The Eric Metaxas Show - Albert Mohler

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

Albert Mohler, president of one of the largest seminaries in the world, makes some significant points about the current state of America, drawing from his new book, "The Gathering Storm."

Hey, for you Eric Mataxis trivia buffs out there, Eric's Secret Service codename is El Jerko. Please make note of this. And now the man who'll deny it, but it's true anyway. Here's El Jerko himself, my friend Eric Mataxis. Hey, folks, welcome to Eric Mataxis show. Did you hear Todd's intro? Because I didn't. And they're usually mean.

And I just want to say, if it was mean, I apologize. Todd's a friend. And, you know, I just, I've committed to working with him despite the issues. Albin, how are you? Yes. I do. my beanie to you, Eric. I doff my beanie. That's not a beanie. You can't fool me. That's a baseball cap. Well, listen, we've got to tell our audience before I blather, we have Al Moeller coming up in a few minutes. Al Moeller, he's a big deal. If you don't know who he is, you will in a moment. But he's got

a book out. And we're going to talk current events. He was famously anti-Trump four years ago. And he has recently changed his opinion, and he's taken a lot of heat for that. So we'll probably touch on that. He's now anti-anty-Trump. Maybe. Let's see what he says. In our two today, we play the rest of my interview with the great Ravi Zacharias. Now, if you haven't seen that, folks, I put it on Twitter. You can find it on our YouTube page, Eric Mattax's show. It's from 10 months ago, but it's an amazing thing because he talks about his tombstone, his grandmother's tombstone. You'll see when you watch it. It's amazing. This is only 10 months ago. He was so vibrant and alive. And now he's even more vibrant and alive in glory. But he's not with us. So many of us

were sad because he was, there's certain people that are such an encouragement, just that they're alive. They're so wonderful. So let me say that he's coming up in hour two. Tomorrow, I'm going to be talking to the co-author of the book by this woman. She's in the pandemic. What do we call it? Documentary, mini-documentary. She wrote a book called The Case. What, oh, gosh. A Plague of Corruption. Plague of Corruption. We've gotten a lot of emails about that. She's obviously very angry at Dr. Fauci and claims some really horrific things about Dr. Fauci. I do not know what to believe.

Her co-author of that book is going to be on this program tomorrow. And I don't know enough about this to know what I think, frankly. I have suspicions on both sides. So I'm about as objective and ignorant as you can be, which I think is an excellent thing. I work hard on that. Let me also say that at the end of the week, we've got Victoria Jackson, a new episode. Victoria Jackson and fun fact, we got such great stuff. And we got Victor Davis-Hanson.

I don't think next week, but the week after that, the following Monday, Victor Davis, that we got a lot of stuff planned. Now, Albin, I want to talk, and you can jump in at any time, but I've just got to tell people that I didn't know really until the last minute. But last night at 10 p.m. Eastern time. So it was dark. I was sitting right here. It was dark. There was no sunlight on my face. And I was on just a wonderful panel discussion. It took place in California with Pastor Rob McCoy. He was the mayor of Fresno, California, I think. No, sorry, the mayor of Thousand Oaks, California, where the Reagan Library is. He's a pastor who got involved in, you know, government. And he claims it's a result of reading my book on Wilberforce and then my book on Bonhofer, which you want to talk about humbling, I'll be honest with you.

I, you know, that's my prayer. But when I hear something like that, I'm, I'm unequal to it. But he's become a leader in the world of, you're holding up my book seven more men. Listen, I'm inspired to be in your next book, seven bucks more men. You have to die.

So don't do that. Don't do that. So, but the issue is that I spoke to Charlie Kirk last night. I posted it on Twitter. I cannot post on Facebook. I wanted to say this today, over two weeks now, I think it's three weeks, Facebook has locked me out of my account. I cannot post anything. I have to get an assistant to post some things for me, but I myself

am unable to post. So why is that? You go in, you try to fix it, it tells you that it needs to confirm where you are, because I'm, I've got, you know, 80,000 followers and I could be, you know, a Russian something, right? So I have tried over and over and over. I've spent hours trying to convince Facebook that I'm in New York, I'm always in New York, there's a million ways you can corroborate this. I've turned on my location services. I've done everything.

