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April 22, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

45:19

Ep. 335 - Our Post-Christian Society

Islamic terrorists in Sri Lanka murder 290 Catholics on Easter Sunday, and around the world, churches have become the #1 target for attacks. So political and media elites who don’t want to admit that fact have made up a new term to describe them. Date: 04-22-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Islamic terrorists in Sri Lanka murder 290 Catholics on Easter Sunday, and around the world, churches have become the number one target for attacks.
	So, political and media elites who don't want to admit that fact have made up a new term to describe all of them.
	We will explore lies and ignorance in our post-Christian society.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
	Hello there, fellow Easter worshipers and non-Easter worshipers, Passover worshipers, maybe some Ramadan worshipers out there. Passover worshipers, maybe some Ramadan worshipers out there.
	I want to have all of those worshipers in here to analyze the new way that left-wingers, media elites, want to deny that Christians are being victimized around the world.
	Welcome, welcome, welcome.
	We will get to all of that in a second.
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	Go to ring.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Islamic terrorists murdered 290 people in Sri Lanka.
	This was mostly at a Catholic church, also at some hotels that were frequented by tourists who were in town for Easter.
	The group that we now think has committed this crime is the National Tamwif Jama'ath.
	This is a radical Islamic group, and it's not really being reported very much by the mainstream media.
	They're saying, we don't know.
	We have to wait.
	We're not certain who this is.
	Now, finally, it does seem that it's this radical imam that was behind this attack.
	It's this Islamic group that's behind it.
	And so now the media are pivoting.
	Daily Beast put out a headline.
	They said, quote, Is Sri Lanka Easter Massacre a bid to revive global holy war?
	This is the response that the left so often gives to Islamic terrorist attacks.
	Barack Obama used to give this response.
	They'd say, listen, the most important thing we can do right now is not identify the fact that Islamic terrorists committed the attack.
	Why?
	Because that's just what the terrorists want.
	This is what they would always say.
	They'd say, listen, if Islamic terrorists commit a terror attack, the most important thing, don't associate the attack with Islam.
	They might want a global holy war.
	We can't allow them to get what they want with a global holy war.
	At a certain point, they're waging the war.
	This is the thing with war, is that your opponent has a say.
	You're not the only person who can say, well, I'm going to be at war or I'm not going to be at war.
	This is how the left tried to frame 9-11.
	They said, we launched a war into Afghanistan.
	We launched a war into Iraq.
	No, we didn't.
	Islamic terrorists waged a war on us when they knocked down our Twin Towers and when they hit the Pentagon.
	They declared the war.
	So you can have two options at that point.
	You can either put your head in the sand, surrender, pretend that nothing's happening, or you can fight.
	Those are your two options.
	But you don't get a say over whether or not you're in a war.
	When someone wages a war on you, you're in a war.
	And there is an explicitly holy aspect to this war.
	Say, oh, is this just an attempt to revive a global holy war?
	No, it is a global holy war.
	This is explicitly an attack on Christians and on Christianity.
	It happened on Easter Sunday.
	When that cathedral of Notre Dame burned down on the first day of Holy Week, said, you know, this timing is a little strange.
	Although we actually don't know what caused that cathedral fire.
	This happened on Easter Sunday.
	290 Christians, specifically Catholics, attacked.
	Three churches and hotels on the holiest day in the Christian calendar.
	Holier than Christmas.
	Christians are a highly persecuted minority in Sri Lanka.
	Christians make up 7.4% of the population of Sri Lanka.
	And it's not just in Sri Lanka.
	Around the world, churches have become the number one target for attacks.
	Right now, around the world, more than three churches are attacked per day.
	There's an average of 105 church attacks per month, almost all of which are ignored by the mainstream media.
	Obviously, the Notre Dame burning is the most explicit example.
	And, again, we don't know what caused that fire yet.
	We don't know one way or the other.
	I think a lot of people are trying to say, well, it was just some accident.
	Move on.
	We don't know.
	It was just an accident.
	We have no idea what caused that fire, for sure.
