American Thought Leaders - Behind America’s Mental Health Disaster: Carrie Sheffield

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

“When someone asks me where are you from, I say I’m from America, because I’m from so many different places, growing up in a motorhome, but also in houses, in sheds,” says Carrie Sheffield. ��There were parts of my experience as a child that I really treasure that taught me to love America. But there unfortunately was a lot of abuse as well.”Now a columnist, broadcaster, and senior policy analyst for Independent Women’s Voice with a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, Ms. Sheffield grew up with seven siblings and an abusive, mentally ill father who thought he was a modern-day Mormon prophet. Always on the move, Ms. Sheffield rotated between 17 public schools—as well as homeschooling—over the course of her childhood. The glue in the family was her mother.She is the author of the new memoir, “Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.”In this episode, drawing from her own life circumstances, she offers some profound insights into the cultural malaise she sees afflicting America—from the rise in suicide and depression to the epidemic of addiction and isolation—and a path forward.“We put human intellect in the place of God. And so even though we are materially better off, and even though we have economic wealth, it has come at a price, and that price is the humility and the recognition of the giver of our gifts. We’ve substituted worship for the giver of our gifts, with worship of the gifts. And any society that is ordered in this way is disordered,” Ms. Sheffield says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

It's funny when someone asks me, where are you from? I say I'm from America because I'm from so many different places. Growing up in a motorhome, but also in houses, in sheds. There were parts of my experience as a child that I really treasured that taught me to love America. But there unfortunately was a lot of abuse as well. Carrie Sheffield is the author of the new memoir, Motorhome Prophecies, A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness. Suicide rate in 2022 is the highest since the Great Depression, since 1941. In this episode, she offers some profound insights into the cultural malaise she sees afflicting America today and a path forward.

What ended up happening is that we put human intellect in the place of God. And so even though we are materially better off, and even though we have economic wealth, it's come at a price. And that price is the humility and the recognition of the giver of our gifts. We've substituted worship for the giver of our gifts with worship of the gifts. And any society that is ordered in this way is disordered. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Carrie Sheffield, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me, Jan. Good to be back. Congratulations on your new book. And I want to start off with this remarkable childhood that you had. I mean,

17 schools, you've basically been in school in the inner city, you've been in the school in Harvard, at Harvard, you've been across the board. It's absolutely fascinating. Why don't we start with that? Because it kind of paints a picture of your life experiences and how you got here today. Yeah, I mean, it's funny when someone asks me where are you from, I say I'm from America. Here in the US because I'm from so many different places. Growing up in a motor home but also in houses, in sheds and tents, having one of my siblings being born

while the family was living in a tent. So it was a lot of just different parts of the country. And there were some beautiful aspects of that. That's how I learned to love this great country, being exposed to some of the most beautiful, seeing Mount Rushmore, and going down to visit New Orleans, and tasting jambalaya, and visiting Robert Frost's home in Vermont.

So there were parts of my experience as a child that I really treasure that taught me to love America. But there, unfortunately, was a lot of abuse as well. Absolutely. So, well, why don't we start with this? You actually ended up in Kansas City. That's one that's going to be very memorable, at least for me, from reading.

And I can't remember what year it was, but this was already a very kind of serious way to go to school. You were going through metal detectors. I think you were one of the very few, one of two white girls in the school system in the first place. So you kind of, you stood out quite a bit. And it was just something that I think a lot of people that might be watching this show just aren't familiar with. Yeah, I mean, it was in the mid-90s, I think around 1994 and 1996. I was in middle school. And that first day, I remember walking in with my mom,

and I just felt like we were walking into a juvenile detention center. But this was just a regular middle school. And that experience, being for two years, nearly two years in these schools, it forever emblazed in my mind the importance of school choice, because these were very difficult academic environments. This was the first school district,

Kansas City Public School District, in the entire country to ever lose its accreditation, which is an incredible dishonor. And this was, you know, overwhelmingly black school, one of only a handful of white students. I was bullied for being white. My black friends were bullied for being friends with a white girl. But the worst part about this whole experience was the just dangerous learning environment. You had to wait through the metal detectors. Sometimes you had to, you know to be out in the cold for maybe an hour or so. We all had to go into a holding pen in the morning in order to go there.

