Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - How Did America Lose Its Way? | Dr. Erwin Lutzer on Marxism, Darwin, and Cultural Decay

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

Dr. Erwin Lutzer, former pastor of Moody Church, explains how three influential thinkers—Marx, Darwin, and Freud—shaped modern America's cultural crisis. Drawing from his books "The Eclipse of God" and "We Will Not Be Silenced," Lutzer breaks down how cultural Marxism, Darwinian evolution, and sexual revolution have systematically undermined faith, family, and freedom.Learn how:Marx's ideology continues to influence education and social policyDarwin's theory impacts views on human value and lifeFreud's ideas revolutionized society's approach to sexualityCultural Marxism differs from classical MarxismPropaganda shapes public opinion despite contrary evidenceThe family unit is being deliberately targetedSocialist dependency is replacing family stabilityDr. Lutzer offers hope for Christians navigating these challenging times while warning about the dangers of compromising with culture. Essential viewing for understanding today's social and cultural battles.#CulturalMarxism #Christianity #Faith #Culture #DrLutzer #Apologetics #Politics #CriticalRaceTheory #Socialism #FamilyValuesWatch VideosVisit the Website Buy Consider the LiliesFollow on Instagram

Hey folks, my name is Johnny Artavanis and this is Dial In. I want to thank those of you who continue to support Dial In Ministries and share these resources with your friends and family and church community. And I also want to particularly thank those of you who have already received my new book, Consider the Lilies, Finding Perfect Peace in the Character of God. You know, for me it's been really encouraging to see those of you who have already been blessed by the resource. And obviously, everything good within my book owes its origin to what is within God's precious

word. And I have a favor to ask if you could help me. It really does help with the visibility of the book and more people finding out about it if you would give me a rating and review on Amazon. That way, people that may not know me personally can find out about the resource. Sometimes people just type in Christian book anxiety, and whatever's at the top of that list is the book that they'll purchase. And my hope and prayer is that if they're anxious, they seek the solution that comes only from God's changeless and matchless character within his word. And so if

you would give me a review and rating on Amazon, that would really help. Well, in this episode, I sit down with Dr. Erwin Lutzer. He was the pastor of Moody Church in Chicago for 36 years. He's written numerous books. And I've, in the last two weeks, read his most recent three books, one of which is entitled, We Will Not Be Silenced. And one of the things that Dr. Lutzer is known for is his ability to biblically and intelligently look at the world in which we live through a biblical worldview. Sometimes we may turn on the news and we see our culture is collapsing around us. That didn't happen overnight. And in this episode, I sit down with him and I begin to just ask him

simply, how did we get here? When you see our country in decay and when you see growing hostility towards the biblical Jesus Christ, what are the philosophies and ideologies that have gotten us to where we are today? Now, to be fair, some of the things he may say or the terms he uses or the people he references may be new or it might feel like a lot of information, but I would encourage you to dial in here, no pun intended, so that you can begin to understand the various ideologies that have contributed to the world in which you currently live. And if we're going to be shrewd as serpents, as the ambassadors of Jesus Christ,

I think it's really helpful, even as you go about this world as a witness, to understand the world that you are called to be a light in. Well, without further ado, let's dial in. If you're in a city and you're lost, if you have a compass, you know which direction north is. If you know where north is, you know where all the other directions are. You know which direction you're going, whether or not you're making progress. But let us suppose, Johnny, that you have a magnet in your backpack, and that compass continually points to you. You have no idea if you're going in circles, whether or not you're making progress, where you're going,

because it all depends on you. That ought to make us weep. But that's where we are today, in a world that has lost transcendent realities. Pastor Lutzer, thank you for sitting down. I'm looking forward to our series of conversations here. I got three books of yours right here, but for 36 years, you were the pastor at Moody Church. You've written a number of books and you're still heard daily around the world, but I want to punctuate these three books for a moment. And I want to jump into our conversation, which will feature largely your voice, not mine. The first of which is We Will Not Be Silenced. I read it recently. Well, yesterday. I read all three of these books in the last 24 hours, been greatly impacted by them. And I want to thank you for your ministry. And this most recent one, The Eclipse of God, and the subtitle I think is fitting for the conversation,

