The Eric Metaxas Show - Joshua Zeitz

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Joshua Zeitz shows us the progress of President Abraham Lincoln's faith in his new book, "Lincoln's God" -- were Christian values at the heart of his decision to free the slaves?

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. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. It's a nutritious smoothie of creamy, fresh yogurt, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, and a mushy banana. For your mind? Drink it all down. It's nummy. I wub, vanilla. I wub, I wub, vanilla. Here comes Eric Metaxes. Hey, folks, welcome. You know what?

I get to talk to people about really interesting things. For example, right now, I get to talk with the author of a brand new book, which I have read and thoroughly enjoyed. It's titled Lincoln's God, How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation. The author Joshua Zites is with me. right now. Joshua, welcome and congratulations on the book. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. You have a lot to be proud of because this is one of these subjects. There's often a lot of mystery around, you know, where was Lincoln really coming from?

And you lay it out that he begins life as a skeptic for sure and ends life as some kind of Christian believer, the details of the details. But how is it that you came to write on this subject? You know, I've always found Lincoln to be a fascinating and almost singular character in American history. And in many ways, he's seen as being a representative of his era, but was always in many cases an icon class. And so one of the great mysteries about him was how a president who, or a politician who so openly stayed clear of religious revivalism in a period when it marked, you know, the true sensibility of American culture in the 1840s and 50s. How does he become arguably the president who up until then and arguably now most assiduously engaged religious communities, particularly Christian communities from a political standpoint, infused state documents and public speeches with, you know,

the language of the King James Bible and use religion to frame the public issues of the day? How does that happen to somebody who began life as a skeptic? And so that fascinated me. And at the same time, I thought that there was an opening to do a broader book about religion in the Civil War, particularly in the North, and to use Lincoln's personal journey as an organizing thesis that looked at broader themes that touched the nation. And that's what surprised me in reading the book is that the book is a, it's a social history, it's a history. It's not just a biography of Lincoln's journey. it tells the larger story, much of which I'm happy enough to say I didn't know and was very pleased to discover, you know, what was the 19th century like, what role did religion play? And it's kind of funny because when I think of Lincoln's skepticism toward revivalism, it reminds me of people we just mentioned before Mark Twain, who's probably been in this room where we're sitting here doing this conversation, that would have been a lot of.

you know, around 1902, but the skepticism that a thinking person might have toward the kinds of expressions of faith that one finds in the 19th century. Lincoln was counted among those. He was. I mean, and I think backing up, it's important for people to remember that evangelical Protestantism was in many ways the predominant cultural and religious phenomenon of the first half of the 19th century. But I think most people do. But I think most people do. don't know that. And I myself didn't know it to the extent the case you make and make that case now, just because it's important. I think a lot of us have, you know, mostly gaps in our sense of history. And you kind of think of the, you think of George Whitfield, and you think of the first great

awakening. And then what? How did it, how did that work its way through America? Well, just to set the scene, right, between the late 1970s and the 1840s into the 1850s, America, underwent a second great awakening in which a number of denominations, some old, some new, some sort of reinvented, came to displace some of the older denominations, the Episcopalian Church in the south, the Congregationalist Church in the North, and these new churches, the Methodist Church, which grew out of the Wesleyan movement in the Church of England, the Baptist Church, which had certainly been a force in England than in the colonies before, but underwent an intense sort of moment of revivalism and evangelical fervor in the early 19th century, the disciples of

Christ as well as other sects that came and went in a more fleeting fashion, these new denominations and movements came to occupy central place in American culture and life at the same time that America was democratizing and at the same time it was becoming a market economy. And while historians have labored over the years to understand, how these three things relate to each other, the rise of a market economy, the democratization of political and social life in America, and the Second Great Awakening, I think there's broad agreement that they grew up together, that they reinforced each other in the same ways that people started to feel a certain personal agency in their lives as they became more involved

in a market economy, and the same way that they asserted agency in their political lives during the Jacksonian era and came to rebel against elite governance, they also came to believe that that they could shop for their own church, the church that appealed to them the best. And they tended to gravitate to churches that emphasize personal agency as opposed to a more rigid Calvinism of Lincoln's father's era in which people didn't believe that they had that much agency and didn't view themselves as enjoying a relationship with a more personal God. And so these things happen together. But part of, I mean, boy, there's so much here. And again, I hope folks will just read the book. But you have so much going on. When you talk about the free market.

