Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why America’s Christian Leaders Are Failing — and What We Can Do About It with John West - Hank Unplugged: Essential Christian Conversations

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
Welcome to another edition of the hand Gunplugged Podcast, a
podcast that is deeply committed to bringing the most interesting,
informative and inspirational people directly to your earbuds. And today
will be I say this every time. Probably should mix
this up a little bit, but I'll just say it.
Today is no exception. I mean, in fact, today may

(00:46):
be one of the most important podcasts you've ever listened to. Period.
It's based on a book called Stockholm Syndrome Christianity. And
when I was thinking about this just before I walked
into the studio about something I memorized a long time ago.
It's Paul's Farewell addressed to the Ephesians, where he says,

(01:07):
in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who
will come to judge the living and the dead, and
in view of Suppearian kingdom, I give you this charge.
Preach the word, be prepared in season and out of season.
And then something else he said is and now compelled
by the spirit. This is an Acts chapter twenty, I think,

(01:28):
and now compelled by the spirit. I'm going to Jerusalem,
not knowing what will happen to me there. I only
know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me
that prison and hardship are facing me. However, I consider
my life worth nothing to me if only I may
finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus
Christ is given to me, the task of testifying to

(01:49):
the gospel of God's grace. Now I know that none
of you, among whom I have gone about preaching the kingdom,
will ever see me again. Therefore I testify to you
that I'm innocent of the blood of all men, because
I have not hesitated to preach the full Council of God.
And then he said, take care of yourselves and all

(02:10):
the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers,
be shepherds of the Church of God, which he purchased
with his own blood. For I know that after I leave,
savage wolves will come in among you and will not
spare the flock. Even from among your own number. Men

(02:31):
will arise and distort the truth in order to draw
away disciples after themselves. So be on your guard. Remember
that for three years I never stopped warning each one
of you night and day with tears. And I think
this book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity is a warning to the

(02:54):
body of Christ it's a warning not to capitulate to
the culture, but to transform the culture anyway. With that,
let me introduce our guest. His name is doctor John West.
He's vice president and Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute
in Seattle. I Love Seattle. He serves as managing director

(03:15):
of the Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and by
the way, he co founded that center with philosopher science
Stephen Meyer, who we love way back in nineteen ninety six.
His current research examines the impact of science and scientism
on public policy and culture. His other areas of expertise

(03:39):
include constitutional law, American government and institutions, and religion and politics.
John West holds a PhD in government from Claremont Graduate
University and was previously an associate professor of political science
at Seattle Pacific University, which is a university that we're
going to talk about some in this podcast. And at

(04:02):
that university he chaired the Department of Political Science and Geography,
and he has directed a dozen documentaries. He's written or
edited some thirteen books, including the book We're going to
be talking about today. His most recent book, Stockholm Syndrome,
Christianity and the subtitles important why America's Christian leaders are

(04:25):
failing and what we can do about it. John, it
is an honor to have you on the hand gun
Plug podcast.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Hank, it's an honor for me to be on. I
mean the work of Christian resources to from the days
of Walter Martin when I was growing up, to your
wise stewardship. I mean, it's one of the lights, i'd say,
in American culture and American Christianity of really giving wise discernment.
And you've had an influence for decades and so it's

(04:53):
a real privilege.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
To join you. Well, thank you, John, And I hope
this is a book every single podcast listener will get.
And I say this from the bottom of my heart.
I think it's a very important, timely book. It's called
Stockholm Syndrome Christianity. And if you're watching this as opposed
to just listening to this, you can see the cover.
And that's the very first thing I want to ask

(05:16):
you about, John, is the cover, because it really is
descriptive of what the content of this book is all about.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, so it just stuck with me, this imagery of
wolves and sheep, but a little bit different than what
people might be expecting. So the idea is that the sheep,
if you see in the picture, are surrounding the wolf
like he's their friend. And so you have the wolf
in the fold, you're doing bad things. But the Stockholm

(05:44):
syndrome Christians, really, I think, are the sheep who are
misled and actually think that the wolf is something that
they can identify with, when in fact, the wolf really
wants to eat them up.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
So we've sort of defined what Stockholm syndrome Christianity is.
And you say that most Christians in America grow up
in cultural captivity. They're immersed in a cultural battle to
genuine Christianity, so they take on the trappings of the
culture as opposed to transforming the culture.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah. And I you know, when I was thinking about
this and praying about this, image came for me. You know,
some people may know a little bit about the history
of Stockholm syndrome. This was this infamous bank robbery in
the nineteen seventies in Stockholm, Sweden, where a bunch of
bank workers were taken hostage. But the strange thing that
happened was after that experience, many of those hostages had

(06:36):
greatful feelings toward their hostage takers. Towards the criminals, and
so some psychologists in psychology it's quite controversial, so I'm
not claiming that good or bad, but this insight that
sometimes when you're in this stressful situation, or held captive,
or in an abusive situation, that one strategy that some

(06:57):
people adopt is they end up adopting the point of
view of their captors. For me, that really hit home
to the people who I do as when I was
at a Christian college and in my work at Discovery,
where I've seen people go off the rails, they basically
are adopting the point of view of their cultural captors.
And I think that, you know, these people in some

(07:20):
sense are personally sincere, but again their worldview is becoming
indistinguishable from the secular elites that they really should be
be a missionary too. You we're called to be salt
and light, so we should be representing truth to the
secular world. But in many cases, these Stockholm syndrome Christians
are becoming missionaries for the secular elites to their fellow Christians.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah, and you in the book Site a University that
you were an associate professor at Seattle Pacific University as
sort of a microcossum of what this book is all about.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, So, as many people and probably many of your lists,
there's no universities in America when they got started, like Harvard, Princeton, Yale,
were devoutly Christian institutions, many devoutly even evangelistic. But then
by the nineteenth century many of them had started to
fall away, and so evangelical Christians started a whole new

(08:18):
slew of Christian universities in the mid to late nineteenth
century to sort of uphold the faith. And many of
those have done great work over the years. But what
I experienced at my university and I think is is
in microcuse and what's happening elsewhere in the last couple
of decades particularly, really they're falling in the same direction,
you know, cow telling to the secular elites. And so

(08:40):
what I saw at my institution is in a way,
we're kind of sad because the more intentional we got
about Christianity in our marketing to parents, because that was
sort of the marketing niche, the less it actually reflected
in the classroom, you know. So at the same time
we were marketing Christian Christian Christian, we were hiring peopeople
who are further from Orthodoxy. You know, students were getting heartbroken.

(09:05):
I mean I had students come in, you know, seeking
counsel from their religion classes where they were being taught
that open theism ide that God himself doesn't know the future.
And as a political scientist, I was giving them resources
for more orthodox things that they weren't being assigned. So
it wasn't just that they were being exposed to false
ideas like God doesn't know the future. It was they

(09:27):
were only being exposed to that view. They weren't given
the orthodox you know, responses. And so I saw just
how devastating this was in students' lives, and that was
that was hard. And then you know, on a lot
of other issues, it began to you know, they began
to hire again people when when I came there, actually
this sort of summarizes my experience and summarizes the problem

(09:50):
of why institutions like that slide. So when I came
to see All Pacific, I was warned by some fellow
faculty members, oh, we have a really theologically conservative board
of trust. They just denied tenure to someone in the
you know, school of theology because they were regarded as heterodox,
and they were saying, you know, to warn me. But

(10:10):
little did they know. You know, in my heart, I
was saying, great, you actually have a board who's upholding
the mission of the institution. That's the number one thing
a board of a Christian institution or a board of
a church should do, safeguard the mission. But then fast
forward twelve years when I had when I decided to leave,
I had tenure. I didn't have to leave, but I
sort of saw the writing on the wall, and I

(10:31):
didn't want to be an institution that was going in
a trajectory, you know, further and further away from the faith.
But when I left, one of my last battles, which is,
tried to defend a faculty member who had been hired
and basically was being got rid of and denied tenure
because he was too theologically and also politically conservative, so
he had alienated people, even though students loved him. He

(10:53):
was a vibrant Christian. I think he was one of
the best hires in the years I was there. And
then at that point the board didn't protect them. So
we went from a board actually upholding the standards of
faith to twelve years hence basically allowing that the increasingly
woke faculty and administrators to do whatever they wanted. And
that emasculation of the board, where the board was convinced

(11:16):
to defer everything to the faculty and staff because you know,
the board isn't an expert, so just trust the faculty
and staff and don't exercise oversight. That was the downfall
of the institution in my view.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Yeah, and you know, maybe this is a little off point,
but I think the fact that you were a professor
at a professor Christian university highlights the reality that parents
have to be very careful about where they send their children.
In fact, you have a guideline that helps people when
they're trying to determine where they're going to send their

(11:51):
children to university.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
Yeah, so this is I do have a heart for
this because I saw parents and children mortgage their future,
going into tens of thousands of dollars of debt, solely
because they thought they were going to integrate, you know,
their faith with their learning, which is a great idea,
but in fact the opposite was happening, and so you know,
they were basically sending I mean, one other example while
I was there, it was just tragic. You know, a

(12:15):
student who actually wrote something for the student newspaper about how,
by the time they got through the theology classes, how
their faith was almost destroyed because they were taught that
the Bible really isn't historically accurate. They were taught, you know,
all sorts of things that they shouldn't be paying attention to.
This was from a validly evangelical Christian institution, and so

(12:37):
I do think that parents need to be very careful.
In some cases, it's actually maybe better to send your
kids to a secular school that has some devout Christian
ministries on there than to send them to a quote
unquote Christian university where you know, the walk and the
talk are different and so, but there are ways you
can find out. I mean, even at my institution, if

(12:57):
you knew the questions to ask you, I would determine
pretty carefully. And so, actually, on my website, Johngwest dot com,
I have a free sort of series of ten questions
parents can ask when evaluating a Christian college and just
one example, it's hard to know exactly what's happening in
the classroom, but in most Christian institutions, their chapel program

(13:18):
whether it's required or not. Those things now post COVID
are posted online and so you can get an idea
of well, what speakers are they bringing to chapel. Are
they bringing speakers who say defend a pro life stance
or biblical sexuality or the historical truth and integrity of
the Bible, or are they not? I mean, if they're

(13:41):
going with increasingly woke speakers or speakers who aren't really
getting at the culture pressure points that are on Christianity today,
that is a big warning sign because that's who they're valuing,
who they're bringing to campus. And then you know, there
are a lot of other questions. A lot of even
Christian colleges have campus health centers. Well do they people
to plan parenthood in those campus health centers? In their

(14:04):
theology schools? How many are members of the Evangelical Theological Society,
which has a statement on Biblical inerrancy. At our school,
they boasted that they didn't have any members of the
Evangelical Theological Society because they would have had affirm biblical inerrancy. Now,
we may talk later about some of the challenges even
in ets, because definitions of trying to redefine inerrancy but

(14:27):
I mean when you have people boasting that they won't
even join because they don't even want to say that
they believe the Bible is anarrative, then I think that's
a warning sign. So there are lots of key questions
that you can ask recruiters to really glean some things
about those institutions. But I do you know, if you
have a passion for your kids and you want them
to get a good Christian education, that's an honorable and

(14:49):
great thing. But don't think that what the pr for
the school is is the same. Like I said, in
the twelve years I was at Seattle p Civic, they
did a marketing study that made their marketing more intentionally
Christian while what was happening in the classroom was going
in the other direction.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
Yeah. Wow, And you mentioned this a few times in
your comments just now there's a dismissive view of the Bible,
and I think it really begins with that.

Speaker 2 (15:16):
I agree. And so chapter one of my book is
about that, you know, it's merely human because that everything else,
whether you're talking about sex, race, religious liberty, science, it
all flows. You know, all that a lot of errors
from first you surrender the Bible and I don't think
that people are sufficiently aware of just how much that

(15:37):
is happening. And we can talk some specifics. And that's,
by the way, what made my book controversial. You know,
this was ultimately published by Discovery at Stute Press. I
had an agent who was really well connected, who sold
lots of books and got some interest, but they regard
it as too hot to handle. There was one publisher
that I'm not going to mention, that was very interested,

(15:57):
but I had to give a list of everyone who
I critiqued in the book, and when they saw, especially
one name, Andy Stanley, that killed the book, they weren't
allowed to publish a book that criticized him.

