The Eric Metaxas Show - #187 - Frank Turek

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, Frank Turek joins Eric to discuss his new book The War on Reality. They examine why Turek believes Western culture is increasingly rejecting objective truth, biological reality, logic, and moral clarity. They also discuss abortion, transgender ideology, cultural Marxism, the legacy of Charlie Kirk, Christian courage, political engagement, and why Turek argues that reality ultimately cannot be defeated.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🪙 Grace Precious Metals: https://www.metaxasmetals.com/🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/0:00 Frank Turek Joins1:16 The War On Reality3:32 Why People Reject Reality4:46 Charlie Kirk And The Reality Of Evil10:28 Abortion And Suppressing The Truth15:37 Cultural Marxism And The Oppressor Narrative23:12 How Social Media Distorts Reality25:14 The Logic Problem With Gender Ideology31:28 Gossip, Slander, And Charlie Kirk’s Legacy- -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE:    / @ericmetaxas  #EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #PoliticsChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don’t directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Hey there, folks. Welcome to Monday, August something. 24th. Yes. Monday, August 24th. Oh, boy. Where do I begin? How about by telling you that I have as my guest for the whole hour? My friend, Frank Turek. Frank, welcome to this program. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. man, because you didn't bring a crowd for me. I didn't know. Typically, uh, we rely on our audience to be the crowd and, um, their applause is, is quiet. It's a tinkling sound, but you have to really have your ear cocked. Uh, you, my friend, Frank Turrick, uh, uh, let's see. You're known, I guess, mostly for your book, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. Yes.

Which is a brilliant statement. It's the sort of thing that I, if you hadn't used it, I would have used it because it's kind of where I end up. When I wrote my book as atheism dead, I thought, you have to be nuts to be an atheist. I mean, I don't know how people can, you know, it makes zero sense. And you're the head of cross-examined.org.

And you have a new book out. It's coming out very soon, and we want to get pre-orders for the book. It is called The War on Reality. Yes. Frank, it's funny because, again, like you and I, You know, we're friends and we care with a lot of the same things. But this has been what I've been talking about.

I haven't phrased it the way you do the war on reality. But I have said anybody that's reality-based, I'm on team reality. That's what I keep saying. I'm on team reality because God created reality. And if you kick against the goads of reality, you will lose. If you say that there are more than two sexes and you want to call them genders, or you want to say, you want to say whatever you want to say, eventually, you're going to lose.

You're betting against the house. But we are experiencing at this point, as you put in the title of your new book, The War and Reality, a War on Reality. There are people going to war with reality because they're at war with God. And by the way, Eric, reality is undefeated. Eventually, you're going to slap up against reality if you keep denying it, and it's going to hurt. That's very funny.

Reality is undefeated, and it will always be undefeated. defeated, ladies and gentlemen, because it's called reality. Good luck. Good luck, though, if you want to take a few wax at it. I mean, that's Satan's job, right? Like, he is more intelligent than any human being alive and yet more foolish, because to come against reality is madness. It's a kind of madness. To say, like, I'm going to kill God and I'm going to be God. It's like, okay, I can see where you're coming from. I don't think it's going to go well for you, but go ahead. Evidently, that's what God has said, right? He's like, all right, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

I don't understand the background of the cosmic war, why God allows these things. And I don't know if we will, even when we get to heaven, I guess we'll get a clue on it. But let me ask you the more basic question. Your book is titled The War on Reality. You wrote it with Phoenix Hayes. Who is Phoenix Hayes, and why did you and Phoenix write this book? Phoenix and I have worked at cross-examined for quite a while. She's kind of a freelancer now, but she's brilliant.

She's originally from New Zealand, but came to America as a nanny, met an American man, now has four children here with her husband, and loves America and has seen socialism and other isms in New Zealand destroy people, destroy people's lives. And she's also gone to Southern Evangelical Seminary like I have. and she wanted to actually put out a book along with me, pointing out you cannot fight against reality and win. And Eric, there are so many different ways people are denying reality. They're saying there's an infinite number of genders. They're saying people are whatever they feel. Men can have babies.

Math is racist. That just doesn't add up with me. Math is racist, you know. Reason and logic are tools of oppression. There is no objective truth, they say, Eric. To which we ask them, is that true? Is it true? There's no truth?