First, everyone had to sit there, and sometimes fights would break out. And then once everybody got through the metal detectors, then we were allowed to go to classrooms. But if you're pent up and everyone's fighting, you go and you bring that chaos to the classroom, which is what happens. So you have students throwing chairs at each other. That's just utter chaos. And meanwhile, the adults in the room, a lot of them are afraid.

The teachers are having to call the security office. But then just the academics. I was in sixth grade and eighth grade, and I'm doing things that I had seen maybe in like first or second grade. So to me, it shocks the conscience that anybody like Randy Weingarten or anybody else would want any student, let alone a vulnerable black student, to be trapped in that environment. And, you know, this was in the late 90s.

And from what I understand, it's really only gotten worse across the country in a lot of these kind of beleaguered school systems, right? Yeah, I mean, Chicago, I think, is a case in point. New York City schools are a case in point. The only silver lining in the country right now is that there are that voucher and go to a private school or a parochial school or some other charter school or some other public school that is going to be thriving and give those kids a chance. Because culture matters. And unfortunately, our culture in a lot of these very urban areas, it's so corrosive. I mean, a lot of especially these families are coming from broken families. A lot of these kids are coming from broken families

where there's maybe not a father present, and so they fall into just terrible role models, and then this intergenerational trauma perpetuates. You know, you're a very compassionate person, and of course I knew that before I read your book. Thank you. But it really comes through, and this is, you know, you're a very compassionate person. And of course, I knew that before I read your book. Thank you. But it really comes through. And this is, you know, your experiences in, I mean, like I said, this is just one of 17, I believe, you know, grade schools maybe you were in.

17, K-12, and homeschool. So 18 total. It's an astonishing, astonishing. If you could kind of lay out a little bit about how that actually was accomplished, because that itself is quite a feat, right? Well, that was certainly my mom was the organized one in the family. So I grew up with seven biological siblings and then with my mom and dad. So 10 of us and we were traveling the country because of my dad's claims of having a special mission. And so in order to fulfill what he said was the Holy Ghost guiding him to do certain things, we had to go

with him. And so my mom had been an elementary school teacher's aide and had an elementary school degree. So she really was the one who enabled us to do all this in terms of she had a folder for each school year. She had a filing system that she kept in the motor home. So each school, she would have the vaccine papers and the registration. And so she could put us in the school and then take us out. So some school years, I was in three different schools in one school year. Some years, I maybe had the same school. The most consecutive years I had was two years in a row where I was in the same school for two years and then we went away to kindergarten and then I went

away to three different schools for first grade and then I came back to the same school that I had been for kindergarten for second and third, but it was utter, utter chaos in terms of just moving so much. But the ability to eventually make it to Harvard, like you said, I think was a testament to my mom's ability to keep the glue on, but also to my determination to have something different for my life. But unfortunately, I, in some ways, encapsulated both the worst of both my parents in my life in terms of how much pressure I put on myself. Well, and you cover that quite a bit, you know, sort of some of the, you know, things that you see as your as your failures throughout. The reason I mentioned, you know, you're being compassionate, that experience of being in Kansas City, and frankly, in a whole bunch of other scenarios that come through,

which is, I mean, it's like a, it's a wild tale that I think I'll encourage people to check out. But that actually got you to, you know, care and want to actually make a meaningful, real difference, not performatively. This is one of the things that, as I read your book, I'm reminded of this, that there's a lot of performativity and goodness in our society today, not actually caring about helping in a meaningful way, like perhaps in these school systems and elsewhere. Whereas what you took from was well I will actually I want to you know I want to make a difference now I mean that's I think as someone who is on the conservative

policy side of things I think sometimes we get accused of not having compassion or empathy that in my view our policies are correct but sometimes we don't talk about them in a compassionate way to uh to help people see that you can be the agent of your own uplift as opposed to just saying like condemning people and the worldview in terms of a conservative worldview is the most empowering for the individual because it allows you to just flourish as an individual. But the thing is, there is a need for a safety net. But how do we balance that need for people who are disabled, who are mentally ill, and who cannot work?