Speaker 1 (16:12):
It's so interesting because I published my first book in
nineteen ninety three and it was called Christianity in Crisis,
and I overtly named names in that book, because if
you go through the Bible, you know that this is
a pattern. I mean, Saint Paul certainly did it. And
it's not gratuitous. It's not to be mean, but there's

(16:32):
a purpose for naming names if it's done in the
right way and in the right context and with solid evidence,
as you do in your book. You just mentioned Andley Stanley.
Andy Stanley very clearly has said that the Old Testament
is an obsolete testament, and he said much much more
in this regard, so it's not just a flipping statement

(16:55):
that could be taken out of context. In context, he
disparages the Old Testament as a testament that is detrimental
to anyone's Christian faith. I mean, the statements are mind blowing.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
It is. And you know there was a kerf fluffle
when he gave some lectures based off of that, and
you know people were saying, oh, things were taken out
of context. So I don't deal with some of his
public statements. I deal with the book he wrote, Irresistible,
where he gives his fullest explanation of this view. And
you're exactly right. He not only calls it the obsolete Testament,
he says that we should reorder our Bible so it's

(17:32):
put to the back of the Bible. He basically blames
everything bad, including get this anti Semitism, on Christian's believing
in the Old Testament. So in some strange way, some
perverse way, he's actually blaming you know, Jews for their
own persecution because it's Christian's believing in the vengeful God
of the Old Testament is leading to you know, Jewish

(17:54):
anti Semitism. I mean, it is a really and this
is not how a spirit filled or orthodox pastor learn
should talk about God's Holy Word. And so that whole
book is dismissive. And just to be clear, you know,
obviously Christians, you know, have always regarded we don't believe
in the Old Testament in quite the same way as

(18:14):
Jews do because we think Jesus fulfilled like the sacrificial system.
So Christians have always understand that that's not what Andy
Stanley is arguing. Annie Stanley, as you point out, calls
holding obsolete, says, you know, we should just and he
also says actually in that book that the Bible is
no longer defensible in public, and so he sees so

(18:34):
much ground. And this is a minister, you know, Andy Stanley,
I was ordained as an elder in a Presbyterian denomination.
Andy Stanley is Baptist, but I was instructed as as
a Presbyternity elder. We were given some of Andy Stanley's
books because he prides himself as being a leader among leaders,
who is mentoring a whole new generation of pastors around

(18:56):
the world. So I agree, you know, I not don't
try to be gratuitous in this book. And you know,
there are a number of things I share where I
don't name people because they're not public figures, but it's
still important insight. But with public figures, public teachers like
Annie Stanley, I think it is important to name names
or else people will be, you know, not on guard

(19:18):
and they won't realize what's happening. And so, yeah, Annie
Stanley is really bad news. And I start with his
view of the Bible. I'm so glad that you highlighted
his views on the Bible because more recently some of
his defenders have gotten squeamish because you know, he's also
been very squishy, if worse than squishy, on same sex
marriage and things, which is important. But he was his

(19:42):
views of the Bible and biblical authority, on the Old
Testament or the lack thereof pre date those things. And
so that's the other thing is things don't stay the
same once you start conceding ground and bashing the Bible
in some areas. I mean, you're basically you're on the
wrong road. And you can actually see that in Andy Salley,

(20:02):
it didn't just stay with the Old Testament.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
You know, John, I wonder when we're talking about this subject,
and we talked about this in house some when we
were going through your book, just wondering how someone can
say the things that he says. I'm talking about specific
statements which you cite in your book. How they can
say that if you ever have read through the Bible comprehensively,

(20:28):
in other words, if you have some sense of how
the testaments fit together, how you have the types and
shadows in the Old Testament fulfilled in the New Testament.
You know, it's a congruent hole. It's a pattern that
you can't disrupt, you can't try to dissect improperly. It
seems to me that someone like Andy Stanley, whose father

(20:51):
was a famous preacher as well, it seems like he
would have some kind of understanding of the scripture and therefore,
or the question comes to mind, is he doing this
gratuitously or does he just not know any better? Are
people biblically illiterate in the pulpit to that extent.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I can't presume to
get into his heart, but I do think, I mean,
he has to know some of this, and I actually
think I've seen sometimes when he's pressed personally, he'll bob
and weave and say, oh, well, yes, I accept that.
But then but then he goes right and preaches what
he's been doing. And so I think actually he is
a good example of a Stockholm syndrome. Christian in this

(21:32):
way is that when he says he and I think
this is also how he defends it to himself when
he says the Bible is no longer defensible in public.
He has so imbibed the secular critiques. I mean, we
also see this where he's not willing to defend, you know,
in one part of the book, basically, oh, you know,
the archaeologists say that Jericho never fell in the way

(21:54):
that the Bible says, well, that's actually not true, but
he has this list or that the exodus didn't really
take place. Now he then goes and say, oh, but
actually there is some evidence, but he doesn't go into it.
But I do think what this shows is that he
really has imbibed the secular critiques really deeply, and so
he's fearful. He does believe in Jesus, but he's fearful

(22:15):
that the secular critiques are true, and so he just
seeds ground and he thinks that well, and those aren't.
So he's not willing to defend those things as important
because in some sense his own belief system has been
made insecure, and so he's really viewing things from the
standpoint of, you know, a secular non Christian and that's

(22:37):
not helpful. Now, I think to himself, he probably says, well,
that helps me, you know, reach out to people who
aren't Christians. Well, but what are you reaching out to
them with. I mean, at the end of the day,
if you strip away all the things he's stripping away,
there's not that much left, and you're not really you know,
the Christian message that's transforming is the true Christian message

(22:59):
that goes you know, in the entire Bible. And so
if you cut off large parts of it you're not
going to talk about it, or you don't think are
defensible or you then you're depriving it of its power
because it's truth is power. But if you muzzle it,
I mean, what's left. So I think Andy is a
really sad, sad case, but also a case of how

(23:21):
he is at a historically evangelical church that he founded.
He has a board of elders he's supposed to be
accountable to. And you know, ten fifteen years ago he
wasn't as heterdox as he is today. So presumably at
least some of his elders should be troubled by some
of this, and so where are they? And I do
think one of the messages of my book this is
both with regard to Seattle Pacific University with its board,

(23:43):
but also Andy Stanley's church. I went to his website
and look, they have a board of elders. He's supposed
to be accountable to it. What are they doing? And
so it's not just the heterodox people like Andy Stanley,
it's the people surrounding him who are making it possible
for him to have that platform and who are not
calling him to account. You know, I'm not a member
of his church, so I don't have any authority over them.

(24:04):
All I could do is talk about, you know, what
he says, and so show that this isn't really what
the Bible says. But you have elders in his church,
what are they doing?

Speaker 1 (24:14):
What do you say to the person that says, John,
I appreciate what you're saying, but why do you have
to name names. Why can't you talk about this conceptually
without actually naming the name Andy Stanley. I mean, this
is a rhetorical question on my part because I think
you've done exactly the right thing.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
Well. I think one reason we're at the situation we
are at today is because increasingly a lot of mainstream
evangelical Christian publishers don't want books that name names, and
for a variety of reasons. So may be economic. I mean,
Andy Stanley is a big economic figure for you know,
places he publishes for and does stuff. But here's the challenge.

(24:55):
If you're just generic, then people aren't going to see
where the problem really lies, and they're not going to
be as discerning. And I bring people back and some
of your listeners should certainly know this. In the nineteen seventies,
there was a battle for the Bible and there were
a lot of I mean, the Southern Baptist Convention back
then was not the Southern Baptist Conventions today. And I

(25:16):
understand there are log issues going on in the Southern
Baptist Convention today, but you had evangelicals who were also
bailing on the Bible. And the way we got around
that was not simply by people tiptoeing around it. We
had people like whether it be Herald and sell actually
Walter Martin, other people who named names and gave evidence,

(25:36):
not in a gratuitous fashion, not in an unloving fashion.
But that's what warrened people and got them thinking, and
then out of that I think something good came out
of it. Francis Schaeffer, who I actually dedicate the book to,
was another person who lovingly was willing to name some
names and give examples. And that's out of which I'd
say a genuine sort of mini revival if you would happen.

(25:59):
But if you may, it's so generic that people can't
really tell what you're talking about. I don't think that's
enough for really applicability. And again I could just go
Here's the other thing is if you're a public teacher
of the Bible, it comes with the territory. I mean,
look at the Brians in the Bible. You know when

(26:19):
the Apostles brought the message, what did they do? They
compared it to the Bible and discussed it openly. They didn't.
And so if you're and that's the difference I made.
You know, one of the key differences of the stories
I shared that were just personal level versus those that
I named publicly. Where you are they a public figure
making these arguments out there, well, then they need to
be held publicly accountable, and in fact, in many cases,

(26:40):
if they're not, there's no chance of addressing the error
because it goes on and they end up misleading people
and there's never any accountability.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
Yeah, it goes back to what I quoted earlier. Watch
over the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made
you overseers, be shepherds of the Church of God, which
just with his own blood. For I know that after
I leave, savage woolves will come in among you and
will not spare the fuck. And then he says, even
from among your own numbers, men will arise and distort

(27:11):
the truth. And we're talking about people who are considered evangelical,
mainstream Christians who are clearly distorting truth. One of the
people you cite is a case study is Robert Gundry, Westmont.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
Yeah, so you know, this was a time in the
seventies and eighties where this battle for the Bible was
taking place. In Robert Gundry we still identifies as an
evangelical institution, but he came out with a commentary on
Matthew that basically adopts the and baptizes the higher criticism,
you know, liberal progressive theology of the nineteenth century. And

(27:48):
so for example, the infancy narratives in place like Matthew, well,
that was made up by the author, you know, with
albeit commendable reasons to make his theological point. But you know,
I think if I recall correctly, he said, you know,
you had the shepherds and Luke, and then that was
transformed rewritten as the wise men in Matthew, and then

(28:09):
who really knows what the real history was, you know,
get between that and so it was. But it that's
also a glimpse into why we're having a problem now.
When Gundry published that, you had enough high powered people,
you know, obviously Norman Geisler was one who were willing
to raise and press the issue and say this is

(28:31):
not good and this is not an evangelical or even
i'd say historically Catholic or Eastern Orthodox view of the Bible,
and this is you know, this, this is really baptizing
theological liberalism, and there really isn't good grounding for it,
let alone, you know, it's just not good teaching, but
there's not good grounding for it, and so you had
that pushback and so and that was salutary because it,

(28:54):
I think, you know, really encouraged a lot of more
biblical faithful Christians to counter that positively with better teaching. Sadly, Gundry,
and this is an indictment of the Christian colleges. You know,
he was a chair at westnot and he probably taught
thousands of students with his views that were really devaluing
the importance of the Bible or the truth of the

(29:16):
historical actity of the Bible. And so he wasn't removed,
and I think that is that then you get the
next generation from Gundry, you know Gundry. Actually someone pointed
out to me that later in life Gundry actually wrote
a book sort of lamenting the theological liberalism that was coming.
And I don't know how he reconciled that with with

(29:41):
he really set the groundwork for that. But again, there
was a good salutary pushback. But today, let's fast forward
to today, and you know, I know this is controversial.
I had other people who really were not pleased that
I dealt with this, and the person who can't be
criticized today is a guy named Mike Lacona at Houston
Christian University who has done some good working on the resurrection.

(30:05):
I accept that he's a you know, has a personal
faith in Christ. But what he's preaching and what he's
calling flexible inerrancy, not only is not in errancy, it's
not even a traditional view of Christians who say, don't
may not believe the scripture of an err but do
think that the teaching is infallible. I mean, it's it's
nowhere near and let's you know, I'm a I like

(30:27):
to get details because to me, that's where the rubber
meets the road. And so, you know, at the surface
he says, oh, I trust the Bible. You know, I'm
defending its authority. But look at what he's actually doing.
And one thing that I think stands out is when
he talks about how you know Jesus in some of
the Synoptic Gospels, is given at the time of his

(30:47):
death of the cross where he says, my God, my God,
why have you forsaken me? Which is of course a
quote from Psalm twenty two, this dramatic prophetic psalm about
what you know Jesus experienced on the Cross. Michael Lacona says, well, okay,
but John says Jesus said I thirst. No, there's no
incompatibility between that, I mean, giving different to tail, So

(31:10):
there's no problem to solve there. I mean, there's not
a problem. I mean, it's just not But what does
Lacona say? Well, he said, well, actually I thirst was
John's paraphrase of my God, my God, why have you
forsaken me? Well, I would bet. I'm not a betting man,
but I would bet if we brought in a thousand
people and gave them paraphrase, my God, my God, why

(31:30):
have you forsaken me, that none of them would come
up with I thirst. I mean that's not a paraphrase.
I mean, that's just that's a wholesale reinvention. If your
view of inerrancy thinks that it is. And yes, they
didn't have tape recorders, no one says that, but that
that rewriting my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
As I thirst? If you somehow think that that has
a smitche of accuracy, or that your view of inerrancy

(31:53):
sort of justifies that. I mean, I guess I have
some swamp land in Florida to sell you, because I mean,
that is just that's not inerrancy, that's not infallibility. That's
not the historic Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant view of
biblical authority. But that's his view. And it goes on.
You know, he basically says that the Gospels are like
should be regarded at like Hollywood movies that are inspired

(32:16):
by true events. But then you take liberties, you create
new situations, you create new you know, plotlines, new details,
you create new words and messages. I mean, so you're
basically saying it really isn't authoritative. So he says, well,
I'm defending a new type of you know, inerrancy. But
if you actually get to the specifics of what he's doing,

(32:37):
he's not. And here's why it's so corrosive. Is very
very very few people are calling Mike Lakona out. He
is still a member and good standing of the Evangelical
Theological Society, which says that it endorses as a non
negotiable biblical inerency. And I know, people, I mean, there's

(32:59):
a I don't want to get too much into this,
but I know there are back doors campaigns where people
are really criticized and try to shut down, and Lacona
himself tries to shut people down behind the scenes, because
I've seen that in one case that I'm personally aware
of that I'm not going to talk more about, but
I just so there's this effort to not give it

(33:20):
the light of day or open discussion. And I want
to say, that's a manipulation tactic. Whatever Lakona thinks he's doing,
the shutting down of actual criticism or the inability to
respond to serious criticism by like Lydia mcgru or others,
is that is a manipulation tactic to try to win
the debate by ensuring there is no debate. And that's

(33:44):
just really unfortunate and it's going to be damaging because
if you have the view, really what Lacona is preaching
is pretty much it's garden variety nineteenth century early twentieth
century theological liberalism. He's basically, you know, the Bible is
so oh human that you know, really it's not God's
you know, direct authoritative word, it's humans come up with it.