ideas. The idea that, I mean, it's distinctly American, we can go where we want on Sunday. We have religious liberty. We don't have to go to church on Sunday. And if we want to go, we can go where we want, where we like. That is a radical idea in history. You don't have that, you know, in Luther's Germany. No, you also don't have it in, you know, 17th or early 18th century, New England, where the Congregationalist Church was the established church. in the Tidewater regions in Maryland and Virginia, where the established church was the Church of England and other religious movements in churches were or were not suffered. Well, that all changes after the revolution.

Right, which, so it's fascinating. And so on the one hand, so you're saying that people tended to choose, what are we calling it, more evangelical expressions of the faith than the kind of theological, Calvinistic, moralistic churches. I mean, and I would argue part of that is just because the former is more entertaining. There's just something, there's something more inherently attractive about it. It's not just that the theology is more attractive. There's something about the expressions of it that seem, I don't know, freer. There are a couple things, I think, and I wouldn't say moralistic, because there's a deep moral strain that runs through evangelical Protestantism in this period.

But it's not, I think you're probably like referring to the notion that, you know, Puritans were scolds in many ways. But I think it's a couple of things. First of all, the culture of revivalism in the early 19th century, it was effectively a form of popular entertainment in the same way that political rallies were as well. Remember, there's no professional sports, there's no television, there are no movies. I mean, the two things that bring people together and form community and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, and. entertainment and engagement are religion and politics. And a lot of contemporaries in the 1820s and 30s noted a deep similarity between, you know, political rallies in the Jacksonian era and evangelical revivals. And so it's no secret that, I'm sorry, no surprise that somebody like

Peter Cartwright, who was a famous Methodist circuit writer in Illinois and who ran against Lincoln once for the state legislature and once for Congress, you know, that he was both a very successful evangelist and a successful politician. But I think there's also another thing happening. As people get wrapped up in the market economy, as they make the transition from people like Tom Lincoln, Abe Lincoln's father, who existed in a pre-market economy in which, you know, you had a kind of limited scope for success and really, you know, you just didn't have a lot of agency. As people are moving into that sort of market economy, they feel more autonomy, they feel more personal agency. They gravitate to a to a theology that tells you.

tells them that you actually do have choices in life. You have a choice whether you want to be a Christian, whether you want to have a personal relationship with Christ, and whether you want to secure your own salvation, as opposed to this idea that you are or aren't born the elect, and you can't even know it. Yeah, I mean, there's just something, I don't know, depressing and fatalistic about Calvinism taken to that extreme,

and you can see how that, you know, dialectic works its way through. But the idea that suddenly, in the 19th century, century, you have more people turning to those kinds of churches is interesting. There's so much here. We're going to be back plenty more. We're talking to Joshua Zites. The book is Lincoln's God. I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of iconic American brands selling us out to appease radical leftists. But it's not just beer and sneakers. For years, big mobile companies have been dumping millions into leftist causes. and we had to take it because another option didn't exist. Well, now it does.

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that's so interesting about the book and the story is how, you know, one of the shibboleths of our era is that, you know, faith and politics shouldn't mix. We're supposed to, you know, and yet you see, and I have written and spoken about it a lot myself, that when you see a moral issue like slavery come to the four, it's virtually impossible to say that faith in politics can't mix, because you have this issue of this horror of slavery. And that is, it seems to me, the main reason that these two strands that faith in politics became more and more comfortable intermingling. I think that that's true, although we see in the book that the war is really instrumental in breaking down the wall. In the 1840s and 1850s, you know, two things were true at the same time.

Most committed abolitionists and anti-slavery activists came from a strong evangelical faith, and that faith informed their abolitionism or anti-slavery position. But at the same time, most evangelicals did not regard themselves as abolitionists. Now, the churches themselves, however, split the main denominations, the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterians split in the 1840s along sectional lines over the question of slavery. But for the most part, in the 1850s, even abolitionists and anti-slavery activists would have said, you know, our job is to convince individual Christians not to sin by holding slaves. Right.

