Andrew Clavin’s Hell on Earth dissects Pennsylvania’s Catholic abuse scandal—300 priests, 1,000 victims, and 70 years of systemic cover-ups—calling it "Holocaust-level evil" while defending Trump’s combative stance against leftist violence as justified. A listener’s family opposition to her 22-year engagement sparks advice to prioritize marriage over familial approval, while another debates rebaptism, dismissed as redundant. Clavin also tackles balancing Christian values with alcoholic in-laws and warns against stifling personal growth for a lackluster partner. Controversially, he speculates Jews may embody "doubting Christ" but insists they’re still God’s chosen. The episode closes with praise for Trump’s deregulation, framing bureaucratic resistance as tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
The American Association of Journalistic Mendacity has issued new guidelines for the coverage of demonstrations.
The guidelines came in the wake of last weekend's marches in which thousands of left-wing activists assaulted or insulted or threatened to kill police officers, journalists, passersby, puppy dogs, innocent children, President Trump, and the entire United States of America, whereas evil fascist white supremacists pleaded with their 20 followers to cease their hateful ways and live in peace and harmony with all mankind.
The AAJM said the news coverage tended to slightly favor the peaceful and virtually non-existent white supremacists by showing them to be peaceful and virtually non-existent, while the violent leftist multitudes were shown unfairly as being violent and multitudes.
This is in violation of the organization's credo.
First, spread no information that makes leftists look bad.
Second, lie like a house of fire.
According to the new guidelines, journalists shall refer to non-violent fascists as violent fascists, whereas violent leftists shall be referred to as anti-hate groups.
Journalists who get knocked to the ground and kicked by peaceful anti-hate groups shall report that journalists were caught up in clashes, whereas journalists who are asked directions by white supremacists shall report they were accosted by violent fascists.
Demonstrations in which leftists cause violence and no right-wingers appear whatsoever shall be taken as evidence that we live in a divided country, as opposed to an indication that we live in a great country under attack by violent leftists.
And the fact that no one can find enough fascists to play around a fascist bridge shall be taken to indicate that those who are festering with anti-black hatred are simply too cowardly to actually exist.
Using these simple guidelines, the American Association of Journalistic Mendacity says even amateur journalists should be able to become lying dirtbags like the professionals.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Abuse And Hiding00:17:44
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Yes, that's right.
And the reason she's cheering like that is because she knows your problems are minutes away from being solved.
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They are hard, hard questions.
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All right.
You know, my first reaction to this scandal, this Catholic abuse scandal, latest Catholic abuse scandal in Pennsylvania was now I know why Pope Francis is against the death penalty.
He can't afford to lose that many priests.
This is a, just if to read the details, and I'm not going to go into the horrific details, although I am going to talk about what those details mean a little bit.
This is just an absolutely blistering report by a grand jury.
Good job to Joshua Shapiro, a liberal Democrat.
I hate to, you know, I hate to say it, but he did a great job.
And the grand jury, you could just tell their hearts were bleeding as they talked about this.
This is over 300 priests they found with over a thousand victims.
And those are just the ones that they really felt they had the goods on.
They said there were probably thousands of victims all throughout Pennsylvania, six counties, I think it was, all throughout Pennsylvania.
It's just stories.
The story is basically this, that priests were grooming, raping these children, mostly boys, but some girls as well.
And the diocese and the bishops were doing everything, had developed an actual system for how to cover this up.
70 years, a lifetime, this went on.
This went on for a lifetime.
I will let Shapiro just describe some of the things that they found.
The cover-up was sophisticated.
And all the while, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up.
These documents from the diocese' own secret archives formed the backbone of this investigation, corroborating accounts of victims and illustrating the organized cover-up by senior church officials that stretched in some cases all the way to the Vatican.
The term secret archives is not my term.
It is how the church officials themselves referred to the troves of documents sitting in filing cabinets, just feet from the bishops' desks.
So whenever these horrific stories come out, the problem is the question that I ask myself is how do we speak about this usefully without devolving into virtual virtue signaling outrage?
Because people spend time trying to find words to express the evil of it, trying how horrible it is.
And really underlying that is just our desperate desire to communicate to one another that we are not these people, that we are the righteous.
And that's why we, you know, we just want to express the outrage and describe this in the worst terms we can possibly come up with.
And of course, there are no terms.
There are no words for something like this.
And I'm not righteous.
That's the other thing.
No one is righteous.
No, not one.
And I'm not righteous.
And I'm not trying to signal to you that I am a righteous person.
But I think we all know what this is.
We all know this is satanic evil.
We all know that this is the depths of evil.
So I want to just, I was thinking, like, how do you talk about this in a useful way?
And I'm not a Catholic, though I am very friendly with Catholic theology.
But let me just talk about some of this stuff.
I mean, every mailbag day, I make the same joke.
I say that this mailbag will, these answers will change your life, possibly for the better.
And the basis of that joke, as I've explained before, is that when you say to somebody, this will change your life, it is immediately taken as a positive thing.
