The Daily Signal - Eric Metaxas Says America Needs Faith to Thrive

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Can a civilization survive without faith? It's a question many Americans are considering as a wave of secularism sweeps the nation. There are those that push back against the idea that faith and religion should be involved in the political process. They point to the establishment clause in the Constitution that prevents the government from establishing a religion as evidence the Founders wanted to keep religion separate from the apparatus of state. Eric Metaxas, a Christian author and host of "The Eric Metaxas Show," disagrees. "I think that the Founders knew that a robust faith was at the very heart of keeping the republic. There was no question about that," Metaxas says. "I think the misunderstanding that we've been living with for decades now, that somehow we're supposed to keep our faith out of the public square, is utterly preposterous." Metaxas joins the show to discuss the role of faith in society and whether America can survive if she loses her faith heritage. We also cover these stories: President Joe Biden says he isn’t worried about a possible Chinese response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent visit to Taiwan. Greg McMichael and his son Travis McMichael are sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges for the death of Ahmaud Arbery. New York City Mayor Eric Adams calls for federal aid to deal with ongoing busloads of illegal immigrants from Texas. American author and historian David McCullough is dead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, August 9th. I'm John Pop. And I'm Doug Blair. Can a civilization survive without faith? It's a question many Americans are considering as a wave of secularism sweeps the nation. There are those that push back against the idea that faith and religion should be involved in the political process at all. They point to the establishment clause preventing the government from establishing a religion as evidence that the founders wanted to keep religion separate from the apparatus of state.

But Eric Mataxis, a Christian author and host. of the Eric Metaxus show disagrees. Metaxis joins the show today to discuss the role of faith in society and whether America can survive if she loses her faith heritage. But before we get to Doug's conversation with Eric Metaxus, we want to let you know that this interview was recorded at the Young Americans Foundation's National Conservative Student Conference and may sound a little different than normal.

With that said, let's hit today's top news. Former President Donald Trump claimed Monday evening that the FBI raided the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump said nothing like this has ever happened to a president of the United States before. Trump continued, after working and cooperating with the relevant government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. The New York Times reported that unnamed sources said the FBI cited a search for classified materials as the motivation. Supposedly, Trump brought boxes to Mar-a-Lago containing classified documents.

Per the Guardian, officials were surprised by the raid. The outlet reported that President Biden's top aides found out about the search from reports on Twitter and that White House officials claimed they learned of the news from Trump's statement. Responses from GOP leaders were quick. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted late Monday, I've seen enough. The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization. When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department

follow the facts and leave no stone unturned. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted, the raid of Marlago is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime's political opponents while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the regime is getting another 87K IRS agents to wield against its adversaries, Banana Republic. Other conservative leaders also weighed in. Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, said, the raid O'Maralago represents yet another example of the federal government weaponizing law enforcement to punish political enemies, silence critics, and send a message to those whom it views as enemies. The Biden administration and the D.C. Swamp are making it very clear that they

will use all the power of the state to intimidate anyone who stands in their way. The daily signal is the journalism arm of the Heritage Foundation. The FBI has not commented publicly on the alleged raid as of the recording of this podcast. In the aftermath of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, President Biden said he isn't worried about a possible Chinese response, but he is concerned about their movements around Taiwan. Here's Biden speaking with reporters outside Air Force One via the sun. I'm not worried, but I'm concerned that they're moving as much as they are.

But I don't think they're going to do anything more. Do you feel with a line move on the speaker to go to Taiwan? I was hard decision. The Biden administration has condemned Chinese aggression near Taiwan. China has launched a number of missiles near the island, some of which have landed in Japan's exclusive economic zone. On Monday, Greg McMichael and his son, Travis McMichael, were sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges for the death of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020. These life sentences are on top of the life sentences they were already going to serve for the murder itself. The Washington Post reports that on February 20,

23rd, 2020, Arbery was jogging in a Georgia neighborhood when the Michaels chased him down and shot him. The McMichaels will serve their sentence in a Georgia state prison, though Travis McMichael requested he be allowed to serve his term in federal prison. McMichael and his lawyers argued that he would face a backdoor death penalty in state prison due to numerous death threats he had received. The judge presiding over the case, Lisa Wood, claimed that she couldn't override procedure by sending the McMichaels to federal prison first. New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for federal aid on Sunday to deal with ongoing busloads of illegal immigrants from Texas to his jurisdiction. Adams also said what Texas Governor Greg Abbott was doing was horrific. In a Sunday tweet, Adams wrote, Greg Abbott used innocent people as political pawns to manufacture a crisis. New Yorkers are stepping up to fix it.

