Nathan Apffel and Tucker Carlson condemn Donald Trump's alleged desecration of Easter, citing his threats to destroy Iranian infrastructure and profane tweets as a rejection of biblical limits. They critique the modern nonprofit sector, established in 1913, for becoming an unregulated monopoly where institutions like the LDS Church prioritize corporate investments over spiritual truth. Apffel argues that dispensationalism fuels Christian Zionism, weaponizing scripture to justify geopolitical agendas while corrupting church governance into a monarchy. Ultimately, they warn that prioritizing power and control over humility and the finished work of the cross turns the church into an instrument of spiritual war against God's people. [Automatically generated summary]
Millions of American Christians voted for Donald Trump when he ran for president in the last election and millions more Christians around the world rooted for him to win.
Many still do root for Donald Trump.
Now, why is that?
Because of his personal piety?
Well, of course not.
Trump, to his credit, has never claimed to be personally pious, especially religious in any sense.
They voted for him and they still support him because he seemed like a protector.
He seemed like someone who might save them from the growing and highly aggressive Agnosticism, if not atheism, of say the technology class or the bureaucratic class, godless nations, nations of other religions that oppose us.
Donald Trump seemed like someone who would protect Christians from that, who was committed to the free exercise of religion in this country and who was also committed to ending abortion.
Whether or not he himself opposed abortion, whether he was pro life in any meaningful sense, didn't seem to matter.
He would appoint justices that opposed abortion, that thought Roe v. Wade was unconstitutional.
He did that.
And that he would basically carry the flag for their issues and that he was sympathetic to them.
And they support him on that basis.
Can they still support him?
That's the question.
And that's the question Christians should have begun to ask themselves on January 4th of this year.
And that was the day that the president announced the capture, the arrest of the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, who was no question an anti American leader and a socialist.
Not someone most Americans liked or really had cause to like.
So the problem is not necessarily that Trump was against an anti American leader.
In fact, that was a benefit in the eyes of most of his voters.
The problem was why we did it and why the president told us he did it.
And that was for the oil.
So in the days before that operation in early January, the president tweeted out, sent out on his Truth Social account, and also said in public, we're doing this.
Because we want the oil, because that oil belongs to the United States.
He never explained how exactly the United States would own the natural resources of a foreign country.
Apparently, American oil companies helped develop the oil fields in Venezuela.
Therefore, we own the oil.
That was the idea, and they stole it from us.
But there was no real effort to explain how that works, how that makes any sense at all.
Instead, you had the president of the United States say, We need the oil.
Oil is really important.
True and true.
Therefore, we're going to take it.
And therefore, apparently, we did.
In the days after that operation, the successful removal of the president of the country and the installation of his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, as president, our president, Donald Trump, held a widely publicized on camera meeting with the heads of American oil companies and talked through how we're going to split up the natural resources of Venezuela and why this is great for America.
So, Why should Christians have paused at exactly that moment and asked, can I still support this?
Is this what I voted for?
Is this what I want?
Is this acceptable?
And the reason is really simple because Trump at that moment revealed that the motive was taking something that we wanted.
And that's not acceptable for Christians.
In fact, that's not acceptable for Americans or any civilized people because taking other people's stuff by force cannot be allowed.
In fact, preventing that is the basis of our legal code.
If there's one thing that every person knows that is, in a civilized country, you can't steal without penalty.
It's not allowed.
That doesn't belong to you.
You can't shoplift.
You can't rob banks.
You can't embezzle.
You can't invade countries to steal their stuff because they're all varieties of the same theme, which is theft.
And theft is wrong.
It's wrong under the American legal code, but it's also wrong under the Christian legal code.
Theft is wrong.
Spelled out really clearly.
It's also intuitive.
And here was the president saying, we're just stealing this because we can.
Well, as a practical matter, that's quite a thing to say out loud, given that we know from history that the things you do will be done unto you.
Once you set a standard, you will have to live by that standard.
Write a law, you'll be judged by that law.
So, if the new law is, I can take it because I want it and I have more power than you, at some point we can rest assured the tables will be turned and the things that we want and cherish and have earned and that we own will be taken from us by force at the moment when some other power has more force than we do.
It's really simple, sometimes called the law of the jungle.
And it may be the law of nature, but people don't want to live under that law because it is a brutal and unforgiving law.
So, they create higher laws.
Or they appeal to the highest law of all, which is God's law, which prohibits that.
So, this was a profound moment in American history, probably in the history of the modern world, where the most powerful nation said, if we want it, we'll take it.
No one's ever said that before.
Now, they've done it under the guise of ideology.
They've made up stories to hide the fact they're doing it.
But to say you're doing it implicates everybody else in the crime.
You can't say you didn't know.
Your president just told you on television, we took out their president because we want his oil.
And at that point, you're an accessory to the crime, whether you want to be or not.
And it's at that point that a lot of people should have spoken up and said, I'm out.
Not that I hate Trump or don't like his entire program, lots of things about it I love.
I'm grateful.
I'd maybe vote for him again, but I can't support theft because it's immoral.
But they didn't.
Maybe some did, but certainly the leaders did.
Of the American Christian churches, by and large, said absolutely nothing.
And maybe because they said nothing, this accelerated.
These are the same people who sort of didn't notice somehow that on inauguration day, the president did not take his oath of office with his hand on the Bible.
His wife stood next to him holding it.
I was about 15 feet away and saw it, but he did not put his hand on the Bible.
And that should have been maybe a clue.
That we need to pause and think about what is this?
Why wouldn't you put your hand on the Bible?
If you don't believe in the Bible, you think it's just a book, there's no cost to you to putting your hand on it, just kind of following the protocol, going along with the tradition.
All presidents do it.
Why aren't you doing it?
And you're not doing it intentionally.
You're choosing not to put your hand on the Bible when you take that oath.