Okay, now, before we get deeper into this, I want to point out, just the other day, just a few days ago, I was with our friend Erica Kirk. She wrote the widow to the book. Yes. I was going to say, the widow of our very, very dear departed friend, Charlie. And she wrote the forward to this book. Some people know, some people don't know, of your real. relationship with Charlie, that you were with him when he died. You were there. You talked about that on this program, but, you know, Frank, God knows all things, right? And God ordained that somehow,

that you would be there at that moment. It's a terrible thing, but God allows these things. And he allowed, and I would think planned for you to be there so that you would be a witness to those moments. And the murder of our friend has drawn us all closer together. It's interesting. When I was with Erica the other day and Lucas Miles and Russell Johnson and Ryan Helfenbine, all our friends, we're all closer because of this tragedy has drawn us closer to each other. We love each other more.

and it is I guess we are more dedicated to fighting those on the wrong side of the war on reality because that's part of what led to the murder of Charlie. You have an insane, or maybe an insane is too subjective. You have a deranged human being who has bought into the transgender lies,

bought into the lie that murder is a way of expressing yourself. And something, what I said in my speech at TPSA Faith the other day was that the murder of Charlie was like God pulling the pen on a grenade in a way. It's like now you're going to see those of us who love Jesus, we're all in on a level that like this has. has radical. If he thought we were radical before, we're really radical now. We're going to, and we're not talking about violence. We're talking about the opposite of violence. We're talking about love. We're talking about truth. But anyway, I just, I had to say that because that we are not,

I say this because this is not theoretical, you know, it can be theoretical. But at the end of the day, this is about reality. This is about how we live our lives, how we choose to live our lives. Do we want to live by the sword? Do we think violence is acceptable? And so I just, I want to start there because this is not just, oh, we're going to philosophize a little bit. If philosophy doesn't point you to the truth, then it's just a lot of nonsense. Well, the first chapter is called murder on campus, and it tells all about what happened leading up to that day and that day and what happened right after it. And two things, Eric, have become more front and center in my life since that terrible day about a year ago.

One is the existence of evil. I mean, I obviously knew evil existed before. It's in my own heart. It's in all of our hearts where it's easy to be bad. It's hard to be good. But to see someone that you love murdered in front of you and to have him bleed out in the car, even though he was already gone. We learned later, the surgeon said,

if Charlie had been shot in the operating room, we couldn't have saved him. He was killed instantly. But to see that, an experience that makes me realize that evil isn't just theoretical, it's real. And by the way, there are 50 Charlie Kirk's killed every day in Nigeria and the media doesn't say a word about it. Secondly, the second thing that's front and center

now is the importance of eternity and the gospel, because without eternity, without the gospel, without a resurrection, without an afterlife, without God, nothing ultimately matters, Eric. You know, if there is no God and there is no afterlife, it doesn't matter if you live like Charlie Kirk or Tyler Robinson. At the end of the day, why? Because we're all going to end up in the same place, nowhere, if there is no God and no afterlife. Meaning only makes sense if God exists and there is an afterlife and the things that we do here actually matter not only for now but into eternity. I mean, this is, I just think it is important for us, you know, to start there that this is not about, because I'll tell you why I think I say this, Frank,

is because there are a lot of people, they're in love with the theologizing and the philosophizing and it becomes unmoored from reality. For them, it's like an intellectual game. And I think we have to be clear, this is not an intellectual game. This is about life and death. This is about real people. And that's the point of it all. That's why it's important to get it right. Because it affects people's lives.

It affects children. It affects everything. And we have to ground ourselves in that and not become, you know, as I say, unmoored into the ether that we're just floating, you know, and debating things. I think people who are in love with intellectualism can get like that. There's some people out there that they just love the highfalutin tenor of the debate more than they love people or God. Or reality, truth itself. That's the problem.

Or reality and truth. Truth is being suppressed, Eric. It's being suppressed. Like, I don't know if you saw this recently. We just had them on my show. We had played a clip on my show of Brandon Gill, the Texas congressman who was reading what an abortion actually is to a pro-abortion person on his subcommittee. and she was squirming in her seat because she wanted to call it health care.

