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Well, welcome to another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh, joined in studio once again by Gary Bauer, the Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the Dobson Policy Center. Gary, it’s good to have you on the broadcast again today.
It’s always great to be with you, Roger, and to be on the broadcast. This is such an important time for our country. Families are hurting, there’s a lot of anxiety.
So it’s good that we have this chance daily to share the thoughts of Dr. Dobson and our team as Americans ask a lot of important questions about what’s going on.
Well, one of the new initiatives here at the Dobson Family Institute and the Dobson Policy Center is a website that we’ve set up. It’s the Countdown to Decision 2024. It’s all about the national election and also some of the regional issues that are facing a lot of states right now and just motivating Christians who haven’t voted historically to vote.
And one of the resources that we have available at our Countdown to Decision 2024 website is a video series hosted by Joseph Backholm from Family Research Council. And this time we’re going to get into a little bit of audio from their video of a recording they did with Eric Metaxas. And Eric has become quite a voice of reason in the culture right now, pretty outspoken.
But the truth that he shares is really helping a lot of people see the American landscape for what it’s really become.
That’s a great way to put it, Roger. You know, Eric Metaxas, and I don’t use the words likely, he’s an intellectual giant. I mean, the guy brings a level of intellect to this debate that I certainly am all of.
His book, A Letter to the American Church, I hope it convicted the entire church and certainly pastors, because we’re at a time in our country that Eric compares to the 1930s in Germany, where not only did the German Christian Church not speak up against what was happening in the culture, to German families, what was happening in the schools, the indoctrination that was taking place. But worse than that, they brought into the church in Germany, the crooked cross of Nazism and put it right next to the cross of Jesus Christ. I can’t imagine and yet, Roger, in some ways there’s a lot of confused churches doing that today and there’s a lot of Christians today that say to us and to Eric Metaxas and to Dr. Dobson, you know, I’m just not interested in politics or government.
Well, guess what? Government is interested in us. So our religious liberty, our liberty to teach our children what to believe about the key issues of life, all that’s at stake on Election Day, which is why this November we’ve got to have on Election Day what some are referring to as Christian Visibility Day, as millions of Christians go to the polls and Eric talks about that very eloquently as he always does.
Well, he certainly does, Gary, and you know, that letter to the American Church book was so powerful and you mentioned earlier how it would be great if we could show it to every church in America or at least have Eric go around and have a conversation about that. Well, a couple of Christian filmmakers were so impressed with it that they made a documentary of this movie called Letter to the American Church. It really is an urgent plea for all Christians and shows those similarities that you were talking about.
Now here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we are co-sponsoring a free online streaming event of the documentary, Letter to the American Church. It’s available for the first 5,000 people who register and it’s available absolutely free. Now this is happening coming up this Thursday night, September 26th, at 6:30 p.m. Mountain Time.
And in addition to seeing the movie, you’ll also get a chance to hear some great commentary from our own Michelle Bachman here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. And you’ll hear from the film’s producers as well. Now I mentioned there are only 5,000 spots available.
So go to drjamesdobson.org/americanchurch to register. And you can do that right now. That’s drjamesdobson.org/americanchurch and be one of the 5,000 people who will be part of this online movie event watching The Letter to the American Church based on the book by Eric Metaxas.
And now let’s get into just a little bit of that snippet we were talking about. Some of the audio recorded on our recent podcast on Countdown to Decision 2024 featuring Eric Metaxas right here on this special edition of Family Talk.
As you know I wrote a book called Letter to the American Church. I wrote a sequel. The sequel is called Religionless Christianity, which spells out the rest of the story.
So if people have seen the film Letter to the American Church or read the book Letter to the American Church, I would send them to Religionless Christianity because in that book we are in a war. I say in the new book Religionless Christianity, we are in the third existential crisis of our history. The first was the Revolution.
The second was the Civil War. We are now in the middle of the third existential crisis. It’s a different kind of war, but it is all out war.
It is existential. If we fail, we will cease to exist as the nation that we have been. If we had failed in the Revolution, we would have never come into existence.
If we had failed in the Civil War, the Union would have been destroyed and the America we know would have never come into being as we see it today. We are in that kind of a crisis right now. It’s a crisis with some people would say secular atheist, but that’s really ultimately demonic as I explain in the book, Religionless Christianity, Marxism.
Marxism is by definition, not just atheistic, but anti-God. Karl Marx was a Satanist. This is the kind of stuff you don’t hear much.
And it doesn’t really matter to the larger conversation. I’m just throwing it in for context, but cultural Marxism is at war with God. If you know the history of Marxism, I mean, even if you go back to the French Revolution before you would call it Marxism, but it’s a demonic, secular spirit.
