Sept. 26, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
06:23
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| So Christians can absolutely get it wrong and do. | ||
| They can follow the wrong path. | ||
| They can be mistaken. | ||
| They can be silly and profane. | ||
| They can commit the worst sins imaginable. | ||
| The one thing they cannot do is be afraid. | ||
| Period. | ||
| And so boldness, again, is not just a status extra. | ||
| It's a baseline requirement for following the gospel. | ||
| And if you're not doing that, you're not doing it right. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So that's the first thing. | ||
| Don't be afraid. | ||
| The second thing I notice in reading Paul's letters is his deep concern for his fellow Christians. | ||
| Now, it was a universalist message to the uncircumcised and the circumcised, and that's the beauty of Christianity. | ||
| It's for everybody. | ||
| No matter what you look like, no matter where you're from, your language, it's truly a universal faith. | ||
| Which was a... | ||
| Completely radical idea when Jesus was crucified. | ||
| Like, I don't think anyone had ever thought of anything. | ||
| Like, there was nothing like that. | ||
| Never had been anything like that. | ||
| And I love that. | ||
| And so Paul was preaching to everybody. | ||
| In fact, in a lot of ways, he was preaching to the Greeks a lot of the time. | ||
| But even though his concern was for everybody, his heart was focused, and you see this again and again in his letters, on his fellow Christians. | ||
| Titus, Timothy, how are they doing? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| I love you. | ||
| He really cares about his brothers in the faith. | ||
| He really, really does. | ||
| And it's intimate and kind of raw in these letters. | ||
| It's wonderful. | ||
| And I think that's a model for us. | ||
| We should care about everybody. | ||
| But we should have a soft spot for other Christians. | ||
| We should. | ||
| And we don't at all. | ||
| We don't at all. | ||
| And that's one thing I've noticed the whole time I've been in D.C. I'm totally opposed to tribalism, particularly religious tribalism. | ||
| My instinct is ecumenical. | ||
| We're all in this. | ||
| Let's speak to everybody. | ||
| I'm American. | ||
| Very American. | ||
| And that's an American idea. | ||
| But I can't help but notice how the Christian church has almost specifically excluded concern for other Christians from its portfolio. | ||
| I see it all the time. | ||
| I'll never forget going to Iraq to cover the war in 2003 and running into a Christian. | ||
| I didn't know there were Christians in Iraq. | ||
| 1.5 million of them, actually. | ||
| It was one of the biggest and oldest Christian communities in the world. | ||
| It's gone now. | ||
| 1.5 million Christians in Iraq in 2003. They're about, we think, 150,000 or fewer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So that's like, I don't know. | |
| Kind of qualifies as a genocide, I think. | ||
| I mean, they're gone. | ||
| A lot of them were murdered. | ||
| Not a lot of them came here because they were excluded, specifically excluded, by the Obama State Department. | ||
| This was a news story at the time. | ||
| So we're getting a lot of refugees from Iraq. | ||
| What percentage were Christian? | ||
| None. | ||
| And no one said anything about it. | ||
| This wasn't hidden information. | ||
| I reported it at the time. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, well, a lot of great people coming. | ||
| Well, okay, but if you're a Christian church, what about the Christians? | ||
| The president who sent them there was a self-described Christian. | ||
| But there was not one word in 20 years, I have not heard one word of concern about what happened to all those Christians. | ||
| Nobody seems to care. | ||
| We should care. | ||
| Not just about them, but certainly about them. | ||
| Why wouldn't we? | ||
| They're Christians, so are we. | ||
| The Christians of Syria. | ||
| Never hear a word about it. | ||
| Look, the world is super complicated, and any time someone tries to reduce a conflict, say, or a rivalry in another part of the world to a bumper sticker, you know that person's lying. | ||
| Because the closer you get to anything, whether it's a country or a marriage... | ||
| For any human interaction, the closer you get, the more you know, the more you understand. | ||
| It's indescribably complex, and you can never fully know the truth. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I'm only suggesting that one factor that Christians use to assess the behavior of their government and other governments ought to be the treatment of Christians. | ||
| It ought to be. | ||
| Why is it not? | ||
| So if there's a conflict in, say, Syria... | ||
| And you're being told by everybody in the media that the bad guy in that conflict is Bashar al-Assad. | ||
| I'm sure he's bad. | ||
| I'm not endorsing the guy. | ||
| Never met him. | ||
| Glad I don't live in Damascus. | ||
| On the other hand, I think one of the questions you can ask is, how are the Christians faring? | ||
| Are they going to do better under Bashar al-Assad? | ||
| There's a massive Christian community in Syria. | ||
| There was. | ||
| We funded the Islamists who killed a lot of them. | ||
| We're funding the Islamists who are killing the Christians. | ||
| Anyone know that? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| Churches never talk about it. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Are we for that? | ||
| I'm not for that. | ||
| Look, it's far away. | ||
| I don't think it has anything to do with us. | ||
| I don't think we should be involved. | ||
| But as long as we are involved, why doesn't someone stand up and say, wait a second, we're funding the killing of Christians? | ||
| No, I'm a Christian. | ||
| I'm against that. | ||
| How's that? | ||
| Let's start there. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The conflict between Russia and Ukraine, super complicated. | ||
| I don't think there's an easy answer. | ||
| I don't think there's a... | ||
| Good guy and a bad guy. | ||
| I don't think it's Churchill versus Hitler. | ||
| I just don't think that. | ||
| And the more I learn about it, the more I'm confused. | ||
| I'm certainly not endorsing Russia. | ||
| I don't live there either. | ||
| I've never been there. | ||
| But one of the guides that we as Christians should use to assess that situation is how do Christians fare in those countries? | ||
| It's totally legitimate to ask that question. | ||
| Is it easier to be a Christian in Russia or Ukraine? | ||
| They're forcing us to pick. | ||
| I mean, I kind of happily live in a world where I don't have to pick. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There are foreign countries far away. | ||
| They're not America. | ||
| I'm not that interested, but they're making us be interested. | ||
| So now that we're required to be interested and pay for the war, why doesn't some Christian minister stand up and say, is it easier to be a Christian in Ukraine or Russia? | ||
| One of those countries just arrested a bunch of priests and shut down churches with political police in the army. | ||
| It wasn't Russia. | ||
| I raised that question at a Christian gathering and people scowled at me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They're arresting priests? | ||
| I don't need to know more, actually. | ||
| Well, they had bad opinions. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| So? | ||
| I have bad opinions. | ||
| I don't want to be arrested. | ||
| Bad opinions are not grounds for arrest. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| And moreover, the gut-level reaction of Christians to the arrests of Christian clergy should be horror. | ||
| Period. |
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