She wanted to call it reproductive freedom. And he was saying to her, are you telling me that tearing a baby apart in a womb is reproductive freedom? Are you telling me this is called health care that you inject a baby with a saline solution so it burns the baby to death and then you pull the corpse out of the mother?

Is that what you call health care? People are denying reality, Eric, because they want to go their own way. This is all explained very well by the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter one, that we know God exists because his invisible qualities are all around us, but we deny he exists because we want to suppress the truth in order to go our own way, to do what we want to do, to do immoral things. To the point, Eric, according to Paul, and I think it's expressed this way in our culture,

that when you go down that immoral road so long, you're given over to a depraved mind to the point where you're not only doing evil, you're cheering on other people who are doing it. I mean, you saw the abortion law that was just signed into place in Massachusetts where you can kill your baby up to the moment of birth and there were people applauding at the signing of this. It's Romans 1.

This actually brings something up. I posted this on X today. You and I are not Catholics, but I think both of us are astonished that the Catholic Church has this hierarchy, how can they not excommunicate this woman governor who dares to claim to be a Christian, Catholic Christian, whatever this means, I guess it means nothing, because Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi claim that.

They are pro-abortion. This woman, I just, I want to call out the Catholic hierarchy, how do you not excommunicate someone for doing a thing like this? And let me go further. The reason so many people are running away from God or from the church, and in this case from the Catholic Church, they see it as nothing but hypocrisy. This is an example. If you do not take a bold stand against this wickedness, most people just think, like,

you know what? You're just a bunch of hypocrites and bureaucrats and, you know, you would know marriages and you do what you need to do and you play the game. People see enough of that. They lose faith in the whole thing. And so I hope the Catholic Church will stand against this vileness. I really, I hope they do. It's a war on reality, Eric. And tragically, unfortunately, as you said, people will see this hypocrisy and think that it reflects badly on God.

But I always ask people this and we have this in the book. when somebody plays Beethoven poorly, who do you blame? You don't blame Beethoven, right? So when someone plays Jesus poorly, you don't blame Jesus. Look, just because I'm not true and beautiful or the Catholic Church isn't true or beautiful, or some alleged Christian isn't true and beautiful, doesn't mean Jesus isn't true and beautiful. Christianity is not Christians. Christianity is Jesus. Keep our eyes on Jesus. He's Beethoven. We play him poorly, but he's still true and right. And by the way, he's the author of reality, Eric. People are fighting against the God who created them and died for them. I mean, if that's not the height of irrationality, I don't know what

is. If God exists and he does and if Jesus did come to save us and died on the cross to take our punishment upon himself, you have to be irrational to say, I don't want that. Why wouldn't you want that reality? It happens to be reality and you're suppressing it. By the way, this is why Jesus said you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free. What does that imply? If you don't know the truth or accept the truth, you're in bondage because you need the truth to be set free, free from your sin, free from the consequences of your sin in front of an infinitely just God. If you reject that, you're rejecting reality itself and God will not force you into his presence into heaven against your will. Today's show is brought to you by grace, precious metals in an industry that

can be confusing, Grace believes in doing business differently with Christian values, transparent pricing, and a focus on straightforward gold and silver bullion, not high markup collectible coins. They even publish their spreads directly on their website so you can see the numbers before speaking with anyone. Learn whether physical precious metals may fit your financial plans at metaxusmetals.com. That's metaxusmetals.com. I want to say again, the title of the book is The War on Reality. Now, what is the book basically? Is this like a primer on, you know, all the lunacy and like here's your one-stop shopping book on how to stand

against it? It covers almost every topic you can imagine in that regard. We cover the transgender issue. We cover the abortion issue. We cover probably the center of understanding the culture war right now, Eric, is in chapter 10 of the war on reality. It's on page 192. We have a chart. And this chart shows the breakdown of cultural Marxism, how people categorize others by certain characteristics they have. They're either oppressed or they're an oppressor. And if you'll say are someone like Eric Metaxus,

