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June 29, 2023 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
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Listen and Weep | Eric Metaxas | EP 371
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And that thin theological view that some Christians have of what it is to have faith is profoundly wrong.
It is unbiblical.
And that's where we have drifted to this idea that people say, I can be against something in my mind, but I don't have to do anything about it.
Hello, everyone watching and listening.
Today I'm speaking with author, speaker, radio host, and incorrigible Eric Metaxas.
We discuss his most recent book, A Letter to the American Church, which argues that it's a betrayal of faith to stay silent in the face of tyranny.
We parallel the rise of the wannabe arbiters of speech across history against those making themselves manifest today and detail the responsibility to act against falsehood that's an intrinsic part of the Abrahamic tradition, although increasingly non-existent in the American church today.
So you recently wrote Letter to the American Church.
I released a podcast a while back, or I guess it was just a monologue, which was Message to Christians.
And so obviously, to some degree, we're thinking along parallel lines.
Why did you think it was necessary to write A letter to the American church.
What did you mean by the American church?
And tell us about the letter and what the consequences of writing that was.
That was 2022 that was released, right?
Yes.
I'm large.
I contain multitudes.
You know who said that?
I believe it was Chris Christie.
Just kidding.
I'm very eclectic.
I'm very eclectic.
And I have to tell you that some people know me principally as a writer because I've written whatever, 14 plus books, many children's books.
I do, of course, radio show, TV show, and so on and so forth.
But almost everything that I do, I do for everyone.
In other words, I'm trying to reach a broad audience, not just I want to sell more books, but because I feel God created me to speak to a popular audience, to a wide audience.
This most recent book, which is my shortest book, Letter to the American Church, is the first time I have ever written something specifically only for those who claim to be Christians.
I thought to myself—well, I shouldn't say I thought to myself.
I had a number of thoughts rambling around in my head that became increasingly— I've never felt God called me to write something the way he did this book.
In retrospect, all of my books, Bonhoeffer and so on and so forth, it's exceedingly clear to me that God's hand was in my writing them.
But never have I felt a burning passion that I knew was God's Calling me to write this specific book.
So it's a strange and unique thing in my experience.
There's a, you know, if you think of the title, Letter to the American Church, it would be natural to think, what kind of hubris are we talking about here that somebody would dare to write Letter to the American Church as though he's some modern-day Paul or something like that?
But on the contrary, because I felt it was God's I had more humility than ever in writing it, thinking that I cannot get this wrong.
I have to really be sure to take myself out of the way as much as possible to let God say what he wants to say.
And I don't mean this in any mystical sense, but I was very...
I'm sober-minded to write something with a title letter to the American church.
And the reason I wrote it in a nutshell is that in 2010, I came out with my longest book, a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was involved in the plot to kill Hitler.
I knew when I was writing that book...
I could smell what was happening as I was writing that book.
I could smell that in our future, in the West, not just in America, but in America specifically.
And with the events of the last few years, let's say the last three years, it was impossible for me to avoid the thought that just as the silence of the it was impossible for me to avoid the thought that just as the silence of the church in Germany opened the door to hell on earth, which we now
And of course, I documented in my Bonhoeffer book and in this new book, Letter to the American Church.
But the thesis of this book, Letter to the American Church, is that precisely as the German church was silent and precisely as that opened the door to hell, to every kind of evil, it is the silence of the church in America now, this minute, that's the silence of the church in America.
That is similarly opening the door to hellish things on a number of fronts.
The parallels are so marked.
Even the parallel of the excuses given by theologians and Christians in the 30s who said, we don't want to speak out against Hitler.
These are our reasons.
Dramatically similar parallels Among many evangelicals and others in the American church today for why they are being silent on issues that they ought to be screaming about.
Issues that you and others have shouted about.
The evil of the transgender lunacy and on and on and on and on.
So I said to myself, I can't believe it, but the parallels are so dramatic to the silence of the church in Germany that I am just burning to speak this, hoping and praying that God in his grace would use hoping and praying that God in his grace would use it to wake up those who might be awakened.
We know that some people will insist on sleepwalking to the abyss.
They cannot be reached.
But I know that in Germany, in the 30s, there were many good pastors who got this wrong.
Many good pastors who were fooled, deceived, who allowed themselves to be deceived until it was too late.
Many of them woke up and then it was too late to do anything.
So I wrote this book hoping to reach those specifically who call themselves Christians, who dare to call themselves Christians, with the idea that they would say, yes, I have been complicit in my silence, in my inaction.
These excuses are not biblically based.
I must speak out.
Okay, so let me ask you.
There's a lot there.
So...
Let me go through some of the questions that we might address.
I'd like to know what you mean by God's hand, say, rather than your hand in your writing, so that people can understand exactly what you mean by that and how that appears to you and how you distinguish your voice, let's say, from the spirit of inspiration.
Then I'd like to know What events of the last three years that you think are particularly problematic?
Because there's no Hitler staring us in the face at the moment, so that's the obvious historical parallel.
There's systems of warring ideas, and you're on the Christian side of that war, let's say.
You said, dare to call themselves Christian, which is an interesting phrase.
So let's start with...
Your description of some of the books that you've written is that they were inspired.
And my sense is that you can separate out an attempt to write a book for instrumental reasons from an attempt to write a book to put forth what you believe to be true.
Now, they're mingled a little bit because you sort of have to select your audience.
Although...
When I wrote my first book, I was just— But Paul does not erase his personality to speak for God.
God created Paul with his personality so that God could use the medium of the human being that is Paul to say what God has to say.
So it's different from, you know, there are people I know who will hear The voice of God.
They will hear God speak a sentence or speak a scripture or something.
I'm not talking about that.
That happens, but that didn't happen to me.
For me, it was...
And it's a funny thing.
It's like developing a muscle where you become increasingly sensitive to...
You're able to use it.
And I think literally over the decades, I've become more sensitive to...
In other words, in the past, I think, you know, since I became a Christian, you know, rather dramatically in 1988, I have all—I wanted every moment God to use me, to use me in my gifts, which are strange and various.
And I've always— I assumed that he would and that he was doing that, and in the various books that I've written and the various things that I've done, even in the jokes that I've cracked, that God is with me.
But over the years...
I've become a little bit more sensitive to these moments where I feel, I would say, you know, God is particularly in this.
I can sort of feel it.
It's almost like a highlighter going over something.
The words are the same, but you can sort of see this highlighted.
The text is highlighted or something like that.
I don't mean that specifically with my books.
I'm talking about my thoughts and things that I think that these thoughts feel like God is particularly behind them.
Could I be vaguer?
I'll try.
No, no, no, no.
This is a hard thing to get right.
So, you know, there's going to be some wandering about in the darkness trying to get it right.
I mean, one of the things I try to do when I'm speaking and also when I'm writing is to feel...
I wouldn't use a visual metaphor.
For me, it's more like feeling my way forward for toeholds.
The image that always comes to mind for me is walking across a swamp of dirty water where there's stone pathway underneath and I can feel out with my feet if the next thing I'm standing on is water or crocodile or solid ground and I'm always searching for that sense of solidity But it's interesting.
There's a presupposition in what you're saying that there is a path forward.
There's a right way and a wrong way.
And that's a presupposition that you've just put out there.
In other words, you operate with that presupposition.
There's such a thing as truth, and I don't want to get it wrong.
And that alone is a big thing to put that out there.
Not to say that I have no idea whether that's truth.
Right.
Well, I think that's akin in some ways to your claim that you're attempting to be directed by as close as you can manage to divine inspiration when you're writing.