Our role is not to coerce through politics and to try to legislate it. The war changes that. And during the war, with Lincoln's, you know, having active encouragement, religious and lay leaders in the evangelical churches and and movements become way more comfortable asserting a role for religion in elective politics and in government. And the war changes that. It flips that switch. So it's no longer just that, you know, the role of the religious abolitionist is to try to win a soul and change a sinner and make him, you know, divest himself or herself from the institution of slavery.

But rather it's to say that, you know, we will actively support a movement that not only favors abolition, but that will encourage the use of state force and violence through the military to achieve it. And, of course, the irony, if you were a black person living during that time, you would be earnestly praying that the government would get involved in abolishing something that has turned you into an object, into property. And it's so fascinating to me that you have large swathes of course, Christendom at that time, simply looking at it from their own point of view. Well, that's right. And, you know, that's an important point because most black northerners

were also evangelical Protestants in this period. But before the war, you know, there was a divergence in how white and black congregations, you know, thought about Christian theology, you know, for white audiences in the 1840s and 50s, there was more of a New Testament emphasis, an emphasis on Christian pacifism and love, whereas, you know, black Christians like, you know, Frederick Douglass, who was deeply religious, gravitated to the Old Testament, you know, with its stories of the Exodus and wars in ancient Israel. And there was more of a sort of pessimism and a belief that, you know, that Christians could embrace, you know, force and violence in order to achieve just outcomes and justice.

during the war, you see many white ministers coming to say, like, we're finding renewed, you know, meaning in the Old Testament. And you can, not just can, you can be a Christian and embrace the idea of a liberation war, but to be a good one, you have to. So you see white Christians moving toward where black evangelicals had been before the war, and it happens in both theological and political ways. Right. And I would argue toward a more biblical view. I mean, the idea that we're going to pick one testament over the other. As a Christian, you're really not supposed to be doing that. You're supposed to think of it as one book with all these different things that it's saying. And so it is, it's interesting that it took, as you say, the war itself really to seal that deal. That's right. And you see a coming together of these two strains of evangelical Protestantism.

And it takes somebody like Lincoln, who although a lifelong skeptic had also been a deep reader and student of the Bible from a linguistic standpoint, and his incorporation of the language and themes and tropes of the King James Bible into his speeches after he becomes president in many ways is the kind of the thread that runs through that story where he's able to use a language that people were familiar with and stories and themes and references in order to build support for that war and sustain it. What's in some ways most interesting to me is that he didn't do it cynically. In other words, the standard story would be that Lincoln knew the language. He knew he could use it to political advantage. But at the same time that he's doing that,

he is on his own journey. Tell us about his journey. I mean, let's start with the beginning, right? The beginning. Yeah. So, I mean, Lincoln is raised by parents, his father and mother, and then later father and stepmother. But in Kentucky and Indiana, principally, they moved to Illinois, right as he turned 2021. His parents were anti-mission Baptists. They were so-called Hardshell Baptist, which was a kind of strain of the Baptist Church, which actually stayed clear of the more predominant evangelical strain.

They were more strict Calvinists. They believed in a predestinarian-type theology. He rejected that as a kid. We know this. We know this based on, you know, it's hard to get it in Lincoln's internal life, because we can only do it through three sources, right? We can get it through the things he wrote privately, and there's precious little of that.

We can get it through what people remembered of them, but that, you know, people's memory was both faulty and sort of selective in the years after he died, and then we can get it through contemporaneous sources. But we have enough to let us know that he was, you know, he rejected his parents, Calvinist faith, as well as their entire lifestyle. And from the minute he left home at 21.

