America Divided | Douglas Wilson

every society has a god of the system so I want to argue that the god of the system needs to be the true God the god that parliaments and congresses can't reach because otherwise if your highest moral ethical Authority is under the sun inside the world then the god of the system is Dimas the people if Dimas is the god of the system then you have to be prepared for an ethical system that changes radically and arbitrarily foreign [Music] with Douglas Wilson in Moscow Idaho a farming area of the United States fantastic crops all the things that interest me as a farmer I've got to say but he's pastor at Christchurch in this town he's the chairman of the board of new Saint Andrews College uh he's involved in Christian Media both old school and alternative media he served in the submarine service of the U.S Navy he earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees one in philosophy One In classical studies he has an M.A in philosophy he's a senior fellow at new Saint Andrews College where he's taught greek latin theology rhetoric and where he currently serves as the Director of the master of arts program he's also taught many classes at logos School a classical Christian School in Idaho where he helped uh put the program together he's authored almost 80 books on a variety of educational and devotional topics he's also been featured in two documentaries including one in which he debated famously Christopher Hitchens on whether the world would be better off without religion Douglas is a gifted Christian apologist and culture critic he's active on YouTube he writes prolifically online he's been published at the Gospel Coalition and The Huffington Post well Doug thank you very much for giving us your time great to be able to talk to you yeah happy to do it now as an American just brought it to me America when I made the comment that it looks distressingly divided he said it's divided all right all the way to the bottom right now this is a concern for me as an Australian not only because I admire your country but because you are actually still the leaders of the Free World of America is not able to run a coherent policy because it doesn't know what it is internally that's really challenging right it seems to me at the bottom what you've got here is completely opposing World Views now clashing for dominance in the marketplace completely almost irreconcilable right so now I see you as an Exemplar of what I would have seen of that sort of art style quite straightforward very strong commitment to Christianity right so I've got to start by asking you why you're a Christian what does it mean why is it important I I would answer that question on two levels so on one level I'm a Christian because I had Godly Christian parents who brought me up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord the way the Bible requires and I'm a Christian because my mother spanked me diligently and I needed it because I'm a I'm a sinner so that's that's one reason I'm a Christian is I was privileged to grow up in a home where my parents really loved God and they really acted like it um so that's sort of an autobiographical reason but it's uh and it's a good start it's a head start but then when you grow up and you start encountering other World Views and beliefs you can't just say well I like I'm a Christian because I like it or I'm used to it so I um when I joined the Navy which is the U.S Navy which is not exactly a Bastion of righteousness so I I began to encounter other ways of navigating the world which were antithetical to what I believed and I knew that I had to stand on my own feet as a Christian I I couldn't just take my parents Christianity all the way to the Grave I had to figure it out for myself and and read through and think through the issues for myself so when I was a young man I uh I began reading diligently and thinking diligently about the the big issues and then when I got out of the Navy I majored in philosophy because I wanted to be a Christian apologist I wanted to defend the faith to unbelievers and that meant I had to understand the other World Views that were out there and um so I'm a I'm a Christian because and this is the build up I'm a Christian because I'm I am um fully convinced that Jesus rose from the dead and if a if a person in this world is crucified by the authorities and comes back from the dead three days later then whatever else we say about that person I would want to say that he is the king he is Lord and that's the fundamental Christian confession that Jesus is Lord so he he died on the cross he was buried for three days and came back from the dead and he was born to die um so that's that's the message that we see at the very beginning of Jesus life his mother is told that a sword will pierce her heart also he was given a human body because he needed something to sacrifice on our behalf so I'm I'm a Christian because I have come to the conviction that the central claims of Christianity are true and true is an objective reality that would have been true had I never been born would have been true whether I like it or not would have been true had I not been brought up in a Christian home so I believe in the objective absolute Rock Bottom truth of the Central Christian claims Jesus is the Lord used to sacrifice for our sins he was born at Bethlehem in order to die for the sins of the world which are many now this is really interesting because let's go back to a divided America divided to the very core unable to find a way like so many Western countries it seems to resolve your differences right but one of the things I admire about the way you go about things is that you have managed your differences with somebody who's at the opposite end of the spectrum we first heard about you in Australia I first heard about you Collision right uh you know about you and and Christopher Hitchens interacting so you represent one end of that worldview Spectrum he represented the other and as of course was a great hero we all regret his death to uh to um cancer of the throat but you managed to build a relationship and to debate one another respectfully pretty Spirit at a time it's pretty willing right but that's pretty interesting you actually modeled how you could get on and have a conversation and respect one another as human beings right Christopher it seems to me can I ask you on that uh Christopher Hitchens and I got along famously we got along really really well we wrote a book together uh yes uh uh debate uh together that's what began our journey together then we made a movie um the documentary Collision which was recorded during our book release tour and we spent a good bit of time together and we he was a gentleman to me I've mentioned to you before the only time he was ever rude to me was on stage part as part of his debating uh style but in person he was affable and we got we got along very very well and from and his world view was antithetical to mine he's he was an atheist materialist and I'm a traditional Christian but one of the tenants one of the ethical tenets of the Christian faith is Jesus says that we're to love our enemies wow Christopher Hitchens was a personal friend but a worldview enemy and I need to be willing to sit down with anybody and talk about anything and in the current divide in America the unwillingness to talk is largely coming from the cancel culture side the people who who would who have tried to shut me down or shot me down or cancel me or to censor me are all people that I would be happy to have a beer with I'd be happy to go go to lunch with um and talk about these things they're unwilling to reciprocate uh and that's the nature of the divide it used to be that you could have two different World Views in principle but we you still had enough civility to to communicate this is what I'm driving at right um but that civility has now gone and and I think it's largely unilateral largely aimed at traditional Christians because it's traditional Christianity that that creates the Bedrock for that civility right if uh if there is no God and we're just uh Concourse of atoms banging down through history there's no reason there's all there is is power yeah that's that's one of the things that's very notable now about the people who reject Christianity in our culture is that everything's about the pursuit of power so as I said what you model the ability to get on personally at the same time as you vehemently disagreed in terms of your intellectual approach to life right is needed more than ever because the things that divide us are greater than ever right but we've got less confidence in democracy than we've ever had as a means of clearing those differences right and at the same time there's this level of of judgmentalism and of hatred and of rejection of anybody who dares to disagree I would have thought Christopher Hitchens would have despaired at where we've got to would that be fair I think that would be fair because he was an atheist of the old school yeah right um and some of the newer breed are are atheists that um that