I'm locked out of Facebook. So if this is my first taste of this chilling thing that's happening in America right now, I'm glad it's only my first taste, but I'll tell you, folks, it is an amazing thing when one of the two principal ways that I communicate on social media completely cut off and nothing I can do about it, evidently, we've really been trying. But what an extraordinary thing. I just thought I would say that. But anyway, my conversation with Charlie Kirk last night was tremendous. I recommend it to you if you can find it on Twitter. We'll post it on my newsletter. We may be sending more than one out per week in the next few weeks as a result of this just to communicate with you. And also,

so you've got to watch that. You've got to watch the Robbie Zacharias video. Again, we're playing the audio today, but we put it out again on video. I sent out an email yesterday. If you're not on my email list, please get on the email list. But it's a wonderful interview. But also, Albin, we've got to mention, Chris Heimes and I cut together what I think is a very funny Mike Lindell commercial. Yes. I think it only has 4,000 views. So if you have not seen it, folks, honestly, it's, it's, it features Joe Biden and the whole

corn pop sequence. I don't think you want to miss it. If you have not seen it, you know, you have to go to our YouTube Eric Mataxis show account. And yes. And I don't, I don't think Joe knew that he was participating in, in this video. when he shot his part of it, you know, and then Hillary Clinton, too. We haven't gotten their permission,

and it'll never happen again. So anyway, maybe that's why you're not on Facebook anymore. So honestly, it is so, no, that was only posted a week ago, but it is so funny, I promise you, you'll see, but I just wanted to put that out there. We're trying to do some entertaining things so that our commercials aren't all boilerplate. Now, Albin, before we go to Al-Moller,

I do want to say that we're doing a fundraiser with Angel Tree. Now Angel Tree, that's prison fellowship. And they send kids whose parents are incarcerated. Try to imagine this. They send them to summer camp. And if they can't go to summer camp because of this pandemic shutdown, they send them a care package. A lot of these families can't afford groceries. At this point, you know, a lot of people are in trouble.

They're unemployed. They're waiting in food bank. lines for hours and stuff. So I just want to say that we are, we're doing what we can, but we need your help. And for some reason, we've gotten off to an unbelievably slow start. Our goal was to get 130 packages to 130 kids or 130 kids to camp. We're at 40 and we're over halfway done. So I don't know why that is. But if you're out there, if you're in a position to help, we really need your help at this point. So actually, let me just give you a statistic.

In the United States of America, one in every 28 kids has a parent behind bars. Now, you think about that. One out of every 28 kids, that's an amazing thing. That's like three out of 100 have parents behind bars. Now, you know that a lot of these kids, their lives, they feel abandoned. They're lonely. They're shamed. And these kids are at home, spending a lot of time at home alone, probably.

I want to play a clip. Kelly McCoy monitors some of these at-risk kids and how they're getting in trouble on the internet. Let's play that clip so you know what we're talking about. Kids and teens who are home are almost completely dependent on their devices to complete schoolwork, potentially resulting in hours of unsupervised screen time. Okay, folks, please go to metaxis talk.com. We need your help. We'll be right back with Al Moller.

Hey, folks, welcome back. This is the Eric Mattaxas show, and I have as my guest, someone, I haven't had on for a little while. An old friend, Al Moller, he's the president of the Southern Baptist Seminary and the author of a brand new book, The Gathering Storm. Al Moller, welcome the program. Eric is always great to be with you. Thank you. Well, I'm excited just to talk to you in general. but the new book, what is the subtitle of the Gathering Storm? What is the book about?

Well, the subtitle is secularism and culture in the church. It's really trying to help people to connect the dots. And you're an historian, you'll care deeply about this and know exactly what's going on with the title. I've had a fascination with Winston Churchill ever since I was about 13 years old. And a part of what has fascinated me is that Churchill had the ability to connect the dots when others could not or would not. And when he wrote a Titanic six-volume history, the Second World War, that first volume was entitled The Gathering Storm, because it was all about Nazi Germany, its militarism, its rise, and Churchill connected the dots, and Britain's establishment refused to, and many others in Europe as well, and it led to disaster. I want to help Christians

connect the dots in our time. And we have to remember how vilified he was. I mean, many people, you know, who don't know the history, think of, wow, Churchill, a hero. Yeah, he became an amazing hero. But that was in part because he was so vilified for so long that when he finally was proven right, the whole world thought, my goodness, this guy's a prophet. And they rallied around him, and he led the West against the Nazis. It's one of these things that, you know, you feel like it seems like fiction.

