Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Rush Limbaugh: Saint or Sinner?

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Last week, Rush Limbaugh passed away. Some people lauded him. Others hated him. But no one denies it: Rush invented a new way of doing news. He pioneered a highly entertaining, highly polarized, highly politicized version of the news, which paved the way for FOX News, Jon Stewart, and Donald Trump. In this episode, we explore his mixed legacy and what Rush’s 33-year tenure tells Christians about our current cultural moment. Do you follow us on https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (Twitter)? Now's a great time to start: https://twitter.com/tmbtpodcast (@tmbtpodcast) Don't forget to follow https://twitter.com/keithsimon_ (Keith) and https://twitter.com/patrickkmiller_ (Patrick), too. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. If this podcast has been helping you in your walk with God, would you take five seconds to help us? Hop onto Twitter and follow our new Twitter accounts at TMBT Podcast. If you go there, you can see our latest episodes. You can also follow Keith and I and send us messages. We'd love to follow you back and see what's happening in your life.

On February 17th, Rush Limbaugh passed away at age 70. He died of lung cancer that was diagnosed or at least publicly announced roughly a year ago. And Rush is a complicated figure. If you see the coverage that he's received on social media or in newspapers, journals, magazines, you can see that there are a lot of wide variety of opinions about him. Some people absolutely hated him and thought he was horse. for our country. You saw the hashtag rest in piss circulate around his name. Oh, man, I did not see that. You didn't? There's some pretty hateful things. I saw some Christians saying something about rotting in hell. I mean, it was bad stuff. And then there was the opposite, which is a lot of people lauding him and saying that he was kind of the champion, their champion, politically, morally, culturally. And so we just wanted to spend a few moments trying to figure out, Who was Rush Limbaugh and what was so important about him? What does his life and death tell us about our cultural moment? And one thing everybody has to acknowledge is that from when Rush broke on the scene in the late 80s until now, a lot has changed.

So Patrick, you're younger than me. Are you familiar with Rush? I can count on one finger the amount of times I've listened to Rush Limbaugh. Count it on one finger? Yeah, one finger. You might as well just stop listening to this if you want someone, at least on my side, who's in front. What about you, Keith? I listened to Rush a lot when I was in college.

Was this during the days that you told me that you ran out onto your front yard cheering because Republicans had taken the house? That was in 94. In 1988, Rush Limbaugh comes on the scene. I go to the University of Missouri in 1986. In 1988, that's when Rush breaks on to the scene. And I must have been one of his first listeners, one of his early listeners. I don't know if you can remember how I found him. but he became a big part of my life for a number of years. I think over the years he changed and I changed,

but he had a big influence on me, not always for the best. My experience with Rush, the first time I heard of Rush Limbaugh was actually a daycare provider. I think I was in third grade at the time. And my mom had become a Christian around the time I was in third grade. So I guess that makes me eight or nine years old. And she gives me this dictionary for kids Bible. You might not be familiar with Dictionary for Kids.

It was a secular publisher. They made books like the Titanic and a bunch of cross sections of the Titanic, which I think they actually modeled this Bible after because the only thing I remember from it was a cross section of the ark, which now as an adult. I'm like, how did they get a cross section of the ark? Like they knew what the ark was. It's kind of funny, whatever you think about it. But she gives me this Bible, and I take it with me to my daycare provider.

And again, I've maybe never even heard the name of Jesus. I never went to a church in my life, but I'm coming to my daycare with this dictionary for kids' Bible. And when my daycare provider sees me showing it to her son, who was my age, she lost it. She freaked out? She got so angry. Because she was anti-Christian? To be honest, I didn't understand why.

You're in third grade. Yeah, I'm assuming that was the case. I'm assuming that she didn't want her child to interface with Christianity in any way. But she lost it. She took my dictionary for kids' Bible. I remember her ripping it out of my hands. This is a scarring moment. It wasn't because I was just so confused and shocked.

I didn't know what I did wrong, but what I knew about my day-a-k provider was that she was a huge Rush Limbaugh fan. She had all of his books that he'd published at that point. This is probably 1994. So I think he'd published two books maybe at this point. She listened to him constantly. So I guess I should say I have listened to Rush Limbaugh, just not as a conscious adult. And so I just assumed Rush Limbaugh was this kind of anti-Christian figure that he was against the Bible and against Christians. Because the only person I knew who loved, I mean, she loved Rush Limbaugh.

