Transcription
Cliff and Steuart Connect. Welcome, guys. So, you've been doing this on campuses for a while, kind of similar to what I do, somewhat from a political standpoint, but we're unafraid to to talk about the deeper things, more important things. Talk about that.
I mean, that's Yeah, sure. I will. You know why I like him? Because he hasn't made the mistake of elevating politics over faith in Christ. Okay. Obviously, we can slip into a type of nationalism that is rah rah country and leave God out of the equation. That is lethal. And what Charlie does in a way that I've come to respect is because I've been uh confronted by more and more of this type of issue is he puts Christ at the center. God is the basis of your world view. And then because of that, you respect your country. You're very grateful for what our foreathers and forefathers have done in putting this country together. And you want to return it to the Judeo-Christian ethic that was the foundation of this fam this country even though we're well aware of the fact that many of the founding mothers and fathers were deists. And no, we're not deists. We believe in a personal God who's involved in our lives today, not in a distant god who remains aloof. So we disagree with Thomas Jefferson with the Jeffersonian Bible, but we're very grateful for the Judeo-Christian ethic that ethics that our forefathers and foremothers held to so tight.
Well, thank you for that. And so I I have you seen let's just talk in the last couple of years both of you visiting campuses be interesting to hear you say what are you hearing what are you seeing have things changed in recent years talk about trends I think our audience would be interested in that.
I am not here to butter him up okay in fact I don't like talking about people all right but but guys for 44 years I've been standing up on university campuses dialoguing with students now I am committed to pointing people to God's existence. Therefore, morality is not subjective. There are few moral absolutes. Therefore, the logical conclusion is not despair. There's hope because there's a God who has eternal life in heaven for all who trust in his son, Jesus. All right. Now, I don't feel comfortable going into the political arena. That's why I respect what he's doing. It's very hard to communicate Christ and then also to challenge people to think, okay, what are the ramifications of your belief in Christ? Especially politically, especially culturally. That gets real hard. And one of the reasons it's hard is because we don't all agree, right? You go around in this room and I don't think we're all going to agree on everything. That's where tolerance comes in. Tolerance is not an atheist and I agree. No, we don't agree. Tolerance is although you are an atheist, I respect you and we're going to have an intelligent dialogue. Now, that's what he does and that's what we try and do. intelligent dialogue. Guys, that's what a liberal arts education is all about. A free exchange of ideas where we don't necessarily agree, but we communicate respectfully and we explain why we believe what we believe. What's the evidence of whatever it is you believe is true. So, that's the kind of thing that we want. The most important thing is always Jesus. The second most important thing is making sure that we could talk about Jesus and worship Jesus, which is increasingly more difficult.
You went on Logan Paul's podcast, which I'm sure you you got a couple emails and things from that. Talk about that experience. What an amazing way that God used you to reach a population that has not heard the gospel. All right. So, here's some of the challenges. I really respect Logan Paul. He began our time together by saying, "I am not a Christian, but maybe by the end of this podcast, I will be." No pressure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that kind of honesty and vulnerability. Goodness gracious, that's cool. I found him to be a very nice guy and it was fascinating. His sticking point, his sticking point was, "You got to be kidding me. good Jews and good Muslims and good Hindus, they need to accept Christ. I mean, that just is too narrow. That's just too bigoted. That's too intolerant. And so, what I was trying to help him see was if I say that every path leads to God, that's a truth claim. I'm saying majority of Muslims, the majority of humanity, which is Muslims, Christians, and Jews, they're wrong. Every path leads to heaven. That's a truth claim. If I say to you half the religions and philosophies of the world lead to heaven, that's a truth claim. I'm saying half are right and half are wrong. That is a truth claim. And when Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me." That's also a truth claim. He's saying you got to put your faith in me. I am the way to heaven. So, let's be real honest. We all make truth claims. Let's not sit back sit back and act like, "Oh, I'm a really open-minded, really tolerant person because I say all paths lead to heaven. All paths lead to God." No, you're making a truth claim. And I can promise you if I say that 1 plus 1 equals 2, I'm not necessarily being arrogant. Now, I might be arrogant, but just to make a truth claim does not mean you're being arrogant and intolerant. It means this is my take on reality. You better ask me, what's the evidence that your take on reality is true? And I'm going to ask you the same question. And what is your take on reality? What's the evidence that your take on reality is true?
