The Eric Metaxas Show - Douglas Groothius

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Douglas Groothius takes on the craziness of the woke mob with observations from his new book, "Fire in the Streets: How You Can Confidently Respond to Incendiary Cultural Topics."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. The Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Folks, my guest in the next segment, and for the rest of this hour, is Douglas Groteheist. We have had him on many times, and I really look forward to that conversation. always spectacular. He's got a new book out. But we continue our conversation for now with

Victor Davis Hansen. We're speculating on the direction of the country, and we haven't really talked about the midterms and Trump. It seems to me that the blessing of the unfolding nightmare of this administration is that many people who are kind of on the fence are waking up and understanding, wow, I never dreamt that anyone could make Jimmy Carter look Reagan-esque. I simply never dreamt that we could have this kind of series of unfolding disasters. And disasters is almost a nice way of putting it. What happened in Afghanistan, everywhere we look, we see kind of nightmares of historical proportions. And I think that's good for the Republic, because my thesis is always that we've been so spoiled as a nation that we've kind of acted as though,

well, I don't need to do much. We're pretty, we'll be fine, the pendulum swings back and forth. We never took it seriously that we could swing so far away that we swing into cultural Marxism and the death of America, which is where I think we are now. So what are you thinking for the midterms and for Trump, if you have any thoughts on that? Well, I think there's some historic change. that the Democratic Party is not aware of. They have been for the last 10 years,

the party of the very, very wealthy, the dot-com corporate mind, and the very subsidized poor. And the Republican Party turned into a Nationalist Workers' Populist Party, and it drove out, of course, the never-Trump elitist. But nevertheless, part of that is we're starting to see a re-emphasis on class rather than race, and that's disastrous for the Democratic Party, because race and their way of thinking LeBron James and Oprah are victims.

But my point is that we're going to see, I think, 50% of the Hispanic vote. And these are people that I live in a predominantly Mexican-American community where there's outrage about gas prices, inflation, crime, all the border. And I think I've never seen anything like it. So I think there's going to be a big pickup in seats. I think they'll take the Senate. but more importantly, they have the, they're going to be identified with a lot of middle-class people, and race will be secondary. It'll be their class, middle-class interest. And I think that's going to be very

positive. I don't think the Democratic Party is going to know how to deal with that. And that's happening as we speak, as we see with these candidates down by the border. But that's going to be, I think that's going to be increasing. And then you add the social dimension, as one person said to me the other day, Mexican-American guy. Why are they going into a diocese in LA to disrupt our services about Roe versus Wade? And do they really, Victor, one person said, do they really believe that you can have, you can have a, basically he put it, you can kill a baby as it comes out of the birth canal in rare cases? So the point I'm making is they have not, they, the Mexican community, a lot of the black male community, they have really,

said to themselves, democratic people are for us and we're going to ignore the issues that we don't want to talk about. Radical abortion on demand, transgenderism, radical climate change that alters the economy, all of these boutique issues that the wealthy element that runs a Democratic Party champion that are never subject to the consequences of their own ideology. But I think it caught up to them. We've all, you know, everybody's been saying it would catch up to them, but I think Biden put it over, it was too much. And so we're going to have radical defections from these constituencies. I think also that it really told us that the never-trumpers have been exposed. They had told us that they were basically traditional conservatives and they wanted a united country and Trump was

over beyond the pale and then they wanted Biden and he would, and that was just completely bankrupt. Biden didn't unite anybody. It was a hard, a tool of a hard left and they don't know what to do now. because they either have to reject their entire careers and lives of all the issues that he's advancing, or they have to say we're hardcore leftist now. We always were, and we're back where we wanted to be. I don't know what they're going to do. That's, it's fascinating to see the never-trumpers. And what fascinates me is just how out of touch they are with your average American.