But it happened. And he saw things very similar. to what some of us are seeing now, and everybody told them, oh, shut up, shut up. You know, Chamberlain didn't understand it. And we are going through some similar things, and I know that that's what your book is about. So tell us specifically, Al, where do you connect the dots? Well, I think the biggest shift in Western culture that Christians should be aware of is the secularization of the culture.

And that doesn't necessarily even mean what some people think it means. It doesn't mean that no one's talking about God. It doesn't mean that no one's interested in spirituality, but it means that any binding religious authority, in our case, the binding religious authority of historic Christianity, has been receding from any authoritative posture in Western society for over a century now. And the process has just reached what we might call warp speed in recent years. And it's left a lot of Christians wondering, how could this happen? How could the entire moral order be turned upside down?

And how could it be that the mainstream press now uses the phrase religious liberty in scare quotes? How could this have happened? And you and I both know it didn't happen out of a vacuum. It happened out of an historical context that we could see happening and is accelerating even now. And so defining those terms is important. We talk about a secular America. Clearly, it doesn't mean that religion is illegal, that there's no Christianity. but it does mean that the most influential sectors of our society have either rejected the Christian truth claim or so distant from it.

It's no longer even on their horizon. Well, this is, you know, this is an opportunity for me to say why I typically vote Republican and why I voted for this president. It's not because I think that all the problems of the world are solved in voting for the GOP or for voting for Donald Trump. But something has happened in our lifetime. that is so dramatic. We need to understand, for example, that the Democratic Party is so dramatically different than it was 30 or 50 years ago.

They never were a secularist party. They had elements, but they have become a dramatically secularist party. They've pushed God out of their platform. There used to be plenty of Democrats, plenty. And these are friends of mine that still both that way. They don't see what has happened

to the party. And Americans need to wake up. I think people are voting for FDR when they vote for the Democrats and not realizing that, you know, JFK and FDR are part of another universe. That was when the Democratic Party was open to basic American values, open to people who respected the Bible and Christian teaching. That is no longer the case. And so that is part of where we are. It is, you know, and there is a partisan divide. It's growing deeper, by the way, and more intensive. You have people like Robert Putnam and others, places like Notre Dame and Harvard University, they've been noticing for years that one of the most important predictive factors in a presidential election vote is whether someone went to church the Sunday before the election day. So there is this increasingly secular divide in the United States, and it's not accidentally a partisan divide.

Because even as there are two cultures now in the United States in many ways, those cultures naturally organize themselves. into political parties for national campaigns. You know, Eric, I think we can see something else, and you're right. If you go back, say, a half century, you can find plenty of people who openly identified with historic Christianity in the Democratic Party. And by the way, there still are. And that includes a large number of African-American Christians in the United States. But when you're looking at the elite culture, you go back to a figure like either

Eisenhower or Kennedy. And what we now know, just to make clear it wasn't so partisan then, what we now know is that the supposedly Protestant Eisenhower, who I do believe had some form of theistic faith, and the acknowledged Roman Catholic Kennedy, neither one of them was very much what they were. Eisenhower was not very Presbyterian, and Kennedy was not very Catholic. The binding authority of Christianity at that point for both of them was pretty cultural. By the way, people would forget that the Kennedy family during that time was a valid. anti-abortion. All that would change in the late 60s and the early 70s. And, you know, that's the tipping point, I think. And you and I are both old enough, I think, we can say that the tipping point was somewhere around 1972 in that election, where the two parties just began to absolutely veer off into different directions. Yeah. You're quite right. It's very dramatic, and we remember it. And as I said, and you, you're just alluding to it, that there was a cultural

consensus. Kennedy was bringing prostitutes into the White House. So anybody who feared that he was, you know, a devout Catholic and would listen to the Pope rather than the American people of the Constitution, you know, we can laugh at that. But the fact is that there was a cultural consensus. We also saw it in Hollywood. Something happened in the 60s. And we have gone over time, slowly, slowly, slowly, but we've come to a place now, which is so dramatically different. And I think that that's why folks like you and I, we have to speak up. And I, you know, I try to explain myself, why have I supported Trump? Have I gone soft on adultery?

Or do I not care about marriage? Or do I not care about bluster and hyperbole and boasting? It's like, folks, we've got to look at where we are. We've got to read the times. I don't mean the New York Times. We've got to read what is happening in the culture because we are in a dramatically different place than we were, let's say in 1980 or, I mean, think of it.

