The Eric Metaxas Show - Justin Brierley (continued)

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

We continue this conversation with Justin Brierley about his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God

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Folks, welcome back. I continue my conversation with the aforementioned Justin Breyerly, who has written a book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and he does a podcast called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. You were talking a moment ago about Russell Brand, Bear Grills. Now, Bear Grills has been a public Christian. for quite some time. I didn't know. I don't know who.

You always wonder who is in the life of somebody like a Russell Brand who is helping him move along. But what we were talking about earlier is the idea that a really atheistic world view is intellectually bankrupt. I mean, I have said very boldly in a way that I never had in my life before that. Look, you cannot be an atheist. You can say, I'm an ignorant. You can say I have questions. You can say the things about God that enrage me, the things about the Bible that enrage me, the things about Christians that enrage me. Good for you. They enrage me as well. But I don't know how you can say it would it's like saying science is stupid. I think science is dumb. I don't do science. You can't really. That's just silly. You can't do that. And that's I feel that that's where we are. And you said this earlier that the new atheist movement in a way. cleared the decks. It's like, okay, all right.

So what, I think what we're discovering and what the new atheists have discovered is that people are inherently religious. You can kind of take away the Christian story, but it will be replaced by some other story. And that's what we're seeing in our culture, I think, you know, and whether it's, you know, sort of identity politics and, you know, sexuality, gender or whatever, people will make something sacred in their life. And this is what has come back to bite the new atheist, actually. This is why Richard Dawkins, of all people, was stripped of his Humanist of the Year award in 2021, because he as a scientist started to, you know, critique transgender ideology. And suddenly he found his secular peers came back to, you know,

there was a big backlash to him. So I think he himself has realized that certain things get treated religiously. And you can't sort of, and the question is, are some religions better than others? Now, this brings us to Ayan Hesiali, who is a fascinating example of, I think, this thesis in my book, the surprising rebirth of belief in God, sort of coming true in real time, because Ayn Hesiali would have been really at one time the best known female atheist in the world. She was a Somali-born Muslim at one time, but came out of fundamentalist Islam, became a very sort of outspoken atheist based in the Netherlands, became very much part of the new atheist speaking circuit, speaking on state. alongside Sam Harris and Dawkins and Dennett and so on, and wrote this best-selling book, Infidel, you know,

all about the evils of religion and why we need to leave it behind. And then, out of the blue, in November last year, she writes this viral article, Why I Am Now a Christian. And it was so interesting to see the reasons she gave, almost exactly are the reasons that I set out in the book, why the new atheism, the atheist movement has failed. It cannot give us meaning. purpose, identity. It cannot provide a bullock against the big threats. She obviously talks about

things like the progressive left. She talks about Putin, China, some of these hegemonic powers and so on. She says, and she's very much a convert to the Tom Holland thesis. That, I think, was what brought her across the line to say, we need the Judeo-Christian story. That's the only thing, actually, that has ever secured these rights and values that we cherish in the West. So a lot of people said, oh, this is just a sort of political, cultural conversion. But actually, she also talked about her own meaning crisis. She said, I realized that I needed something to believe in. And atheism didn't provide that.

And she went on to give a very moving interview with Unheard about that personal story. She said she had reached Rock Bottom. She was depressed. She was alcoholic. She was suicidal. And her therapist said, well, have, I think you're spiritually bankrupt, I am. And Ian said to her therapist, well, I can't believe in God. The God I was raised with was a monster.

And her therapist said, well, what kind of a God could you believe in? And so Ian started to describe the hypothetical God she might be willing to believe in. And she said, as I was describing that God, I realized I was describing Jesus Christ. And she said, well, I might as well try Jesus rather than invent a new God. And so she did. She started going to church with her husband, Neil Ferguson. And she says it has changed her life. she now described herself as a Christian.

Now I can't judge exactly where I and Hershey is in her journey. But all I know is when someone like Ian Hershey has that kind of road to Damascus kind of turned around, something interesting is happening in the culture. Something is definitely stirring. And I just find that an absolutely fascinating aspect of this whole story that even Adorkins, who was on stage at the time of recording just a couple of weeks ago with Herseali, engaging with a story, I think he's starting to reconsider

whether he too hastily dismissed Christianity. I think even in recent weeks, he's talked about the cultural value of Christianity, even if he doesn't believe it. So it's interesting just to see the way that the tune has changed so significantly even in the last year or two. It's interesting.

