I got an email from a Christian who tells me that I should save the God stuff for church and talk about other subjects. I hear this kind of thing a lot from Christian readers/viewers. It is a symptom of the secularization of faith in America. We treat faith and "the real world" as two entirely separate things that should not cross over into one another. But I don't think that is the right approach, and here's why.
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Well, before we begin, I was reading an email earlier this morning from somebody responding to my show yesterday, which was about masculinity.
And she says that there's too much macho, manly stuff going on in the culture, and it's okay for a man to cry, you know, to show his feminine side and cry.
I like a man who cries, is what she said.
And that just got me thinking, And I wanted to stipulate this just kind of as a public service announcement at the top, and it's not related to anything else we're going to talk about, but let me just stipulate one thing about crying.
It is generally not okay for a man to cry, except for in the following seven situations.
There are seven situations where a man can cry.
The first one, death of a loved one.
Obviously, crying is okay there.
The second one, a major milestone involving your kids, like when your kid is born, when child graduates, that sort of thing.
The third thing, during an intense spiritual experience, crying is okay there.
The fourth, of course, when you're watching the final scene of Rudy, when they're chanting for Rudy and he finally comes out and he makes a tackle and the tackle's totally irrelevant because the game's basically over, but he's been working for his whole life and then everyone's cheering and his dad is there and they carry him off the field.
You can weep over that as a man.
The fifth thing, if you're kicked in the shins by a horse, I think is a fine crying situation.
The sixth thing, if your wife makes you a lasagna, that is just so good that it brings you to tears.
That's acceptable.
Seven, if you go to somebody's house, and this has happened to me before, you go to somebody's house, And they say, oh, we're having chili.
And you say, oh, wow, this makes my day.
And then they serve you the bowl of chili.
But then you discover that the chili is made with ground turkey and black beans.
Then it's acceptable actually to throw the hot bowl of chili at the person who served it to you and cry.
And that's acceptable not only morally and ethically, but also legally, I believe.
The law stipulates that, I'm pretty sure, in most states.
Anyway, those are the seven times.
And there are no other times.
That's it. Those are the only times when you're allowed to cry as a man.
But I can expand on that some other time.
I want to respond to something else, actually.
As I've mentioned before, I get complaints about the religious content on my show quite a bit.
People complain that I talk about God too much and there's too much Jesus stuff.
Especially after I did the last show, I was talking about doubt and what do you do about religious doubts.
And there was a ton of complaints from people about, why are you talking about God again?
I don't want to hear this.
And it makes sense for them to complain because it is true that I will go into people's homes with a loaded gun and force them under threat of death To watch my show.
So it makes sense for them to complain that they don't like the content because they're forced physically to watch it.
Now, if I weren't forcing people physically to watch it, it would make no sense at all to complain about my content.
It would make sense simply to not watch it and go live your life and do something else.
Because there are, after all, probably like 100,000 different podcasts and shows that I'm not interested in, that talk about content that I don't find interesting, but I don't show up to announce, hello, this content doesn't interest me.
I am not interested in this content.
And I will watch the entire thing and remain here and leave comments letting you know how uninterested I am.
I don't do that. But some people follow a different strategy, I guess.
Some people are under the impression that everything that happens in the universe must cater to their special interests.
And if it doesn't, then they'll complain about it.
Then they'll barge in and complain.
It's kind of like if...
It's like when people come, if you watch whatever platform you're watching the show on, and you look at the comments, and there are people complaining, I don't find this interesting.
I don't like this.
This I don't like.
That's like if you were walking by somebody's house, and the windows were open, and you could hear what sounded like the people inside playing Scrabble.
And so you knocked on the door, and when they answered it, you said, I don't like Scrabble.
And they said, okay.
Did anyone ask you if you liked it?
You weren't even invited to play, so I don't know, who are you?
What are you doing here at my house?
I don't like Scrabble.
No, I don't like it.
That's kind of what happens in the comments section under all my videos.
But when I've discussed, and by the way, I have decided to change my policy.
This is good news. I will no longer be forcing people At gunpoint to watch or listen.
I'm going to stop doing that. I've decided that it's not really in keeping with my Christian convictions.
I won't do that anymore. So you are free.
Everyone is free to not to do what you want.
You don't have to be here if you don't want to be.
But when I've discussed before the complaints about the religious content on my show, most of the time I'm focusing on atheists and secular people who criticize me for it.
Unfortunately, though, and this really shouldn't be too surprising, It's not only atheists.
