EPISODE 358: THE WAR ON RELIGION WITH ERIC METAXAS
In today’s episode of Human Events Daily, Poso is joined by Eric Metaxas to discuss the ongoing "war on religion" and the drastically changing landscape of Christianity in modern society. They delve into the various ways in which Christianity is being targeted and marginalized, and explore the implications of these trends for believers and the broader culture. All this and more on today’s episode of Human Events Daily! Here’s your Daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiec Save up to ...
We're here at the Human Events Daily with our AmericaFest special.
We're continuing the series and I do have to apologize to the audience because unfortunately we have Eric Metaxas back on.
I apologize in advance for being who I am.
I'm very sorry.
I'm very sorry.
The host of the AmericaFest show.
We were going to have somebody else.
It won't happen again.
They canceled.
It will not happen again.
Yeah, you know, we needed somebody and Eric was around.
He barged his way in.
I know.
You know, he said he would tie me up.
It was a whole thing.
So I said, fine, we'll have him on again.
What?
The last episode we did is Atheism Dead.
We have so many great reviews, so many comments, and the question that I want to come up with though, because I think we also have to get into the meta sense of why you wrote the book and also Letter to American Church, because the real issue I think that we face as believers, as Christians in our country today, and I want to pose the question to you and frame this as, is there a war on Christians today in the West?
Yes and no.
Okay.
Ultimately, it is a war on God.
Wow.
Uh, what we're seeing right now, um, is, I mean, if you, if you think about it, no matter where you look, uh, when you see genuine atheism, okay, atheism is at war with God.
It has this preposterous utopianist plan to make everything better.
If we can just get rid of God, if we can just remake everything, what it really means to do is to unmake God's reality.
So everything that God has put in order, the family, men and women, whatever it is, even beauty and goodness, these people are wittingly or unwittingly, depending on where they're coming from, At war with these things.
So, I mean, look, you see it in 20th century art, right?
A war on beauty.
Now we're going to make ugly things, and we're going to tell you that they're beautiful, and we're going to make ugly skyscrapers and brutalist architecture that everybody's going to want to gag at, but we're going to tell you, no, no, no, no, if you're sophisticated, you'll think it's good.
Right, right.
Or my favorite are the the the modernist art, the paintings, which is all just money laundering.
And I say that beyond Hunter Biden.
Yeah, it's that, you know, a big swath of blue across a palette.
Right.
And it's oh, it represents man's search for meaning.
Yeah.
No, it's just blue.
It's blue on a canvas.
It represents man's search for a buck.
Yeah, exactly.
Basically, what I'm saying, this is the history of the 20th century.
Everything beautiful and accessible, beautiful poetry.
I mean, the poetry of Longfellow, the poetry going through the ages.
All of that in the 20th century, the elites basically said, no, it's too pretty and it's too accessible.
We want to do arcane, difficult, ugly things.
We want to create poetry that no one will ever read except us and our five friends.
And in a sense, that's the history.
I mean, we're only talking about beauty right now.
But it is a war, ultimately, on God.
When God says something is beautiful, representational art, God... I mean, notice there's nothing tacky in nature, okay?
That's right.
Everything in nature is either beautiful or awesome or whatever, but only human beings can create things that are tacky.
And you actually bring this up in the book a little too, because where you point out that What is the purpose of beauty?
How do you define beauty?
What is the evolutionary developed purpose?
It makes no sense.
Ultimately, what I say in my book is atheism dead in a number of things, but I talk about the idea that Everything that is good and true and beautiful is of God and points to God, whether you know it or not.
So when you look at a sunset, you don't say, oh, that's a Christian sunset.
But the point is you're moved to tears or you're moved by something beautiful.
Why are you moved?
Now, the strict atheist, blind Darwinian evolutionist who believes only in the natural, he believes in materialism, he basically says there's no such thing as beauty, there's no such thing as truth, there's no such thing as love.
So whatever you feel is just some chemicals in your body.
It's a biochemical reaction, a dopamine release.
Right.
You know, has selected for you to be moved by these things.
But also, but why?
Well, what's the evolutionary answer to that?