(34:07):
I mean, here's another example. He suggests that when Jesus
in John talks about the coming of the Holy Spirit
that well, that happened before Pentecost, so that was so
John was sort of interpolating that from you know, something
later into the words of Jesus. I mean, this is
not how serious Christians for the last two thousand years

(34:28):
have treated the Bible. And let's be clear, it's not like, yes,
there are a few, very small handful I would say,
of issues. I wouldn't call them contradictions, but some things
that need to be explained that on minor matters. That's
not what he's dealing with. He's creating, you know, things
where there is no problem, where you know, people are

(34:49):
sharing different aspects of things that are both true, and
he's basically devaluing their truth. And I'm really actually concerned
about Lacona so much because there's been this almost curiosity
of silence not to talk about or to criticize it.
And so he's has a platform, though to teach you know,
a whole new generation of people and this is bad news.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah. The Synoptic Gospels and we've been talking about this
for years on the Bibilancecare broadcast. I mean, they provide
complementary details and you cite an example of that, and
I think Michael should most certainly know that your second
chapter is titled Secularist Science, and I found this to
be a very important chapter. In fact, you cite Francis

(35:34):
Collins as the quintessential example of a Stockholm syndrome Christian
who diminishes the role of God in creation. Can you
expand on that?

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Yeah, And this was now sort of post COVID controversies.
Collins is less a star, a little more controversial. But
I will say that when we discoverance it began interacting
with him, or we're following him. It was like any
criticism was regarded as for boten and I experienced this
actually some of myself. But the issue is, it's not

(36:06):
his personality, and just to be I'm not questioning his
personal attachment to Jesus. And he has an inspiring story
of how he was an atheist agnostic and then came
to Christ. But again he's a public figure, and he
has public teachings and also public actions and government which

(36:27):
we can get to, and I think those are things
to the fair game. And like Micha Lacona, I think
Francis Collins, in the area of God, his creator, tried
to get his way by discouraging debate and by deplatforming,
if you will, people who disagreed with him. So Collins
promotes this view of theistic or I would say, deistic evolution,

(36:51):
where he tries to baptize Darwin and not just Darwin
as common ancestry, which I think is problematic too, but
even more generally, if you read his book The Language
of God, which got you know, was a best seller
and loads of Christians, and I think loads of Christian
pastors who should have known better, I think some of
them didn't actually read the book praised. He basically argues

(37:12):
that you know, either God didn't direct specifically, and he
uses the example of junk DNA, which many of your
listeners may now know has now been exploded scientifically. I mean,
it's not good science, but at the time this is
the idea that you know, most of our DNA doesn't
code for proteins, and if it doesn't co for proteins,
it's of no use to Darwinian evolution to build new

(37:33):
things to that those chance mutations, and so it must
be junk. And the argument was by Collins, well, God
wouldn't have done you know, if God did that, he
wouldn't have loaded our system with junk DNA. You know,
that would have been a lousy creator. So it must
have been through this process of Darwinian evolution, because that's
a messy process and we could expect lots of junk

(37:54):
and happenstance. That was part of his argument in this book.
Now he had one other alternative. So you're either believe
that the history of life was you know, done by
Darwinian evolution because it was and involved in a way
happenstance and things because of you know, the random mutations
because we're filled with junk DNA. Or he said, well,

(38:14):
maybe you could believe, you know, if you're a Christian.
He doesn't say he did, but he said, you know,
you could believe that maybe God did actually direct things,
maybe didn't just leave it to the unguided process of evolution.
Maybe God did direct things, but then he made life
look like it was the product of a blind and
purposeless process. So your two options are either either you know,

(38:36):
our development really was in some sense, you know, a
Darwinian process that really didn't have us in view, or
that maybe God did know from eternity and did did
direct but he made it look like it was blind
and undirected. And I have to say, this is a
real mind bander. Some of your listeners will know Richard
doc is the arch atheist Darwinist. Even he started one

(38:57):
of his books saying biology is the study of things
that give the appearance of having designed for a purpose.
Now he goes on to say, well, through science and stuff,
we know that, you know, the real truth is that
it wasn't. But he actually does say that the actually,
when you look at biology, it looks designed, you know,
for a purpose. And but here you have the leading
evangelical Christian scientists toasted on the cover of Time magazines.

(39:19):
Oh no, no, no, no, God made it look like it
was random and directed. But well, you know, we know
through the subjective eyes of faith that maybe God, you know,
God directed it, but he made it look random and directed.
This is really screwing. And it's not based on evidence.
I mean, that's the other thing. If you actually and
I do that a little bit in my book, and
certain my colleagues have done it even more. But this

(39:41):
is not driven by evidence because the evidence doesn't show this.
This is driven by a desire to be accepted. And
also in some degree, I think you know, that Collins,
as a Stockholm Syndome Christian, has bought into this is
shrounding secularist mind st and so didn't want to delve

(40:02):
too deeply into the evidence on the other side, because
the evidence that he offers, like criticizing Michael Bihan iroducible
complexity and stuff, he offers rehash arguments that don't actually
pan out. But here's why this matters. It's not just
his view. He went on a crusade to spread this
view to other Christian leaders and then by default to

(40:25):
all evangelical Christians. So I write about in the book
that there's this actually meeting at the Bush number two
White House between him, speechwriter Michael Gerson, and a guy
named Pete Wenner, who were commiserating about there were embarrassed
that so many Christians still were critical of Darwin. And
so how do they surmount that embarrassment, Well, they have

(40:47):
to convince them of the truth of Darwinian evolution. And
so what did Collins do. He got millions of dollars
from the Templeton Foundation to basically start a project specifically
designed to convince evangelical Christian leaders to embrace Darwin. And
he did it in the name of dialogue. Okay, that's
fine to have dialogue, but he actually didn't want dialogue.

(41:10):
What he did was hold these private confabs that would
bring say, leaders from Christian today, reformed theological seminary and
you name it, leading evangelicals to privately only hear from
people who are going to defend Darwinian evolution. They wouldn't
bring anyone on the other side. They wouldn't bring Steve
Meyer or Michael bhe or Bill Demski or any of

(41:32):
the number of other Christian thinkers who had critiques of Darwin.
And the message of these meetings was science overwhelmingly baptizes Darwin.
Therefore your only goal, is theologians, is to baptize that
and figure a way to make it work. No one asked.
The first question was, well, is Darwin is actually true

(41:54):
or not? And Colins has spent a lifetime. Some people
saw this during COVID, but this was even in the
debate over design and Darwin. It was similar. Collins tried
to win the debate by preventing a debate. His message
was basically, anyone who disagreed with him was equivalent of
a flat earther, and so just listen to me and

(42:16):
my handpit proponents of deistic evolution and get them to
buy off on that without listening to anyone on the
other side without and you know, he would go and
Christian group after Christian group enabled this. I write about
how the you know, the official group of all the
Protestant Christian collegees, the Coalition of Christian College and Universities,

(42:37):
invited him to lecture people on theistic evolution and invited
them to lecture college leaders, but did not invite anyone
on the other side. And this happened with group after
group that basically because they were so smitten. Oh, he's
on the cover of Time magazine. They so it wasn't
just Collins, like with Stanley, you have to well, well,

(42:58):
why did Collins get such a big platform. It wasn't
just because of Time magazine or the secular groups. Is
because many avowedly Christian groups and pastors, like sadly Tim Keller,
whose own denomination actually had views that were completely contrary
to collins views on creation. They helped platform. I mean

(43:19):
it was Tim Keller who used his prestige to invite
people to these private get togethers to basically only hear
one side. And when Keller was invited by Discovery Institute,
actually by me personally to do something similar for people
to hear from intelligent design proponents, and I actually had
a Christian foundation that he respected, ready to fund it,

(43:40):
Keller begged off.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Let me ask you a point of question. Can Christianity
and neo Darwinism be reconciled in any sense? No?

Speaker 2 (43:52):
Now, that's because what neo Darwinism is, Let's be clear,
it's not just deals with age issues. It doesn't even
just deal with an answerstory. It claims that life as
we know, biological life, is the product of an unguided process.
Darwin's whole point in his theory was to come up
with a designer substitute, and that, in his view, natural

(44:13):
selection acting on random variations. Today they say random mutations
or genetic drift or other things. That that was unguided.
And what do I mean by that? That means that
the end goal, So for example, humans or other things
were not the end goal of evolution. They weren't anticipated,
the process wasn't directed at that, It was radically, you know,

(44:34):
depending on chance and necessity, and with no designer you know,
planning or foresight, and so that's what Neodarwinism is in
its core definition. Now, can you have a type of
guided evolution that is more or less faithful to certain
parts of the Christian faith? Yeah, I think you can.
I don't really buy that myself, and we could delve

(44:54):
into that. But neo Darwinism, let's just be clear, at
its core claims that life the product and unguided process.
So at best, the only way you can reconcile it
is well, really the two ways, and I talk about
this in the book. You either basically deny that God
really was responsible, and you see this when Collins is
trying to say, well, you know there's all this junk DNA,

(45:16):
God wouldn't have done it that way. Or you say
that God himself didn't know the future and so you're
denying he's responsible. Or you go the route of Colin
and say, well, maybe in some subjective sense, God did
do it, but the evidence shows otherwise. And in that case,
you know, you might be able to get along with
your secularist friends because you say, well, I believe that

(45:37):
God is creator and that he guided things, but I
don't claim that there's any evidence of that. That's just
my subjective feeling, and I can see that the evidence
looks like it was undirected. So those are your alternatives,
but imagine that that's watering things down. And also you'll
think of the Romans won or Psalm nineteen, or the
clear talkings even of Jesus, where he talks about look

(45:58):
at he refers to the birds of the air or
the lilies of the field as examples of seeing in
nature's things about the character of God. So so the
Bible at let alone, you know, early Church fathers let alone,
you know, Christian Phlosser's through the Agents have always said
that God's Book of Nature points to him. And so

(46:19):
people who try to meld Darwinism with Christian Theism at
the very least devalue that. And often they go further
and say God himself doesn't know the future. And so
that's how you can reconcile genuinely unguided evolution with God
not knowing the future. And then of course there are
some issues with regard to the fall because Francis Collins

(46:41):
compatriot in arms in establishing Biologos was a guy named
Carl Geiberson, and also Darryl Falk, But Carl Geiberson wrote
a book that Francis Collins endorsed called Saving Darwin, where
Giberson explicitly says that you know, evolution in an Darwinian
sense of evolution, we were never morally innocent or good.

(47:05):
We were basically selfish to begin with, because evolutions trying
to survive at all costs, and so there was nothing
to fall from. In other words, we were botched and
sinful and evil to begin with.

Speaker 1 (47:16):
Which is the evolutionist paradigm, right, I mean correct?

Speaker 2 (47:20):
Yeah, And this wasn't a book that was for people
who say, well, Collins didn't say that point, and that's true. Collins, though,
endorsed that book and wrote a forward to it.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Is it a bridge too far to say that theistic
evolution is the worst of all possibilities because you are
now blaming God for evolution.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
I'd have to think about that whether it's the worst
of all possibilities. But it is a pretty bad synergy.
It doesn't really fit, and it really does call and
if you look in people's personal lives of the people
who adopt that, sadly it often doesn't stay with that
because once you have to compromise God's sovereignty, once you
have to compromise God's goodness. Things follow from that, and

(48:02):
so one of the stories I tell you know, I
have a chapter about the slippery slope. You know, people
often dismissed the slippery slope, but I think that if
you take your cues from the culture, and the culture
is going down into the ground, then you're gonna slide
right along with it. And so in the modern debate
over intelligence, I say, in the nineteen nineties, one of

(48:22):
the key figures were the key opponents of people like
Phil Johnson or Michael Beahe was a physicist at Calvin University,
Howard Van Til, and he was trying to say, well,
you know, there was God's design, but it was all
front loaded and really didn't play out into anything else.
And he was trying to create a third way still
sided today. But what people don't actually say. In fact,

(48:46):
as of just a few years ago, I was on
a platform with Carl Garverson where he was citing this
as how an orthodox evangelical could embrace our winning theory.
But the sad truth is that Howard Van Till, by
the time he retired from Calvin, was then describing himself
as a freethinker. He was no longer evangelical, and then
by the time he died just a couple of years ago,

(49:07):
he had gone all the way to an utter materialist.
He actually wrote an essay that he was believed in
a comprehensive naturalistic worldview, basically without the need of any
creator at all. So in his own personal life at least,
that was just a stopping point, and it wasn't very solid.
And Carl Geiberson himself is very sad. He hasn't gone

(49:27):
quite full at least publicly, the way Howard vent Tilt.
But one of his last books was published by the
Unitarian Universalist Association, and it raises question that you know,
Jesus may not have even been divined, that that was
something Paul created. And I just poor Carl Geiberson is
on the same tragic slope, you know, as I think

(49:47):
Howard Ventil.