He really never looked back, and that includes religion. And he was an active scoffer in the 1830s in New Salem where he was a bit too loose-lipped about his. It might have been deism, but it was more likely just atheism or agnosticism. But so much so to the point that when he first ran for the state legislature, his friends had to encourage him to tamper down his sort of open, you know, open disdain for dismissal of religion. And it became an issue when he ran against Peter Cartwright for Congress in 1846. So he gets a lot quieter in the 1840s and 1850s. But what's singular is that, you know, as abolitionism and anti-slavery politics rise to a fever pitch in the 1850s,

and you see many prominent anti-slavery politicians like Joshua Giddings, you know, really speaking about slavery and religious terms, for Lincoln, it's always a very secular and economic argument about, you know, freedom and the freedom to earn the bread that you've, you know, you do to enjoy the bread that you earn with your own hands. But there's no religious imperative behind it. And as late as 1858, according to a friend in Springfield, the local Presbyterian minister with whom he and Mary were very friendly tried to convert him and couldn't do it. So he almost certainly leaves for Washington in 1860s, still a non-believer, but then something changes in 1861, 1862. And one of those things, of course, is the death of his son while he's in the White House. Willie. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, Willie has,

One of his sons, Willie, died in early 1862 of typhoid while they're living in the White House. And this had a profound impact on both Lincoln's. And I think it's important to note that, you know, while we can never quite prove this, because, again, he didn't leave much in the way of personal or internal thoughts on paper, you know, this is a moment when he's presiding over this carnival of death, and he's coming to view himself as responsible for this butcher's bill that the nation's being asked pay. 750,000 men are going to die in this war, North and South. I always hear 600, so I'm surprised when you said 750,000 that struck me as a new number. I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah, the

estimates have changed over the last few years based on just census data and forensics, so the thinking is it was probably more than we always used to. I think the standard number when I was in grad school was 620, but I think it's 750,000-ish now. But this is happening. He feels his own weight and responsibility for it, and in some ways, you know, Willie being taken from him is the personal cross he has to bear in this war. And, you know, Mary would later say that by the time Lincoln went to Gettysburg to deliver the address in late 1863, he was feeling more religious than ever. But it's very clear that something between Willie's death and Gettysburg, that this becomes a more predominant strain in his personal belief system. And we know this because in 1862, he

actually did write a rare memorandum on religion that was not meant for public consumption. That's one of the strangest things. I mean, I've read that a number of times, and I think who sits down and writes something like that? You know, maybe that just was the way he, it helped him to think by putting it in on paper. I think that's right. It was almost, I mean, he didn't keep a diary, but it was almost like an isolated diary entry. And for the listeners, what this was, was a very brief paragraph he wrote about sort of divine, will and religion and human agency with respect to divine will. And, you know, he didn't write this for anybody else.

Nobody knew it existed until his two White House aides found it after his death years later. So it's hard to imagine that he wrote it in any way other than deep sincerity. Going to a break, we'll be right back with the author of Lincoln's God. We shall offer our tribute of his love. Are you tired of not getting a good night's sleep? Well, my friend Mike Lundell has created the perfect solution. He didn't just stop at the pillow. He also created the Giza Dream Bed Sheets, made from the world's best cotton called Giza.

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Talking to the author of Lincoln's God, brand new book by Joshua Zights, it's fascinating to me when we're talking about, you know, someone's faith and trying to figure out whether they're a believer or not a believer or, you know, and this goes on with so many figures in history. But when you're dealing with Lincoln, it seems impossible. at the end of his life to think that he was anything but a believer. Now, when we say believer, it depends specific, you know, because there's always somebody that's going to say, well, he didn't believe in this and he believed in that.

Well, the fact of the matter is that, you know, his second inaugural is just dripping with religious phrasing and thought. It's actually really bold of him as the president of the United States to write an inaugural address that sounds like a sermon. Yeah, I mean, Frederick Douglass said of the second inaugural that it sounds like a sermon. Yeah, I mean, Frederick Douglass said of the second inaugural that it sounds more like a sermon than a state paper. And this was certainly not. It might be the most pronounced example of Lincoln weaving religious imagery and language into his speeches, but it's not by any means the only. When we think about the Gettysburg Address, when he talks about a new birth of freedom, well, as historians have rightly noted, that was the moment when he really signaled that the war was changing from a war for union to a war to have. abolished slavery, but for millions of Americans, particularly Methodists at that point, the idea of a new birth, of a rebirth, of a regeneration would have been instantly recognizable. And I think