Even if you're talking to Tom Cruise, right, who's the richest, biggest superstar on earth, can have anything he wants, and people treat him.
You know, if you say to him, hey, Tom, read this book, it'll change your life, he'll read the book.
He will read the book.
Why?
Because all of us know that we are not who we're supposed to be.
This raises profound questions.
That means, who is it that you're supposed to be?
What is the perfect Andrew or John or Mary who you are not?
And how do you know that person?
And how do you know that person is there and that you're supposed to be that?
All those things are very profound questions once you start thinking about them.
And I believe that, you know, this is why Jesus said, suffer the little children to come unto me, for if such the kingdom of heaven made, not because children are so innocent.
We all know children are not innocent.
What they are is they are closer to that original person before history destroys them, before abuse or just the vagaries of human life turn them into something else, right?
When we look back, we think, oh, I'm doing this.
I have this bad habit because of things that happened to me, but this good habit I have, my ability to sing, well, that I was born with.
We all know this.
We all know that there was something we were made in the fashion to be in the womb that is better than what we are.
And every day, I will tell you, I don't like to get too personal about this stuff, but every day I pray that God will bring me closer to that person he made me to be because of that original me that he made and will get me past this.
So this Sunday, I experienced a small miracle.
I believe that miracle is the absolute right word for it, but it is a small miracle, right?
I was in church.
I haven't been to church in a long time.
I've talked about the fact that I'm at odds with the Episcopal Church because I believe that their leadership has become a bunch of social justice warrior goombas who are basically have replaced their personal morality.
They've replaced the gospel with their personal take on morality.
And I don't care what they think.
I really don't, what their personal opinions are.
But I think the gospel should rule.
If you're running a church, I think you should be paying attention to the gospel.
But I believe in the liturgy, which is the kind of the way the prayer, the pattern of the prayer, and it's very much in the Episcopal Church, especially the one I go to, it was a very Catholic liturgy.
And that liturgy carries you through to the Mass.
And I believe in taking the Mass.
So I went to church.
And while I was there, I was actually singing a hymn, which I do incredibly badly.
And while I was singing to him, I felt an old, old, from the beginning of my life, an old error of perception of myself literally lifted off me and taken away.
And a sudden unity of personhood came to me that I understood.
It wasn't just an experience.
I understood intellectually what was happening.
And I realized that this was Christ answering my prayer that I pray every day.
He answers it in many, many different ways all the time.
But listen, I've done a lot of different things to try and put myself together over time.
And I've talked to you about the fact that the first part of my life was really unhappy and really twisted.
And since then, it has been increasing joy, increasing wholeness.
And along that journey, I tried psychotherapy, which changed my life.
It was great.
I tried Zen meditation.
Absolutely great.
I recommend meditation and therapy to anybody who does it well.
But nothing has been like the experience of Christ because it's not healing me psychologically.
I no longer need that, thank God.
It's not healing my ability to pay attention, which meditation does.
It is actually a spiritual healing that seems to like almost eradicate, not entirely, but eradicate many of the effects of the past.
And I know you all understand what I'm saying because I know each and every one of you has problems that come from your past.
Each and every one of you has demons and things that adhere to you from history that you don't want.
So I felt this thing lifted off and I realized that this is the presence and the work of Christ in my life.
Jesus is the center of my religion.
My relationship with Jesus is the center of my religion.
Now, I believe, I say this, this is the Nicene Creed, I believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church.
And in the Nicene Creed, that word Catholic means universal.
It means there is one church covering us all.
But I don't believe that the Roman Catholic Church necessarily is that church.
There was a time in the West, especially, of course, there was a time when the Roman Catholic Church was that church.
If you were part of Christendom, you were part of the Roman Catholic Church.
With the Protestant Reformation, that changed.
There was a splintering of churches, and this hostility still goes on.
We still have conversations here where the Catholics and the Protestants are fighting with each other.
I never care about those conversations.
Why?
Because I just want to get to Jesus.
If you get to Jesus through the Catholic Church, if another person gets to Jesus through the Lutheran Church, great.
But I will tell you this.
Catholics are always telling me, jokingly, but still kind of annoyingly, are always telling me they are the one true church.
I don't believe that, but I do believe when they call it the mother church, that it is the mother church.
All the other churches come from the Catholic Church.
And even the most anti-Catholic theologian I know, who's probably our God-King, Jeremy, who, you know, he is a Catholic.
He doesn't know it, but he's a Catholic.
He's really arguing at the fringes of Catholicism.
It is really Catholicism that explained and created the structure of Christianity, Western Christianity as we know it.
And all the other churches came out of rebelling against that.
So in the same way you can rebel against your mom, you still come out of your mom.
And the Catholic Church remains the Catholic Church, and that makes it the mother of churches, and that makes it all of our business.
That is why we all pay attention to the Pope.
That is why we all have a stake in what happens there.
And when you look at what happened in these Pennsylvania things, and again, I'm not going to get into all the incredible detail, but it had the stamp of true satanic evil.