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Frankie Schaeffer as well.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
Frankie Schaeffer is another really sad, particularly poignant because I said,
I dedicated my book to Francis Schaeffer. And it's very
sad at how you know, he started, you know, one way,
then he gravitated a little bit, and then he was
going to a church where he was saying, well, I go,
I don't really believe it, but it sort of is mysterious,

(50:11):
and so that gives my life meaning. Then it was
I'm an atheist who believes that God doesn't exist, but
then sometimes I do he she or it exists, and
sometimes I think he doesn't. And so it's just so
he's an atheist who sort of believes in God. What
does that mean? And then more recently he's just you know,
unlike on the pro life thing to overturn roe v Wade,

(50:33):
which until nearly the very end of his flipping, he
was still saying, you know, roe v Wade was wrong,
but then when it actually got overturned, Oh, this is
one step away from this is Ayatola Holani territory, this
is theocracy, this is I mean, it's just he's really sad.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
Yeah. Yeah. You have, on the one hand, the apostle
Paul saying in Romans chapter two, God's eternal power, divine
nature clearly seen through what has been made, so that
met are without excuse. And then you have this capitulation
to the evolutionary paradigm, which seems to be at the
base of most of the issues that we're facing. Today,

(51:11):
if you dig down deep enough, you find that the
evolutionary paradigm becomes a foundation on which all of these
isms are built.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Yes, and I know we get into that and in
sexuality and race and a lot of other things, and
I think that's true. Let me just say with before
we go on from Collins, is that these arguments about
collins views on creation were really clear, but a lot
of Christians were so enamored by someone who was well,
he's on the cover of Time magazine that they weren't

(51:42):
willing to pay attention to it. And I think the
tragic cost of that is so Collins was picked to
be the head of the NIH under Obama, but how
did he govern in there? And the thing is, the
things that I'm about to talk about now have created consternation.
But you could go back pre Obama and you'll find
some of these things in collins record, but people didn't

(52:05):
want to focus on it. So then you got Christians
supporting him to be at the NIH. Well, what is
his record there? It's basically indistinguishable from the secular materials.
He spent millions of our tax dollars to create a
national tissue bank at the University of Pittsburgh that harvested
aborted baby parts from aborted babies up to forty two

(52:26):
weeks in gestation. I mean, that's just fought out in
fantaside to do medical experiments. For example, one of the
medical experiments funded also by the NIH was to take
the scalps from these little babies and graft them into mice.
That's not great. But the thing is, where do you
If you had read his book The Language of God
and read the appendix to it, you would have known

(52:48):
that he didn't defend the idea that life begins at conception.
He wasn't willing to say he really dissed that. So
that predated his time in government service. And so what
he did government service followed that earlier capitulation. And that's
really tragic. But it wasn't just that. So oh well,
one other thing I abortion is somehow maybe he felt

(53:12):
he must have known that it wasn't completely kosher, because
the only reason we know that we spent that money
harvesting those aborted baby parts is because Francis Collins didn't
want you to know. A group called Judicial Watch filed
a public documents request and the NIH refused they had

(53:33):
to go to court to force Francis Collins NIH to
divulge what they were spending their tax dollars on harvesting
aborted baby parts. But then let's go over into the
transgender manness. By the end of his tenure there, Collins
was identifying himself in a letter that he wrote to
all of the people who worked there as an ally

(53:53):
and advocate his words of the lgbt QIA movement and
basically urging everyone you know in his employ that they
have to be that. And he's it was sort of
dismissive himself as a white cisgender male, and cis gender
is a terrible word, is a put down for normal sexuality,
but he was using that term. And then even worse,

(54:15):
they spent millions of more dollars funding a hospital in Boston,
a doctor in California that were promoting surgeries on young women,
you know, cutting off breasts of you know, teenage girls,
filling kids with puberty blockers. So that was also and
we're even now we're finding out more grants. I mean,
some of this has come out after he left, but

(54:37):
there were grants that were done during his tenure. And
then finally, of course, during COVID. You know, Christians had
sincere differences of opinion, and so that's I'm not challenging that.
But during COVID, he demonized Christians who had sincere conscience
based objections to not take the COVID backs and and

(54:58):
he also really promoted these really draconian mandates. Were tens
of thousands of Christians of good conscience lost their jobs
and livelihoods. And so what I fault him with is
not that he, you know, pushed his view of what
people should do, but he did it in a way
that demonized fellow Christians who had since here and I
would say, in the light of history, serious qualms about

(55:22):
some things. And he weaponized the Bible, so in clear
biblical teachings he wasn't willing to stand up on like
God his creator in a way, but in the when
it came to COVID, he weaponized love by neighbor that
if you weren't willing, if you had a conscious base
objection to the COVID vacs, you were responsible. And one
of the interviews he did, I think was with MSNBC,

(55:42):
maybe it with CNN, he basically said, yeah, you were
a response for the deaths of children.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
One of the chapters that was so revealing to me
was your chapter three Sexual Suicide. And by the way,
that chapter titles are brilliant. But you talk about how
Stockholm syndrome Christians damaged the understanding of sex and gender,
and you make the point that there's a direct connection
between Darwinian evolution and what's happened with respect to the

(56:09):
evolution with respect to ideas related to sex and gender.
This is a very important chapter and you make your
very first point in this chapter the horror of redefining marriage.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yeah. Well, actually, I also just to be clear, because
I think the redifferenition of marriage is really really central,
But it's also the point I'm trying to make is
that heterosexual promiscuity and heterosexual devaluation of marriage and heterosexual
no fault divorce are areas where the Church compromised before.

(56:47):
You can't just start with the redefinition of marriage, say,
you know, being between two or three whoever, people, You
have to actually look, well, what were the compromises and
the things that the Church may that led up to that,
because you don't immediately graft on to same sex marriage
or now I think people are discussing polyamory or stuff.

(57:08):
You started with this. Many churches seding grounds on outside
of marriage heterosexual activity, and so I want to make
that clear because I think that is one of the distinctives.
But you're right, the Darwinian case, people don't really understand that.
You know, Darlin wrote a book called The Descent of
Man where he redefines morality as basically that which promotes

(57:29):
survival in any given situation. And he has a whole
discussion of marriage. And you know, Darwin in his nineteenth
century proper Victorian view, I mean, would basically say that marriage,
monogamous marriage was that which we evolved to for nineteenth
century Victorian society. So he was, in his own personal views,

(57:49):
was fairly you know, conventional and even conservative, but he
adopts a really radical view of what sexual morality or
any morality is, and of sexual late that then when
other people believe that, then that just took off. And
so in marriage, the thing is, there's nothing particularly sacrifact

(58:10):
about monogamous marriage. He actually says that the original form
of marriage, if you will, wasn't really marriage. It was
communal sex basically having sex with multiple partners, you know,
all the time, and then so depending his point is,
depending on what you need under the given environmental circumstances
for survival and flourishing, that's what natural selection will pick.

(58:32):
So yes, in our society right now, in his society,
that happened to be monogamous marriage. But he really clearly
said that depending on how circumstances change, what circumstances can
also be technology. You invent the birth control pill, I
mean that's a change. Then the dictates of what's moral,
what's sexually moral change. And many people know about Alfred Kinzie,

(58:57):
but they don't understand that Alfred Kinzie was trained as
an evolutionary biologist, and so when he wrote his influential
book about Sex in the Human Male that really in
the nineteen well late forties, within fifties and sixties, helped
feed the sexual revolution. He was coming at it with
a Darwinian worldview, which is basically, well, if it exists

(59:18):
somewhere in nature, if a practice exists somewhere, even in
some niche in nature, it must have been favored by
natural selection for that purpose. So it's all equally natural.
You can't criticize it. And that really provided this scientific
basis or argument that pushed a whole generation of sexologists
that really set the stage ultimately for the redefinition of

(59:39):
marriage and for the redefinition of biological sex. And you know,
the denial of biological sex, and the irony is today
some of the leading Darwinian evolutionists, like Colin Wright or
Richard Dawkins, to their credit, have not embraced the abandonment
of sex, you know, male and female. But they don't

(01:00:00):
realize how they're desacralizing of nature. And you know that
nature is simply this product of this blind, purposeless process
and whatever is dictated, you know, for survival, nature will,
Nature will choose, which means it's not chosen by anything.
And they don't realize that that view leads to a view, well,
why should you respect you know, yes, we have men

(01:00:22):
and women now, but if we, through our technology can
surmount that, why not what's the imprincipal objection? Because ultimately,
nothing biological can be grounded in some sort of transcendent nature,
because there is no transcendent nature or designer.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
And so I have to.

Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Say it's sort of a tragedy that or sort of
I wouldn't say heroes, tragic figures of some of the
most hardcore d already evolutionists who have ushered forth a
society that even some of them are horrified by.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
Now, yeah, I always say the redefinition of marriage. If
you change the meaning of a word like marriage, you
change the thing itself. And you point out in your
book that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is a
lifelong Roman Catholic Christian, holds that marriage as historically defined

(01:01:12):
fosters little more than ill will and animosity. So, in
his considered opinion, anyone who embraces the historical definition of
marriage and therefore excludes same sex couples does so out
of hate and animus. And I have written that what

(01:01:33):
must surely have been self evident to this supremely erudite
arbiter of justice, is that virtually every redefinition of marriage,
including his own, excludes someone. But is that due to
hate or is it due to common sense? If marriage
means everything in the end, it can mean nothing at all.

(01:01:55):
And marriage is not a tangentile issue. I mean, it's
one of the pill of civilization. It's at the very
bedrock of all of civilization.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
And that's what people often don't understand, who are seeding
ground on marriage. Then let's go along over to like
poverty issues and long term poverty. Well, once you've seated
that marriage isn't important and that traditional family is important,
and then you're trying to talk about the problems that
creates for poverty, you don't you don't realize these are
dominoes and that they you know, you think, oh, well,
what happens in the bedroom stays in the bedroom. That's

(01:02:28):
not true. I mean, we know say in an area
of poverty that the long the best predictor of long
term intergenerational poverty in America, whether you're white, Black, Asian, Hispanic,
is whether you have an intact family, a mother and
a father, and if you don't, the chances of the
dysfunction of your kids. And you know, this is nothing

(01:02:48):
about those people are forced to be, you know, in
a single parent situation, who do their absolute best, and
some good things can come of that, but as a whole,
that is not the model. And so once you see
marriage in the intact family, you create massive problems that
we've seen actually in long term intergenerational poverty and dysfunction.

(01:03:09):
But the other thing you mentioned, Anthony Kennedy that I
just like to stress. And this gets back to the
main point of the book, which is we are always
as Christians. You know, I find myself going against the
theological liberals and things, but it's we have to realize
our own complicity in the Christian community of getting our
own house in order. Anthony Kennedy was not only appointed

(01:03:29):
by Ronald Reagan. He was known in his personal life
as a goody goody. He was a devout weekly mass goer,
you know, part of a church of the Catholic Church
that has officially a biblical view of marriage. He was
the one who was the deciding vote. Why this matters,
the reason we have a phony constitutional right for same

(01:03:51):
sex marriage, it doesn't exist in the constitution is not
because of a you know, someone appointed by a Democrat,
not because of a looney atheists, a mass going goody
goody Ronald Reagan appointed justice. He was the deciding vote.

(01:04:11):
And similarly, when we talk about the it's not you
know Catholics. We talked earlier about Jimmy Carter. I mean,
Jimmy Carter was a devout evangelical Christian, but he is
embracing in the end of his life before he died
that Jesus would love gay marriage. You know Jesus would
love I think he said, you know, any anything that

(01:04:31):
didn't harm someone else. I'd say, gamers does harm people,
But you know, anything, any relationship you know, would be
fine with Jesus. See there you have the nation's most
prominent born again Christian politician making that argument. And then
when it comes to who's persecuting the bakers and the
florists and the other people you know who don't want
to be conscripted to support gay marriage, Well, in many

(01:04:54):
cases it's people who identify as Christians. So in my
home state of Washington, we had Christian grandmother who had
a longtime floral shop and she would sell to everyone,
but when it came to developing particular flower arrangements, just
specifically for a gay wedding, she didn't want to do that.
She'd sell them flowers, but she didn't want to be

(01:05:14):
a participant in that. She no longer has her floral shop.
She was driven out of existence. The person who drove
her out of existence was not an atheist. It was
a church going Catholic attorney general. He's now our governor. Unfortunately,
in my view, Bob Ferguson, who actually wrote an article
at the time defending his persecution of her as part

(01:05:37):
of his faith commitment, I mean other words, as part
of being a good person of faith, a good Catholic
was driving her out of existence. Andy Stanley, who he
talked about earlier, disparaged Christians who didn't business, people who
didn't want to participate in gay weddings. So don't think
that this is just the big bad secularist who are
putting this on it. It's people who self identify as Christian.

(01:06:00):
And if we don't get our own house and ornor,
it's hard to expect better results.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
And you know, it's really interesting. You get this sense
in reading through your book that the slippery slope that
you've been talking about in the podcast and you certainly
talk about in the book is dangerous not only for civilizations,
for countries, but also for individuals. And you point this
out and give example after example after example of people

(01:06:27):
that start down this road. And once you start down
that road, you gain momentum, you give up this pristine principle,
and then it's easier to give up the next one,
and pretty soon you're gaining speed as you go down
that slope.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
That's exactly right. And especially if the culture is getting
worse and so, and you're taking your cues from the culture,
so it's sliding down, it's going to drag you down
with it. And another case in my book is a pastor,
former pastor Ryan Meeks, celebrated as one of the new
breed of Evangelicals years ago in Time magazine. Why well,

(01:07:03):
because his congregation repented against, you know, not affirming the
gay and lesbian lifestyle and actually started to do gay weddings.
But he claimed to be an evangelical in doing this. Well,
as I say in the book, if you check out
his church today, it doesn't exist. It went out of existence.
And if you actually check about its history shortly with

(01:07:25):
you know after that time that he was trumpet in
Time magazine as a new breed of evangelical, that church
no longer even identified as specifically Jesus oriented or a
Christian I mean, and then and then he left all together,
and you can find his website people going to their leaks.
Now he doesn't call himself a Christian. I'm not even
sure he's a theist, but he helps people on their journeys,

(01:07:48):
including especially with psychedelic drugs. He now lives an organ
with his wife, and so he has a whole new ministry.
So yeah, if you look at the personal trajectory, a
lot of the people upheld as these, you know, the
new paradigm of the new teaching for Orthodox or Evangelical
Christians that actually is the old heresies. It doesn't end well.

(01:08:08):
It's really tragic for these people, and of course it's
tragic for the people who they mislead.