I mean, the idea that Mike Pence, you know, who I think is a good guy, basically, but that politically he could, be so out of touch as to think that America would want the kind of leadership he would bring. I find it almost funny how some people have their finger on the pulse, Trump obviously does, and then there are other people that they live in a world where maybe just because they're talking to people who like them or agree with them, but they don't seem to have a sense of just the outrage in middle America of what's going on and how people are looking for champions simply to speak the truth. You don't have to be even an ideologue. I agree. One of the things that's been fascinating for me to watch is Ron DeSantis, and I'm not going to get into Trump versus DeSantis, but he's almost a litmus test for the never Trumpers because here's somebody that they claim that they always wanted on abortion, on social issues, on the economy, on national offense. They said they were conservatives, but the fingerprints of Donald Trump on those issues were so terrible that they had to reject.

the entire. Now they've got an alternative. They've got their conservative values supposedly, and they've got somebody that went to Harvard. He pushes all their buttons. He was properly educated. He was in the military. He's a lawyer. And yet,

what's happened? They are as critical of him almost as they are of Trump. And that tells you that they either are so prideful that they can't admit they've been exposed as hypocrites or they really were never conservative at all.

They were just, that was just a route to power, and now they're going to, they are where they always wanted to be as leftist. I don't know the answer to that. Well, yeah, I think it's a combination of things. I'm just fascinated about how they're, if they showed, I mean, if people like Pence and others showed proper outrage about what happened with January 6th. I mean, I still can't believe that there are people in solitary confinement. I mean, every American ought to be up in arms over this and getting to the bottom of this.

And talking about anything else is almost a joke. When you think about that in America, we're willing to countenance that kind of behavior or a government putting forth a narrative and not allowing the truth to come out, that to me speaks volumes. That if you're not willing to address that because it's better for you politically, that kind of tells me. me about your character? I agree. I mean, I think every American, if they had just said, we're going to have a January 6 commission and a May 31st, 2020 commission combined. May 31st, 2020, a mob broke out of Lafayette Square. They burned the Episcopal Church. They tried to storm the White House grounds,

the Secret Service, fought vali. They took the President of the United States and put him in a bunker. that was an assault as well as burning down a federal courthouse in Portland, but they weren't interested in that. If they were only interested in January 6th, I have no problem with, you know, a 7-6, a 5-4 committee where you have cross-examined discussion, special investigators, special counsel, and then people say, okay, there's an allegation there were FBI informants that were aiding on the crowd, true or false, or ask what is the policy when you shoot an unarmed, person for committing a misdemeanor? Do you identify the officer? And who created the narrative that Officer Sicknick was killed by Trump supporter when he died of natural causes and etc? And do we have

all of the, so all of the stuff should come out and yet we're only having one side. And that's why people have lost confidence in it. Well, it's astonishing, I have to say, as an American who loves this country, who would die for this country, so many have died for this country, the idea that we would look the other way at things like this really tells us everything. And I do think that the so-called to hearken back to Nixon, the silent majority, they're paying attention. They see these things. And you've been a great source of encouragement to folks like that.

So Victor Davis-Hanson, thank you for your time. Folks, you can go to AM greatness, Americangrateness.com. Thanks again. They block the sun. So many things I could have found. The clouds got in my... Improve your memory with award-winning Vivalore memory support. Vivalore's founder prayed God would show her the solution to memory loss

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If you change your mind, I'm the first in line. Honey, I'm still free. Take a chance on me. If you need me. Hey, folks, welcome. We are talking to, well, right now I will be talking to, the author of a new book,

Fire in the Streets, how you can confidently respond to incendiary cultural topics. You know what I'm talking about? Incendiary call. I think you know, or you'll know as the conversation goes along. But my guest is the author of the book, Dr. Douglas Grote Heis. He's a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. He's been on this program before.

Dr. Grote Heis. Welcome back. Thank you. Happy to be here. You've written many books. You've written on a lot of things. We've talked to you about a lot of things. But this book is about what everybody, unfortunately, is talking.

about and needs help with. So since we need help with it, that's the fortunate part. But it is unfortunate that we're living in a time where there is so much rancor on basic cultural issues. So let me ask you, what led you to write a book called Fire in the Streets, how you can confidently respond to incendiary cultural topics? Typically, a philosophy professor would not write on that. Well, it was the riots of two. 2020 because I was getting a lot of requests to be on radio programs and podcasts and so on to try to explain what was going on. And I realized this came out of a certain philosophy. It didn't come out of nowhere.