	There are also many, many desecrations and burnings of churches all around France that were going on during the week prior to the burning of Notre Dame.
	All of those other church attacks, desecrations, smearing excrement all over the church, burning churches down.
	Days after the Notre Dame attack, there was an American professor who walked into St.
	Patrick's Cathedral in New York with two gallons of gasoline and lighters.
	And when he was finally arrested, he said, oh, I was going to bring these to my car.
	Did you park in St.
	Patrick's Cathedral?
	What were you doing?
	Obviously another attempt to burn down a major cathedral.
	The most important cathedral in the United States.
	That same guy had booked a ticket to Rome later that day.
	I guess he thought he'd burn down St.
	Pat's, fly over to Rome, and I don't know, try to burn down St.
	Peter's or something.
	Yesterday, also on Easter Sunday, A woman jumped on stage at an Easter service, holding a baby and a handgun, screaming about how she's going to blow up the church.
	Fortunately, she was tackled, think the baby is okay, and nobody was injured during that attack.
	Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world.
	That's the conclusion of all of this.
	That's not hyperbole.
	That's not some shocking statement.
	That's according to the Pew Research Center.
	The Pew Research Center last year came out with a study analyzing trends all the way up to 2016.
	It showed that Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world.
	They are harassed by law, often, in 144 countries.
	That's up from 128 countries the year before.
	That edges out Muslims, who are also harassed in a lot of countries, but not as many as the Christians are.
	And yet, if you went out to someone on the street right now and you said, Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world, what would happen?
	They would laugh in your face.
	You hear this all the time.
	If you write on a column or on Twitter or something, I hear this all the time.
	They'll say, oh yes, Christians are so persecuted.
	Oh yeah, wah, wah, wah for the Christians.
	Actually, they are.
	At my church in New York, the Church of St.
	Michael, they dedicated a shrine to persecuted Christians in the Middle East because that story was totally untold.
	Nobody had talked about the Christian persecution that's been going on for years and years and years.
	Even when we look at our immigration policies in the United States, under Barack Obama, we took in scores and scores, hordes, untold numbers of Muslim refugees from war-torn countries like Syria.
	We took in barely any Christians.
	But Syria today is a Muslim nation.
	Why weren't we taking in the most persecuted minorities?
	Why weren't we taking in Christians?
	The reason for this is because a post-Christian society, which is what we now are, has two problems.
	The society both does not understand Christianity and it thinks it does understand Christianity.
	It's like that line from Mark Twain who says, it's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble, but what you know for sure that just ain't so.
	We don't even know in the United States that we're a post-Christian society.
	We don't even know in the West that we are a post-Christian society.
	What do I mean by that?
	Do I mean that Christianity is over?
	No, it's not over.
	Christianity will endure until the end of the age.
	The church will always be with us.
	But the period in which Christianity was the dominant cultural institution, where virtually everybody went to church, where the Christian view of the world was the nearly exclusive view of the world in the West, that period is over.
	And we're watching it come to an end right now.
	It doesn't mean that all of society is permanently over.
	It doesn't mean that there won't be a Christian revival.
	Let's not forget, Christianity was not born into a Christian society.
	Let's not forget that the beginning of Christianity, which we've just gone through on Good Friday all the way through Easter Sunday, was Christ himself being crucified.
	Let's not forget that Christians were persecuted for all of the early history of the church.
	The martyrs were crucified upside down, were tortured and killed in horrific ways.
	Then we had this nice period of Christian society.
	Now we're in a post-Christian society.
	How do I know that we're in a post-Christian society?
	Because you're all just a bunch of Easter worshipers.
	That's according to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
	A new phrase yesterday entered into the English language that came by way of our political elites, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
	The phrase is Easter worshipers.
	Barack Obama, responding to the terror attacks in Sri Lanka, said, The attacks on tourists and Easter worshipers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity.
	On a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal, we pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.
	Attack on tourists and Easter worshipers.
	Does he mean Christians?
	I think the word that Barack Obama is looking for is Christians.
	Specifically, actually, Catholics.
	And listen even the language that he uses on a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal.
	We pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.