I think are just going with the current Zeitgeist of a power play all right we're going to shut down everybody it's about power it's about power with the thing that people don't realize is that things like things that we traditionally value an open Society a free exchange of ideas an absence of ideological censorship religious liberty things like that all of these are there's no neutrality anywhere all of these things are fundamentally religious values so if you look at the different religions that exist in the world certain values arise out of these um different religious systems whether it's Islam or Christianity or Hinduism or secular materialism these worldviews produce certain sets of values and the thing that's very clear now is that secular materialism does not generate the value of the free exchange of ideas the had America been founded by secular materialist atheists we wouldn't have had a First Amendment we wouldn't have had uh the ex the the uh welcoming attitude toward religious liberty of different denominations and World Views being welcome that that would not have been generated by the the world view that we're after so the reason I want Christian values to be the Bedrock of our social order is I want really I want religious liberty for atheists and I I trust the Christian system with their Liberty more than I trust their system with my Liberty that's an interesting perspective I should say there'll be I know there'll be people who are thinking these issues through there are many atheists who I think would belong squarely in the Hitchens camp where sensible debate and interaction matters and you don't just blithely walk away from it and shut it down and you don't resort to nastiness right but I mean I found his book more much more challenging than some of the other atheists right I've got to say that these arguments God it's not great yeah yeah yeah I thought here is a man grappling with the great issues he's not being tried he's arguing he's mounting some arguments that were really very challenging what do you what lay at the heart of his atheism that you found hardest to tackle if I can put it that way where was he at most convincing because I understand he would say to you and I've seen him I saw him I've seen him do this on he's gone now of course but he would say that's a tough one you know yeah you know I don't deny that one's I've got to Grapple with what what was it that in his saying his attitude that made you grapple and think again I would say that his toughest argument and I have to be honest that he didn't get to me on a personal level where I I went home and thought Oh my gosh he's rocked my world but there there were things that he would say and do on stage where I had to think think fast all right so he was uh he was very quick on us very quick on his feet very um pointed and very witty so he could he could get a laugh from the all right uh from the the audience he could get a laugh from a Christian audit from a Christian audience and you say okay that's a all right I've got to deal with him I've got to deal with the argument and I've got to deal with his rhetorical genius so he was a rhetorical genius and he was quick he was very quick uh as far as the substance of his arguments probably the um the things that that he cared the most about um were and I noticed if I said something the things the two things that would get him going more than anything else would be if I referred to the fatherhood of God um because I think Christopher was driven by fatherlessness right the so if I mentioned the fatherhood of God or if I mentioned the vicarious death of Christ on the cross and those would those topics would get him going and I would say that his representation I'm I'm a calvinist which means I believe in the exhaustive sovereignty of God I believe that God is Sovereign over all things and the toughest challenge that he could Mount to me would be he would represent the fatherhood of God as sort of a religiously based North Korean totalitarian system right where God's in everything and the surveillance cameras are everywhere and you you can't make a move the hairs of your head are all numbered it's it's the totalitarian state that's swollen beyond all recognition and that's what he would attack as the fatherhood of God right the dear leader and that's a tough one to answer it's a complicated theological subject how do you have an exhaustively Sovereign God and free agency and responsibility on the part of creatures that's a that's a challenging subject to begin with and then when you're being questioned by a hostile atheist who understands how challenging it is and is going after you on that point that's that's a steep climb the rest of the world would see America as a particularly religious country it remained deeply Christian uh research shows that you know many more people in America still call themselves Christians after Europe but pretty much given up on real Faith Great Britain my own country now where in the last census less than half identified as Christian um not so in America you know you've still got a very vibrant Christian um you know slab to the community very you know I've seen some very full churches in this place but the divisions here seem deeper still than any other how has this happened given the emphasis in Christianity uh on modeling the very thing you've been talking about respectful disagreement and ongoing debate rather than canceling one another right let's try and unpack what Earth has happened in this country um there are numerous culprits but one of I would say one of the central culprits for us would be the conviction that many Christians had that the public schools or the government schools for our kids Were Somehow on our side and at the beginning they were so in the early 19th century when the common schools or the public schools were first getting established um it's quite striking that when the the great Roman Catholic immigration flood in the mid 19th century happened from Irish fleeing Irish probably right Irish immigration that sort um the Catholic church in um in America formed their own parochial school system in the mid 19th century as they did in Australia all right well they did that because here the public schools were so Protestant and Evangelical so uh Public Schools when they started the the leadership of them was Unitarian and Progressive but the schools were controlled by local school boards and the populations in the Heartland were Evangelical and Protestant and so the public schools had catechisms in them they had the King James Bible they had Protestant prayers and the Roman Catholics who arrived started the parochial school system not because of secularism in the schools but because of Evangelical protestantism in the schools they were tax supported schools but they were decidedly Christian and I I remember as a school boy when I was a young boy uh praying being led in prayer the beginning of the school day by a government school teacher and that was the last thing to go so R.L Dabney and then in the 19th century said predicting this he said Christians then must prepare themselves for the following results all Bibles prayers and catechisms will ultimately be driven out of the schools and I remember the last of them being driven out of school to pray the prayer but the the allegiance that many Christians had to the school that their grandfather went to yeah these are our schools and the Takeover of the state boards of education and the teachers colleges and the training of the teachers has been gradual and slow until suddenly a lot of parents woke up and they said what are you doing what are you doing like in the in the recent round of agitated parents at school board meetings illustrates this principle some Christians the the movement to private education has been really significant starting in the 8th 1980s uh but in the last two years it's accelerated to a major wave so it went from something like 2 million students being homeschooled in America a couple years ago to about six million now really yeah so a lot of kids the public schools are hemorrhaging now and then a lot of the parents who are staying behind in the public schools are in revolt against the critical theory and all the stuff that's being taught in the schools uh but the reason we are in this position I think is because the the college students who are Bernie supporters the college students who want Socialism or who want uh to adopt all this critical theory this neo-fascism those who those who those people who want those things were educated somewhere they were taught or Not educated somewhere or they were they kind of been taught the history right and because all those young people thinking the answer is socialism they can't they can't have been taught history it has not worked anyway right and you can't counter um the thousands of hours in a secular school system where every class presupposes that God if he exists is irrelevant to what we're doing here right we we just ignore him um you can't have uh that many thousands of hours of inculcation