Andrew Klavan at YAF’s Reagan Ranch retreat diagnoses modern despair—rising suicide rates, plummeting birth rates, and cultural collapse—as rooted in feminism’s rejection of motherhood and biological reality, while progressive policies like transgender ideology and artificial wombs signal existential decay. He traces moral relativism to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, warning that without Judeo-Christian faith, society lacks a compass, and even conservative movements risk incoherence without biblical grounding. In Q&A, Klavan defines "embracing Christianity" as a personal relationship with God, not dogma, and urges pragmatism in politics while avoiding absolutist rhetoric, arguing that shared moral principles—not faith—can bridge divides with atheists. The core message: bad ideas thrive when faith falters, and only divine truth can restore meaning. [Automatically generated summary]
So I gave a speech at the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara for YAF, the Young America's Foundation.
I hope you'll take a listen to this.
It's called The Tyranny of Bad Ideas, and I think you'll be really interested in what I have to say.
Andrew Clayton is the author of such international best-selling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, Don't Say a Word, starring Michael Douglas, as well as Empire of Lies and Werewolf Cop.
Clavin, and this is the most surprising part, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, of all places, has won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award twice, the Thumping Good Read Award from W.H. Smith, and nominated for Anthony Awards and the International Thrillers Writer Award.
He scripted the 2018 film God's Now, The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer, a crime based on the true story of an abortion doctor convicted of murder.
His first book of nonfiction is a memoir of his religious journey, The Good, excuse me, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ, was published in 2016.
It is a memoir of his spiritual journey from secular Judaism and agnosticism to Christianity.
As many of you know, he currently does a weekly podcast for the Daily Wire called The Andrew Clavin Show and speaks for YAF across the country on college campuses.
Please join me in welcoming Andrew Klavan. Thank you.
Thanks very much.
The Bible says that the span of a man's life is three score years and 10, 70 years.
I'm 69, so I'll be brief.
First, let me thank Andrew and Governor Walker and YAF for inviting me.
I'm always a little bit startled when I'm invited to speak at respectable venues.
My wife says that when I really say what's on my mind, I manage to offend every single person in the room.
And I plan to tell you what's on my mind today, so you might want to file in an orderly manner to the exits to beat the rush.
I genuinely love making YAF speeches in a lot of ways for the same reason I love working at the Daily Wire, which is that it gives me a chance to talk to people who are a lot younger than myself.
At the Daily Wire, I'm older than any three other people there put together and have earned from my younger listeners the nickname Hot Gandalf.
A nickname which is only half true and I'm going to leave you to decide which half is true.
But along with my nascent decrepitude, the thing that actually distinguishes me from a lot of political commentators in general is that I'm primarily an artist.
I'm a novelist.
My job is not really to talk.
It's to listen and to observe so I can write stories that hold the mirror up to nature.
And I want to tell you what I observe about young people.
And it's mostly that they're not very happy.
And I would say they're very unhappy.
And it's not the usual unhappiness of youth, which we all experience.
They're miserable.
And the statistics bear me out on this.
Suicidal ideation among young people is just skyrocketing.
But as I say, and I'm going to be very blunt about this, I'm an artist.
I'm not just an artist.
I happen to be a really good artist.
And historically speaking, the observations of people like me are actually more accurate and predictive than statistics.
So I'm just going to tell you what I see.
I see young women who are depressed and lost because they live in a culture that despises their womanhood, that tells them their failures unless they succeed in terms that were created by and for men, that tells them they can and ought to be strong the way men are strong, in the particular ways that men are strong.
If you watch the movies, it's unbelievable, these little slips of girls beat up three men, they punch a guy, and he goes rolling back out of the room, something that actually does not happen in real life when you punch a man.
They're told that they should live on a male timeline so that their early years are devoted to career success and their later years are committed to family instead of on a female timeline, which just logically should be pretty much the other way around.