if you're white, if you're a Christian, if you're a person of means, if you're a heatheras sexual, if you're a citizen of the United States, you're automatically deemed an oppressor. By the way, those were the same characteristics to Charlie Kirk had. You're an oppressor. Eric, you could be as the nicest guy, the sweetest guy. You could be Mother Teresa in your personal and public life. But if you have those characteristics, according to cultural Marxism, you're an oppressor. On the other hand, if you're a minority, if you're a non-Christian, if you're not

heatherosexual, if you're LGBTQ, if you're not a person of means, or if you are a non-citizen of America, you're already considered. oppressed. And it doesn't matter what your personal behavior is. Out with Martin Luther King, we're not judging people on the content of their character. We're now judging people on the color of their skin and these other characteristics. If you want to know why the cultures at war right now, part of it is this oppressed oppressor motif that comes from cultural Marxism. And this is why, by the way, Eric, Eric, you have this phenomenon known as gaze for Gaza. And you go, how could you be gays for Gaza. If they go to Gaza, they're going to be murdered. Well, why are they aligned now?

Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And who is the enemy of the Muslims? Who is the enemy of the gays? It's Christianity. It's according to them anyway. I saw this morning, I saw an exa clip of a woman. I don't remember her name, but I remember her drawn awful face. It's just one of the, You could just see the, you could see, you could see the weariness. The anguish on her. It's just the whole thing. Yeah.

She was railing again. I mean, she was actually saying this. And I'm glad somebody actually said this because this is obvious from, you know, the left has taken this position, but she's actually saying, she's saying, I don't see the threat to women from Islam. I see the threat from these lunatics, whack jobs who are in the church of Erica Kirk. and Pete Hegseth. In other words, you and I are a greater threat to her as a woman

than the Muslims who treat women like dogs and second-class citizens who enslave them and rape them. She has persuaded herself. And this is the important kind of hinge of this here. These people, they really are not, you know, you talk about they're against reality. the book's called The War on Reality. They're against reality.

And part of reality is logic, clarity, truthfulness, rationality. They are wedded to an emotional truth which overwhelms actual logical truth. So they feel that people like you and me are more harmful to women than actual theocrats, actual Muslim theocrats who treat women like dogs. Who, by the way, Eric. This Western woman who would be stoned in many Muslim cultures actually says this. And so they create these fever dreams like The Handmaid's Tale. It's like Christians.

And you think like, no, no, no. Christians, you know, for the last 400 years, they haven't been anywhere near this kind of stuff. But you have persuaded yourself that they are. And you don't care about the reality. You don't care that evangelical Christians are far closer to your view of women infinitely closer than these Muslims. It's just a fascinating moment that we're living in, that they persuaded themselves of crazy things. But they're convinced somehow because it has this emotional, quote-unquote, truth. Well, this is what happened in Iran in 1979.

There were a bunch of college kids that wanted to get rid of the Shah and bring in the Ayatollah. Jimmy Carter greenlighted that. What did, what, what, what, what did the Ayatollah do as soon as he got into power? He murdered the college kids and he called them useful idiots. Why? Because they thought, oh, this is going to be wonderful. He's going to give us free health care and he's going to give us free that and free this. And he arrived and said, no, you are, you're infidels.

And he murdered them. You know, this is actually, it's funny because we're here to get people to, to, to, to, to get copies of your book The War on Reality. But of course, it reminds me of my book on The Revolution because what I talk about is this idea that if you don't like the, there's some oppressive authority. So let's say it's a mild form of oppression. It's King George III.

Let's say it's the Ayatollah. Let's say in France, in 1789, it's King Louis the 16th. The point is you want to get rid of that. Okay. The question is, what are you going to replace it with? Yes. If you don't replace it with the God of the Reformation, the God of the Bible, you're in big trouble. So the French basically said, well, they went the opposite from working with the Ayatollah.

They basically said, we want to get rid of all religion. So we're going to kill the king and the queen, and then we're going to kill the priests and the nuns, because the Catholic Church is oppressive. It's part of the hierarchy. We're going to get rid of it. Well, how does that end up for them? they get a bloodbath of terror. In the Iranian revolution, quote, unquote, what do they do?