	It is a day devoted to love and redemption and renewal because of the resurrection of Christ.
	There are other days devoted to love and redemption and renewal.
	Easter Sunday is about the resurrection of Christ.
	People would always say, actually, Chris Cuomo, the Fredo of the Cuomo family, was just going off on this because we've been pointing this out.
	A number of conservatives have pointed out how ridiculous the phrase Easter worshipers is when Barack Obama should have used the phrase Christian.
	And what Chris Cuomo said is, oh, you guys are just using code to say that Barack Obama isn't one of us.
	First of all, we're not using code.
	It's not code when you directly criticize somebody and you're explicit about what you're criticizing them for.
	And we're not even saying Barack Obama isn't one of us.
	We're saying he's not even the guy that he's pretending that he is.
	Remember, Barack Obama ran, I would go to church all the time, he's a professed patriot, professed Christian, all of this.
	All of these words.
	But then, in his behavior, and in the language that he uses after he gets elected, it doesn't seem that way.
	Easter worshipers.
	I've never heard that phrase before.
	Have you ever heard that phrase before?
	Hillary Clinton said the same thing.
	On this holy weekend, for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence.
	I'm praying for everyone affected by today's horrific attacks on Easter worshipers and travelers in Sri Lanka.
	Not Christians, not Catholics, Easter worshipers.
	A holy weekend for many faiths.
	You see, it's not Easter Sunday.
	No, no, no.
	It's the holy weekend for many faiths.
	And it was actually just those evil attacks that hurt people.
	It was those evil attacks.
	It was just hate.
	It was hatred and violence.
	It wasn't Islamic militants waging war on Christians as they prayed on Easter Sunday.
	No, no.
	It was these broad terms, Easter worshipers.
	That's all we can talk about.
	Now, Julian Castro had the same thing, by the way.
	He said, on a day of redemption and hope, these evil attacks on Easter worshipers and tourists in Sri Lanka is deeply saddening.
	My prayers today are with the dead and injured and their families.
	May we find grace.
	This is so strange.
	Why all of these responses say Easter worshipers?
	Hillary Clinton, when there are attacks on gay people, she says, I stand with the LGBT community.
	When Orlando gets hit, she doesn't say, I stand with nightclub dancers.
	My heart goes out to nightclub dancers.
	No.
	So I stand with the LGBT community.
	When Muslims are attacked for something...
	She doesn't say, I stand with Ramadan worshippers.
	I stand with hijab wearers.
	No, she says, I stand with Muslims.
	But when it's Christians, then we can't say that.
	We're not allowed to say that word.
	It sounds so accurate and precise.
	We're not allowed to use that kind of language when we're talking about our culture, our civilization.
	Christians.
	We're not allowed to do that.
	We need this generic, made-up term, which I don't think anybody had used until last night.
	Easter worshipers.
	So why is the left using the phrase?
	Nobody worships Easter.
	We've never heard of this phrase before.
	We worship Christ.
	We are Christ worshipers.
	If you want to use the word worshipers, use the word Christ.
	Why can't the left say Christian?
	It's because Christians can't be victims.
	That Christians can't be victims.
	Not in reality.
	Obviously, in reality, Christians are the most persecuted religious group in the world.
	But in leftist ideology, Christians cannot be victims because of all of their theories, because of intersectionality.
	Because we know that at the top of the oppressor pyramid is the straight white man who knows that he is a man who is a Christian.
	That's the worst oppressor in the whole world.
	So when that person is the victim, he can't be a Christian.
	He has to be some new phrase.
	He has to be an Easter worshiper.
	In fairness to the phrase Easter worshiper, by the way, there are lots of people who only go to church on Easter Sunday.
	They're the ones who go on Easter.
	Maybe they go on Christmas.
	I don't think that this is the reason why Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are using that phrase.
	I don't think that's what they're trying to convey.
	I think what they're trying to do is defend their own ideologies, but...
	This is true.
	This is also a problem.
	The number of Americans who are members of a church right now is at the lowest number ever recorded.
	You're going to see a It's going to make you think that 80 years ago, there were also not a lot of people going to church.
