David Knight critiques a Texas GOP representative's religious comparison of Donald Trump before interviewing Adam Rasmussen about Christianity post-Charlie Kirk. Despite anecdotal surges like 54,000 Turning Point USA sign-ups, Rasmussen's Cultural Research Center data reveals a steady decline in biblical worldview adoption from 11% in 1994 to just 4% today. This long-term cultural shift, measured across 2,000 adults, suggests that recent events cannot reverse decades of erosion in America's intellectual and spiritual filters. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Robotic Cops and Killer Machines00:10:10
I think this is linked to its deployment for government because that's really what's going to have the leverage and it's going to have the autonomous killer machines are going to be, uh, you know, having the robotic cops that are out there.
What's going to happen when they, um, when they go crazy on people?
Well, we're going to take a break and, uh, we're going to begin with the interviews here.
I think you're really going to enjoy these interviews.
Um, uh, the FBI detective, of course, he explained to me he's got, at first I saw him, I thought, well, he really doesn't look like an FBI agent.
Of course, he's been retired for a couple of decades and he's now.
Helping people, helping as a detective, helping people find art issues and forgeries and things like that.
But he told me after the interview, he said, The reason my hair is so long, he's got hair that comes down over his shoulders.
He said he's going that out for children who have cancer and are getting chemotherapy and have lost all their hair.
But I just saw him and I thought, Wow, he doesn't look like an FBI agent.
He looks like a ponytailed libertarian.
Some of the guys that I met in the Libertarian Party.
But we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be right back with our interviews.
First, we have coming up Adam Rasmussen, who is going to talk about the state of Christianity here.
And we all know that it's in a pretty sad shape based on what we've seen this last week and the excuses that have been made.
As a matter of fact, before we go, I've got one clip here that I wanted to play.
And that is this is a GOP representative.
Listen to what he says about Donald Trump.
And The context of what's been happening this last week.
This is a GOP representative from Congressman from Texas.
I believe that Donald Trump is better than sliced bread.
I think he's almost the second coming, in my humble opinion.
I think he's done a fantastic job.
He's got a very difficult job.
Pope's got a tough job, you know, got issues in the church.
But Donald Trump has a very, very difficult job to do, the toughest job in the world.
Yeah, yeah.
He is nearly the second coming of Christ, he said.
Yeah.
Nearly, huh?
Well, they get right up to the line, except these people have crossed over the line so far.
It's not even funny.
We're going to take a quick break.
We'll be right back with Adam Rasmussen to talk a little bit about the state of Christianity here in America.
We'll be right back.
Elvis.
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Find them on the Oldies channel at APSradio.com.
Joining us now is Adam Rasmussen.
He is with the Cultural Research Center out of Arizona.
And I've talked to George Barnum in the past.
He also works with that organization.
It comes out of Arizona Christian University.
And you can find their website at culturalresearchcenter.com.
We're going to talk to him about the spiritual.
State of America.
And of course, it's always a difficult thing to measure.
So we're going to talk to them about the metrics.
It's a great last name, probably just a coincidence.
Okay.
All right.
Let's talk a little bit about what's going on because we've had a lot of buzz about how the assassination of Charlie Kirk has caused a revival in terms of a lot of people reassessing their lives, as we always see when there's a sudden death of somebody who is very well known, especially.
Charlie Kirk being very outspoken about his faith.
What did you see when you looked at this?
Arizona Christian University is in Glendale, which is right next door to where Charlie Kirk went to church.
So a lot of our students and faculty knew him.
And if people were watching on TV, they saw the memorial service and wow, what a powerful life Charlie lived and what he stood for and the people that are.
With Turning Point USA and just incredible.
And those anecdotal stories that we've heard about people signing up to have Turning Point USA on their campus, like over 54,000 turned around for that.
And we've heard about Bible sales being up from the American Bible Society and those kind of things.
But the long term results just really aren't showing much of a change as it comes to biblical worldview.
And that's really what we study at the Cultural Research Center.
We want to understand people's.
Beliefs and behaviors that flow from those beliefs.
And it's pretty much the same since September 2025.
And we just measured that again.
It's still at 4% for biblical worldview incidents.
And there's been a significant.
Yeah, let me just interject here.
I'm sorry.
There was a significant decline from 2020.
In the report that you just put out, you looked at 2020, 2023, and 2026.
And there's a significant decline from 2020.
Was 2020 higher than usual, or is this a long term decline that's going on?
Because I can imagine a lot of people are challenged with the things that were happening in their lives during 2020, and that might have caused an uptick.
Was that the case, or is this just a long term downward slope?
That's a great question, brother.
We look at this trending since all the way back to 1994.
So, the construct that George Barna and the Cultural Research Center work with is what we call biblical worldview.
So, how does it square with the Bible?
Not Christian, not Protestant, not Catholic.
We're just looking at what does God say in his word?
And in 95, it was at 11%, and it has declined down to where we are today at 4%.
I don't think it's ever gone up.
So, the number you're looking at in 2020 was at 6%.
So, across the U.S., among adults, 6% of them had a biblical worldview in 2020.
COVID happened.
We had these mandates where we couldn't meet together.
Within 18 months, it reduced in 33%.
So, it went from 6% down to 4%, which is kind of where we're at right now.
Well, and I guess a part of that is, you know, if you're going to a church and the church just shuts down, it's like, oh, what we're doing is not important, I guess.
That is, people are seeing a real conflict.
And I guess that's really kind of how you look at this.
What do people say they believe?
And do we see evidence of that in their life?
And so, if there's an inconsistency in what's happening in the leadership of the church, I imagine that helps a lot of people to turn the other way and say, well, we don't really think that they really believe this necessarily.
It's a difficult thing to measure somebody's practice.
So, how do you do that?
I mean, this is something.
That is very personal between an individual and God.
It's difficult to measure, but you've got certain ways that you look at this to see how the culture is going.
And of course, as I've said many times, culture as well as politics are all downstream from what you think about God, right?
Absolutely.
I think it was Tozer that said, What you think about God is the most important part of who you are.
And you're right, individually and then corporately as a culture, what we believe about God and morality affects everything.
Everything.
And the way we measure it is a scientific study, a representative sample of 2,000 adults in the US.
And it has a 95% confidence interval, plus or minus 1 or 2%.
So this is kind of the gold standard of social science.
And really, we're just measuring tendencies of central tendency, okay, like right in the middle of averages.
And There are about 50 questions.
Some of them are demographic, depending on what we're focused on.
But mostly it takes about 20 minutes to fill out.
And yeah, that's how we do it.
And you've got different categories that you put people into.
Talk a little bit about the terms that you've got here.
The Gold Standard Survey00:00:32
First of all, what do you mean by worldview?
Explain that to the audience.
Great question.
So everyone has a worldview, it is the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual filter through which an individual.
Experiences, interprets, and interacts with the world.
So, we all have a worldview, and it is the basis of every one of our decisions.
So, the biblical worldview is only one among many, and the biblical theism we are defining as coming from scripture.