That suggests not that you don't believe it's real because if you didn't believe it was real, why would you care?
You'd put on the costume and take it off.
Doesn't matter.
That suggests you know it is real and you're rejecting it intentionally.
You know what you're doing and you're doing it anyway, but nobody asked questions about that either.
Seem kind of inappropriate.
Given the celebration that in progress, to ask, why wouldn't you put your hand on the Bible when you take the oath of office to lead our nation?
But right around January 4th, it became clear that maybe he didn't put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what's inside that book.
And what's inside that book are limits on human behavior.
Because if there's one theme that spans all 66 books in the Christian Bible, it's that you are not God.
And you cannot assume his powers.
Because you don't have them.
You may convince yourself you have them.
You may want them.
You may have been promised them.
But in the end, they're not yours.
And you'll never have them.
And you can only destroy yourself and the people around you by pretending that you do.
That is the consistent message that spans from Genesis to Revelation.
And people who ignore that law are punished.
Just like people who ignore gravity or freezing temperatures are punished because these are laws that were not created by people.
They supersede people.
But on January 4th, when the President of the United States told us he was stealing, that our country was stealing something that didn't belong to us, people should have piped up and said something, but they didn't.
And that got us all the way to yesterday, which was Easter Sunday.
Easter Sunday is not just a holy day on the Christian calendar, it is the center of the Christian calendar, it is the holiest day.
In Christian life, because the day that Christians remember the whole point of their religion, which is not that Jesus was killed, but that he rose from the dead, that he beat death, unique in history.
And this is the day that Christians celebrate his resurrection.
And in this country, that celebration's been watered down effectively to candy and Easter bunnies.
But globally and certainly historically, Easter is the focus.
It's preceded by Holy Week and Lent, 40 days of self denial and prayer, all leading up to yesterday.
Easter morning.
And for faithful Christians, it is still the biggest day of the year.
And it's a day of joy.
The thing every person fears most is death.
We're born fearing it because we're born knowing it's coming.
And Christianity, unique among religions, promises victory over it.
And Jesus' resurrection is proof that God can beat death because only God creates life.
And so the morning of Easter is a uniquely joyful and peaceful moment.
And yet that peace yesterday was shattered.
That's not an overstatement.
It was shattered for many observing Christians by a statement that the president of the United States put out at 8.03 a.m. Eastern Time on Easter morning that said this, and we're going to read it in its entirety, not in outrage or self righteousness, but honestly in horror.
Quote Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran.
There will be nothing like it.
Three exclamation points.
Open the fucking straight, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell.
Just watch.
All caps.
Praise be to Allah, President Donald J. Trump.
Now, a lot of people reading that imagined, of course, this can't be real.
Did the president of the United States really just write that?
And it is real.
It is maybe the most real thing this president has ever done.
And also the most revealing.
On every level, it is vile.
On every level, it begins with a promise to use the US military, our military, to destroy civilian infrastructure.
In another country, which is to say, to commit a war crime, a moral crime against the people of the country, whose welfare, by the way, was one of the reasons we supposedly went into this war in the first place.
They're being killed by their government.
We have to rescue them.
And now here's our president, not even a month and a half into the conflict, which we are not winning, by the way, because the Straits of Hormuz are not open.
There's one way to keep track that's the measurement.
Saying that we're going to use our military to kill the civilians of this country who didn't choose the war.
They get nothing to do with it, they're like civilians everywhere.
Blow up their bridges?
Bridges on military bases?
No, no, no, just bridges.
Bridges that people cross every day to go to school and work and to worship and yes, church, because there are over a million Christians in Iran.
This is their Easter too.
And power plants.
Not the power plants attached to missile factories, okay, but civilian power plants in a country of almost 100 million people.
What happens when a modern country and a country that has a nuclear program is a modern country?
Sorry.
Iran is a modern country.
What happens when it loses power?
Well, people die.
Babies connected to incubators die.
People in hospitals die.
And those are the first level effects.
And then people begin to starve.
And then you have refugee crises.
People leave the cities looking for food.
And yes, they move into other countries.
In the region, in Europe, in the United States, you cause chaos and death, mass suffering and death when you do that.
And we have done that.
We have intentionally bombed civilian infrastructure in Iran.
It's totally unacceptable.
Not under the phony laws of some international body, but under moral law, God's law, killing non combatants, people who did nothing wrong, who didn't choose this war, who were just people created by God.
That is immoral.
That will never be moral.
That can never be justified.
That is always wrong.
It can be expedient.
We need to do this.
It doesn't mean it's right.
It's the most wrong thing.
And we should always remember that what we do will be done to us.
Live by the destruction of civilian infrastructure, live by the killing of children, the bombing of elementary schools and colleges.
And you will die and your children will die by those same things.
That's just a fact.
That's never not been true.
We don't want it to be true.
It's the last thing we want to be true, but it is nonetheless true.
And everyone knows that on an animal level.
You can feel that that's true.
Ooh, shouldn't do that.
You'll be punished for it in this life or the next, or maybe both.
For the president to say that and not bother to tell us, oh, it was an accident we did this?
Well, one, it makes you reassess the bombing of the girls' school attached to the IRGC naval base, where the children of Iranian military officers were incinerated in a bombing, not one, but two, a double tap.
Every person has assumed that was a mistake.
No American could ever believe the US government would do that on purpose.
I still don't believe it.
But after this, you have to kind of wonder how did that happen?
Was it bad targeting coordinates given to us, we hope, by Israel, another country?
Maybe it wasn't.
Who knows at this point?
For the president to call for that, it's worth stopping and saying, no, this is not acceptable.
Under any circumstances, you haven't justified it, you couldn't justify it, and it can't be done in our name.
And the point, of course, is to get the Iranians to open the Strait of Hormuz.
Well, no sane person thinks that's going to work.
At which point, you have to ask, why would we do it anyway?