1980, we have a choice between Reagan and Carter. Carter is a born-again Christian who says he's a born-again Christian. His sister is an evangelist. He teaches Sunday school. He believes in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. That's what you have on the Democratic side. we are just in such a dramatically different place. You talked about religious liberty being in scare quotes.

How is it that we have a, you know, a formerly philandering New York Manhattan developer who is the champion of religious liberty? How did this happen? I mean, it's almost funny to me. Well, it certainly is ironic. But, you know, I think conservative Christians cut, and I was a part of this. I was a young person. I worked in the Reagan campaign.

I think conservative Christians in the last part of the 20th century woke up to the reality of politics and began to understand how politics works. What conservative Christians didn't understand is how the culture works, two different things. And even now when I hear Christians talk about power in the United States, they tend to think about political power. Political power is not irrelevant by any means. But cultural power is actually far more influential in the society. So you mentioned Hollywood. You know, you take the cultural production that comes out of Hollywood, the information industry that comes out of New York, the academic world with higher academia, especially in the most prestigious institutions.

And then the leadership of the Fortune 500 companies, you know, sociologists to point out, that's a very elite is a loaded term. Let's just say it's a very self-selected group, and they have an agenda, and they're far more secular. And by that, there's no way to exaggerate that, by the way. They are intensely now secular. And the Democratic Party, by the way, both parties at the elite level have connections there. But the reality is that the Democratic Party has organized itself with leadership from those who are trying to move the culture in that direction. So I will have students sometimes. I'll give them a copy of the 1960 Democratic and the 1960 Republican platforms.

Here's the thing. If you bought the names out, you can't tell which is which. Forgive me. We're going to go to a break. We'll be right back to continue this conversation, folks, with my friend Al Mueller. Stick around. Christian bestselling author and speaker Richard E. Simmons does not shy away from the big questions of life. His latest book is called Reflections on the Exist of God, and it tackles the biggest question of all, does God exist? I've read this book, and I've got to tell you, I'm a little biased, but you can imagine that I like it a lot.

because Simmons offers insights for those grappling with life's biggest questions. Where do we find meaning in life? Who determines what is evil? Can we be moral without God? Does God even exist? Former White House aide Wallace Henley says, I've taught apologetics for many years and I've read every scholar mentioned in this book. Of all the books on apologetics, Simmons is the best I have ever read.

This book is easy to read because it's divided into a series of brief essays perfect for a devotional or discussion with a friend, I highly recommend that you add a copy of reflections on the existence of God to your pandemic reading list. Simmons asked questions that speak directly to one of the most important things you possess your worldview. Folks, you know how important this is to me. Your worldview is going to impact the way you live your life for better or for worse. If you want to challenge yourself to spiritual and intellectual growth, and I hope you do, then be willing to ask yourself life's toughest questions. dive in today by picking up a copy of reflections on the existence of God right now.

Go to existence of godbook.com. That's existence of Godbook.com. I'm talking to Al Moeller. He's the president of the Southern Baptist Seminary. And the new book is The Gathering Storm. Now, what you're saying, Al, this is dramatic stuff. We have come from a time when there was a consensus on the left and on the right. It has changed over 50 years.

imagine JFK saying, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Notice the victim mentality, it wasn't even, you know, there was no identity politics. What's that? There was no identity politics.

No. And things have changed so dramatically that JFK's own brother, Teddy Kennedy, you know, became one of these leftists, you know, was willing to sign on unlimited abortion,

all these kinds of, kinds of things. It happened in a short time. Yeah, and by the way, that story is just extremely interesting, that what you just pointed to, because we know from inside the Kennedy family how that family made the political transition. And it was largely tied to, to Robert Kennedy's run for president in 1968, and of course with Teddy Kennedy's political ambitions thereafter. It was a very Roman Catholic family. The Roman Catholic family objectively condemns abortion as murder of an unborn human being. So that's when this is another way secularization takes place.