	Then it rose and then it fell.
	That's not true.
	The reason that we're at 80-year lows right now is because we only started looking at these numbers 80 years ago.
	So we are at, certainly, historic lows.
	All-time lows of church membership in the United States.
	Church membership in the U.S. held steady at about 70% from 1938 to 1999.
	You had 61 years of it, basically around 70%.
	Maybe it goes up to 73 or even a little higher.
	Maybe it goes down to 68, 67.
	But it's around 70%.
	Then around 1999, that number plummets to 50%.
	The plummeting, the collapse of church membership is by far most pronounced among Democrats.
	It's down 23% in the last 20 years.
	It's down from 71%, now down to 48%.
	The majority of Democrats do not belong to any church.
	And it's much less pronounced among Republicans.
	It's down only 8%, single-digit drop, from about 70% to, I'm sorry, down from about 76% That's not true.
	Down from 75% to 69%, somewhere around there.
	So Republicans were punching above the average before by two or three points.
	Then there is still a drop, much less pronounced than among Democrats.
	Why has church membership plummeted?
	There are a few theories on this.
	The number one theory that's being pushed by people who don't want to take an explicitly cultural lens is that it's the Internet.
	This is the idea that Alapundit is writing about at Hot Air, which is that basically anything that happens starting in the 90s is explained by the internet.
	And this theory usually holds true.
	However, in this case, the church membership thing is that it's part of a trend that began earlier.
	Membership in civic institutions in the United States dropped earlier than the internet became popular, and then churches followed afterwards.
	So first you had people not going to the PTA, people not going to the Kiwanis Club, people not going to the Lions Club, whatever.
	Then you had people not going to churches.
	I think the actual culprit here is most likely not the internet.
	I don't think it explains.
	I don't think the internet theory explains why there was such a difference in the way Republicans and Democrats reacted to this trend.
	Republicans use the internet just as much as Democrats do.
	Doesn't explain why it follows earlier trends.
	I think the biggest issue here is religious ignorance.
	This is also known as millennial theory.
	The theory that as people are raised totally ignorant of religion, they're not brought up really as members of churches, they're not brought up with any real religious education, they're not brought up with much education at all, be that philosophical or literary or historical.
	As a result of that, religiosity plummets.
	You're not going to hear this from the atheist types on the internet.
	What you always hear from the mainstream media, the elites, is as education increases, atheism also increases.
	This isn't true.
	It's true in a very narrow way because you can look at credentialism.
	You can look at people, oh, so-and-so has a degree from Harvard and Harvard graduates are more likely to be atheists.
	Therefore, educated people are more likely to be atheists.
	The problem isn't too much education.
	It's too little.
	You've got this whole generation raised without religion, largely raised without religion.
	Now you've got religiosity declining.
	If it's the millennial theory that's right, if it's my theory that's right, if it's just that these generations are being taught less and less about religion, it would explain why it's most pronounced among Democrats because millennials are overwhelmingly Democrats.
	They're almost two to one Democrats, two Republicans.
	The new atheism movement highlighted this.
	Those new atheists, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, made terribly weak arguments against religion.
	Totally pathetic arguments, but they were bought by people who couldn't refute them because they were basically biblically illiterate.
	you see this playing out in the mainstream media.
	You see this playing out by people who went to really good colleges, really good universities, then they go and they work for the New York Times, and then they expose their total ignorance.
	This headline came from the Associated Press over the weekend.
	Quote, Breaking news!
	Breaking news!
	Notre Dame is a cathedral.
	Some editor at the Associated Press thought that it was newsworthy that Notre Dame, cathedral, is a place of worship.
	And even look at the language.
	Tourist Mecca, Notre Dame, also revered as a place of worship.
	Wait until they find out that tourist Mecca, Mecca, is also revered as a place of worship.
	Wait until they find out what the word Mecca means, which refers to a holy city in the Islamic religion.
	It's not just the Associated Press that's religiously ignorant.
	The New York Times last week reported that Father Jean-Marc Fournier ran inside Notre Dame to retrieve a statue of Jesus.