Our Nation's Disastrous Search for a More Inclusive Deity and What We Must Do About It. A large focal point of your writing is how the Christian is to think and live in light of where our world is going. And so I want to maybe frame this series of conversations, and you've written about this in detail in really all three of these books, but even especially in this most recent one. How did we get to where we're at right now? How did we arrive at a world

today that is increasingly on the surface more broken than ever? The family is deteriorating. People throw out terms like critical race theory and Marxism. And I think in large part, many people in the church don't even know what those terms even mean. So talk to us, help us understand how we got here. Well, you know, you referenced my book, The Eclipse of God. So let me begin there. When there's an eclipse of the sun, it means that the moon comes between the earth and the sun. It doesn't affect the sun, but there's darkness on the earth. And what I argue is that the moon of secularism has blocked the face of God. And Israel experienced this, chapter 59 of Isaiah, verse 1, where it says,

Clearly I am not deaf that I cannot hear you, my arm is not short that I cannot help you, but your iniquities have separated between you and me, and I have hidden my face from you. And so what's happening in America is we are descending more and more into darkness. But now I want to answer your question much more specifically. How did we get here? The second chapter of the book is very critical. You know, of course, Nietzsche, he's

famous for saying, God is dead. And he says, cannot we hear the noise of the gravediggers who have buried God? He died in the year 1900. I asked myself, who would these gravediggers be? And I think that there are three of them that he would have known, Freud a little less so, but he certainly would have known about Marx, and you already referenced Marxism. When you stop to think of it, you see Marx attacked God as ruler. Here's what Marx believed, that the only reason why people misbehave, the only reason, is because of oppression. Take away the oppression, and they're going to live together in harmony. So we destroy the family. Why? It's a unit of oppression. Men oppress their wives, parents oppress their children, and then they take them to church, and God is the ultimate oppressor. So let's get rid of God, let's get rid of all

of that oppression, and lo and behold, people are going to live in harmony. Now, I want you to know, Johnny, that recently, a couple of months ago, I was in Berlin, and when you go up the stairs of the University of Berlin, there's a huge Marxist quotation. It's in German, but I translated it into English. What it says is this, up until now, philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it. For everyone who is listening there, let us remember that Marx is still ruling a good part of the world from his grave. Why do I begin with Marx? Philosophers, their impact has been huge. And then the second one is Darwin. Johnny, I can't overemphasize the role of Darwin in our darkness. Why? Well, you stop to think of it. He believed

that we came up through the animal world. I have a quotation in the book, and the book that we're talking about here is the Eclipse of God. I have a quotation in which he says that the baboon is our grandfather. Well, Johnny, if the baboon is our grandfather, we have no argument against abortion, no argument against infanticide or euthanasia. We do that with animals, and we're only animals on a further continuum. I could take this so much more further in terms of discussion, but I must hurry on. Of course, Hitler was a Darwinian, no question about it. You get rid of the inferior races, which to him were the Jews, to give the Aryans their best opportunity to continue to advance. And then, of course, you have Freud. Freud believed that the highest pleasure was sexuality. So we should have no rules regarding sexuality.

And I show in the book, and this brings tears to my eyes, that this actually leads to pedophilia. And we've had that in American society. And I wouldn't doubt whether it might be the next domino to fall. Now, let's think about it. And I have to throw this in. Darwin, of course, had the great impact. He rebelled against God as creator, Freud, God as lawgiver, and Nietzsche had a funeral for God. He said, I'm sending somebody into the cathedrals of Europe and proclaiming that the cathedrals of Europe are the tombs of God. Johnny, have you been to Europe?

I have several times, yeah. And you know that some of the cathedrals are mosques and they are bars and they are libraries. And if you go to England, the one that Bunyan would have attended is a nightclub. I know that I'm giving a long answer, but I am giving it because I believe that there are some very important lessons that we can learn from that. Number one, I share my heart. We cannot take the existence of our churches for granted. I was in Albania this past spring, and I have to say that Albania during the 60s was the North Korea. Communism shut down 1,200 churches and synagogues. Communism can do that. People say politics isn't important. Well, like our good friend, you know, Frank Turek likes to say, have you ever noticed that there is no First Baptist Church in North Korea? So what you have is, you have this happening,