- It gets the bigger stuff.
So the bottom line is, most people know that's garbage.
Most people know that I see something beautiful and I weep.
If I hear beautiful music and I weep, it points to something holy and sacred.
We're made in God's image.
We're made for eternity.
We're made to be with Him in a world of beauty and truth and goodness.
And so everything in the world points to that.
So the Marxist atheists, the materialists, they basically say, no, no, no, we can't have that.
So we're going to unmake anything good and beautiful and true.
So the family, the love that a husband and wife have for each other, the beauty of the family, the beauty of a nation, of natural National cultures, all of that stuff, they are at war with that.
They want to deconstruct it.
They want to strip it down and break it down.
When you get to critical race theory, when you get to transgender madness, all of these things at their heart are a war on God's reality.
There's a fun experiment you can run on social media.
I'm constantly running experiments on social media.
That's one of my favorite things about social media is that You, you can find a picture, find some picture, whether it's, you know, if it's my family, I'll post it or, you know, or it doesn't have to be a stock photo, you know, just a, a well-dressed family.
Yeah.
Mom, dad, two kids, you know, walking into a church and just post it up.
Oh.
On social media.
Yeah.
No commentary.
Right.
And wait, wait for the comments to come in.
Wait for the haters.
And you will get, I guarantee you every time I've done this, you always get the comment Oh well, he probably beats his wife.
This is a trained, pathological, Pavlovian response to this, that they have to find some way to deconstruct and deny that an image of a totally normalized, homogenous relationship A heterosexual relationship, a godly relationship would occur, would exist.
They have to find some way to rob it of its validity.
No, that's beautiful.
This is why I love you, because we kind of think alike.
What you just said, I have actually said this, I've never heard anyone say this before, but The narrative, okay?
Now, let's think about it.
It's kind of like the Howard Zinn narrative of America.
Because they have to find something wrong.
It's very Howard Zinn, yes.
It's the Howard Zinn narrative of America, but applied to everything, where you basically say, what would the devil say?
The devil would say, oh yeah, you probably don't know.
He beats his wife, you know.
So, what we've noticed in 20th century pop culture, okay, and this basically came in in the 50s and then the 60s, is to deconstruct everything.
To say, yes, there are no heroes.
Everybody's a bum.
Now, Biblically, we can say, yes, everyone's a sinner.
But then we also know that God has created us in his image.
He wants to redeem what's broken.
But they give you this hopeless narrative that basically says, every husband who loves his wife, whatever, like, we know the real story.
The real story is he beats his wife or he's cheating with her.
He's cheating on her, probably with a guy.
They have to corrode what is beautiful, but they have so successfully sold that narrative.
Okay.
And especially in elite culture, which is filtered down through pop culture so that when you see something beautiful, even we kind of, it's almost like we've been trained to think of what's the negative thing hiding behind the beautiful thing.
What's the, you know, that's right.
So I realized when I got married 26 years ago, when we had my daughter 23 years ago, I re I said, I've lived in a world that has not sung the praises of marriage.
Marriage is a glorious thing.
Even at its worst, it's a glorious thing.
Even the best marriages are difficult, and it's worth it.
It's beautiful and amazing.
I haven't heard that narrative.
I've always heard the narrative that marriage is a prison, you know, stay free, or whatever.
The ball and chain.
The ball and chain.
Whatever it is, right?
Children.
Greatest thing imaginable.
Your life is over now, buddy.
And all you hear about is how you're not going to be able to actualize yourself.
You're not going to be able to have an amazing career and do all the great things, whatever.
Listen, the decades have passed, and I look at the people that bought that lie.
They're alone.
They missed the opportunity to have a family.
These lies, these pernicious lies, have been in the culture for decades.
We talked about this on the show before, but the founder and my colleague Alex Clark of Poplitics and Spillover here at Turning Point USA, we did an episode talking about how the founder of the show, Sex and the City, Oh yeah.
Actually came out and admitted that she regretted not being married and she regretted not having kids.
And Sex and the City was the show.
You're talking pop culture.
They've been selling these lies.