and catechetical instruction in the tenets of this secular faith and have it countered effectively by a 20-minute sermon once a week yeah because I suppose the average kid I read somewhere in America you know your State education system still what 80 90 of your kids go through it so it's much lower in Australia friendly enough uh over a third of Australian kids are educated outside the public system okay it's quite different but it's an enormous monolith isn't it a state-owned sector I think it's the largest bus fleet in the world yeah and those yellow buses and uh you know the average kid's spending 16 000 hours of their lives before they leave school in the classroom right that's a lot of indoctrination and and the parents who are blately assuming that the kids were being taught Reading Writing and arithmetic the way their grandfather was in that same building um have had their Illusions um recently destroyed and I think so I think that that's where a big part of this division has come from and the the uh I've recently read uh I really liked Oz Guinness's framing device of the the antithesis lies between the revolution of 1776 and the revolution of 1789. the American Revolution and the French Revolution the French Revolution he says that they represent two Different World Views entirely and I think that that is very true and what produced the American model of Freedom the other 10 years of chaos before Napoleon ended it but a lot of damage was already done because Marx particularly picked up he liked the French Revolution it was a good thing yeah so you had the moused revolutions right in Russia and in China which have visited Untold misery and death and pain around the world so the contrast is very Stark yeah and if you look at the 19th century as the century of Revolution uh kicking off in the late 1700s with the French Revolution and just bookended on the other end by the Russian Revolution and all the foment in between and 100 million dead right you mentioned they can't have been taught history this collectivism has resulted in an enormous pile of bodies uh so that's one way and I would call what the way of death it's it's the way of death and the way of death and slavery uh they either kill you or they enslave you and there's no um there's no real option for you and the only alternative is the structure of form and freedom together because Anarchy is no answer to collectivism because Anarchy is doesn't have the ability to muster any kind of resistance at all because if you have an anarchistic Society each individual is a singular atom and they they cannot stand against the Juggernaut of the collective um and so what happens is if you if if you encourage atomistic individualism uh by encouraging pot smoking encouraging pornography encouraging do what you feel you've got all these people it's like a big sack full of BBS and all these um libertine policies are Greece you know poor oil in there greasing the babies and it's like a bean bag chair you can it has no structural rigidity there's no it's manipulable easily manipulable but a Christian Society is molecular and it's complex molecules form churches denominations families regions towns it's these are complex molecules that have the capacity to stand up to to the collective and and there's form and there's free but there's in this system in the in the way of 1776 there's a balance between structure and Liberty that's a delicate balance and you maximize freedom but you realize you have to have a certain structure for for the freedom to operate and to ensure that the tyranny of the mob correct is is not let free right because the mob can behave with unbelievable tyranny right and nobody know you know uh lynch mobs are or Twitter mops French Revolutionary 99 right when they get the wind in their sales uh individual rights go out the window and and so I'm I'm concerned for Liberty uh not libertinism not license yeah but Liberty and the the thing that is interesting to me is the both the left and the right at least in our political debates are saying that they want freedom right um abortion Advocates say they want reproductive freedom well uh but we have different definitions of Freedom operating the freedoms that they want us to have are freedoms that could be exercised in a six by eight prison cell yeah I could have I could have pots smuggled into me in a prison cell I could have porn in a prison cell I could I can be immoral in a prison cell um the freedom that I want people to have is the freedom to start a business employ people move around the country uh uh earn your living spend what you've earned on what you want you know Freedom the freedom of a free man to uh to not answer to the state conscience versus Constable yeah very good yes it's not mine yeah it was one of your fellow Americans yeah you know you exercise your conscience as good citizens you don't need as many constables if you don't you'll need more constables yeah so this this ties in with something that our second President John Adams once said uh and it was just on the nose he said our constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people it is wholly unfit for any other so uh the our Constitution which I think is a glorious document um if you give it to a nation of uh people who are slaves of sin who you know who are slaves to their vices and and they can't govern themselves according to that document that document won't help them and which we have found out in our vain attempts at nation building around the the world you can't go into a peop to a nation where they have no history of Christian personal responsibility give them a document like the Constitution yeah and say here do this I think we're all a bit naive about Iraq in that regard yeah for a good example here why don't you all become Jeffersonian Democrats because the preconditions weren't right they wouldn't reached the point right where they understood that model of democracy versus if you like theocracy right there's another part of my takeout from what I was Guinness has been writing that strikes me as really relevant I know it's true in my country which is that since the end of the second world war you know the overcoming of tyranny and so on and so forth the rules-based system in our part of the World oversighted by the Americans the Western Pacific is prosperous because the Americans have kept the peace since then but then the falling of the Berlin Wall democracies run out very comfortable it seems like it's an Endless Summer or has until we all started to hate each other right and that's perhaps created an environment where the mats through the left an actual term used by people who dislike their institutions and so forth has allowed to and you know as you've alluded to push its way through the education system undermine and I think this is important to the point where we lack confidence in our leaders we lack confidence worse in the institutions of our freedom that they serve in and now we no longer understand or believe in or we're actually hostile to the underlying concepts of Freedom that gave rise to those institutions so we've been satiated it's going to go on forever nothing's going to threaten us particularly in America you're so big you're so powerful um has created an environment where we've been satiated not alert not switched onto the dangers yes do you think that's fair I think it's um entirely fair so in the second world war we were fighting the Nazis and and Japan we were fighting the uh the Axis powers and after the war we we shifted to the Soviet threat the Soviets were fighting Germany the same time we were we were co-belligerents not allies so we shifted to a policy of containment the Cold War so and I'm a Cold War Kid I grew up in the Cold War um this I grew up in Annapolis Maryland and uh school I was in used to have nuclear war drills so you know we'd go down in the basement and settle on the wall and yeah so it was a um it was a thing right so we had that lasted we had an identifiable adversary and a reason for doing what we're doing until the uh Berlin Wall went down and the Soviet Union disintegrated and then the danger is is this um when there are no more dragons to fight and and you succeeded you run a great risk of becoming the Dragon so uh We've successfully fought the Nazis and we successfully fought the Communists but the in the in World War II in the time of World War II there were certain um leftist thinkers of the Frankfurt School who fled the Nazis and they came to the United States and um set up shop in California New York with the deliberate intent of undermining conference in the institutions of Freedom correct as a precursor right to Bringing Down Western Democratic capitalism so planting it with another form of Marxism so lent Lenin was a violent revolutionary he wanted there was a doctrinaire Marxist view of the the dialectic would result in the revolts of the proletariat and then you know then it would be violently accomplished and there was an Italian I think he was an Italian uh gramsky was a communist a leftist to spend some time in in prison