	Now, the problem is there's no statue of Jesus in Notre Dame, and Father Jean-Marc Fournier didn't run out carrying some giant statue of Jesus on his back.
	It's because the writer at the New York Times didn't know...
	That the body of Christ that Father Fournier was referring to means the blessed sacrament, means the Eucharist, means the communion, the host.
	He said, I went in and I got the body of Christ.
	They thought, body of Christ?
	I guess that, I don't know, like a big statue or something?
	The body of Christ is about as elemental to the Christian faith as things get.
	Totally ignorant.
	In 2013, the New York Times reported that Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus into heaven.
	Think about that for a second.
	Let that one settle in.
	If Jesus is resurrected into heaven, then he's not really resurrected, is he?
	The resurrection means he comes back to life in his body.
	He walks around in a body on earth.
	Then he ascends into heaven.
	The basic fact of Christianity...
	The resurrection.
	Totally ignorant.
	It's actually better what they said the next year.
	The next year, 2014, the New York Times said that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marks, quote, the site where many Christians believe Jesus is buried.
	Let it sink in.
	If you believe that Jesus is buried somewhere, chances are you are not a Christian.
	This reporter, this reporter who wrote that, has a master's degree from Cambridge University, one of the most ancient and elite universities in the world, and he's apparently never read the New Testament.
	Or if he has read the New Testament, he apparently missed the point.
	He missed the ending where Jesus stops being buried.
	And is resurrected.
	He could have talked to the reporter who reported the previous year.
	In 2005, the New York Times was talking about Pope John Paul II's funeral.
	Pope John Paul II was holding that staff that bishops hold, and that staff is called a crozier, and he had it in his hand.
	And the New York Times referred to Pope John Paul II as holding a crow's ear.
	Like a little ear of a little bird.
	I guess he was holding a little crow's ear because they didn't, not only did they not know these aspects of the Christian faith, it didn't even occur to them to ask.
	Now, do you think that the media would treat Islam in this sort of way?
	Do you think that they would, no, they wouldn't.
	They would do their research.
	They would go in depth.
	They would make sure that they try to get it right.
	But they treat Christianity in a more flippant way because that's the ideology.
	And also, I mean, even broadly on all sorts of religions, these guys think, okay, oh, you're just some scared little people who are afraid of the dark and need a sky daddy to help you wake up in the morning.
	We are so sophisticated.
	We are so educated.
	We are so elite.
	We don't need to concern ourselves with your silly little fairy tales.
	And as a result, They do not know the most basic elements of the faith that shaped the entirety of their civilization.
	This is a major problem.
	This calls for an obvious solution.
	That solution is that we must start teaching the Bible in schools.
	We'll explain why in a second, but first we've got to think about Facebook and YouTube.
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	So if you write for the New York Times, you are allegedly highly educated.
	Right?
	You almost certainly went to Harvard or some good university.
	Maybe you went to a graduate school.
	Now you write for this elite publication.
	Probably went to a top high school if you got into those good colleges.
	So you've had good education basically your whole life.
	What's supposed to be good education.
	And yet, you are biblically illiterate.
	This is a big deal.
	The easy solution is to teach the Bible in schools.
	President Trump has just endorsed this idea.
	President Trump came out a while ago, early this year in January, and said it's time to teach the Bible in schools.
	Multiple states have bills on the table right now endorsing this idea.
	Why is that?
	What all of them are pointing out is that the Bible is integral to our culture and our civilization.
	Now, do I want the Bible to be taught in schools as though it's from one particular perspective and this is the only way that this can be interpreted and this is the only way that you can read it?
	Absolutely not.
	Why?
	Because I'm a Catholic.
	I'm a Catholic in a country which has more Protestants than Catholics.
	So I probably disagree.
	Now, the difference here, of course, is that there are lots of different Protestant denominations, all of which disagree with one another about Bible exegesis.
	But that actually underscores my point.
	All of these Christians in America maybe have a different take on the Bible.
	So I'm not saying that everyone needs to have this only one approach.
	By the way, in public schools, no other books are taught with only one approach either.