Very often I hear from Christians who are upset that I'm talking about Christian stuff.
For instance, I got an email from a guy after that show, whatever it was, two, three days ago, and he said, and I hear this a lot.
This is a very common line that you hear.
He said, if I wanted to hear about this, I'd go to church.
And I didn't ask him, but I'm sure if I, okay, well, when do you go to church?
Well, I went in 1987.
That's the last time I wanted to hear about this stuff.
Now, he says he doesn't want to hear about God and religion all the time.
There's a There's a time and place for it, he said, but my own show is not a time or place, he's decided.
That's not a time or place.
In fact, if he comes in contact with a conversation about religion, then it is immediately not a time and place.
It must always happen in places where he cannot hear it.
He was saying, I need to separate the religion stuff from everything else, and I shouldn't bring God and religion to everything, and so on and so on.
And this, again, is something that I hear a lot from Christians.
When I hear this, it brings to mind a conversation I had with an atheist a little while ago.
And he made a very good point.
It was not the first time I've heard a point like this made by an atheist, but he said, you know, the reason I don't believe in God, or one of the big reasons, is I don't believe that you believers actually believe.
How can I be convinced about God if the people trying to convince me aren't convinced themselves?
And I asked him what he meant by that, and he said, and I'm paraphrasing now, but he said, If I really believe, if I personally really believe If I really believe that a supernatural force was active in the world and this force had made me and made the world and made everything,
and this force is watching us now and judging, and when I die, I'll either go to eternal paradise or eternal suffering based on how I live here, and if I really believe that angels and demons are around me and are acting in the world, though invisibly, and if I believe that all of that stuff exists, angels, devils, hell, heaven, God, Well, then I would be obsessed with that fact.
I'd be obsessed with it.
It would be the only thing I ever thought about or talked about.
I would live completely differently.
I mean, I would live and act and speak and behave as if there were a supernatural force watching over me.
But that's not how Christians in this country act.
That's not how they...
Carry on, not even close.
They mostly just carry on the same as everyone else, which makes it clear that they don't really believe what they say they believe.
Because if they did, it would be such a significant fact.
I thought that was a great point.
And by the way, I've heard a similar point made by pro-abortion people in relation to pro-lifers.
I've heard pro-abortion people say, If you really believed that babies are being killed, why aren't you acting like it?
Why aren't you doing anything about it?
I mean, and they'll say, you know, if there was a building down the street where they were killing two-year-olds, I mean, I would really act upon that in a way.
I mean, I wouldn't just sit around.
And I think that it's hard for us to hear this, but these are very good points.
And we need to face them.
Because they're right. And this is the consequence of being secularized Christians living in a secularized country.
This is the consequence of insisting that God be separated from normal life and normal discussions.
This is the consequence of treating our religion as something that belongs only in church.
The consequence is that nobody believes us, and we don't really believe ourselves.
Nobody takes us seriously, and they shouldn't because we don't take ourselves seriously.
We make these extraordinary claims about the nature of life and about what we believe, but then that claim is not reflected in anything else we do.
So if you're a Christian saying, I don't like all the Jesus talk, it makes me uncomfortable, let's talk about something else.
While the atheists around you, they may agree with you and they may be happy that you're joining them in their efforts to shut down religious conversations, but they're also laughing at you in their heads because you're a ridiculous figure.
You're a fraud. You're laughable.
And they're right to see you that way and to treat you like that.
Because what are you doing taking their side?
They believe in a world where there's no God.
It makes sense for them to be saying this stuff.
But you? What are you doing?
I thought you believed in this I mean, imagine that God, imagine that you, this is what we talked about in the video a few days ago, but imagine that you did walk outside your house, and you could literally physically see God in the sky, like he was encompassing.
I don't mean that he's living in the sky.
I mean, you see this infinitely immense being just hovering over everything, right?
And looking right at you, directly at you, would you not be obsessed with that fact?
Would you be able to go and talk about something else?
And if somebody said to you, hey, you know, hey, about that, about God up there, would you say, no, let's not talk about that?
No, you wouldn't. But as Christians, we believe that though we can't see him, that is actually literally what's happening.
He is there, over and above and in and through everything.
A personal being looking directly at us.
So when we do this thing, we say, ah, you know, I don't want to talk about that.
Eh. Well, then we come off as frauds.
And we have no chance of reaching anyone.
We have no chance of reaching atheists or anything like that because they know that it makes no sense for someone who believes in God to not want to talk about it.