I remember seeing his picture all over the place. I just assume these two things must go together. That's interesting because I think most people would see Christians as being big Limbaugh supporters. So it's kind of ironic that your exposure to Rush was from a person who didn't like Christianity but loved Rush. My experience is totally different. I grew up in a very political family where my dad was a conservative Democrat and my mom was a liberal Democrat. And for whatever reason, I don't know if just to be a contrarian or because of something else, It's because you're a contrarian.

It wasn't because I was a Christian because we weren't really involved in church at all, at least not much. But I was a little bit more conservative than them. So you have to understand what the world was like back then. There were no cable news networks. So Fox, CNN, MSNBC, none of that exists. Google's not around. So you can't look up articles that might support your opinion. All the major news outlets, so New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS, CBS,

they all are center-left, and it's hard to be a person who is a conservative, who thinks of themselves that way, which is definitely how I thought of myself, and link arms or read other conservatives. All you had was your local newspaper and whatever columns that they chose to print. So you might get a George Will, you might get a Charles Crouthammer, Robert Novak, and you would latch on to these as, wow, somebody out there thinks like me. And then all of a sudden, in 1988, I'm in college, and Rush Limbaugh comes on the radio, and it's like, to me, at least at that point, it was like a breath of fresh air. Here's somebody who articulated things that I thought, but I didn't know anyone else did.

So let's come back to that in a few moments, but let's talk a little bit about the facts of Rush Limbaugh's life. He was born in Cape Girardo, Missouri, and he comes from a really successful and well-connected family. His dad was a fighter pilot in World War II, a lawyer, a prosecutor, and became a judge. He was a member of the Missouri State House of Representatives. Pause for a second, because in the mythology of Rush Limbaugh that I did grow up around as a child, he was always presented as a self-made man, kind of the classic American who didn't have anything but pulls himself up by his bootstraps. I agree. He talks about how he bounced around from job to job, and he worked a little while with the Kansas City Royals. He became friends with George Brett. And my understanding, although I may be wrong,

is that they have been friends since that time. And as you read the obituaries about Rush Limbaugh, the complexity of his character come out all the way back when he was working for the Royals. One of the reasons that people say he was let go over kind of pushed out of the Royals' organization was because of his sarcastic, mean spirit at times and that he apparently made some racialized comments that they were obviously not comfortable with. Now, I never heard that before, and I think you mentioned before when we were talking about this, that he never acknowledged that, but that was kind of the rumor circulating, right? Back to his family real quick.

His uncle was a federal judge, Stephen Limbaugh Senior, and his cousin, Stephen Limbaugh, Jr. is currently a federal judge. So anyway, Rush bounces around from job to job. Never graduates from college. No, goes for a semester or a year at Southeast Missouri. Missouri State in Cape Girardo to appease his family, I think, but was never very interested. The story is that he always loved radio. So he ends up at a radio station in 1984 in Sacramento, California. And if you listen to the show, he would always call that his adopted hometown.

He was married four times. His current wife, Catherine, they got married in 2010. She's the one that came on air on February 17th and announced his death on the Rush Limbaugh show. He was He's extravagantly wealthy. He made a ton of money. I mean, when I was reading the numbers in preparation for this, they were just shocking numbers. I mean, I don't even know if to really believe them or not. One of the numbers I saw was that towards the end of his life, it was something like $84 million a year that he was making. And obviously it didn't start there, but it grew quite a bit, but that shows how popular his show was.

Still is. And that's remarkable. If you pause and think about someone who has been on air, for 30 years and is still making an extraordinary amount of money to have that kind of popularity sustained over time. It's almost unheard of. One thing that Rush was always known for is being generous. And in his death, some of that generosity that had been kept secret has come to life. John Rich, who's a country music star, was on Celebrity Apprentice. So this back in the Trump days when he was hosting that show. So anyway, John Rich just recently shared that Rush had made a $100,000 donation

to St. Jude under the condition that John Rich wouldn't tell anyone, and he didn't until his death. According to Forbes magazine, he gave millions and millions. I wouldn't even going to say how much because I don't even quite believe it, but we're talking tens of millions of dollars to cancer research, to leukemia research. In 2020, so this is just a year ago, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was at the State of the Union address when Melania Trump put that metal on him, obviously a very emotional moment for him. And these stories of his generosity often untold, again, like Keith is saying, they've come out. And this actually leads to, by the way, my second experience with Rush Limbaugh, which was when

I was in college. One of my friends in college, her mom was one of the highest level people in the Limbaugh media world. And so she grew up around Rush Limbaugh was on his private jet, spent time with him. Remember, my experience with Rush Limbaugh is not necessarily a positive one. So when I heard this, I like to ask a lot of probing questions. And one of the things that she said was that he was a sincerely nice person. She loved to be around him.