It’s a spiritual war that’s manifested in the natural. You see it in the Bolshevik Revolution with Lenin and you see it with Stalin. You see it with Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
It’s a demonic spirit, a power, a principality, utterly evil and wicked. We’re seeing it manifested right now, and that’s what we’re dealing with. The Church has the job given to us by God, to go to war against evil.
The Lord has saved us for that purpose. He’s appointed us to do that. As I say in Letter to the American Church, and I expand in Religionless Christianity, the Church often fails to do what God calls it to do.
The prophets say, do this, and the Church says, no, no, we have reasons not to do it. So that’s exactly what happened in Germany when Hitler was rising, which is another demonic thing. The Church said, no, thank you.
And the evil that followed was beyond belief. That’s exactly where we are right now in the United States of America. You can be ignorant and serving the devil.
The devil is happy for you to be ignorant and to go along with his plan. You don’t need to be on board and say, I want to serve Satan. He’s much subtler than that.
And so there are some people who really are openly at war with God. But we know that the enemy is subtle. He comes as an angel of light.
And so many Christians tragically have been fooled. The scripture is clear that believers can be deceived. That is what we’re seeing right now.
Christians are often very naïve. There’s ignorance and then there’s naiveté. Not to understand you’re dealing with satanic evil.
And you have to be wise as serpents. I think a lot of Christians think it’s holier to be wise as doves. No, that’s not what Jesus said.
He said wise as serpents. So we’re supposed to recognize evil. Jesus didn’t come to make your life better.
He came to defeat sin and death and satan and hell. And I think sometimes in America we think, well, you know, yeah, I guess so. But we don’t really believe in evil on that level.
We don’t believe in sin and death and hell. We’ve just kind of moved on and everything’s fine. And if we’re winsome and friendly, that’s not what the scripture says.
And I think all these terrible things that have been happening are meant by God to be a wake up call to the church. I mean, there are no different versions of Christianity. There is only Christianity.
And Christianity is a living relationship with the Lord, which means the Holy Spirit sometimes might guide me to pick up a stone and to kill Goliath and cut off his head. Other times, the Holy Spirit might guide me to pray for someone on the street and to love them. The Holy Spirit is alive.
God is alive. He’s a person. And if we’re sensitive to him and don’t have a hide-bound theology that says, I got to do this all the time, if we are sensitive to God, which is the whole point of us having a relationship with him, we will discern when we are supposed to do X and when we’re supposed to do Y.
And I think that the problem always arises when Christians don’t do that, when they have a dead relationship, a non-relationship, the German Christians in Germany in the thirties, many of them had that kind of relationship. They say, Oh, the scripture says this and this and this and this. Well, the scripture says a lot of things.
You have to interpret the scripture and you have to say, Lord, what are you saying now? And that’s what Bonhoeffer did. Anybody who’s read my Bonhoeffer book sees over and over and over how Bonhoeffer changes.
The scripture doesn’t change, the Lord doesn’t change. But Bonhoeffer’s discernment of what do we do now changes. And many in the church in Germany at the time, they couldn’t bear that.
They wanted it to be the same thing. And they would say things, lies, demonic lies, like, oh, we don’t do politics. If slavery is on the ballot, do you say, well, we don’t want to take a position on slavery.
You’re serving the devil if you believe that. There’s nothing in the scripture that says we’re not supposed to be political. Maybe we’re not supposed to make an idol of politics.
We’re not supposed to make an idol of anything. You’re not supposed to make an idol of loving your spouse or your family. But it doesn’t mean you’re not supposed to do that.
And so, there’s a lot of deception, a lot of deception in the church today. On the other hand, there are a lot of people waking up. There are a lot of people, including people we wouldn’t even think of as Christians, that are looking around and thinking, what’s happening doesn’t make any sense.
It seems evil. It seems like maybe God is the only answer to these things. So, I am ultimately hopeful.
But there are many Christians right now, many pastors, many Christian leaders that are deeply deceived. And it’s a kind of a nightmare to see it. But I have to say it.
And I pray that some of them would wake up, would understand the times in which we live. I actually wonder whether they’re Christians. If they are Christians, they’re getting this very, very wrong.
And let’s be clear, God is a judge. God will hold you accountable because patriots have died. Christian patriots and pagan patriots have bled and died so that we could advocate for what we believe is right and true in politics.
We’re not living in the first century. We’re not living in communist Russia or China. We’ve been given a gift that many of us, we don’t deserve the gift because we don’t take it seriously.