There are segments of the population who have those traits, and we should provide for them. And I think as conservatives, we don't talk about that enough. But the thing is, like when you're talking about, you know, for example, racial issues or poverty issues, like the actual conservatives who donate the most to charity give, you know, for churches with involved with food banks, um, it's actually conservatives who, who give the most, but we, we don't speak in a, in a compassionate way. There's a really good book that, uh, I recommend called, uh, from, from Tim Keller, pastor, the late pastor, Tim Keller, it's called prodigal God. And it's the story of the prodigal son in the Bible. And, um, he calls out the older brother in that story, because for those who aren't familiar of the prodigal son in the Bible. And he calls out the older brother in that story, because for those who aren't familiar,

the prodigal son is a story about a younger brother who takes half his inheritance, says peace out, and he goes and he lives a drunken, just frivolous lifestyle, wastes all the inheritance he gets from his family, which is half of his father's estate, and gets a job feeding pigs. And he wakes up one day and realizes, you know what? Even a servant is treated better than I am in this pigsty. I'm going to go back to my dad's house and be a servant for my dad. And instead, the father runs out to meet him and says, you were lost and you're found. And what does the big brother do, the one who stayed?

He's angry because he doesn't want the father to throw a celebration for the younger brother coming back. Well, the older brother is the church, and the older brother, I think, in some cases, is the conservative, where we should, it's not about excusing the sin or saying that this behavior is acceptable, but also having compassion and welcoming the prodigals back. I think that's something that I've seen over and over in my life, that we should be doing better as conservatives. I picked a few quotes from your book, and I'm going to read one right now because I think it's a perfect time for that.

You say, The truth is, any politician or party or policy process is a false idol. False idols, like politics, can never fulfill the human pull in our soul towards the divine. Politics is a shoddy substitute, just like abusive man-made religion is a shoddy substitute for divine relationship. come to believe that one of the biggest, I guess, costs of the Enlightenment, with all its, you know, kind of amazing benefits, has been this kind of severing of the awareness of the relationship, the human relationship with the divine. Like, it became almost like the correct view, the way you were supposed to view the world in this weird mechanistic way, where God is no longer part of it, whereas traditionally it would

be the sort of foundational relationship that you were acutely aware of at all times, right? And this, you know, this actually comes through, this is just one quote, but this idea comes through in so many places in Motorhome Prophecies. Yeah, it's so interesting because I think this, my book, is a very typical story in that way, that it is the arc of what's happening to our country here now currently, but also more broadly, like you said, to the Enlightenment, that if you look at the long, long slog of human history where it's poverty, poverty, poverty, poverty, and then they call it the hockey stick of growth,

the hockey stick of economic flourishing, economic lifespan being expanded, scientific discovery that all these amazing discoveries that came because of the enlightenment. But what ended up happening is that we put human intellect in the place of God. And so even though we are materially better off and even though we have economic wealth and we have health and we have freedoms and flourishing at an individual level, really not seen compared to our ancestors. It's come at a price and that price is the humility and the recognition of the giver of our gifts. And so what we've done is we've substituted worship for the giver of our gifts with worship of the gifts. And any society that is ordered in this way is disordered.

I talk in the book about divine order, and divine order is to put God first, then people, and then things. And when I was agnostic and angry at God or just didn't believe God exists or was uncertain about God, that's what agnostic, I call it or just didn't believe God exists or was uncertain about God, that's what agnostic, I call it a shoulder shrugger, I don't know. When I was in this place of disbelief in God or loving God, I was living life in a disordered way.