He was always kind, always giving gifts. He was just a nice guy, which certainly doesn't fit the persona that you saw on air. Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the public version of someone and the private version, especially when they're so different like it is in this case. And my guess is that Rush Limbaugh was an incredibly complex character. I mean, the guy was married four different times. That's probably not a sign of someone who is kind and generous and wonderful to be around. So let's go back to the 1980s when Rush Limbaugh hits the radio market.

And there was something that was completely out of his control that propelled him, or at least set the stage for him to really grow quickly. And that is something called the fairness doctrine. You may not realize this, but the government owns the airwaves, the radio airwaves. And that's why a radio station has to have a license in order. order to be on the air. And that makes perfect sense because you don't want to have two radio stations trying to broadcast over the exact same wavelength. That would be really annoying in your car and it makes for poor competition. Absolutely. And so one of the things that they required, the government required radio stations to do, was to give free air time to opposing views on controversial issues. If the radio

is going to give someone on their station airtime to talk about, say, pro-life issues, they had to give corresponding time for free for somebody to talk about that same issue from a pro-choice perspective. And of course, not just abortion, but any controversial issue of the day. Now, this wasn't the case on television. No, it was only on radio. I'm not sure exactly why. But one of the things that people say about it is that it made radio very boring. A radio station wasn't incentivized to have controversial topics because then they had to give free airtime to the opponent of that topic. And so AM radio, especially, was extremely boring in the 1980s. But in 1987, under Ronald Reagan, August 5,

1987, the fairness doctrine is repealed. And that means that now radio stations don't have to give free air time to opposing views on controversial topics. That's about the time that Rush hits the national radio scene. And, wow, he took off. As is the case with many people who are extraordinarily successful. It's both a combination of talent and hard work, but often being at the right place and the right time. And that's 100% what happens to Rush Limbaugh. He was at the right place and the right time. He began to talk about politics on the air. And he was talking, as Keith said, about conservative politics in a way that no one else was talking. He was laying out arguments that no one else was making. And in a world, which was dominated by left and center left media,

it caught on like wildfire. Man, he was incredibly talented. He would be on. air live radio for three straight hours. He had incredible ninja talking skills. He was on there supposedly with no notes. Now, I don't know if you ever tried to do anything like that, but to talk about the issues that he talked about without notes. We can't get through a 30-minute podcast without notes. No, I know, unless you've tried, trust me, it's difficult. He was able to explain difficult issues in a way that people could understand. At the same time, he was able to have a lot of fun with it. But the problem was that a lot of his fun was at other people's expense. But he had the kind of show that people rearranged their life. You would go sit in your car during, because remember,

this isn't a podcast. You've got to be on the radio. So you would go sit in your car during your lunch so that you could eat your lunch and listen to Rush. You would try to figure out how do I run my errands for the day so that I can be in the car as much as possible to listen to Rush. It was kind of appointment radio, and there hadn't been any show like that in decades, maybe ever. So eventually he's on AM FM. He's being broadcast to the Armed Forces. He has massive growth. He's on 600 different stations. They think he had about 27 million listeners every week, which can you imagine the ability to talk to 27 million people. And he's hugely influential. In 94, when Keith was on his front lawn dancing around and celebrating, because Republican, Americans have taken the House, that freshman class, was New Gingrich, part of that freshman class? Yeah, this was the contract with America in which Gingrich leads this. Was it called then? A revolution sounds a little bit overstated at this point, but the House of Representatives