And now, I studied the Holocaust a long time, just trying to understand it as a Jew, just trying to know what that was about.
And there are certain things, certain touch that the devil has that just marks these things.
It has to do with wit in a way.
It has to do with a kind of evil wit.
I always say, you know, I'm somebody who doesn't take a lot of things seriously.
I make a lot of jokes about a lot of things.
And I always say everything in life is funny except other people's suffering.
And the reason I say that is because we're all joking at our own, at the world's corruption.
We're all joking at the terrible things that people do.
And why is that funny?
It's funny for the same reason it's funny to see a guy in a tuxedo slip on a banana peel.
Same thing I started out by saying.
We all know we're supposed to be something better than we are.
And when we see a politician taking money and selling services, when we see people abusing each other, there's something funny about watching somebody who should be an angel descending into corruption.
But when you're laughing at that, you're laughing along with God because God is looking at this thing and saying, oh man, it's right here for you.
All the good stuff is right here for you and you're going that way.
And there's something comical about that.
But when you look at it from the other side and you look at the people who are being hurt by that corruption, you look at the people who are being hurt by that cruelty, you're looking at the people who get hurt, it stops being funny, right?
That's when you're not laughing with God.
That's another kind of laughter.
And there's something about the way these priests abuse these children that had a kind of wit to it, a kind of invention to it, that is always to me the mark of evil, the mark of true genuine evil.
You know, they used to yell at me here at the Daily Water when we'd get in these arguments backstage.
Now they yell at me because they think I'm a little too easy on Trump sometimes.
But then they would yell at me because they thought I was too easy on Obama because I would never say Obama was evil.
I used to say, look, I've seen evil.
I really have.
I've sat across the table from people who would put a bullet in your kneecap.
I know what evil looks like.
Obama was a goon.
He was a corrupt guy in a lot of ways.
And he was ignorant of what makes the country work, but he was not an evil person.
This, this stuff is the real deal.
This is the real deal.
And what does it do?
What does it do?
It puts up a barrier.
I was talking about the work of Christ in my life.
That's what I started out taking it, talking about.
That's what Christ does.
That's what Christ does.
He does that work in your life.
He does that work in your life.
He brings you closer to that person you were meant to be that you know you're not.
Every word that you say is meant to disguise the fact that you know you're not.
You think you're hiding from your brother, your sister, that you're ashamed.
You think you're hiding that stuff from everybody, that you don't feel quite right, that you wake up in the middle of the night and think, you know, I'm not who I was supposed to be.
You're not hiding it because we all feel the same thing.
We're all spending a lot of our energy hiding that from one another.
But you can't hide it from Christ.
He will help you.
He will bring you closer.
But when you can look at the Catholic Church and say that this is what it is, that the mother of churches is this, that gets in the way.
That, what's the word, disgraces, disgraces the word of God.
Let me, let me, I won't say it.
I won't say it.
Let Jesus say it.
This is what he said.
He said, what sorrow awaits you, you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees, hypocrites, for you shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces.
You won't go in yourselves and you won't let others enter either.
What sorrow awaits you, teachers of religious law and you Pharisees, hypocrites, for you cross land and sea to make one convert and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you are yourselves.
So listen, I listen to Catholics.
You know what?
Let's pause here for just a minute and just, CBS had interviews with the victims.
Just pause here just a minute and let them talk about what happened to them when they were children.
And you'll see they're grown-ups and one of them is the mother of a boy who died and it starts with her.
My son was 15 when it started.
His hell was right here on earth.
Judy Devin says the death of her son Joey three years ago can be traced to what happened to him as a teenager.
Because of the way he was, and I'm not going to say abused, I'm going to say the way he was raped.
At age 17, his back was injured.
There was nothing they could do surgically.
And because of the pain medication, his death was caused by an accidental overdose.
The word abuse gets thrown around.
We're talking rapes.
Julianne Borts and Mary McHale both say they were molested by priests at their Catholic high schools.
My abuser, when he took his collar off, he told me that he could do whatever he wanted to do.
And he believed.
I mean, you're trying to.
I believed him, yeah.
The collar is still a trigger for me.
They murdered something in me.
Something died.
Everything I believed died.
Right.
She took away her faith.
They took away, they closed, did what Jesus said, they closed the door of heaven.
And by the way, all these innocent priests, Rod Dreyer, who's a good Catholic writer, has been on the show.
He put up a list of tweets from a father, Philip DeVoos, I guess it's pronounced, D-E-V-O-U-S.
He says, I've given my whole life to serving Christ and his church since beginning the seminary in 1994.
Every year has brought fresh revelations of the darkest corruption along with criminal moral perversion coupled to unbelievable levels of incompetence.
Then I read the papers or catch the evening news and I see cardinals and bishops that I know for a fact are lying with impunity, deploying weasel words and fake emotions.
I mean, that's what I see too when I see them coming out and saying this stuff.