Speaker 1 (01:08:14):
Yeah. I remember his famous quip, Gayer straight here, there's
no hate here, and he popularized that particular equip But anyway,
chapter four, rebuilding the Walls of hostility, this is an
important chapter as well, where you talk about how Stockholm
syndrome Christianity produces this divisive view of race and class.

(01:08:34):
Talk about the anti racist movement. It sounds so good,
but there's a distinct problem with anti racism.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
Yeah, and here's a tragedy again of Christians who don't
want to really defend the Bible because they without good teaching.
I think the Bible is the greatest engine of human
dignity and equality in the history of mankind. I mean
no question. And so if you're not willing to draw

(01:09:04):
on that resource. Then you basically there's the gap. And
so what has filled the gap are these so called
anti racism, which really is just racism. It's but it
comes back. I mean, let's go back to the Darwinian story.
Darwin again thought human beings weren't creating the image of God.
We descended with common ancestors, ape like creatures. And then

(01:09:27):
that helped fuel discussions of higher and lower races, who
was more evolved than others, and that really debuted and
the foemen of you have scientific racism and the idea
that race defines you more than you know, your fellow
religious beliefs or other beliefs. And where did that lead. Well,

(01:09:48):
on the left, it led to people who basically, you know,
they say they're against racism, but they imbibed this underlying
structure that they actually think race or at this see
is paramount, and so they just disagree about who the
oppressor class is. So if they're being oppressed, the idea
is that they should become in essence the oppressor. And

(01:10:10):
so it's all about power. It's not about building common ground,
it's not about building you know, that all people are
created equal and that we should be aspiring to equal
standards and loving one another because we're all created in
the image of God. It's that no, they buy into, yeah,
there are it's all about power and these tribal groups,

(01:10:31):
these racial groups, and so if we happen to be
black or Hispanic or whatever, we should identify with our
own and then we should be pushing back about, you know,
anyone else as the oppressor. And the thing is this
is also you know, I write about this a little
bit in the book. It's become more pronounced since I
wrote the book. But so you have that on the left,

(01:10:53):
you have something that's really disturbing on the right that
mimics it among secularists on the right, but also among
some set described I don't think they're accurately described as
in the reform view, where they basically accept this diagnosis
that yeah, it's all about race and tribalism, and they
just say, well, but since we're white, we should be supreme.
And so they're actual white supremacists. And the thing is

(01:11:16):
both of these ideas, which have some derivation from Darwinian evolution,
are false. And the tragedy of the Christians who stood
out and weren't preaching Biblical equality is there was a
vacuum for these noxious, pseudo Darwinian and other views to
just rush in. And I think that's what we're seeing.

(01:11:38):
And to go back to Andy Stanley, I think you
see a microcosm of how this happens. He has a
really poignant story in his book Irresistible about how a
father came to him early in his career with his
daughter and his daughter was dating a black man and
wanted to marry him, and he wanted Andy Stanley to
read the Ride Act to his daughter and to tell

(01:11:59):
her that you in God's view, that you know this
was an abomination because and the example he gave is
that God was irate with Moses for marrying a black woman. Well,
I mean, the clearest thing to say on that, Well,
first of all, that's completely false. In fact, God was
upset with Miriam and Aaron for being upset that Moses
married who he married, and so it was it's a

(01:12:21):
complete opposite. But what is Andy Stanley, how is he
using this? He actually says, well, you know, I didn't
really want to get into a debate over this, and
you know that wasn't really productive, and so he said
something about you know, do you want to lose your
daughter or do you want to hold your ideas? And Okay,
maybe pastorally that made sense in that situation, I don't know.
But he uses it as an example for why we

(01:12:42):
should abandon the Old Testament. He uses it as we'll see,
you know, the Old Testament leads to things like racist
rather than I mean, I would use an example of
this is why we get things like critical race theory
on the left and then sort of the racialism on
very the fringe of the right is because because people
like Andy Stanley aren't willing to give good teaching. I mean,

(01:13:03):
the Bible, like I said, is an engine of human
dignity and equality from Genesis to Revelation. And for a
Christian pastor to not give good teaching, I mean, I'd
say that the father who came to see him, the
fact that that father had such a distorted view of
what the Bible said is an example of the not
of the Old Testament failure, but the failure of Christian

(01:13:26):
preachers like Andy Stanley to actually tell him what the
Bible actually says.

Speaker 1 (01:13:32):
Yeah, and a beautiful point. And you say that the
Bible has served as the greatest bullwork against racism, and
the Bible has also helped people understand equality of human
beings throughout human history. So this is the bullwark, and
the Bible is actually being denigrated. I mean, that's the

(01:13:55):
insidious nature of this.

Speaker 2 (01:13:57):
It is and this is yet another fruit of not
being willing to defend the authority of the Bible. Is
now we see it in the area of race, and
like I said, you see it on the left, but
you also see it these pernicious people on the right
who claim to be Christians, who are themselves, if you
read their works, are imbibing Darwinian evolution. They actually cite

(01:14:17):
Darwinian arguments for racism. I mean, this is such a
tragedy because you're right, the Bible. One reason why I
think actually people should read creation stories from other religions
is not because I think they're true, because they're not.
But they'll begin to see just how absolutely unique the
Bible's creation story is. I mean, if you read say
the Laws of Manu, the Hindu creation story, where we

(01:14:40):
don't reflect God's image, we reflect the image of different
pieces of the gods, and so some people are actually
in the image of the feet and they're are only
meant to be slave classes. I mean, in their creation story,
inequality is built in compare that to what the Bible
teaches of male and female of God. I mean this

(01:15:01):
was a radically I mean, we are so because we're
living in the light of this type of thinking. You know,
from the Bible. People take it for granted. But if
the Bible had never existed, a lot of things would
be awful. But you know, this idea of human equality,
it comes from there. And then you know, certainly Christians.
When I see some right wing Christians now saying that

(01:15:24):
their ethnicity is more important, that they have more to
share with, say fellow American born, you know, Americans of
their same race, than they do with Christians in Africa,
Well that's absolutely false. I mean, one of the great
joys of being a Christian when I travel is being
with Christians of other races, ethnicities, nationalities and realizing how

(01:15:44):
much you know, we have that we share together. In fact,
it's a tradition thing that almost everywhere in the world
you travel here you actually have brothers and sisters. And
for anyone who has traveled, and you know, I haven't
traveled as much as many people, but when I have traveled,
especially outside the United States, let alone in different areas
of the United States. Having brothers and sisters finding a

(01:16:05):
biblical church is one of the most inspiring, powerful things
that could ever happen. And so and then just the
history of getting rid of slavery and the arguments against that,
and some of the misconstruls of people thinking the Bible
was pro slavery.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
No it's not.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
And you know, I go through that a little bit
of depth in there. So I'm trying to equip people
here also that when they hear these objections to actually
articulate a Biblical view of equality. And I think so
tragic hosts say twenty twenty, And you know, I don't
think it was tragic in twenty twenty that with George
Floyd's death and things that many white Christians began to

(01:16:41):
think we really need to face the issues we have
in our society about race and ethnicity. That was honorable.
The problem is, rather than going to the Bible and
going to the rich Christian tradition to teach about equality
and dignity, many of them went to places like you know,
the church that I was in. You know, people wanted
to read Robin DiAngelo, who's white, I mean white women,

(01:17:04):
white fragility, which is not at all biblical, And it's
just it's really pernicious. And so the tragedy is so
many Christian churches aped the culture rather than going to
the rich Christian tradition of biblical teaching on human equality
and dignity.

Speaker 1 (01:17:20):
A couple comments on your fifth chapter where you say
we must obey men rather than God. That's the chapter title.
The subtitle really points out that Stockholm syndrome Christians abandoned
religious liberty.

Speaker 2 (01:17:36):
Yeah, and this gets to the point that again it's
not just the big, bad, nasty atheist and secularists who
are a problem. If you look time and again, there
are Christians who are facilitating a lot of the persecution,
either directly like the former Attorney General of Washington that
I talked about earlier, or by refusing to talk about it,

(01:17:56):
refusing to defend people, refusing to speak up for people.
And so that is really sad. And I think actually,
you know, during the COVID era of some of the
endless lockdowns and the mandates, and this also I think
creates some controversy because I on the COVID mandates, which
I think were unjust, and I think that some Christians

(01:18:19):
who demonized their fellow Christians were wrong. I cite examples
from both parts of the political spectrum. So you had
David French, who's an evangelical columnist at the New York
Times is very anti Trump. But then you have Robert Jeffers,
conservative Trump supporter Baptist church in Dallas, who a lot
of more conservative Christians really love both of them, though

(01:18:41):
demonized Christians who didn't feel that they could take the
COVID vacs. And I think that that is really sad
and tragic. And again I'm not saying if they had said, well,
I think it's good for these reasons, so that's why
she think you should take it. But no, David French
wrote piece basically accusing everyone who disagreed for whatever reason.

(01:19:03):
I've had a hardness of heart that so hard their
hearts are so hard that virtue can't penetrate. I mean,
it was really high vaulted stuff. And similarly, Baptist Robert
Jeffers boasted to the news media that he did not
offer any exemptions to his own staff of his Baptist church. Now,
Baptists historically are strong believers in religious liberty. I mean,

(01:19:27):
I think that's really really tragic.

Speaker 1 (01:19:29):
And there were some really good reasons that people had
for not taking the COVID vaccine. I mean, I took
it because I had to travel around the world and
I couldn't travel without taking the vaccine. My wife did not,
and she had valid reasons for not wanting to take it.
There were reasons that included the fact that the derivation

(01:19:51):
of the vaccine itself had systemic problems.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
Yes, I mean, and certainly in some of the testing,
depending on the particular vaccine, there was use of some
cell lines derived from a boarded fetal cell lines. And
then also I mean, I would broaden it out if
you're a parent, I mean, and I'll be honest. I
did not end up taking the COVID vaccine. Neither did
my wife or kids. Now, part of it was because

(01:20:16):
we end up getting COVID, and so there was no
reason of you to take an additional vaccine. But we
know a lot of people who chose for some very
serious reasons. You know, some who are pregnant who were
you know, it was a little bit unclear of how
it affect pregnant women and say young men. I mean,
it's now well established that if you're a young male
in good health, you probably shouldn't be taking those COVID

(01:20:38):
vaxines because of the heart issues with that. And in fact,
I know of some cases personally where that was the case.
And so if you're a parent, so and someone like
Robert Jeffers or David Franchwis said, well, that's not a
religious objection, that's not a conscious objection. That's just a
sexual objection. So it doesn't matter. Well, who's actually if

(01:20:59):
you're a parent of say a thirteen year old boy,
who is responsible ultimately before God for the safety and
care and raising of that child. It's not Anthony Fauci
or Francis Collins or David French for that man. It's
the parent. And so if the parent has serious reasons
to be concerned that, you know, say, their kid is

(01:21:21):
in good health and they're reading this material that's coming
out about the problems with heart issues, that is a
particular I'd say that they were called by God to
follow their conscience there and protect their child. And that
is an issue of religious liberty and conscious because it's
the parents who are supposed to be responsible for their kids,
not the government, and so I think some of these

(01:21:42):
people who say, oh, there's no religious liberty component in
here were just as such a narrow view of religious
liberty that it's really concerning. And now we know actually,
I mean, the government made and we could get into
this for a whole sorts of things, but the government
made no distinction between those who actually had COVID before
whether they should have these vaccine mandates. But we now

(01:22:03):
know just a few months ago, we now know that
there was a meeting with Francis Collins, the head of
the CDC, and some epidemiologists early on where they basically
all agreed. They all conceded that scientifically that if you
had already had COVID, really the vaccine provide no additional benefit.
Where they disagreed, and they that's why they didn't publicly

(01:22:26):
acknowledge this at the time, was oh, well that would
create a PR issue and it would you create inconsistent messaging,
and so it wasn't about the science, it was about
the PR message. Well, I'm sorry that I don't think
that's ethically defensible. And we now know this because someone
who participated in the meeting, who agreed with the COVID
VACS has come forward to share about the meeting, and

(01:22:49):
so I think there were a lot of issues where
I think a lot of Christians need to apologize to
how they treated their fellow Christians. And again people should
hear me. It's not because if someone took the COVID
or thought that was right, fine, or if someone supported
COVID lockdown's fine. It's how they treated the people who
disagreed with him on an issue that at best was

(01:23:10):
arguable among Christians. And I you know, Paul does talk
about this with regard to eating food that has been
offered to idols and stuff, and talking about respecting on
things that are not non negotiable biblical things, to respecting
the conscious beliefs of your fellow Christians. And I think
that we had a lot of Christian leaders who failed
at that. They were so raw raw that and they

(01:23:32):
could have again, they could have shared their own perspective
without demonizing, you know, the people on the other side
who suffered a great deal. I mean, I know people
who lost their jobs. I know people who actually had
to take the COVACS against their will, who end up
being vaccine injured. I mean, it's just I think there
needs to be some ownership on the part of some

(01:23:53):
Christian leaders about their complicity in this.

Speaker 1 (01:23:56):
Yeah, let's talk a little about listening to the wrong
voice as your check or seven where you discuss root
causes of Stockholm syndrome Christianity, what makes in other words,
Christians susceptible to Stockholm syndrome Christianity, and you give a
whole list starting with traditional news media. And when you're
listening to the wrong voices, you're going to be stuck

(01:24:18):
in the psychle epistemological cocoon. You can't break out of it.
Once you determine your paradigm, then your paradigm determines you
and so often this is the root cause you're listening
to the wrong voices.