Well, there are a bunch of possible reasons, but the darkest of all is for the sake of doing it, for the sake of killing, for the sake of exercising the most obvious form of power, which is extinguishing life.
That's why we're doing it.
The thrill is in the killing.
The power is in the killing.
The exertion of force is the point.
You don't want to think that.
But after a message like this, what could possibly be the reason?
There's nobody who thinks that if we do this, and we pray we don't for our sake as well as the sake of non combatant innocent Iranians, nobody thinks this is going to work.
But then the tweet continues.
Pardon me, the ironically named truth continues.
There will be nothing like it.
Open the effing straight.
How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country?
Who do you think you are?
You're tweeting out the F word on Easter morning?
You'll be living in hell as if hell is a place, hell is a condition.
And this is an example of that condition.
Just watch.
Praise be to Allah.
So obviously, you're mocking the religion of Iran.
Okay.
If you seek a religious war, that's a good idea.
But by the way, no decent person mocks other people's.
Religions.
You may have a problem with the theology.
Presumably, you do if it's not your religion, and you can explain what that is.
But to mock other people's faith is to mock the idea of faith itself.
And we should never mock that because at its core is the acknowledgement that we are not in charge of the universe.
We did not build it.
We won't be here at the end of it.
We can destroy life.
We cannot create it because we are not God.
The message of all faith at the biggest picture level is the message in our Bible, which is you are not God.
And only if you think you are do you talk this way.
But it's not just mockery of Islam.
And no president should mock Islam.
That's not your job.
This is not a theocracy.
We don't go to war with other theocracies to find out which theocracy is more effective.
We are not a theocracy.
And God willing, we never will be because theocracies corrupt the religion.
No, this is a mockery, not just of Islam, it's a mockery of Christianity.
To send out a tweet with the F word on Easter morning promising the murder of civilians and then saying, praise be to.
Allah, without explaining any of it, you are mocking me and every other Christian because we're Christians.
It doesn't mean you have to hate Trump or take the opposite position on every issue from Trump.
You shouldn't.
A lot of his positions are the right positions, but you cannot support that.
That is evil.
That is an intentional desecration of beauty and truth, which is the definition of evil.
And you have to ask, where does evil lead?
If the core point of evil is to destroy, which it is, God creates, Satan destroys.
It's dualism.
When you see something of beauty being created, when you hear the truth being spoken, you are witnessing a manifestation of God's power.
And when you see the opposite, you're witnessing the opposite.
So where does this lead?
Well, on a practical level and a spiritual level, they converge in the same place, which is the use of weapons of mass destruction.
So when a Practical level, on a strategic level, if you're at the Pentagon gaming this out, like, how does this work?
The President of the United States keeps laying down markers.
You can't go past next Tuesday at 2 p.m. or whatever.
You must open the straight, or else you'll be living in hell as if we're not there already.
And at a certain point, what we're doing is revealing that we've exhausted conventional power.
If there's some tricky way to open the Strait of Hormuz by air, probably would have done it by now because we are on a path to plunge the world into global depression and famine.
And that's not hair on fire panic inism.
That's math.
30% of the world's fertilizer, 20% of its energy.
Yeah, that's a global depression and famine.
What happens to Africa?
A billion and a half sub Saharan Africans without enough fertilizer?
Well, a lot of them will be living in the United States.
So, getting the strait open is the essence of the mission.
It is the strategic goal.
By the way, not to be bitter, it was open on February 27th and had been for, you know, since there were pirates roaming the strait for modern history to have been open.
Now it's closed because of this war.
Okay, so there's that.
But leave that aside.
Okay, that was then.
How do we get it open?
Conventional airstrikes will not open the strait for very obvious reasons.
You can close it with mines.
So if you reach the end of your conventional power, where does that leave you?
Oh, with non conventional power.
What's that a euphemism for?
Nuclear weapons.
And the effects of that hardly need to be explained.
Well, they can't be fully known because modern nuclear weapons have never been used.
But you can just draw obvious conclusions.
Like life in Iran, not possible.
So you wipe out a country of 92 million people.
What about directly across the Persian Gulf?
What about the seven other countries, all of them allies of the United States, the biggest oil producing countries in the world?
Could you live there?
What about the 100 odd million people who live in those countries?
Maybe not possible for them either.
Would a nuclear strike be followed by peace?
Probably not.
The US isn't the only country in the world with nuclear weapons.
You could have a global nuclear war.
That's why we haven't used nuclear weapons in 80 years.
And the casualty numbers, as horrible as any casualty is, need some context.
Let's look at World War II.
The Battle of the Bulge, 80,000 to 90,000 plus casualties, deaths and injuries and so forth.
Nearly 10% of all the casualties in World War II happened at the Battle of the Bulge near the end of the war.
The Battle of Okinawa, 50,000 plus casualties, over 12,000, nearly 13,000 killed on that island, which is what convinced Truman that we would lose a million men.
If we didn't drop the atomic bombs that we did.
So, this is a war or a peace mission to stop nuclear weapons that can blow away millions of Americans.
Every bit as important as World War II.
This is a crucially important military operation war, call it what you want, peace mission.
And we ought to be celebrating the success of our military, unifying around our military and our commander in chief, and urging them.
To complete the task so our country is safe from nuclear weapons by insane suicidal primitives from the seventh century.
It's not easy, but embedded in there, and that's why we prefer a transcript over the actual audio.
Embedded in there is something you need to know.
It's an argument that is being test driven.
And since no one, to our knowledge, has pushed back against it, may be in full operation now.
It's an argument for nuclear weapons.
Weapons against Iran.
And here's to restate, in case you couldn't make it through the accent, here's what he said.
Nearly 10% of all casualties in the Second World War happened at the Battle of the Bulge, which, of course, at the end of the war.