Now, of course, each individual can do whatever he, she wants, but just in general, I'm speaking in general.
They weren't told these things by accident.
They were told them by decree.
In a 1975 interview between the famous feminist Betty Fredan and Simone de Beauvoir, de Beauvoir told Fredan, no woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children.
Society should be different.
Remember that line.
Society should be different.
Women should not have that choice precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
Now the young men I see are angry and they're frustrated because feminists told them that their natural feelings of protectiveness and leadership toward women are oppressive and toxic.
So a lot of them dialed down their masculinity and then found that even feminists prefer men who are strong leaders and they felt conned and cheated.
And they've turned to guys like the online influencer Andrew Tate.
Now I don't know how many of you are familiar with Andrew Tate, but he is a man who drives me absolutely insane.
He is a confessed pimp.
He seduces women into sex work and then takes their money.
There's a video of him beating a woman with a belt and then bragging about how much she loves it.
They love it.
They love it.
They love this stuff.
And this guy, I tell you, is hugely popular with young men.
Even decent young conservative men who you would never guess are watching Andrew Tate videos, passing them around, laughing over them, because they've been lied to and he's telling them something true.
He's telling them that many women will follow a strong man who abuses them before they'll give themselves to a weakling who treats them with simpering, fake, feminist-dictated respect.
When good people lie, they put the power of truth in the hands of evil people.
Now, this speech is not, I promise, going to be a rant against feminism.
But to make my larger point, I have to point out that since feminism became our dominant cultural mode in the 1980s, every study shows that women have become increasingly unhappy.
Almost one in five is taking antidepressants.
Wages have stagnated because the potential workforce has essentially doubled.
Childhood obesity has skyrocketed because children replace the mother love they need with food.
And the birth rate has gone into steady decline.
It's predicted that our population is going to start to decrease for the first time since 1919, when World War I and the Spanish flu killed millions.
And not coincidentally, with the spread of the induced psychosis of transgenderism, the very existence of women as a fundamental component of the human experience has been called into question and is under threat.
Now, again, my speech is not about feminism.
I just need to make the point that while everything I just said about feminism is absolutely true, no one wants to say, this was a mistake.
This was bad.
When I speak like this, I see the young girls start to nod their heads and then look around to make sure no one saw them.
And older people, especially men, they just want me to stop.
They just want me to shut up and knock it off.
It makes them so uncomfortable.
I get accused of wanting women to be kept barefoot and pregnant, and that's just ridiculous.
I think every woman should own at least one decent pair of socks.
But of course they should be pregnant.
Of course they should be pregnant.
A pregnant wife is the crown and glory of our race, of the human race.
This is insane that we think that I have to say this and feel that I may be offending people by saying it.
But we need not just more children.
We obviously need children.
We need more pregnant wives.
We need more wives to be pregnant.
A pregnant wife is the center, the source of our religion.
She's the central symbol of our most cherished holiday.
Every song ever written, every story, every movie, every book tells the same story, asks the same question.
Is there a man manly enough to win the heart of a woman womanly enough that she will come together with him in order to start the world again?
This is what young people yearn for.
It's what old folks like the rest of us fondly look back on and remember and hope happens again to our children.
So my question is, how on earth did we allow some small-minded, pinch-hearted, gray-souled, joyless academic theory created by unhappy sexual deviants who want everyone to be as unhappy as they are, strip us of the joy of the essential duty of human life, which is to create new life.
And that's what this speech is about.
It's about the tyranny of bad ideas.
The power of bad ideas to get a stranglehold on the culture and refuse to let go, even as the disastrous results come pouring in.
It's not just sex, obviously.
Look around at the cities run by progressives.
Look around at San Francisco.
I lived in San Francisco years ago.
It was the most beautiful city in the country.
It is now an unlivable hellhole.
This happens slowly.