and his followers wanted to argue for what they called the Long March through the institutions and that strategy the Frankfurt School of thought leftist thought came here to America and they employed that strategy and have very successfully conducted their Long March their leftist critical theory marched through the institutions they've captured the universities seminaries publishing houses media K-12 education and not only that they've captured all of these institutions and they still think of themselves as the resistance right it's just mind about mind-boggling the real resistance is out in Heartland America where people still go to the state fair and the rodeo and and have small businesses and are and are trying to live an ordinary um blue-collar civilized life and yet everything uh the The Establishment is now hostile to them because this long march to the institutions was enormously successful and it finally got to the point where the people in those institutions decided to make their move and you know it began with the Roe v Wade decision 73 then the burgerfeld decision was another the legalizing same-sex marriages what they call marriages I call it same-sex Mirage it's not it's not a marriage but that is being crammed down our throats and belatedly a lot of people woke up and said we have to start doing something and I regard the traditionalist Americans as numerous really upset and angry and are like sheep without a Shepherd there there's no clear identifiable leadership um from the churches from political leaders um it's basically a lot of people are are bothered and this how can they be doing this this is America but they're doing it Lincoln there's nobody uh yet I pray that God will raise someone up who can articulate the vision clearly and winsomely uh now we have we have spokesmen we have people uh who who can yell and yell effectively and uh this is this discontent is the only possible thing that could explain the election of Someone Like Donald Trump um and we look we need someone to throw in the breach we need we need to we need to do something and uh we've got cancer so we'll try this radical new drug we don't know whether it'll work but we're on so much in so much trouble we might as well give it a go yeah yeah that's for that's the best illustration I think I've heard of of um Trump's success or his election in 2016 was Trump is toxic he really is toxic but it's sort of like a chemotherapy this cancer is killing us and chemotherapy poisons the body in the hope of poisoning the cancer more than it poisons the healthy part right so uh Trump is toxic and he's got all kinds of problems um but the thing that's killing us is not him and he and and so that I see it as as at best a stop Gap measure of traditionalist Americans who are caught flat-footed at the at the development of of these two Americas I've been very comfortable for a long time right and all seems like I'd go on forever seems like we thought it was just going to just go on forever but it doesn't um and if the only thing I need to do to have a garden Full Of Weeds is nothing if I just I just have to sit there and what happened is we were so cozy and so comfortable that we just did nothing and this goes back to Edmund Burke's great observation the only thing that's necessary for the Triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing and that's what's happened over the last half century is a lot of good men thought that we could just put this thing on cruise control and just go down the road merrily and everything would take care of itself but it turns out this is a fallen world and nothing takes care of itself one of the things that people who know America will tell you including our former High Commissioner Kim Beasley uh in Australia who's a man I've got enormous respect for and in a conversation with him he made this point he said in the rest of the world on our televisions we see what's happening in the big cities mainly on the coast it misses Middle America geographically as much as socially that the heartland of America yeah is still different and it's an unbelievable number of Americans who as you say were not necessarily supporting an individual as reacting to what they saw as the killing off of their country one of our names for it is people call it heart the Heartland or red State America another name for it is flyover country it's like yeah so if you're going to fly from New York to California it's a you can get on the plane and get off the plane and have lunch right but there's a huge quadrant there if you if you look at uh election electoral Maps they'll give you red state blue State um and you but you can get maps where they break it down by County red counties blue counties and there the the red is overwhelming and blue blue hot spots uh here in the cities and the coasts and it's two different ways of thinking two different ways of functioning two different two different World Views and the the two are not consistent with each other this yeah I'll tell you something that jumps out at me about this it's incredibly patronizing it's it's it's like a really ugly class based system it's almost Marie Antoinette living the High Life saying let those peasants eat cake yeah uh but the point I wanted to drill into here is that there's almost a despising uh by the Elites in particular of those who are in the red state so to speak and yet they're what Victor Davis Hanson might call the muscles of the country they're the farmers they're the people carting the grain around we're in a rural area of uh USA as we speak they're the people processing the food they're the people delivering it to your doorstep when you're in isolation during covert they're the people that are doing the nursing if you get sick they're the people doing the policing that are under attack I mean what an irony that you defund the police out of your political correctness when the people most likely to call them are vulnerable black women and what an irony that it then produces a desire for more Americans to go and get guns in case the police can't defend them right which is also happening this attack on the people who actually make the country work without saying growing alongside them and saying you're obviously troubled can we sit down you did it with Christopher Hitchens why can't political leaders sit down and say we need to have a dialogue I need to walk a mile on your shoes maybe covert's made that even worse it's highlighted the the the the the the the scorn for the people who actually keep our society together and do the manual work yeah but what it highlight the the covert Panic really did highlight it because it was amazing to me how um in the masking orders it was in the lockdowns and the masking orders where they said we want to regulate or dictate to you your behavior in every detail of life right and when you go outside where everybody else interacts with you you must have a mask on well in here in our little town uh Moscow is a microcosm of what's Happening all over the country you know it's just a little tiny Moscow Idaho Moscow Idaho we're not in the other places not at the moment it wouldn't be very safe right so uh but so what what this means is it back it was five years ago I could go through my day buying things at the store and getting gas for my my truck and I could interact with people all day and not have any idea of where they stood on on the various issues that I would read about in my news feed yeah but what happened with the masking orders is everybody I meet is either made a decision to mask up or not mask up everybody is either compliant or not compliant right and the people who are wearing a mask encounter me not not wearing a mask or the person not wearing a mask encounter some and we are invited to make a judgment and the Judgment might be erroneous but it's amazing to me how fast masking became a political flag all right you've got to wear this lapel pin that says I I support the government and you got you you guys who are not masked are obviously Rebels and um and uh Libertines so and that has helped polarize things so all of a sudden uh we have oh tell a little story here during the masking um era um some of our uh our our private Christian School here stayed open through the through the lockdown our our church continued to worship through the through the lockdown and we didn't require masks of the people who came to worship and so there was that a lot of tension in the town over that there was one photograph of our church worshiping on the front page of the newspaper okay look at these Reckless people look at what these Reckless people are doing some of my uh some of the students at our school logos School uh one of their teachers had a birthday or uh and so they went over to a local grocery store nearby grocery store to get some small present some candy or something for them and they were just there visiting quietly and a lady in a mask came up and just chewed them out just how dare you and you're doing this just let them have it and they just smiled and didn't answer her and and then she huffed