It’s an amazing gift to advocate for God’s purposes. Human lives are being destroyed. Young men and women have been propagandized and bullied into thinking they should cut off body parts.
This is some of the most wicked stuff we have ever seen. And in many cases, the church is silent. In many cases, the church does not want to take the trouble to speak the truth.
So they say, well, we just need to love them. Well, the way you love them might not be the way you think. The way you love them might be speaking really clearly on this.
That’s just one subject. The idea of erasing our national borders and allowing in millions and millions of strangers is going to bring unspeakable harm to many human beings that the Lord loves. Christians are on the hook for those policies.
If we don’t stand against that, the fentanyl flooding in, destroying families, the sex trafficking, child rape. If you’re a Christian and you say, well, I think we need to welcome the stranger, you’re actually encouraging child rape. Have you ever been around anything like that?
Are you familiar with the cruelty and the violence of drug cartels and how they rape people? This is evil. There’s no other way to say it.
It’s evil. And we have been given the gift of advocating for God’s policies and for electing people who are going to stand against this evil. We have had prominent Christian voices like John Maxwell, like Rick Warren, huge names in the Christian world saying Christians shouldn’t be political.
Let me tell you, that is wrong. That is not biblical. And they are harming millions of people.
They have to understand there’s a time when it’s a moral issue. Corruption in our government, our government trying to censor us, standing against free speech, standing against fair elections, if you don’t stand against that, you are guilty. There’s the famous phrase attributed to Bonhoeffer.
I don’t think he said it, but it’s silence in the face of evil is itself evil. When the church is silent in the face of evil, the Lord in the last day will separate the sheep and the goats. And he will say to many, depart from me.
I never knew you. It’s a chilling thing. And Christians in America today need to think about those words.
Is it possible the Lord will say that to you because you were not listening? You did not have a personal relationship and you were not open to doing what God called you to do because you were afraid, because you were simply unwilling to obey him. If Christian pastors are not at war with all of the evil that we’re seeing, if they are censoring themselves in the pulpit because they’re afraid of losing their 501c3 status, they are cowards.
I want to be really clear that this is a test right now. This is not like, well, let’s see what happens in five years. This is the test.
And there are many that don’t get this. And I say this to them as a warning. I beg you, brothers and sisters, consider what I’m saying.
I wrote a letter to the American Church to speak to those folks, to reason with them and to say, this is not some political screed. On the contrary, what does the scripture say? What is the Lord saying to us?
Imagine if you were a pastor in Germany in the 30s, do we know how many good pastors got it wrong and for the rest of their lives, lived with the burden of guilt that they opened the door to the hell of murdering millions of Jews and millions of others that was on them and they lived with that for the rest of their lives. I’m saying this to my brothers and sisters. We’re at that moment right now.
If you look the other way or you have some convenient excuse, God is a judge. He’s not fooled by the fig leaf of your theological excuse. He knows what is right and wrong.
He expects you to hear from him and to obey him and to trust him and to rejoice in trusting him. When we’re called to the battle, it’s not like, oh no, we’re called to the battle. The Lord has created us for the battle and he will be with us.
And the meaning of our life comes in being in the battle for God’s purposes. And so those who think there can be some third way, they can carve out some religiously neutral space and not be political. I want to say clearly that’s a lie from the pit of hell.
That is not where we are at this point. Many believe it, many don’t want not to believe it. They’re going to cling to it no matter what.
It is shameful, it is wrong, and human beings’ lives are going to be destroyed because of those in the church advocating in this way. These people like David French, like Russell Moore, those are a couple of prominent names. They are so in bed with the elites, so willing to say anything to curry favor with the elites as though that might give them more of a hearing with the gospel.
Well, I don’t know what kind of dead gospel you’re going to be preaching. I don’t know what they’re going to allow you to preach when these cultural elites finally have the power that you are giving them. It is a chilling thing and this is a moment for the church.
It’s like nothing we’ve seen in the United States of America. And so that’s why I think many are just drifting along because they don’t know about the evilness of evil. We’re seeing it for the first time in our lives, in some ways for the first time in our history.
This is the moment that the Lord is calling to his church to wake up. And the question is how many will wake up? Will enough wake up in time?
Powerful words from Eric Metaxas today here on this special edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh back in studio with Gary Bauer, our Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at the James Dobson Policy Center. And the entire conversation is up at drjamesdobson.org/countdown to decision 2024.
Eric Metaxas, he really kind of puts it right between the eyes for us in terms of what the church is facing coming up to November 5th.
Well, he certainly did, Roger. And I wish we could have him pay a visit to every church in America. We are at such a critical time right now.