The Battle of Okinawa, 50,000 casualties, nearly 13,000 killed on that island, which is what convinced Truman, Harry Truman, the then president in 1945, we'd lose a million men if we didn't drop the atomic bombs that we did.
Did you hear that?
That's Mark Levin's counsel to our sitting president, Donald Trump, right now.
You are looking at a choice.
Between the catastrophic loss of your troops in a ground war or the use of nuclear weapons, which in a sense, if you think about it, just think about it for a second is actually an act of peace.
It's an act of peace.
The most humane thing you could do is to end this now with nuclear weapons.
That's the case Mark Levin is making to the president who just last week recommended that all Americans watch Mark Levin's show.
And again, we're moving toward the use of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, possibly nuclear weapons.
But non conventional weapons, not bombs dropped from the air, missiles launched from launchers, but the use of weapons that have never been used in war ever.
And the argument is the same argument that you heard in 1945, or didn't hear, by the way, if you're an American civilian, no one ever cuts you in on this.
Thank heaven for Mark Levin saying it out loud so the rest of us could at least follow along and know what we're in for and implicated in.
But the argument that it's actually much more humane to kill tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of civilians than it is to like, Fight it out with the Marine Corps on the rocky shores of mainland Iran.
That's the argument.
But it's not just the argument that one guy in cable news is making.
It is the logic of escalation in this war because, in some sense, Mark Levin is right.
We are not going to open the straits with the United States Marine Corps, the 82nd Airborne, or the tier one operators that everyone in cable news seems to know so much about.
The tier one operators, who are tier one?
Just guys like some of the best guys actually in America could be killed in this.
That's a better way to put it.
It's a more real way to put it.
They are not going to open the straight.
And so, unless somebody puts the brakes on right away, we're going to wind up in a place that we can't even imagine.
Not just Iran, us and the rest of the world.
And so, that means because this is obvious to anyone who's paying any attention that if you work in the White House or in the US military, now it's time to say no, absolutely not, and say it directly to the president no.
In case you're thinking about using some weapon of mass destruction against the population of Iran, in whose name we liberated Iran, we killed their religious leader for their benefit.
Do you remember that?
This was last month.
Those people who are in direct contact with the president need to say, no, I'll resign.
I'll do whatever I can do legally to stop this because this is insane.
And if given the order, I'm not carrying it out.
Figure out the codes on the football yourself.
Because everything hangs in the balance right now.
This is not hysteria.
This is 100% real.
And yet, the people in this country, by and large, are sleepwalking along.
No, the future will be pretty much like today, maybe a little different.
That's not the lesson of history.
Things change fast and forever.
There are pivot points where nothing is the same.
Sometimes it's better, but mostly it's not.
And this is one of those cases where it might not be at all better.
But there's something else to think about, something maybe even more important than whether we have a nuclear war.
What could be more important than that?
Well, your soul, the way we worship God, whether we acknowledge God or not, that's more important ultimately than anything else.
And you have to think through could there be a spiritual component to what we're watching?
Is it just a conventional escalation ladder in a badly thought out war with ill defined goals, and we just wind up in this really tough?
Place where we face either humiliation on the one side or a nuclear launch on the other.
That's, yeah, that's part of what it is.
But could it be something bigger than that?
Is it possible that what you're watching is a very stealthy, yet incredibly effective attack on what, from a Christian perspective, is the true faith, belief in Jesus?
Is that what really is under attack here?
Is that what, maybe that's what's been under attack for a long time?
Maybe our whole lifetime.
Maybe almost everything we see is an attack on that faith.
The one faith that is always attacked, always and everywhere for 2,000 years.
It's one, many faiths have been attacked.
Many religious people of different religions have been killed over the past 2,000 years.
But there's been only one sustained effort to exterminate a faith, and that's the Christian faith.
Could that be part of it?
And is it possible that the president sees this not just in geostrategic terms and military terms and economic terms?
Is it possible the president sees this in bigger terms?
Sees this as the fulfillment of something or the elevation to some higher office beyond President of the United States?
That's entirely possible.
And that's not an attack, but it's also not a guess because at every turn, Since the inauguration last January, there have been religious leaders on the scene telling us, telling us out loud.
Most of us ignored it because we're just so secular.
We just sort of ignore it.
Got some sleazy Southern Baptist preacher who says whatever for money.
We should always remember that just because we're a secular nation, have been overwhelmingly secular, maybe not coincidentally since we dropped those atom bombs 80 years ago, doesn't mean that we live in a world where everyone else is secular.
And it definitely doesn't mean that the spiritual realm has been eliminated, that is not real, that the only things that matter are the things that we can see and hear and feel and taste and measure.
Talk about fake.
Talk about a silly religion.
That's the silly religion.
In real life, in the life that every person lives, no matter what your religion or lack of it, there is a daily recurring experience of the transcendent things you cannot explain or see or touch or feel or taste or measure.
That is every bit as real.
In fact, it may be determinative.
Maybe the most important things in your life are the things you don't fully understand.
All of us know that.
And so when people start making reference to mystical religious principles that we don't understand, it doesn't mean.
That it's fake, they may be getting it wrong, but it doesn't mean there's not something real at the center of this.
Of course, there is.
And only a civilization as bereft of spiritual language as ours wouldn't pick up on that immediately.
What do you mean, praise be to Allah?
What does that mean?
Why are you standing this out on Easter morning?
I mean, obviously, it's designed to offend and degrade and defile.
Got it.
But is there something else going on here?
One of the keys to this is the behavior of a woman called Paula White.
In a moment, we're going to speak to a man who studied her, who went to her church yesterday, called Nathan Abfell.
Fascinating conversation with him, which we just finished, where he tries to understand who are these people encouraging the president of the United States to see himself as a millennialist figure, as part of the eschatology of like part of the end time story.
Who are these people who are encouraging the rebuilding of the third temple in Jerusalem, whatever that is?
Like, what is this?