All right. Who here has a problem with the idea of God being angry? All right. Well, Logan has a problem with God being angry. And guess what? So do a lot of Americans. You know, God is love. God doesn't get angry. The wrath of God. I mean, how primitive. You really believe that? Yeah, I sure do believe that. You know why? Cuz I promise you that if one of you kidnaps one of my little granddaughters, I'm going to be real angry. And guess what? If I'm not angry, my granddaughter doesn't matter to me. Not with a selfish anger, but with a righteous indignation. Is God angry? Yes, he is. Not with a selfish anger. Oh, you've offended me. Oh, you rained on my party. No, none of that. With a righteous indignation of how we dehumanize each other. That's sin. Racism is dehumanizing. Sexism is dehumanizing. Sexually exploiting someone is dehumanizing. She's not a Barbie doll. She's a human being created in the image of God. Don't use her sexually. Greed dehumanizing. Your money is more important than you are. I want your money. Coveting. dehumanizing and so God is angry because we dehumanize each other and God has created us not to dehumanize each other but to respect each other to love each other.
So when you visit campuses is that the most common sticking point that the path is too narrow? If you had to really bring it down, what is the limiting current belief of Gen Z when confronted with the truth that prevents them from accepting Jesus? What would that be? Yeah, moral relativism for sure. and this white western adopted philosophy which is all religions are true and how dare you say that you have the right religion. So they will say look at the elephant look at all paths lead up to the mountaintop. So all religions are just grabbing one's grabbing the ear one's grabbing the foot of the elephant one's grabbing the trunk and see you guys are all just grabbing part of God and yet what they don't get is well those people are blind so they don't realize they're grabbing parts of the elephant. Okay. Then someone has tremendous vigilance and spiritual superiority to say, "I'm the one who's not blind. And I see Charlie grabbing the trunk, so he's Buddhist. I see Cliff grabbing the foot, so he's Hindu. So you guys are all idiots. All gods are the same." What you don't realize is you are not only spiritually elitist, but you are also rejecting the exclusive truth claims of 95% of the world. So that's one of the biggest challenges.
Would you agree with that? Is that the the core objection you got you receive? Yeah. And then let's be real honest. I think it really comes down to I want to sleep with whoever I want to sleep with. Well, that's a separate issue though. But meaning that they don't meaning that they won't believe it if it's true. That's Frank Turk's line. Would you believe Christianity if it was true? Right. And most people would not because it would change their life. Correct. And so therefore, the reason I reject Christ is for a moral reason and then I hide behind the intellectual reason. But if you push comes to shove, I mean, my my younger brother went to Princeton University. And at Princeton, he used to share Christ with his roommates late into the night around about midnight. He turned to his Princeton classmates and say, "Guys, if you're just going to ask these questions, we'll pull an all nighter if if this is honest. But if the real issue is I want to sleep around and I want to cheat on my next exam because the pressure to get into med school is intense and let's h be honest. And every single time his Princon classmates would say, "Stuart, you're correct. This is not an intellectual problem. It's a moral issue." Of course. Yeah. And he would say, "Guys, wait. You don't have to pull an all nighter. Good night. Have a good night's sleep."
So then how then, do you overcome that, if at all? For me, it's it's getting rather simple the older the older I get. You know, morality is relative, which means the guy who took a whack at President Trump and killed another guy. It's all relative. That's his definition of truth. And the trade traffic, well, you know, it's all relative. So, if you don't if you're upset about it, fine. But I kind of enjoy it. And truth is relative. You know something? You can't live that out. Because even when you were a little kid, if your sibling got more ice cream in their ice cream bowl than you did in your ice cream bowl, what would you say? Oh, that's cool. No, you'd say, "That's not fair. And if you're married and your spouse takes a whack at you, you don't say, "Oh, that felt good, honey. Why don't you do that again?" No, you say you should not do that. You ought not to do that. It is impossible to live out moral relativism. Doesn't work.
I want to get to some questions here in a second. I visit college campuses as you guys do, and I get the spicier encounters at times. I'm sure you you guys get them as well. But but it's what's so fascinating is that I'll come and talk primarily about politics but as you well know I always share the gospel whenever it comes up but inevitably almost always if I go and I have a a table and the what I want to talk about for the day never remains and whe it could be about immigration it could be about that there are no genders and two sexes and unlimited personalities you know whatever it is within minutes they are asking me well are you religious because they have been so trained been conditioned because they want to get down into, well, where is this coming from? Because if if you're saying something that's true and they think about it, they say, "Well, is is there do you think there's a God that's telling you this?" Because they they want a moral license to live as they want to live. Um, but what I found is that almost all of these conversations yield back to some moral standard at some point. and they'll many college students and even college professors will deny the fact that there is a moral standard, but they're living up to some standard at some point. So someone tells them that murder is wrong or murder is evil or theft is wrong, they say, "Oh, that's just common sense. I we just know that. I I I I know that murder is wrong. I I understand that." So like why so many murderers then if everyone knows that it's wrong? So do you guys encounter that as well that it gets down to the deeper issues rather quickly?