I mean, it is a set of axiomatic statements.
Forgive me for interrupting, but it's going to sound like...
I'm claiming that I'm being led by God in everything I write.
I don't want to say that.
Basically, I'm a writer.
I'm a speaker.
I do my best.
The only time I felt something more palpable of God's inspiration was in writing a letter to the American church.
I've never written anything as sobering And urgent.
And so I had a more keen sense that I really need to get this...
Right, because what I'm saying is so serious and so urgent.
But I don't want to imply that there was anything mystical about it or that every word was chosen by God, but I just had a sense of humility.
There is something, I suppose, mystical about that intuition that there's a distinction between words that are false and words that are true.
It isn't easy exactly to describe how you know the difference.
I mean, you know the difference, the way you know the difference between truth and falsehood, if you do in fact know that difference and haven't clouded your mind up too badly.
But it's no different than the instinct to know what's...
It's no different really than the instinct to know what's funny if you're a jokester as I am, to know the timing of why would it be funnier if I hesitate, if I stutter the phrase...
Why will it be funnier?
The timing.
All those things are instincts that we all develop in our various ways through life, or at least ideally that we would.
So it has something to do with that.
It becomes...
It doesn't feel conscious.
It feels like something that...
It's an inner knowing, a sense of things.
But, I mean, I've had...
There's numerous genuinely mystical experiences, miraculous experiences, but that's not what I'm talking about here.
Here I'm talking about just what it is to be a writer, but as I say, it kind of became pointed with Letter to the American Church because of the seriousness of what I was writing.
Well, okay, so let's turn to that now.
Because of the seriousness of what you were writing, and you pointed specifically to the events of the last three years, and this is probably what'll get this whole discussion cancelled on YouTube, by the way.
Good.
Excellent.
Because that's increasingly happening.
Yeah, well, three.
They've taken three of my videos down in the last month, by the way.
So...
What is it exactly that you think is afoot?
Why do you think it's akin to the sorts of things that were happening while the totalitarian state was rising in Germany?
You've just said it.
YouTube canceling your conversations.
How extraordinarily preposterous and sick is that?
It's mind bending that in the West, we would have some arbiters out there deciding what is okay and what is not okay.
That's despicable.
Speaking as an American, it is profoundly anti-American.
I think of the blood of patriots who died for freedom.
for freedom of speech.
So it is, on the one hand, deeply offensive to me in that way, but as a human being, it's deeply offensive to me.
As a Christian, it's offensive to me because I believe that we are all free to speak truth.
So the idea that we would be alive at a time in the West, where in places like Canada and America and the West, somebody would dare, would dare to be shutting down what you and I and most people know are perfectly wonderful conversations.
We know that it's not like, well, yeah, I guess they had a point.
They had less than no point.
And by my show, the Eric Metaxas show was flourishing on YouTube.
Uh, I'm getting more and more subscribers.
I'm very eclectic.
So I'm, you know, some of it is comedy.
Some of it is serious discussions about faith.
Some of it is politics.
Some of it is I'm interviewing authors about their books.
Two years ago, I dared to have Naomi Wolf, who was one of my classmates at Yale, liberal feminist.
I had her on the show.
I interviewed her, yeah.
To talk about, I know, yeah.
To talk about vaccine.
I didn't even choose the subject.
I had a few other people on the show to talk about some things, but the show was not focused, you know, on those kinds of things.
But YouTube wiped my program out completely.
Didn't just take some videos down.
Wiped the entire program, The Eric Metaxe Show, ceased to exist on YouTube.
And I thought to myself, if you're standing back objectively looking at the situation, you'd say, well, that's interesting.
Why would they do that?
In other words...
This is not—this doesn't look good for the people at YouTube.
They look like fascists.
They are acting in a fascist way.
They are globalists.
They are cultural Marxists.
But, of course, there's a good dose of fascism in there.
They don't believe in freedom.
They don't believe in free speech.
They have an agenda and they have tremendous power, which they are now using because, as we all know, they are scared to death of the truth.
They are so scared that they're willing to look like the monsters that they are because they have nothing left to lose.
So when we say, what are the parallels to Germany in the 30s?
You don't suppose that in 1933 most people knew what was coming.
Nobody could have dreamt of the death camps.
I mean, they didn't discuss the final solution for another eight years.
Nobody saw what was coming, but people with eyes to see, people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, they could smell this.
They said, if you follow the dots, they lead in this direction.
The people who are seizing power now and being allowed to seize power now by cowardly people, by confused people, those people trying to seize power, when they get the power, they're going to use it for very wicked ends. they're going to use it for very wicked ends.
Their presuppositions are the antithesis of our presuppositions.
They are atheistic.
They don't believe in good or evil.
They only believe in power.
And the cultural elites, the globalist cultural elites today are working with the same presuppositions.
They couldn't care less about the things that most of us would take for granted, the dignity of the human being, the sanctity of life, all of these things that people have lived for and died for.
They are not only not interested in those ideas, they're at war with those ideas.
And so there are, you know, some parallels that we can make and some that we can't make.
But basically, we, you and I, have never seen anything like this in the West.
And it's astonishing the speed at which these things have been happening.
In the last week, YouTube took down my discussion about what is a woman and associated issues in that direction with Matt Walsh.
And they took down a video that was a year old that I did with Helen Joyce, who's an economist, journalist, and a very credible person on the Trans minor surgery scandals in the UK which have resulted in the change of a number of UK policies not that podcast specifically but those issues but most relevant as far as I'm concerned they took down a discussion I had with Robert F. Kennedy and the reason for that in principle
was he veered into the vaccination criticism domain and you know it's not like I walk arm-in-arm across the desert with Robert F. Kennedy.
I think he's an interesting person.
He's a bull in the China shop, just like Trump.
And God only knows what he's up to or what he'll do.
But here's the issue.
He's running for president.
And he's in the middle of a presidential campaign.
And YouTube took down one of his videos.
And I'm looking at this from outside.
My country, Canada, is as screwy as you can possibly imagine, and then some.
But I never expected to see this in the United States, that a corporation would interfere with an ongoing presidential campaign.
But is it the United States...
Is it?
I mean, when you're dealing with Google or YouTube or any of these companies, they are...
And this is an interesting thing.
And this is why if you're a whore for money, you don't care whether someone is patriotic or has any fidelity to American principles.
And most people, most politicians don't care.
But we need to care.
So the idea that you would have...
Google allying itself with China.
As I say, why?
Why?
For money, okay, what could be more despicable?
Well, no, no, I can tell you something that's more despicable than that.
I think that if you're whoring for money, so to speak, that there's actually something predictable and admirable about that.
And let me lay the argument out, okay?
Partly because if I know that you are actually motivated by money, And even if that's your single preoccupation.
There's nothing wrong with being motivated by that, but you and I know that there are limits.
If somebody says, you know, it's like that scene in The Third Man.
If I know I can make a certain amount of money, Orson Welles' character, you know, if a few of those people disappear, who cares?
In other words, this has always been the question, right?
Somebody says, well, you can make a lot of money, but it's going to involve, you're allying yourself with people who are torturing and murdering and sexually abusing people.
Are you okay with that?
Most people would say, I hope no.
Some people would say, well, I don't know.
But the point is, what we're talking about right now is people who are looking the other way.
They would gladly do business with slave traders.
They would gladly do business with the Nazis if they could make a buck.
They cynically, some of them believe, listen, if I'm not going to make a buck here, someone else will.
I might as well make a buck.
And that's what we're dealing with now with all of these globalist corporations.
Well, I think it's worse on the YouTube front because they've left me alone up till now.