	I think the boogeyman argument against teaching the Bible in schools is, well, then you're going to get one particular faith shoved down people's throats.
	I don't think that's true.
	When you read Hamlet in an English class, does the teacher say, this is the only way to interpret it, and every other way to interpret it is wrong, and if you don't interpret it this way, then you're going to burn in hell forever?
	No.
	I'm going to give you an F if you don't interpret it this way?
	Hopefully not.
	No.
	However, the Bible is the most important book ever written.
	The Bible is at the basis of all of our culture, all of our civilization.
	This year, no public school student will read the Bible in school.
	Today, all of those public school students will celebrate Earth Day.
	None of them will read the Bible, the most important book ever written, undergirds our entire civilization.
	All of them will celebrate some ridiculous made-up pagan nonsense that was invented by some weirdo who ended up murdering and composting his girlfriend.
	No one reads the Bible in school.
	Everybody celebrates Earth Day.
	He did.
	He did end up murdering and composting his girlfriend.
	The guy who started Earth Day, Ira Einhorn, invented Earth Day in 1970.
	He then, seven years later, murdered and composted his girlfriend.
	I'm not drawing a direct connection between the two.
	I'm pointing out that Earth Day is a very young, new, neo-pagan, weirdo holiday, and it is taught like a sacrament in public schools in this country.
	And the most important book ever written is banned from public schools.
	Why is it banned?
	The Bible has been banned from schools since 1963 because of a very stupid Supreme Court decision called Abington School District v.
	Schemp.
	This was part of the very activist, leftist war in court, and in the ensuing decades since 1963, people have been getting dumber and dumber and dumber.
	I don't think this is a coincidence.
	Not only is the Bible the most important book ever written, the Bible is the 73 most important books ever written.
	All of them are more important than all the other books ever written.
	How could you possibly understand the other things you're supposed to learn in school without knowing the Bible?
	Speaking of Hamlet, how could you possibly understand Hamlet without understanding the story of Cain and Abel?
	Or without understanding purgatory?
	Hamlet begins, spoiler alerts, if you haven't read Hamlet, got some spoilers coming.
	It begins because King Claudius murders his brother, who's Hamlet's father.
	He murders his brother, and he specifically invokes the story of Cain and Abel.
	How can you really appreciate that without knowing first the story of Cain and Abel from the book of Genesis?
	How does Hamlet find out about this something rotten in the state of Denmark?
	How does he find out about this nefarious act?
	Because the ghost of his father comes to him.
	But you cannot appreciate that scene of Hamlet talking to the ghost of his father without understanding purgatory.
	Without understanding this middle ground between hell and heaven, this area where you get in, you have hope, you are going to go to heaven, but you are being punished and cleansed until you get to heaven.
	The reason you can't understand it until that point is because at the time that Hamlet was written, the conception of purgatory and purgatorial souls is that the souls could come down to earth, you could maybe see a vision of this spirit, and they would ask you to pray for them.
	And what's interesting about Hamlet is that the spirit comes back to earth and tells Hamlet to get revenge for him.
	So then Hamlet has in his mind this question.
	Is this the true soul of my father in purgatory waiting to go up to heaven?
	Or is this a demon, an apparition?
	Some manifestation of madness in my own mind?
	All of that you would miss if you don't understand purgatory.
	How about the Protestant Revolution?
	Hamlet is a play about the Protestant Revolution.
	It is explicitly about Martin Luther and Wittenberg and the Protestant Revolution.
	You would miss the essence of the play, what it says about truth, what it says about the church, if you don't understand that.
	All of that will be missing because you are not allowed to be taught the Bible in schools.
	You're not allowed to be taught those theological disputes at the heart of the Protestant Revolution, at the heart of Hamlet.
	How could you understand?
	Forget Hamlet.
	We've been talking about Hamlet for too long.
	How would you?
	I guess you could talk about Hamlet really for days and days and days because it's so rich.
	The only way you can't talk about it is if you don't know the culture that undergirds it.
	How could you discuss the Gettysburg Address?
	Gettysburg Address is a lot shorter than Hamlet.
	Very short text.