And that was the life my order was, you know, people. I wanted to take care of people and honor people, things. And then I was ambivalent to God. And I think in many respects that's how kind of your average spiritual but not religious person lives in some respects. They may or may not believe in God or maybe they just think, oh, if I'm just a good person, then that's enough. As opposed to really taking a step back and thinking about, where do I come from? What's my purpose? And I think as a society, we've lost that, and that's part of why we're seeing skyrocketing suicide,

why we see skyrocketing depression. Just looking at the statistics now, Gen Z women, their suicide rate is almost double Gen X women when they were the same age now. So it's just it's very troubling. And the highest suicide rate in 2022, which is the highest and most current we have, is the highest since the Great Depression, since 1941, coming out of the Great Depression. So something's happening to America's mental health. And that's part of why I wrote the book is that I've had so many struggles with my, not only my own mental health, but people in my family. And I've seen what's worked for me. And that is returning to this understanding of God as a source of healing. And it's not certainly just me. There's so much

science behind faith and belief in God and religious community scientifically proven to heal our minds. unusual manifestation of it, obviously. And then you're led to question. You read the motorhome prophecies. Your whole worldview is kind of shattered. You're trying to figure out how to deal with that. And eventually you become agnostic for a while. And I can relate to this type of experience very much. Not a lot of the other elements, but this absolutely. And you actually mention in the book something about the probabilities, right? What are the probabilities of all this working out? What are the probabilities?

Actually, one thing that I've wondered about is just water as a compound. It's like all these incredible properties that are essential to actually facilitating life. And what's the likelihood that it actually works like it works in this unbelievably unique way? Well, exactly. It actually takes more faith to believe in random chance, statistically speaking, when you're talking about the probabilities of the earth being at this velocity, at this axis, at this temperature, that our heads aren't exploding, that we have the existence of life at this, you know, everything is so utterly improbable. I think intellectually,

it actually makes a lot more sense to believe in a creator, mathematically speaking. And as a Christian also, I've heard a really good encapsulation of it, which is that it takes a lot more faith to believe in a virgin universe than a virgin birth. That's interesting. I hadn't heard that before. One thing that, you know, the COVID time, frankly, the last, say, you know, five, eight years of our existence here has revealed to me is just that we're very susceptible to narratives being kind of bombarded at us, right, so to speak. And there's some significant portion of our society that believes things which are just, if you really sit down and think about it for two seconds, it just can't be right.

But they're very determined that that's the case. And frankly, in many cases, these people are also not just a-religious, but anti-religious, right? It's a weird combination. Have you thought about that? Yeah, well, it's very interesting. In particular, I'm very concerned about mental health. And I was researching about atheism. And being atheist is actually strongly associated with emotional repression, which I think is very telling, especially because the psychologists and psychiatrists who run our mental health treatment are overwhelmingly atheist. Harvard found among all the professions that the two most atheist professions within the teaching university system were biologists and psychologists. So on the one hand, you have almost a hostility toward God, which is associated with emotional repression. They're the ones assigned to treat our mental health, even though there's overwhelmingly, you know, overwhelming scientific evidence that God heals your mind. So it almost seems like there's this hostility that is part of why we have such a

disaster in our mental health system. And I talk in the book about some of the scientific evidence for faith healing you. So for example, the Harvard School of Public Health found that women who attend religious service once a week on average, they are 68% less likely to die from suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol overdose. And men are 33% less likely. And that's way statistically significant. There was also another study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is one of the big feeders into the White House Council of Economic Advisors. They found something similar, that in states that had a drop in religious participation, there was an uptick in opioid deaths, suicides, and other these deaths of despair as they call

them. So and then there was another study in the Psychiatric Times that was a literature review of 93 different studies and they found 66% of them had a strong correlation between religious participation and lower depression rates. So you have this overwhelming scientific evidence for the power of God and faith on the one hand and then on the other hand you have this regime of psychologists and psychiatrists who have a hostility or aversion to God as atheists. And you have this, it's like a recipe for disaster. And that's why we are where we are. So it's interesting that you mentioned that biologists are in this group that are the most

atheist, because you know that I studied evolutionary biology. And one of the things that was very curious to me was, you know, I think by third year in my studies, and this is actually what interested me particularly in evolutionary biology, it became abundantly clear that evolution by natural selection doesn't explain the diversity of life or, you know, the origin of us as human beings, certainly, never mind, you know, certain aspects of diversity of life. Maybe it's as one mechanism, fine, never mind, you know, certain aspects of diversity of life. Maybe it's as one mechanism, fine, but there were a lot of people around me, and I talked with my professors around this, and I had some of the top evolutionary biologists, professors in the world in my school at the time. I said, isn't it odd that given everything we've learned, you know,