It's not the only one, but the most obvious one that sold this idea of go to the city, get your job.
Versus if you watch a Hallmark movie, and this is why I'm an unabashed supporter of Hallmark, because every Hallmark movie is the exact opposite of Sex and the City.
No, look, sex in the city sells... I mean, these things are so pernicious and so evil.
They sold the lie that women can have unattached sex just like the pig guys have been doing since Hefner's been selling that lie to the guys.
Yeah.
It is destructive to every man, to every woman, but they sold this.
They used everything they had to sell this to the culture.
How many people have bought this lie?
And so when you say there's a war on Christians, there's a war on God's values because God's values bless people.
God's values, you know, in my book, Letter to the American Church, I talk about how the church is supposed to be active and we're supposed to bring our values into the public sphere, into politics everywhere.
Why?
Because it will bless people.
Christians believe slavery is wrong.
So we bring that value, that human beings are sacred, and we bring about the abolition of the slave trade, thanks to William Wilberforce and all those heroes.
The abolition of slavery.
We think racism is wrong.
So the Jim Crow laws were abolished through the churches.
In other words, if you believe in what God believes, people will get blessed.
Not just the church.
Everyone will get blessed.
You'll have more freedom in America.
Well, the kingship of Jesus Christ extends beyond the church.
Amen!
It's called truth and reality, right?
And this is why also that if you're following an ideology that doesn't... I got into a debate earlier today online where... I suggest everyone to get in an online debate at least once a day.
It's certainly the best way to share your time.
But someone said, is religion an ideology?
And I said, no.
Okay.
This is why I love you more every day, Jack.
It's called reality.
to, we try to define reality itself, but religion is...
It's called reality.
Truth and reality are not an ideology.
And the worship of the creator.
So ideology is the way that perhaps we try to understand it, reflect it, express it, but to equate worship of the creator with some mundane political or economic ideology, no, no, you're totally missing the point.
I mean, look, there are people, Christians, who have media ideology, there's no doubt about it.
But that is a non-believer's take on religion.
No, I think the reason I wrote the book Is Atheism Dead and the new book Letter to the American Church in a way is to say the opposite of that.
To say that what we're dealing with here is incontrovertible reality.
God stacked the deck.
The house always wins.
He invented this universe.
He invented all of reality.
It all points to him.
You can only kick against those goads for so long before you lose because there is no way for a man to become a woman, for a woman to become a man.
There is no way to create some utopianist, atheistic world.
These lies can only be sold for so long and then they fall apart because they're at war with reality itself.
And so I'm simply convinced that It's less, you know, my project is less to convert people to Christian faith than to reality, because all reality points to the God of the Bible.
And if you care about truth, there's no way you're going to go in any other direction.
And so I really do think that In the book is Atheism Dead, when I talk about science, I think to myself, you know, for a while, some people sold the lie that science is at war with faith.
So you can get away with that for a while.
But eventually, if you continue to do science, science begins to point to the idea that, oh, yeah, there's an intelligent designer.
Right.
Who created all this, and the more science you learn, the more obvious it becomes.
It's not kind of like, well, the evidence is pointing.
The evidence is overwhelming.
And we've done, and I've done interviews with, Ben Stein is coming back around again.
Oh yeah.
And he was canceled Before we had the word cancelled, he was sort of the proto-cancelled guy because he did a documentary about Intelligent Design and the war on Intelligent Design.
Adam Carolla was in it.
It was a great documentary, by the way.
It was called Expelled, and it was amazing.
He was destroyed.
He was blacklisted.
His career was over at that point.
But think about that.
Think about why would they, I mean, you kind of say, If people really care about the truth, they would look into it or they would say, well, he has a point of view, I have this point of view, but they are so, now we can use the word triggered, right?
They're so horrified by the implications.
Well, here's the trouble for them now, is that the people who blacklisted him and the new atheists and all this, You can go around now and when you talk about intelligent design, suddenly people start listening.
Yeah.
Suddenly people, that is not a, a, a, a, you know, a dirty word anymore.