You know, I hear, oh, you know, the Pope said the latest silly thing that he said that has nothing to do with Catholic law.
And I think, why aren't you cleaning this up?
So here's the thing.
You know, I get into debates with Catholics sometimes, and they're very good at arguing, and they've got 2,000 years of doing it.
Chris Cuomo Reacts00:09:32
And I hear them say things like, well, there are more child abusers in the teaching profession or just as many in the teaching profession as in the Catholic Church or whatever they say.
That doesn't wash.
That doesn't wash.
If you are stopping people, if you are closing the door to the kingdom of heaven, you are committing a sin against the spirit that is immense.
And if you're the mother of churches, it affects us all.
It bleeds down unto us all.
So the enemy is not like the editorialist who goes off and, you know, in outrage against the Catholic Church.
The enemy is not me when I say these things.
The enemy is the devil who is in your church.
He is in your church.
This has got to be pulled up root and branch.
I mean, it shouldn't be, you know, God bless Joshua Shapiro, the AG in Philadelphia for the work he's doing.
It shouldn't be a guy named Shapiro who's doing this work.
It should be a guy in the church.
Your Pope should be doing this every day.
This is the work he has been given to do.
This is 70 years of cover-up, 70 years of rape, 70 years of taking away from people their path into the kingdom of God.
That little miracle that happened to me on Sunday and has been happening to me ever since I accepted Christ in my life.
You are depriving people of that by allow every day this is allowed to go on.
This evil is evil in a million ways, but mostly not just for the people it destroys, of course, but also for the fact that it keeps others, it destroys the pathway of faith to God.
And it's just, it is on the Catholic Church now to go after this root and branch.
This can't be about a bunch of, as the priest said, weasel words.
It can't be a bunch about a bunch of posing.
I mean, it's the Boston Globe is exposing this, and that was like 10, 15 years ago.
And now the Philadelphia AG is exposing this.
This is the work of the Pope.
This is the work of the church, and they should be doing it.
And they should be doing it for us all.
We are all depending on you because you are the mother of all churches.
I also just want to talk for a minute about Trump's, this thing that Amorosa, you know, it's all ridiculous, but I don't want to get into this place where Amorosa is saying there's a tape of Trump saying the N-word.
And I don't know if, you know, Sep Gorka was on yesterday saying that there was such a tape.
It would be out by now.
And I don't even want to debate it.
I'm sure that Donald Trump has said some terrible, terrible things.
He says terrible things all the time.
I hear him say terrible things.
I see him tweet terrible things.
I will say, if he's a racist, I mean a true racist, a guy who's out to do harm to black people, he is the worst racist in history because black people are doing great in the Trump administration.
He is elevating them.
I truly don't think, as I said before, I think if you're for him, he's for you.
If you're against him, he's against you.
That's the way Trump works.
But I do want to say this about the N-word, okay?
George Carlin, I think back in the 60s, famous countercultural comedian.
He kind of got swept up in the 60s counterculture, and he became this famous countercultural comedian.
He used to do this routine called the Seven Words You Can't Say on Television.
And he strung together every dirty word and just repeated them over and over again.
And the idea was they had no meaning.
It was just us saying, you know, that these were dirty words.
They weren't really dirty words.
It was a really funny and creative routine.
It wasn't true.
It's not true.
If I can say the word oak tree and you can think of an oak tree, I can say the F word and make you think that sex is a degraded, violent, ugly thing that can be used as a way of cursing other people out.
I mean, words have meanings and words communicate thoughts and feelings.
To say a word is ugly just because we say it's ugly is ridiculous.
It's ugly because that is its meaning in the world.
The left has managed to declare that these words that degrade sex, that degrade bodily functions, these words that degrade human beings are fine, are fine.
You can say them on TV.
You know, I mean, every time I doze off in front of the TV and wake up at 1 o'clock in the morning, there's porn on my television set.
I'm like, oh, I went to sleep.
I was watching a Fred Astaire movie and I wake up and I'm watching porn.
The left did this.
The left did this.
But now they want to tell us, oh, but there's one word.
There is one word that is just positive proof that this word has meaning suddenly.
This word has meaning.
And all I want to say about this is that when you have, you know, let's play this.
You have dumb and dumber, Chris and Don from CNN.
I mean, these two guys, seriously, I think they're made of cement from the neck up.
They're telling us that the violence that leftists commit is fine.
I played a little of this yesterday, but here's the two of them doing it together.
The law will take care of what you do to me and what I do to you.
But to make it moral equivalence, when you're coming at me because I'm saying that you don't matter in this world as much as I do, those are not equivalent motivations that lead us into the confrontation.
Well, sometimes you can't fight people by, you know, praising them or being nice to them.
You have to fight fire with fire sometimes.
Listen, I'm not advocating.
You should be your best.
Those guys going after cops, going after the media, it's wrong.
They did nothing productive.
They did nothing to make anything better.
Yeah, let me just say this, though.
You asked why he doesn't call out because the white nationalists are winning right now.