people seemingly, like, they deeply believe that evolution by natural selection is the answer to, like, the origin of life and who we are and things like this. And they say, yeah, it is actually quite strange. It became, again, this sort of quasi-religious belief. And that prompted me to study alternate models of evolution. That's what I became interested in. But in my family, I have a mother who is deeply devout, and I have a father who believed more that religion is very important, but more as sort of providing a moral foundation. But as to whether it's actually real, that's a different question. I think so, you know, there's a lot of people out there would say, yeah, yeah, it's necessary. But, you know, whether it actually is everything, if it's if this is actually divine revelation, well, that's a whole different question.

Yeah, well, one of the big themes that I talk about in the book is what I explain as the difference between religion and relationship. That religion is a human-run institution, and so it will be inherently broken. And I was looking when I was first in my father's cult. And then when I was looking in other religious explorations for the divine, I kept getting frustrated. Well, guess what? That's a feature, not a bug, that religion is broken. And so I was expecting divinity in religion, even though God is not religion. At best, religion can point you to God and help connect you with God. At its worst, it becomes a stumbling block and causes pain and suffering and separation from God, which

unfortunately happens quite a bit through everything from the pedophilia scandal within the Catholic Church to you see some pastors stealing money or embezzling money or swindling people or sexual abuse against women in some churches or other denominations. So there's a lot of using the name of God for abuse. And I like to say that is with Beethoven. If you go to the symphony and you hear a really bad rendition of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, are you going to blame Beethoven or are you going to blame those musicians? That's how I feel about the difference between God and religion. One of the things, you know, reading through your book, it made me reflect on, let's say, how good a family and community situation I

have, particularly in the context of COVID. That's something I've been thinking about a little bit. It's very curious that one of the sort of inessential industries apparently was church. So in this situation where everybody's suddenly, you know,'s suddenly isolated, how is it that church was excluded? Because that's where people would find their community. For a lot of people, it was disastrous. And it contributed to this massive spike, as you suggested, in suicides. Yeah. And in fact, it's actually gotten worse. I paid attention very carefully to the State of the Union that we just had with President Biden. He talked about the mental health crisis and he blamed Trump and somehow implying that now mental health is so much better under President Biden, but it's actually gotten worse. That's what's really

sad is that coming out of COVID, mental health is actually getting worse. And I think there are lots of reasons. I mean, it started with that isolation with COVID. But then in some respects, people have continued those patterns. And once your subconscious has kind of been programmed, then you become on autopilot. And I think if you've programmed yourself with isolation, you can kind of continue down that pathway and then technology is exacerbating it. And the strong ties between, you know, social media addiction and depression is very well documented, especially among young people and seeing like even for young girls, like the Wall Street Journal reported about the Instagram

with internally, Instagram staff knew the addictive properties and how dangerous it was for the self-esteem for young women and how it encouraged eating disorders and low self-esteem and depression, and they didn't really do anything about it. So I think that parents should be aware, but faith and community and connection,

in-person connection, there's no substitute for it. There really isn't. And so for the churches that were in other houses of worship that were designated as inessential, I would argue that was one of the catalysts for this mental health crisis that we have. You know, something that you just reminded me of, one of the sort of monikers which is being trotted out as like a big threat to America right now is Christian nationalism. How do you react to that? I think anybody who puts government as your God, whether it's a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or Hindu or anything, if you put government as your god, then you are a fill-in-the-blank nationalist, whatever identity you put. To me, the nefarious attribution of this phrase, Christian nationalism, to me is just simply the worship of government by someone who happens to be a Christian. And so I would disavow that. I would disagree with someone who

worships government, but I would do that with an atheist as well. If an atheist is worshiping government, I disavow that too. Anybody worshiping government instead of God, I disavow that. I think it's wrong. Again, that's a disordered life. I think though there is a profound lack of understanding though about what Christians actually believe. An example was this Politico reporter who just seemed so shocked that Christians believed that the rights of people flowed from God and not from a central bureaucracy. And the fact that this was just nefarious to this Politico reporter, the only silver lining about that is that she was routinely and profoundly corrected by Christians who said, yes, actually, that's the point. And that's what's in our founding documents, that our rights do flow from God. And that is not anything to be nefarious at all. So as someone who loves America and I am a proud Christian, I think

the nefarious use of this label for someone like me, it doesn't apply. But at the same time I'm also aware that I am a flawed human being and my impulse is to brokenness just like all of us is. And so I really try, I'm very mindful of a phrase from Ronald Reagan, which is, he said, I'm wary of people claiming that God is on our side. I think we should be very much asking ourselves, am I on God's side?