away and then another man an elderly man in a mask came up the girls and said way to go Patriots good job good job Patriots you see these were just high school girls going to the grocery store to get a small gift for a beloved teacher and all of a sudden it turns into a scene it turns into a hostile division that's one of the things that inflamed everything now people say the comeback will be well it wouldn't have been inflamed if you guys had just done what you were told if if you just complied but Freedom doesn't work that way all right Liberty doesn't work that way uh when I I do believe that Civil Authorities do have a responsibility before God for public health I I do believe that and so we gave one the orders first came down we said okay what what can we do to cooperate but after about a few weeks it became obvious to us that this was a massive power grab um and in a pandemic a plague you quarantine the infected you quarantine the people who are symptomatic use so if you have a if if the Bubonic plague broke out in a nearby small town and our Sheriff cordoned that town off and said you can't come out uh because half the people in that town have died in half of the survivors are deadly sick it is the responsibility of the civil government to Cordon that off Idaho state law gives the magistrate the authority to quarantine and I support that authority to quarantine but it doesn't have the authority to quarantine everybody uh symptom symptomatic or not sick or not you've got to stay in your basement all the time for a year you're under house arrest for a year are you are you kidding me uh that was just a naked Power grab so my my argument is that kovid was simply the beta test for the climate change emergency so if governments can just arrogate to themselves emergency Powers because of this health this threat to Everybody's Health and if anybody dissents on the science we're going to censor them we're not going to allow debate okay if I'm a Martian and I just arrived in the middle of this thing and I've said what's going on everybody I don't know who's right about the pandemic I don't know who's right about covid but I know which side is not letting the other side talk right yeah right I know which side doesn't want descent I I know which side doesn't want scientists to be free to publish a paper without fear of losing their job right basically the naked Power grab over with big Tech censoring responsible opinions censoring medical doctors who want to use Ivermectin or wanted to use hydroxychloroquine or you know you can't do that can't say that you you may not so I'm a martian I'm here for 15 minutes I don't I've not done the virus viral research but I know who the tyrants are I I know who the the authoritarians are the ones who don't want a free exchange of ideas but science um Science is based upon the willingness to have your thesis be falsified and we it's astonishing to me that that an Orthodoxy on covid-19 was ossified and hardened within weeks all right so so this thing hits and people were being dogmatic about where this virus didn't origin you know didn't originate from a lab and we're going to censor youth you say it did it can't be treated by these things and we're going to censor you if you say that it can uh this is uh totalitarianism and it's not 1984 Jack booted totalitarianism it's more like Brave New World totalitarianism I call it totalitolerance where they they want everyone to be tolerant but it's a suffocating tolerance where you may only tolerate what we approve to tease this out a little bit you're describing there this sort of um sensoriousness if you dare to disagree it will silence you in no longer virtuous now let's be honest extremists of every flavor left right color thumpian whatever can engage in that behavior to go back to you and Christopher Hitchens what's remarkable uh is your ability to keep talking keep communicating presumably because you respected one another as human beings and you probably enjoyed it a bit as well it was an extraordinary thing to enjoy the conversation and Company with somebody you disagree with yeah I mean that's radical in there yeah but um what I would love before we come to your fight back what you're doing to try and address all of this just your comments I mean it seems to me as an outsider I should be careful here I'm not an American but I admire your country and you're the leader of the Free World so it matters very much to me and my listeners um I think both Trump and Biden have exacerbated this problem in their behavior by the way they've gone about demonizing people who disagree with them with their language from time to time what are your thoughts on what the contribution of each of those presidents to this problem of canceling one another when we disagree yeah I I think that Trump's language frequently needed to be moderated he would say outrageous things and those who voted for him I didn't the first time in 2016 I didn't I did not vote for him because I was really just concerned about all the obvious all the obvious things and I flat didn't believe he you know he promised a number of things he I'm pro-life then I'll do this but my entire adult life I've been having responsible well-dressed Republican candidates promised me things that they then don't do they get elected and they run to the right and govern to the middle and and as I've been disappointed time and time and time again so when Trump who is this I've never heard anybody in Australia say that yeah we're very cynical now about the local leadership yeah and that's a problem in itself and so consequently after Decades of that with well-dressed well-spoken candidates who constantly let us down when this Renegade from Queens uh shows up and says yeah I'm a conservative and you've got quotes of him on tape saying he's pro-choice and that sort of thing and I'm pro-life and I'm going to do this I just I just flat didn't believe him that I just thought he's an ungodly man he's um I don't know what he's up to but it's no good and so I didn't didn't support him he said some outrageous things in the primaries against other Republicans and um Ted Cruz's father was involved in JFK's assassination and you know just unhinged kind of things and then when he got elected and Hillary wasn't I was astonished at how relieved I felt that you know Hillary whatever else I owe that man I owe him the fact that Hillary has not been my president and so I was very relieved and that was kind of surprising and then to my astonishment I mean just he kept his promises on on judges he governed he governed to the right of where he promised it just it was like a photo negative thing now I don't know how um and then he would tweet things the Mean Tweets and those sorts of things he would tweet things that would get the chimps jumping and and I would think man what do you do that for what what did you do that for so all the things that people point to I'm more than happy to acknowledge yeah it would if you had someone who did what Trump did but who had the genial personality of Ronald Reagan you know that would have been sunshine in America yeah morning morning in America morning in America let me tell you that would sell that would sell now so I'm I remain concerned about Trump's personal irascibility and things how thin skin he is but he he calls his opponents names but he doesn't shut them down he doesn't cancel them he just answers them he brawls he brawls with them what Biden does is shut you down all right he he'll send the Department of Justice after you um I've been visit I've been visited by the FBI because of things that are something I wrote on my blog all right so and what why what do you you know what are you doing where the the an arm of the state is now monitoring how people debate and discuss and that sort of thing so I would say yeah uh Trump helped set the tone of debate at a lower level than I think it ought to be but at the same time I want to say credit where credit's due he did keep his word unlike a lot of respectable uh Republicans and the the end result of that is the crown jewel of leftist politics in America Roe v Wade just went down in the Dobbs decision and now we have the opportunity to fight abortion and we have the opportunity to Outlaw abortion in Idaho uh which we've already begun to do with the heartbeat Bill and so about half the states are are likely to severely restrict abortion or outlaw and which is now um within our constitutional purview according to the Supreme Court for which we must thank Donald Trump the interesting thing about that as an outside Observer is that um again it reflects a lack of understanding of history and the high court was not set up to make law but to interpret it that's a very important division of power right right around the world the view has been promulgated that this was a decision about abortion where it was actually a decision about who should make the decisions about abortion correct and that those people who make those decisions should be accountable to the people because judges aren't right and so that's again a