I remember talking to detectives in San Francisco who told me it was happening 20 years ago, but it never seems to have occurred to anybody to throw the bums out of office and bring in some ugly-faced law and order Republican to replace them.
They just don't do it.
They just don't do it.
The bad ideas keep them in thrall.
Legal immigrants destroying the country.
I don't have to go through this list.
You all know it.
Race relations are getting worse.
War is spreading.
This one, again, for someone who grew up in the America I remember, which was Reagan's America to a large extent, we have a lowered life expectancy because of deaths by despair, deaths by drugs and suicide and alcohol.
And large segments of the population are looking at this like that dog in the internet meme.
I don't know if you've seen this.
The dog is sitting in a house that is burning to the ground and he's drinking coffee and thinking, this is fine.
The power of bad ideas is almost magical.
It hypnotizes people so that they can look at Armageddon and think it's the Garden of Eden.
Why is it true?
Why do bad ideas have so much power?
Well, here, as an artist, I'm going to tell you what I think.
Over the last several centuries, thinkers have been trying to find what is the single motivating factor of human actions.
It's called the totalizing theory.
What is the thing that makes us do what we do?
There have been many brilliant minds who worked on this.
Schopenhauer said it was the universal will.
Freud said it was Eros.
Marx said it was self-actualization through labor.
The big one now is the evolutionists, who think we just have these kind of instincts that were formed in us randomly to keep us alive, and now they make us think that those are our moral senses.
And the postmodernists, of course, think it's free to be free of power constructs as power drives everything.
I have my own theory, which is called original sin.
I just made this up.
You can call it actually whatever you want.
The fact is, there is not a single human being walking the face of the earth who is or thinks he is what he is supposed to be.
We all know we are broken inside.
We all know we need forgiveness.
We are desperate to avoid the feeling of shame, which is one of the most powerful and painful feelings there is.
We will blame anything rather than the state of our souls.
I mean, I hear people say, you're fat-shaming me, you're slut-shaming me, instead of, I'm a fat slut and I'm ashamed, which is obviously the truth.
People are so desperate to avoid shame and feel righteous that if you can point to a real injustice, the mistreatment of women, racism, inequality of wealth, you can then convince them to buy into whatever lousy solution you propose next.
Feminism, anti-whiteness, social justice.
socialism, even as that solution improves nothing and makes people more and more miserable.
Convince a man, you can make him righteous, and he will buy any garbage you are selling him.
Queers for Palestine.
Queers for Palestine, where they kill queers for being queers.
Women for Palestine, where women are forced to dress like the ghost of Christmas yet to come and are perpetual victims of oppression and abuse.
Jews for Palestine.
For the illusion of righteousness, men will follow the devil into hell like the children dancing after the Pied Piper.
To my mind, this is the whole purpose of YAF speeches.
In fact, it's the whole purpose to any really good political commentary, but especially YAF speeches.
Young people, especially, need to see that you're not afraid to just call a bad idea bad.
That you're not afraid to be called names.
You're not afraid to be called a sexist or a racist.
You will say that bad ideas are bad and you will replace them with good ideas.
And where do good ideas come from?
They come from traditions.
This is the big fallacy of radical politics: you wouldn't even have the morals that you have if it weren't for the traditions that you're trying to overthrow.
So you go in a YAF speech, you will hear certain quotes come up again and again because they are central to our culture and to our beliefs.
Central Quotes in Conservative Speeches00:04:20
You'll hear Aristotle quoted on the connection between virtuous actions and happiness.
You'll hear Burke quoted on the value of tradition, Madison on the need to control the powers of government.
But there's one quote that comes up again and again in YAF speeches, all speeches to conservatives, and that's the quote from John Adams, his famous 1798 letter to the Massachusetts militia.
He said, Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Morality and virtue are the foundation of our republic and necessary for society to be free.
Always gets applause.
Conservatives, Yaf kids, they love their religion, they love their Constitution, put them in the same quote, and it's like winner-winner-chicken dinner.