that's the first lesson. The second lesson is this. The way this comes about is one compromise after another. One compromise leads to another compromise. They say that there's a middle path, and then we stop at the middle path. And then the last one, and this ought to bring us to our knees, even good people can submit to the culture if they are under intense pressure. And I could give many examples, but I've already given you a very long answer to the question of how did we get here? You have those cultural streams that flow into our culture, and we need to understand their origin, but we also have to know how to stand against them. I want to go back and maybe extrapolate a couple things from what you said. You mentioned Marxism. People kind of heard the terminology, you know, maybe just explain, because I think you delineate it in your book. What is the

difference between classical Marxism and cultural Marxism? Because sometimes those are interpreted to be one and the same, but it's actually a pronged reality that is shaping our culture today. Exactly. Classical Marxism, of course, resulted in the great revolutions in Russia and China. So cultural Marxism says we can bring about a Marxist state incrementally. If we can capture education, let's take, for example, Marx believed that truth was socially constructed. There was no real objective truth that existed out there. I try to help parents to understand this. Why is it that when I send my child to university, he or she comes back, and lo and behold, they think differently than I do? Absolutely. Because back in the days before men could have babies, back in those days, what happened is that truth was seen as something objective that you work toward.

And we might argue as to whether or not we got it, how to get there. But today, truth is internalized. It's how I feel. The whole LGBTQ plus advances have been made because of feelings. I feel compassion. I feel love. But love can be evil. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, they didn't stop loving. They just started to love the wrong things. Lovers of pleasure, lovers of money, lovers of self. So love is love. Herein is love, that you keep my commandments. So getting back to Marx, once he determined that laws and truth is socially constructed and has no real objective reality, from there we can see the huge implications for our educational system. And then, so you capture education,

you capture the media, you capture various influences in our culture incrementally. And then the hope is, of course, economically as well, socialism, the hope is that eventually people will see Marxism is just wonderful, and we don't need a bloody revolution like happened in Russia and China. Maybe now talk about the relationship between that incremental Marxism, that's the cultural Marxism, how it relates to the classical Marxism, which would be more economic focused. And obviously, I'm a pastor, you're a pastor, but I want to understand how the world is operating. So I'm asking you this question, because I want to understand the world with a level of, I want to be able to minister with a level of understanding. So you talk a little bit about the dismantling of the family in your books. Why is the dismantling of the nuclear family, which a husband, a wife and kids, a father who leads and provides.

Why is that so important to the Marxist agenda? Well, destroying it, of course, brings about equality. You know, in one of my books that you referenced here entitled No Reason to Hide, in that book, I talk about those who criticize family supremacy. It's the same category as white supremacy. So if you say, for example, that the nuclear family is the best way to propagate truth and righteousness and so forth, you are actually a racist, you know, because you are appealing to bourgeoisie values instead of the values of the proletariat, you know, to use Marxist terms. So that I think is the reason. And therefore, you know, I'm from Chicago and we have a lot of crime. And of course,

there's crime throughout all of America. I understand that. But so often, it is because children are growing up without a father. So there are no guardrails. There is no one to emulate, no one to teach them. And again, we are getting into various areas here all at once. But I would say this to the parents out there regarding education. You cannot take your children and throw them to the wolves. You can't take your lambs and throw them to the wolves. Now, I don't know how it is here. But I can tell you that in Illinois, I give illustrations of what is happening educationally. But there again, certainly the influence of Marx and critical race theory, critical race theory basically sees people as both oppressors on the one side and then the

oppressed, and they divide them into those two categories. And in our society, that division usually has to do with race. Why? Saul Alinsky in Chicago in the 70s, who was a Marxist, saw that Marxism could be applied to race so that there would be continual conflict and chaos. In fact, Johnny, it's all of God. But through God's providence, I met a man who worked with Saul Alinsky, and he said, we had great ideas as to how to help the under-resourced communities of Chicago. And Saul Alinsky would shout at us, no, we don't exist to solve problems. We are here to use problems. So what does critical race theory do? It tears apart everything that Jesus died to bring together. In the book of

Colossians, the apostle Paul says, in Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, bond or free, Scythian, barbarian, but they are all one in Christ. He doesn't say Jews become Greeks and Greeks become Jews. The ethnicities stay. But Jesus died to break down those barriers. Critical race theory tears that all apart. Why? It wants us to see one another in continual opposition. You touched on it in the book, and we're asking the question, how did we get to now? Like the world in which we live, we're filming election season 2024.