In my book, is Aeviism Dead. I deal with Dawkins very, very briefly, but I do mention one of the things where he ties himself and knots and ends up just sounding preposterous is when he praises, first of all, he says, you know, A, period, we can only know anything via science, he says this, then B, how wonderful Christopher Wren's architecture is, how wonderful the plays of Shakespeare are, how moving, I don't know if it's Mozart or Beethoven, he, you know, and I thought to myself, you've just

contradicted yourself. You make no sense. The music of any of these geniuses is just frequencies according to your materialist thesis. So when you say you're moved by it, what do you mean by that? You're pointing towards something beyond the material, but you yourself haven't made that connection. You're not logically consistent at all. But it is interesting to me that he, so he does come out praising the beauty of this and that and the other thing. And you say, okay, if you understand that this is not meaningless, you're on your way to the truth, whether you like it or don't. There's just no way around it that if you can say there is something called beauty, that it speaks

to me, it's not nonsense. It's not meaningless. Clearly, you're moving beyond the material. Yeah. I'd agree absolutely. And I think Scientism, which is essentially what Dawkins has subscribed to, is a kind of self-refuting, self-defeating kind of thing

because it's such a narrow set of ways of understanding the world. And the realities, there are all kinds of things we know and understand in the world that do not succumb to a purely scientific analysis. And you've just mentioned several of them. Art, architecture, music, literature. You know, all of these have to be understood, and in a way which obviously goes beyond just, you know, the firing of chemicals or logic. So absolutely, I think, and I think that's where people like Ian Herscheli have actually realized.

They've realized I hemmed myself in to a belief system that was just so poor at actually explaining the world and doing what we need to do. I mean, even Dawkins' sort of criticisms of Christianity and especially the Old Testament, you know, in his God delusion, he has that famous long line about this sort of barbaric, evil, malevolent, and pestilential bully of the Old Testament. And it was so fascinating because one of the people I brought on for this podcast documentary series, not a well-known name, but a lady called Jenny, who came from communist China, and she has recently converted to Christianity. She's been living in the UK for the last couple of decades. And the reason she converted was she saw how different the UK was to her communist China. And she wondered, what makes the people here believe in charity in helping the vulnerable?

Why in China where I've come from is everything oiled by money and power? And she realized that it was because of the Christian heritage. So this got her interested and she eventually came to believe. And she said she started listening to some of these debates with Dawkins. And she heard him railing against the Old Testament, against this sort of God he didn't believe in. And she said, Richard Dawkins would never have been able to make this argument in the China I came from. There, the idea of a bully who kind of wiped people out is absolutely taken for granted. Power is absolutely something.

She said, he's a very Christian atheist, she said. He absolutely makes his arguments against God from a Christian standpoint. And I found that fascinating. It is fascinating. We'll be right back talking to Justin Breyerley. Remember as a kid, your parents and grandparents making you try all the vegetables on your plate or when they coax you to eat fruit instead of sweets? That's because they knew what was good for you.

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Welcome back talking to Justin Breyerle, who has written a book called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, and who does a podcast called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief. in God. Well, let's keep going. This is a, it's all very exciting, Justin, and I want to ask you more about what you are seeing and what is in your book, because I hope people will get your book the surprising rebirth of belief in God. What else do you see? I mean, I want to say also that my friend Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute wrote a book called The Return of the God hypothesis. To some extent my book is an atheist and dead. It's a similar thing. And,

And here you are writing the surprising rebirth of belief in God. It seems that lots of people are noticing this, that even if you are hostile to the idea of God, the evidence is weighing rather strongly against that thesis. Absolutely. And funnily enough, I've just done a couple of interviews with Stephen Meyer for the new podcast documentary series. We're currently in a section of this documentary looking at science and just the way in which absolutely in so many areas, the story has changed dramatically in the last few decades to show that we live in a cosmos that is teeming with purpose and meaning

and that many secular scientists are saying must have some kind of a mind behind it. So I think that's just, there's a whole chapter in the book dedicated just to the kind of the revolution in science where I see a surprising rebirth of belief in God. But indeed, you know, history, the way in which Tom Holland has really helped us to see the way in which the Christian revolution shaped us, even places like philosophy of mind, consciousness,

I touch on in the book as well, I think we're seeing a real pushback against the kind of materialist, scientific view that was championed by people like Daniel Dernet, who only passed away recently. But we're seeing a lot of people, not necessarily theists or Christians, but who are realizing that there's something more.