for Lincoln, it was a knowing reference. And we see this in other of his speeches. Now, from a stylistic standpoint, what's so interesting is that the two things he liked reading the most, even before he became religious, were the King James Bible and Shakespeare. And they both sound the same because the King James Bible, the version of it he was reading or that Americans were reading at the time was written during the Elizabethan period. So all of the sort of the, you know, the words that end in TH and the constructions and the verbal, you know, the grammatical constructions, they sound the same kind of melodic way. But he knowingly weave these themes in. And I think to your point, it's hard, it's hard to conceive that this, it was certainly a knowing thing. And he

openly courted the churches and the pastors in order to build support for the war. But he also, on a fundamental level became a believer. But what's interesting about him is that his brand of faith, the one he develops, is really divergent from the brand of faith that most evangelical Protestants, who were the majority of Americans in the North, shared. And, you know, at the same time that he appealed to them in their language, he was moving in a different direction religiously. Yeah, I mean, and that's what's so tricky about when you're trying to, you know, parse, I guess, someone's faith. You know, what does anyone mean by? that. What does anyone mean by Christian faith, evangelical Christian faith, personal God versus,

you know, you make the point that he still had this, you know, hearkening a little bit back to his hard shell parentage, this kind of slightly fatalistic sense of providence, which is, I mean, it's at least interesting that he's incorporating both strands into his, what, becomes his faith. What's so interesting about this is that so for Lincoln, I mean, and we know this from the things he wrote privately and the things he said publicly, he comes to believe that there is a sort of unknowable God, a providence, a force that, you know, a force, right? Whether he's a Trinitarian, Christian is another question entirely. And not a small question for most Christians. My guess would be no, but he certainly never

indicated yes or no. And by then was smart enough not to wait in on something like that. But I think for him, he comes to believe during the war that God has willed this war, that it's a war that is intended to be punishment to North and South for the sin of slavery in which the North was complicit. But Lincoln believes, and Lincoln comes to believe that he's God's instrument, which is a kind of eerie notion for a president to have, because it can lead to some dark places, in his case probably did not. But comes to believe that, you know, he's been put here on earth because God wants him to, oversee, you know, wants him to fight this war until its very end. But unlike most evangelical Christians, both lay and religious leaders and just individual Christians, he doesn't necessarily know that God

wants the North to win this war. Most evangelical Christians believe they have a personal relationship with Christ that their God is more knowable and immediate, and that, you know, the religious leaders during the war come to believe that God's on the union side and the unions on God's side, and they're going to win this because it's what God wants, but Lincoln is never sure of that. Well, I mean, there's a lot in what you just said. First of all, you know, the idea that you're an instrument in God's hands, we're, I would say, lately in our own lifetimes, always led to say, ooh, be careful, you know, because you'll become, I don't know, a cult leader or a monster or a demagogue of some kind. But obviously, in the case of a Lincoln, in the case of a Moses,

is you, what it ought to do if you actually feel that you're being used by God is it drives you to this almost unbearable humility because you know I am not worthy of this, I'm not capable of this. So in a sense, you surrender to God. And that's what I see with Lincoln, that he's a little bit awed by it, but he doesn't feel like it's escapable. No, he doesn't. And in some ways, though, it can express itself in another way, like John Hay, one of his two, Chief White House aides would later talk about Lincoln's sort of detached sense of of inner calm. And we know that, you know, in key moments of the war, I mean, he was as distraught

as others at union setbacks. But, you know, you saw politicians like William Seward or Salman P. Chase, and you saw military generals veer left and right on, they'd, with every setback, want to move the strategy, whereas he just sort of kept his eye forward. And, you know, this is speculation, but I, you know, writing about this the way I have, I found it hard to believe that that belief that there's a sort of providential role for him doesn't keep him at least steady in any moment when other people buckle. No, and I would say that's one of the marks of true faith, and it's interesting that you comment on that.

We'll be right back talking to the author of Lincoln's God. Joshua Zyte is my guest. Hey, get rhythm. When you get the blues, come on. Get rhythm. When you get the blues, get a rock and roll feeling in your bones, but taps on your toes and get gone. Get rhythm. Welcome back talking to the author of Lincoln's God, how faith transformed a president and a nation.