You mentioned a big part of it is the propaganda, the way that the media is shaping people today. I think you said it, the purpose of propaganda is to shape people's reality. Yes, exactly. So that even if faced with a mountain of evidence, that would be contrary. Thank you for quoting me directly because I remember writing that and that is exactly true. The purpose of propaganda is to so shape people's view of reality that even when there is a mountain of evidence against it, they will not change their minds. That's correct. So even with the terminology that's being employed today, and again, I think this is important to understand because there's a way that the media palletizes what's actually happening.

Abortion is not called abortion. It's called reproductive freedom. You mentioned a couple things. You talked about how Hitler talked about starvation being low-calorie diets. You need to use some other examples. How is the propaganda in the media today being used to shape and drive the agenda that we're finding ourselves currently in the middle of? Well, in many different ways. As a matter of fact, one of the chapters in the three books we're talking about deals specifically with propaganda. But here's what happens.

Propaganda takes one flaw in your opposition, whatever that might be, and it becomes the headline. It becomes the one driving force and you ignore all the other issues that might be of importance. And so propaganda has to have fear. You need an enemy. Hitler knew that. And the enemy, of course, were the Jews. You have to be able to generate hatred. Hatred is a very important part of propaganda.

Because if people don't hate, they're not going to be enthusiastic for what you have to do. You have to generate hate. And then what you have to do is to drive them to certain solutions, even though those solutions might be completely unworkable, and you make promises that you're never going to be able to keep, but you have before the people the vision. The other thing, critical, the individual means nothing. It is the group, and everyone is to be in step, even the goose step that Hitler's soldiers had. Everyone in line, and woe to the person who stands against the culture and against the prevailing narrative. So here's a young Nazi, for example. He's

questioning whether or not he should go out there and kill Jews, but everyone else seems to be doing it, and it seems to be approved by the authorities. So his conscience tells him differently, but he's willing to override his conscience in order to fit in. Mention the story about the 100,000 youth in the stadium. You mentioned something along the lines of, as long as 100,000 people are for it, you're either going to be silent or you're going to bend. You hit on a topic that I have a great deal of interest in. There were people who went to Nuremberg as skeptics, and they came back praying, our father Adolf, who art in Nuremberg, the third Reich come. Now, the word Reich in German means empire, the third empire, and I could explain what number one was and what number two is,

but that would take us too far afield. So here's the point. There would be this cultural moment of pressure, of unquestioning pressure, where people would have to suspend their individual judgment and go along with the crowd and all the chanting and all the yes, yes, yes, and exactly, you put it correctly, woe to the person who stands against it. And so in order to fit in, and of course we could talk about how consciences are overridden, what you have to do is to kill a child, do something evil. Hitler had his men do that because he knew that if he could deaden the conscience after you've done that, you can commit any atrocity that you're expected to commit. Huge implications here. And you know, as we look at American culture, which of course we're very interested in, what we have to ask ourselves is, are we giving the culture

what the culture wants? Or are we willing to stand against the culture as individuals and pay the price? Or are we simply going along with the flow? Maybe just a couple more questions about this whole Marxist ideology, because I think it's important, even as we think through, you know, let's just talk about the politic, the politics of, hey, taxes, for instance, what's the relationship between the dismantling of the family and the dependency upon we're moving into a socialist environment? That's part of the agenda. It's incrementally happening. Maybe just talk through the flow. If it's happening over time, they want to dismantle the family. And what you want to do is to make sure that there are as many people dependent upon the

government as you possibly can. So you dole out benefits, even though the government can't really pay for them, but you keep on borrowing money. You know, our national debt is unsustainable. And Johnny, I'm saying this with a smile, but I've heard that for many, many, many, many, many years. But you know what? It's sustainable. Our national debt is unsustainable. And eventually we know how it's going to end up. And the book of 2 Peter tells us that everything is going to be burned and everything. But the point is this. You want people who are dependent on the government. People don't

understand socialism. In a socialistic society, you don't work for yourself. You work for the government. And then the government doles out the money in accordance with equity and fairness. Just go to Russia and find out how that has worked out. And I've been to Russia many, many years ago before you were born, Johnny, I'm sure. And what you find is the greed of humanity takes over and so many implications. Now, here's the thing. Mark so misunderstood human nature. He thought that everyone would wake up in the morning excited to work for the state.

