March 6, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
06:34
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Matt, welcome to the Dennis Prager Show. | |
| Hey, Dennis. | |
| Thanks for having me on. | |
| What is a complacent Christian? | |
| Well, I think it describes Christians and probably religious people in general in the West. | |
| We live such comfortable lives. | |
| We're sort of floating on the tide of the culture and going wherever the culture takes us. | |
| And when you compare that especially to Christians overseas and the very real persecution that goes on there, You know, we have sort of the exact opposite problem of our ability to avoid suffering and to live such comfortable lives, I think, has led us into decline. | |
| And how does that decline manifest itself? | |
| Well, I think it manifests itself in many ways. | |
| You could look at just the statistics and they'll tell you that Whatever it is, 80% of the United States claims to be Christian, and that number is going down. | |
| For religious people in general, we know the number is going down. | |
| The number of secular people and atheists is going up. | |
| But I think the numbers are a lot worse than what they tell you, because if you were to actually talk to some of those supposed religious people and ask them what they really believe and ask them about the doctrines of their faith, you're going to find that a startling number of them don't actually buy into many of those doctrines. | |
| And so that's what's happening, is that people are... | |
| Even those who still claim the faith are beginning to get rid of bits and pieces here that they don't like, especially the ones that call them to sacrifice and the ones that deal with obedience and morality and reverence. | |
| We don't like any of that. | |
| We throw that aside. | |
| And we start constructing a faith for ourselves that is all about making our lives in the here and now more comfortable, which is really the exact opposite of what faith is supposed to be doing. | |
| Well, you get an amen from me. | |
| You know, of course, I know you know I'm Jewish and I'm a religious Jew. | |
| And the Indianapolis Jewish Federation for the Jewish Holiday of Purim put out a flyer that people should celebrate with them at a drag queen reading hour for the Jewish Holiday of Purim. | |
| This is put out. | |
| I have a copy of the flyer by the Indianapolis Jewish Federation. | |
| That is happening in, if you will, mainstream Judaism, mainstream Protestantism, and mainstream—well, that particular one wouldn't be in the mainstream of Catholicism, but they have other left-wing positions. | |
| So I'm simply echoing what you're saying. | |
| So what do you propose in your book? | |
| I think I propose, first of all, at the beginning stage here, And I think with an issue like this, when you're talking about something like the decline of faith, people always want the one, two, three, four, five-step plan, you know, do this, do that, do that, and we'll solve the problem. | |
| I don't think that there is quite a plan like that. | |
| Anybody peddling a plan that simple is probably, I don't know if we should listen to them. | |
| So I think it's got to be more sort of broader and more abstract. | |
| But I think it begins with very basic. | |
| If you're a religious person, you're a person of faith, ask yourself. | |
| Do you actually believe all of the claims that you make? | |
| We do make some rather startling and extraordinary claims about the nature of reality, the nature of the world. | |
| Do you really believe those things? | |
| If you don't, if you say to yourself, you know what, I don't actually buy this, I don't know if I believe it, then okay, then go and try to live your life without that belief. | |
| Try to live your life, you know, without a deeper meaning to anything, and then see how that feels. | |
| Try to walk in those shoes, and maybe you'll discover some of the problems there. | |
| But if you really do believe it, then the next step is to look at our lives and realize that that belief should infiltrate every single aspect of our lives. | |
| Everything we do should be affected by that faith that we claim. | |
| And I think what we'll find, I know that what I often find when I do this inventory, is that there's so many aspects of my life that I've sort of put aside. | |
| I'm stashing in a box on the side of the room and saying, well, no, that's exempt from faith. | |
| Faith has nothing to do with that. | |
| But, of course, it can't be that way. | |
| Everything we do has implications to our faith, and so we should try to live that way. | |
| You have a chapter, I'm speaking to Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, Church of Cowards, a wake-up call to complacent Christians. | |
| Before I get to this chapter on what you call virtues, why do you use the word cowards? | |
| Do you think that's the animating principle of the decline of seriousness in Christendom today? | |
| Cowardice or ideology or both? | |
| I think it's sort of all of the above. | |
| I think it was, I believe it was C.S. Lewis paraphrasing, who said that courage is the substance of every virtue at its testing point. | |
| I might have butchered that. | |
| So that's what courage is. | |
| And then what you find with cowardice is sort of the lack of albers, kind of the opposite of that. | |
| And I think that's what we see in the culture. | |
| So it is cowardice. | |
| I also put complacency in the subtitle. | |
| I think all of these things are wrapped together. | |
| We're afraid of sacrifice. | |
| We're afraid of trying to live our lives according to some greater truth beyond ourselves. | |
| So there is, I think, fear and cowardice in that. | |
| You have this as a variant of the false virtues. | |
| So you list, for example, welcoming, acceptance, and tolerance, and then under judgment you say that's the one they most fear. | |
| I mean, this is so up my alley, I can't endorse this highly enough. | |
| Matt Walsh's book, Church of Cowards, A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians. | |
| So what type of church do you attend? | |
| I'm Catholic, so I go to a Catholic church, and I write this book not just about Catholicism, about Christianity generally, but these problems I'm talking about are certainly very much manifested in the modern Catholic church. | |
| Yeah, well, I want to talk to you about that, what's happening in the Catholic church, and we're going to resume the talk of our daily affairs. | |
| But this is important. | |
| The book is up at DennisPrager.com, Church of Cowards. | |
| Dennis Prager, back in a moment. |
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