So Joshua Zites, when you talk about Lincoln in a way, he's kind of the culmination of this trend. in America toward evangelicalism. There's something uniquely American, it seems to me, about the faith and the whole story. I mean, it's not just literally an American story, but there's something distinctly American about all the elements of it. Do you, what do you think happen? And this is speculation because I don't think you mentioned in the book, but what happens after Lincoln? It's just fascinating to me how he kind of breaks the mold.

He changes everything in America. And Americans become more comfortable with these kinds of expressions of faith, which has carried on, you know, into the present, mixing faith in politics, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. How do you see, what do you see the influence of Lincoln's faith beyond Lincoln? I think it's Lincoln's faith and it's the experience of the war and they're hard to separate. You know, the churches during the war became, well, first they became, you know, really adjuncts of the state, you know, the churches, the evangelical churches raised, you know,

money for the war. They staffed, you know, chaplains in regiments. They raised regiments themselves from their churches. They, you know, they raised consciousness for the war effort and support for it. And then they became effectively, you know, a sturdy brick in the Republican Party coalition by 1864, where they came to believe that you couldn't be a good Christian and be a Democrat at that point. Right. Which, of course, didn't become true until just a couple of years. ago. We're just kidding. Maybe. No, it's so fascinating because that phrase gets thrown around in present tense so often what does it mean? Where, what is that line in politics and in faith? Where does that go? And it's so interesting because when you're dealing with the slavery issue,

I just want to say there's nothing more clear to us today that that was a horror, a moral horror. So it's hard for us today to blame someone for making it a moral and a political crusade. Sure. But it took time to get there. It took time to get there. But by the end of the war, I think the church leaders and individual Christians felt that fighting that war and supporting the government have been an expression of Christian faith. A ordinary union soldier, Elijah Hunt Rhodes, who's featured pretty prominently in the old Ken Burns Civil War, a mini-serie, you know, a documentary says toward the end of his diary, and I'm paraphrasing, but I'm pretty close, you know, I'm glad that I had an opportunity to serve my country and

my God and free the slaves. They were all the same for him by the end. But what happened, and then you have a president like Lincoln who validates religion and public life during the war rhetorically and through other actions. So what does that do after the war? I think it creates a feeling among the key Christian churches and key Christian leaders that there's a place for them actively. in politics that while yes, part of their role is to save souls and fill pews,

it's also to assert a more muscular form of Christianity in the political sphere. And in the late 19th century, that could express itself in ways that were kind of, I guess you would call it conservative and coercive today, so anti-vice crusaders like Anthony Comstock or Francis Willard. But on the other side of that, there were also social gospel leaders like Washington Gladden in the late 19th century who believed that to be a good Christian, you had to participate in politics because there was a whole raft of social reform movements from, you know, labor reforms to protection for women and children that needed state sanction and that Christians had to

involve themselves in that process. So it breaks the dam and creates a precedent for Christians engaging in politics as Christians. Well, and of course it can go, you know, it cuts, it goes on both sides of the aisle, depending on what issue we're talking about, depending on what decade we're talking about, but it's obvious that the, you know, the civil rights movement came out of the churches. There's no doubt about it, but it's also political movement. There's just, there's no, there's really no escaping that. And I think maybe what happens, the story that you tell is that this, this breaks that idea down, that you can't really, you can't have cleanly divided lanes, basically, when you're dealing with some of these issues. If you're dealing with,

you know, who is a human being, what does it mean to be equal? That those are things that are, you know, on the one hand, moral, ethical issues. And on the other hand, politics gets involved. Laws can get involved. Sometimes have to get involved. I mean, you know, to your point about civil rights, of course we know that the black churches were instrumental in the modern civil rights movement. But even, you know, in 1963, Joseph Raoul, the famous labor activist who was on the Capitol lobbying for the Civil Rights Act, noted that you couldn't turn anywhere in the Capitol corridors without running into someone with a collar. And that could be a white person or a black person because the churches were deeply involved in lobbying on behalf of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But, you know, one of the things I try to do in the book is show not only do, not only do Christians become more comfortable bringing their religion into the political sphere, but, you know, the secular events also change the churches and changed theology during the Civil War as well. So it's a dialectic. I think, you know, more secular readers will be surprised that religion was such a force for people in the way that they acted as soldiers and as citizens in the 1860s. But I think more religious people might also be surprised by the way in which the churches are impacted by their particular. in politics, which is certainly something we see today. Right.