Oh, today I'm going to be working for the state. That's not the way in which it is. Now, there was a kibbutz in Israel that decided that they were going to run according to socialistic principles. Everybody gets paid the same. The people who slept in till 10 in the morning got paid the same as the early risers because we want to be fair and have equity. People left lights on. Why? Because we don't have to pay. You know, the

community is going to pay. And they discovered something, and I hope I remember this exactly, that the kibbutz became a paradise for parasites. Everybody wanted something without contributing anything. And socialism is very attractive because it gives the illusion of equality. It gives the illusion of compassion, but it undercuts all personal self-initiative. And as a result, eventually, it ends up eating itself, so to speak, and becomes unsustainable. You know, we've been, and I think I want to at least alley-oop us for our next conversation, but I want to be able to at least thread some of these needles together for a moment. I asked you, how did we get here? And you mentioned three gravediggers that are in your book.

That being Darwin, you destroy the reality that we're made in the image of God. Then that's why you get PETA saying a rat is a dog is a chicken is a human. You know, it doesn't matter. We're all the same. We're all grown up germs. And I have to tell you this, that I point this out in the book that as they take animals and raise them to the level of humans or try to, They actually bring humans down to the level of animals. Well, for sure. Our culture cares more about a golden retriever than a baby. And so that's already the reality that we're living in. But Darwin, you mentioned that we've maybe underestimated the influence

that Darwinian theory has on the reality. Because if we're not made in the image of God, who's to say that, I think it's Nancy Piercy that talks about this and love thy body, but who's to say we don't get on a surgeon's table and have them change up her body if it's not made by God. So you mentioned that big derivative of the world in which we live in flowing from Darwin. The second would be Freud, a glorification of sex. We talk, you talked about the future domino of pedophilia, but that's the god in Freudian thinking is sex, and that's the peak of life. And then obviously Marxism and talking about dismantling of the family is a big object there or objective because once you dismantle the family, you make them dependent upon the government. And I think it's somewhere in your writing or something I listened to you talk about. Just I think it's Margaret Thatcher that says sooner or later, the government

will run out of money to hand out. And so it's it's fraudulent thinking. And so we are now living in a world, an eclipsed world that is trying to shun God and is the baby of Freud, Darwin, and Marx. You know, for all those who are out there, in one of the books I give the illustration, which didn't originate with me, but this helps understand the millennials that are listening, the younger generation. If you're in a city and you're lost, if you have a compass, you know which direction north is. If you know where north is, you know where all the other directions are. You know which direction you're going, whether or not you're making progress. But let us suppose, Johnny, that you have a magnet in your backpack, and that compass continually points to you. You have no idea if you're going in circles,

whether or not you're making progress, where you're going, because it all depends on you. That ought to make us weep. But that's where we are today in a world that has lost transcendent realities. Before we wrap this up, the question again is how did we get here? Anything that we missed or anything I didn't ask that I should have asked to answer that question? Human nature is much more aligned to go downhill than uphill. And if you do not have a consensus of the Judeo-Christian consensus which we had in America, which held society together, as things begin to fragment and each does what is right in his own eyes, maybe in the next segment we'll have an opportunity to even talk about law, why it is that it has to be based on transcendent reality, because if not, justice becomes whatever I want it to be.

You know, there's environmental justice, the Green New Deal. There's such things as socialism, you know, economic justice. There's marriage justice. So in answer to your question, how did we get here? We're greatly influenced by the past. We're influenced by the present. And the question that all of us as Christians have to ask is, to what extent are we being a part of the culture rather than standing against it?

And that's one of the things I want to address is how do we live in this environment? But maybe a glimmer of hope that you mentioned Jehoshaphat in your books and in your preaching that we don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you. Maybe just leave those listening and watching with the glimmer of hope and an anchor for what seems to be a stormy world. Oh my, Jesus gives us lots of hope. He predicts that these days are going to come. And he says, blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. Great is your reward in heaven. So I think this is an exciting day to be alive. It's a harder day to live for Christ than when I was a boy, but that's okay.

The question is, who is going to be faithful despite the cost? Let's make sure that we talk about that next time. Well, thank you, Pastor Lutzer. Appreciate your time and your wisdom. Thank you.