had been ruled by the Democrats for 40 years. Republicans take it for the first time in 40 years under this contract with America. And the freshman Republicans give Rush Limbaugh honorary membership into their freshman class because they thought he had that much influence on the election. So Rush is able to talk about deep topics in a clear, fun way, and he was known for these outrageous statements. He was doing battle with half his brain tied behind his back. He had talent on loan from God. He said the fact checkers checked him, and he was right 99.5% of the time. and he would do these sticks that would kind of poke the sacred cows of the left. He had a policy that said if you called in on a cell phone,

and remember that cell phones are really expensive in the 80s, and if you called in on your cell phone because you're paying data, all these calls cost based on how long the conversation is. He would put you at the front of the line to get on his show because he said you were rich, and he wanted to tailor his program to rich people like you. People who listened to them, they were called ditto heads. And the way they got that name was there was a person who called in, and he was praising Rush and talking about how much he agreed with them.

And the next caller called in and said, hey, ditto to what that guy said. In other words, I agree with everything he said. So from that point on, that was early in the show, all of the regular listeners were called dittoheads. In other words, they all thought that Rush was fantastic. Now, that brings up one of the challenges that comes with Rush Limbaugh. It seems like there were two people, or maybe sometimes they were the same person who, who listened to Rush, some who enjoyed him because he was supremely entertaining. Jonah Goldberg, he wrote a little piece on Rush Limbaugh. And like Keith said, he's not trying

to glorify Rush, but he does make the point that Rush was incredibly funny. He was incredibly entertaining. And again, I remember talking to my friend who knew Rush well, and I was deeply disconcerted by Rush because the people I knew who listened to Rush didn't listen to him as entertainment. They listened to him very seriously. He was giving them the real news. And I asked I said, so do you believe all the stuff he says? And she started laughing. She goes, he doesn't believe all the stuff he says. It's entertainment.

It's jokes. It's meant to be fun. He's got a schick. Yeah, I went back and rewatched when Rush was on 60 Minutes. And I think it was Steve Croft is doing the interview. And he asks him, what are you trying to do? And Rush says, oh, I'm trying to attract the largest audience possible and hold them for as long as possible so that I can charge advertisers,

confiscatory rates. And so Steve Cross goes, so you're in it for the money. And Rush kind of sighs and takes a moment and goes, sure. So Rush was always very upfront. He wasn't hiding the ball. This was entertainment. And he was trying to gather a big audience to make a lot of money. And like we already said, he did that.

But that doesn't tell the whole story because he was also trying to convince people, persuade people of a particular worldview. He was satirical, he was sarcastic, he was irreverent. And that's exactly the kinds of things that you tend to expect from most comedy entertainment shows. And it's part of his legacy that, you know, as someone who didn't listen to, I find personally the most disturbing in many ways. He made jokes about homosexuals who had contracted AIDS. He called people incredibly mean names. Towards the end, he started to become more and more interested in what I would describe as conspiracy theories. And so his legacy is an incredibly mixed in dark. one. And yet, it's exactly what you would expect from someone who saw himself primarily as an entertainer. Before we get to some of the problems that he ran into, I'm curious, Patrick, what you think about the comparison between him and John Stewart. We were reading something the other day, and somebody made, it was Jonah Goldberg, and he made that comparison. And I hadn't really thought of it. And you're probably much more familiar with John Stewart than I am, because I've

never watched John Stewart, although I'm familiar with a little bit of a schick. So how do you think Rush and John Stewart compare. I thought the comparison was interesting in some sense because it wasn't the first time that I'd heard it. My friend back in back in college had compared Rush to that kind of person, to a John Stewart kind of person. And at the time, I was an avid John Stewart watcher. I watched John Stewart every night, and then I would watch Stephen Colbert. And my politics back then were definitely left of center. And so I thought these guys were hilarious. I didn't think that they were mean. I didn't think that they were unkind. I thought they were just saying the truth in a sharp and entertaining way, which is what I find so interesting when you get to figures

like John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or the old Stephen Colbert, the new Stephen Colbert is kind of boring, if we're going to be honest. And people like Rush Limbaugh, is that if you were on their side of the political aisle, you say, oh, they're funny, they're entertaining. They didn't really mean what they were saying. You weren't in on the joke. And people who are on the other side of the political aisle like to lob bombs. No, they're unkind, they're mean. They're saying falsehoods. They're trying to deceive people. You see it on both the left and the right. Yeah, I completely agree. When we agree with someone, we think they're funny. It's like what people say about Trump. They would say, take him seriously, not literally. And that's the kind of thing you say about Rush Limbaugh is don't take