Well, and again, it can go both ways. We know how it can go wrong. I would say it can also go right, because sometimes pretending that you can be, you can keep faith divorced from politics or politics divorce. I wrote a biography of Dietrich Bonhofer, this German pastor who was desperately trying to get the church involved in speaking up for the Jews. and they, most of them in Germany, said, well, that's not our lane. We are, you know, quoting Romans 13 from the New Testament.

We're not allowed to be political. We're not allowed to stand against the way. And he's saying, no, on the contrary, this is your moral obligation to God to speak up. So this goes back and forth and back and forth. And of course, we are, we're arguing about these things right now. Do we have time for one more segment? We've got to, because I want to keep talking about this. It's just so much in the book, Lincoln's God.

Joshua Zites, I want to just congratulate you because you've really, you've done more than talk about Lincoln. You talk about the whole of the 19th century and the history of these things. So if we have another segment, we'll continue to explore that. Again, the book is Lincoln's God, how faith transformed a president and a nation. Hope you're enjoying the show. show three quick announcements before we move on. Number one, the study guide is available for my book, letter to the American church. A lot of people have been saying, we want to study guide because we want to do this. We want to study the book in our home group or whatever. I'm thrilled to hear

that because this is about changing America. This is about saving America. This is about the church stepping up and doing the right thing precisely in the way that the German. Church did not step up and do the right thing in the 30s as Hitler rose to power. Nobody saw what was coming. They looked the other way. And by the time it happened, it was too late. The reason I believe God called me to write letter to the American Church is to avert that nightmare, which absolutely is happening and will happen unless the American Church stands up. So the book is letter to the American Church. The study guide is now available. You can get it either at Amazon or at Socrates. in the city.com if you prefer to get it there. So I want to mention that letter to the American

Church. The study guide is now available. Okay. I also want to mention we are thrilled to say that there's a film out now. I have seen the film. Okay. I don't get to watch every film that we talk about on this program. I've seen every minute of the film. It's called the real Anthony Fauci. It's made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His, I mean, well, you know he wrote a book called Real Anthony Fauci. He exposes the nightmare, okay, at the heart of what Fauci did. Because, you know, you hear a lot of information. But if you're not on top of this, you're kind of wondering what's true, what's not true. His book is the real Anthony Fauci. The film is available for free, for a short time. So this is why I'm, I sound urgent. You have to go to the real Anthony Fauci movie.com to see it for free.

I'm telling you I've seen it. And I think if you see it, it will change what you know about what has happened in this country. And you can share it with anybody. You can tell it, tell everyone you know, it's free, okay? The real Anthony Fauci movie.com. The real Anthony Fauci movie.com. The real Anthony Faucimovie.com. It is free. When I'm talking about it, I guess some of you understand that what he does brilliantly in the book and in this film is he exposes the connection between the NIH, okay, Francis Collins. I had him speak at Socrates and the city number of years ago. This is, you know, outspoken evangelical Christian. He and others bowed the knee to the Chinese protocols to Big Pharma. It is a nightmare. happened. But you need to know what happened because it affected all of us. So, you know,

Bill Gates obviously involved. The amount of money involved is just horrific. And Anthony Fauci's at the center of this. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, they're involved. So go to the real Anthony Fauci movie.com. The real Anthony Fauci movie.com. And before we go, let me remind you, if you have not yet participated in our campaign to free slaves in the Sudan. Christian Solidarity International is doing God's work, but they need your help. Every $250, you don't have to give that. You can give 10 times that, or you can give 100 times that. You can give 100th of that.

Whatever you give will help free a slave. But $250 is the magic number to free a slave and set that person up in a life of freedom. You have to go to metaxis talk.com. You have to click on the banner. Whatever you are able to do, I want to say, God bless you. This is a really urgent call. These are real people genuinely enslaved in horrible, horrible conditions. You can also call 888-253-3522, 888-253-3522,

888 253 3522 or again go to metaxis talk.com. The banner is at the very top. We really do need your help. God bless you.