Is this Christianity?
Is it something else?
And he knows a lot about it, and it's a fascinating conversation that I hope that you will watch.
But at the center of this is the most unlikely person of all, a ludicrous figure, someone who's so absurd on one level that it's impossible to take this person seriously.
That would be Paula White, the president's spiritual advisor.
And because she's so self evidently not worth taking seriously, most people don't, and they just tune it right out.
Who cares what she says?
What does F do with the economy?
Oil prices, GDP, reopening the straight?
I don't know.
Maybe you should listen a little more carefully.
So, Here's one example.
This is something that Paula White said about the president right before this recent escalation during Holy Week at the White House, a gathering to which many American Protestant leaders, big ones, Franklin Graham included, were invited.
And they gave a blessing to Donald Trump as he accelerated this war against the civilian population of Iran.
Standing in front of American flags in the White House with some kind of beta evangelical leader nodding along as you liken the President of the United States to Jesus, the Christian Messiah, God in human form.
How could you say something like that?
How could the rest of us sit by and not protest when she said something like that?
How could any Christian watch that and not feel revulsion?
Well, because people didn't pay attention or they didn't think about it.
Oh, it's just the praise that Trump demands.
Fine.
Not the first vain president, not the first vain leader, that's for certain.
But to compare him or any president to Jesus has got to be a deal killer.
That is the end.
You cannot allow that in good faith.
If you're a Christian, you have to say no to that.
Doesn't matter whether you voted for Trump, campaigned for Trump across many states, defended him for 10 years, still like him.
Doesn't matter.
You cannot compare a president, a secular president of the United States, or anybody, any human being, to Jesus.
But because it distorts who Jesus is, it is a lie about Jesus.
Did Jesus command the disciples to go out and kill people?
Where in the New Testament is that?
Well, most people probably don't even know because they don't read it because their understanding of Christianity comes filtered through people like Paula White and Franklin Graham and many others of varying levels of good faith or maybe entirely good faith, but they don't read it themselves.
Kind of weird.
If you think about it, it's a great story.
You don't have to believe in it to enjoy it, to learn from it, to love it actually.
And if you're a believer, you need to read it and it's not hard to read it.
By the way, it's on Amazon.com.
Try this New Living Translation, NLT.
Just probably the most modern colloquial English translation of the Bible.
Easiest to read.
It's great.
It's $4.30 on Amazon delivered to your house.
NLT.
Just read it.
Just read the four Gospels.
You don't have to believe it.
What do you think of that?
What's the picture that emerges?
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Just four stories about Jesus from slightly different perspectives.
Is the man that you read about?
The Messiah, you read about, recognizable as you listen to these people talk about him?
Does he send his disciples out to kill?
Well, I'll answer the question having just read him.
No, he sends them out to be killed.
He says to them, Go out, tell the truth.
The world will hate you for it.
Take no weapon, take no food, take no money, take no talking points.
I'm not even going to tell you what to say.
Just tell the truth.
God will speak through you.
Totally unprepared.
Doesn't give them a map.
Doesn't give them a plan of any kind, and it gives them no defense.
And he says point blank again and again, you could be killed for this, probably will be.
And anyone who perverts that is doing a grave crime against the faith itself.
And that actually matters.
You can argue about all kinds of points of doctrine and transubstantiation, and there are a million things you can argue about.
And Christians have argued about them for 2,000 years.
But you can't argue that Jesus sends his people, God's people, his disciples out to kill.
He sends them to do the opposite thing, to die.
And they do.
And the world is transformed because they did.
That's the message.
And anyone preaching the opposite gospel of any Christian denomination is saying something vile and dangerous and should be called out for saying it because the message is not of conquering, it's of submission.
Put your hand on the Bible when you take that oath because, in doing that, you acknowledge I am submitting to a law greater than myself.
My own desire, my own whims, my will is not the final word.
There is a limit to what you can do.
And that limit is set not by you or any other person, but by God.
There is time to prevent whatever is coming next, whether it's the murder of civilians and children by air, or whether it's something even worse than that.
There is time to fix it.
All is not lost.
But the first step, and this is also the first step toward faith, is submission.
There are things I want to do that I will intentionally not do.
I will submit to a law higher than my own desire.
That's the first step towards civilization.
And it is the first and absolutely mandatory step toward averting the true disaster that is coming.
And we pray that the president will take that step and that those around him will take that step because everything hangs in the balance.
And with that, here's our conversation with Nathan Apfel.
I ran into Paula White for the first time, heard her name for the first time, and I ran into her in person right outside the Oval Office last winter, right after the inauguration.
And she introduced herself to me and said, I'm the head of the Religious Liberty Commission or something.
And I remember thinking, I'm so glad there is such a thing because we need it.
We need religious liberty.
Almost more than anything.
And I said, I felt moved to say, just like escape from my lips.
Thank you.
And I really hope that you will do something to protect the Christians of the Middle East, particularly in the Levant.
There are a lot of great Christians there and they're being hurt and nobody seems to care.
And she like recoiled.
I remember thinking she doesn't like this at all.
That was my first and only experience with Paula White.
And so I've wondered ever since who is Paula White and how did she become the president's main spiritual advisor?
You told me this morning that you went to church on Easter Sunday, which was yesterday at her church.
And so before you give us the overview, can you just describe what that was like?
You know, when you see Paula on stage next to Trump or you see any big evangelical leader, Kenneth Copeland, Franklin Graham, you'd expect their church to be massive.
So there is the coolest movie we can imagine it's a new film adaptation of George Orwell's amazing novel, Animal Farm.
1984 gets all the attention, but Animal Farm is better.
It's coming to theaters May 1st.
You probably remember that Animal Farm is not actually about animals, it's about human nature, the desire for authority, and how quickly people tend to fall in line and give up all of their God given rights.
The movie follows Lucky, a young pig whose curiosity and courage guide viewers through the farm's rise and fall.