them literally, or less that's what people would say is, yes, it sounds mean to you because you're not in on the joke. It's all a joke. But if you're the object of that joke, it doesn't seem near as funny. He definitely changed over the years, or again, like I said, maybe I changed, but it seemed like he became more mean-spirited, more attacking. CNN put up a bunch of clips of Rush Limbaugh, and I'm not sure it's fair because I think what they did is they took the worst moments of his life and his career and put them all in a montage and acted like that's all who he was. And we've already said he's been on the air for decades, three hours a day. You're going to say some dumb things. If you took all my worst moments and strung them together, they'd be bad. But at the same time, we can't just act like these didn't exist. He made fun of Michael J. Fox for his Parkinson's disease. There was a whole controversy that we won't get into around a Georgetown law student named Sandra Fluke, who was testifying about contraceptives before the United States Congress. And he ended up saying some really mean things about her, calling her a slut. And that led to the loss of some of his audience. And it led to the loss of some significant advertisers. He called Chelsea Clinton,

when she was a 13 years old, he called her a dog. These are just horrible, mean things that you shouldn't say. And one of the things that I found is that as I listened to that a lot, I became more like him than I wanted to be. I began to think of people who disagreed with me as my enemies, somebody that needed to be defeated instead of debated with. And I think that had a bad impact on my soul and my worldview. I think there's some good lessons that you're drawing out here.

and it's true of more than just Rush. If you're listening to someone for three hours a day, that person is discipling you. They are training you. They are teaching you. They are educating you. And not just in ideas, but in the right way to be a person. There's an author named Wendy Alsup who had a great tweet, and it's a little long, but I think it's worth listening.

And she makes exactly same point. She said that Rush Limbaugh, in a sense, disciples her. Helped her think about what it meant to be a person. And as a result, it opened her up to being influenced by people who probably weren't very good influences. She said, I listened to Rush Limbaugh for years as a teenager, through college and into adulthood. His death has spurred a lot of thought about that time in my life and his influence on me. At some point, I felt deeply convicted in a Psalm 1 kind of way. Rush tempted me away from loving my neighbor as myself, and I chose to sit in the path of the scornful mocker. Many Christians who

praise him today note his articulation of true conservative principles, with caveats around his sarcasm and irreverent language. Do we really? believe the Bible when someone tickles our ears? Limbaugh was a tickler, a sarcastic, malicious tickler. Let's not caveat around the second command, the Bible's description of love for your enemies, or Ephesian 4's warning against malice and slander. Limbaugh's sarcasm and malice wrapped up in witty insights and insider talk set me up to accept Driscoll's. She's talking about Mark Driscoll here. He was a pastor in Seattle who had a very similar rush, a very bombastic, sarcastic, mean, spirited preaching style and was eventually taken out of his ministry because he was bullying people.

Wrapped up with a lot of good truth, a lot of good Bible, a lot of good theology. Just like Rush, it was a mixed bag. Driscoll was a mixed bag. But I really like her point that when you're disciples by someone who uses language in a harsh, mean-spirited way, it sets you up for the next person who comes along to do that. And I think that's one of the things that we have to wrestle with when we engage with people not just like Rush Limbaugh, but like John Stewart. Anyone who's entertaining who has that sarcastic and satirical attitude. So let's keep thinking about what Christians can learn from Rush Limbaugh. Let's just put this on the table also, though, is that he has said that he claims Christ as his savior. So here's a quote, God is a profound factor. Jesus Christ, a profound factor.

I have a personal relationship. I've not talked about it much publicly because I don't prostitize these things. Now what do we do with that? I don't know. I mean, it's not like I know Rush Limbaugh. I don't know if he understands the gospel, gets the gospel, believes the gospel. It's not my place to judge him. It's not my place to assign him to heaven or hell. I mean, it's just not my job. But I do think we have to wrestle with this. As a Christian, is he comporting his life as a Christian? Is he living out this faith that he says that he has? and maybe more importantly, are we? Are we getting caught up in the media polarization that Rush helped promote? Are we getting caught up into thinking of people as our enemies that we need to defeat,