In his imagination, they got up 20, they got the Unite the Right was 20 people.
So that's winning to him.
Now let's listen to Chris Cuomo talk about the fact that Trump responded to Amarosa in typical fashion by calling her a dog in one of his tweets.
And this is something, by the way, they're making it about race, but this is something he said about a lot of people.
There's a word he uses which means, I think it means a failure.
You know, it's the old phrase that that dog won't hunt.
It's kind of like that thing.
But it's ugly.
It's an ugly thing to call somebody, and especially a woman.
So here's Chris Cuomo reacting to that.
All right, welcome back to prime time.
So if my 12-year-old Mario called someone a dog, he would not say it again in my presence.
I guarantee you, he would apologize.
In fact, if he said most of the things that the president says about people he's threatened by or doesn't like, his cheeks would be glowing.
And that's because we teach our kids, we make our kids do right because it shows respect for people and respect matters.
So don't defend President Trump calling Omarosa a dog.
Don't defend him calling anyone a dog, period.
Stop making it all okay, whatever Trump says.
Fighting back is not automatically a virtue.
Mama says, if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing for a reason.
Same in your house, right?
Discretion can be the better part of valor.
Same in your house, right?
Why?
Because this kind of ugly talk is contagious.
It creates a coarseness that leads to unintelligent confrontation.
So let's get this straight, okay?
If a leftist punches you in the face because he doesn't like your politics, that's not so bad.
That's not so bad.
But if Donald Trump uses language that Chris Cuomo doesn't like, that is awful.
Because from Donald Trump's point of view, he's doing exactly what Don Lemon is talking about, exactly what Chris Cuomo was talking about.
He is fighting fire with fire.
From his point of view, he's doing the exact same thing.
When you tell us that your anti-white racism is not as bad as anti-black racism, when you tell us your violence is not as bad as other people's violence, when you tell us you can call us racist, call us male chauvinist pigs, call us all these names, but when Donald Trump starts calling you names back, we have a problem with civility.
You have got a problem with a double standard.
I have never said, I have never said that Donald Trump is my dream president at all, at all.
But you have made it so that we either have to accept your double standard and surrender.
I mean, there was a poll the other day that showed more Democrats, more Democrats support socialism than capitalism.
I mean, that's an ignorance and stupidity beyond imagining.
So if you ask me to choose between Donald Trump, who says dreadful things, says things that I, like Chris Cuomo, would not accept in my house, if you're asking me to choose between that and slavery, the slavery of socialism, I'm going to choose that.
That's the choice you've given me.
That is the choice you've given me.
Remember, Trump didn't run against Abraham Lincoln.
He didn't run against George Washington.
He ran against Hillary Clinton, one of the most dishonest, creepy presidential candidates there has ever been.
Okay?
So remember, we're still living in a binary world.
I will not countenance Trump's use of any kind of language like this.
I've talked about his rudeness.
I've talked about the fact that it repels me.
But the choice still remains.
The choice still remains between this guy and a bunch of people who are racist.
They say it's anti-white racism.
That doesn't make it racism.
Those words can come out of your mouth.
Doesn't make them true.
They're not true.
If you make me choose between socialism and Trump, I'm going to pick Trump.
So that is the real thing we're dealing with.
And that's why I don't care about Amarosa.
As far as I'm concerned, I want one of those Mission Impossible scenes where Amarosa pulls off her mask and she turns out to be Michael Wolfe.
And then Michael Wolfe pulls off his mask and it turns out to be Dan Rather because you guys have been doing this character assassination routine for a long, long time.
Hey, speaking of Michael Knowles, oh, we weren't speaking of Michael Knowles, but let's speak about Michael Knowles because he is doing his conversation on Tuesday, August 21st at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific.
Knowles will answer your questions as well as he's capable.
Don't hate on him, all right?
It will be moderated by our lovely host, Alicia Krauss, who has the absolute courage to sit next to this man.
Body of Christ Roles00:13:42
She makes it look effortless.
The Q ⁇ A will stream live on YouTube and Facebook for everyone to watch, but only subscribers can ask Knowles questions over at DailyWire.com.
I guess you're going to hammer him with the Catholic stuff this week.
It's going to be tough, but it's going to be worth it because Knowles is good at making his case.
All right, we've got the mailbag coming up.
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Cafe.
All right, from AJ, dear Andrew No Eason Clavin, my boyfriend and I have our third year anniversary in December and we want to get married.
We both have talked about it extensively and even picked out an engagement ring, talked about our future finances, made money plans for a better financial future and what we both want out of life.
I know he plans to propose and that my father has given his blessing.
However, there's a catch.
I'm 22 and he's 23.
My father has expressed that I am too young and my mother, a divorce attorney who divorced my father years ago, has told my family behind my back of our soon-to-be engagement.
My family members have already started to ridicule us.
They say jokes about how I'll be pregnant quickly, despite the fact we don't want that right away and now I should get married when I'm 25.