We see hope, betrayal, and above all, the danger of totalitarian power.
This is a movie to watch with your.
Kids, especially if they're old enough to ask real questions and to notice when the answers don't add up.
The book affected generations of American school kids, no longer taught, of course, because it's too true.
What do you do when the rules start changing and you're told you're not allowed to notice?
Do you speak up or just go along with it because, hey, that's easier?
That's the conversation you should have with your kids about power, corruption, and freedom.
This movie's entertaining, it's sharp.
Not many studios would do it at this point, but Angel did because their guild members voted to bring it to the big screen.
So, see it, talk about it, decide for yourself what it means.
Well, of course, because I don't know and I don't want to repeat things that are not true.
But it's sexual scandal.
Those are the allegations.
So there's that.
And I do think, in order to maintain credibility, I also think your faith requires you to explain that and show people that it's true and repent, apologize, be better, or prove it's not true.
But that seems all kind of unaddressed.
So, how did she wind up given all that?
The president of the United States, chief spiritual advisor.
Section five is resignation, removal, succession of pastor president.
If the pastor president voluntarily resigns, she may designate her successor.
The pastor president shall serve as president and a member of the board of directors until her death or resignation without need of election or appointment.
And that's what we should probably be modeling ourselves after, right?
We want to have a say in how this all operates.
A couple of years ago, one very interesting lawyer from Dallas who I've had multiple interactions with, And then the young family decided to, in a shady back end deal, remove voting rights of 93,000 members like that.
So, a billion dollars in assets that was voted on by 93,000 members in a single meeting on page seven removed the voting rights.
As such, members are not entitled to vote in person by proxy or otherwise.
So, a billion dollars in assets were put into the hands of six people, five of which are related.
Yes, but capitalism has crept into it, and shrewd, smart businessmen and women and lawyers have realized it is the perfect legal architecture to either scam people or build empires in the name of Jesus.
And your point is, and you've devoted, I mean, I think people can watch your documentaries and look you up, but your point is the problem with a lot of American Christianity is not the faith, of course, you are a Christian.
But is the structure that corrupts by its nature?
It's like almost, I think you said to me this morning, it's like almost impossible to get out of this without being corrupted if you're leading a church with a structure like that.
It's, I say that you can go in with the best of intentions, but if there's no external accountability on the system, that system will inevitably eat you alive and corrupt you.
Your sermons, your messaging will all tilt to protect that institution.
And it's, I would, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt.
They're doing it unconsciously.
Whether that be the idea of tithing, whether that be Zionism and Israel, it all tilts towards protecting the status quo of the institution.
Christ literally gave up all control and hung on a cross.
And this is one place I want to get to whether you're a Christian, my 160 million self professed American Christians out there, my brothers and sisters out there, we can see the Bible as the word of God.
And I could speak to it on that.
My atheist and Gnostic friends, let's see it as a history book.
And today I want to talk with you about when he said it is finished on the cross, the last words that came out of his mouth, he meant it.
So if you're a Christ follower, We're going to break down a lot of scriptures that, depending on your theological approach, you will have to say it isn't finished.
And so that's what I want to get into.
And power structure is one of them.
When he hung on that cross, he broke all power structures.
He is the only way, the truth, and the life.
And no one gets to Jehovah the Father except through him.
One of those traditions is the legal architecture of the nonprofit sector and then the religious exemptions applied to all churches, mosques, temples, you name it.
They play by the same rules in America.
That legal architecture, there's only one conclusion to it, and that's corruption.
There's only one.
When you look at how it's structured, there's no external accountability from an exterior source to hold the institution accountable.
The government does not hold religious institutions accountable.
So what it means is we hold ourselves accountable.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard scripturally.
Like, we can't hold, should we just sit around and be like, hey, Tucker, you and I, we've got a million bucks sitting on this table.
What should we do with it?
Well, let's just hold each other accountable with what we're going to do with it.
No, we need some outside pressure saying, hey, let's oversee what we're going to do and how we're going to steward those resources.
And the best part about that million, or the ironic part, is it's not even yours and my resources, it's the donors who gave it to us.
And so the system right now is just set up for failure.
So in 1913, the IRS carved out, or the government carved out, the nonprofit sector.
It looked at all the institutions in America and it said, wow, there's really brilliant institutions that help social good.
And this is a big one.
They build local social capital in their community.
1913 is pre-really technology.
You know, your life was like an 80-mile radius, basically.
Yes.
So you cared about your local community.
And so the government said, Hey, these businesses do things that we can't.
Salvation Army was a great example.
So the Salvation Army does things for its local community that the federal government and state government cannot do.
So we're going to carve out these businesses and say, Hey, you don't have to pay taxes.
You have more freedom to pursue your mission, which is building social capital in your community, helping the homeless, the needy, basically Matthew 25, which is who Christ told us to help.
Um, flash forward to today, there's 1.9 million nonprofits.
So it went from 12,000 organizations in 1913 to 1.9 million.
And you have to ask why the jump.
And most arguments are, well, Nathan, population increase.
Population increased 4.3% in America from 1913 to present day.
If you do the math, that's around 50,000 organizations today.
So population increase didn't increase the nonprofit sector.
So how do we go from 12,000 to 1.9 million?
Well, I think a lot of good intentioned people wanted to help people, but the lack of accountability in the system has turned the nonprofit sector into an opportunity for massive abuse and inurement.
And inurement is, I don't have the definition in front of me, but it's basically no founder, family member, or executive can inure themselves by the benefit of the organization's net assets or net resources.
So I can take a salary, but I can't use it like a personal piggy bank.
Right.
These guys use it like a personal piggy bank, and most people use the nonprofit sector not like a personal piggy bank.
And because you say you're a church, you get that designation from the IRS immediately.
They don't have to approve you of it because of what I would argue separation of church and state.