They're going to ally with the harsh theocrats because we don't like the Shah. So we're going to get rid of that kind of authoritarian thing. It couldn't be worse than that, could it? Oh, yes, it could. And it just fascinates me, Frank, because this is not complicated, right? In other words, unless you look to God as your king,

unless you order your life according to the God of the Bible who is a God of liberty it's not going to go well for you so there's a hundred ways you can go wrong there's only one way you can go right and that's basically what we're talking about I mean when you talk about what happened in Iran

in 1979 I mean I was a teenager and I remember it it's hard for us to believe that these young people could be that naive but again it's this emotion that they basically said we hate the shock so much, we're not going to be rational. We're going to reject him, and whatever we get will be better.

And they got the Ayatollahomani, and they got 47 years of the worst oppression. They dream of going back to the Shah. And one of the interesting things we point out in the book on how this happens, Eric, particularly in our social media age, now, you know, 50, almost 50 years after the revolution, is so much of this is done by short clips that people get behind and think they reflect reality. This is in logic called a hasty generalization. Now, we don't teach logic in public school anymore, Eric. Instead of teaching kids how to think we're teaching them what to feel,

and that can be dangerous. What's a hasty generalization? We saw it several months ago with regard to ICE in Minnesota. You know, the authorities up there release these criminals into, the community and then ice has to go track them down and sometimes there's a confrontation and some people have been shot some people have been abused they say by and they're recorded on these short videos and what do people do they get a 15 second video and they take that one instance and they generalize it to the entire population all ice is bad ice is doing evil this is called

a hasty generalization and logic you don't judge a whole group by a question questionable behavior of a single incident or a couple of incidents. You don't do that. When we were growing up, Eric, we used to call that prejudice, right? We used to say, oh, you see one person in a particular group do something wrong, and you assume everybody in that group is doing that. This is how people get off on these crazy ideas, and they start with these slogans, whether it's gaze for Gaza or from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free or

ICE or murderers and we need to abolish ice. This is not reason. This is not reality. You don't judge a group by the behavior, questionable behavior of a few. You have to get better data than that. And this is what people don't understand. So they're actually

putting forth a false reality and they're worrying against what reality really is. Speaking of which, you mentioned the transgender thing, I have to confess, I mean, I've said this before, I couldn't be more baffled. than I am by the transgender thing.

I mean, the gay thing I get, you know, you're attracted physically to whatever you're attracted to. Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes that's a bad thing. But what is this idea of being, of deciding you're in the wrong body or whatever? I really am so baffled by this

that there are so many people that have somehow been sucked into this. And I have to say out front, put my cars on the table, it has to be a spiritual dismal. It has to be a demonic spiritual deception because it is so bizarre that there are people unmoored from the reality of their own bodies. This is really at the heart of what we're talking about in your book, The War on Reality. This is a central disconnect from reality itself, from physical reality.

And so much of this, Eric, is driven by social media now. It's called rapid onset gender dysphoria. I mean, there was like a 6,000 percent increase around the year 2020, just, prior to 2020, especially around COVID time, of young girls claiming to be boys. There wasn't anything new in the water, right? There wasn't no new genetic cause for this. This is almost entirely driven by social media. And it actually doesn't make any sense logically. It's self-contradictory, and here's why. So many people say in this ideology, there are no fixed genders. There's an infinite number of genders, but transgenderism itself presupposes fixed genders. Why? Because if I'm a man and I think

I'm a woman, I have to have some idea what a man is and some idea what a woman is to know that there's a mismatch between my psychology and my biology. If I didn't know what a man was or what a woman was, transgenderism conceptually couldn't exist. Secondly, if I try and take the impossible step of trying to transition to another gender, I again have to know what a man is and what a woman is in order to make that transition. So it's a self-contradictory ideology. And this is why, perhaps one of the reasons, transgender folks, although it's still a minority, tend to be more violent than others, because they can't reason to this conclusion. Now, we learned that Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk, is involved in a trans relationship. And he could not argue with Charlie Kirk,

even though Charlie offered anybody who disagree with him the mic, come up and make your case. Let's have a civil conversation. So he decided he would kill him. And isn't it ironic, Eric, it's sad. They called Charlie Kirk a fascist because we all know a typical fascist comment or a typical fascist tactic is to hand your opponent the microphone and say, please, let me hear what you have to say. Let's have a discussion. No, Charlie Kirk was not a fascist.