And I was familiar with Marxism and critical theory and critical race theory. So what I wanted to do is try to get to the bottom of it philosophically and theologically, get to the root of it and not just the slogans or the images of. of riots or the images of police interacting with black men and so on. I really wanted to understand this whole ideology behind the riots. Well, you're a Christian. You write as a Christian. I'm mystified and horrified that many churches and many in the Christian community have embraced critical race theory or at least open the door to it,

not, seeming not to understand that it is by definition Marxist atheist, they don't seem to have bothered to see that at that level it's incompatible with faith. It doesn't represent what the great tradition of Christian faith. So is that, is that where we start just defining something like that? Yeah, I do. I talk about Marxism, that Marxism is intrinsically atheistic, that it tries to bring heaven to earth without God and therefore creates a kind of hell on earth, as we saw in the 20th century with the Marxism of the USSR and China and Cambodia and so on. So critical race theory is not classic Marxism because it expands the categories of those who are oppressed to sexual minorities and people of color. And we really have Herbert Marcusa, the philosopher of the

new left to thank for that. Because Marcusa and his fellow philosophers in the Frankfurt School realized that Marxist predictions did not come true. Workers around the world did not revolt against the oppressive bourgeois. And so they had to try to figure out a way to make people in basically free countries discontent with the present situation. So they kept the Marxist idea of pitting one group against the other. But now it was more the white male oppressors against everyone else. So it retains two basic features from Marxism. One is this idea of a conflict worldview and conflict according to groups.

So group identification is the most significant thing about you. That is your economic grouping, your racial grouping, your sexual preference grouping. And the second key thing it takes from Marxism is the idea that only the revolutionary vanguard can understand society as it really is. So with Marxism, we have the idea that most people suffer from what they call false consciousness. They don't know how the oppression matrix works. So the Marxists, the ones have been illuminated by the sacred writings of Marx and Engels and so on, can tell us the real problem of society, which is fundamentally economic. Now, with critical race theory, which is sometimes called cultural Marxism or neo-Marxism, there's still that idea that the people who are supposedly

oppressed have a unique and reliable vantage point on what is going on in society. And the oppressors, the ones with white privilege, the white supremacists, really have no voice in the matter at all. And this goes back to Marcuse as well, because I think you know, Eric, he wrote this essay called repressive tolerance. And the idea was, the oppressors should not be given, of voice in the marketplace. They don't deserve free speech. They have to be squashed. They have to be silence. And now we're seeing this today through cancel culture and through the censorship of free speech. So if you hold to this neo-Marxist perspective, you don't believe in the founding ideals of the United States. You don't believe in individual equality before God that should

be recognized by the civil government. You don't believe in the First Amendment, which gives That's the five freedoms, including freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of press assembly, and to petition the government for the redress of wrong. So what I'm trying to argue is that while Christians and everybody should be concerned about a racial justice and a more just society, critical race theory is not the place to go for this at all. In fact, not only is it not the place to go, but it is making the problem worse. I think we have to be clear. When you described it as you did so beautifully,

it sounds like what the Nazis did. In other words, it's unavoidably divisive, number one. It pits one group against the others. It demonizes one group. And of course, that always feels good. If I can blame someone for my suffering, it feels good. But we know that that's a satanic project. We know that the Bible says,

I'm a sinner and I am to blame, and the idea that I could blame someone else, point someplace beside myself. That's instantly not squaring with the biblical view of things. But the idea of demonizing a group and of seeing things along racial lines or tribalist lines is also not biblical. But of course, you see it through history. It's exactly what the Nazis did. And the idea of cancel culture, you were just talking about it, it's the opposite of grace. It says, let's find something that you say, aha, Satan the accuser. Let's find something you said to squash you, to crush you, to demonize you, to make you go away.