And so, and that's like a double dip.
You know, they love to say separation church and state until they want the state to help them out.
It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down.
But then you just file with the state, you file your articles of incorporation, so you are a business, but you never have to tell the Fed what you're doing at all.
And then if you're in the evangelical world, in the non denominational world, there's no denominational hierarchy.
So then it's the sky's the limit.
It's how charismatic are you?
How good of a teacher are you?
How good of an entertainer are you?
And at that point, it just becomes how quickly you can scale.
And we call it religious economic theory in the religion business.
Because it's now, if I start a church tucker down the street from yours, now we're pitted against each other for consumers.
And so I'm going to get a better stage than you.
And then you're going to get a better lighting system.
So I got to out compete you.
And naturally, the system just becomes a production, like just production.
And we need consumers in.
So we got to keep them entertained.
And so the nonprofit sector has just corrupted over time because of the lack of accountability.
And from the secular side, nonprofits used to look local.
And that's why it was carved out originally, right?
A nonprofit was supposed to build their local community.
Well, now with globalism, nonprofits want to look global.
It's way more appealing for me to put a starving kid from Africa on the cover of my newsletter than a white kid who needs some school books down the street.
And so the secular side went global.
So they forgot about the local community.
And then the church started pitting against each other for consumers.
And so the nonprofit sector just naturally is corrupted and it's never been reformed.
And ironically, so the 14 point checklist, which I originally thought came from the IRS, because there were so many churches popping up, someone was like, How do we define what a church is?
You know, like there was a big lawsuit.
I can't remember.
It was in the 50s or 60s.
And it was literally a wine distillery that was registered as a church.
And so there was a lawsuit about it because they're like, you're not a church, dude.
You're just selling wine, you know?
And so the word on the street is the IRS was like, hey, we got to put some structure to this.
And so out popped this 14 point checklist.
And the checklist came from that lawsuit.
And it was in California.
And it's really simple.
You need a house of worship.
You need a place.
You need a physical building.
You need a congregation.
That congregation has to, what do they call it?
It's basically a faith statement.
Your congregation has to have a specific Faith statement to itself.
And then you have to meet once a month physically.
And most churches already acted like that somewhat.
And so, boom, you get the exemption.
Well, what that does is it shoves all religion and faiths into that simple box.
And so, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, you name it, Scientology, they just play by the same rules now.
And the LDS side of things is fascinating too, in regards to the temples they love to build.
And you have to ask why they want to build those temples.
And that just goes into the history of Joseph Smith and Mormonism.
But they've, I tip my hat to the Mormon church in regards to you figured out the cheat code.
Like in any video game, you figured the cheat code out in the religious exemption side of things.
Because the only reason why they got rolled and busted.
By the SEC, they had so much money invested and they weren't filing what's called a 13F.
So, when you have 100 million bucks invested in the market, you have to fill out an informational 13F, which is just an informational filing saying, Hey, here's my stock, here's our stock portfolio because you could technically sway the market.
I mean, you run into, you know, the longer you live and the more you travel and the more people you meet, you'll run into people in institutions that you revile that are just obviously evil CIA, FBI, IRS, you know, who are just great people.
And you're like, wow, you know, I feel sorry for you.
But it's also just important to make the distinction between individuals in whatever institution they're serving.
They work with refugees, they work immigration, they work natural disasters.
They do good work.
And I want you to think about that carrot.
There's always that carrot that nonprofits dangle.
This is their 2021 990, which is just an informational sheet.
That churches do not have to file.
So, the beautiful part about the 990s, this is the first two pages.
A 990 is just an informational sheet that every secular nonprofit files annually, and it shows the IRS and then their donors roughly where the money goes.
So, there's two things I want to bring up.
And if I forget, I want to talk about Alaska.
Just say, let's talk about Alaska.
This is 2021.
Up in this top right, there's two numbers highlighted.
Yeah, I mean, I always gave to land trusts because I don't like.
You know, ugly development, and I really love nature so passionately.
But then you realize the land trust kind of exists, not all land trusts, but a lot of land trusts exist for their own benefit, and then they gate the land and you can't use it.
And I don't want to focus too much on Samaritan's Purchase because I know that there are many groups like it, but they're at $2.5 billion, clearly one of the biggest.
A lot of these guys fly private.
And as someone who flies commercial, often coach, I mean, because you should, because, like, why would you be wasting money on a private plane all the time?
Like, how does a Christian organization justify having a private jet?
So to have a private jet that you own and pilots whose retirement you pay, fuel costs that you shoulder, the endless maintenance on the plane, incredibly expensive.
Like ask any rich person that rich people don't do, I mean, some do, but most rich people are like, I'm not rich enough for that.
Well, this goes back to our conversation earlier about Malachi 3.
If you don't read the scriptures in its entirety and see it as one book, In one glorious story, you can bastardize a couple verses that have detrimental effects on the global church.
So I just get, I get this story specifically because that's every rich guy in the world wants, you know, who's a sportsman, wants a camp on a remote lake in Alaska, easy access, and wants a bug out spot.
And if you can find a way to get your nonprofit to pay for it and a way to morally justify it to yourself, Helping wounded warriors keep their marriages together.
That's just, that is so corrupt.
I can, if what you're saying is true, that's like.
They serve a very specific hamburger that's Franklin Graham's favorite hamburger.
His favorite meat patty.
And so we just picked a random date to go.
Like I didn't coordinate this or anything, but you can only go in the summer.
And so I'm sitting there and it's the only place to eat.
So literally we ate there every day.
And we're sitting there and we had hiked this ridge line to get a shot looking down.
And Franklin Graham pulls up in the Bronco.
And I'm like, well, my camera operator's like, dude, that's the Bronco.
And I was like, what?
And Out drives from the side road, this soft top Bronco pulls up, gets out, walks straight into the food truck, not goes up to order, walks into the back of the kitchen and starts making himself a burger.