This is like a great.
But the fact is, I find this quote extremely troubling.
If our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other, that was fine when America was what G.K. Chesterton called it, a nation with the soul of a church.
But I'm not convinced we're religious anymore, and I'm certainly not convinced that we're moral anymore as a people.
Once again, I can quote statistics.
I can tell you that statistics show a decline in church membership and any house of worship membership, a quick decline since 2000.
It's now below 50% for the first time in history.
But I think it's much worse than that.
I don't think even our churches believe in religion.
I was telling Andrew before, I just changed, I moved, and I had to find a new church.
And I went down a list of, oh, it was like 100 churches in my neighborhood, eliminating anything that said we're inclusive.
That was the first thing.
I thought, why should you include anybody who doesn't believe what you're talking about?
Anything with Black Lives Matter, who had forgotten that there are no black and white lives in Christ.
Anything with gay pride, who forgot, never mind anything else, I forgot that pride is the worst of the seven sins.
And of course, one of them said, hate is not welcome here.
And I thought, well, if I'm not welcome, I'm not coming.
But we saw during the recent pandemic, the churches closed, the church built by martyrs closed as if they believed what then Governor Andrew Cuomo said, that there was nothing worse than death.
And it's not just the churches.
These people behave that way too, like cowering in their apartments, wearing masks that didn't do anything.
Even beyond the pandemic, taking antidepressants as if their spiritual state were just a question of getting the chemistry right.
Democrats won elections just this last week because using a woman's body for pleasure and then killing a baby if it should result is a fundamental right.
The president supports gender-affirming care.
The president of the United States supports gender-affirming care for children, the butchery of children to make their bodies a costume of the opposite sex.
We're not religious.
We're not moral.
If we were, none of this would stand for 10 minutes straight.
If you want to see the connection between the loss of religion and the power of bad ideas, take a look at the disgusting upsurge of anti-Semitism after the mind-boggling massacres by Hamas in Israel, people supporting, I'm not even going to go through the atrocities, you know what they were, and people are out there marching in support of them and terrorizing Jews.
Whenever anti-Semitism rises, it's a theological event.
People have tried all kinds of explanations for this, what's called the oldest hatred, the hatred of Jews.
They say, well, Jews are rich and successful, and people are envious of them.
Jews of Russia in the shtetls weren't rich, and that didn't stop the pogroms.
They say, well, Jews are standoffish, and they won't conform.
They won't assimilate.
The Jews of Germany did nothing but assimilate, and it didn't stop the Nazis.
And now they say Jews are colonizing the indigenous people of Palestine.
But no country of Palestine has ever existed, and Jews are the indigenous people.
People hate Jews because they hate God.
Why We Have No Natural Rights00:11:13
That's the only reasonable explanation.
Jews wrote the book on God, and the God that was revealed to them was graciously given to the rest of us through Jesus.
And the light of God shines on our brokenness and shines on our shame, and we want to put that light out.
The attempt to escape from shame, that's where the power of bad ideas come from, and without God, there's no path to forgiveness and no idea of righteousness.
Now, I wish, it would be one thing if I was saying to you, this is just something that's happened over the last 10 years, but this is actually the end result of a century, centuries of the withering of faith.
Great thinkers in Western culture have understood that this was happening since at least the Reformation and have told us exactly what it would mean and exactly what it would look like.
Shakespeare, I think, was the first.
And this is not an attack on the Reformation.
It's just the fact when people began to doubt the church and the church fragmented and there were religious wars, people were going to lose faith.
And Shakespeare saw it.
And I think this is what the play Hamlet is about.
Hamlet comes back to his home from Wittenberg, which is where the Reformation began, and he can no longer tell what's real and what's not real, what's right and what's not right.
There's an amazing scene in Hamlet where Hamlet pretends to be mad, and in his make-believe madness, he basically predicts every philosophy that's going to come down the pike for the next 400 years.