ridicule, and mock instead of love like Jesus calls us to? In a commentary by Peggy Noonan, she makes the point that the world after the end of the fairness doctrine is a world that looks very, very different. When Rush Limbaugh came on the state, and he started doing this kind of political talk, it's ultimately what led to Fox News and that style of communication. It's ultimately pushed our left-leaning media outlets to become even more left-leaning. We are living in a highly, highly polarized time, and I think you could probably trace the lineage of our polarization all the way back to shows like Rush Limbaugh's. Now, again, like Keith said, part of why Rush existed was because there wasn't a conservative

voice out there. There weren't people who were defending what a lot of Americans believed, but the consequences of a sarcastic, satirical approach to politics are ultimately polarization. And I think we ought to ask the question, are we really in a better place today? Is our political situation, the situation in our media, which I think, if you're like me, you're having a much more difficult time trusting people on both sides of the issue because it's all become opinion, whether or not it's on the news page. Are we in a better place? I think it's a fair question, but again, you have to remember what it's like before Rush. And all you had was one monolithic voice, center left.

It was either left or more left. So it's easy to look back on that and have fond memories. But when you were back there, it was tough to hear opposing views. Now, I think one of the things that Rush did that you have to kind of give him credit for it. But at the same time, I don't think it's played out well for us, is that he made news. into entertainment. And it takes me back to like Neil Postman, the medium is the message, or maybe it's Marshall McLuhan. When you make news into entertainment, it changes it completely. And I think that's what Rush did. And so then you have something like Fox News, MSNBC, CNN,

and they're trying to become more entertaining. Now, let's remember, the reason they're all doing that is that's what consumers want. That's what you and I want. And then you fast forward 10 years to the internet age where papers are dying because people are now getting their news through digital means, through Facebook and social media once you're into the late 2010s. And what happens, those news providers have to give news that people want to click on because that's the only way that they're going to make money. And so like it or not, we've all been made into the image of Rush Limbaugh. And you might like it because you might think, well, I'm on the left and I'm an enlightened person. I would never say the kinds of things that Rush Limbaugh says. And I would simply propose to you, that's not true. What I've

found is that both on the left and the right, there are people who are looking for strong men and strong women to be their bullies, to be their fighters, to be the people who will come into their corners and defend their cause and say and do the things that they would never do, but they love watching someone else do it. Whether or not you agree with Rush Limbaugh or not, you have to acknowledge that he was a big factor in setting the media environment that we are in today. and I think that all of us see that there are some big problems with that environment. Nonetheless, here's where we are. One of the things that Christians found themselves doing was looking to rush to fight their battles.

Rush Limbaugh was going to be the guy who told the truth. He could be mean so that we wouldn't have to be mean. That's big. I as a Christian want to love my neighbor. So I've got this other guy. He's my David. He's going to go out and fight the Goliath. And he can be a jerk.

Robert Jeffers said this. He's the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, huge church, big proponent of Trump out on the campaign trail for him in 2016. He said this, nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it. Nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek. Government is to be a strong man to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I'm looking for somebody who's going to do with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don't care about that candidate's tone or vocabulary. I want the meanest, toughest son of a you know what I can find. So what you find is that Christians are still looking for that person. Rush was that for a while. Bill O'Reilly was that for a while. Different people, maybe Glenn Beck. They all have their champion. And then Trump became that champion.

So Trump, I think, followed in the line of entertainment and playing the tough guy and being the front man for Christians that Rush Limbaugh started years ago. And I think, again, it can be difficult for people on the left to understand this, or really non-Christians to understand why right-leaning Christians have bought into this stuff. And I think part of the reason is that, like Keith said, they didn't feel as though anybody was fighting their battles. They felt as though their perspective wasn't being represented. And sometimes when you feel that way, you end up turning to someone who is not like Jesus, who's like someone else. Evangelicals have said of Trump, we're not electing a pastor-in-chief, by which they mean, we're not electing, we're aren't electing someone who is training us in our character, who's giving us our theology,

who's acting or behaving himself in a way that befits someone who had claimed to follow Jesus. We're electing a commander-in-chief. As a different author put it, Jesus can save your soul, but John Wayne will save your ass. And that's what this comes down to. We don't want Jesus in the White House and said we want John Wayne. We want a gunslinger who's going to fight our battles, fight our causes, and take names. Yeah, think about evangelicals turned away from Jimmy Carter in 1980. He was a Sunday school teacher, a member of a Baptist church, and instead they went for Ronald Reagan, who whatever you might say about him very positively, and I admired Ronald Reagan, thought he was a great president. He wasn't nearly as committed to solid Christian faith as Jimmy Carter was, but it