Instead of the Christian idea, which would be that we have grace. We all make mistakes. We all say things. Maybe we would want to put it a different way. And we have to have grace for each other because we want people to have grace for us. those ideas don't exist in critical race theory or in cultural Marxism. No, not really because you have this fundamental division between the oppressors and the oppressed. And you add to this the idea of intersectionality.

So there are multiple indicators of oppression. Race would be one. Gender is one. Sexual preference is another. And so people who are, let's say, triply oppressed of being a, say, black woman lesbian has to be favored. and then society as a whole, or at least the oppressors, the white people who were trying to exercise control over everyone, are to blame.

And I like Shelby Steele's approach to this, who's an African-American historian, very articulate man. He says this idea comes out of really white guilt. It's not only the idea of some people wanting to play the victim and to be compensated, but a lot of it comes from this resistance. sense that if you're white, you're somehow responsible for racial inequities, right? And so the governmental program that is used on this mentality is what Shelby Steel calls interventionism. So you can't

really trust African Americans or other people of color to advance themselves if there's a level playing field. That idea is rejected by critical race theory. The state has to intervene in all these various ways. And of course, we've seen this in the Great Society program of Lyndon Baines Johnson, which was not overall good for American blacks. A lot of the statistics for the black community before the Great Society means of the 1960s and 70s were better than afterwards. People like Thomas Sol has documented this, the late Walter Williams and so on. So it pits one group against the other. It makes a victimizer and a victim.

And a lot of it comes out of this sense that there's this residual guilt, this sense that just by being white and especially being male and especially being Christian, you're part of this terrible force in history. So a lot of these folks talk about whiteness. We have to get rid of whiteness. And I want to say, I don't even accept that category. I mean, if you're talking about someone's racial background, fine, but whiteness is not some ontological category of being. We're human beings from different places with different perspectives who are either followers of Christ or not. That is what really matters. And then we need to consider how do we try to make society more fair and where you have opportunities to advance.

But you see the whole critical race theory view, you could call this wokeism, says that they're inequities in society. They're structural. So we have systemic racism. And the only way to solve a structural problem is to really start over again. Hang on a second. We're going to go to a break. Brilliant summation. Dr. Douglas. Groatheises, my guest, don't go away. Tell me, Eric, why is Relief Factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right, designed to heal, and I agree with them. So the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, each helps your body deal with

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Feel the difference. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Dr. Douglas Groatheist, the author of Fire in the Streets, how you can confidently respond to incendiary cultural topics. like critical race theory, cancel culture, the transgender madness. What's interesting to me, Douglas, is that it's all the same stuff repackaged. It's divisive. It is fundamentally anti-biblical in all of its presuppositions and its suggestions for answers.

but many in the church really horrifyingly have embraced this, usually because of what you just described as white guilt. There seems to be this innate sense. I mean, first of all, we are guilty. We know that. We're sinners. But the idea that people are eager, in a sense, to embrace this narrative in the church is astonishing.

and it's more astonishing that Christian leaders are not saying no, this is not the path, that they seem to be, I guess maybe they feel it's just safer to go along with it, which is frightening. Right. Well, I think Christians are very vulnerable to this ideology because Scripture does speak a lot about the marginalized, the poor, the oppressed, the outcast, the widows, and so on. So we need to have a fundamental concern for people on the edges of society. Jesus says, as you've treated the least of these, so too have you treated me. But then the question is, what is the best social policy to try to achieve a fairer, freer, more equitable society?