And if you believe in God and you really believe it, then it must be the most relevant thing in your life.
In every conversation, everything is tied to this fact.
But we have...
We've participated as Christians in the secularization of culture.
We as Christians have participated in this process of separating God from life.
We've not only participated in it, but we've been the driving force of it.
We have been facilitators of it.
We've been encouraging it.
We have made Two different camps, two divisions.
And so there's the God camp, and then there's the everything else camp.
And the God camp is very small.
It doesn't get a lot of room to operate.
And the everything else camp encompasses most of the rest of the landscape.
And so that we as Christians can live in this camp over here, and we can acknowledge that that camp exists.
But that acknowledgement has no bearing on our lives or on our conversations, and we just continue about our life as if that camp doesn't exist, as if it really is completely separate, as if the two things are completely separate.
We live atheist lives.
And if we acknowledge God's existence at all, it's maybe for a few minutes on Christmas, And then maybe if something happens to us that we really need, we need his help, then we might say, oh God, can you come here for a minute?
I need a promotion at work. Yeah, just come here.
Okay, thanks for the promotion. Now go back to that.
Go back over there. Go over.
Go, go, go, go, go.
The point is we've created an environment as Christians.
I think we've created an environment where faith in the gospel cannot be preached because faith Effectively.
Because faith and the gospel must exist in the culture intertwined with everything.
That's what faith demands.
Considering the claims that it makes about life, it makes claims that, if we believe those claims, should alter everything we do, think, and say.
By its nature, faith has to be all-encompassing.
It really is an all-or-nothing proposition.
People tell me all the time, it's not all-or-nothing, it's not black or white.
It is. That's exactly what it is.
That's exactly what God is.
All or nothing. He is either all or He is nothing.
He cannot be anything in between.
But I think we look for that in-between thing.
Where we want to live and operate as if there is no God, yet still say that we believe Him.
This is pretty unprecedented, I think, in history.
For most of the existence of Christianity, for most of Christendom's history, this didn't exist.
You didn't have this dichotomy of, well, there's God over here, and then there's life, right?
There was none of that. There was just, God and faith was a part of everything.
It was just, it was ingrained in everything.
It was your life.
And that made sense.
So if you go back to supposedly the Dark Ages, which were times much more spiritually enlightened than the times we live in now, by the way.
So if those were the Dark Ages, then I don't know what this is now.
Um... But if you go back to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, what you're going to find is that people drew no distinction whatsoever between faith and religion and life.
It was all everything.
It was all together. There was no distinction.
They couldn't even conceive of a distinction.
You really didn't have the option to be a secular Christian.
You couldn't be that. That was not an option for life.
And so, although back in those days, back in the older times, it would have been harder to live physically, would have been more physically challenging and demanding, certainly.
I think spiritually, it was easier.
It was easier to be a Christian then, because things just kind of made sense.
You lived in a society where everyone really just acted and operated like they really believed this stuff.
And that's what society was.
There was no dividing line.
And there shouldn't be.
I don't know how we as Christians can argue that, yeah, we should keep God out of this.
What? How can you...
I understand why atheists say that.
How could you possibly say that as a Christian?
Keep God out of it.
You must know that you can't.
It's impossible. And nothing good can ever come out of keeping God out of anything.
Out of anything.
This is, again, if we lived 500 years ago, it wouldn't be necessary for me to make this point.
Everyone would look at me like, yeah, of course, what are you talking about?
And now I say it, and Christians are disagreeing.
Well, yeah, but you know, you can't involve God in this.
So ridiculous, so weak, so flimsy, so ridiculous, so stupid.
I mean, if you want to be an atheist, just be an atheist.
Don't try to turn Christianity into atheism.
By the way, this is why I'm so opposed to anything that hints of secularization in the church.
Because we've got, the entire culture is secularized, right?
We live in a secular culture.
We live in a culture where, as I said, it is not just feasible, but very easy to live as a secular Christian and to separate your faith from everything else you do in your life and to not even really think about it.
It's possible to live that way.
That is an option. That never used to be an option for living.
Now it is. And most people, that's the option they select.
Which makes it harder for Christians who want to really live like Christians.
It makes it harder for them because there's more of an effort.
Just an effort. It requires effort every second of the day.
And you're going to get pushback, not just from atheists, but from other Christians who mock you and laugh at you for actually taking the religion seriously that they supposedly share with you.
But at least in a church, at least you should be able to go to a physical church.