The guy that killed him was a fascist. That's what tyranny does. It shuts up all opposition. And that's what, of course, Tyler Robinson alleged killer tried to do. But Charlie Kirk is with the Lord right now, and we're here, as you said earlier, to continue the mission that he was on.

And we're going to keep going, despite the fact that there's a war on reality, Eric. Yeah, no, I mean, I spoke about this. Russell Johnson, who is a pastor now in the Seattle area, who is one of the heroic figures of our age, who gives me tremendous hope. He spoke along these lines that our revenge on what they did to Charlie

is that we're going to preach the gospel, we're going to speak louder, we're going to speak louder, we're going to speak more, we're going to speak. I mean, we have been radicalized by the murder of our friend. It's like, okay, we're going to be, we're not going to be quiet.

we're going to be more and more vocal because there are more and more people out there who've been deluded, whose lives have been destroyed. And, you know, the converse to that was when Erica Kirk said a week after Charlie's murder that I forgive the murderer of my, you realize that is the litmus test. Non-Christians or Christians that are really not that Christian, they don't get that. they don't understand that that is normative Christian faith. That is what Elizabeth Elliott did to the people who murdered her husband, Jim Elliott in 1956.

Jesus says, forgive them, Father, they know not what they did. That is as radical as it gets. That is, if you're solving for X, that is Christian fate in a nutshell right there.

You want to see it for what it is. It is so powerful. And that's what hell screams against. Actual living out of, of what we believe, that we are sinners, we forgive those who have done wicked things, as we ask the Father to forgive us for the wickedness we have done. If you don't get that, folks, you're probably not a Christian, and you probably better get serious about this,

because this is where it all ends up right there. And that was, I've said many times, when Erica did that, that was like dropping a daisy cutter into the bowels of hell. The damage that did to Satan's kingdom incalculable. And that's why they have raged. And we've had Candace and Tucker and all the Looney's screaming and blaming the Jews and whatever they want to say. I mean, just madness because hell is angry. And you know what?

It is our job as Christians to make hell angry. We praise God. He called us to that. He's prepared us for that. He's anointed us for that. That's why we're here. And to not do that. is to miss it. That's exactly. That's our job description. And then that's what you do,

obviously, in your book, The War and Reality, you're helping us, because we need to think this through. We need to understand what is reality, what is truth, and that we're in a time when all of that stuff needs to be challenged, the crazy stuff. We need to be able to challenge it with love and truth and facts. Well, notice, too, Eric, that Jesus and the apostles call Satan a murderer, liar, accuser and slanderer who seeks to steal, kill, and destroy. We had a murder on 9-10 last year. Then we had a wonderful memorial service where more people heard the gospel than at any time in human history at one time, including preached by politicians. And what have we had since then? We've had lies, accusations, and slander seeking to steal, kill, and destroy. And people don't

believe in the demonic. How could it be more obvious? This is what's going on. Satan's trying to tear down something good. And that is unity around him, around Jesus. So Satan's trying to tear that down. And a lot of Christians have led him. A lot of Christians have said, oh, maybe this is real. Maybe this is legit. Maybe Erika is complicit.

Are you out of your mind? Yes, they are. I mean, please. Exodus 2222 says, if you wrong a widow or the orphaned, God says, I'll come after you with a sword. This is the Old Testament, obviously, not in the new, but it's expressing God's thoughts on what you should do with widows and orphans. And then in Deuteronomy 19, Eric, it says this. It says, if you accuse somebody falsely of a crime and you're found out, you get the penalty of the crime.

If you falsely accuse someone of murder, you get executed. Man, that would shut down the internet if we had that law. Now, I'm not advocating for violence against anybody doing that. I'm simply saying that this is God's heart on the issue. If you're going to accuse anybody of murder, you better have some really good evidence. The Bible talks about two witnesses. You don't slander. You don't speculate. You don't accuse. That's what the Satan does. That's what the Satan means. The accuser. That's what's going on here. It's a war on reality. It's a war on a widow. It's a war on her children. It's a war on Charlie's legacy. And we're going to sit back and go, oh, maybe it's true. It's not true. There's no evidence. And if there is evidence, show me. Haven't

seen any of it yet. Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing is, uh, Frank, that you and I, we've got the inside track. We know Erica. Uh, I know a lot of those, those people, uh, you know, on the, on the inside. I remember when they were, you know, casting aspersions on my friend Rob McCoy, I thought, look, I know these people. For you to say that they could be involved in this, I guarantee you that's wrong. Like, you might not like them for good reasons. Fine. But for you to go there, I can tell you that you are way off. Like, that is nuts. But if you don't know these people, if these people just exist as names in the newspaper or on the internet, you can see how people will give themselves the freedom to just float and just come up with theories and whatever.