Yes, it definitely gets down to the deeper issues rather quickly when you have the privilege of talking with thinking people and people have to think. I mean, I am very grateful that over 290 times in the gospels Jesus asks question and this whole idea that faith is anti-intellectual. Faith is anti-rational. Faith is anti-logical. That's a naive blind faith. And Christ does not call us to a naive blind faith. Does he call us to a something you can prove? No. To prove means to show it cannot be another way. I can't prove, Charlie, that I'm not just a bad dream you're having right now. Maybe your eyesight is flipping out on you and you're having this weird dream of Cliff. So, I can't prove it. But the overwhelming evidence is you're and I are having this conversation now. That's why we behave the way we do. So, we've got to use our minds and ask ourselves, what does the evidence point to as being true? I do not think the universe is religiously ambiguous. I think God has left more than enough evidence for any thinking person to believe in him. That's why anthropology shows us that around the world, every culture has some type of religion. Yeah. Atheism is is the vast minority of a new age belief. Oh, yeah.
So, Daisy, let's start doing some questions here. Um, we lost our uh 18-year-old brother back in October to an accident in our front yard, and we're constantly told like, "Oh, you guys might be might have to move on. you guys might need to kind of like put it in the past. It happened. Get over it. And we do have really good days where we get to share his story and share the gospel. But with those good days, there's also some really, really bad days where anger comes out. And I mean, I might get mad at my wife. I might get mad at the family, at the kids. What's your advice? And what do you have to say about how to cope with those really bad days that we have, all of us collectively being really close to him after his loss?
All right. And I'm really sorry for your loss, brother. It stinks. And that's one of the reasons I'm so glad that in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes, "Death is the last enemy." I am sick and tired of hearing people say, "Oh, death is just part of nature. So just accept it." No, I don't accept death. That's why we fund hospitals. That's why we do medicine because we are against death and we're for life. And that's what Jesus said. I've come that you might have life and have it to the full. Second point. All right, wife and brother and family. You've heard the man say, "I'm hurting and at time I'm okay, but at other times I get really angry." Okay, he's been honest, right? He's been honest with all of us. He's been vulnerable. So now we got to be patient with each other, right? We got to love each other through the hard times. And it's a hard time you're passing. The most difficult day of my life was when my 7-year-old niece was knocked into an early grave in a horrible car accident. And I had to go out to Madison, Wisconsin, where my brother, who was a transplant surgeon at W Madison, was transplanting kidneys and livers. And I had to walk with him around a field behind his home in Madison, Wisconsin. And he's pouring out his heart to me about the death of his seven-year-old daughter. And if anybody thinks they got an easy answer for that question, they're nuts. The answer, the honest answer first is I do not know why the babysitter didn't see the stop sign. Why she went right through the stop sign and a pickup truck at 55 mph came careening down the road, smashing into the car, sending my 7-year-old niece into an early grave. I don't know why God allowed that to happen. And so therefore, we got to be patient with each other. We got to love each other. We got to be committed to each other as we go through these painful, difficult times. The third point is what's comfort? Comfort is presence. So you being together as a family with your presence is crucial. And even more important is God's presence with you. The presence of Jesus Christ. And that's where all of this talk and all of these answers to all these difficult questions gets real practical. It's not an issue of a good answer to a difficult question. Now it's an issue of presence. I need you to be with me cuz I'm hurting. My loved one died and it stinks. And now all of a sudden faith becomes real personal because now it's an issue of do I know the presence of God? And brother, I'm 70 years old, so you're a lot younger than me. And I'm still working on that. I want to know the presence of God cuz it's hard. And I was really ticked when Time magazine came out with Mother Teresa on the cover saying, "Oh, the woman struggled with doubt. See, she didn't really have real faith. Oh, bologoney, give me a break." There is such a thing as depression. There is such a thing as loneliness as the snut gets kicked out of you by life. And so now we got to know Christ. And I find great comfort that in Philippians 3:10, Paul writes, "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering." Remember, you worship a suffering God who got the snot kicked out of him and he was nailed to it in cross. So you can connect with this God. This God can connect with you. He's a suffering God. And then ultimately, brother, we have the solution to suffering. We're going to go through good times. We're going to go through hard times in this life. And you're going through them now, both of them. And yet we have the ultimate solution for suffering and death. And that solution is eternal life in a heaven where there will be no more still birth, no more cancer, no more heart failure, no more little kids getting knocked into early graves by ridiculous car accidents, but eternal life in the presence of God. So come on, my atheist agnostic friend, let's go into the hospital. Come on, my atheist agnostic friend, let's go into the room where the baby lies, whose body is being shredded by terminal cancer. What are you going to do? You're going to wave your fist in God's face and blame God? That's a copout. That's misplaced blame. I, as a follower of Christ, walk to the other side of the bed, and I too will hold that child's hand and seek to comfort that child. But in Jesus Christ, I've got a suffering God who gives a rip about death, about grieving people who wants to comfort us and wrap his arms around us. That, my friend, is the solution to the very real problem of suffering and death. Jesus Christ.