And I think that mentality reframing how you think about government, how you think about your actions, because if you are think about government, how you think about your actions. Because if you are worshiping government, because government in the U.S., it's we the people. So if you're worshiping government, you're actually worshiping the people, which is a very dangerous place to be. We should not be worshiping that. We should be worshiping God. But how do we make sure that we're not imposing our will in place of God? I think there are lots of controls that we can and should put in place

to make sure that doesn't happen. It's supposed to be we the people, but I guess certainly a number of people on this show and elsewhere have kind of revealed to me that it's kind of been shifting from that for a while. Yeah, it has. Unfortunately, it's become we, the small coterie of bureaucrats who know better than we, the people, and want to impose this worldview on everybody else as opposed to having it really be something, a well-educated, civic, participating populace that's coming, that is able to voice their opinions freely,

according with the First Amendment. So I think that the idea of we the people, yeah, I think it is under attack. I think also when I hear the phrase, democracy dies in darkness, which is the current Washington Post motto. And look country and their worldview in terms of understanding the root of the word democracy is demos. And demos means people. And if you are completely detached from the worldview, whether it's their faith or their values, and you have no understanding or respect for that, then you are actually a threat to democracy,

because you are actually not understanding demos. You're not understanding the people. You don't have a fundamental respect for we, the people. There's two different ways of viewing the world that I think about when you describe this, very broadly speaking. These would be the extremes. One is where people should have the right to think and believe what they want.

And the other one is that someone who's somehow enlightened and of a certain level should have the right to make sure that others believe or think something particular, which is the correct view. Ultimately, I think we should be centering our society on truth. But unfortunately, in our postmodern society, we have untethered ourselves from the idea that truth exists. And so if truth doesn't exist as an objective outside phenomenon, then who becomes the arbiter of truth? Well, whoever gets the most power or whoever gets the most credentialing. And so I think the danger of that, again, is to worship the created instead of the creator. The creator is the source of truth. The arrogance of imposing, as a human, your interpretation of truth versus the truth,

and of course that's where always the dispute is, is what is truth. But I think the overall idea of coercion versus persuasion is ultimately going to be the biggest question of our time, because we were founded as one nation under God, not one nation under a small elite cabal of people who have convinced themselves they embody truth or that they know my truth. And my truth is to be imposed on other people. the broader question of our country in terms of, for me, I see my life in the book. I rejected a lot of the Judeo-Christian underpinnings for a long time because I had been abused in the name of God. And I lived in this place of darkness and anger and antipathy, even though I called myself a secular conservative.

So it was almost like an oxymoron. I respected religion in the sense of that I could see that it could be some glue, but I didn't actually believe that there was an objective truth. And if I can jump in, you know, what, what really strikes me here is that, you know, you, of course, you, there were, there were these underpinnings, but there was also this coercion that you didn't even fully realize was coercion because it was routine. It was just how you lived. And it took you a lot to just kind of figure this all out. And this, again, speaks to your compassionate nature to be able to look at it through a somewhat benevolent lens afterwards. Yeah, and I think the Bible says where the Spirit of the Lord is, there's freedom. And this is also the tension, though, because the Bible also says, do not abuse your freedom

to make bad choices. And so that's the paradox of America, is that we are born and designed to be free. But unfortunately, because we are flawed and our human nature is to depravity, if we allow the freedom to basically run amok and just have our most base impulses govern our society, then our society will collapse. And I think that's kind of what's happening. Irving Kristol, who was kind of one of the godfathers of the conservative movement, he had a book. It was really a collection of essays, but the title I think was a very telling title,

which is he called it Two Cheers for Capitalism. And he said, I withhold that third cheer because at the end of the day, like a free market is basically just a very well-oiled machine for maximizing production and productivity and giving goods at a low cost. Well, that third shear is really the ethics and the morals and the programming of that machine. And there's been no successful long-term society that has not programmed and elevated that capitalistic machine in a long-term way that's sustainable.