I have dealt with the differences between my family for some time as I'm a Christian and my family consists of non-believers and pagans.
I feel hurt, but not surprised my family doesn't support our decision.
And I disagree with them about marrying Young.
My friends and his family support us and I'm grateful for that.
We are willing to get married without my family support.
However, I've always wanted to be close to my family.
How can I tell my family that their lack of support hurts me and that marrying young isn't a bad thing?
Also, do you have any marriage advice?
Love listening to your show and thank you so much, AJ.
AJ, you don't have a problem.
Marry your boyfriend.
That is what is in front of you.
You have a sorrow in your life.
The sorrow is that your family is antithetical to you and to what you believe.
Your family, your true family, lies ahead of you, not behind you.
The family that you make with your husband is going to be the family for the rest of your life.
And you're going to have a sadness in your life that you cannot be as close to your family as you wish you could be.
That is just something, you're not going to fix that.
That's not going to fix.
Your family is on a little train track.
They're going to go around the circles.
They're not going to change.
Nothing you say is going to change them.
Nothing is going to transform them into the people you want them to be.
Doesn't mean you have to reject them.
You can tell them that they're being hurtful when they say hurtful things, but you cannot spend your life trying to fix them because that's not what's going to happen.
That's just not going to happen.
It ain't going to work.
Go forward.
That's why it says in the Bible: you leave your mother and father and become one flesh with your husband.
This is your new family.
Go forward and do it.
I mean, he sounds like a good guy.
It sounds like you've worked things out really well.
It sounds like you thought it through, and that's great.
So, God bless your marriage.
And just understand, this is a sadness.
You know, we all have sadnesses in our lives.
This is going to be one for you.
You know, try, I would say, try not to make it a hostile relationship.
Try to be polite when you can.
If you have to say something, say it politely.
But put your concentration on the future, on your husband, on the children you guys are going to have.
And you're not too young.
That's, you know, that is a very individual thing, whether people are too young or not.
It has nothing to do with it.
My marriage advice is always the same.
And that is be nice, be excellent to one another.
It's like, what is it?
Bill and Ted's excellent adventure.
Be excellent to one another.
Remember that the little politenesses that we show to people in stores, to waiters and waitresses, to shop clerks, the person you buy a movie ticket from, those shouldn't stop when you come home.
Those should be things that you should remember to do.
Remember to thank the people, your husband and your wife, for the things that they do for you.
Just those words alone.
Remember to tell each other that this is a good thing.
And remember, when you disagree, to stick to those adherents.
You know, if somebody brought you in a restaurant, if somebody brought you a cold hamburger, you wouldn't start shaking your fist, and I hope you wouldn't start shaking your fist in the waitress's face.
You would say, this is too cold.
Please take it back.
When you disagree, disagree politely.
It won't kill you.
It will not kill you.
The advice that you need to fight, that couples need to fight, is bad advice.
You don't need to fight.
You can discuss things and speak politely and think about the feelings of the other person.
That's my advice.
Those little things, if you do those every day, you'll be in great shape.
From Ben, my parents baptized me in the Catholic Church when I was a baby, but from that point on, I never had any sort of formal religious upbringing.
My parents are nominal Christians at best.
They baptized me more out of tradition.
Along the way, he says, I was a devout atheist as early as I can remember, especially in my teenage years.
Along the way, that worldview eventually started to break down.
I ultimately came to believe in God and gave my life to Christ when I was 19, although I don't consider myself to be a Catholic.
My question to you is: is there a justification to pursue baptism again now at 27, given that I made a conscious decision to become a Christian as an adult and given that I've already been baptized into the faith long ago?
You know, you should certainly ask your pastor about this.
My answer would be no.
You weren't baptized by your parents.
You were baptized by God.
You were baptized by Christ.
That is your baptism.
It stays good.
The fact that you grew into it is his work as well.
That's something that he did in your life as well.
But he doesn't need you to do that again.
He did it for you once already.
It doesn't matter whether you're a baby.
It doesn't matter whether I know there are Anabaptists who want to do it again.
I'm just giving you, you asked me, so I'm giving you my point of view.
It does not matter what you thought about it at the time.
It was valid in Christ's eyes, so you don't have to do it again.
You know, but there are ceremonies like confirmation that people in this situation use.
You can get confirmed, and that is something that kind of stands in for what satisfies the need that you're feeling.
From Audrey, hi, Andrew, I love listening to your show, and I'd love some of your life-changing advice.
I recently got married, and my husband and I have decided to wait a few years before we have children.
My in-laws are very kind people, but they are both dependent alcoholics.
My husband is sadly used to it and has given up on encouraging them to seek help.
We plan to raise our children based on Christian values, but I struggle to reconcile the idea of letting my in-laws be a part of their lives.
Of course, I want my children to have the joy of being with grandparents, but I don't want those habits to be seen as normal.
Is there a compromise here?
As they are my in-laws, the situation feels awkward.
How should I approach this problem?