And I think that what they're doing to buttress their ideology is actually counterproductive, at least in this situation on the economic front.
The thing that frightens me about the YouTube ideologue types is that I think that they would act even against their own narrow economic self-interest.
Correct.
Push their damage in.
Well, that's what I mean by worse.
If you're honestly greedy.
I agree with you.
No, no, no, no.
I agree with you.
But The point is it's mixed.
The point is it's mixed.
When Hitler took over in the 30s, some people—it's just like today.
It's exactly like today because this is human nature.
They simply didn't want, quote-unquote, any trouble.
So they were willing to look the other way when something bad was happening.
There were some people who didn't want to lose their jobs, so there's an economic thing.
But the point is, evil— Never operates in a vacuum.
It works with things like human interest.
And the question is, there's this amalgam of things going on.
For some, it's purest greed.
How much money can Pfizer and company make?
They don't give a damn about the side effects.
There are people who are in it for the money, and there's so much money that they're willing to look the other way.
There are other people who are pulling the levers, other people that couldn't possibly need more money, whether it's George Soros or Bill Gates.
So it's an amalgam of things, and we're dealing with all these things.
We're asking the question, how does evil operate?
That's how evil operates in every kind of way.
And every single person has a choice whether to participate or to say, I refuse to participate.
I would rather do the right thing and trust God with the results.
And that's why in Letter to the American Church, I'm writing specifically to those people, Christians, who claim to believe in the God of the Bible, to believe that Jesus defeated death on the cross.
Well, if you believe that, you are going to Presumably behave differently because you believe that.
Okay, so you said something core there, you know.
And I think it's core to...
No, no, no.
We're just getting closer and closer to the point, which is a good thing to do in a discussion.
So you're implying and also stating explicitly a theory of Christianity.
And one of the key points that you just made was that...
If you have faith, which by the way, I think is a form of courage.
It's a form of existential courage.
It's a decision to stake yourself on something.
You will, you said, do the right thing and let God take care of the consequences.
Okay, so my understanding of that is that I've been trying to conceptualize faith, I suppose, to some degree.
And, you know, the atheist types and the materialists think that faith is the willingness to suspend disbelief in the service of a fairy tale.
And I think that faith is something entirely different than that.
I think it's The willingness to stake yourself on the truth in the faith that whatever happens when you tell the truth is the best thing that could possibly happen.
And that's regardless of the short-term consequences, right?
Because people lie because they want to manipulate the short-term consequences.
They think they can get away with it.
They think they'll gain something from it.
Okay, so I think, no, no.
You tell the truth.
And sometimes you're gonna pay a price for that, but it's nowhere near as much of a price as you're bloody well gonna pay if you lie.
Now, you might be too stupid and willfully blind and naive and crooked and devious and deceptive to understand that, but it doesn't mean you're right.
So you said, do the right thing and let God take care of the consequences.
Well, that's a statement of faith.
Now, this letter you wrote, is that the message that you're sending to the American church?
Are you telling people?
Say what you believe to be the case or suffer the consequences.
Is that the central issue?
In a word, yes.
Yes.
That was two words, but it was the same word, so it counts as one word.
Yes.
That's the thesis.
If someone claims to believe in the God of the Bible, which I do, then there's no question that God requires of us to behave as though we believe what we claim to believe.
And one of the theses of my book, Letters to the American Church, is that just as the German church drifted tragically in its conception of what is faith, so too the American church has drifted. so too the American church has drifted.
In other words, they have adopted a kind of enlightenment rationalist view of faith.
Faith is what I believe, which means what I believe intellectually.
I assent to these ideas.
So I tick these boxes, these theological boxes.
Somebody says, what do you believe?
And they say, well, go to the website of my church.
There's a statement of faith.
That's what I believe.
Well, that's a fig leaf.
It does not fool God.
It does not fool the devil.
If you actually believe that What the Bible says, what the Nicene Creed says, if you actually believe those things, you will behave as though you believe those things.
It will affect your life.
You will live with courage because you know too much not to live with courage.
You're afraid of living fearfully.
So, I thought to myself, that idea, Bonhoeffer wrote a book, The Cost of Discipleship, where he famously talks about cheap grace, because the excuse given by the Germans, the theologians and pastors at the time, was that, well, it's all about grace.
It's less about what we do, because Luther said, oh, we're not saved by our works.
Well, congratulations, you're correct.
You're not saved by your works.
However, There is a little scripture in the epistle of James that says, faith without works is dead.
In other words, if you're foolish enough to believe that you can have faith and not evince it in how you live, then you're a fool.
Then actually, biblically, you have no faith.
And so I think that that bad idea about grace and faith, which we get, and again, these are always, these are good ideas taken to extremes, right?
Oh, you know, faith is what I believe.
Yes, that's a nice idea, but it can become unmoored from the reality that what you believe has to be lived out forever.
It has to be an integral part of who you are.
It has to be holistic.
And the Germans were particularly guilty of this.
And what I'm saying is that the American church is particularly guilty of this today.
And it's always manifested in the idea that, oh, we shouldn't be political.
And I thought to myself, that's preposterous.
If you're against slavery and you live in the mid-19th century, people will say, oh, you're being political.
Just stick to the gospel.
Well, that's what Hitler said to the pastors.
Just stick to your little gospel.
I'll worry about the Third Reich.
I'll worry about everything else.
You just worry about your little theology.
And that thin theological view that some Christians have of what it is to have faith is profoundly wrong.
It is unbiblical.
Your theology has to be lived out.
It has to be integrated into every part of your life.
And that's where we have drifted to this idea that people say, I can be against something in my mind, but I don't have to do anything about it.
I don't have to live out my life heroically.
I don't have to put my life on the line.
I don't have to put my career on the line.
If you believe these things, then of course you have to put your life and your career on the line.
Otherwise, it's obvious you don't believe these things.
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Okay, so the works issue, this is how I understand it.
You tell me what you think about this, if you would.
So what I thought Luther was trying to establish, and I think this is wise, is that just because you have the privileges of a king doesn't mean that you're, what?
Walking the road to the kingdom of heaven, right?
The mere fact that you've been provided with or perhaps even earned, that's more complicated, with a certain degree of material prosperity isn't a signal message from God that you are on the right side of things.
So you can't confuse works with grace or with redemption.
And you can't assume that someone who's rich is a more moral agent than someone who's poor merely because they have plenty.
So that's the point I think Luther was trying to make.
That's my understanding.
I actually, I wrote a...
I have a 450-page biography of Luther, and nowhere in my book do I touch on that idea.
So I think it may follow from some of what Luther says, but I don't think principally—I mean, what you just said is an important point, but I don't get it from Luther.
I mean, I get it from other places.
He doesn't seem to me ever to have worried about that.
That doesn't seem to be on the list of things he was dealing with.
Yeah, well, I could walk back my claim.
I would say then that my understanding is that that's the underlying rationale of the Protestant claim that you're not saved by works.
It's more that the works themselves and their manifestation aren't inevitable proof of, what would you say, God's appreciation for your existence.
All right, let me put it this way.
The point, and I think my dear friend Dennis Prager and I would differ on this, and it came out in your conversation with him, but I think the idea, you know, one of the principal ideas of the New Testament and one of the principal things that Jesus was trying to say to clarify,
you know, why many of the religious leaders of his time were off was that the What you think, your inner life is vital, is central.
So if you write a big check to some wonderful charity, yes, it counts.
It goes to help medical research for cancer in children.
Yes, there's a reality there.
But if in your heart you only did it to impress some woman that you want to sleep with, God sees that.
