, the Biden administration tried to stop that, and they basically said that this is a guy...
Who did not directly order Facebook or Meta to suppress the Hunter Biden story.
He's not the guy who did that.
And the plaintiffs are like, we're not saying he is the guy that solely did that.
Maybe he was part of a team.
He certainly has had extensive connections with these Silicon Valley companies.
And we want to find out the full extent of the FBI's involvement.
By the way, not in suppressing stories that are false.
But in suppressing stories that are true.
The Hunter Biden story is a perfect example.
The story is true. The point of the suppression was to hide the truth.
So in the name of fighting misinformation, you could almost say that the FBI has become a conduit of misinformation.
What is the misinformation? That there's nothing there.
That the Hunter Biden story is Russian disinformation.
That it was planted by Russian agents.
All lies. And by the way, remember, many deep state officials came out and swore to the lie.
That the Hunter Biden story was somehow Russian disinformation.
Now, happily, I'm actually looking at it right now, a U.S. District Court judge, this is Terry Doty, D-O-U-G-H-T-Y, is not falling for the Biden administration's He signed an order saying, hey, listen, I don't know what this guy Elvis Chan knows, but I am ordering that he appear for a deposition and he testify about what he knows and about what he did.
This guy, Elvis Chan, is together with another senior FBI agent.
This is Laura McLeod. She was a section chief of the FBI's so-called Foreign Influence Task Force.
She's a defendant, by the way, in this lawsuit.
And she seems to have been the direct communicator to Meta or to Facebook about suppressing the Hunter Biden story.
And of course, her pretext is...
It's Russian disinformation.
Don't touch this. This is a story that was sort of cooked up by foreign actors.
Now, we know today that is not true.
It's a legitimate story.
The Hunter Biden laptop is real.
The material on the Hunter Biden laptop was put there by Hunter Biden.
There's even independent corroboration of that, which is Tony Bobulinski, the business partner of the Bidens.
And to his credit, Judge Doty has, in this case, been ordering a number of major figures, major, you could almost call it, censorship moguls in the Biden team to come forward and testify, such as Anthony Fauci.
Why? Because Fauci apparently, like this guy Chan, was actively involved in ways that haven't been publicly disclosed yet.
In working with these platforms, yeah, censor that guy.
Yeah, remove that guy. Yeah, we don't want to see this being shared on Facebook.
No, we don't want to see this being shared on Twitter or on YouTube.
So there's a very active censorship regime that has been in place.
We're only learning the full extent of it now.
And I think there's an important step in this judge ordering this FBI agent, who is clearly or seems to be one of the bad actors, to come forward and fess up to what he's been up to.
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Do it today. Guys, I'm really delighted to welcome to the podcast my friend Dennis Prager.
You all know Dennis Prager.
He hardly needs any introduction.
He's the famous and fantastic syndicated radio host.
He's also the founder of Prager University, the author of a whole bunch of best-selling books on politics, religion, and happiness.
We're going to talk about his new book, which is called The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy.
By the way, also DennisPrager.com.
That's the website. Dennis, welcome to the podcast.
I'd like to start by asking you about the midterms.
It seems that almost no one saw this coming.
It's a rare case where the polls appear to have overstated Republican support.
What do you think happened?
If the public is so intensely against what Biden is doing, low approval ratings, all this nonsense going on around the country, why would the public turn around and take it out on the Republicans?
By the way, just for the record, I just want to state I never once uttered or implied there would be a red wave.
I find predictions to be almost foolish.
I don't know why they're made.
It doesn't help anybody.
The world is an unpredictable place.
But to answer you in a nutshell, when you own virtually all the means of communication in a society, You have almost unlimited power.
And people just need to understand that.
All they hear is insurrection, threat to democracy, women's rights will send them back to the 19th century.
And if that's all you hear, and that is all they hear, see, we who are conservative know exactly what they say.
They don't know at all what we say.
And that's a huge distinction and a huge advantage that they have.
So living in the world that they live and arousing the passions that they do, if you vote Republican, you're voting to end this democracy.
And if you deny that, you may be kicked off Facebook or Google or YouTube.
That's an enormous advantage.
But yes, the American people did seem to vote against its own interests.
I put no sugarcoating on this issue.
It is a disgrace that the party that is wrecking our country won in the Senate.
I mean, I think a point that you're highlighting that's critical here is that because we're in the political world, we assume that everybody is getting a fire hose of political information.
Whereas the vast majority of people are living in a kind of fog where they pay intermittent attention to politics only in perhaps the days or at most weeks leading up to the midterms.