	And yet it is not understandable without the King James Bible.
	Basically, all that Abraham Lincoln ever read was the King James Bible and Shakespeare.
	The language of the Gettysburg Address is the language of the King James Bible.
	That that nation conceived in liberty, dedicated, devotion, the last full measure of devotion, all of this language is coming from the language of the King James Bible.
	John Adams, second president of the United States, says...
	Our Constitution was built for a moral and religious people, and it is wholly unfit to the governance of any other people.
	How does that Constitution survive when church membership reaches all-time lows, when religiosity reaches all-time lows, and what ultimately the cause of all of that, when Biblical literacy, when religious education hits all-time lows.
	If your religious education disappears, if your biblical literacy disappears, all of your other education is going to disappear in the West.
	It cannot remain, because it's the basis of it.
	How on earth, you say, listen, you can keep your whole house.
	You can keep your entire beautiful house.
	We're just going to rip out the foundation.
	But keep living in your house.
	It'll be fine.
	What could go wrong?
	Well, I'm pretty sure I need my foundation if I'm going to live in my house.
	No, the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, said in 1963, you're not allowed to have a foundation to your house.
	But it should be fine.
	What would happen in the ensuing decades if you ripped out the foundation of your house?
	It would all come tumbling down.
	And that is what we're seeing happen to our education and therefore to our society.
	We've talked a lot about liberal education because of all those scandals at the universities, all the way from parents trying to buy their kids' way in to me getting squirted with some weird chemical at University of Missouri-Kansas City.
	This crisis of liberal education is a crisis of politics and culture and the whole country.
	Because you need liberal education in order to have a free society.
	The liberal arts mean the arts of freedom.
	It's the way that we make sense of our freedom, the way that we earn our freedom.
	If that disappears, which it is, we've seen that happening since the 60s, your institutions of liberty, your governmental institutions, your society are going to erode along with it.
	How can we educate people without exposing them to the most important book ever written?
	Not very well.
	And this brings us to the bigger question.
	Can the West survive a post-Christian society?
	I don't see how they can.
	Which is why President Trump is attacked all the time because he's cheated on his wife and he's been married multiple times and he says naughty words and he doesn't seem to go to church very much.
	They say, this guy, he's a terrible guy, he's a terrible Christian.
	Why on earth would Christians vote for him?
	At least he gets it.
	At least he gets the existential problem that we're facing.
	He might behave in a way totally contrary to how we hope Christians should behave.
	He might behave in a way totally contrary to sainthood.
	Maybe he does.
	I don't know.
	I don't know Donald Trump.
	Maybe he does.
	Maybe he doesn't.
	Maybe he has immense contrition and repentance and faith.
	Maybe he doesn't.
	I don't really care.
	That's his problem.
	That's a problem between him and God.
	What I care about is whether the society can survive.
	And when that guy, a thrice married lapsed Presbyterian, is calling for Bible literacy in schools, I gotta support that.
	You should support that too.
	Atheists should support that too.
	The secular, the religious, or the spiritual but not religious, they should support that too.
	Imagine if someone came out and said, you can read every single book in school, but you can study everything in school, except you can't study arithmetic.
	No, you can do algebra and trigonometry and calculus, but you can't do arithmetic.
	Why not?
	Well, the Supreme Court said in 1963 you can't do arithmetic.
	Without arithmetic, you can't do any of the other math.
	Even if you don't believe in the Bible, even if you don't believe in Christianity, even if you don't believe in the stories, certainly we know that there's a lot of truth value there.
	Certainly we know.
	It's the difference that John Stuart Mill, the philosopher, explained between radicals, what we would call leftists today, and conservatives.
	He says the difference is when the radical comes across a tradition, like Jeremy Bentham, he looks at it and he says, is it true?
	Is this specific story in the Bible literally true in the way that I'm asking if it's true?
	And what the conservative says is, like Carlyle, is, what does it mean?
	What does the Bible mean?
	What do those stories mean?
	If we don't ask that question, if we don't have the humility and the seriousness and the wisdom to ask that question, we're not going to know what any of the other stuff means either.