And there we have to look to biblical principles of morality, civil government. We have to take a look at history, knowledge outside of the Bible. we have to consider things like, is our fundamental system, the American system just or unjust? Now, obviously, it's a mixture because the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution didn't come down from Mount Sinai. But I like what the conservative columnist Ken Hamblin said years ago in a book. He said, find a better country. And what we have to realize about critical race theory, folks, is they think America is originally and systemically racist and has to be torn down. That was the language of so much of the riots of 2020. I've

a quote in my book from Hawk Newsom, who is a member of Black Lives Matter. And he says, if you don't give us what we want, we're going to burn it down. He says, you can take that figuratively, or you can take that literally. Well, we saw in 2020 in the summer what happened. This was extremely serious. I think all of us remember the terror that we felt, the horror. We felt I was in rural Alaska, actually in the summer of 2020, with my wife, Kathleen. And we really wondered if we should go back to Denver. I called up friends, was looking at the news. I think, I was thinking, we're a lot safer in rural Alaska, in Willow, Alaska, on 80 acres that we're going to be in Denver. But we decided to go back. And I'm glad that we did. But that's how concerned we were. We thought maybe you need

to hold up for a couple of years in Willow. And I can teach the grizzly bears, at least they're not Jacobins. They're not crazy. It's amazing. It's amazing how, I mean, look, a lot of people felt that because you're thinking, what is happening? And how is it really that this mob mentality

in America could gain a foothold? And I think it's always lack of leadership. I mean, if you have leaders that say, no, I don't care who you are. You're not burning anything down. You're not tearing anything down. You're not intimidating people. We don't play like that here.

But the leaders, in many cases, are cowardly, not just leaders in the church by allowing this in, but leaders in government unwilling to stand against this, themselves somehow crippled. Well, that's true. And I was appalled in the summer of 2020 that we didn't hear every politician with a podium say, stop this. We don't make things change for the better in America by rioting, by burning things down, by demonizing. the police. We need to make reforms. We need to take all this extremely seriously. But this is not how we do it. And I didn't hear that. You know, maybe a month or two in, Joe Biden said something not to riot, you know, be peaceable. But I do take my head off to the late John Lewis, who is very much a man of the left, he worked with Martin Luther King. But right away, John Lewis came out and said,

this is not how we change things. When I was a part of the civil rights movement, I was linking arms with Martin Luther King, Lewis said. We peacefully demonstrated. We organized. We organized votes and so on. This is how you deal with the problems of race in the United States. It is not by rioting, burning things down, intimidating people. And I quote John Lewis in my book. And he and I would disagree on a lot of political matters. But on this one, he was part of the old civil rights vision, that we want a free and fair society. You remember Martin Luther King and his great speech in Washington said, we're here to make good on a promissory note of America. That is, that all men are created equal and given certain inalienable rights by their creator.

In that speech, King talked about the magnificent documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He wanted to reform the United States on the basis of our founding principles, not tear it all down, or not say because Thomas Jefferson had slaves when he wrote the Declaration. then the declaration is a crock. It's a fraud. It's not. So I think the Constitution really has the declaration has its conscience. And the Constitution had to, really, because of a compromise, allow for slavery. Otherwise, you would have had two nations, a northern nation and a southern nation. But the Constitution does not enshrine slavery or make it a permanent part of the United States. In fact, I want to just speak briefly to this idea of the three-fifths clause. Actually, that, we're going to go to a break.

When we come back, I would be delighted to hear you talk about the three-fifths clause because that has been so twisted and it is very important. People understand that. We'll be right back talking to the author of Fire in the Streets, Douglas Groatheist. We'll be right back. My Pillow is having their biggest sheet sale of the year. You've all helped build my pillow into the amazing company it is today. Now, Mike Lendell, Inventon.

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Order now with promo code Eric at mypillow.com. That's mypillow.com. Promocode, Eric. When you get the blues. We return to our conversation with the author of Fire in the Streets, how you can confidently respond to incendiary cultural topics like critical race theory. Douglas Grote Heist, you were just going to talk about the notorious three-fifths reference in our founding documents. Please talk about that because the misunderstanding on this is grotesque. Yes. Yes, if people are interested, I talk about this on pages 54 and 55 and give all the documentation to it.