So I think the rise of panpsychism, for instance, which is an interesting sort of view that there's, that consciousness is fundamental in the universe. is just an example of the way that the pendulum has swung away from this hard, materialist reductive thing. Now, that doesn't mean that they've necessarily arrived at the correct conclusion, but it's all signs for me that there are large changes at foot in academia, and these are trickling down in all kinds of ways into the way people think about these issues.

I mean, the other thing that I really focus on in the book, apart from these cultural changes in the conversation around God, is the fact that I'm meeting so many surprising converts, adult thinking, intelligent people who you would not expect to become Christians and yet have become Christians against all the odds. One of the people I profile in the book is a celebrated author and poet here in the UK, Paul Kingsnorth, who went from being a sort of phrase of teenage atheism to being a sort of environmental activist. He was a Buddhist for many years.

But he always loved nature. He absolutely adored being out in the woods. And he says he had an instinct to worship something. and he didn't find that ultimately in his Buddhism. He became a wikken for several years. He went and tried a wikin, you know, doing the kind of the pagan wican thing, worshipping nature in the woods,

but eventually realized it was basically a pastiche of a number of things. And to his great surprise, he found himself being dragged, he says, out of wicker into Christianity. A number of unusual circumstances. His wife, who, again, was not a Christian, but just set out one day out of the blue over day, dinner, you're going to become a Christian. And he said, what are you talking about?

And then suddenly he had people writing to him. Vickers, he didn't realize, were fans of his writing. He had dreams where he was dreaming about Jesus. And eventually he became a Christian. And again, he himself was the most surprised person of all. So it's so interesting when you hear these stories of personalities like Paul Kingsnorth, who find to their great surprise that the story they had dismissed, you know, as a sort of childish fairy tales, turns out to be.

the story that makes sense of everything. And I'm just seeing more and more of those examples of people who find themselves incredibly surprised that the Christian story makes sense. And I think as that culture changes, more and more people are going to find the doors open, both intellectually, emotionally, spiritually to this conclusion. Now, I'm not saying this is going to result in some great revival. I don't want to overreg this. But I do feel like we're on something's changing.

And I'm very encouraged by some of these stories of people who, who have crossed the line. I actually do think it's going to lead to revival. And it's fascinating how these things work, how these trends work. But I really do think that, you know, to be an intellectually satisfied atheist has become, frankly, impossible. You have to, if you're honest, if you're willing to be honest, which many people are not, but if you're willing to be honest, you realize it can't be this.

somehow saying that there is no God has become genuinely preposterous. We have to be honest. It's preposterous. It's not just, well, the evidence is weighing against it. It's been, you know, weight in the balance and found wanting would be putting it mildly and kindly. It's like saying, let's discuss whether the earth is flat. Let's discuss it. There are different points of view.

And most people would say, I won't discuss it. That's ridiculous. if you want to talk about whether the Earth is an oblate spheroid or you want to, you talk about anything, but I will not really genuinely discuss whether the Earth is flat, because that is over, that conversation is over. We can talk about anything. We can talk about whether the moon landings were faked. We can talk about anything, but the idea that the Earth is flat, it's been settled.

I really believe for anyone who's intellectually honest, whether there is a God, that's been settled. If you want to talk about the nature of God, you want to talk about it's God. You want to talk about it's got a personal God. You want to talk about problems with the body. You can talk about that. But whether there is a God, I think honestly, that's been settled. And so the ground is shifted. I think that's what you write about in your book.