reflection of this lack of understanding of and commitment to foundational principles exactly people don't think through these issues carefully which is what happens when you have two rioting crowds facing each other across the barricades the time for nuance is passed so Doug let's let's change gears let's come to you know it's all very well for us to sit and talk about how things are falling apart and how serious it is um many of us are trying in our own Cabbage Patch to do a little bit I'm trying to make good thinking uh very thinking available for people to ponder which is what we're doing here now uh but you are deeply invested in classical education for one of a better term Chris why and is there a demand for it there's there's a huge demand for it um when we started logos school which was the flagship uh what we didn't know at the time it was going to be a flagship anything but it was the we established in the early 80s logos school it's a private school it's a private school okay government funded not government funded not one Thin dime from the government and uh we established it as a classical and Christian christ-centered education and we did that because we didn't want we we knew what we didn't want when we first started we didn't want a fundamentalist reactionary Academy so hence the word classical and we didn't want a Tony prep school where that did everything the government school did with a an anemic Chapel service we wanted to be robustly Christian so we our tagline was a classical and christ-centered education so that we planted in the early 80s I wrote a book about it in um early 90s 90 or 91 somewhere around there I wrote a book about it and that book caught fire and we started getting requests from all over the country people wanted to start schools like this and now the association of classical Christian schools has hundreds of schools all over North America thousands of students are enrolled in these schools so the the rationale for for this and we've we're in the early part of this conversation we were talking about what's called the culture War but you can't have a naval Warfare without ships and you can't have a tank warfare Tank Warfare without tanks and Christians can't be engaged in culture War without a culture we we need culture to be we can't just be on autopilot for a culture that we've inherited that we've not thought through so what classical education does is it equips the students to understand the heritage of the West what is it that we've been uh has been bequeathed to us what are the reasons for it what is the history of it how did we get here so there's a map of the world a timeline of the world and we're teaching our kids there's an X that says you are here these are your people this is where you came from these are the currents and the Dynamics that derive that have resulted in us being where we are and we didn't get here by accident almost an assumption that in the society now that was always like this right it's changing now but it was always like this whereas in fact we're the product of great ideas great struggles over those ideas in some cases a lot of Bloodshed and pursuit of Freedom yeah and things were not likely arrived at and modern contemporary Americans tend to think of decades as a series of Pawns all right there's a pond called the 90s and another pond called the 80s and another pond called the 70s but it's actually a river and we're living on the banks of a river and what happened Upstream affects us and and it goes a long way back so the reason the reason we have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour goes back to the Sumerians right it's not like a uh where we think that oh they they do things differently in the past everything that we have and that what we've inherited is inherited for a reason so we wanted our students who've grappled with the big issues who've read important books who know something about the heritage of the West and who are grateful citizens who've been equipped to give it forward to push it forward and to bring up their children in this the same way so we've discovered that building self-consciously building a culture is provides rigidity some of that molecular strength I was talking about earlier and of course what we're doing is attacked as being anti-diversity or white supremacy because most of the great books we have them read or were written by white males and you know that that kind of charge but it's really but here's a robber isn't it what not to be about an English educator who was charged with that same thing oh you're just teaching in British history and she just said well actually they're all going to end up as British citizens your students are all going to end up as American citizens it's their own citizenship that they need to understand surely before they start to consider others right and so that that's exactly the point the thing I tell people is that you cannot teach students to respect other cultures by teaching them to despise their own yeah right and what's what's happening is uh it's like two men who are shopping for a Mother's Day card aren't going to get in a fight in the in the card shop because one of them tried to buy a card to the world's greatest mom well he's supposed to think his mom is the is the world's greatest and you're supposed to think your mom is the greatest if I love my country and my people and my Heritage and I do I'm very grateful for it I understand because I honor my mother I understand why a Korean would honor his mother and love his Heritage and love his Customs uh I'm a a young person who's taught to honor his father and mother knows why somebody else honors his father and mother but if you grow up in a society where they teach you nothing but contempt nothing but disdain for your own father and mother well what's going to happen is you're going to have disdain and contempt for everybody else's father and mother and what you get at the end of the day is this alt-right reaction uh sort of like a a proud boys recoil against this but it's it's pretty ugly too yeah it's really ugly but what's happened is that it's a it's a reaction to the um the contempt that they're there that they've been taught and then they react to it which out without being taught in in terms of the Christian worldview that gives bounds and and limits on this sort of thing so I love my father and mother but they're not absolute I love my country but my country is not absolute my allegiance to Christ is absolute but my uh gratitude for my Heritage and my people and my Customs are relative and I understand that other people are in different positions and they have duties that are different than mine and that's why affection uh bounded patriotism uh a cultural uh establishment that as you said is training these students to become the kind of citizens you want in the nation they're going to be living in is what what we're after we're not trying to create jingoistic xenophobes we're trying to create model citizens who understand and respect model citizens in other countries so if you came over here and expected me to have the same feelings toward Australia that you do or if it went the other way it'd be ludicrous right so you love your country and I understand why you do and I understand why you love it more than you love mine and if I objected to that I'm the guy in the in the card aisle getting in a fight with someone about what do you mean your your mother's death bounded patriotism yes um I'm fond of saying that no human authority no human relationship is absolute so I'm grateful for my family but it's not absolute I'm grateful for my country and my people but it's not absolute I'm grateful for uh all the relationships I'm in but only my relationship to my Creator is absolutely God Alone is Sovereign absolutely Sovereign God Alone is the one who cannot be questioned so I love my country but I I question my government all right so yeah bonded patriotism means that Stephen Decatur was a early American naval hero who's famously quoted as saying my country right or wrong um his toes it was a toast that he gave and the full toast was my country may she always be right but my country right or wrong and Chesterton once responded to that by saying that's like saying my mother drunk or sober um but if she's drunk you're gonna have to deal with it you have to you have to face facts so bounded patriotism is it does not it is something that refuses to take your nationality or your government or your culture as an absolute source of your standards so so there are people some people uh are identify as Christian nationalists where I suspect that they're deriving their ethical standards from their Nation instead of applying God's standards to their Nation now there are other people we have to factor in the fact that the left calls anything that they don't like from Christians Christian nationalism and I'm I love my country and I want my country to be Christian so in that sense I'm a Christian nationalist but I'm not a nationalist in the sense that I think my country has the authority to generate