He doesn't just grade you on the externals.
He's interested in your heart, in the disposition of your heart.
And so Luther, I mean, there's so much to Luther, but I think...
The issue is that Luther was making this distinction.
What he was worried about was this idea that you go through the mumbo-jumbo and the rigmarole of the church, and that's all that counts.
And he was saying, no, no, no, no, no.
It is your faith...
That counts.
Right, and you're making an existential case in some ways for that faith, which is that it's not assent to a series of explicit propositions, but a mode of conducting yourself in the world.
And part of that mode is that you say what strikes you as true.
That's what you do.
That's how you live your life.
And if you do that, well, that's part and parcel of having a genuine Christian faith.
Yes, it reveals that you, A, that you believe there's such a thing as truth, and B, that you believe that the author of that truth, who is God, is with you in this.
In other words, you don't say, well, hey, I'm just going to do this because it's the noble thing.
It's like, no, no, no, I believe in a reality where God is with me and only with me when I believe Speak the truth and live the truth.
And I can trust him with the results.
How do you trust yourself?
How do you trust yourself?
Like, so fair enough.
I buy the argument.
I think it's accurate.
I think it's the most accurate argument in some ways.
But then you come to the next problem, which is, well, there's God and then there's you and you're just a confused human being.
And so how the hell, how do you take steps to ensure that your judgment about what constitutes the truth is reliable even in your own eyes?
Well, first of all, you have to want it to be—you have to care.
You have to have enough humility to know that you could get it wrong, and therefore to cast yourself on God and say, Lord, help me, because I know that I'm a fallen, sinful human being.
I got that much.
That's clear to me.
And so without your help, I will screw this up.
So, this is part and parcel of what it is to be free, you know, that it comes with risks.
You can get it wrong.
But to be cynical and not to try to get it right is really wicked.
So, this cheap grace you talked about, too, which...
So, I have this interpretation of, I'm sure it's not unique to me, but of one of the commandments, which is, do not use the Lord's name in vain.
And people like to think that means don't swear.
And I think in a very trivial sense...
That is what it means.
But what it really means, as far as I can tell, is don't pretend to be doing the work of the divine when you're feathering your own nest, right?
And I really see this as a particularly egregious sin of the times.
Pride is a sin of the times, and so is deception.
Pride and lies, and of course, I think those are the two canonical sins in some real sense.
But this notion of easy moral virtue, almost everything I see on the ideological side appears to me to be an attempt to, I proclaim moral virtue and the accompanying status and perhaps even the pathway to redemption without doing any of the work at all.
And I think the universities are terribly complicit in this because what they basically tell students is the secular equivalent, I think, of what you're complaining about on the Christian side, which is...
Well, you don't really have to be a good person, which, by the way, is a very difficult thing to do.
And the consequence of not doing that is everyone ends up in hell.
But you don't really have to be a good person.
You just have to be against the right things.
And conveniently, that'll require a little protesting on your part.
And conveniently, it will enable you to...
To what would you say?
See the devil in everyone else and not in yourself at all.
And then you've paid your price and you can trumpet your moral virtue and away you go down the road.
All of which is a satanic counterfeit of the truth.
I was at Yale in the 80s and I saw this for the first time.
I grew up in a working class home and No one had gone to college.
So here I am at Yale.
And for the first time I saw that, we didn't know the term virtue signaling, but it was all there already in the academy.
Yeah, well, you were at Yale, so what were you taking?
In the academy.
I was taking penicillin, but we can't talk about that.
Just kidding.
Just kidding.
No, I was...
I guess that's how you Canadians put it.
I was...
I was an English major.
Oh, yeah, at Yale.
English literature at Yale, yeah.
But the thing is that that concept, well, I managed to avoid critical theory and all that, although I did once escort Jacques Derrida across a courtyard with an umbrella.
I wrote a poem about it.
But the point is that while I was there, for the first time I saw the virtue signaling, and I was taken in by it.
I was young and naive and foolish.
And I, for the first time, saw, you don't say this, you say this.
Be careful about this.
You know, we don't say Oriental.
We say Asian.
We say, this is what we're supposed to believe.
All of that kind of stuff, and I kind of thought, oh, well, you know, to get along, I guess I have to.
Yes.
Yes.
But it was there in strength in the 80s already.
And of course, it filtered its way down, down, down into the culture.
And here we are.
Right from Yale and right from the English department, as a matter of fact.
Well, that's quite right.
Quite right.
It's unpleasant to talk about, so let's avoid it.
But the point is that it is ultimately...
I mean, there's great irony.
Irony is the happy way of putting it.
It's...
Think about this.
You're dealing with cultural Marxism.
They don't believe in God.
They don't believe in truth.
They don't believe in good or evil.
They believe in nothing but power.
But somehow They have to cannibalize truth, and they have to talk about things like racism, and they have to talk about things like that's right and that's wrong, and we care about the marginalized.
And of course, what we want to ask is, excuse me, why do you care about those things?
In other words, you say racism is wrong.
I agree, but I know why it's wrong.
Why do you say that it's wrong?
If you don't get your values from the Bible, which says that we're all created equal in God's image, if you get your values from quote unquote science and blind Darwinism, then who's to say that some people aren't more evolved than others?
In other words, according to what you claim to believe, you have zero basis on which to make any claims about morality, about what's right or wrong.
So you're gaslighting all of us.
You're telling us, shut up.
Don't ask questions.
Do this.
Don't do that.
Don't say this.
Don't say that.
And everybody is kind of I'm bullied into going along with it.
Oh, okay, okay.
But we ought to say, excuse me, not only are you wrong about everything, you don't even have any basis on which to make any of these claims.
So the idea that this was born in Derrida, Foucault, critical race theory, critical theory, Gramsci, this kind of bubbles its way through the decades.
Until here we are, living with madness on every front.
To be pro-reality is to be a radical in this day and age.
To be a revolutionary and a radical is to be pro-reality.
So let me throw another idea at you.
So I've been doing a lot of writing and thinking about the biblical stories, well, for a very long time and very intensely recently.
And I've spent many, many hundreds of hours, I suppose, thinking about the story of Cain and Abel, which is a story that never ceases to terrify me right to my core.
And what you see in that story is the story of two principalities making themselves manifest in some way for the first time, right?
So you have Abel who makes the proper sacrifices, who dedicates himself to God, who looks upward and does what's actually necessary and true and reaps the benefit as a consequence.
And then you have Cain who, you know, he's not so much into the sacrifice thing and his sacrifices are second rate and he's trying to pull the wool over the eyes of God and that doesn't work out very well.
And so then he calls God on God's misbehavior and says to him, I don't know what sort of cosmos you think you've hacked together here, but I'm busting myself in pieces and all I get is misery.
Why don't you straighten yourself up?
And God says, well...
If you did things properly, things would probably go okay for you.
And that makes Cain murderously angry and envious and resentful and bitter and cynical.
And so then he goes and kills Abel.
And I think that's exactly what's happening today, is that what we point to as Marxism is just the most recent rational manifestation of the eternal spirit of Cain.
And what do you think of that?
I mean, you're a religious thinker.
You think that's accurate?
I think you're a pretty sharp cookie.
I think you're ready to go professional.
Honestly, that's a wonderful...
All in, man.
All in.
No, but I mean, that's a wonderful exegesis.
I had never thought of that, really, but it seems to me dead on, and I think that you...
It only took me 40 years to think it through.
Yes.
Well, but the thing is...
What you just said, I don't remember your phrasing, but it's the same thing over and over and over again.
In other words, we're talking about human nature, right?