turned out that what evangelicals wanted was political power more than they wanted a godly behavior. And you can see that evangelicals are still attracted to those kind of people. So when you look at Rush Limbaugh, you can't help but see that he rhymes a little bit with Donald Trump. Both of them were into the birth or controversy. But if you go back in Russia's history, you'll find that he said things that could be interpreted as pretty racist. But he would always kind of play the card of, no, just joking. You're not in on the joke. But one time he said about the NFL, it looks like a war between the bloods and the crypts without weapons. He said the FBI most wanted list looked like a bunch of Jesse Jackson's. But then when he was called out on race issues, check this out,

see if this sounds familiar. I'm the least racist person you know. Well, where have I heard that? I heard that right out of the lips of Donald Trump. He got into conspiracy theories as he went on. He said the deep water horizon oil spill off the Louisiana coast was perhaps kind of rigged. In other words, there was some conspiracy behind it to hurt conservatives. He said the election was stolen in 2020. Now, I don't know. I just think if you look at the history of Rush, you can see how it set Americans up to embrace Donald Trump. In so many different ways. And I think one of the warnings for Christians is we don't actually need a strong man to fight our battles. We've said this on the podcast. I don't know how many different times. But the White House, the Oval Office, would be a

demotion for Jesus. He already is king over everything. We don't need someone in the White House. to fight our battles because we already have someone on the throne of heaven who's won the battle. And when we get our minds in the wrong place, we end up looking to people like Rush Limbaugh, or you mentioned many others, who we think will fight our fights in this culture war. But that's not the war that we're supposed to be fighting. And I think as we've seen time and time again, that doesn't work out so well for us. Yeah, I said before that I think Rush changed. And, you know, I think that's right.

I listened to them for several years and then haven't listened to them for a long, long, long time. kind of started to realize, like Wendy Alsup said, that he was having a negative impact on me. And I started to realize that the people who disagree with me politically are not my enemies. There's a sense in which I needed to dethrone politics in my life. Having grown up in a politically oriented family, I loved politics. I even saw that maybe one day I'd be involved in politics. And I took that same kind of combative, win at any cost, the other side of your enemies, into my faith. And it wasn't a good fit, but it took me a long time to realize that, that I needed to take

politics off the throne and put God's kingdom there, that the kingdom of God wasn't going to come because some party won an election or some candidate filled the Oval Office, that the kingdom only comes with the king, and that king is Jesus. So yes, Rush Limbaugh changed, but I changed, and I realized that I needed to love my enemies and to build bridges to people and to listen to people and care about them. That power wasn't something that I should try to amass so that I could get my way, but power was something to use on behalf of other people because that's exactly what Jesus did for me. He laid aside his rights so that he would give his life to me. The spirit of Rush Limbaugh's combative style does not fit well with a follower of Jesus.

And right now I know a lot of chastened conservatives who read the sermon on the mountain and say, you know what? I'm ready to believe what Jesus said about loving our enemies, about walking the extra mile, about turning the cheek. And I think it issues a warning to evangelicals on the other side of the aisle, who maybe haven't gone down this exact same path, but I'm seeing more and more people go down this path, people who have bought into a militant, far-left approach to politics that they want to merge with their faith. I mean, I've experienced this personally on Twitter recently. I was having a debate back and forth with a leader of this kind of new movement called Progressive Christianity, which don't read into that that they are left in their politics. Patrick's a little more combative on Twitter than I am. I'm just kind of putting out some little nuggets here and there, but Patrick's picking a fight.

My approach on Twitter is actually not to be a mean person. I don't call people names. You're the Rush Limbaugh of the Crossing Twitter of 10-minute Bible Talks. You're the Rush Limbaugh. I try not to make sarcastic comments. Now, my style of communication is very direct. On one level, I'm not patting it with a lot of love. And you don't get a choice when you have a limited number of characters, but I try to engage people who I see expressing the same kind of directness. And so anyways, I'm in a conversation with this leader of this progressive Christian movement. And again, I think there is a place for both people on the left and the right inside of Orthodox Christianity. Progressive Christianity is actually an unorthodox form of Christianity.