Moral relativism, he says there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Think it's good?
It's good.
The alienation between words and meaning that the postmodernists have used to overturn our society.
Polonius asks Hamlet what he's reading.
He says words, words, words, as if they had no meaning.
And the ultimate distrust of the human conscience, the human heart, the human moral order that comes when you don't believe in God.
Hamlet says, I don't know what to think of anything because everything changes with my mood.
When I'm depressed, man, who is meant to be like the angels, becomes nothing more than quintessence of dust.
Quintessence means the ultimate formation of dust.
That was 1600 around when Hamlet was written.
A century later, after Newton had discovered the clockwork of nature and made people feel, well, maybe we didn't need a God.
Maybe things just happened naturally.
The Marquis de Sade, who wasn't just pretending to be mad, but was an actual psychopath, upped the ante.
He said, well, yeah, since all morality is relative and nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so, you should just surrender to your natural love of self and serve yourself with whatever pleasure you desire, including the pleasures of rape and murder.
That's where we get the word sadism from the Marquis de Sade.
He said, nature, it's a funny line, he said, nature has endowed each of us with the capacity for kindly feelings.
Let us not squander them on others.
A century after that, in the wake of Darwin's theory, which made people lose their faith for a lot of reasons, but one of them was they just thought God must be very cruel to just get rid of species like that, carelessly get rid of species, but also that it seemed that man was nothing more than a naked ape.
That's when Friedrich Nietzsche declared that God was dead.
He said, God is dead and we have killed him.
Must we ourselves not become gods?
And what he meant by that was that a new man, a superman, was going to rise above the loser morality of Christianity, what he called the slave morality of Christianity, and write a new morality for man.
And that's exactly what happened.
Unfortunately and predictably, the new man turned out to be Adolf Hitler.
And that was predictable.
I'll give you one more quote.
It was predictable because even before Nietzsche started writing, Dostoevsky predicted that's exactly what would happen.
In his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, the brother who rejects God, says, for every individual who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact opposite of the former religious law.
Egoism, even including crime, must become not only lawful, but even recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position.
So we've been falling from the height of faith for centuries.
And it's like the old joke about the guy who jumps off the Empire State Building and he gets to the 40th floor and someone looks out the window and says, how's it going?
And he says, okay, so far.
Now we've landed.
Now we have landed.
We have hit the street.
When our elected representatives can cheer on Nazis like the killers of Hamas, when drag queens perform sado-masochistic acts in front of children in public elementary schools, when abortion is sacred and the body of children is not, can anyone deny that we are living in Hamlet's madness or Dassad's nature or Dostoevsky's prophecy?
So the question is, if our faith is gone and our Constitution is adequate only to a religious people, do we find faith again or do we ditch the Constitution?
And you may be surprised to learn this.
On the right, among conservatives, this is an actual debate.
People who, a lot of them are Catholic, they call them Catholic integralists, like Patrick Denin, are saying that liberalism was a mistake.
Liberalism, in the old sense of the word, meaning freedom to do what we want, to make our own choices.
It was a mistake.
We need a more restricted government with a church behind it that will limit your freedoms to the freedom to make the right choice, as the church sees it, and limit your speech to the ability to say the right things, which to me isn't freedom at all, actually.
And then there are others who talk about Plato, who said there's a cycle of regimes, and the problem with democracy is that it leads to chaos as people begin to worship freedom over everything else.
And then a tyrant has to come in and take it over, and that's the next regime, and each regime replaces the next.
And a lot of conservatives are saying, well, maybe it's just that time.
It's time that freedom has run out.
And it's time to find what they call a red Caesar who will impose our conservative values on the nation.
Because it's too hard to turn around centuries of dying faith.
How do we do it?
How do we do it?
And if our Constitution is only adequate to the religious, maybe we have to get rid of the Constitution.
But the thing is, I don't think we actually have a choice.