And in fact, you see this happen even earlier in Scripture than Cain and Abel, when Adam and Eve make for themselves aprons of fig leaves, right?
In other words, that's the first religious act.
Religious in the negative sense, let's fool God, right?
We know something's wrong, okay?
So all human beings throughout history have known something is wrong.
How do we address it?
Well, that's what religion is, right?
We say that there's this gulf between us and the gods.
There's this break.
How do we deal with that?
Well, that's what religions purport to do, to somehow repair the breach or to climb the ladder or From here to there, we know we're not there.
We need to get there to heaven, to someplace other than here.
How do we do that?
How do we appease the gods?
How do we lure the gods into coming to our aid?
That's what religion is.
In our hearts, we often do it in a way that there's deception.
It's like, well, how do I fool God?
Adam and Eve say, we're going to cover our nakedness with fig leaves.
Now...
Which apparently aren't a very good covering.
I talked to Matthew Paggio about that.
And fig leaves turn out to be not exactly the sort of leaf that anyone with any sense would ever use to cover themselves.
So it's a pathetic attempt as well as a deceptive attempt.
Well, I didn't know that, nor is it relevant.
But since it's your show, we're going to let that ride.
Let me tell you why the fig leaves are insufficient.
God, then, this is just an amazing thing.
You've probably seen this, but I'm fascinated by this, that in the first few verses of Genesis, it shows Adam and Eve doing something to sort of fool God.
They know something is wrong.
For the first time, of course, something is wrong.
They're no longer walking with God, and they've broken the relationship with God.
And they try to do something about it.
And God deems what they have done insufficient, and it says he makes for them animal skins.
In other words, blood had to be shed.
Innocent animals had to be killed, and blood had to be shed in order that they could be killed.
Which is, of course, a prefiguring of the sacrifice and the death of Jesus.
Blood has to be shed.
You think you can cover these mistakes on your own with these little religious acts and things, and God says, no, no, no, you don't understand the depth of the horror.
Blood, innocent blood has to be shed to cover the What you have done.
And of course, when you refer to Cain and Abel, it's the same kind of thing.
I'm trying to do this and this and this, and God says, no, this is what's required.
Right, it has to be a real sacrifice.
That's Abel's sacrifices, right?
And there are also sacrifices that involve blood.
So imagine where we are today that you have people...
I mean, they've effectively created a false religion, which is particularly horrifying and wicked.
It's almost like a, you know, we're seeing it now with the sheer lunacy of the pride juggernaut, you know, that everybody has to be bullied into agreeing with whatever it is.
Not agreeing, celebrating and worshipping.
Yeah.
Way more than just agreeing.
If you don't say Heil Hitler loud enough...
People will look at you funny.
You seem to say, Heil Hitler, with some trepidation.
Perhaps you don't like the Fuhrer.
In other words, if you don't heartily express your enthusiasm and approval of X, Y, and Z, people look at you funny.
And so if you don't have any connection to God or to truth or to reality, then you look around and go, oh, what do I need to do so that people won't look at me funny, so that I might not lose my job or lose my friends?
What do I need to do?
What do I need to post on social media?
How do I need to outperform other people?
What do I have to not say?
And so, that's, again, you know, you see this all through history.
But the reason I wrote a letter to the American church is because, you know, it's my thesis that Christians have no excuse in this.
You claim to believe in the ground of all being.
You claim to believe in the God of the Bible, that he, you know, not just died for you, but literally bodily rose from the dead and defeated to death.
If you believe that, which you claim to...
You will behave differently.
You will behave fearlessly as martyrs and others have throughout the centuries.
That's what's required of us.
And we've been kind of drifting along with everything, you know, pretty fine.
We kind of thought like, well, we don't actually have to give our lives or maybe lose our jobs or whatever.
You have a lot of pastors, you know, to put this even more pointedly, who they're worried about maybe losing their 501c3 tax deductible status by saying something vaguely political from the pulpit.
And I thought, what kind of cowards can you be?
You're supposed to be speaking truth.
You're supposed to care about people out there, not just in your congregation, but out there in the world so that if you were alive in slavery times, you would be speaking against the satanic abomination of the slave trade as Wilberforce did and against slavery as people did.
And when people say, oh, you're being political, just stick to theology, you say, excuse me, what kind of theology do I have?
What kind of gospel am I preaching if I don't care about people who are suffering horrors, if I'm silent?
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This is what happened in Canada.
You know, when I burst onto the scene, I suppose, so to speak, in 2016, it was on this trans issue peripherally.
But for me, it was the government was mandating a certain form of speech, right?
The government said, well, here's the words you have to use.
And I thought...
There's no goddamn way I'm letting you pikers take control of my tongue because I know what happens when that happens.
And what happens is everyone ends up in hell.
And although it's sort of like hell being in Trudeau's Canada, it's not as bad as it could get.
But it'll certainly get there if everybody holds their tongue when they have something to say.
I've been reading Jonah.
So here's something cool, right?
And you tell me what you think about this.
It's sort of like the Cain and Abel situation.
So God comes to Jonah and says, well, you got some things to say there, buddy.
Get yourself to the city and make some noise.
And Jonah, being a very wise man, thinks, up yours, God.
I'm going the other direction like anyone sensible would.
Right, right.
And so he jumps on a boat, right?
And away he goes.
But the storms rise and he admits his sins and the sailors throw him overboard.
And then you think, well, that's pretty rough on poor Jonah.
God told him to speak and he was silent.
Now he's going to drown.
And then you read and you think, oh, well, drowning would have been real good for Jonah because the next thing that happens is the worst possible creature from the darkness of the abyss comes up and pulls him to the bottom of reality itself, where he cooks away for three days.
And so you don't just end up in the damn water.
You end up in hell if you shut your mouth when you have something to say.
You've just given it a vaguely Jungian gloss, which I will pretend not to notice.
Honestly, These stories, I mean, I don't know how to respond except to say, yes, again, wonderful exegesis.
And look, these stories, which are from sacred scripture, they're fathomless, you know, meaning, truth.
I mean, it just—it's— I run a series, a conversation series called Socrates and the City.
And the idea is, Socrates, you know, being Greek, I had to name it Socrates and the City.
But Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living.
Now, he was not a Christian, but he had the good sense to believe that there's probably this thing called truth or We could probably arrive at it by asking questions and honestly trying to answer the questions.
And that again, there's a presupposition that Socrates has.
And he says it's worth risking and it's worth examining our lives when he says the unexamined life is not worth living.
And I think, you know, you have to be a particularly fearful, shallow person to say, I don't have time for that.
I just want to get by.
Tell me what I need to do.
How many Jews do I need to kill?
How many blacks do I need to enslave?
Tell me what I need to do.
Oh, do I need to say this?
Oh, no.
Now, today I need to say the opposite of that.
Just tell me what.
In other words, the idea that you would, you know, sell your soul for a mess of pottage, to go back to your Cain and Abel reference, it's an amazing thing.
And I think if we're honest, we know we are all guilty of that to some extent.
But to the extent that you are aware of your guilt, you want to wake up others.
And that's what I am hoping to do is to say, folks, those of you who claim to be Christian, this is again, I write all of my books for everyone and I can make the case for why I believe in the Christian faith.
But I'm talking in this last book, Lord of the American Church, specifically to those who already claim to believe this.
And I say, listen, if you believe this, you're on the hook for actually leading the way in leading the way in showing people what courage looks like, in showing people that, no, no, no, there is this thing called truth.
And we are made to speak truth and to act truth.
And we believe that, you know what, even if I lose my life, I don't lose my life.