And we don't know where it's leading. But to me, it's hopeful. It is hopeful. And I'm very optimistic because I do believe, as a G.K. Chesterston said in a god, you know, well, the quote that I use in the book is he said there's Christianity has had many deaths and rebirths over time. And it has always come back to life because it has a God who knew his way out of the grave. And I believe that.

I believe that we have a God who is not done with the church. You know, lots of people look at the UK church and think, is there any hope? But actually, I believe in a God who brings dead things back to life. So I actually think this could be the start of something really interesting. Many of these secular intellectuals who find themselves very attracted to faith, people like Douglas Murray and Tom Holland, have said, you know what, I would go back to church. But sometimes I find the church so looks so much like the culture. I think what's the point? And they're actually looking for something distinctive.

They want, you know, one of the phrases that has come around time and again when I speak to these folk is keep Christianity weird. Don't dumb it down. Don't dilute it. Don't just become so insipid that you blend in. They're looking for mystery. They're looking for awe. They're looking for the miraculous. And I think that's a challenge to us as the church to kind of, you know, keep salty.

make sure that we stand out from the culture. And because actually the culture is what's, you know, that's the last thing people need is just more of what they can already get in the culture we've currently got. So I am like you, optimistic that something's happening and the church needs to learn the lessons here, okay? Don't answer yesterday's questions of the new atheists.

Look to some of those people who are making waves, the Jordan Peterson's. There's a reason why they're attracting people and that they're asking those kinds of questions. They don't necessarily have all the right answers. We believe that the Christian story is the ultimate answer. And we have an amazing story. Let's be encouraged to tell it again boldly and confidently.

I think really that anywhere one looks, one finds evidence for God. I think sometimes people dismiss the miraculous as though, well, that's not scientific evidence. And I think, on the contrary, if you have a series of anecdotes, If people tell you, this happened to me, this happened to me, this happened to me, this happened to me, in a court of law, that tends to mean something. It's not, you know, you can't prove the resurrection, quote unquote, scientifically. But if everyone comes to you and swears in an affidavit, this is what I saw, this is what happened, whatever, you have to put it together. And you've got to deal with it. And so the scientific view, it's not willing to deal with that kind of evidence.

But that is on any human level in any society that is considered evidence. What you do with that evidence, you know, what the jury decides. That's another story. But there, I was having a conversation to Socrates and the city conversation with David Berlinsky, who styles himself a secular agnostic. And, you know, he's written enough that I feel like he's being coy. I think to myself, I don't know how you can. write what you write and see what you see without being forced to acknowledge probably there's a

God. I don't know, you know, whatever. But he, he was very dismissive when I said, have you, have you never experienced? I mean, this was in my conversation with him about a year ago at Socrates and City, but I asked about, you know, have you, have you never had any miraculous experience or don't know anybody? Because almost everyone has. And he seemed to be like offended by the question. but I thought this is a kind of evidence. And I think that there are people listening right now that they think, yeah, I had a weird thing happen. Yep. I had a weird thing.

Yes. Yeah. You know, that's part of it. We've run out of time. We have to have you back because this is a very important conversation. Justin Brerley, how can people find you? Well, you could go to my website, justinbriley.com. You can find links there to the book, the surprising.

rebirth of belief in God. Also links there to the podcast of the same name. And if you just like listening to podcast, just search up the surprising rebirth of belief in God and you'll find it there. But yeah, it's been a tremendous journey, Eric. I feel like God's given me a sort of a little glimpse of what might be happening. And he gave me the grace to be able to write about it just as this wave was happening. And yeah, I just feel like there's a movement here. And we're perhaps only seeing the very beginnings of it. No doubt. Thank you for being my guest. We'll have you back as soon as possible. For 10 years, Patriot Mobile has been America's only Christian conservative wireless provider.