Speaker 2 (01:24:29):
Yeah, so thank you for raising that, because you know,
we've spent a lot of time talking about the problems,
and there is that in the book, and that's a
main feature of the book. But then I do shift
over into several chapters of you know, one of the
root causes, what are the things we can do about it?
Because my goal in this book is not just to
be another book that criticizes, but is to provide some
pods of things that people can do and some understanding

(01:24:51):
of how we can avoid and you're exactly what I
think one of the absolute most important things. When I've
seen my own friends at church or colleagues at you know,
when I was a college professor, of where people begin
to go awry. It's they're listening to the wrong voices.
And so many people don't realize, you know, they think that, well,
you know, I have a solid Christian worldview, so it

(01:25:14):
doesn't matter what I'm reading or looking at because or
I'm just you know, reading a news source that oh
it's just a neutral source. Well that's just not true.
And whether it be social media or Wikipedia or search
engines or let alone the traditional media, all of this
is curated for you largely by people who are hostile

(01:25:35):
to the Christian faith. Now that doesn't mean that they
can't have some accurate information there, but it does mean
you need to be really careful. And it does mean
that if that's all you're feeling your mind with, don't
be cocky. Because for example, if you have and I've
seen this with some people, say you start out with
a biblical view of biblical sexuality, but then you're told

(01:25:57):
you read news article after news article that says, well,
you know that's not biologically realistic, or you know, this
is how people are born with this, or this is
you know, and you just read ad nauseam these things
that seek to say, well, in the real world this
isn't true. Then you at the very least have this
tension between what the Bible has taught you and then
what you think real world is showing. So these sources

(01:26:18):
of information about daily life are really important if you're
not getting good information. And what I tried to do
in that particular chapter is go through in detail and
sort of show people, I mean, who are the people
who are making these choices and how does it impact you?
Even something as simple as that. People don't think about
the agenda setting function of the news media. You know,

(01:26:40):
at one time, I mean America is still for like
compared to most of Western Europe, is still much more
religiously devout in terms of church attendance and prayer and
love other things. You would never know that from our
secular media. I mean several generations ago, in the nineteenth century,
you would actually have reports of sermons on Sunday at

(01:27:02):
big churches. Now you don't have that now now is
that because objectively religion isn't so interesting anymore. Will I
go through the stats if you actually compare the number
of people who attend church weekly or a couple times
a month versus those who go to movie theaters or
go to a sporting events or stuff, church wins out,
and so objectively speaking, we still have a lot of

(01:27:23):
people who are really concerned about their relationship to God,
but our media sources do not reflect that. And so
if you're listening to all these secular media sources, you're
imbibing this idea that your religion really isn't important, it's
something only that you're interested in that culturally it's all
the other side, when it's actually not, and so you
end up transforming and being manipulated by that. Now, the

(01:27:45):
good news that there are now lots of good media sources,
and so actually, if you're listening to this podcast is one.
I mean, the work of Christian research is too over
last generations has been to give discernment and equip people
and help and so this is a great information source,
and there are others for news and other things, and

(01:28:07):
so I you know, the real encouragement. I end that
chapter talking about the Brians, which we mentioned before. You know,
the Brians heard stuff, but then they compare it to
the Bible. They want to, you know, compare you know,
what was really the case. And so I think I'm
calling for people to be discerning, but to be discerning,
you need to make sure that you're getting decent information sources,

(01:28:28):
and that your kids are getting decent information sources, and
that you're if you're a pastor, that your parishioners are
getting decent information sources because if they're not, they're going
to become like what they are listening to.

Speaker 1 (01:28:41):
Yeah, and social media is a big part of that.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
Yes, and so I deal also with social media, but
I will say a lot of stuff on social media
the agenda is still set by more traditional outlets because
you're sharing stories, you're commenting on stories that are made
possible by the rest of the media. But yes, social
media a lot of things are said answered. Algorithms push
some things over other things, and so yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:29:05):
Yeah, and you point that out in your book. I
mean you talk about algorithms. Google search engines are critical
in terms of what you're steered towards and what you're
steered from.

Speaker 2 (01:29:16):
That's true. I give an example that people can use
in their own life of searching for in not just
Google but other search engines, crisis pregnancy center. And I'll
tell you that often what will come up is lots
of planned parenthoods or a site that actually calls itself
pregnancy center finder that is actually a hit site attacking

(01:29:36):
pro life pregnancy centers. And so you would from that
if you don't dig deep down the list, do you think, well,
there aren't any good you know, crisis pregnancy centers or
these are all a bad thing, and you know, the
new thing on the horizon is a lot of people,
and a lot of Christians are relying increasingly on AI chatbots.

(01:29:56):
And this is really worrisome for a more general reason.
It's not just biased. It's chat bots. These AI things
like chat GPT or a lot of the other ones,
they don't have minds and so they can't be programmed
for truth. And so what you're getting is this misshmash
of stuff that conjugates sentences and concepts that technically it

(01:30:20):
will read well, but it may be false and it's
hard for you to know. I mean, I give an
example where I engaged in you know, research on a
chat over intelligent design and what the courts have said
about it. And I got fake citations of court cases
that never existed, and you know, one party was from

(01:30:41):
a real case, you know, so it was like say
Smith versus Jones, and maybe Smith came from one case,
Jones came from another case. It was a missmash in it.
And it would actually say, well, in Alabiama's Supreme Court
in two thousand whatever gave this case and there was
no case. And this is ubiquitous among these AI chat bots,
and so this is a really bad way to get
your information.

Speaker 1 (01:31:01):
So the Russians didn't actually send bears up into space?

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
Oh yes, the case I use in there, which is
really humorous, you know, I think of the old Muppet
show Bears in Space, but the and you know, we
did some chimps and stuff. But so after chot Bought
basically claims that the Russians set this series of bears
into space. And they'll even give you names of the bears,
you know, Aliosha and I forget what the names are,

(01:31:26):
but they it's all thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:31:27):
Vladimir was one of them.

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):
Latimir.

Speaker 1 (01:31:29):
Yeah. Yeah. So another thing that I want to get
at in this podcast, which I think is so important
is the entertainment media. I've often said that the ballot
box is necessary. We so often talk about elections and
the criticality of elections, and the ballot box is certainly necessary.
But people's views are so often determined by the educational institutions,

(01:31:56):
by the environmental institutions, by the entertainment institutions. So we
have to be so careful about entertainment media as one
of those major issues.

Speaker 2 (01:32:09):
Yeah, so I think they're at two levels.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:12):
One, I think some Christians will we'll understand, although not enough.
You know, what is just the gratuitous sex on biblical behavior,
values confusion, transgender confusion, and so that's one thing. But
then even in more family friendly things, if the messaging
can be really sinister. And so let me give an

(01:32:33):
example that might offend some of your viewers. But I
know a lot of Christians love so the Hallmark channel,
and I don't dislike the Hallmark Channel. And you know,
I know a lot of Christians who loved all the
Hallmark Christmas movies. But you know, overwhelmingly those Christmas movies
aren't really about Christmas, They're not about Jesus. They're very
hyper secular and so if you are watching twenty Hallmark

(01:32:58):
Christmas movies where maybe one of them has something about
the real meaning of Christmas, how are you shaping your
view and your mindset and your children's mindset about what
the real meaning of Christmas is? And so I use
that example to show that it's not just the most
obvious things where that you shouldn't be watching or you
shouldn't be allowing your kids to watch. That's just you

(01:33:19):
filling your mind with filth. It can also be things
that are maybe they're not filthy, but they're really changing
your worldview or your reference point of what's important without
you even thinking about it. And so the number one
thing is when you do that, you should at least
be discerning and realize what you're watching and sort of
mentally push back on it. And then I don't think

(01:33:42):
many parents, because you know, parents are of always a
generation behind their kids, at least in the newest technology.
I think many parents who didn't grow up in quite
the saturated social media environment that we are in now,
or the saturated pornography of hardcore pornography environment, aren't sufficiently

(01:34:04):
concerned about what their kids are doing on their iPhones
or their androids or in some of these actually simulation
gaming sites, and that can be very very dangerous and
destructive to your kids and to adults for that matter.

Speaker 1 (01:34:20):
But you know, yeah, what about this phrase, follow the
science wherever it leads. I mean, we got to be
true to science. I mean I've been hearing this on
even very conservative shows. Follow the science. But that's kind
of fraught with all kinds of pitfalls.

Speaker 2 (01:34:35):
Oh it is, and so you know, in one sense,
I mean, like most slogans, it has a kernel of truth.
If you're trying to get out, you know, let's follow
what the evidence actually says. That the problem is who
speaks for science and what we saw during COVID, but
it's not just COVID. We see it in debates over say,
climate change. You have people who are saying, we speak
for the science. And therefore, if you raise questions, even

(01:34:58):
if you're a fellow scientist, even if you have degrees
from the same prestigious places, even if you've done research,
it doesn't matter. If you're a minority dissenting view, we
don't have to respond to you, We don't need to
listen to you. And you're anti science because you're raising
evidence based objections. And so here's the problem with science

(01:35:18):
becoming its own ideology of being this catch phrase to
actually stand for something other than really science. I mean,
if you're using science as this dogmatic phrase to justify
and baptize whatever ideological claim you're trying to promote, that
you're not a good scientist. And the best of really
good scientists are open, you know, to criticism, and in fact,

(01:35:42):
if someone criticizes them, rather than trying to shut them down,
they should respond to them and say, well, you know,
that really doesn't work out, because I think the evidence
overwhelmingly points in this direction. But if instead they say, well,
let's demonize or shut them down. I mean, this is
another problem with Francis Collins. During the COVID It's come out,
you know, either there were a lot of scientists who
disagreed about some of the policies on endless lockdowns, and

(01:36:05):
rather than engage them, the issue was, well, let's just
smack them down or let's just you know, disregard, and
that is a danger signal. So I think when you
say people say you follow the science, I think the
first question should be, well, it says who who's talking
about the science? And then are there any scientists who
disagree and what does the evidence actually show? And at least,

(01:36:28):
you know, be open to asking those questions. And then
the people if you ask questions of people who are saying, well,
science says this with the capital s, and they get
upset because you're asking questions like this, that's a big
danger signal that maybe what they're promoting isn't science after all.

Speaker 1 (01:36:45):
And this is particularly true when it comes to global warming.

Speaker 2 (01:36:47):
Oh yeah, and you know this is you know, I
know Christians have different views, but here global warming is
actually what is It's a constellation of different claims, each
of which have to be justified. So one is has
there been a warming period in the last one hundred year?
So that's one claim, and most people I think would
agree that there has been, although there's some question that
may have leveled off. Then the question is, well, but
what are the factors that actually cause that? Well, then

(01:37:11):
there's a lot of disagreement over the things or you
and you know, how much is it human, how much
is it the sun? How much is the other things?
And so that's a separate question that requires its own
evidence to answer. And then well, let's say you even
agree on those two things, Well, then what can we
do about it? And you can we do something about it?
And then what will be the cost of doing something

(01:37:31):
about it? In fact, in order to say do something
about it, are you going to put so many millions
of people out of work that you're going to harm
them or lead to starvation or things, you know, one
of the consequences. So you have these different questions and
the people who want to say, you know, are you
with me or against me with global warmer? You're a
climate change denial. That really is Again it's a manipulation

(01:37:53):
of science because the actual questions are a set of
different questions, each of which have to be answered. You
may answer one one way. You may say, well, yeah,
there's global warming going on over the past one hundred years,
but it seems to be part of a natural cycle
that you know is now leveling off. I mean, the
answer to one question doesn't prejudge the answer to the

(01:38:14):
other questions.

Speaker 1 (01:38:15):
Yeah, Jay Richards, your colleague and friend, has done just
brilliant work in that regard. Talk about the celebrity culture
a little bit you do in your book, and I
think it's important because we not only have celebrities that
often we give ear to outside the Christian community. But
you have celebrity pastors, so celebrity personalities. I mean all
of us are kind of in danger of that. I mean,

(01:38:37):
you know, people make an idol out of people who
are very fallible.

Speaker 2 (01:38:41):
Yeah, so I think that is a big danger. I
think there is a component of what has happened to
American evangelicalism is that the culture is so inaborated with
trying to find the next celebrity without asking discerning questions.
And I think that is partly an explanation for the
rise of Francis Collins. But you know, we also see
it in I mean, I give an example of the

(01:39:01):
book that at the time Roe V. Wade was decided
justin Bieber, you know, comes out and basically attacks it.
You know, he's for a woman's right to choose or
I forget exactly what he said, which is quite an
irony because he exists.

Speaker 1 (01:39:14):
Has the right to do whatever she wants to do
with her own body. It's a basic quote, I think.

Speaker 2 (01:39:18):
Yeah, yeah, which is quite ironic because people who know
his personal story, his mom was in a really challenging
pregnancy and decide to have him and not have an abortion.
So he exists because his mom didn't agree with that.
And then the celebrity pastors. The thing is, we know
that Christianity is not always popular, and I'd say, as

(01:39:38):
the culture gets worse, you know, genuine Christianity probably becomes,
you know, less and less popular. And so if you
have pastors who are getting the toast of the New
York Times or celebrity or the rest of the culture,
it may be an indicator that there's not you know,
there's not something great going on, and so that you
have to be very discerning about that. But I think

(01:40:02):
that and we see this also on the right. We
see this on the left and the right. And so
without being really controversial, I mean a lot of people
now are pining, you know, to uphold Trump as this
Christian leader. Well, there's no indication that Trump is really
a Bible believe in Christian and it's not just because
of his past life when he talks about the Bible's workspace.
There just isn't. Now that doesn't mean I would say

(01:40:24):
I agree with many of his policies, so I know,
but this gravitation of Christians to try to look up
to celebrities and somehow giving them guidance on Christianity is
really dangerous because the whole thing, the people pleasing nature
of celebrities is stuff that actually usually goes against what

(01:40:45):
true Christian teaching is. And so you really should if
you're primarily following people who are the most popular, you
should ask why.