So the Kennedy family came up with an argument. They brought in some very liberal Catholic moralists. And they came up with the argument that said, okay, we will be personally opposed to abortion, but we will say we will not enforce our religious views on the American people in legislation. Now, that's just a picture-perfect illustration of how secularization happens. It enables people at a certain point to say,

hey, I'm Roman Catholic, or like Joe Biden, I'm personally opposed to abortion. But hey, I won't do one thing to limit one abortion, given the policy he has now, even calling for the withdrawal of the Hyde Amendment. But it's not even that he won't do one thing. He will actively do many things to promote abortion until birth. There's no question about it. And look, that kind of, you know, how do I put it? When we're talking about secularization, it boils down to what you just said. It's this clever division where you say, oh, oh, we're just going to push religion over here

into this little religious corner where it can be ignored. And then everything else is going to have secular humanist values. And it was a governor Cuomo, the previous, Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, who famously or infamously said, oh, yes, I'm personally as a Catholic opposed to abortion, but I'm going to to now give a pass to everyone can vote for abortion on demand and still pretend that they're privately against it. It's really sophistry, and it was an evil thing, and we're living with it today. Well, we certainly are, and you know, what we're talking about here is that, for instance, they will say, well, the claim that an unborn child is a person's a theological claim. There's

no rule, there's no role for theology in public policy. But of course, every policy is to determining whether or not we believe the baby in the womb is a human person. Because if that baby is a human person, and you and I know that baby is, then that baby possesses the same rights as a born person. By the way, you don't even need to go to abortion. Let's just talk about slavery. Imagine I say, I believe in the Bible, and the Bible says black Americans are human beings, and it's 1850. And somebody says, that's a religious view. In my view, I have a secular view, and I think they're not up to us on the evolutionary scale. And I believe slavery is a fine thing. So you keep your religion out of politics. And by the way, if you don't like slavery, well, then you don't buy a slave and let me do

what I feel like doing. That's effectively the argument. Well, and it shows the impossibility of a pro-choice argument. That was Lincoln's whole argument during the war. There's no such thing as a pro-choice argument when it comes to something as abominable as slavery. You're talking about the fact that to every society is going to take a position. And everything comes down to whether or not the society takes the right position. And eventually you're going to have to decide questions of personhood, just as we talked about. And, of course, we're living in a time in which secularization has gone so far that you have people who are claiming all kinds of rights, but they have no grounding for those rights.

You know, you and I know that even the founders of this country grounded those rights in nature and nature is God. The creator has endowed us with certain unalienable rights. You know, so you take the creator out of this, and then where do those rights come from? Do we give them to each other? That's a horrifying thought, because any government that can give us those rights can take away those rights. And if we don't, you know, use the opportunity of this pandemic to explain these things, because I honestly think that this is the teaching moment for America.

We're seeing government overreach. We're seeing the limits of government. We're seeing that once they go past a certain line, they are really. really acting like fascists. They're not doing what the Constitution says they're supposed to do. And so all of these things, we're needing to be reeducated. And I know that in your book, The Gathering Storm, that's part of what you're doing. Yeah, what people understand that the battle over religious liberty didn't come out of nowhere. It comes out of somewhere. And it's the inevitable collision between people who think that our society should not only tolerate, but respect

religious truth claims and a society that says those religious truth claims have no no place in an intelligent polite society and this very constitutional order was premised on the first and i mean the soviet union was premised on the second and and yet we have people today and look they're haunted eric and given your role and and what you do you know this they're haunted they're haunted they're haunted by someone who comes in and says god says because they don't believe god says or say they don't believe God says. But, you know, we as Christians know, they're haunted by this. And that's why there's a particular vehemence right now towards Orthodox Christianity. I want to pick up right there, Al. We're going to go to another break. Be right back, folks, with Al-Moller. Don't go away.

Welcome back to the Air from Texas show. I'm talking to Al-Moller, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary and the author of a new book, The Gathering Storm. Al, you were just talking about people who were haunted. Keep going on that. It's very interesting concept. Well, I find it in In all of the, first of all, you have this flight to anxiety and the psychotherapeutic, you know, even in the mid-century of the last century, people said that's the new Ayrsat's religion. Yeah. But I notice it right now. I mean, the New York Times last, just a couple of Sundays ago ran a front page article on the future of Christianity. Now, it's arguing for this radical grunge, you know, kind of postmodern Christianity.

But, you know, a secular society doesn't need any kind of spirituality, right? if you're really secular. But the problem is, God did not make us so that we can actually operate in a secular way. It reminds me the fact that Richard Dawkins, the most acerbic of the leading atheist, you know, had to do an interview in which he admitted he loves Christmas music at Christmas, Christian Christmas music, Anglican Christmas music at Christmas. Yeah. You know, and there's just something there that even the most ardent secularist can't get away from.