And quite often it will actually elevate destructive, corrosive things, whether it's bad food that's bad for yourself or having this terrible obesity crisis. I mean, the fact that so many young men are not eligible for the military because they're obese, that's a huge red flag. Or elevating technology in the way it's so addictive, but it's through the capitalistic machine. So we as a society, we have to reprogram that machine, I believe, in a way that we are controlling it instead of allowing it to control us by elevating and perpetuating this like pop sugar, pop culture that rots your brain, you know, content that's not, I mean, you don't see it with the CCP,

but that's the CCP controls the content on TikTok. You can bet they do. But that's the paradox of living in a free society that it's more of the cultural controls that are put in place through the traditions of faith and family that are of a free private nature that create pro-social controls on capitalism, as opposed to the CCP, which is imposing a government mandate. And so America is an experiment in this freedom of private control over the culture as opposed to the CCP, which is a government control. I think that's a very beautiful way to say this.

Actually, this is something I've been talking about a number of times. We, in our perhaps hubris, believed that by investing and building this country of China under the CCP, we would change them and we would impart these values that you just described. But somehow they figured out that we were very corruptible to the mighty dollar, so to speak. So I wanted to touch on this because we've talked about this before, this idea. Ronald Reagan had this speech where he calls out the evil empire, right? And this, of course, this was the Soviet Union. But a lot of people didn't actually like that wording even because, like, what's evil, right?

How do we, who gets to judge? You know what I'm talking about here, right? Yep, they didn't like that language. And they didn't like someone using the cloaking himself in a mantle of morality and the saying that there was good and evil, right and wrong. But that's honestly, that's always been the human experience. It's constantly been a struggle of evil and good, light and dark. And we're deluding ourselves if we can't use those terms. Looking at Lenin and that philosophy, he said any method that can be used for the elevation of their proletariat aims was moral and good. And any notion of a supernatural concept of morality or good, we profoundly reject.

And so he was all about putting this forced atheism that was controlled by the human brain as the source of morality. And that was how I lived my life. And I describe in my book, I call that my walk of darkness when I was agnostic because, um, I, I had been, it was one form of control, like extreme cult religious control, and then swinging over to this other form of it's, it's the atheist. That's what the Soviet form of control. It's, it's the same thing, you know, and that's the healthy, the healthy faith, the middle ground. And that's why I really try to, in the book emphasize is that there's the healthy relationship with God is what is great for the and right for the individual. And it is what is great and right for society. And that is in God we trust. It's not in man-made

cults we trust. It's not in the state we trust. It's in God we trust. You know, I guess as we finish up, I want to touch on a couple of things you mentioned, which are, I think, incredibly important. You know, you forgave your father for a lot. And I'm sure some people say that that's impressive, Carrie. But the curious thing about forgiveness is that you actually benefit more in the end than the person and you touch on this. And I've certainly experienced that myself. And for way too many people, this is kind of an odd abstract idea. So let's talk about this a little bit. The other piece is gratitude. Yeah. And I talk about the science of forgiveness. I really try to tie science into all the claims I make. But there is a lot of evidence that forgiveness is very good for your

mind, your body, and your spirit. And for me, I was living in a place of unforgiveness. And it really culminated in 2019. And I ended up in the hospital because I, I had not forgiven. So as much as, you know, pat myself on the back for forgiving, it was really because I tried living without forgiveness. And I, I went through a big forgiveness process on my dad in 2020, um, in part because I realized how much negativity I trapped in my body. Um, and so so yes forgiveness is very much for the person who has been wronged and if you're in the Christian faith it's actually a commandment to forgive it's not an option and the well you have to make the choice I mean I certainly know a number of Christians who have held

grudges for quite some time yeah well. Well, then I would say they're not following what Christ has taught. So, I mean, I, of all people, am a very flawed person, as the book lays out. So I am by no means in any place to judge anybody. But I do know for me, with forgiveness, and I talk in the book about a mentor of mine who became my forgiveness mentor. And his name is Anthony Thompson, and he's a pastor in Charleston, South Carolina. And his wife was murdered in this brutal shooting in 2015, where he had a white supremacist coming in and mercilessly slaughtering nine innocent black parishioners in this historically black church. And his goal was to spark a race riot.

