Feb. 17, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
06:47
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Because it's conservative, and not on the left, he would not be published. | |
| Look, I'm sometimes, I speak for a living professor, and yet there are times when I'm speechless, because there's nothing I can say that approximates the threat, the unprecedented threat. | |
| It's just free speech that this country is undergoing. | |
| Anyway, his book is published by Encounter, which publishes wonderful books. | |
| And I say that as a Regnery author. | |
| So I just want to... | |
| But my listeners expect honesty from me. | |
| So you were talking about the first affliction, this identity politics, and you said, of the innocent. | |
| I don't follow that. | |
| So let me pick up where you just left off talking about free speech and try to get to identity politics and show you the link. | |
| You know, I tell my friends on the right that we should not be talking about this threat as cultural Marxism or multiculturalism. | |
| This is indeed something new. | |
| And let me give you evidence of this. | |
| So I'm going to list off a bunch of words. | |
| Hater, denier, transphobe, misogynist, homophobe, Islamophobe. | |
| Fascist, Nazi, and more recently, Insurrectionist. | |
| Now, all of these words are not designed to engage in political discourse. | |
| They are designed and intended to purge and to scapegoat. | |
| And my thesis in the first part of the book is that we are in a kind of Salem witch hunt moment in American history, where the task is really to seek A way to purge the poisons from the body social. | |
| Toxic masculinity, for example, this is a medical term. | |
| You're supposed to purge toxins from the body. | |
| And when your objective is to purge and to scapegoat, you will have no respect for free speech because the task is not to build a world where people are able to freely exchange ideas, but rather to purify the body social. | |
| Now, I argue... | |
| This is actually a deeply deformed Christianity, because what Christianity understood right from the outset was there was a divine scapegoat who takes away the sins of the world, that all human beings are stained, and that only through this divine scapegoat could the sins of the world be left behind, and we could have something of a pure world. | |
| Of course, at the end of time, it's actually purified. | |
| We can only build a world together that's not wholly stained and polluted through the divine scapegoat. | |
| And my argument is that with the collapse of the mainline churches after the Vietnam War and with the softening of the Roman Catholic Church, which has been happening for half centuries as well, the category of transgression and stain left the churches and came out into politics. | |
| So it's not an accident that the Pew Charitable Trusts Published a study a number of years ago which indicated that a whole new generation of people have no religious affiliation. | |
| My point to that is that they don't need to have a religious affiliation because they have a way of understanding purity and stain and transgression and innocence. | |
| It's called identity politics. | |
| So it's been the failure of the churches and the synagogues. | |
| Solovey Cech was talking about this in the 50s with the Jewish tradition. | |
| It's been the failure of our biblical institutions, so to speak. | |
| To wrestle deeply with sin and to give up on it because they wanted a God of love, not a God of judgment. | |
| That has basically allowed the movement out of the churches into politics of the category of purity and stain. | |
| Even with respect to climate change, I'm all for paying attention to science, but when you hear things like, we need to move from dirty fossil fuels to clean... | |
| Green energy. | |
| I'm enough of a biologist to know that those categories are not biological categories. | |
| Those are spiritual categories, which I think alerts us to why so many people are suspicious of climate change. | |
| It seems to be about more than what it professes to be. | |
| So we're in the midst of what I call a great awakening without God and forgiveness. | |
| The first and second great awakenings in America, 1760s, 1820s, were attempts to find purity and to purge stain. | |
| That's what religious renewal is all about. | |
| We have one going on right now today, which makes free speech impossible because it's about purging the impure ones. | |
| But it's one that doesn't have room for God and doesn't have room for forgiveness. | |
| So let me tell you, I have two reactions. | |
| One is, God, is it a joy to hear you? | |
| And the other is... | |
| Ladies and gentlemen, I am no longer necessary. | |
| You know, the concept of post-Christian, and I'm a Jew saying this, the post-Christian world has given us Nazism, Communism, and Fascism. | |
| It hasn't given us Boy Scouts. | |
| And I am as certain as I am of my name. | |
| That the collapse of Christianity in the United States will lead to evil. | |
| And you have put it in such eloquent terms that I hope everybody got it and I hope everybody reads your book. | |
| There are no irreligious people. | |
| I say this almost daily. | |
| The only question is, is it a Judeo-Christian religion or is it a secular religion? | |
| So, if I may pick up right on that, The pagans were involved in scapegoating. | |
| It's what I call cathartic rage of one nation battling another in the name of purging the other's gods. | |
| And Christianity put an end to that kind of scapegoating. | |
| That's why St. Augustine is the first one to come up with a just war doctrine, because now you can't go to war just to discharge your rage to purify the world. | |
| You have to come up with reasons. | |
| And the reason, theologically, is you have a new way of understanding How you get rid of stain, and that's the divine self-sacrifice. | |
| Hold it there. | |
| This is so important. |
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