Look, let me mention something that is a plus that could quickly become a minus. I’m told by experts that right now, the Supreme Court of the United States is more pro religious liberty, more likely to defend religious liberty than any time in the last 50 to 75 years. And there’s a very simple reason for that.
It’s because President Donald Trump had the chance to fill three Supreme Court vacancies. And the three justices he added to the court are regularly part of a five or six vote majority defending our religious liberty. Now, several justices are up in age.
Presidents appoint justices to the court. Senates confirm them. The left in America is very upset about all this because they want religious Americans to have to bow to the demands, among other things, of the LGBTQ movement.
And so it’s imperative that in future Supreme Court vacancies, we get to appoint justices that believe in the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly. Both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have endorsed a plan to increase the size of the Supreme Court so that they could put more judges on that would not support religious liberty. So this election is extremely important.
People, when they go to the polls, Christians need to be thinking about that. What politicians more pro-life? Which ones more pro-abortion?
Which one will defend religious liberty through their court appointments? Which one will undermine religious liberty? You can just go down the list.
You know, Roger, Eric said a lot about the Christian Church in Germany and how ultimately those pastors that didn’t do anything, they had to live with the knowledge that their lack of action contributed to the horror of both what happened in Germany and what ended up being a world war. So I can’t impress strongly enough. Every Christian that is in church on Sunday and ends up going to work on Monday needs to be in the voting booth on Tuesday if we’re going to save our country.
Absolutely and you’ll find resources when you go to drjamesdobson.org/countdown to Decision 2024 that will help you. Obviously we can’t speak into all 50 states elections and there are some states that are going to lean one way or the other. We know that they’re really not in play, but there are about 10 states, which is 20% of the country that are swing states.
And talk about why it’s important, especially for those of us who are hearing this conversation right now, who are in swing states to really take up the mantle and get out and vote. If not, on November 5th, if there’s early voting available to you, take advantage of that as well, but make sure your vote is cast and counted.
Well, Roger, you really summarize. I mean, these swing states, places like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, some of these states, for example, have very large Christian populations. And if all those Christians of all races show up and vote, they can swing those states toward pro-life, pro-family, pro-religious liberty candidates, including the important presidential race that we’re all watching and following.
And that, those states going for one candidate or another will determine who wins the electoral college. And that will determine who takes the oath of office in January at this very important time for our country.
This is a very critical time in American history and we as Americans who are also Christians need to be in the polling place on Tuesday, November 5th or register to vote early and go take part in the elections early as well. Now the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute is co-sponsoring a free online streaming event by the way based on Eric Metaxas’ outstanding book, The Letter to the American Church. You heard an excerpt from it earlier on the program today.
The first 5,000 registrants who go to drjamesdobbson.org/americanchurch and register, it’s a free event, all you have to do is sign up, can watch a special streaming of the screening of the documentary that was made based on this book. Again, Letter to the American Church by Eric Metaxas will be screening this documentary in its entirety for free Thursday, September 26th at 630 p.m. Mountain Time. In addition to the film, you’ll also hear from the film’s producers and have a special message from our own Michelle Bachman as well.
So go to drjamesdobson.org/americanchurch to register. That’s drjamesdobson.org/americanchurch to register. As Gary mentioned a moment ago, this Eric Metaxas presentation is one of several that you’ll find at a special website that we’ve set up to help you become more informed as a voter this election season.
It is Countdown to Decision 2024, featuring Eric Metaxas, Dr. Del Tackett, Kirk Cameron and more. You’ll find all of their videos and their reels too, little shorts that you can share with your friends and family members to encourage them to vote and to vote biblically. When you go to drjamesdobson.org/countdown-to-decision-2024, you’ll find all those videos, voter guides and more.
In addition, we know that children have been under attack and last week here on Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, we heard a special presentation from Riley Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer in women’s swimming who was forced to give up her space on the podium when a biological male by the name of William Thomas, who swims as a female, Leah Thomas, when he and she actually tied in a specific event. This has led her to become a very outspoken advocate, not only just for women’s rights and women’s equality in sports, but actually for protecting children as well. And Dr. James Dobson, along with our JDFI president, Joe Warsack, Dr. Owen Strand from the Dobson Culture Center and our Gary Bauer, the Senior Director of the Dobson Policy Center, have all drafted something called a Declaration to Protect Children to show our support for children and biological gender differences that God has ordained.
You can sign this Declaration to Protect Children when you go to drjamesdobson.org/protect the children. That’s drjamesdobson.org/protectdash the dash children. Great resources all available for free at our website.
Well, I’m Roger Marsh. Thanks so much for listening today. Join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.
This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