That's our city's values. But we need the federal government's help, money, technical assistance, and more. He continued, unlike Governor Abbott, New York City will always do our part, and I thank the NGOs, city workers, and everyday New Yorkers who have proven that today. Many were quick to criticize Adams for a seeming hypocrisy surrounding the illegal immigrants in his city. Adams has previously expressed support for illegal immigrants and tweeted last October that New York City would remain a sanctuary city under his administration. American author and historian David McCullough is dead. He died at age 89 in his home. southeast of Boston on Sunday. His daughter, Dory Lawson, confirmed McCullough's death but did not provide a cause.

McCullough was known for writing a number of books on American history, including biographies of many of the founding fathers and presidents. He also served as the narrator for several historical documentaries like Ken Burns, the Civil War. Over the course of his career, McCullough earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom, more than 50 honorary degrees, two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, and France's highest award, the Legion of Honor. That's all for headlines.

Now stay tuned for my conversation with Eric Metaxus as we discuss the role of faith in civilization. As I approached the walkway from around the back of the building, they had taken crow bars to almost all of our windows, two of our doors, and just shattered all of the glass. That's the voice of Susan Campbell, executive director of Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center. In the early hours after Roe v. Wade was overturned, vandals, smash. windows and spray-painted threatening messages outside the center. I'm Virginia Allen. The Daily Signal has just released a documentary about what happened to the Blue Ridge Pregnancy Center. Plus, we take a deep dive into the violence and attacks against crisis pregnancy centers

across the country. Make sure that you're subscribed to the Daily Signal's YouTube channel so you can watch the new documentary and never miss our new content. My guest today is Eric Mataxis, a Christian author and host of the Eric Metaxus show. Eric, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Nietzsche famously said that God is dead. However, your book, Is atheism Dead?

Seems to say the opposite. Time Magazine in 1966, you know, obviously springboarding off of Nietzsche, asked the question on the cover of Time Magazine, is God dead? And I thought, based on the really astonishing evidence from science and other things, now the question has to be, is atheism dead? Because, as I say, the evidence is just dramatic. But most people don't know it, which is why I wrote the book. I said, we've got to be aware of the fact that essentially atheism is no longer tenable. And I think that that's an honest assessment. want to be agnostics or you can do what you want, but to say there is no God has become intellectually

genuinely untenable. So what is some of the evidence for God's existence? Well, from the world of science, I mean, it's almost funny how I wasn't planning to write a book about this, but over the years when I came to faith, I started looking into what people call apologetics and whether science is, you know, whether science pushes against the idea of the Bible or faith or not. And I kept discovering that, on the contrary, that's not the case. But it wasn't until recently that I began to get really serious about it. Christopher Hitchens was asked, what is the best argument from the God's side? He had debated all of these people of faith, Muslims, Jews, Christians.

And he said, oh, without any question. question, it's the fine-tuned argument. The idea that there are innumerable things in the universe that we've discovered with science that appear to be fine-tuned, in other words, that if they were one hair in this direction, or one hair in the other direction, the universe wouldn't exist, or there wouldn't be life on Earth, or any of these things. So he conceded that, and he said almost comically, yeah, that all of the minds. colleagues on the atheist side would concur that that's the most serious argument it takes a bit of working out but what I find comical as I say is that it is

not something that you can work out it is a stymieing reality that 50 years ago you you couldn't say it but as ever as science has itself advanced ironically it has pointed to the inevitable existence of some creator who fine-tuned every detail, the laws of physics, the details of chemistry, the position of the planets. Everywhere you look, you see a level of design that is so astonishing. The biggest news, really, is that most of us don't know it. But when you look at it, it stops you dead, and you think this doesn't make any sense. We've all grown up in a world that says either faith and science are enemies,

or they exist in different silos. But the reality is that in recent decades, evidence from science has been pointing very dramatically to the existence of an intelligent creator. And it has mounted up so extraordinarily that I said, I've got to put this in a book, because most people aren't even aware of this. And so the fine-tuned argument is probably the main one. There are also two other arguments from science that I put in the book. There are many, but the three basic ones are the five.