Well, first of all, you know, obviously never leave them alone with your small children if they are helpless drunks.
Better to see them in the morning than in the afternoons.
That usually is the way it progresses.
You can't save them.
Your husband is probably right.
They're probably beyond your help and certainly yelling at them.
Just don't worry about this.
Don't worry that your children are going to be somehow infected with alcoholism.
Your children are going to get their values from you.
Don't worry that this is like it's a bad influence.
The influence that's going to matter is you.
And so you shouldn't think of them as some kind of disease.
They have an addiction.
You shouldn't think of that as something that's catching.
But I wouldn't let drunks take care of my children alone.
I would be there on hand.
But no, you shouldn't deprive your kids of their grandchildren.
Shouldn't deprive them of the grandparents of the children.
Like I said, take precautions if you can to see them early in the day and don't leave your kids alone with them.
But don't worry that they're going to infect your kids with alcoholism or something like this.
From Gerrin, who I think has written before several times.
Dear wise one, what do you think is your biggest blind spot?
Something you may be wrong about or an issue you feel most on the fence about?
You know, probably has to do with sex.
I grew up in, it's a good question.
You know, I think I got a million blind spots, so I'm just picking one.
But I think, you know, I grew up in the 60s, so sex became sort of free and easy.
That worked out well for me as an elite, as somebody who was educated, somebody used birth control, luckily didn't get anybody pregnant, luckily didn't get any diseases, was cautious and all that stuff.
So it worked out well for me, but I'm not sure it was good for me.
I don't think it was good for me.
And I don't know.
I think everybody's so different.
You know, I wouldn't change my life.
I wouldn't even change the mistakes, a lot of the mistakes in my life if they didn't hurt other people.
But I think everybody's so different that it's hard for me to talk about one-size-fits-all sexuality.
And yet I think that sometimes because I was an elite and because I was protected from the ravages that a simple act like sex can create in people's lives, I think I sometimes have de-emphasized it in living a good life and how you do it.
I mean, obviously, I want people to treat each other well.
I don't particularly think it's a great idea to be sleeping with people you don't know.
I think that is degrading.
But I also know that life is filled with errors and mistakes that make you who you are.
And so I just sometimes wonder if there's some, I don't want to become a one-size-fits-all.
I certainly don't want to become a condemnatory person.
But I sometimes wonder if I don't speak enough about the fact that your body is you, your experience of you in the world.
That is, your body is your experience of your spirit in the world, and it is worth taking care of, and it matters what you do with it.
And so sometimes I think like I haven't quite developed a theology of the body.
I've developed a theology of my body.
That's important.
I live a conservative life.
I live a life with my wife.
That is my life.
As I always say, my sex life is just my wife and Game of Thrones.
That's it.
But in terms of how to communicate that to other people, I'm not always sure I do as good a job as I want to.
All right.
Let's see.
We've got time.
From Jamie, Great Wise One Clavin, I am in need of your assistance.
I am 20 and currently a dating girl, 18, who's extremely sweet and kind.
However, she doesn't have much drive towards her future in terms of education and is not someone I can discuss concepts like philosophy, politics, and such without feeling like I have to educate her on the subject before we can even begin to discuss.
Anyway, I'm at a bit of a crossroads of either waiting and seeing if she matures intellectually or breaking off the relationship as painlessly as possible and searching for a better match.
She's an amazing person.
I don't want to hurt her if I can avoid it, but I also need to factor in my own happiness.
Thank you.
Well, I think that the giveaway here for me is factor in my own happiness.
It doesn't sound like you're happy.
It doesn't sound like this is a satisfying relationship to you.
I have seen happy relationships in which one person was intellectual and the other person wasn't, and they provided other things.
But that doesn't sound like, it doesn't sound like you're satisfied.
From what I'm reading here, if you're factoring in your own happiness, this woman deserves a husband.
If she's as great as you say, and I have no doubt she is, she deserves a husband who is made as happy by her as she is by him.
And you don't sound like that guy.
So you say hurting her, it will hurt her if you leave, but it will hurt her a whole lot worse if she marries somebody who's unhappy with her and who looks down on her and doesn't think she can measure up intellectually.
Uh, So that's what sounds to me like is going on in your head.
And if that's true, it is always best to get out of these things faster.
Women are working on a time, on a schedule, not like men.
They have, you know, their bodies are on a schedule.
And so you really should not be stringing her along.
And that's what it sounds like to me just reading it from that letter.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but that's what I hear.
From Parker, atheists always say that if the Jews are the chosen people of God, why don't they accept Jesus Christ as a Savior?
I think that's a moderately okay point.
How would you rebut that?
I have a theory about this that not only does nobody else agree with, but everybody hates and finds offensive, so I'm absolutely certain I must be right.
When you have offended everybody, you know that you're probably either utterly wrong or in the right.
You know, in the letters of Paul, I believe, it says that the body of Christ has many members, right?
And each person does something different in the body of Christ.
And we all belong to the body of Christ, but that doesn't mean we all have all the gifts that Christ gives.