It is wicked. It is so wicked. It is so awful. But this is what God is a judge. God is a judge. That's why the Bible hates gossip. This is why God hates gossip. I was just going to say that. It gets to that issue right there. A lot of Christians don't understand. God hates gossip. Gossip and slander. And many Christians don't. They just don't think of it.

You know, it's kind of like, you know, you see 500-pound pastors and you kind of think like, what's going on there? Something's out of order. The gossip thing, it's like we need to take that seriously. That's not just like, oh, it's extra credit to not gossip. No, that or we're seeing it in real time right now. What else is in your book is we only got a few minutes? I want to make sure people understand what is in the book.

It's the war on reality, Frank Turek and Phoenix Hayes authors. What else is in this book, The War on Reality? We cover how to know reality. What are the laws to discover what reality is? We cover who is the source of reality. We cover the attacks on the family. We even talk about AI in there. And then we have a chapter on why Christians need to be engaged politically, Eric.

I know this is near and dear to your heart and mine. let me just give two out of 10 reasons of the chapter that we have in there from the chapter on why Christians have to be involved politically. You hear this. I hear this from pastors all the time, Eric. I don't get involved politically. I just preach the gospel. To which I respond, I guess you don't really think the gospel's all that important then. And they go, what do you mean? I say, because politics affects your ability to preach and live the gospel. If you don't think so, you can go to some of the countries I've been to. I've been to Iran. There's no First Baptist Church of Tehran, I checked.

into Saudi Arabia. There's no Calvary Chapel of Mecca. I just got back from Egypt a few months ago. If you want to start a church in Egypt, you're going to have trouble because politically, they're going to give you trouble. In other words, politics affects your ability to preach and live the gospel. And as you point out in your book, Revolution, that if the Christians hadn't stood up against King George, we wouldn't have the freedoms that we have now. Second reason we have to be involved because we're called to love people and you don't love people by allowing them to be hurt by bad laws or laws that don't protect them from evil. Case in point, this Massachusetts abortion bill which allows the murder of a baby up to the moment of birth. Where are the Christians?

And I always ask people who say, well, we Christians, we should just stay out of it. I asked them this question. Are you telling me that 160 years ago that Christians, should not have gotten involved politically to outlaw slavery? And they all go, uh, welcome to politics. Yeah, you have to be involved. Are atheists only qualified to run the country? Where do you come up with this? Now, we also deal with objections in the war on reality to, well, isn't that going to put an obstacle to the gospel? We deal with all that in there. The answer is no. The exact opposite is true. churches that actually are more politically engaged have have more disciples in them than those that are not.

Now, I do want to point out that the key chapter in my view in the book is chapter 10, and people can get chapter 10 right now before it comes out. If they go to the war on reality.com and put their receipt in for the book that they bought, we're going to send you chapter 10 immediately. And once you see that chart on pages 192 and 193, you're going to go, Ah, I get it now. I see why there's a culture war going on. This chart explains so much.

So you can download that for free at the war on reality.com. You'll also see Erica Kirk's forward there, whether you buy the book or not, it's at the war on reality.com. The war on reality. dot com. It is, it's funny, you know, as I hear you talk, you were just saying the stuff that I say all the time about people. I mean, I was, just the other day.

I was with somebody who was expressing this painful, naive view that somehow we're not supposed to be involved in politics. And it's just, it's just, I no longer have patience for these people. I just get angry. It's like, you understand the level of foolishness that you're expressing. Again, what about slavery? And I think the real bottom line is these people don't care. They don't care. If America burns down, if people are enslaved or what, they just.