fine-tuned argument, the story of the Big Bang and how that was a tremendous challenge to secularists who wanted to believe in a steady state universe who wanted to say that we don't want to acknowledge a beginning, that makes us uncomfortable, it sounds very religious, and that battle, which we've largely forgotten about, because now everybody knows that the universe started 13.8 billion years ago, that story is the first chapter in the book, is atheism dead, and it's very funny in a way, because you realize at the time people, secularists, materialists were freaking out about the idea of an expanding universe. And the third part has to do with what's called abiogenesis,

the idea that life emerged from non-life through random accident, which of all of these is almost the most preposterous. In seven decades since the famous Miller-Uri experiment of 1952, people have been working day and night and figuring out how you go from no life to single-celled organisms. and the more we know from science, the more we know, that simply cannot happen. It's infinitely complex, and the idea of DNA kind of inventing itself randomly, it just doesn't make any sense. So you have three really strong arguments, and I think most people are not aware

of them, and I wrote the book, Is Atheism Dead? Because I said people are going to be blown away. They didn't even, you're not reading about this in newspapers, but this has been mounting up over the decades, and it's time we assessed it, honestly. Are religion and faith necessary for a society to find? function? Are religion and faith necessary for a society to function? That's a complex question. I'll give you a simple answer. Yes. Because religion and faith, first of all, come in infinity of forms. I mean, you know, when the Aztecs murdered people and believed in human sacrifice, as did many civilizations, those were religious acts. It speaks to an ordering of society.

The question is, what is the religion? Is a religion an evil, inhuman, cruel, irrational religion, or is it a religion based on reason and truth, on the dignity of the human person? Is it a religion which will abolish slavery? Is it a religion which will work against injustice, will work to pull people out of poverty? So the question simply is what kind of religion we're talking about, I think.

but societies have always been ordered by one religion or another. Atheism and radical atheism is, of course, a kind of religion. It's philosophy built on really nothing. But it's inevitable that a society will have to deal with some kind of organizing principle, and usually we call that some kind of religion or some kind of faith, even if it's not one of the standard models. Now, people have faith. faith have been sort of self-aware of making faith part of their policy platforms and sort of the

separation between church and state has been part of American culture for a very long time. Should people of faith be more concerned with putting faith-based policy into their platforms? Well, it all depends what we mean. The founders wanted people of faith to bring their faith into public life. We were never meant to have a naked public square to quote, Father Richard John Newhouse. We were never meant to have a secular culture. That's preposterous. It's antithetical to the founder's vision.

It's antithetical to the separation of church and state. It's antithetical to the no establishment clause. That's not what was meant. What was meant was that the government cannot put its thumb on the scales and come out for one thing or the other. It cannot force people to be atheists, cannot force people to be Catholics. It has to be agnostic. Same thing, of course, with the market. The government has to let people be free and the free market of eye.

ideas, these things have to be preserved as much as possible. So the idea that you can have policies that are somehow devoid of value, I mean, you know, it's, we have a constitution that prevents everybody from, you know, putting in some kind of law that is antithetical to the basics of what we've always believed and that would undermine the whole society. But I think people of faith, I think the founders and lovers of freedom understand that religion and faith are supposed to be brought into how we govern ourselves. The only question is what are the boundaries of that? But I think that the founders knew that a robust faith was at the very heart of keeping the republic. There was no question about that.

They only said that we have to be careful never to go to that next step where we, establish a religion for everyone. We have to let that be voluntary. We have to let that be free because we believe if it is free and uncoerced, then people will own it themselves and they will live out their faith. And when they live out their faith, they will do all the things that Burke's little platoons do, that this is basically how freedom operates. So we need faith, but we can't coerce faith. And I think the misunderstanding that we've been living with really, gosh, for decades now that somehow we're supposed to keep our faith out of the public square is utterly preposterous. William Wilberforce led the battle against the slave trade precisely because of his