I don't think that theocracy or imperial rule are going to save us from what is going to happen next and soon.
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration started holding meetings to discuss the possibilities of an artificial womb.
They immediately said, oh, well, you won't be able to bring a child from conception to birth in this artificial womb.
It's just if you have a premi, you'll be able to keep the kid alive until he matures.
But that's obviously a lie, right?
Once they build this machine, it's only a matter of time before they'll be able to replace human mothers altogether.
The pregnant wife, the crown and glory of our race, the human race, will become, potentially at least, obsolete.
And then we'll be faced with a choice, not whether we want to remain free human beings under our Constitution, but whether we want to remain human at all.
And the answer to that question, I swear to you, is going to depend entirely on whether we believe in God or not.
Whether we believe that we are accidental products of blind nature and therefore infinitely malleable without moral consequences, or whether we believe we are created beings made in the image of our Maker with a purpose, the purpose of drawing near to God by freely chosen love.
This means what happens next depends entirely on what we say and don't say, not just in YAF speeches, but to each other, to our children, especially to the young.
This is the moment when those of us who speak, and all of us speak, all of us are part of the culture, all of us are culture creators, all of us have someone to whom we are the model and to whom we set the standards.
This is the moment when all of us are going to have to answer the great question of Moses, who is on the Lord's side?
We can't keep telling half the story.
You know, we go to YAF speeches and we're always saying socialism bad, capitalism good.
Absolutely true.
Capitalism, the greatest economic system ever invented.
But prostitution is capitalism.
Selling fentanyl is capitalism.
Talking people into buying garbage they don't need with money they could use somewhere else is capitalism.
Capitalism only works for people who understand the moral order.
The moral order and its values come first, and then capitalism is genius.
When we attack transgenderism, we say things that don't make sense.
We say, well, that's not natural.
Who cares?
Air conditioning isn't natural, and I love this stuff.
What we really mean is you were made male and female, and it is good.
It is a gift, not just to yourself, but to others, and is also a responsibility coming along with different responsibilities for male and female.
And we love to talk about our Constitution and our founders and limited government, but again, John Adams was right.
Our Constitution is only adequate to a people who know which way righteousness lies and who can find forgiveness for their sins so they can live on earth free of the tyranny of bad ideas.
If we talk, we have to stop talking about our Judeo-Christian tradition, a phrase I dislike, and start proclaiming our Judeo-Christian faith.
There's no way out of this.
There's no way out of this.
Without God, the image of man as an inherently free being under natural law becomes a mere fiction, as the World Economic Forum's favorite philosopher Yuval Harari says.
He says it's a fiction that we have natural rights.
It's a fiction.
Even human nature is a fiction.
We're going to become homo deus, he says, just like Nietzsche said.
And it didn't work out well then, it's not going to work out well now.
We have to wear God on our shirt fronts the way the Marxists wear shea.
Now, I understand that just because our country, our freedom, our humanity can't survive without faith, there's no reason to have faith.
There's only one reason to have faith, and that's because God is real.
Why Faith Matters00:11:50
And he is real, and science increasingly supports this.
But that's a conversation for another day.
For now, I simply want to say this, and I'll close with this.
If you are a person of faith, you have been called to this hour.
You cannot stay silent about it.
There's no escape from shame, no cure of the tyranny of bad ideas beside the moral law of God and his forgiveness.
That's just the way it is.
And if you're a person of integrity, and I know many who in all honesty simply can't believe, all I would ask is that you think again.
Reconsider.
Check your work.
Today I found out that Ian Hirsia Lee, a hero of mine, has finally embraced Christianity, a woman so abused by religion, I don't even know how she could believe in anything at all, but she has found Christianity.
If she can, maybe it's time to check your work.
Because the hour is coming and is already here when the future of the race will depend on those who speak truth in the spirit and speak the spirit in truth.
Thanks very much.
Thank you so much, Andrew, for speaking.