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Use the code Eric for 15% off. Folks, right now I'm talking to our friend Todd Chapman of CSI, Christian Solidarity International. We are literally freeing slaves in Sudan. We need you to help us do that. That's why we are partnering with CSI this month to free slaves in Sudan, where slavery is still a thing. Folks, think about that for a second. Think about that. that that's real. Todd, you were talking in the past about how the UN and folks stepped in the

90s and abolished the ability of these Sudanese to take slaves, to take war slaves, war captives, but they were not required to give up the slaves they had already taken. So right now, as we have this conversation, there are innumerable enslaved people, in Sudan, we have the ability through CSI to find them, to free them, to set them up in a life of freedom. So this is a big deal. I want my audience to be all in on this. I want to tell you out of the box, folks, you go to metaxis talk.com. You'll see the banner at the top of the page. But it's an amazing thing to me, Todd. You said that every $250 frees a slave and sets them up in a life of slavery. And you talked about the kids. This is what I can't take it. These are mothers that are enslaved. Their children

are enslaved. So we can free them as well. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because if you do the math, many of the slaves that are still in captivity today were taken captive. You know, they were enslaved back in the 80s and 90s. And so many of them have had children who have grown up in slavery. And now those women are having kids as well. And one of the things that we've been trying for many years to be able to to accomplish and we haven't had any success until recently. And we're really excited about this is begin to free children, present day children, along with their mother when we negotiate. And these slave owners, they were really reticent to do that for the longest time. You know, I mean, again, they're like, well, I'll give you this slave in exchange for this cattle vaccine.

By the way, that's what we barter for. We never give them cash. But it's also, it's always a cattle vaccine that they need because these are, these are, are largely cattle ranchers, but they would never let us take their children until the last year or so we've been able to negotiate and say, look, we want the child to come with the mother, and they've been open to doing that. So that's a big praise God, first of all. And I was just reading stories.

Several women and their kids were liberated during our November slave liberation. And you're talking kids, you know, two, three years old. And they didn't have to be taken away from their mom. And you can imagine a mom. so she is liberated, but she can't take her child. We've had them say, no, I'm not going to go because I can't leave my child. And so the ability to free that baby along with her mom, Eric, E, E, Ricky, we even had some pregnant women make the long three, four, five day march into South Sudan while they were eight months pregnant. And then they gave birth to their baby in freedom.

And we just love that. It's just another layer of God working through you to provide freedom for even more people. So look, if you can't get excited enough about freeing one slave, I hope you can get excited about freeing a slave and her baby and making sure that they both can live their lives in freedom and be reunited with their family because that's what you're doing with every $250 that you give during this campaign. I said it a few minutes ago and you said it that people can give monthly. So $250 is the magic number. We hope that everyone will want to do that. We hope that people who can do multiples of that will do multiples of that. Imagine being able to celebrate with your family and say, we have freed four slaves in Sudan.

This is real. These are real people. This is not a metaphor. This is not a metaphorical slavery. This is literal slavery that is happening now in 2024. And we can do that. But I want to say, folks, if you can't pull together $250 for one gift, you can give something per month. Maybe you can do $50 this month.

If you do $21 a month, that reaches $250 by the end of the year. So if that's all you can do, please do it. Please tell your kids that this is something we get to do as a family because we are free. Because Jesus died for us. We live in a free nation and we're compelled by our love of God to help our neighbors. The scripture commands us to love our neighbors. And this is one of the things we can do. This is how we love our neighbors by sacrificing, by taking money that we could use on whatever we want and saying,

I choose by the grace of God to use this for God's purposes. You get nothing back in the natural, right? But you choose to do this as an act of worship to God. You worship God with your money. So I say $21 a month, $250, every $250 freeze a slave. And this is real. And, you know, I talk a lot, Todd, about I have a new book out called Religionless Christianity. And I really talk about how if you don't put your faith into action, maybe it's a sign you have no faith.

And so I want to exhort people. Live out your faith. Don't just say, I believe these things. Live out your faith. It's an opportunity. By the way, folks, when you live out your faith, it increases your faith. When you lean on God by living out your faith, it increases your faith. It's like exercise.

We have to practice our faith. We have to live out our faith. And people say, what can I do? What can I do? Well, there are many things you can do. But this is something right now we're talking about that it's as clear as a bell. There are people enslaved. You can give a small amount of money and free them.

To me, it's just one of the most beautiful things imaginable, that you can do something. It is an unadulterated, unmitigated good, something beautiful. You can teach your kids. You can teach your kids about the value of freedom, about what freedom is. You can teach your kids about what it is to live out their faith by giving, to live out their faith by acting, live out their faith self-sacrificially. The website, my website, radio website, metaxis talk.com right at the top of the page, you'll see the banner for metaxis talk.com. There's all the information there. I just exhort you to do what you can please, folks, metaxis talk.com.