That was his intention. He had seen the cities burn in Baltimore and Ferguson. And he drove all the way across the state from Columbia. And he chose that church because it had been a center of fighting against slavery and very historic. And his goal was to create rioting and burning in these black neighborhoods. But instead, this miracle happened after this horrible shooting, and my friend was one of the people who was part of this. And in the bond hearing, which apparently it's not normal for the judge

to allow the family of the victims to speak to the accused, but in this case they did. And these family members who had just lost a loved one, they spoke to him and they forgave him. And they said, give your life to God. I forgive you. God forgives you. Change your life. Surrender. Ask for God's forgiveness and you'll be okay. And that was just the shot heard around the world. The city didn't burn. There was no rioting. It was this miracle of outpouring of love and just compassion and understanding.

I met Pastor Thompson a few years later and I read his book called, Called to Forgive. He talked about that journey of how he was able to do that. I knew that if he could forgive, then I could forgive. And as much as I had kept so much anger trapped in my body, I knew that wasn't healthy. I knew that he, as they say, hurt people hurt other people. And he's been wounded. He had a brutal childhood assault. He was sexually assaulted by someone, a trusted adult in his life. And he passed that trauma on, you know.

And so I think quite often when we're talking about justice, there's this phrase thrown around about rehabilitative justice. I think it is important to hold people accountable. And it's not like Anthony Thompson says this guy should walk free. No, not at all. But I do think the posture of the heart and allowing that space for the person to repent, it should always be open. Yes, we hold them accountable. So do I think my dad should have been thrown in jail? Probably. I still probably think that. But do I harbor anger toward my father? Do I allow that anger to control my life anymore no you know and this is such both this you know the example with

your father but also with pastor Thompson is so powerful and I you know this you would think that this would be something that would be broadcast everywhere like this positive example of incredible benevolence and sacrifice and transformation right as you describe it. But unfortunately, like what we often see, you know, just kind of saturating our media is all the other stuff. Yeah. And that's what's ironic about, you know, for example, these shootings, these police shootings. It's in the headlines because it is actually so rare that this happens.

And as Ronald Fryer from Harvard showed, there's actually no disproportionate use of lethal force against black people compared to white people by the police. And, but then meanwhile you have maybe like hundreds or thousands of black people who are killed by other civilians and they get almost no coverage because we've normalized that. And that's not news because it's so normalized. And then the same with forgiveness, like forgiveness is not a very splashy headline in the news business.

They say if it bleeds, it leads. And I think that's incumbent on us as news consumers to the conversation earlier about, you know, two cheers for capitalism. As a news consumer, I appreciate that, you know, at you guys at Epoch Times, you have a positive news section where you're putting out content that is just restoring faith in humanity. So I think it's important to seek those out. And I think that church and whatever house of worship you go to, those are places where you can get those

experiences. It's absolutely what's gotten me through so much trauma. But as so many people are leaving church and leaving faith practice, they're cutting themselves off from these amazing stories. So I think that's where we as consumers, we have to demand them. I think technology can be used for good as well as for bad. You know, Carrie, I mentioned the word gratitude. And I'm profoundly grateful to know you and to be able to read about your life. I feel I learned so much about just who you are and what you bring to the world through reading this wonderful book. So thank you. Thank you, Jan. And I'm grateful to have met you. I'm grateful for the stories you tell and the

truth that you present. I think if I had to pin you politics, I would just pin you as an independent thinker. And as someone who is really striving for the truth. So you're part of the truth party. Well, Carrie Sheffield, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you, Jan. Thank you all for joining Carrie Sheffield and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.