We do have some time for some QA.
We have a limited amount of time.
The students have to start their tutorial.
We will go ahead and if we could prioritize students first, please, so they could start on time.
Students, go ahead and raise your hand, and Madison or I will bring a microphone to you if you guys have questions.
Hello, Andrew.
I'm Grant from the Chicagoland suburbs.
I've been watching your podcast for the last few years, and I've had a wonderful time listening to you and your observations and the artistic quality of which you communicate about who we are as a nation and our identity.
And my question for you is: I feel like there's so much of our generation that we're out of touch.
And when I see your podcast and everything that you talk about, it's a hidden jump because I discover all these truths from pop culture to the world and how it works to scripture and leaders of our past.
And my question for you is: what should we be doing to prepare ourselves for the future and to get in touch?
You know, one thing I would really say is it's going to sound simple, but it's so true.
You have to read, and it's not reading to be online.
You have to have a book in your hand and read the book from the beginning to the end.
You have been actually schooled in ignorance.
It is unbelievable what people come out of college not knowing.
And they've done it on purpose.
They don't want you to know the greatness of this tradition.
So that's the first thing.
And the other thing, and this is more difficult, but I really believe it's going to be necessary, is you've got to start forming new churches just among yourselves.
You've got to start gathering together to talk about the things that you read.
And it doesn't have to be the Bible.
It can be about all the things that you read, but you have to gather together and form those communities because they've all been destroyed and they've been purposely destroyed.
So you have to make them again.
And it's the kind of thing a shy hermit like me, because I'm a writer, probably wouldn't be able to do.
But other people who have more social skills can do it, and they really should begin.
You're absolutely right about this.
You have to make an effort to change it.
Hi, my name is Tim and I go to Cedarville University.
And I have two questions.
The first is, what does it mean to embrace Christianity?
And do you think we need to start talking about Christianity and the gospel more at YAF speaking events?
Well, the answer to the second question is yes, because of what I said.
At YAF speaking events, we talk about capitalism, which is great.
We talk about limited government, which is great.
We talk about the things that we don't like.
If you invite Walsh or Knowles, they'll tell you about transgenderism forever.
But our arguments don't make any sense without the gospel, without the Bible.
And so we're always leaving that bit out.
And so I think we have to point out the fact that the left is right about everything if there's no God.
They really are.
Why not cut up a body and turn it into something else?
Why not cut it up and turn it into a cat?
Why not?
And so I think we have to just be very clear about that.
What was your first question?
I'm sorry.
It means primarily to develop a relationship with God through Christ, that to say, you know, this is the image of the invisible God, as it says in the epistles.
This is the image of the invisible God.
By getting to know him, I can get to know God.
And by doing that, I can reshape myself.
I mean, look, all of these guys who are talking about, you know, the Marquis de Saud, one of the reasons I stopped being an atheist was I read the Marquis de Sade, and I thought he's making perfect sense.
If you're an atheist and I don't want to live in that world and I don't want to be that person, one of the things was we all have these urges to do things that are terrible.
The guys, the Hamas people who invaded Israel, did things that people have been doing for centuries.
That's not new.
So the question is, are we something else?
Are we that thing that we yearn to be, that thing that says that there's something wrong, is that real?
And I am absolutely certain that it is, but in order to find it, you have to be in communication with the guy who made it.
And so what I always tell people is if they're searching, the first place to begin is go into a room by yourself every day for at least 15 or 20 minutes and talk to God out loud.
And the reason I say that is out loud will keep your thoughts straight.
You know, you won't just drift off into daydreams and things like that.
The other reason I say it is God will answer you.
He will talk back.
You will be shocked.
You will be shocked.
The reason I became a Christian is because I started to pray, not to any particular God, just started to pray, and suddenly looked around at my life five years later and thought, oh my God, my entire life has changed for the better.
What do I do now?