But you know, Bonhoeffer, famously, when he was being led to the gallows, he knew that he says, this is the end, but for me, the beginning of life.
If you know that Jesus has risen from the dead, you know that this is not all there is.
You're going to live dramatically differently than someone who's scared to death.
And so what I'm saying to those who claim to be Christians today is you ought to be leading the way.
You pastors ought to be shouting this from your pulpits fearlessly.
All of these lies, all of these efforts to silence us are satanic.
And by the way, they are harming human beings.
Just as the silence of the pastors in Germany led to the You mean the kids with double mastectomies?
You mean those human beings?
Well, that is one Prominent example.
If you care about them, and by the way, God commands us to care about them and to love them, then you will speak up for them.
If you don't, you're not loving them, and God judges you as guilty, and he will hold you to account because you claim to believe in the God who says you're supposed to care about them.
So that's one issue, one very dramatic issue today.
You know, there's also a line, I was just writing about this the other day, About stripes.
So Christ says, if you do not know and you transgress, it's something like that, you will be punished with a certain burden of stripes.
But if you know and you sin, then you will be punished much more harshly.
And this is the situation the Christians you're addressing actually should find themselves in.
Because they've already made this claim to no, right?
They've already made this claim to faith and are attempting to accrue the status that goes along with that.
And some of them actually do know that they need to tell the truth or else.
And the notion there is that if you do already know that and you still lie...
You're going to be punished much more harshly than those who lie who are also ignorant.
And I believe that's also true.
I certainly saw that in my clinical practice.
Because it's partly because if you lie, there's a sin there, obviously, because you go off the path.
But if you know you're lying and you're transgressing against your own moral code, then not only are you lying in the moment, but you're betraying...
Your innermost self, right?
You're betraying your ultimate core in the most real sense.
And you are absolutely 100% gonna pay for that.
And so is everybody around you.
This is what terrified me.
I wanna ask you why you became a Christian.
Like what terrified me into religious submission was- It just seemed like this thing to do at the time.
Studying the Holocaust.
Yeah.
Okay, well, you went to Yale and you were in the English department.
That was before you had a conversion.
What happened to you?
What happened in the conversion and why did you switch your tune?
That's the funniest way of putting it that I've ever heard.
Thank you for that.
Why did I switch my tune?
I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church, and I had a vague faith at Yale, which is extraordinarily important.
Was then, and of course is now dramatically more secular, hostile to genuine biblical faith, hostile to the American ideas of freedom and so on and so forth.
I foolishly drank that Kool-Aid and drifted into...
Genuine agnosticism, and I was dramatically lost.
I wasn't some proud atheistic sinner.
I was just lost.
And ultimately, we could talk about this later, but ultimately, I found myself lost.
Horror of horrors moving back in with my parents, my European immigrant parents who had worked menial jobs to put me through Yale University.
And they're kind of looking at me like, so why are you back here again?
What are you doing here?
But I was totally lost.
And in that season of my life, I was 24, I got this horrible menial job as a proofreader at Union Carbide in Danbury, Connecticut.
The The Hebrew word is Gehenna.
It was awful.
And in that misery, I met someone who began to share his faith with me.
And I was initially hostile, or at least not wanting to hear it, for many, many months.
And long story short, around my 25th birthday, I had a dramatic, miraculous dream in which In a nutshell, God spoke to me so unequivocally that there was no going back.
It was game over.
I say it's like going to sleep single and waking up married.
Would you tell me the dream?
Now?
Sure.
It's actually hard to do justice to it.
No doubt.
It...
It encompasses three parts of my life.
Part of the reason it was so staggering to me as I was having this dream, because I don't dream very much, and I had never, ever had a dream anything like this.
This was another category of dream.
It was like having a vision in the context of a dream.
I was unconscious, of course.
I was sleeping.
But...
I have to say a couple of things for background so you get the vocabulary.
Number one, grew up as a son of immigrants.
My father from Greece, you know, very...
Like most Greeks, inordinately proud of being Greek and wanting to raise his kids in that tradition.
And so that was a very important part of my growing up, that I am Greek, that this is my identity.
Once my father, we were at a light.
I mean, I still drive there today.
And at this light, we saw the car in front of us on a bumper that had one of those, you know, chrome fish.
This is in the 70s.
And my father says, do you know what that is?
And he explains to me that that's the Greek word for fish is ichthys.
And it's spelled, you know, it's an acronym.
Well, the word is ichthys.
But the early Christians adopted that symbol of the fish as a symbol of the Christian faith because the word fish is an acronym for Isus Christos Christos.
Theos imon sotir.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior.
So they used the symbol of the fish because to them, the symbol of the fish meant ictus, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior.
So it's the secret symbol of the Christians.
And my father was thrilled to tell me that's a Greek word and that's where that comes from.
And so I always associated that fish with Christ after I saw that.
So again, this is by way of background.
Fishing was very important to me growing up also.
I should say that if I had a hobby, Other than watching sitcoms, it was fishing.
That was very important to me.
So you like to pull things up from the depths?
Don't get Jungian on me.
You do that on your own time.
Okay, so yeah, of course.
So basically, around this 25th birthday, if you'd said, who are you?
You know, in your guts.
It was, well, the Greek background and my family was vitally central to who I was.
Secondly, this idea of fishing.
This was my main, my only hobby.
The thing that I did when I had time.
But thirdly, the life of the mind.
When I went to Yale, suddenly I cared about the meaning of life.
And I really was an English major.
I realized, even somewhat at the time, because I'm trying to figure out the nature of reality, by reading these great novels in the Western canon, I'm putting together these pieces to figure out what is the nature of reality, what is the meaning of life.
And I was actually doing that without doing it particularly intentionally.
It was just instinctively the life of the mind.
And I came up, and I have to say this so then the dream will make sense.
I came up with...
As only a pretentious undergraduate could do, I think I've got it figured out.
It's kind of like a literary trope.
It's an image of a frozen lake.
And what all religions, world religions, mean to do is...
So this is where it becomes Freudian and Jungian and you must forgive me.
But the idea of a frozen lake, I thought this is a perfect image for what religion tries to do.
You have this ice on the top of the lake We want to touch the divinity, the Godhead.
Again, Jung's idea, not the Bible's idea, but this idea that the That's what God is, the collective unconscious.
So I had this image that I developed as an undergraduate.
Like, okay, so that's what all religions are trying to do.
They're trying to drill through the conscious mind to touch the other side, to touch the collective unconscious, which is the kind of New Age idea of the divinity, the Godhead, whatever that is.
So I bring all of this into my 24th year, and around my 25th birthday, I have this dream.
In the dream...
I'm standing on a frozen lake, Candlewood Lake in Danbury, Connecticut.
I'm ice fishing with friends.
And I look at the hole in the ice and I see what you never see if you're ice fishing.
I see a fish pointing its snout out of the hole and I look at it and I reach down and I lift it up by the gill because it was a pickerel or a pike.
They had very sharp teeth and you'd never lip land a fish like that.
So I pick it up and in the dream...
I lift it up, and it's a large pickerel or pike.
And anybody who knows that fish knows that it has a kind of bronze coloring.
But on that glorious winter day, the sun was shining brightly.
The sky couldn't be bluer.
The ice and the snow couldn't have been whiter.
And I hold up this fish in the dream, and I see that because of the sun, it looks golden.
And suddenly in the dream, I realize, no, it doesn't just look golden.
It is golden.
It is a golden fish made of gold like in a fairy tale, but it is alive, a living golden fish.
And in that moment in the dream, God effectively drops this into my head like in paragraphs.