an ethical system we must submit to an ethical system there has to be a Transcendent moral Authority from outside the world um because otherwise uh this if there is no if there is no God above the state then the state becomes god well this this is a really important point because in the driftage in our understanding I think of political systems you take that as you say the idea of uh responsibility to a higher authority out you end up with the real dangers of an authoritarian regime saying your loyalties are to us and that's communism this is the Fatal flaw that is now at the heart of Communism that people have overlooked when they say oh the trouble of Communism has never been done properly well yes it has and we can see it writ large in China today yeah you must be loyal to the state that will never work it will it can never work and there are never any absolutes in the state either there are no uh it's all just shifting standards in terms of the state determines what's right and wrong yeah every every society reflects the the every society has a god of the system all right so uh I want to argue that the god of the system needs to be the true God the god that parliaments and congresses can't reach and and uh transcend it from outside the world because otherwise if your highest moral ethical Authority is under the sun inside the world then the god of the system is Dimas the people or a few people the people who got near the levers of power and but God the god of the Bible is Holy he's immutable unchanging that means an ethic based on him based on his character is going to be a holy standard and it's going to be an unchanging standard it's not going to fluctuate with the era it's uh you know mistreating women is always going to be wrong abortion is always going to be wrong racial antipathy is always going to be wrong because God is outside the world but if dmos is the god of the system well what is man like well man is Unholy and he changes all the time he's not immutable and he's corrupted so that means if you make if you enshrine Dimas as the god of the god of the system then you have to be prepared for an ethical system that changes radically and arbitrarily which is why we can the state can say we've always been at war with East Asia in Orwell's uh portrayal of it fascinating that the book you wrote with Christoph Hitchens going back to that was actually entitled is Christianity good for the world so for example I would argue and I think you'd understand this line of argument that as a Scot it was really the coming the Protestant Reformation John Knox and so forth that led to one of those moments when the Scots had a parliament as early as 1698 uh passing a law that said all Scottish children should have an education yeah and I love pointing out to the English that they didn't catch up with levels of Scottish literacy and numeracy for 200 years that's how important education can be but it's it's what you educate isn't it what is it about your Christian education of your children here young people here that you think is transformative other than them being broadly educated it's uh it's more than just wanting them to be competent and do well on their test scores it uh one of the taglines that we use for our project here is all of Christ for all of life so we we believe that it's a comprehensive worldview it's a comprehensive worldview we believe that God has authority over geography mathematics history grammar and if that's true if adults are to live their lives under the authority of Christ as though Christ makes a difference in architecture and gardening and police work and sewage disposal Christ is Lord of all of it and if that's the case as I believe it is we're to love the Lord Our God the greatest commandment is you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your mind Jesus says with all your brains and with all your strength if that's the case for adults then children have to be taught how this works and that means education so the great that great command the Shema hero Israel the Lord Our God the Lord is one comes in Deuteronomy 6 and it's in the middle of a passage on education so the the single great command love God with everything you've got and apply it to everything Paul says whether you eat or drink whatever you eat or drink do it all to the glory of God well in Deuteronomy 6 you're to talk to your children about the authority of God when you rise up when you walk along the road when you lie down children are to grow up in an environment that's dominated by the word of God and so that's uh and what happens is we've discovered that when you teach children this way they're centered they're oriented they're integrated they live integrated lives that it's not just I go to church on Sunday inside a closed box where I talk to God and then I go out into the world and try to be relatively honest but I more or less live the way all the non-believers do that that's not good enough there's a song a kid song I remember from when I was a child I want to be more than a son to go to meet and Christian I want to be a Christian all the time so you would say there are many who'll say the founders in America were Enlightenment figures they were deists they believed in a higher authority and a greater good yeah but you'd say you need more than that you actually needed to be grounded yeah and the core beliefs of Christianity in other words you can't leave Christ out of it right you can't leave Christ out of it and but I would I'd go back to the first claim because this that's one of my favorite topics when people say the founders were deists well arguably a handful of them were but at the Constitutional Convention there were 55 men there 50 of the 55 were Orthodox Christians 50 of the 55 were Orthodox Christians the people who were either deist or I would say the American deists were more like semi-deists right Jefferson would qualify Ben Franklin would qualify and then Thomas Paine was an Infidel but not really a Founder he was a popular author from from the time but Hamilton's role and the musicals everywhere yeah uh but Hamilton's role is very important he had a yeah he seemed to have strayed a bit in his personal walk in the middle of his life came back to it at the end but he had he had a brilliant insight into the tyranny of the mob capability of people and that was profoundly Christian yes and he was one of the authors one of the main authors of the Federalist Party papers the enormous influence yes so everybody's going out there he learned about Hamilton he's worth closer study yeah I would have thought Hamilton and Madison Hamilton Jay The Federalist Papers were newspaper articles that were trying to get uh uh ratification of the Constitution through and I think it's Federalist 53 um Madison says basically you must you must frame a constitution that restrains the people and simultaneously requires the government to restrain itself and if men were angels He said we wouldn't need a Constitution and the thing that if again if I were a martian arriving here and I said hey let me look at your Constitution what can I do what can I conclude about the founders from the Constitution they wrote my big takeaway is the Constitution they wrote uh has this one Central takeaway never ever trust an American they didn't trust anybody that you know they they said C.S Lewis has a great line in this he said Lewis said that there are two kinds of Democrats there's a small D Democrat there's the Democrat who believes that every person's opinion is so valuable that we can't do anything until we've checked with everybody um and he said that's not the kind of democrat I am uh I believe that men are so fallen and so corrupt that we have to spread the power as thinly as possible because we can't give too much power to anyone person or entity and that's the genius of the American absolutely of the of the American Constitution and I have to say the Australian Constitution yeah basically it recognizes that break the power up don't let anybody get too much of it don't let them hold it for too right that what that is built on the Bedrock of the Christian doctrine of original sin right uh when they when they formulated the coupled with the dignity I would have said yes exactly yeah somebody I read an American said uh uh uh we are so good we have to give ourselves the vote we're so bad we had to give ourselves the vote yeah that's exactly right that's exactly right so when when the Constitution was adopted they weren't worried about the British coming over again all these checks and balances the separation of powers the two-layer federalism the the central government and then all the state governments and then at the national government you had the legislative and the executive and the judicial and then the legislative is broken up into two houses it's a bicameral system they're spreading the power as thinly as they can and they're they're doing it not because the British might come over and become tyrannical again they did all this because they knew that the Americans could become tyrannical again and