And we have a camera.
And so I just put the camera on the table and it starts rolling.
And there's only two picnic tables.
And so I'm looking this way.
Franklin makes his burger, walks out, sits in the other picnic table, staring right at me.
I don't think most really rich people who actually made the money honestly, or not honestly, but who made it themselves and didn't just like not pay taxes on donor money designed to help starving Africans, I don't even think they would go to that expense.
Well, the most effective Christian mission I've ever seen, I think that exists in the country, is not even explicitly Christian, but it is Christian and it's AA.
And it raises no money.
They won't even take money from you.
And no one gets paid.
There's no one in charge.
And they take people who are killing themselves, literally killing themselves, and they change them completely.
Not all of them, but they have a better success rate than any other rehab by far.
And then I'd come back to the mega churches that I would go to, and I'd walk in and I'd be like, oh, it's just the fog machines filling the room for sure.
But it was just performance.
And so that really made me rethink what is a church.
Christianity is more, and I don't like the word socialist with the weight it carries, but Christianity and its.
Is socialism at its core non authoritarian?
It's the marker to build social capital.
You look at that early church of Acts, and it transformed Rome within a couple hundred years the greatest superpower of its time to where Constantine was like, I'm a Christian hanging out with these dudes.
They had no money, they had no buildings, but somehow the love of their neighbor transformed the greatest superpower of its time.
And yeah, I just figured it's, it's, it's, um, whenever anybody starts talking about subjects like this, I will always refer to the scriptures for truth, nothing else, not popular belief, not opinion.
Um, whether you see it as a history book or the Word of God, it's a, it's a great book.
Um, dispensationalism is a very new thing.
It's only a couple hundred years old.
A guy named Darby kind of spun it up.
The Schofield Reference Bible had it in its margin notes.
And so it's the idea that the world is broken into dispensations or periods.
And so Darby had this idea that Israel, the 12 tribes which came from Abraham, are different from the body of Christ that Christ talks about in the Gospels and that Paul pushes for and really closes down in the epistles.
And so dispensationalism is.
Israel, the tribe of Israel is set apart from the body of Christ.
And part of that is this idea of reclaiming the promised land, the physical promised land.
Where does that, I mean, Paul, who wrote the majority of the New Testament, who was a Jew, was a Pharisee, a persecutor of the church, and then met Jesus, he goes out of his way to say that the opposite of that.
And, um, so it goes back to this idea when we don't see the scriptures, and this is what I want to encourage everybody out there Christians, atheists, agnostics, I don't care.
Like it's the greatest history book of humanity.
We can see it as that.
And you have to see it as one story.
It's not 66 different stories for the 66 book canon.
It is one story.
When we dive into this book and start cherry picking verses or parables and applying it to our life, that's a very dangerous practice because we become Our own storyteller, which is idolatry.
Leaving aside the land and what you do with the Levant and all that, and what the boundaries of that land are, I mean, these are all questions I tried to get answers from in my conversation with Mike Huckabee to no avail.
But that's secondary as a theological matter to the core question, which is how do you get to heaven?
How are you redeemed?
And I think the New Testament could not make it clear.
Jesus couldn't make it clear.
Paul, the Jewish Pharisee, couldn't make it clearer.
But if all the new messages, I mean, that just seems like an explicitly anti Christian message that you don't, that some people don't need Jesus to be saved.
If you were to, some are, I mean, you can believe it or reject it.
Most people reject it.
That's fine.
You know, it's not my job to save people.
But the Christian message is you need Jesus.
So if you have Christian preachers all of a sudden standing up and be like, well, actually, not really, then they're not Christian preachers, are they?
And I'm here to present this argument that right now the evangelical church and most Christian leadership is being used for something far more nefarious than they understand.
And can fathom.
They're all blind.
The blind lead the blind into a ditch, and they're being walked into a ditch rapidly in the name of Jesus and in the name of this book.
And it grieves me to say that I think the president of the United States may not fully understand that theology or that argument, but clearly sees this war in Iran as a way to achieve power over the world.
It seems to me that people who are coming in the name of God and doing God's will, who are holy, throw off around them kind of an umbrella of peace and they don't leave chaos in their wake.
Like we can judge the tree by its fruit.
This is just my half baked thought of in my living room theology to myself, but I want me running against you with deeper knowledge that we know when someone's on God's path because.
That person is at peace.
That person is not seeking power and control over others.
That person is not besotted by greed or lust or pride, obviously.
And that person can admit fault.
He's humble.
And that his world, the people around him are at peace.
I believe in Christ teaching peace and love and loving your neighbor.
And we.
And again, I'm going to go back to something positive because everybody always says everything's negative about my conversations.
But the generosity of Christians can transform our nation.
We don't need to give more.
We need to be better stewards, which would be the biggest light to the world.
And right now, it's going down a really dark path, really quick.
And in one breath on Easter Sunday, we have pastors claiming similarity from Trump to Christ in regards to the beatings and the lies.
And then the next day, he's.
Threatening to blow up power plants and bridges, hurting civilians, saying fuck, like literally the most disgusting evil in a tweet that I've ever read.
I think a lot of us were too cynical and approached this as theater, which it may have been intended to be, you know, get whatever money hungry dispensationalists or, you know, fallen, screwed up people who don't have real congregations and get them to sort of put the imprimatur of the New Testament on what is clearly in violation of like basic Christian principles.
And, you know, let's get the evangelicals on board for this.
Pete Hogsworth, or whatever his name is, he's quoting that.
Trump's quoting it.
That's why you have to read this thing as one story.
It's one complete story of redemption.
And so.
If you're looking to Trump and looking to what we're doing and looking to the nation state of Israel and saying, oh, yeah, this is why that's justified instead of geopolitical reasoning, you are being duped and you are saying it is not finished on that cross.