And that's the reason I went back to the Bible and started to read it as if it were true and all this stuff.
So it means to develop a relationship.
And then you can worry about theology.
Then you can worry about your church.
Find your church.
But I think to gather with people and pray is important.
To pray on your own is important.
But just to understand it.
You're not in this alone.
You were made by a person for a purpose.
And you find that out in conversation with that maker.
We have our next question over here Oh, there you go.
Hi, I'm Trevor Goodwin.
I'm from the Chicagoland area.
So I always see a lot of conservative influencers, such as like Graham Allen, talk about how such a low percentage of Christians actually vote in our elections.
So I was wondering what we could do to try to get more Christians out there and voting because they typically have conservative ideals.
Yeah, there is more conservative, although there used to be more conservatism there.
You know, I actually think when Jesus said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, he was making, as he had a habit of doing, an excellent point that politics is a mechanical profession.
It's about fixing the mechanics of things.
And you need your Christian and Jewish moral order to vote properly, but you're not going to vote in angels and you're not going to vote the country into heaven.
It's just not going to happen that way.
And so I think we need to explain that to Christians, but also come to them with the issues that are at hand.
I mean, I think that it's difficult, for instance, with this abortion issue where the only way forward in most states is to compromise.
Much as I hate to say that, but politically you have to compromise because it's a two-front war.
You have to fight it in a culture and change minds, and then you can get what you need politically.
But for now, you can only get a certain amount.
And sometimes that alienates Christians who want to be holy, but don't want to do the work of getting the country to the place.
So you have to explain these things.
You just have to talk clearly, plainly, and reach out to them with their values, but make them understand that politics is a game of compromise.
We all know it, and there's no sense.
One of the things I dislike about a lot of, at least right-wing talkers, is the way they pound their fist into their palm with absolute certainty and 100% purity, where the world just doesn't work like that.
And I think we can explain that to Christians.
They're not stupid.
They'll get it.
Andrew, this will be our last question over here.
Hi, my name is Zoe.
I am from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
So I've watched you speak online on YouTube, especially with Prager, Candice Owens, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson.
And after having listened to many of you, I'm now persuaded that every political argument for anything comes down to a spiritual battle.
I have an atheist friend that I talked to, and it became rather evident.
I appreciated that she was very civil, but I realized there was never going to be convincing if we could not agree on the same reality.
So with that being said, you know, we have, obviously we have freedom of religion in this country, but how would you recommend that I discuss a political idea with someone who doesn't have the same religious views as I do?
And let's just say that I can't, I haven't persuaded them of my religious views either.
One of the things that I have found is really helpful first, the most important one, is don't talk about people.
Don't talk about individuals.
You can't get in an argument about whether Clinton is better than Trump or Obama is bad or all that stuff.
It's endless.
Because let's face it, they all stink.
Reagan was actually an anomaly.
I mean, there's a reason that we get together to celebrate him.
They're not all like that.
And so you don't want to get into an argument about political people.
You want to get into an argument about principles.
And a lot of people, even though they don't believe in God, have moral principles.
They don't make sense.
It doesn't make sense that they have moral principles, but they have them all the same.
And so if you start with the principle that you're trying to get at, you know, I was talking to a guy, and obviously abortion is a hot topic, and people get very angry about it.
And I started off by saying, listen, I'm always for the smallest person in the room.
You know, I'm always going to stand up for the smallest person in the room.
I've been doing this since I was a little kid.
Every fight I ever, every fist fight I ever got into was somebody else getting bullied, you know, and I just couldn't stand it.
You start with that, and the guy at least sees what you're saying.
It was the only, it was the first time, not the only time, because I've done it since, it was the first time I ever had a pro-abortion person stop and listen to what I was saying and why I felt the way I felt.
So if you start with the principles that you're arguing and move to the specific political question and then stay away from the politicians, you always have a chance because nobody's lost.
Nobody's lost forever, you know, until they're lost forever.