You don't mean sincere Christians who just are more politically liberal. You're talking about people who've kind of drifted away from historic Christian faith. They've moved away from the things that all Christians have believed in all times, whether they were Catholic, Protestant, or anything else. They've drifted away from that. But they've unfortunately used this term, which totally fits in with how they tend to talk, that confuses the issue. So anyways, I'm having a conversation with this person.

We're going back and forth. It's a very direct conversation. but the leader's followers started coming at me on Twitter, and they were calling me terrible names, they were cussing at me, can't even say on air what they were saying. Some of it was so funny. I was actually laughing out loud, so no, my feelings weren't hurt. But that said, what was shocking to me was that this leader was liking all of their posts and then often egging them on to keep going, although the leader didn't actually say any of that stuff on their own. And what I found fascinating was watching their followers talk about how people kind of in our Orthodox Christian camp are so unkind and

combative and mean, but we're really nice. I copy and pasted some of these things that they'd said to me on their thing. It was interesting to watch them defend themselves. Well, we've defended ourselves because this is an act of resistance. We have to be mean in order to resist this kind of thinking. Everybody has an excuse. That's exactly. It goes back to the John Stewart thing. It goes back to Rush Limbaugh being entertaining. If someone's on our side, it doesn't mean that they can't be mean. Maybe just to be convicting, maybe I need to make sure that I'm not offering myself that excuse. Exactly. And that was one of the interesting things for me, even in that conversation. I told someone I work with, I said, you know what, I think I did go too far. I think I did get a little bit sarcastic towards the end.

And so I reached out to the person. I said, you know what, I'm really sorry for that. And I wish I wouldn't have said those things. And we had a great conciliatory moment in public. We had a little Twitter hug. Now, that person, of course, never apologized back. But that's besides the point. For me, the bigger deal was if we're going to have direct and honest conversations. And I think we need to have those conversations. There will be times where we use humor and I think it's okay. There will be times when we're going to be direct and it's okay. But we don't have to say mean words. We don't have to bully each other. And we should admit when we're wrong. I don't know that Rush Limbaugh modeled that for us. I don't know that we've seen that get modeled with the other strong men of the far right. And frankly, I definitely do not see it in the far left right now.

Like us, Rush Limbaugh was a complicated person. There were things that he did were really good. There were some things that he did that were really bad. We aren't going to get very far if we just become, I'm anti-Rush or I'm pro-Rush, but instead we are better off if we think about it, put him in historical context, and try to understand what made him appealing and what we as Christians can learn from it. Because not only was he appealing to some, but he was very off-putting and polarizing figure. What do we need to learn from it moving forward? Maybe let's close with this quote.

This comes from one of Rush's books. It was called The Way Things Ought to Be. And yes, if you're wondering, I did own it at one time. There it is on the bookshelf. I see it. Oh, stop. He's making that out. It's signed, right?

Stop, stop, stop. Maybe, I don't remember. I got rid that years ago. Maybe, I don't know. Maybe, I don't know. All right. So here's what Rush says. He says, and it's interesting here because I wish Rush would have followed his own advice.

Here he says this. Without question, there is a rising clamor for change. Not only in our political institutions and establishment, but in the policies and directions, which emanate from them. The key to change, though, will be found inside, not outside the system, among politically experienced people who are ethical, honest, and moral. Characteristics that do matter, despite how loudly they are poo-poohed by the liberal elite, outsiders and those who present themselves as such will ultimately end up as carcasses strewn across the countryside. False profits of a false premise. I think he's right. Character matters tremendously, and we want to have

have people of character, not just outside of politics, but inside of politics. And I think the way that that happens is by changing the way we think about how effective politics work, supporting people who are actually walking in the way of Jesus in their words, in their deeds, and celebrating it when it happens. That's going to be one of the only ways forward. Character matters inside the church, too. So let's be people who represent Christ. Let's be people who dethrone politics, who love our enemy, who give up power on behalf of others. That's the way of Jesus. It may or may not be the way of your favorite political candidate. It may or may not have been the way of Rush or John Stewart or a lot of other people like them on the news channels. But again, we're disciples

of Jesus, not the news media. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps others find this podcast more easily. Also ask yourself who you could share this podcast with. episode to a friend or family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.