But when you say they're haunted, the issue, of course, is that you cannot run from your maker. You can pretend to. You can shut him out. You can go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to drown out the voice of God. But the voice of God is screaming from every cell, from every atom within us, because we cannot escape. It's as if he signed his painting. Every part of us is touched by him. And so you're quite right.

That's Romans one. that are that are writhing because they can't stand it. They want to get away from themselves. You know, in the 14th Psalm, the first verse, we read, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Now, when I was a young person and I read that, I thought, well, that just means atheists aren't intelligent. But then I met atheists, and they're very intelligent. So what does that mean? Well, the biblical concept of the fool is self-delusional. And the key words, I came to understand that verse were, in his heart. The fool who said, in his heart, there is no God. In other words, he knows better. She knows better. And that's the haunting I'm talking about. And that's one of the reasons

why, you know, just also a few days ago, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, you know, purchased this full-page ad in the New York Times to make fun of Jesus and prayer. Now, it takes a certain amount of venom to pay all that money for a full-page ad in the New York Times to say you don't believe in prayer and a caricature of Jesus. That's not secular. That's hatred. I have to tell you only recently because I'm writing a new book. I've been reading some of the atheist arguments. I always had ignored them. I was bored by them.

I read a little bit of Christopher Hitchens' book, God is not good. And God is not great. And it was so bad that I was actually stunned that somebody as intelligent as Chris for Hitchens could write something so ridiculous. I mean, he's just unable to deal with the logic. And so what he does is he takes brilliant pot shots, pot shots, pot shots after pot shots. And so I've read a little more recently, and I really have been overwhelmed, Al, at the paucity of any actual arguments on the atheist side. It's really embarrassing.

In other words, for me, it's nothing but public relations. They don't have the arguments. And so they figure if they can keep making fun of Christians and talking in clever ways, that's the most they can do. because the arguments they don't have. Yeah, it's a public relations battle. And if you look at the classic atheists of the early 20th century, people like Bertrand Russell or the logical positivist, AJ I, you look at those figures, you know, they were cool.

They had dispassionate prose. What I think marks the atheism that we're confronting right now is just anger. Yeah. They're angry. And they say they're angry at God. I think in a lot of ways they're angry at Christians. They're angry that we will not get out of their way. You know, it's these pesky Christians who keep showing up,

whether the issue is abortion or sexuality or marriage or you just got on the list. These Christians just won't get out of the way. Well, it's funny because it's not as though they don't have a lot of valid criticisms of the church, but valid criticisms of the church, guess what? You have them and I have them, and Martin Luther had them, and anyone with a brain who is a Christian has criticisms, of what passes for Christian faith. There's no question about that.

And that's the role. We're supposed to be truth seekers. We're supposed to be. Jesus himself was a religious reformer. If you just look at him historically. And yet they act as though by giving voice to those criticisms, the only option is to leap into atheism, which is, you know, it's really like saying that if anything's wrong with the world,

we should all kill ourselves. It's really not a great option. No, and, you know, I learned a long time ago that when somebody reaches, the point where their argument turns into sarcasm, they run out of argument. And you mentioned Christopher Hitchens, because Christopher Hitchens was capable of such incredible prose, incisive mind, a tragic figure to me. But when he wrote, God is not great or other things like that, he just writes with venom. And, you know, I can't even imagine the atheists enjoy reading that kind of venom too much. It doesn't make for good bedside reading for the atheist

is trying to go to sleep. Yeah, he was flashing out. Yeah, and that anger, look, it's pointing at something. And I think, again, there are deep biblical roots for this. But we're living in this moment. That's the reason I wrote this book, The Gathering Storm, is the reason why you write so many of the things that you write. You're timing them for the big questions of the age,

and people are asking, why is everything now so difficult? What? And, you know, when we were talking about the two parties and polarization in the United States, and we mentioned the right and the left, In the 1950s, the Democrats did their very best to keep the left away from the Democratic Party. In the 1950s, the Republicans did their very best to keep the right away from the Republican Party. Those two parties saw themselves in the mainstream.