this is why I this is one of my favorite pet peeve arguments and some conservatives in recent last decade or so have wanted to emphasize American exceptionalism and then they talk about American exceptionalism but if you look at the history of Empires there was Babylonian exceptionalism there was Persian exceptionalism there was British exceptionalism it's it's the easiest thing in the world for a superpower at the top of its game to say we're number one but when the founders were looking at the prospect of becoming a great and prosperous nation which they were very aware of was happening Thomas Jefferson particularly they were very aware that if we get to the Pacific this is going to be a juggernaut this is going to be a thing at that moment they said in the Constitution we put our pants on one leg at a time like everybody else we're Fallen sinners like everybody else we can't give anybody in the American government too much power they recognized the founders recognized that Americans were not exceptional at all and that's exceptional that's a really powerful statement that what you've just said yeah they're exceptional and they recognized they weren't exceptional yeah it's like Socrates saying I know I'm the wisest man in Greece because I know how ignorant I am like just about every human being I've met that's truly admirable they're exceptional because they don't think they are exceptional because they're humble yeah interesting point isn't it yeah we should bring this home you've been very generous with your time can't help asking uh you know you have strong opinions you're a lightning rod for those who fail you are unfairly like to have a go at you yes that's happened from time to time yes how do you respond well um first there are people out there critics I'm I'm there are a number of reasonable critics out there who've just heard about me or they've got their Pastor who's they've got a parishion who says well Doug Wilson says you know and and I can I can see and understand why a number of people uh are irritated by what they have heard that I say you know they're so that's that just comes with the territory if you're going to be a public figure that you that just comes with it but there are people who attack me who know better and who are you know slanderous or it's malevolent or it's it's that sort of thing and that is probably where the serious um business is and Jesus Jesus says uh this is I think these are clear marching orders Jesus says when men despitefully use you and say all manner of heave all men are of dead cat at you and say all kinds of nasty things about you Jesus says in that day rejoice and be exceedingly glad um I believe that Christians are are required by the Lord Jesus to um thank God for the brick bats that are thrown at you uh because it's this is part of God's purpose and part of God's plan and so I'm if people uh slander me I'm under orders from the Lord to love them to pray for them um bless those who persecute you um this is the I think this is basic Christianity 101 where we have to love our enemies I I quote my dad again um my dad would say the Bible says that you're supposed to love your wife love your neighbor and love your enemy and he said everyone you meet all day long is at least one of those yeah yeah so you um and some of them are more in neighbor and an enemy well that's what I was Chester wasn't it uh love your neighbor and love your enemy and they're all from the same place they're often the same people and so consequently loving your neighbor loving your enemy doesn't mean flattering your neighbor or never disagreeing with your neighbor or never disagreeing with your enemy I I think that you can get into an honest Collision or debate and but the people who slander me or or debate with me or or well-intentioned people people like Hitchens Hitchens that I got along with or people who just think that I'm an orc what I'm responsible to do is see the image of God in all of them so they are made in the image of God and I've got to respect that you bounce back at him pretty hard sometimes sometimes I think the language it could be seen as a servic yeah a cervic I I have I've been known to punch hard um but not all the time and I always try to punch above the belt you know I I don't believe in gouging biting ears or I don't I don't want to fight dirty I want to fight clean and I don't want to fight like a thug I want to fight like a cavalier and I want to fight in such a way that if the per my adversary had a change of heart and mind and and repented and became a Christian and came to our church I'd want to be I'd want to be in a position to give him a hug and welcome welcome him and say ah you're most welcome so I don't want to be in any of these brawls with a personal ego thing or a personal animosity because as soon as I do that I'm I think I'm disqualified from the fight I I want to fight I want to um be an apologist I want to be an evangelist I want to be a preacher of the of the truth but I don't want to disqualify myself on God's terms from that calling which means I have to love and respect my enemies but too many modern Christians think that love your enemies is translated as don't have any enemies and I think that that's just uh just wrong-headed well when the shouting dies down the battle's over we're left standing there thinking what really matters what's the key okay for you everybody in the world is going to stand before God and we're going to stand before God in the judgment as individuals we go to Heaven or Hell by ones right and so every every person has either going to stand before God in Christ or outside of Christ and so my plea or the thing that I would uh say to everyone friends foe people on my side people are not on my side they say we're all on this conveyor belt called time and we're all headed for the moment where we are going to face our maker and I believe that when we Face our maker because we're all Sinners we need an advocate we need a mediator we need someone to speak for us I I need a defense attorney and but we have that's what we have in Jesus Christ we have an advocate with the father Jesus Christ the righteous it says in first John so I would encourage people to remember that they have a relationship with God an individual relationship with God that they've got to do business with him on his terms not on theirs and if God says that we need a mediator we need an intercessor we need a priest to intercede for us and God has provided that priest that high priest in Christ I would urge everyone to Avail themselves of that and then all the cultural political social things that we've been talking about which are very important are sort of the collective corporate aspect of this but the individual being right with God is um crucial because you can't make a good omelet with rotten eggs it doesn't you know I could have I I if someone said hey you can have this social experiment all your way you have the best kitchen in the world you have the best pots and pans in the world you can have the best chef in the world you can have all the the best recipe in the world but all of you got are these rotten eggs I I'm not going to be able to make a good omelet with rotten eggs and that returns to the earlier point about uh John Adams our constitution presupposes a moral and a religious people people collectively have to be right with God and that's not going to happen unless they're individually right with God and that means we have to repent of our sins and sins as defined by the Bible not by the hurt feelings of someone the sins as defined by The Ten Commandments sins is defined by The Sermon on the Mount I've got to repent of my sins and I've got to ask God to receive me on the basis of the death burial and resurrection of Christ and every bible promises everyone who does that is going to be received every uh if you call in the name of the Lord you will be saved and so I don't think America or Australia or any other Nation can be saved unless individuals as individuals decide to get right with their maker brings to mind to conversation 15 years ago one of my daughters brought a friend home for the weekend and for some reason over dinner she started to tell us in great detail what she thought God was like and what she thought about him and it struck me that she was seeking to define God in her terms I thought about it for a while afterwards and I thought there's so much in there I don't want to try and unpack it I simply said to her have you ever wondered what God might think about you and I remember she looked at me absolutely stunned and she said I've never thought of it that way right Doug thanks for your time it's been lovely being here with you in Moscow Idaho yeah Rural America Rural America yeah it's a great place for all America yeah I love it here and thank you for having me thank you [Music] thank you

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 68,865

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations

Id: UZW3KfKujV0

Length: 88min 37sec (5317 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023