And then their sources of information are heavily skewed to one side.
And that alone is almost like a kind of contribution to the Democrats that is being made en masse by the national media.
That's right, and we are doing a great job within the world of the media that we control.
And by the way, the great job is not to skew the news.
The great job is to tell the truth.
That's the irony.
My column today, I write a column each week and it comes out today, this week, is how do you know the difference?
A young man called into my fireside chat that I do every week and he said, Dennis, how can I tell who's telling the truth, who's lying?
And I said, here is an almost foolproof answer.
The side that censors is lying.
What a brilliant observation.
Why else would you need to censor if not to...
Yeah, that's a great point.
Dennis, let's pivot a little bit.
Let's talk about the book, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy.
And here we have a...
I mean, your book is just...
It almost is a bottomless set of ideas and wisdom.
And so we're only going to be able to sort of skim it and touch on it a little bit.
Yeah. Here you have this book of Deuteronomy, which is really a book of laws.
Laws that are handed forth by Moses.
I think you say that Moses is the speaker in Deuteronomy.
So let's talk for a little bit about these laws.
There are a lot of them.
A lot of Christians are familiar.
240. 240.
Now, Christians, of course, familiar with the Ten Commandments, a sort of distillation of laws.
But for a lot of Christians, the idea of having these innumerable laws, and some of them of considerable minutia or detail, at least seemingly so, talk about why you have these laws, why are they regulating things at such an intricate level, what's the point of it?
Bye.
Well, this could be a very long answer.
I'll try to keep it brief. First, I think your viewers need to know something that I did not know.
I learned it after the publication.
The book that the founders of the United States most quoted, secular or religious, is Deuteronomy.
The book that Jesus cites the most outside of Psalms is Deuteronomy.
People don't know this. It's the fifth of the five books of the Torah.
The Torah is the foundational document of the Old and New Testaments.
Love God, love your neighbor, the Ten Commandments, the Exodus, the Creation, Garden of Eden.
It is all there.
My view is that the problem in our society and in the West is secularism.
Secularism is a dead end.
Secularism leads ultimately to the collapse of civilization, which is exactly what we are seeing now.
We have been living off the fumes of Deuteronomy, if you will, and Exodus and Genesis and so on.
We have been living off their fumes for the last few generations.
The fumes have now withered away, and now men give birth.
The chaos in which we are living today is the direct result of secularism, and I have a proof.
The most foolish institution in our society is the university, and it is the most secular institution in our society.
There are no secular institutions with wisdom.
There are a handful of secular people with wisdom.
There are no secular institutions.
The only antidote to the crisis the West is in is to reacquaint ourselves and take this book called the Bible seriously.
I've been working 10 years after teaching 40 years.
I know biblical Hebrew like English, thank God.
It was a gift to me, as it were, and then I developed it.
And I'm trying to make it relevant.
There is a law in Deuteronomy.
Talk about laws. I'll give you one example.
I'll give you as many as you want.
We don't have a lot of time, I know.
But here's a beauty.
You cannot favor the poor in a courtroom.
It is a law against social justice.
The Bible is only interested in justice.
The left is interested.
The anti-Bible world is interested in social justice.
Just that alone is worth the price of the book.
You can't favor the poor man in judgment is the antidote to social justice.
Social justice means you do favor the poor guy, and justice says you do what is right.
Amazing. Let's take a pause, Dennis.
When we come back, we'll delve more into the underlying concept of Deuteronomy and then explore this concept of law a little bit further.
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I'm back with the one and only Dennis Prager.
DennisPrager.com is the website, the new book, the one we're talking about, The Rational Bible, Deuteronomy.
Dennis, you talk about in this book the concept that is often translated as revering God or respecting God.
But you say, let's get down to it.
The actual meaning of the biblical passage is faith.
Fearing God.
But it appears like there's something about our modern sensibility that recoils from the concept of fearing God.
God is supposed to be, God loves us, we love God, you're not supposed to fear something that you love.
You say that the fear of God is in some ways the beginning of wisdom, and explain why that is.
Well, that actually, that quote is from the Bible, that wisdom begins with the fear of God.
Look, the human being fears.
We're born with fears.
There's no way to eliminate fear in the human psyche, condition, and heart.
So the question is not whether you will fear, it is what you will fear or whom you will fear.
There is a great story.
I want to just make clear, this is the third of my five-volume commentary.
Genesis and Exodus have been published.
I didn't obviously go in order because this is the fifth book, but this is the third of my five volumes.