Goldwater changed that, and Buckley and Reagan and all the rest, in the Republican Party. And George McGovern, and an entire array of figures changed that. on the Democratic side. And those trajectories have just gone on and on and on and on. And so when we come to November of 2020, I mean, I just can't believe people ask me, you know, what about swing voters? I just, I mean, unless you don't have a clue what's going on,

there's very little swing. You know, we're now in two Americas voting two different ways. That's, this is the tough thing for people to understand. I've tried to make the case, and you've been attacked recently, but people need to understand where we are. And the idea that you could be so culturally and politically ignorant that you could think not voting is an option because I don't like either guy.

Well, guess what, folks? You're on the hook. God will judge you if you don't vote. In other words, you can't pretend that you can't just say, well, I'm just going to stick my head in the sand. I'm not going to look. I'm not going to look. You are responsive.

If you're an adult, a voting age, you're responsible and you need to make a choice. And there are going to be people whose lives are going to depend on the choice you make, including not voting. We'll be right back with Al Moller. Hey, folks, it's here from Taxo. I'm talking to Al, Al, your book is The Gathering Storm. And pretty recently, you've taken some tremendous criticism from people who are just viciously angry that you dared to say that you thought it was the wise thing at this point to vote for Trump in the reelection. Why did you make that statement? Well, it is because of the very things we're

talking about here. And so I want to be really, really clear. I reluctantly did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016, and it was very public about that. I had never not voted in that sense in an election. I now think that would be the wrong decision in 2020. And so you might say I'm reluctantly voting for Donald Trump, at least I certainly plan to. But it's because, I mean, he's not the candidate that I would choose as a traditional conservative. but he's the candidate at the top of the ticket.

And when you look at the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, I don't want to panic. I don't panic. But if I think about that Democratic Party, which is, by the way, of all things, moving increasingly to the left, even as it faces a general election campaign, never happened in American history.

No. If that party gains control, I have just tremendous concerns about the future of religious liberty and the future of human life. And the things I care about is even being pre-political. So, you know, there's no joy in politics.

And for Christians, there's never satisfaction in politics. But there is a political stewardship. And I pray to be a good and faithful steward of that political opportunity. Well, it seems to me that a lot of people feel betrayed by you. That's where their anger comes from because, you know, four years ago, you on principle, said you weren't going to vote. I think a lot of people felt that with me. They thought, surely Eric Mattaxas wouldn't stoop to vote for, you know, a monster like Donald Trump.

So there's a lot of betrayal of feelings of betrayal and anger. But you know and I know that, and I think I said this in my original Wall Street Journal piece, that a vote for Trump in many cases is not a vote for Trump. In other words, when you vote for the man, you are also voting for Mike Pompeo, for Betsy DeVos, for Ben Carson, for Brett Kavanaugh, for Justice Roberts, down the line. In other words, the idea that it's all about this one guy, It's not. It's about an administration. It's about America. And I think to myself, how is it that Donald Trump,

the caveman, has picked Mike Pence as his vice president. And he has picked so many other outspoken Christians, like Pompeo and Carson and Betsy DeVos and others whose names aren't coming to me. And we need to understand. You can still hate Trump. But when you're voting for him, you're voting for just an array of people with biblical values. And if you vote for the other person or don't vote, you're getting people who are not only not on the page of biblical values, but they're vicious, they've become vicious enemies of biblical values. And we need to deal with that. Yeah, you know, I think we all have to deal with the question. What will the culture look like four years after the election? What policies are going to be in place? Who's going to sit on the Supreme Court? Who's going to sit in the federal judiciary?

Who's going to be making the rules for the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of education. Will Christian schools be able to have, you know, Christian morality on a college campus? I don't believe that's going to be true if the Democratic Party is in power. And it's not because I'm making that up. They've told us ahead of time what their plans are. Could it be more dramatic? You know, I'm afraid we're out of time, but I have to tell you, Al Mueller, it's just wonderful to see your face. And so you can follow this on YouTube. The Ericman Taxis Show is a channel on YouTube, If you're listening, I can just tell you that it's great to see Al Moeller. The Gathering Storm is the new book. Congratulations. It's an important book. I'd like to get you back on just to continue the conversation about the book because there's so much for us to unpack as it were. Al-Moller, thank you so much.

Eric, as always, great to be with you. Thank you for your work. And I'll look forward to continuing this conversation anytime. Amen. And folks, go to Albertmoller.com. That's Albertmoler.com for more on Albert Moller and the Gathering. brainstormed.