faith in the God of the Bible. That's it slavery is evil. And I think that anytime we believe in anything, if I believe in the sanctity of the unborn, there's no way for me to say, well, that's separate, that that doesn't involve politics, it's a religious belief. At some point we have to decide whether we're talking about reality. So it's always figuring out the boundaries of these things, not whether we ought to be bringing faith into public life. Of course we should. It's why we abolished slavery in the 19th century. But a lot of people aren't familiar with that and they have some misunderstandings. As religion seems to have gone down in the country, especially amongst young people, there seems to have been a secular religion that some might call wokeism that has

replaced it. Is that a sort of accurate assessment since we've lost faith in the God of the Bible? or the god of Abraham, that we now have this sort of secular religion taking its place? Well, in effect, yes, but I'm really hopeful because first of all, we're dealing with this thing called reality. Wokism, which is effectively cultural Marxism, is fundamentally atheistic. And as I just said, I think the atheist proposition is now dead. I don't think you can take that seriously. And the idea that you can order a culture along culturally Marxist lines is simply preposterous. It will lead to the bloodbath of the French Revolution. It will lead to the

gulag of the Soviet Union. It will lead to the Uyghur death camps in China. If you don't believe in God, then where do you get your values from? If everybody agrees that, oh, we're going to kill the people who disagree with us, you no longer live in a free society. And so we have to understand that wokeism is fundamentally atheist Marxism. It purports to be able to structure a society in a way that is going to be humane, but it never has done so in history. The record from history, and I write about this at the end of my book is Aeism Dead,

the record in history, which we now have, we didn't have maybe in the 1930s, it is unbelievable. The level of cruelty and inhumanity perpetrated by regimes that have been Marxist is so monstrous, so horrifying that when you look at it, you say whatever they believe has led

to just historical, unprecedentedly historical evils, and we need to be honest about that. When you take God out of the equation, now listen, every generation is fooled afresh into thinking this might work.

It has never worked. By definition, you can't even say that racism is wrong. If you don't believe in God, where do you get the idea that racism is wrong? If somebody says, well, I just believe that we evolved out of the primordial soup, and some people evolved higher than others and why shouldn't I, maybe I have power and maybe I will enforce my power and subjugate people beneath me. Maybe your religion says that wrong. I don't have any

religion. I believe in might makes right. So we have to be honest that Marxism, cultural Marxism, is the enemy of freedom, it's the enemy of human beings of every kind. And if you believe in fairness and justice and all these things that we, most people purport to believe in, you have to understand at some point that what we're calling wokeism is cultural Marxism, it's atheism writ large, it's a utopianist scheme that will lead to violence and evil. We've seen it in the past, then we need to be honest about it. Final question. How do we get more people to come to the faith if we start to recognize that it should exist in public life? How do we bring them into it? Well, I don't think we should worry too much about it. In other words, I think that our job is to

speak the truth in love, to try to reason with people. If somebody doesn't want to be reasoned with, you can't force them to accept something. You can't even force someone except one plus one equals two if they don't feel like it. They can just say, shut up, I'm not interested. So I think we have to live out our faith. And I would, my largest criticism of the church in America, I have a book coming out called Letter to the American Church in September. And in that book, my biggest criticism of the church is that we have not lived out our faith. If you do not live out your faith in a courageous way where people can look at you and say, you know what, He really believes that.

He seems even to be willing to die or to suffer for what he believes is true. That is compelling to people. That is cool. That is interesting. If you think by being relevant, it means not bringing up what the faith teaches. Most people know that you're just trying to be relevant and that you don't really believe anything. So the Bible sets out a view of humanity, of what a person is, of God's design for sexuality and for, family. And the reason you put those things forward is not just because you feel, well, this is

what my religion teaches, because you believe this is how people will be blessed. And if they don't want to be, that's on them. But I think we have a duty to speak these truths in love. And I think when times are tough, which they are now, people are a little bit more open-minded to new things and to new ideas. And so I think that we have to understand ultimately people's salvation is that those things are in God's hands. So we pray and we do our best. And we leave the results in God's hands, but we should never be anxious about anything, much less dragging somebody over into believing what we do. Well, that was Eric Metaxus, a Christian author and host of the Eric Mattaxas show. Thank you so much for your time, Eric. I very much appreciate it. My privilege.

Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. And please leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again for listening and we're back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. The executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen, Doug Blair, and Samantha Rank.

Sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.