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Saddam now.com. Folks, welcome back. Thanks to our friends at the Herzog Foundation. We have as our guest right now, Chris Stigal. Am I pronouncing it correctly, Chris? You nailed it. You'd tell me if I got it wrong. Chris Stigal.

Bingo. Beautifully said. Beautifully said. Thank you very much. I think we're done here. That was really cool. Thank you. I asked you.

I had one question. How do we pronounce Stigall? Okay. So there's a lot of stories in the news having to do with, you know, school choice. I mean, tell my audience just very briefly about the Herzog Foundation before we leap in to the news of the day. I appreciate that, Eric. Yeah, our foundation is devoted to one thing and one thing only, and that is promoting Christ-centered education in every child's life in this country. And we hope that whether people seek homeschooling or whether they, and really, we were,

agnostic on the kind of Christian education, that's certainly up to the parents. But we obviously believe that there's a better choice out there than public education. And so we explore promotion of homeschooling, private Christian education. And the purpose of this is to train up and catalyze and grow. Christian schools that already exist, help them meet with folks that want to create new Christian schools, and kind of commiserate, share best practices. We provide people with mentorships, all for free, by the way, I should mention, if people have an existing Christian schooler,

would like to start one or maybe thinking of homeschooling, if you go to Herzog Foundation.com, we have programs called Schoolbox, and it's a multi-step process to help you begin to think through the process of starting your own school or homeschooling your child, and we provide you with trainings and mentors at our cost. Ladies and gentlemen, are you listening? Are you listening? You're crazy not to take them up on this.

HerzogFoundation.com. Chris, thank you for giving us. us that, you know, Pressee on the Hurtzok Foundation. Now, I got to ask you, there's some stuff in the news. Let's start with Title IX. The madness, the utter madness of where we are in this sick, sick culture that Joe Biden, well, you tell the story. Go ahead.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's Riley Gaines has kind of become the face of this movement, hasn't she? And we're excited. She's got a new book out. She'll be coming to visit the foundation this summer. And we're really excited about that. We have been writing a lot about this at reed lion.com, our crack staff there. In fact, they covered the story of Donald Trump in a recent conversation said day one.

That's one of his first items up for bids is to reverse what Joe Biden has done to extend Title IX to, as you know, allow men to compete against women, biological men against women, allow men into the private spaces of women, locker rooms and restrooms. The idea that men make the best women is basically what he's tried to codify into law. Eric, and so we've got a story there at readlion.com all about it. It's so sick. It's just bizarre. I mean, I live in a world where one plus one always equals two. There are people who don't. There are people who are so diluted that they have persuaded themselves of the insane.

I mean, the insane idea that meant, I mean, where do we begin, Chris? I mean, imagine you're a guy, I'm a guy. imagine feeling like, well, I think maybe I'm a girl. Okay, that's one level of trouble. Imagine saying, I think I'm a girl, and I think I want to be an athlete competing against women and then actually doing it. It's unbelievable.

It's unbelievable. And then to take it one step further, you know, on the wacky scale, to have somebody like bumbling, Joe Biden say, yep, that's good, and we're going to codify that, and there it is. And we've wiped out decades of progress in women's sports. I don't know who said it. I don't want to steal the quote, and I won't get it right anyway. But it was something to the effect of this entire notion of biological men or boys pretending

to be women and competing against women is basically an excuse for mediocre male athletes to become successes. I mean, it's basically rigging it for men to excel in a sport they couldn't excel in as men. And I think that's pretty apt. I mean, we've really stacked the deck against women with this. Can you believe that they're not laughed off the track? Can you believe that there are people who don't just say, excuse me, sir? Excuse me, sir.

I don't think so. Are you out of your skull parentheses, yes? Can you imagine that people say, yep, we're going to take you up on this. So please, come here. you know, get into the blocks and the starting pistol is going to go off. And you can make a mockery of this entire spectacle in every single witness in the stands. You can mock it. Okay.