But the idea is that the Constitution is intrinsically racist and supports slavery because it only gives African Americans three-fifths representation. So the idea is this is how you're typically greeted with this. The Constitution says that African-Americans are three-fifths human. And recently, Whoopi Goldberg lowered it to one-fourth. that was insightful. But the three-fifths compromise is a compromise between the North and the South, and the North wanted to limit the representational power, the voting power of the South in the new government. So they said, we're only going to allow you, they never use the word slave, never use the word black, never use any word about color or race. But there was a reference to what were the slaves, and they only are allowed three-fifths representation of a person.

person. That was to limit the voting power of the South. I want to be clear that my audience gets this. Folks, do you understand that the racist slave holding South wanted to count their black slaves to give them more power as a state? And so the North said, no, you shouldn't be, they don't get to vote. They don't get to do anything. You shouldn't count them at all. How dare you want to use them who has.

have no voice to give you more political power. And eventually they came up with this ridiculous compromise where they allowed, obviously they were bullied by the southern states, that they had to count as three-fifths, which is an abomination on every level, but in precisely the opposite way that it is typically quoted. Right. It's typically viewed that America was intrinsically racist.

The whole government was racist. and you see it in the Constitution. Well, that just shows, if you believe that, you're an ignoramus about history in the Constitution. In fractions. Yeah, infractions, right. So I read an article years ago that I referenced in Commentary Magazine about this. And so every time since I read that article and figured this out, and I hear the three-fifths idea, I just kind of go bonkers. So I thought, well, I've got to write a book that gives a documentation and gives the lie to this.

The Constitution is sort of like a time bomb ticking to blow up. slavery, and eventually, thank God it did. Well, that's the other thing that we have to be clear about. We abolished slavery in America. We abolish Jim Crow. The 1619 Project and all of these people that accuse America as being intrinsically cursed, racist, broken, that is like saying to a child, you're bad, you'll always be bad. you're just like your mother, you're just like your father, you're effectively cursing them.

And you're saying that no matter what you do, you are cursed, you're bad. It's the opposite of loving someone. When you love someone, you tell them what they got wrong. You hope that they can get it right. And then when they try to get it right or they get it right, you say, add a boy, add a girl, we're making progress, we're not there yet. But you're trying to lead them in the right direction. what the critical race theory and BLM mobs have effectively done is said,

no, there can be no progress, there has been no progress, we curse you, we condemn you always to be the worst that you ever were. You know, you talk about something that is fundamentally unbiblical and unchristian. It is a horrifying thing, and that's exactly what this movement has done. Well, a lot of my book, especially one section in the middle, is a look at American history and our founding principles of civil government. And you have to realize people that are very influenced by critical race theory and Black Lives Matter, think that America has to be fundamentally transformed to harken back to a well-known phrase by Barack Obama,

who really set the stage for a lot of this. I go into that in the book to some extent. But it's not true. We don't need to transform America. We need to transform America. We need to to hold America accountable to its highest ideals. And one thing I'm very concerned about is the fundamental distrust or the fundamental hatred for basic American institutions. I mean, we have a very brilliant form of civil government based on the view that human beings are not perfectable. We're fallen. Therefore, you don't concentrate government in a king or in an autocrat. You have the three branches of government.

they have specific duties. And so what I see with a lot of people on the far left is they'll say, well, if the Supreme Court doesn't give us what we want, then we say it's illegitimate. The whole thing is illegitimate. Why? Because we didn't get what we want. So instead of going by the procedures of the American system, so many people with this revolutionary mentality say, well, it's illegitimate. and we have to tear it down and we have to start over again. And starting over again means statism.

It means socialism. It means the idea that capitalism will support racism. That's what I'm Abraham X. Kendi says. It's ridiculous. I deal without the book. So capitalism will always lead to racism. Socialism may or may not. So let's switch to socialism.