In Exodus, there is a great story.
The Pharaoh, who was a demigod, half-god, half-man, orders midwives to kill Hebrew babies that are born, Hebrew male babies, to drown them in the Nile.
They didn't. They disobeyed Pharaoh.
It's like disobeying Stalin or Hitler.
They disobeyed him, and it says why.
The hesitation is because I'm translating from the Hebrew.
The midwives feared God.
If you fear God, it is liberating.
Then you don't fear man.
It is psychologically and morally indispensable to a good life, to a healthy life, to fear God.
My claim is that during COVID, more churches and synagogues feared the CDC and the New York Times than they feared God.
That is how powerful the notion is of fearing God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian pastor in Germany, who died because he resisted Hitler and the Nazis, he feared God more than Hitler.
Most Christians in Germany feared Hitler more than God.
This is not even an indictment.
This is a description.
By the way, this will blow your mind, Dinesh.
There is one other being we are told to fear In the Bible.
Our parents. So here is an interesting little anecdote.
I once asked on my radio show, if you didn't take drugs when you were young, when you were in high school, why didn't you?
Virtually every person who called in said, because my mother would kill me.
That's fascinating. And when I think about my own parents, I mean, I think I did have a kind of, you could almost call it a holy fear of them.
Holy fear.
And I guess I knew a little bit that a part of me had inclinations that went against my own long-term self-interest.
And so I was counting on my parents to be kind of the enforcers of my own long-term self-interest.
And I think, you know, the Bible, of course, equates God with being our father.
So it's interesting that this analogy holds both at the level of our own parents and— And people will notice what the left, which is the antithesis of biblical wisdom— What the left is doing more than anything else is undermining parental authority.
Every cult, every totalitarian movement begins with the removal of parental authority.
I mean, if you look also at, and you know this as well as anyone, the themes of our novels and our sitcoms, it's always that the parents are really stupid.
And the young people always know what's really going on.
And the audience is encouraged to identify with the rebellion against the parents.
Now, one of the themes that you focus on is not merely parental authority, But I think an equally critical one, the distinction between the sexes and the different roles that those imply.
There is a line in Deuteronomy, quote, neither sex may wear the clothing of the other sex.
What does that mean today?
It's clear.
The Bible, the biblical theology rests upon distinctions.
God does not create for six days.
He creates the first day, then he creates animals, and he creates humans.
Otherwise, the word create is never used.
What God does for six days is make distinctions between light and dark, between dry land and sea, between good and evil, between man and woman, between man and God, between the holy and the profane.
This is We're good to go.
And when you end biblical wisdom, you end up with men give birth, men menstruate, Virgin Air and British Airways have just announced that male pilots can wear women's clothing and, of course, the flight attendants as well.
This is what secularism ultimately leads to.
Dinesh, I have said all of my 40 years of broadcasting, I have had one overwhelming theme to everything I have said.
The consequences of secularism.
We all know the consequences of too much religion, but nobody talks about the consequences of too much secularism.
And ultimately, you are now seeing it.
500,000 young Americans say that they are the other sects.
This is what it leads to.
So Deuteronomy could not be more relevant.
Well, I got to say that this is a book that if you almost randomly open it and start reading it, there are gems that sort of jump out at you on every page.
I mean, the book itself, I think, demands careful attention and study over a period of time because there's so much in it.
And it's part of a series.
So this is really... Would you say in some ways, Dennis, we'll close on this, is this kind of...
Is this the kind of crowning accomplishment of your work?
Because this is something that is an incredible intellectual endeavor, and yet you present it in a way that is digestible and accessible to people.
Well, with regard to the last point, this is my motto.
I work hard so that the reader doesn't.
I spend most of my time Rewriting and rewriting and rewriting so that it is so clear that a peasant in China who never heard of Moses will understand what I'm saying.
That is my magical reader.
My imaginary reader is a peasant in China because I believe that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, can change anybody's life for the better, whether it is a Jew, a Christian, an atheist, or a peasant in China.
I mean, you have an opening section where you go to Jewish readers, to Christian readers, to non-religious readers, and it occurred to me, well, that pretty much covers everybody.
So this is a book that is not a book that is kind of insular, but one that is put out there for the widest possible audience.
Well, I have a motto that when I began teaching the Torah at a Jewish seminary, and I saw that half my class were not Jewish, And it made sense to me.
I used to say to them, the Torah is as much only for the Jews as Beethoven is only for Germans.
That's perfectly put.
Thanks very much, Dennis.