I knew that This is God saying to me in this dream, you wanted to drill through the ice to touch inert water, to touch the collective unconscious, the divinity, the Godhead.
I have something else for you.
I have the golden fish, Icthas, Iesus Christos Theos Imon Sotir, my son, your savior, Jesus Christ.
How did you know that?
Why did you make the association between the fish specifically at that point and Christ?
Did that happen in the dream?
No, that's what I'm saying.
It happened in the dream.
Yeah, I know, but the realization took place in the dream too.
The realization took place within the dream.
Within the dream, I knew within the dream that this is...
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Savior.
I had been searching for this thing, to touch inert water, and God says, I'd like to one-up you with your own symbol system.
I'd like to give you what you're really looking for, my Son, your Savior, Jesus Christ, a living being.
And when you think about it, theologically, a fish coming out of water, what happens when a fish comes out of the water?
It dies.
The idea that God came from his medium to our medium to die.
All of this came clear in the dream.
And when I was in the dream holding this fish, I was flooded with joy because what I had believed you could not know.
That the Bible is true, that Jesus is God.
In the dream, I realized, no, I know.
And as I was holding the fish, I realized I have what I'm looking for, what I was looking for, which I didn't believe could be found.
This is God.
He's given himself to me.
And in the dream, I was flooded with joy.
Within the dream, before I woke up, I knew this is true, and I just had this joy.
So the next day, I went and I told the friend of mine at work the story.
I said, I had this dream.
And he says, what do you think it means?
And I said, and I never would have said these words.
These words would have made me cringe at any previous day.
I said, it means I've accepted Jesus.
I never would have said that.
I was made uncomfortable by people who said that, but I knew that I had jumped over the broomstick, that I was in another world, that I had accepted Jesus, and that happened right around my 25th birthday.
What happened?
Well, that's a great dream, by the way.
I mean, that's quite the archetypal blast you got there.
That'll teach you to fish around in the dark.
The archetypal blast.
You never know what you're going to catch.
I really feel like I'm talking to Jordan Peterson.
It changed everything.
I mean, I was a different person from that day forward.
My life changed very dramatically.
How are you different?
How are you different?
What changed about you?
Well, the first most immediate, somewhat embarrassing manifestation is I immediately stopped sleeping with my girlfriend of three years.
I knew I can't do that.
That's for marriage, and I want God.
So that's a sacrifice.
Well, yes and no, in the sense that, you know, people often say that, you know, God always outgives you, that whatever you give up for him is nothing compared to what he gives you.
And I had such a sense of his presence in those first days of my conversion that I thought I wouldn't give that up for anything.
I wouldn't do anything to hinder that.
That personal relationship with the God who loves me and died for me and created the universe, it was so beautiful and extraordinary that you wouldn't do anything to screw that up.
You just know that that's more valuable than anything.
Not if you had any sense.
During this dream.
This wasn't like I reasoned my way to this, and I could take any credit or particular pride.
This happened to me.
So this is the definition of a gift from God.
I knew it was a gift from God, and I just thought, I don't want to screw that up.
Right, right.
So how did you change in your behavior?
You said you stopped sleeping with your girlfriend.
Is that not good enough for you, Jordan?
That's pretty dramatic.
That was pretty dramatic for me at age 25.
I'm sure it was, and I suspect for your girlfriend, too.
Well, yes, of course.
That's the thing, is that when you choose God, you don't know where that's going to lead you.
That's the fun of it.
Well, that's correct.
That is the fun of it.
Because God...
That's the Abrahamic adventury.
Whom we can trust, wants to take us on a glorious adventure.
He invites us to this glorious adventure.
And when you turn it down, you think you're turning down some kind of bummer.
And it's like, no, you don't understand.
This is what you were made for.
This is the adventure of your life.
It's, what's the Pink Floyd line, you know, and did you trade a walk-on part in the war for the lead role in a cage?
You're being given a role in the battle between good and evil, which is real, and, God says, come with me on this adventure.
Participate with me in this experience.
Extraordinary adventure.
You've been given the privilege to be on the side of good and truth in this war, and you follow my banner, and you walk with me, and this is what you were created for.
And...
Imagine saying, no, no, no, I want to be the star of my own show.
I want the lead role, but as Pink Floyd says, lead role in a cage.
In Sex and the City.
Well, actually, it's Miltonic, right?
I'd rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
What could be more foolish than...
Yeah, right, right.
Absolutely.
Well, that's what I think about power claims, too.
It's like because people will say, well, people who use power are successful.
And I think, well, if you're ruling over hell...
And are you the least successful?
Are you the most successful or the least successful?
And it seems to me that the ruler of hell is actually the least successful person in hell.
And that's where you get if you use power.
So you might be able to rule, but it'll be hell.
And you think you're the winner, but you're actually the ultimate loser.
It's actually painful to contemplate.
I mean, genuinely.
Yeah, well that's why you should contemplate it.
That's exactly right.
You know, I tried to learn the lesson of the Holocaust because that's what we're enjoined upon to do, right?
Never forget.
Well, that means understand.
And that means, well, figuring out how you take those first steps to hell and then the next steps and then the next steps and then drag everyone along with you.
And you definitely do that by lying.
There's no doubt about that.
Well, I mean, and again...
What you're saying, my Bonhoeffer book, which...
You know, it's a 600-page biography of a German pastor who saw these things happening and knew that he must speak out against it.
And he tried to wake up the church because he knew that God specifically called the church to be the conscience of the state.
You claim to believe this and this and this and this.
You must stand against this evil.
And We know what happened.
So the idea that all these years later something similar could be happening and How many people have said, you know, we're never going to repeat that again.
And you ask the question, okay, how are you going to prevent it?
Did you learn the lessons?
Did you learn that there is such a thing as satanic evil?
When you look at the death camps, I mean, listen.
That's the question.
Isn't that the question?
You bet.
That's the question.
When they uncovered the death camps, I think most people in the world...
Couldn't believe it.
It was too horrible.
It was too horrible.
There's something inside us that says, I can't take that in.
And I think that's what we're facing today.
When Naomi Wolf dug into the Pfizer documents and you look at the evil, it's too much to take in.
It will change you when you see the evil of...
The Chinese Communist Party's will to power.
It's painful to look at, and yet we must look at it.
We must deal with it.
We must ask, what is the answer for us?
What are we to do?
You know you have to respond.
You cannot look the other way.
But the temptation to look the other way is dramatically strong.
And that's what I think...
People like you and I are hoping to do is to tell people, no, no, no.
God is with you in this.
Don't be afraid.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you can even be more pessimistic about it in some ways.
You know, you can tell people, well, it's going to be pretty damn brutal if you tell the truth.
But boy, you want brutal.
You just keep lying and see where you end up.
That'll be brutal beyond your wildest imaginings, man.
That's absolutely 100% for sure.
In the course of writing this new book, my shortest book, Letter to the American Church, I came to the conclusion that as horrific as it is to think about what the silence of the German church led to, the silence of the American church now, if we do not repent and begin to speak if we do not repent and begin to speak out boldly against every one of these things, the result will be worse even, if possible, than what happened in the Holocaust.
Yeah, well, we're more powerful now.
So why not think about the whole 20th century as a trial run?
And we're no wiser, obviously, because people are still, you know, what do they say?
They still allow the cat to have their tongue.
It doesn't matter if I don't say what I believe to be true.
It's like, yeah, well, you just keep walking down that road, buddy, and see where you end up.
So, hey, so what happened?
What kind of response did you get from the church to your book?
What kind of response are you still getting?