We'll take one or two more. Uh, under the Trump administration, the 1776 commission was really focused on instilling patriotism for students. Um, and I wanted to know your thoughts on a new agenda. I think it's called Project 2025 where many conservative organizations were focusing on the solution of uh helping Americans understand uh the true goal of how our country is supposed to serve us. What are your thoughts on that agenda or that?
Yeah, I I we're one of the listed organizations on project 2025. I don't know all the details. The the Democrats are losing their minds over this thing. I mean, it's unbelievable. Uh it's it's actually like her core message right now. Um, it's not officially part of the campaign. That's important to note. It's a 900page document. I haven't read it. I don't think anyone's going to read it. Um but yes, if the essence is to bring back patriotic education. I was on the 1776 commission and the first act Biden gets sworn into office. He walks 100 ft into a side room in the halls of Congress. doesn't even wait to get to the White House and signs an executive order nullifying the 1776 commission. It was within seconds of getting sworn in, which was a commission all about American patriotism, our American founding. It was literally the first thing he did as president was to make sure that our kids uh wouldn't learn to love America.
I was articulated yesterday by a couple of my friends that our country was not founded on Christian principles. So I I want to see how like an argument that you guys can give me to combat that. So essentially they articulated to me that our country was found on common law. Because the declaration only refers to God four times in the constitution doesn't refer to God at all and it only articulates the structure of government. And does is common law Christian in nature or is it not?
I I can take it first. So I this guy doesn't whoever said that doesn't really know what they're talking about. So, first of all, um, remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else. Nine out of 13 of the original states required you to be a Bible believing Christian to serve in government. At the time of the founding, you could even in P actually 13 out of 13 required a declaration of faith. Nine out of 13 required you to be a Protestant except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith. In almost every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had I profess Lord in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions. So you remember we're a collection of states before that. Secondly, 55 out of 56 of the original signers of the declaration were Bible believing church attending Christians. You asked about common law. So common law is inherited from Blackstone who was Christian. A common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures. So let's go to three principles of common law. Presumption of medicines, due process, and drew of your peers. All three are biblical principles. So, and all wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are richer or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbor as yourself. But before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice. We get that in the west, which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal, neither slave nor Greek nor Jew. You're all one in Jesus Christ. So, you get the idea of human equality. These are all biblical ideas. They're not enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time. But more importantly than that, they say that God was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence. Well, that's a big deal. Okay. Laws of nature and nature's God. The last paragraph of the declaration reads as a prayer. It says, "We appeal to the supreme judge of the universe. Who's the judge of the universe? Jesus Christ." As it says in Revelation that Jesus will judge the earth on his throne. this. So in the declaration they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically. Thirdly as I said on stage yesterday Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book religious or non-religious in the time of the founding when they were putting together constitution more than John Lock more than Montescu more than Blackstone. So the book of Deuteronomy which talked about laws customs traditions it was Moses' farewell address as he's you know about to say goodbye say hey good luck in Canaan guys here's how you should set up your form of government. But finally and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said. John Adams seamlessly said, "The Constitution was only written for a moral and religious people. It was wholly inadequate for the people of any other." The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord. One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible. So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population. So that that's just that's just a surface level belief. So then they'll go to the first amendment which is has two two parts of the first amendment which get conflated. First of all, separation of church and state is not in the US constitution. That is a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1807 to the Danbury Baptist Convention in Massachusetts assuring them that the government would not come after the church. Okay, which is the opposite of what they would say. However, that was then resurrected by the Warren Court and the Burger Court in the '60s where they said, "Hey, you know, all of a sudden we're now going to make this as if it's the Constitution." It does say in the Constitution two things, which is the establishment clause and the free free expression clause. The establishment clause is that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise thereof. What they were most worried