It's not, you know, when, and when I hear, and look, and I'm just going to say it, when I hear Elon Musk and these guys in the futurist talk about, uh, the simulation theory, I said, see the simulation there.
Well, this is just St.
Paul.
You're just, you're just, I mean, this has worked out 2000 years ago, man.
You're just bringing that stuff again because you know intuitively that there is something more.
We have the fine-tuned universe that it doesn't quite work with the Darwinian model.
There's too much that fits together.
There's too much we've learned since the 18th century.
1800s.
Oh, it's unbelievable.
That you have to come up, you have to come to a designer.
Now, now the, the, the humanists, right.
They don't call themselves, they do the same word.
They call themselves humanists.
They won't admit God, but they'll throw in some kind of alien or they'll, well, there's a weird computer program.
But even, even then I'll sit there and say, well, to extend your analogy out, uh, an algorithm or that provides your free will, is that any different than a soul?
Of course not.
It's the same.
It's the same.
You're arguing nomenclature.
It's called sophistry.
They're playing games.
That's right.
Because they don't want to lose the argument, so they kind of switch the subject or say that the reality is that, and again, we were talking about my book Is Atheism Dead?
I was astonished.
There's no other word.
Astonished at the evidence for God from science.
That's right.
I grew up in a world where that wasn't even conceivable.
Like, I thought to myself, we'll always have problems.
There's going to be science and faith.
Science, the more we know from science, the more it points to God.
I mean, this is simple fact.
I mean, if you only read my book, you're going to get the highlights.
But the point is, if you start reading more widely, you're going to say, how does everyone not know this?
That science in the last few decades has effectively proved that an intelligent designer created the universe, this planet, human life.
Like, there's really no other plausible solution.
Now, you might not like it, but you've got to deal with it.
And a lot of these folks, they don't want to deal with it because it makes them uncomfortable.
No, I think if Christianity is at war, it's winning.
I think it's winning.
I think God is winning.
I mean, he's already won in a sense, but it...
In the early days of science, and this is what's so bizarre to me, that if you had anything about the history of science itself and the way we do science, that there wasn't even any idea that this would be a conflict.
In fact, science and theology were sort of considered the same thing.
I actually forgot.
I literally forgot a part of my own book, and the book is Atheism Dead.
Part of it, I deal with the fact that it was specifically Christian theology that led to what we call modern science and the scientific revolution.
Now let's think about that.
It was specifically Christian theology, and in the book of course I explain why, but so it didn't just kind of emerge and we buy this lie that like it was Galileo versus the church, right?
Nonsense!
It was believing Christians... It's really more Galileo versus Thank you.
I also talked about that in the book.
It was absolutely believing Christians who understood that the universe is ordered, it's created with order, and that we can probably find out more if we study it.
There was not only no conflict between faith and science, but it was faith in Christ that led to science.
It's science from faith.
But I mean, you know, you talk about something that almost no one knows.
We live in a world where people say, well, that can't be.
That is true.
And to understand it, it even... And it's amazing because, you know, your Punnett squares and modern genetics, well, that comes from Gregor Mendel.
Yeah.
The Big Bang Theory comes from a Belgian priest.
Yeah.
Who later is, you know, basically is stamped and approved by Hubble.
You know, all of these theories.
And these are recent, new.
Right.
Francis Collins, who I have issues with.
I've got big issues with him.
I've got big issues with Francis Collins, but I will give him credit for the Human Genome Project and has always said that his science made him more of a believer.
I wish he was a stronger Christian.
I will, but that's a whole other podcast.
Yeah, we don't want to get into that.
It's a whole other podcast I don't want to get into right now, but I will make the point there and I'll throw his name out because that accomplishment was real, which I do think that he then turned and used the goodwill for that for bad form.
But again and again and again, and this is something, by the way, my I don't talk about this that much, but I might as well just say it.
So my mom was a, before she retired, she was a microbiologist her whole life for 40 years.
Whoa.
And she is a devout Catholic and has never, never once in her life considered anything other than in all of the science she did, the studies, the interaction.
And she studied the reproductive cycle, um, is specifically what she focused her, her work on and, uh, Never once occurred to her that the things that she was studying and things that she was learning were in any way in conflict with her faith.