And I think that that is obviously the case, and that it is obviously a way of looking at the world that's very important.
And when we see people we disagree with, instead of thinking this person is just out there, does not belong to the body of Christ, maybe what we should be thinking is, oh, maybe this is a different part of that body than I'm not seeing.
I have a theory, and again, I know I'm going to get hammered for this, but it is my theory.
I have a theory that the Jews are the, without knowing it, are the part of the body of Christ that doubts.
Doubt is one of the most underrated emotions in the life of faith.
Doubt is what moves you forward.
Without doubt, you become a self-referential blowhard who just knows what he knows and doesn't want to listen to anybody else.
With doubt, you're constantly questioning why your faith hasn't taken you to the next level, why there's evil in the world.
With doubt, you start to ask these questions that deepen your faith and make it richer and richer.
And we can see by the way the Jews have been treated by Christendom that the Jews have stood as a rebuke to Christendom and that they've mistreated their father religion.
And so that, I think, especially after the Holocaust, that has caused the church to reflect and it has caused the church to know itself in ways that may be kind of uncomfortable.
And on the Jews side, the Jews side, well, we're not part of the body of Christ at all.
Well, I believe that the Jews have been deeply changed, but Judaism has been deeply changed by Christianity.
They don't like to admit it.
They like to think that Christianity is just Judaism by other means.
But I believe that Judaism has been deeply changed by Christianity as well.
And so this seems to me possible that the Jews are a part of the body of Christ, even in their non-belief.
And that is something that just drives everybody crazy when I say it, but it's my theory.
I do also believe that the Jews have a relationship with God that is special and that it doesn't change.
Regulatory Rollback Plans00:03:23
God doesn't break his promises.
He doesn't say, you're my chosen people.
Oh, it's too bad.
You know, I'm pulling the trapdoor on you.
That's not the way it works.
So I believe that it's going to work out for the Jews.
I don't know how.
I don't pretend to know how, but I believe it's okay.
And I always tell Shapiro, if we have to, we're going to smuggle them in.
That's how it's going to be.
All right.
I've got to stop there.
we'll go to tickety-woo news.
So this is one of my favorite things about the Trump administration.
And I know it's boring, but I just have to bring it up really quickly.
The federal agencies, I'm reading from the examiner, I think, federal agencies led by labor and health and human services are cutting Obama-era regulations and saving money faster than demanded by President Trump, according to a new report.
As a result, the administration is expected to easily meet the president's order to cut at least two old regulations for every new one issued and cut the costs of regulations.
With less than two months remaining in fiscal year 2018, the Trump administration is well on its way to surpassing its regulatory budget goals.
Collectively, executive agencies subject to a regulatory budget remain on pace to double the administration's overall savings goal.
You have to understand, these guys, these bureaucrats go to work every day without Trump's rule and they just make regulations and every regulation costs money.
Every single one costs money.
What I would love to see if Trump gets re-elected and he has the Congress with him, I would love to see him start to dismantle some of these regulatory agencies, bring them down.
I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the EPA should be one guy with like a little test tube who goes around from state to state, making sure the air and the water is good.
And then if it's not saying, fix this, or they'll be held to pay.
That's all we need.
We do not need them telling us how many miles our car should get.
We don't need them virtual signaling in ways like the Obama administration rules were just there to help the people, the unions who voted for them.
They didn't do anything to improve our air and water.
And I think that they can all be dialed back.
This new guy who is in the administration, Brian Zink, he's now the Interior Secretary, Ryan Zink.
The green industrial complex, as it's called, is now, it is now, the environmental movement is now this gigantic machine for destroying anybody who gets in its way, right?
They got rid of Scott Pruitt, you know, and he made mistakes.
But this guy at Interior Secretary Ryan Zink, they're coming after him now, but he is one of these guys who just toes the line, and I don't think they're going to get him.
And I think that's really, really important.
This is incredibly good news, cutting back these regulations.
There should be regulations, but our lives should not be run by bureaucrats.
They should not be run.
They should be run by the people that we elect to run them.
Our country should be run by the people we elect to run them, not by these unelected bureaucrats.
One of the things I'm really hoping if Kavanaugh gets confirmed for the Supreme Court is he knows this, that they will start to dial back the respect that is paid to these bureaucracies.
They should not be the people running the country.
Trump has been great in dialing them back, but he's got to start to get rid of the agencies themselves and start to pass laws that bring the responsibility directly to Congress.
We don't have time to talk about this today, but Congress is letting this country down.
It's letting this country down by not compromising, by not making law, by not doing its job as legislators.
They should be doing that.
In order to do that, we need to disempower the regulatory agencies.
Trump is taking great strides to doing that.
Congress Is Letting Us Down00:00:47
Good on Trump.
Good for him.
That's it.
Tomorrow, last day of the week for the Clavin week and then into the Clavenless weekend.
So you want to suck all the Clavin-y goodness you can out of tomorrow's show.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
be there.
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