about was a Presbyterian or a Anglican or a Quaker type religion taking over the federal government. Instead, it was that there is not going to be a state-run religion or a state-run government. Did you know that one of the first acts of Congress was taxpayer funded Bible printing and distribution? Did you know that there were church services held in the Supreme Court building as late as the Jackson presidency in the 1820s? But going back to this idea of separation of church and state, and again, I could riff on this at at nauseium because it's just so ridiculous, right? Is that it's not biblical because first, it's not biblical. It's not constitutional because you go a layer deeper. People that even say that do you believe in separation of morality in state? Nobody does. So all laws are reflection of morality and all morality comes from somewhere. There is no such thing as neutral morality. And we believe what the founders believed because they put it in the halls of Congress, they put it in the Supreme Court and they put it all throughout the country which is that the decalogue, the ten commandments is the core morality of how a society and a civilization should should exist. Right? The the ten commandments of every person. And finally and this is the kicker. If the founding fathers were not Bible believing churchuh church sang Christians, why did they put Leviticus on the liberty bell? Not John, not Psalms, not Proverbs, not Genesis, Leviticus. Most Americans can't spell Leviticus. Leviticus 25:19, proclaim liberty throughout the land of which you are in. It is one of the most sinister, most unsubstantiated lies that does not come up against any sort of academic scrutiny. This idea the founding fathers were a bunch of enlightened common law deists. The reason they hate it is because if they The reason they must say this is that if we actually go back to our Christian roots and we go back to where we once were, it's America's best hope for revival and for a great future.
Do you want to add to any of that? Sorry, that covered it. That was pretty touch that beautifully put. Yeah.
Okay. Uh I realized that it's hard to keep college kids engaged. It's a hard demographic to reach and it seems like my pastor friends are all asking the same question. So I asked George Bara, I said, "What is the solution?" He said, "You think you're losing them in the college years, but you're losing them much earlier." So the worldview is developed by time they're 11. So knowing God designed three institutions, but he gave the responsibility to parents to rear their children. How do these three institutions come alongside parents in God's design to help them establish a biblical worldview in their children before they're 11?
We need and it's very fixable. We need a renaissance of homeschooling and not just sending your kids to private school, but homeschooling itself. Um the excuses people give to not homeschool uh is the following is that I don't know how to do it. That's a really bad answer. Uh that's like that's unbelievably bad. you taught your kid how to talk and you taught your kid the fundamental stuff. There's so many organizations that can supplement or and this is understandable is that it's too expensive because I have to go back in the workforce. So, and here's the contradiction. If you're willing for for you or your kid to go into debt to send them to college, why would you not be willing to go into debt to homeschool your kid? And no one has a good answer to that because they're willing to send their kid to go study North African lesbian poetry at Arizona State University, but they're not willing to make financial sacrifices so that they could educate their kid. And the third thing is that um and I know this doesn't fall into anyone at this conference, but gen the general population, parents are lazy today. They just are. They just aren't doing their job. They're just they want someone else to do it for them. Uh it's the I'm more important than my kid. A parent is like a part-time job. I want my own career and uh we're seeing the ramifications of that.
Can I just add how would you respond to because I I'm pretty strong believer in this 1929 what happens when there obvious biblical homeschool movement occurred and we left the halls of power at the big universities cuz we were terrified all of a sudden Christian parents especially more of the fundamentalists of Darwinism. Yes. Evolutionism. I mean, how do you balance because I was homeschooled through the sixth grade, but how do you take this balance of let's congregate together, grow our faith, but then make sure we don't do what we did in 1929 and get terrified of the culture and lose power in the halls of power.
Yeah, I I'm a big believer that up to a certain age, the child should be protected and nurtured. And I don't know what that age is. Sixth grade might be the right time, but I I wouldn't put an 8-year-old in a government school. And so in the current in the current configuration, I I think that it's okay for us to do our children away from the current um uh culture and then but prepare them that they're going to be going to war and then you send them out. And so I think both can be equally true. And once they get sent out, they must be really deep in their faith and understand what's coming to them because it's not a matter of cloistering them for the rest of their life. But protecting the innocence of a child is biblical. It's necessary and you know we have we've seen the ramifications of throwing these kids to the lions as you say by 11 their worldview is is formed. Sixth grade is 13 years old 12 13 years old right? So it's that's probably you know good uh good cuto off there.
We're out of time everybody give it up for the connect please. Right. Got it. All right. Thanks guys.