	This is a problem of education.
	And it's why I am encouraged.
	I have to bring this up.
	You know I was in Missouri.
	I was harassed, shouted down, screamed, silenced, and then eventually physically assaulted by these weirdos at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
	And what happened the next morning?
	There was a letter from the chancellor of that university, Molly Agrawal, not apologizing to me, not condemning the students trying to use the heckler's veto, but actually condemning me as some sort of bigot with no evidence, no reasoning, no argument, just smearing me as a bigot and then applauding the students who screamed and shouted and tried to silence the speaker from the very beginning.
	That man is unfit to run an American university.
	That man should be fired.
	He should, he should actually have the integrity to resign because he is such an abject failure in his job of running a university.
	He should have great contrition.
	He should apologize and he should resign.
	But he's not doing that.
	He's not going to do that.
	He's going to continue to run that university into the ground.
	And so, fortunately, there's some courageous Missouri state legislators who are trying to do his job for him and get him to resign.
	Missouri state legislator David Sater said, as far as I'm concerned, Agrawal can go.
	Missouri State Representative Robert Ross asked the president of the entire University of Missouri system, President Mun Choi, quote, at what point would a staff member not be worth that trade-off in a reduced amount to your budget?
	He's threatening to defund the system.
	Cut the budget of the University of Missouri system if he doesn't fire this absolute disgrace to higher education, Molly Agrawal.
	That's good.
	That's showing some backbone.
	That's what Republicans have to do.
	We have to push back hard.
	We can't just work around the edges and try to get a few more conservative professors in there and try to maybe get a few more teachers and break the public teacher unions just a little bit.
	No.
	That's not going to work.
	You need to talk tough and you need to back up your talk with actions.
	You need all the way up to the President of the United States supporting legislation for Bible literacy in schools.
	For Bible literacy that has been totally destroyed because of some stupid, ridiculous Supreme Court decision.
	And we need our legislators all around the country, not just in Missouri, not just David Sater and Robert Ross, we need them to go in and say, listen, you Hacks.
	You leftist thugs who are gutting out our universities, who are hollowing them out from within, and destroying education in America.
	You've got to go.
	And if you don't go, we're going to defund you.
	And those kids can go to some other school.
	Plenty of schools in the country.
	Plenty of colleges in the United States.
	Way too many colleges in the United States compared to the ones that are actually fulfilling their mission of educating students.
	So we'll defund you.
	We'll defund the whole damn school.
	It's not doing any good anyway.
	All it's doing is harm in its current form.
	So we'll defund you unless you back up the values of education.
	Those guys are doing great work.
	I hope that legislators around the country do this.
	That I'm a little nervous for how Cal State is going to react to my speech tomorrow because the president of that university is already sending out advance letters talking about the awful costs of free speech.
	So I've got to tell you, I don't have a whole lot of confidence that they're going to handle that well either.
	But bad educators, bad administrators have to go.
	We've got to hold their feet to the fire.
	It seems like a minor issue because it affects 18 and 22 and 15-year-olds.
	So we think, oh, we'll focus on bigger issues, tax cuts, reforming certain welfare programs.
	No, the big issue is the education.
	That's what could gut the whole society.
	So we'll see what happens tomorrow.
	In the meantime, I'll be subbing in for Ben on his radio show today.
	So if you want two more hours of just unbridled me, come on over there.
	In the meantime, I'll see you tomorrow, and maybe I'll see you at Cal State LA. I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz and directed by Mike Joyner.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
	And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Danny D'Amico.
	Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Ulvera.
	And our production assistant is Nick Sheehan.
	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, horrific terror attacks against Christians in Sri Lanka, which I'm sure you've heard about.
	We're going to discuss that.
	We're going to discuss the persecution of Christians, which is happening on a large scale across the world and is often ignored in the West.
	And we'll talk about the fact that certain prominent Democrats seem to be going out of their way to avoid acknowledging that Christians are the ones being attacked and who were attacked yesterday.
	Also, I have been the subject of a pretty outrageous and ridiculous smear by a British publication for comments that I made on my show about gay adoption.

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