They have a naive view. They want to congratulate one another on how winsome they are, while the entire civilization for them, their kids and their grandkids, burns to the ground. That's the kind of level of cowardice that we have out there. Well, I mean, I'm amazed. You know I wrote my book, Letter to the American Church, and so many people I know said, oh, I give it to my pastor.

He wouldn't read it. Of course not, because then he's going to actually have to make changes that may upset his apple cart. Now, let me say this. Most pastors are great people, and it's hard being a pastor. It's the second hardest job in American Christianity. The hardest job is pastor's wife, okay? It's a very hard job, and I think we've drunk the Kool-Aid in a lot of ways thinking,

well, we don't really need to be involved politically and all this. That's because we've had such a great constitution for so many years. There you go. But it's not going to be that way moving forward unless we, what, you wrote another book called if you can keep it, right? Is that the name of it? Okay, that's Ben Franklin saying, I got a republic here if you can keep it.

Reagan said freedom must be defended every generation only takes one generation for that to go away. We have to be engaged in order to protect our ability to preach and live the gospel and to love people by putting laws in place that protect them from evil. It's kind of simple. It's kind of simple.

I still, I'm, when people also, when they say, well, my pastor doesn't get political, but he, he just preaches the Bible. I just want to say, no, he doesn't. And if he says he does, he's a liar. Because to preach the Bible is to preach all this stuff, is to connect the dots. If you don't connect the dots, you're not preaching the Bible. But that's the thing where even people, they'll even go so far as to say, well, you know, we say at our church to vote. devote your principles or to vote biblical principles. In other words,

they don't dare to say what that actually means. Yeah. They don't dare because some people think biblical principle means, you know, biblical principle means welcome the stranger, pro-immigrant open borders. Or there are many deluded Christians who actually believe this. You need to spell this out for them.

Yeah. You need to make it clear to them, just as you need to make it clear that abortion is not health care. but their pastors are unwilling to do that and I have said that they're cowardly some of them really are genuinely cowardly some of them are just confused but I just think my goodness when you think of where we are in America right now the idea that that people would get this wrong folks if you want to know why we're in this mess is because you have given God's money to churches that are getting this wrong like you're on the hook God is going to judge you for how you spend his money for how you

how you vote for where you go to church, for what you allow. It's absolutely vital that we get this right. So I say this in love, please understand the centrality of what we're talking about. The book is The War on Reality. And you said now, so if people pre-order it now, like right now, they can get part of it. They can read part of it for free already. You said that right now. them the chapter 10 which deals with cultural Marxism, which explains so much as to why there's a

culture war going on now and how you can realize where people are coming from when they say things like gays for Gaza or whiteness is evil or math is racist or you know, I can, you're an oppressor if you don't use my pronouns. I mean, if that chapter, explains where all this came from and what to do about it too we have we have very practical things in there like what happens if your kid comes to you and says mom dad i'm trans what do you say what do you do we have very practical things in the book uh i know what my father would have said uh and i can't say it on the air um so which is why i love my father oh my gosh my love for my dad um we just got a moment left here uh where can people find you frank turrick

cross-examined.org with a D on the end of it. We do two podcasts a week as well called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. That's the name of the podcast. Of course, we have a YouTube channel with about 3,500 videos on it. Most of them are from the college campuses where I answer a lot of questions. It's cross-examined two words, YouTube channel, Instagram. You can get to it all from cross-examined. Are you going to be in any towns in the next month or so?

Yes, I'm going to be next week in Georgia. then I'm going to be at the University of Western Carolina University, September 1st. I'll be at University of Georgia, I think the 14th, the 15th, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the 16th Chapel Hill. So we go to a lot of colleges. It's all on the website, cross-examined.org. And I'll be also out in Utah for the one-year anniversary of that tragic day on the 10th of September. several people will be out there as well. I had not thought,

I had not thought about that, that that's coming up. That's September 10th. 10th. I'm going to be in Grand Rapids that day, but wow, one year anniversary, Lord Jesus, give us wisdom in this dark, dark hour.

Frank Turrick, my friend, I feel honored to call you friend. You're my brother. Thanks for what you do. The book is The War on Reality. You can go to the waronreality.com or crossexamine. ORG. Thank you. God bless you, Eric. Thanks so much, brother.

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