Speaker 1 (01:40:54):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:40:55):
Sometimes you know it's for legitimate reasons, because people are
particularly persuasive, particularly you know, solid, but people do need
to think carefully about are they just glomming on? And
I think some Christians also are insecure. They sort of
think that, well, if someone is a Christian who's a celebrity,
that well that means huh, you know, I don't need
to be insecure because someone is validating Christianity for me.

(01:41:17):
And I think that's also not a healthy idea. And
when do you see this? One of the probably most
explicit examples of how wrong this can go is when
in the nineteen seventies, back when Jimmy Carter popularized the
idea of being a born again Christian. And I want
to be clear, I think Jimmy Carter himself, you know,
had a personal believe in Christ. I don't think his

(01:41:38):
public policies really always went along with that. But I
think he was sincere at least for much of his life.
But at that time, for a while, it became popular
in culture to be a born again Christian. And so
at one point you had Larry Flint, the publisher of
Penthouse Magazine or Hutstler, you know, of declaring he was
a born again Christian. Well how did that end? It

(01:42:00):
didn't really end very well, and by the end of
his life there's nothing different. He kept publishing the poet.
I mean, it's just like people do need to be
discerning about glomming on and following people or teachings just
because they're popular.

Speaker 1 (01:42:15):
Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. Joel Ostin comes
to mind. I actually, many years ago wrote a little
book called the Ostinification of American Christianity, where really Jesus
becomes a means to an end as opposed to being
the end, and he invites people to the Master's table
not for the love of the Master, but because of
what's on the Master's table. So it's a complete perversion

(01:42:36):
of authentic Christianity. You offer so many good suggestions on
what Christians can do, including choosing your information and entertainment
sources wisely, and don't let your information or your entertainment
sources shape you. As you said before during the podcast,

(01:42:56):
become a Brian Christian test all things, hold fast to
that which is good. I think that's a really important
part of the book. I wish we could give more
attention to it on the podcast. But in chapter eight
you talk about pleasing the wrong people and you saw
this firsthand as a professor, and I want you to
elaborate on that because you have. We still remember this

(01:43:19):
for years and years at the Christian Research Institute, the
impact of Mark Knowles's famous book The Scandal of the
Evangelical Mind. This book had the skin of the true
stuff with a lie.

Speaker 2 (01:43:32):
Yeah, that's a good description. So you know, the kernel
truth is that obviously God creator our minds, and we
should if you're called to be a scholar, or you
should be as excellent as you can be, and you
should be slipshod. You should. All that's good, But who's
the standard of excellence? That's really the nub And this

(01:43:55):
book which was toasted by Christianity today, And when I
was at this you know, Christian University, it was like, oh,
that's the book that everyone was trying to be shaped
by what I saw. The way people took it was, well,
we need to be accepted by Harvard, the New York Times,
the secular culture. That's the test for having an excellent mind.

(01:44:19):
And that's where I think, I mean, this keys off
of what we just talked about, the celebrity culture. It's
also you know, trying to get the approval of a
disintegrating secular culture. Is I mean, what that's not excellence
from a biblical standpoint or from a truth standpoint. And
so that's and you know, to Mark Knowle's credit in
the first edition of his book, he does have a

(01:44:41):
little caveat that we need to be clear that you
know that the mark of excellence in scholarship isn't just
you know, whether you're toasted by secular society. So he
does warrant about that. But his book was not, at
least in the places that I was dealing with, in
the colleagues I was on with, that's not really that
warning wasn't paid attention to. It was like, this is

(01:45:02):
a plaring call for us to be like Harvard, and
that the test is whether people at Harvard or the
New York Times, et cetera, are praising us. And then
I think that was actually endemic in the book, despite
you know, Mark Noel's protestation, because just a couple of
years ago Noel came out with a new edition of
his book where pretty much he says, you know, if

(01:45:26):
you disagreed with him on the COVID vacs or on
Darwinian evolution or climate change, that's who he's talking about,
of evangelic because who don't have a mind. So his
test is basically, if you disagree with the secular consensus
on any of these things, doesn't matter how thoughtful you are,
doesn't matter how rigorous your research is, doesn't matter what

(01:45:48):
a good case you make. Just by disagreeing on that,
that was his indictment. And I think you see, I mean,
in a way, I'm grateful for his second edition where
he says this because it's sort of rips off the
veneer and makes it very clear that what was being
pined for with secular acceptance, it wasn't really. In fact,

(01:46:08):
he even talks about in his second book about downgrading
the emphasis on Christian's being biblically faithful and actually talks
about people's idolatry of the Bible. And then basically, so
what is a Christian scholarship to him, Well, it's like
it's this really dumb down version of Christian ethics of
love and I forget what all, but it's just it's

(01:46:30):
very thin, and so doctrinal orthodoxy is not part of
good scholarship. Well, I'm sorry if you're I'm not actually sorry.
If you're a faithful Christian, truth should be the number
one guiding test of good scholarship, not whether it's accepted
by the New York Times.

Speaker 1 (01:46:47):
You know. One of the striking parts of your book
that sticks in my mind, gets riveted in my mind,
is an example, and it's in the Lutheran community. So
you have the Lutheran Church Missouri Synate going down a
very bad path but ending up reversing that path, and
then you had the evangelical Lutheran Church kind of ironic,

(01:47:09):
that's called evangelical, going down the opposite path. Tell that story.

Speaker 2 (01:47:13):
I'm so glad you liked that. That was added very
late because I knew someone who I didn't know at
the time, but I taught a Sunday school class that
morphed into this book, and she told me about it
because her dad was one of the professors, one of
the Orthodox professors who stayed, and so then I researched it.
And I think Christians need to know about this also
to show how faithfulness God can honor, but also if

(01:47:36):
you're not faithful, you can actually see in real time
what happens. So the Missouri Said Lutheran Church in the
nineteen seventies, their key seminary basically was increasingly dominated by
professors who basically adopted the old style theological liberalism, that
the Bible wasn't really necessarily accurate, that the miracles didn't
necessarily happen, you know what the Bible said, and they

(01:47:59):
were valuing that. And so the denomination got worried about
it because this was their future pastors that were being done.
And there were some faithful people in the seminary, but
they were increasingly belittled and be rated by the increasingly
i'd say non orthodox people there. And so to the

(01:48:21):
credit of the denominational officials at the time is that
they did investigate and they wouldn't let go. And when
they found out what was really happening, they basically said, well, no,
that's not our confessions. You know, we haven't stated confessions
that you're supposed to uphold, and they basically insisted on that,
and even when they were demonized. I mean, it's really

(01:48:43):
interesting I went back to some of the original documents
how this played out. They were demonized as being anti
Christian for upholding traditional teaching of biblic authority. They were
be rated as being unloving, they were be rated as pharisees.
I mean, it was just it was high voltage rhetoric
against them, but they methodically, carefullet that said no, this
is what we stand for. These are our confessional faith,

(01:49:04):
that's what our seminar is supposed to stand for. And
so then the majority faculty, who by that time had
sort of abandoned biblical faithfulness, said okay, well, if you
do that, we're just going to leave and start our
own seminary. We're and basically I think they were hoping
that they would get the denomination to back down, but
the denomination didn't, and so something about like basically ninety
percent of the faculty and students left a faithful remnant

(01:49:28):
stay and at the time, the news media was saying,
oh see, they've destroyed the denomination they've destroyed their seminary,
and you know they're going to go out of existence.
I would say, even if that happened, well, they were
staying faithful. And that's we don't just do things based
on success. We do things based on what's right. But
an amazing story, within just a few years they rebuilt

(01:49:50):
the seminary and the Missouri sent and Lutheran Church went on.
Still today has close to two million baptized members and
is still the largest theologically can conservative Lutheran denomination in
the United States. And Francis Schaeffer at the time actually
went to encourage them after this happened, and he gave
a chapel and I found this talk by him that

(01:50:11):
I had never known before. And in fact, many of
the people who read the book, who knew a lot
about Shaeffer's didn't know that he went there where he
basically thanked them for what they did and noted that
this in most cases denominations go heter doox and they
never recovered. This was the first time, in his view
that he knew in history, certainly in modern American history,
where the denomination was going in one direction and they

(01:50:33):
actually flipped it back to faithfulness. And so he was
encouraging them. But what's also so that's the story of
faithfulness and all the good that that was led to.
But the other part of it is, well, what happened
to all these professors and students future ministers who went
into what eventually became the evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which,

(01:50:56):
as you know, is ironic because it's not at all evangelical. Well,
these professors who were protesting their innocence that they were
really faithful Bible believers even though they weren't, they helped
become leaders in the new denomination of pushing for acceptance
of gay marriage, devaluing the Bible and everything that basically
played out in the ECLA. And so you could actually

(01:51:19):
see what would have happened to the future of the
Missouri sin and Lutheran had those few denominational officials not
had the backbone and the wisdom and the courage and
i'd say the biblical love to stand for truth. And
so you can see on the one side the benefits
of the fruitfulness and then the consequences of those who left.

Speaker 1 (01:51:38):
Yeah, so you had some faithful board members.

Speaker 2 (01:51:40):
You did had some denominational officials who the board members
were representing.

Speaker 1 (01:51:45):
Yep. You have a section in the book. It starts
with cures. In the first chapters, chapter ten, a cull
to Wisdom, you talk about what we should do about
Stockholm syndem Christianity. We should obviously immerse ourselves in the
Word of God, say, memorize the Word of God, meditate
on the Word of God, mind the Word of God
for all its substantial riches. You also talk about the

(01:52:07):
importance of prayer, and you know, you can sort of
brush that aside. I mean, that's sort of understandable, but
this is really important. We can talk about it, we
can actually do it, and doing it makes all the
difference in the world. I'm sure that was a big
part of the transition for the Missouri Cynered Lutheran Church.

Speaker 2 (01:52:24):
Yeah. No, I think you know, there are multiple aspects
of prayer, you know, praise, confession, thankfulness. But I also
think that I've seen in my work at Discovery, and
in one case I share in the Book of that
intercessory prayer is also really really important. And I tell
in the book how when c Al Pacific brought a

(01:52:47):
big proponent of open theism, this idea that God himself
doesn't know the future to the school to speak in
the official chapel and to engage the faculty. My wife
and I were part of a young person's Bible study
that we helped lead, and we had the leaders. We
were all praying that God would basically safeguard the students

(01:53:08):
from this just really erroneous belief. And I later had
a discussion we were discussing other things with the person
who was the dean of the chapel who supported bringing
this person. So it wasn't that he disagreed with the person,
but I asked him how that went, because actually at
the time, I was actually on sabbatical writing another book,
Darwin Day in America, I think, so I wasn't actually there.

(01:53:31):
I knew about it, but I wasn't I didn't attend
the chapel. So but later I asked that the person
who had arranged it, you know how that went, And
he said, oh, it was one of the worst chapels
we ever had because the students just couldn't make a
head or tail of what the guy was saying and
what his point was. It was just so Harry Ferry
and I said, Wow, what an answer to prayer? That

(01:53:51):
God sort of made what he said babbel to the students.
And so, you know, I have other things, you know
that I've experienced things like that. I think every you know,
Christian has to a degree. But prayer is really talking
to living God, and God honors our prayers in a
variety of different ways. And but one way is a

(01:54:11):
real treat is when God calls you to pray about
something and that you can see his particular answer in
a way that you can see here and now and
you don't have to wait to Heaven to see, you know,
the answer. And so I do think that we need
to remember we can't do it in our own power.
And I know when I was an elder of a church,
can think of some very difficult decisions we had to

(01:54:33):
make where spending an hour walking in prayer where things
really became clear and it was through praying about it
that God sort of made clear, well this is the
key thing. And so yeah, I think we need to
doing God's work in God's way. That's something Francis Shaeffer
liked to talk about. I think that got it from
Hudson Taylor. And it's a good thing to remember.

Speaker 1 (01:54:55):
Yeah, And I was so encouraged that you had the
temerity to believe that things can change. At Seattle Pacific University.
You saw a glimmer of hope there. I mean, you're
not pollyannish about it, but you did see a glimmer
of hope, and you're even willing to pray that there's
going to be a systemic change there.

Speaker 2 (01:55:15):
Yeah, so I want to be fair to them. If
people read my book, if they get to the end,
they'll see that there in the last couple of years
there was a change on the board and the president,
and I do think that some of the new people
are trying to do their best to move things back
to a more biblically orthodox It's a mixed bag, we'll see.
I am praying about it. My fear is I don't

(01:55:35):
know that they understand just how deep the change is
going to need to be, and they've given conflicting signals.
But I do know that there have been some really
good members of the world who are trying, and I
pray that God will bless that.

Speaker 1 (01:55:47):
I think your call to action is very important. When
you talk about equipping yourselves for battle, do no harm, pray.
You talk about what parents and grandparents can do ways
in which you can protect your children your grandchildren. You
emphasize how important it is for kids to learn to
think critically. You talk about preparing your children for college

(01:56:09):
if that's where they plan to go. You talk about
what young people can do. I mean, this book has
so much positive information. So it's not just cursing the darkness,
but it's building a lighthouse in the midst of the
gathering storm. You talk about what pastors and teachers can do,
and what can Christian leaders involved in governance of organizations do.

(01:56:31):
I think that's a poignant part of the book in
terms of instruction, in terms of making a difference.