I mean, look, the more you know, if you're honest, the more you study the human body, anything in science, the more you come to the conclusion that there is no way this just happened through random forces, through the processes of blind evolution.
A tornado in a junkyard, right?
There is no way, if you're honest, but if you are an ideologue, And you say, no, no, no, I don't believe in God.
You try to concoct a way that it's possible these things happen without God.
They could not have.
The more we know, the more obvious it becomes that the God hypothesis is by far the only rational hypothesis we have.
Eric, let me, because we only have a few moments left, a few minutes here.
Let me ask you, though, Why?
Why declare war on God?
And when I look at the revolutionaries of the 1960s and forward from there, you notice that God is their first target in the public square, removing God from the public square.
And the answer that I've always come up with is control.
Is that if you remove God, you can take control, because we see this in every revolutionary movement.
They target the priests, they target God, they target the churches, because if you remove that ideology from people, then they will not look to a higher power.
They'll look to government, they'll look to worldly power.
Well, they will despair, and in their despair, they will turn to whoever says, I've got the answers.
Yes.
You see this over and over and over again.
Why are the Chinese communists at war with God and with Christian faith?
Why?
Or even with the Uyghur Muslims, why?
Because when you say there is a higher power to whom I answer, you cut them out.
You basically say, I don't need to listen to you.
I listen to God.
That's what built America, is that people said, I have faith in God.
I will govern myself.
I don't need a bureaucracy or a tyrant to tell me what to do.
We will be largely self-governing only because we believe in God.
You wouldn't have liberty on the American model if you didn't have God and virtue at the heart of it.
So there's no question, if you're an authoritarian of any kind, Your first enemy are those people that believe in the God of the Bible, and by the way, Hitler clearly knew, if I do not destroy the church, I'll do it very carefully, I won't come out publicly against the church, but slowly behind the scenes, I will crush the church, because They are my only real enemy in German culture.
They are the only ones that can stand against the evil, which of course brings me to my new book, Letter to the American Church.
Hitler got the church to be silent long enough that he was able to wipe them out.
He said, just be quiet, just preach your little sermons, and I got everything else covered.
They bought that lie, just as many American Christians today are buying that lie and saying we shouldn't be political, we shouldn't get involved in these other things.
Right.
At some point, if you buy that lie, as the German church did, at some point, the authoritarian state will crush the church, will remove you from having any voice or any ability to get out, And basically that's where we are in America.
So the reason I wrote a letter to the American church is to wake up the American church, say if you do not put your faith into action now, very soon you will no longer have the ability to do that.
And if you have a state, and I have to say this as a descendant of Poland, that if you have a state that embraces as its ruling ideology atheism, Which, the natural exegesis of atheism will always be eugenics.
It must be.
Oh, there's no question.
Right?
No question.
And so, it turns into eugenics, and this is where you start taking that order, and then ordering humanity itself.
You have your Übermensch, your Untermensch.
I mean, look, we haven't said it, Jack.
It's ultimately a satanic project.
We have to be clear.
From the Garden of Eden, when Satan says, you can be as gods, Okay, that lie, that utopianist lie, you can trace it all through human history.
You can either realize, I'm not God and I need God, or you can believe the lie that we can be as gods.
And that satanic project is something we're seeing now, because let's face it, We have tremendous technology and abilities to communicate around the world in a way that it's actually frightening.
In other words, if you're an authoritarian, now's your time to say, we have the ability, as the Chinese do, increasingly to do what the Nazis could only dream of doing.
The Nazis could only dream of doing this.
Imagine if Hitler had Google and Facebook and all of it.
If Hitler had Google and face recognition technology and on and on and on and on.
So we are living in a time where what human beings, we are able in a sense technologically to build the Tower of Babel that we've never been able to succeed in building before.
And so this is why the war on God and on God's values has never been more in the open.
And so if the church does not wake up now and stand with everything we have against it, we're going to reap the whirlwind.
But again, I wrote the book because I believe God's will is that the American church specifically wake up Eric Metaxas, host of the Eric Metaxas Show.