And it's a safe haven, and it's an oasis different from all the rest of this.
You've got secularization everywhere.
You should at least be able to go to a church and escape secularization and find a place that is grounded in the reality of God.
But that's not what happens in most churches.
You should be able to walk into a church.
And everything about it should be completely different from what you see in the world today.
It should be shocking.
At this point, it should be shocking to walk into a church.
Every time you walk in, you should be taken aback.
It's like, whoa, this is different.
Everything from the architecture, to the music, to the dress, certainly to the message being preached, the attitude, the demeanor of the congregants, all of it should appear to be from a different universe.
Because it is from a different universe.
It is from a universe where God exists and rules over all, as opposed to the universe that our secular culture tries to live in, where God does not exist and is irrelevant.
But that's not how it goes.
Instead, most churches...
Look and sound and in every way resemble the rest of the culture.
Most churches appear to be extensions of secular culture, products of it, rather than windows into something eternal and sacred and supernatural.
And the effect is that you can go to most churches in America, or many anyway, you can go and you can sit in a church and you can attend the service, you can listen to the music, you can listen to the sermon or the homily, and you can still, all the while, continue on forgetting about God.
The reality of God, even in most churches in America, is not really thrust upon you.
You're not really forced to face it.
He might be mentioned.
But the fact that, again, you live in a reality where God is present and looking at you all the time, you're not really, in most churches, forced to confront that reality.
And the way the church itself operates, it does not appear to be grounded in that reality.
Just how casual everything is.
There's just no sense of reverence, no sense of anything sacred happening.
None of that.
Instead, it's like people just stroll in casually.
I mean, if you really believe, especially at church, where church is like the special place, where God, I mean, God is present everywhere, but at church, you know, two or three are gathered, as Scripture says, God is with us, and He is, you're really there, you're really focusing on God more than what happens in secular culture.
And so He's really there in this special sense.
I think there should be this just total reverence and I mean, imagine that you were in church, and Jesus himself appeared there physically, right in front of you.
How would you react?
I mean wouldn't you fall to the floor in just in in total reverence to this divine being?
Or would you just continue along which most people do in church They just sit back and they're chatting and they're just, you know, super casual.
The music is nice and secular and kind of casual.
A lot of churches now, they got the little, they got the donuts and the coffee.
They got a coffee shop. People are sitting there sipping their coffee.
Is that what you'd be doing? If Jesus appeared right in front of you, we'd just be like, oh, hey, Jesus.
Hey, how's it going? Um...
In a secular culture, everything is designed with the intent, I think, of keeping our minds focused on material things.
And it seems now that even churches are designed with that in mind.
And it's a big problem.
It isn't hard to see how Christianity in the early days was able to spread so rapidly through pagan cultures while it seems to be fading and dying in our supposedly sophisticated modern secular culture.
Because people back in those times, even in pagan people, not just in Christian society, but even pagan people lived in a world Where the spiritual and the supernatural and the mystic were all front and center in their daily lives.
Everyone had an idea of life as this thing that was inexorably tied to something else, something infinite, something beyond it.
And so it was just a matter of, for Christians, it was a matter of coming into these societies where spirituality and supernatural forces, all of that was already taken for granted as being real and being part of life.
And so you had to just come in and correct their spiritual ideas and kind of redirect them in the right direction.
But America today is a spiritual vacuum.
There's nothing to build upon.
There's no spirituality. We live in a material world, and we are material girls, as Madonna rightly observed.
So I think to bring it all back together, that means that we as Christians, I think, have to make a considered effort to keep God and keep our faith at the forefront of our minds and of our conversations and of everything we do.
Even though it's hard, Because to live that way is so alien and foreign to most people in our culture, including most Christians.
So if you do, you're going to be mocked by them, and they're going to look at you like you're a weirdo, and you're going to be looked—even in most churches, that's how they're going to treat you.
But I think when we do that, we're not only helping ourselves and our own souls and our own spirituality, but we're helping everyone else because— We, at least, are living as if, and speaking and acting as if we really believe.
And so at least there's a, that doesn't mean we're perfect, doesn't mean we're saints, it just means we believe this, and so we're just, we're operating as if we really believe it.
And then at least there's a chance, there's a chance that Of a little bit of that light poking through the darkness and of getting through to people.
At least there's a chance.
But if we carry on just like them, and if we toss God off to the corner of existence, and we don't talk about Him, and we don't bring Him up, there's no chance.
All the lost sheep out there, there's no chance of us getting to them.