Speaker 2 (01:56:39):
Yeah, Well, over the years, I've had the blessing to
be able to counsel various people in board or governance positions,
and so I try to distill some of the things
I've learned from that and from myself being on a
board of elders and working on committees and things. And
I think that the high calling of whether you're a
board of trustees of a Christian university or school or

(01:57:01):
just on a board of elders, is that you need
to view that your primary goal as a Christian is
not fundraising. It's not just raw rawing everything. It's being
discerning and making sure your institution follows its mission and
that There are tactics that are often used if an

(01:57:22):
institution is going off kilter. There are taxes that are
used to try to prevent that. And one is, oh, well,
you're not the expert. Just trust us, whether we're the
teachers or faculty, or or if it's a charismatic pastor
you know, I'm God's chosen. There are these tactics to
get the people who are called by God to hold
you know, governance ability, to get them to give that up.

(01:57:47):
And so I'm trying to help encourage people call the
governance that no, it is your responsibility, and there are
some things you can do. Most boards, at least Christian boards,
try to run by consensus, and often there's a modified
Robert's Rules of Order or something, but that gives you
tremendous power that if say, something is being pushed on you,

(01:58:10):
simply raising an objection and forcing a discussion can end
up changing something dramatically because there may be other people
on the board who also don't agree, but if one
person speaks up and initiates a discussion, I mean, the
way a lot of things in Christian institutions, in my knowledge,
end up getting done is when they're swept under the

(01:58:30):
rug and there isn't an open discussion among the board,
let alone other people. And if you can force a discussion,
then a lot of good things can come with that.
But I do think that if I gave one thing,
the number one thing that I think a board member
of a church or a school or other parachurch ministry
needs to be concerned about is the quality of the

(01:58:53):
people they hire in government. You know, I'm like political
science professors, so I like government analogies. Being in government,
there's all said that personnel or policy, and in fact,
whatever you think of Trump, go or negative. I think
people can see a dramatic difference between Trump in his
first term and Trump in his second term in hiring
people who actually support his mission. Now you may think

(01:59:16):
the mission is bad, but he's hiring people who actually
are willing to carry out his mission, whereas the first
time he got a lot of pushback on people. And
so similarly, if you have a Christian institution and you're
not making sure that every faculty member, every teacher, or
every pastoral staff member at a church really fulfills your mission.
That's your biggest disservice, because that's where the rubber meets

(01:59:38):
the road. They're the people who are called to mentor
they're the people who are teaching. They're the people who
are carrying out the mission. And so you can't have
people who aren't really committed. And I remember as an
elder when we had to interview people for pastoral positions
and we were considering one particular church that I was
an elder of, and it was when this church was

(01:59:59):
part of embarrassingly admit, was part of the pc USA,
which is really liberal denomination. This church was not. And
ultimately we led the church out of that denomination to
a more conservative one. But at this point, you know,
someone wanted to be in a position and we had
a series of questions we wanted to ask to make
sure that you know, what's your belief of biblical authority,

(02:00:19):
what's your belief on marriage, what's your belief on you know,
is there just one way to salvation through Jesus? And
we want everyone to respond to that. And we were
sort of told by some well, no, they don't ask them,
just let me talk to the person and feel them out.
You don't need to get written answers to these questions,
or you don't need to ask them yourself. But as
a board we ended up insisting, and then that person

(02:00:40):
ended up withdrawing because they didn't really fit our mission statement.
But how do we not insisted on specific answers to
these specific questions? These weren't the be all, end all questions,
but there were indicator questions. And if we just farmed
out to someone else who wanted the person hired to
just talk and report back, they might have been hired.

(02:01:01):
And so the most crucial thing you could do is
make sure that your staff and your workers of your
Christian organization are solid, because if they're not, it's the
gift that keeps giving, and they will find thousands of ways,
both consciously and unconsciously, to undercut your mission.

Speaker 1 (02:01:21):
I have a couple more questions and then we're going
to end the podcast. Although I could talk to you
all day long. You know you're in your book on
exactly the right note, a call to faithfulness. Give us
just your summation of what that entails.

Speaker 2 (02:01:36):
Yeah, so, I think along with the inornate celebrity culture
among many American Christians is this inordinate desire for worldly success,
and that plays out in many ways. It's like, well,
you know, how much money are you raising as a
Christian ministry. And I'm not saying these are not important,
but I'm just saying it's an emphasis on worldly indicators

(02:01:58):
of success. Winning a costs. Well, I'm sorry, that is
not the biblical view. God is in charge of history
and he's in charge of what's going to happen. And
we're not like Atlas, you know, the ancient Greek fable
with the weight of the world or the heavens on
our shoulders. All we're called to be is faithful. God

(02:02:19):
will take care of success or non success or what
he does to be success, but we are called to
be faithful, and He will find ways to bless that.
And so my biggest message of that last chapter is
that's what we're called to be. And I sort of
get some examples where Christians are too witted to what
they think is worldly success. But then I also show
just how surprising God is in being faithful and that

(02:02:44):
people should not be disheartened because well, first of all,
you know, through eternity God prevails, but even in this life,
the times when Christians have been you know, I don't
think Christians adequately know, especially American Christians, of just how
many times if you were Christian you probably thought Christianity
was just going to be extinct and everyone was destroying,

(02:03:05):
there were no faithful people. And yet even on the
cusp of that, often God brings about a surprising change.
And you saw it in the Roman Empire when there
were many horrific persecutions, but then you had this turning.
And I think, you know, it's a bittersweet tale because
Constantine got into some bad things, but certainly the legalization

(02:03:26):
of Christianity and that the right to worship was a
good thing, and suddenly you had a dramatic change there.
You had in early America, people had this idea, Oh,
America was this found as a Christian nation. Well, in
some sense that was true, but in some sense it's
not true. By the seventeen nineties, a lot of Americans
were imbibing the doctrines of the French Revolution, Deism, the

(02:03:47):
Transcendental movement a few years after that, and so if
you actually look at church attendants, and let alone church
attendants at Bible believing churches that believed in the Trinity.
By the eighteen hundred it was in New England. This
was really sad situation. Yet what happened there was something
known as the Second Great Awakening, which was not perfect.
There was some bad parts of it, but overall there

(02:04:09):
was this massive increase of people going to Bible believing
churches and the joining of Bible believing denominations for actually
joint efforts like that. You know, you'd have Baptists at
that time Episcopal or Lutheran Presbyterians would invite an evangelist
to their town and jointly hoold events. So by the
cusp of the Civil War, church attendance, Bible reading, Biblical

(02:04:31):
belief shot through the roof and so, but you had
a time that was very discouraging. If you were a
believer in China after the Communist Revolution, you may well
have thought, well, that's the end of any Christianity there.
But there are now hundreds of millions of believers in
China despite the government, and so God works in amazing,

(02:04:54):
mysterious and surprising ways, and so I think we need
to trust in that and take hope He holds the future.

Speaker 1 (02:05:02):
Yeah, it was just in China a few weeks ago.
It was in four different cities in China. It was
also in Taiwan, and I can attest to the vibrance
of the House Church movement in particular. And I even
saw in the three self patriotic movement. I saw people
who were very committed to the faith once for all,
delivered to the Saints, very committed to the propagation of

(02:05:23):
the Word of God. Interesting enough that I was in
a facility in Nanjing where Avery Press. They've now printed
I think this number is corrected, three hundred million Bibles
in China. You can walk into a bookstore. I've walked
into two bookstores in China and bought Bibles, authentic Bibles.
I bought the NIV in Chinese and in English, so

(02:05:45):
you could read it both ways. So yeah, amazing what's
happening there in terms of the explosive nature of the
faith in the midst of persecution. I want to end
this podcast doctor John West, your vice president senior fellow
at the Discovery Institute. I'm a big fan of the
Discovery Institute. So many brilliant people there, committed faithful Christians,

(02:06:07):
and I want you to talk a little bit about
the state of the Intelligent Design movement and you know,
this wonderful organization that's making a difference for time and
for eternity.

Speaker 2 (02:06:17):
Well, thank you. You know, it's a really exciting time.
And being with this, you know, for about three decades.
It's interesting that perspective because when we got started, you know,
this was the heyday i'd say, of what became known
as the new atheist in the two thousands. So even
in the nineteen nineties, you had Richard Dawkins, you had
Daniel Dannatt, all these people who were saying, the wave

(02:06:39):
of the future is scientific materialism. Darwin is true. It's
now beyond doubt. And you know there were some faithful
Christians who had been faithful all along on that, but
culturally speaking, that was certainly dominant. And what we've seen,
and I admit I give credit to Steve Barr because
he's more of an optimist than i am. I'm always
skeptic that you know, things are going to turn out

(02:07:02):
or radical change because people, you know, like just wedded
to their beliefs. But you know, he's always talked about,
you know, this cusp that we're on the cusp of
these dramatic changes, and in the last five years especially
the situation has almost completely changed. I mean, we have
gone from having all these cultural popular leaders who embraced

(02:07:22):
Darwinian materialism and atheism too. It is really hard now
to find a serious person. So now I'm not talking
about internet trolls like Professor Dave, who still invades against
you know, is a true believer in Darwin. But people
like Richard Dawkins or even you know, that quality of people,
you know, Stephen J. Gould from years ago, that caliber

(02:07:44):
of people who were wrong but were high powered Darwinian materialists.
These people have not reproduced themselves. They're not out there.
I mean, we have Jerry Coyn at the University of Chicago,
but he's a pale reflection of himself. I mean, Richard
Dawkins is now calling himself a cultural Christian. I mean,
it's just so they haven't reproduced themselves. So on the
other hand, we're having all sorts of people at the

(02:08:06):
highest levels who are expressing either interest in intelligent design
mainstreaming it. And these are not all Christians. Some of
these are still believe in a type of evolution, but
they're willing to talk about you know, ID, and willing
to treat it respectfully, and then you have the people
who have just converted into something, you know, like a
more teleological view, a purpose based view of the development

(02:08:26):
of life. And so I have to admit we're in
the midst of a mindset change. Actually at Discovery that
I have to remind our staff because we've been so
used to being the embattled minority that we've talked like
that for a long time. And this has now changed because,
like I said, once, Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultural Christian,
he's still administ and you can't find the high powered

(02:08:48):
people who have replaced him. Things have changed. And when
you have people like the dark Horse podcast Brett Weinstein,
who isn't a Christian does It's Intelligent design, but doing
a podcast saying that when he was in graduates, well
he didn't take any of the seriously. But now that
he's met Steve Byer and his colleagues, they love science
and they're raising really important questions, even though you know
he doesn't go all the way to id these are

(02:09:09):
objective factors of change. And you know let alone, Thomas Nagel,
let Alone, the guy Yale, David Gulerndner, the famous computer
scientists I mean the number of high profile people who
are now either skeptical of Darwin or at least you know,
open to conversation on design. It's just night and day. Now,
Does that mean that everyone's embrace intelligen us? I know,

(02:09:29):
you know what they're screwing now is to try to
come up with, well, what's some new materialistic way of
explaining the problem. But I think we are in a
right now. There's an open window. It's not going to
last forever, and who knows what will come on the
other side of it, where a lot of people on
the secular side are scrambling for a replacement for atheism,

(02:09:50):
atheist materialism, especially scientific atheist materialism. And so it's kind
of exciting and it does cause to change our mindset
a little bit from my just being the unbattled minority,
but to be the common sense. Oh, here's just one
little tiny microcosm that was sort of a foretaste of
this larger change. Again, in the nineteen nineties and two thousands,

(02:10:12):
one of the big pieces of evidence or Dormini evolution
was so called junk DNA. That junk DNA paradigm has
been exploded. I mean, you could count on probably your fingers.
The number of people who still defend it, because every
week almost new research is published about some function for
the non coding DNA, and so that was an early
prediction in the nineteen nineties of people like Bill Dempsky

(02:10:35):
and others that if things were designed, you probably would
expect more levels of function and you wouldn't expect massive
levels of non function. I mean, we do live in
the fallen world. There are things aren't perfect, and so
I'm not saying you wouldn't expect some of it. But
still this idea that ninety percent of our GINA was
junk doesn't fit very well within a design paradigm. And

(02:10:55):
so based on other evidence Bill Dempsty predicted in the
late ninety nine is that we should expect to find
increasing levels of function in that so called functionals DNA
LO and behold. Now that's mainstream. That's actually the scientific
consensus now.

Speaker 1 (02:11:12):
So it's exciting, Yeah, it is. And I appreciate you
on so many different levels. Obviously you're a scholar, you're
a professor, but I like the tone of your book.
I mean, what you've done is whenever you can give
leeway or give credence or credibility, or say something positive
about someone that you're very critical of. You do that,

(02:11:35):
and so I very much appreciate the tone of the book,
the courage to write a book like this. It is
a brilliant book. I highly recommend it against Stockholm syndrome Christianity.
You know, I've read it three times, so I deeply
believe in This book is available to anyone who stands
shoulder to shoulder with us in the battle for life
and truth. Your copy available at Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte,

(02:11:59):
North Carolina, code two eight two seven one. You can
also get your copy on the web at equipp dot org.
We have made good on our promise to bring someone interesting,
informative and inspirational to the podcast once again, Doctor John West,
thank you so much for your time and your expertise.

Speaker 2 (02:12:17):
Hank, thank you, it's been a real privilege to be
on with you.

Speaker 1 (02:12:21):
And thank you everyone for tuning into this edition of
the hand Gunplug podcast. If you enjoy the podcast, subscribe,
rate review. It helps a lot. Look forward to seeing
you next time with more of handk Unplug. So long
for now.

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Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why America’s Christian Leaders Are Failing — and What We Can Do About It with John West

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Stockholm Syndrome Christianity: Why America’s Christian Leaders Are Failing — and What We Can Do About It with John West