Really appreciate your comment on the podcast.
It's an honor. Thanks.
I'm talking about the global revival of religion and specifically of Christianity.
This is all drawn from the opening chapter of my book, What's So Great About Christianity?
It may be kind of cool if you get a copy of the book in paperback.
You can follow along.
as I'm talking about all this.
Now, as I mentioned, there's a kind of sweeping revival of Hinduism in India, Islam in North Africa, also obviously in the traditional Islamic world, but also in Asia, countries like Indonesia, and of course, the revival of Islam in Turkey.
Some people think this is some sort of a fundamentalist revival.
We keep hearing about Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism.
In my view, this is a little dumb because fundamentalism is in fact a concept internal to Protestant Christianity.
There was a so-called fundamentalist movement about 100 years ago occurring in the United States.
And this was a kind of let's go back to the basics movement inside of Protestantism.
And it was a rebellion against so-called liberal Christianity, the infusion of liberalism into the Protestant churches.
So if we're not talking about a revival of fundamentalism, what is it?
Well, it's a revival of traditional religion.
It's the revival of Islam the way Islam's been since the 7th century.
It's a revival of Hinduism the way Hinduism is understood through the Hindu classics like the Bhagavad Gita.
It's a revival of Christianity the way Christianity has been through the centuries.
Now, traditional Christianity is not the only type of Christianity.
There's also, let's call it, progressive or liberal Christianity.
And it's being pushed very hard today, especially onto young people.
As a way of trying to keep Christianity relevant.
And the problem with liberal Christianity...
It's simply this, that liberal Christianity embraces a whole series of liberal causes, equal rights for women, introducing kind of gays into the church, making the churches more democratic, and so on.
But the problem is this.
It's kind of twofold.
As a Christian, you're supposed to be the church's ambassador to the world.
You're supposed to take Christian ideas and push them out there into the world.
It seems like what the liberal Christians are doing is they are sort of not the church's missionaries to the world, but the world's missionaries to the church.
They take secular values, gay marriage and feminism, and they start agitating within the church.
It's almost as if the church is the problem.
We've got to fix the church.
The church needs to change in line with the world and not the other way around.
Probably the most devastating criticism of liberal Christianity is that it's a failure on its own terms.
It's supposed to be making Christianity more relevant and therefore more popular.
Okay, well, let's look at the liberal churches.
Which are they? The United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ.
All of these churches are losing members in droves.
You walk into a United Church of Christ, I mean, it's largely empty.
By contrast, if you go to the conservative churches, Baptist churches, Assemblies of God churches, what do you see? Churches are full of people.
So, what I'm getting at is that the traditional Christian message is resonating far more with people than the so-called watered-down, diluted, progressive message where people go, well, listen, I mean, I guess I can sit in church and listen to this guy drone on about feminism, but I could just as easily go join some feminist I'm listening to all this sort of talk about gays and tolerance.
Well, I mean, I could go, I guess, march on the gay rights parade myself and be even more relevant.
So in a sense, the question becomes, why join a liberal church when those messages are actually pervasive in the culture?
And there are other organizations that reflect those values.
Now, I think what's encouraging to me is that for many years, we have been hearing that as the world sort of becomes, along with technology, and as time passes, the world will automatically become more secular.
People sort of assumed, and scholars assumed, that as people became more educated, they would stop going to church, and cultures that were once traditional, as they began to advance toward modernity, would become less traditional and would kind of throw away the baggage of their ancient, if you will, religious convictions.
But this does not appear to be happening.
In fact, if you look at the most rapidly modernizing societies around the world, they're becoming actually more religious.
There's a huge revival of Hinduism going on in India, so much so that some Muslims and Christians are a little threatened by it.
While the Hindus were normally these kind of go-along, get-along guys, don't seem to be too concerned about their Hinduism at all, suddenly are more conscious about it.
So as India becomes more technological, more modern, is rapidly growing economically, religion is reviving.
And by the way, there is also a strong Christian movement now, largely underground, in China.
And over 100 million Christians in China.
Think about that. That's still a minority, of course, of the Chinese population.
But there's a kind of a weird relationship between suppression and what happens to a group of people.
They could actually shut down under suppression, as happened, for example, politically with Tiananmen Square.
Or they could respond the other way.
oppression actually makes people more fervent, more strong in their convictions, the underground churches begin to grow. That appears to be happening in China. So the point I want to make is that if you take a global sort of survey, you see that religion in general and Christianity in particular are doing Now, of course, none of this by itself proves that Christianity is true or religion is true.
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