So I don't understand how socialism works, how it takes away freedoms. It regulates the economy in such a way it can ever grow. adequately. And I'm so glad with this book, I finally get to quote Thomas Sol all over the place because I've been reading Thomas Sol, the great economist, for 40 years. I dedicated the book to him. And if you want to know the history and the social science of race and economics in the United States, you have to read Thomas Soul. You typically won't see him in media, but the man is absolutely brilliant about how race and economics works and how socialism is not the answer, how firm action is not the answer. Reparations are not the answer. So I give a lot of attention to those sorts of

things in the book. And I was on another program recently, Janet Partial, who's a great interviewer. She said, Doug, why did you write this book? And I said, I needed more enemies because I deal with some sacred cows. And I say they're really not helpful for America or even for racial minorities. Things like affirmative action, even minimum wage laws, which end up hurting poor people. We have to go to a break here, but that's kind of the point, is that if you care about people of color, if you care about the poor people, you must speak out against socialism and against all this Marxist nonsense because this is harming them, as Thomas Soul has said better than we ever could. We'll be right back. Folks, welcome back. A brand new book just out.

It's called Fire in the Streets, how you can confidently respond to incendiary cultural topics. we're talking to the author Douglas Grote Heiss, who is a professor at Denver Seminary. So that's the question, ultimately, you ask. How do we confidently respond? You've given us a lot of tips, but what else? Right. Well, I think as Christians, we need to pray. We need to rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to exhibit the fruit of the Spirit

and to wisely assess the cultural moment that we face. I think a lot of Christians are very concerned, but they haven't looked into matters adequately, so they end up being vulnerable to critical race theory ideas, because they sound like they would bring about justice, and that they would make America a more fair place. And after all, we are guilty as human beings. We have sinned, certainly. But we need to be clear on what our history is and what a biblical worldview is. And I try to articulate this.

It's really the way to understand civil government are right. So we are special beings in the universe. We're made in God's image and likeness. We're unlike any other beings in the universe. But we're flawed. Therefore, we need redemption. We need Christ as Savior and Lord. But a civil government needs to take into account that you're not going to perfect human beings through civil government.

You're not going to create a utopia on earth. And we have to live within certain limits. But that's no reason for Christians not to be involved. We need to recognize, as Francis Schaefer said so many times, Christ is Lord over all of life. He's Lord over the Church. He's Lord over the state. He's Lord over the arts and everything else. So we want to see the Lordship of Christ applied profitably to our society.

And I think given the extremities that we see, the riots, the incendiary language, we need to continue to have fire in our bones for what's good and what's true. true like Jeremiah had. And not a fire that is reckless or vengeful, but a principled fire of indignation that we need to do a lot better than this in the United States. So we need fire in our bones, a holy fire, and we need love in our hearts too. So we want to love those we disagree with. We don't want to caricature and slander people. I think sometimes a little mockery is appropriate given how insane things have gotten. And you find that in scripture. But we don't want to just have a bigger megaphone and use worse language than everyone else. So we need fire in our bones, love in our hearts, and we need knowledge. We need to have a biblical understanding of civil

government and a biblical understanding of the basic American system. You know, we're at a real crossroads here. Our mutual friend, Oz Guinness, has been writing about this for so long. He's from Britain. I talk about him in the last chapter. And he came to the U.S. 40 years ago, realizing the United States was at a crossroads, that we are the last, you know, the last best hope for the world in many ways. We are exceptional. I don't mean white nationalism or anything like that. What I mean is we are exceptional in terms of our founding, our opportunities, our history. So as Jesus said, to who much is given, much is required. So we need to have that Lordship of Christ center in our thinking, our acting, the fire in our bones, not to give up.

not to just become jaded and cynical, but continue to love, love our neighbor, love our enemy, love and the power of the Holy Spirit, and be knowledgeable. Let's outthink the world for Christ. Let's not just be another noisy, special interest voice out there, but let's try to articulate a wise, reasonable and civil perspective. And of course, we need to add to that, we need leaders to lead and to be clear, these things are not the way to go. These things will not lead us to a more just society. We need to know that. We need to speak it, speak it from the pulpits. Make it clear that we may have the common interest, but these things will not lead to what we all claim to want. Douglas Grote Heiss, God bless you. Congratulations on the brand new book, Fire in the Streets, and thank you for

your time. You're welcome. Thank you. for having me.