Who's to say what the church is?
But I will tell you that the response has been very, very positive.
I'm very happy to say that because I had no clue.
I didn't write this book as some career move or a way to make money.
I just thought I have this—I must write this.
But the response has been extraordinarily positive.
I am—I've never, ever gotten as many— Speaking invitations, people emailing us daily.
I bought 20 copies to give to every pastor in my area.
I've been thinking this.
Thank you for saying this.
In fact, later next week, I'm flying to LA to film a documentary about Which is this book in film form to get the message out to a wider audience because the response has been that dramatic.
In fact, I spoke about this at a church in California some months ago, and some people there who are in Hollywood, they said we've got to make a documentary film.
Of what you just said of this book.
We've got to get this message out.
So I can say with cautious optimism that the response has been genuinely better than I had feared.
Better than I had hoped, even.
And you can understand why I'd be glad to say that, because I have hope.
In other words, I feel that there are people joining the battle.
There are people understanding, you know what, I got this wrong, and I see that now.
I was, you know, in the early days of COVID, we shut down our church and we just did whatever the government told us to do.
We'd never seen this before.
Yeah.
But you're seeing...
First of all, wherever I'm invited to speak, it's usually by some heroic pastor.
And the story is the same every single time.
They say...
Our numbers in this church have tripled, quadrupled, quintupled because we were brave in the early days of COVID. We kept our church open.
And people are flocking to us because they say those people must know something.
They seem to believe in freedom.
They seem to believe in something.
And those churches have exploded in numbers.
The churches that were playing it safe...
No church plays it safe.
No actual church.
No, no, absolutely not.
No, the churches, a real church is the most dangerous place you could possibly be.
Well, that's right.
And paradoxically, it's the safest.
Yeah, how weird is that?
Well, of course.
Well, you know that truth is paradoxical.
Well, that's just the nature of things.
But I have to say that, you know, it's kind of like if somebody says to George Washington in 1776, hey, George, how do you think it's going?
You know, I'm seated here on the very island, well, actually, across the East River, which is not a river, from where they had the Battle of Brooklyn, the Battle of Long Island.
And if you'd said to George Washington in 1776, how's it going?
How do you think it's going to go?
Right.
In the natural, his answer would have been, we don't know.
If providence be for us and we fight with everything we have, God may give us the victory.
But he wouldn't have said like, hey, we got this, you know, it's good.
No.
And that's where we are now.
We are in a battle for freedom between good and evil.
And our job is to fight ourselves.
Our job is to fight and to look to God for leadership and guidance, and the results are in his hands.
But the response to this book has given me reason to hope that we might fight on and might eventually win in some ways and might eventually...
Yeah, what would a victory look like, you know?
I've wondered about this on the Russian-Ukraine front, but let's talk about it on this front.
Okay, so...
There's a victory.
All right, so what are you aiming at?
What's the victory here?
What does that look like compared to what's happening now?
The restoration of this nation, America, to foundational principles, to the Constitution, the draining of the swamp that is the deep state, the unelected bureaucrats who are at war with we the people, who are at war with the freedoms enshrined in our founding documents.
That would be a big part of it.
The idea that we would again be free, that I would go to vote and know that my vote is genuinely counted.
I wouldn't doubt that.
There are a host of things that would happen.
Our freedom to speak the truth, whether it makes people uncomfortable or doesn't.
Our freedom to question things like, is this vaccine a good idea?
Our freedom to question whether there was chicanery in that election.
I mean, that's basic stuff, that we have the freedom to question these things.
And people can say, you're full of it.
And we can say, okay, let's debate it.
Let's discuss it.
Let's open the books.
Let's look into it.
That's so basic.
And those, again, those are foundational principles.
And, you know, to put it on a higher plane, when Lincoln talked about a new birth of freedom, I think it would look like a new birth of freedom, a reestablishment of freedom and of the promises, you know, quoting Marx.
Martin Luther King Jr.
No, the promissory notes of our founding documents.
We have yet to live out a lot of that.
In many ways, we've gone backwards in the last 50 or so years.
And so the bureaucratic deep state, these people that have become authoritarian, anti-American, anti-freedom, I mean, all of that has to be dealt with.
And I think that, you know, we don't know where it's going to go, but not to try, not to fight and to try and to pray and to do that is just, you know, beyond pathetic.
It's complicity with evil.
And, you know, Bonhoeffer didn't say it probably, but it's often associated with him.
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.
Not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.
God will not hold us guiltless.
There are many people that think, like, I'm just going to take a third, I'm going to be neutral.
And you think, no, you don't get to be neutral.
Well, you know what Christ says about neutral people in the book of Revelation, right?
Yes, I do.
Hot's good, cold's good, but sitting in the middle, you better watch the hell out, buddy.
Well, it's sort of funny, though, that people, again, this is the parallel.
He didn't phrase it just like that.
No, no, he didn't.
But...
In Germany, this is what a lot of these religious leaders thought.
They thought, well, there's a safe religious path.
We're just going to stick to quote-unquote preaching the gospel.
We don't want to get political.
We don't want to speak against the evil of the Nazis.
And that's when you realize that the parable of the talents in the scripture talks about that.
That somebody who cynically says, I'm going to take this talent.
I'm going to bury it.
That way, I can't lose it.
And it's like, no, you don't understand.
God requires of us to be all in.
If you're not all in, you're judged guilty.
And there are a lot of people that right now are just wanting to not get involved.
I don't want to be divisive.
I don't want to bring this stuff up.
And you realize, well...
God is asking you just to try to get it right.
You might not get it right, but you have to try.
And to not try and just to cover your rear end ends up being wicked because people are going to suffer because of your silence.
People are going to suffer because of your inaction, your passivity, and trying to Painted along some religious lines makes you even more guilty because you're trying to give this religious excuse for something that is at war with God himself, with his purposes.
I'm going to bring Eric over to the Daily Wire side because we're not on the dark side enough yet, so we might as well go there.
And we're going to talk a little bit about...
How his ideas developed, how they made themselves manifest across time.
We did that a little bit with his description of his quite remarkable dream.
And so if you people who are watching and listening are inclined, you might want to head over there.
It's not such a bad idea to throw a shackle So to speak, the Daily Wire way at the moment, because YouTube has decided to go to war with us and them, let's say.
Of course, we didn't say anything inflammatory today, so just to maintain the peace.
Can I say something inflammatory, one final inflammatory thing?
Hey, man, have a...
No, but just because we touched on so many things, and yet there's so many things we didn't touch on, I would like to shamelessly ask people simply to visit my website, which is ericmetaxas.com, because there's so many things that I wanted to say in the course of this and obviously wasn't able to.
But it's just my name.
If you can spell it, it's Greek, ericmetaxas.com.
But I just...
Talking to you, Dr.
Peterson, you know, it's such a joy because there's so many directions that we can go in and so many directions that we didn't get to go in.
But these things are important.
These are all profoundly important, beautiful things.
And let me just say thank you to you from the bottom of my heart for being a courageous voice in the midst of the din around us.
Well, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.
And for everybody watching and listening, your attention and time is not taken for granted.
We appreciate the fact that you're coming along for the ride, so to speak.
I'm going to switch over now to the Daily Wire side and continue this conversation.
And, well, very nice to meet you, Eric.
I'm sure we'll meet again.
No doubt we'll talk again, God willing.
Thank you again for everybody who's watching, listening to the Daily Wire Plus crew for putting this together, facilitating these conversations to the film crew here in Toronto.
That's much appreciated as well.
And sayonara, sir.
We'll talk to you on the Daily Wire side.
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