So at readlion.com, there's an article about how Trump, I always find this funny. This is like when DeSantis, a few years ago, I was at something, and Governor DeSantis was saying, and we're going to fight so that, you know, in Florida, men are only competing against other men. Everybody cheered and I'm cheering. And I thought, what am I? This is crazy. It's nuts. That's speaking the most basic common sense.

I mean, in some ways, that's a clarifying moment. But that's where Donald Trump is. All he has to do, all he has to do is say the most basic thing. And, you know, most people are going to be with you. So I guess that's, there's something healthy going on here. Well, as I know you're a man of faith, and I know you talk a lot about this, the most insidious part about this entire notion is that our very youngest kids in K-12 public education are being pumped full of this bilge.

Eric, they're being encouraged in some cases to, you know, transition or explore it and even keep it secret from parents. And of course, as you know, that erodes the entire principle of a creator that were fearfully and wonderfully made. And if you can get kids to buy into that, what can't you get them to buy into? Well, look, this is propaganda would be a good thing compared to what this is. This is demonic. This is child abuse. And ladies and gentlemen, let me just say this. If you're sending your kid to a public school where they're here, hearing this. I'm sorry, but you're guilty of child abuse. Not just the people doing it. You are sending your kid into the precincts of mad men and mad women, lunatics who are sharing things with

your kids that are profoundly inappropriate for kids to hear. And this is why you've got to either homeschool your kids or send them to a Christian school where this is not happening. And Eric, There's so many, if I may, there are so many options today. The option is not public school or some $100,000 private pennylofer wearing, you know, Ascot and Blazer private school. It's not that anymore. You can micro-school with communities. You can homeschool.

Christian schools are all over the country and help you with tuition if you need it. Hopefully there will be more school choice bills passing through legislatures. They're 12 right now with universal school choice. So the days of it. being this binary choice of a going broke on private school or public school, those are over. Look, and most of those secular private schools are insane themselves. So if you're not talking to get to a straight up classical Christian school or homeschooling, forget it, folks.

I encourage you to go to herdsog foundation.com and readlion.com. Chris Stigal, thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you, Eric. Welcome back, folks. And I welcome to the program, Chris Stagall with the Herzoghugel, with the Herzog Foundation. and readlion.com. There's an article, Chris, I don't know if it's on the Herzog Foundation website or at readline.com, but about how kids are being sacrificed on this altar of gender ideology.

Let's talk about that for a minute. There is an author, Eric, and I thank you for mentioning it. If you go to readdline.com where we have a lot of news on schools, the culture, and so much more, I think it's a real destination for people that want truth in journalism. It exists. And our staff at readline.com, they're fantastic. But this particular story is a profile story of a woman called Mary Margaret Ollahan. And she has written extensively in her book, D-Trans, True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult, about what young people going through these gender transitions, I hate to even say it as though it's legitimate,

but they take the puberty blockers and the hormones, they physically, surgically remove, their genitals, and then Shazam, they regret it. Shocker. I mean, we're finding this in Europe, right? And this is what she chronicles in this book, that people that have come through that, regretted it, and then tried to reverse course. She profiles a young woman who, in fact, tried to transition to become a man, then said, I made a mistake. Now she's a mother, but can't breastfeed because she had her breast surgically removed. It's psychotic, it's demonic, it's all of those things. And so the author in this story that we chronicle there at readline.com talks about the warning signs. And what we need to know, Europe is already jumping up and down, telling people, we tried this a decade ago.

It was a terrible mistake. We're not letting our young people transition. We're not giving them pills and hormones and surgeries anymore. That's over here in Europe. So I'm not sure why we're not listening other than it's a multi-billion dollar industry. I've come to find out surgically monkeying around with children like this. It's awful. something we ought to pay attention to. Well, listen, it is demonic. Let's be clear, folks,

there is evil in the world. I think there are a lot of people, many self-described Christians, that don't understand the satanic evilness of evil. It exists as much today as it ever has in any brutal, cruel, sadistic past you can think of in any civilization, where there was human sacrifice, torture, whatever it is. It exists today. It's just, you know, shifted over. to things that in some circles are respectable. But the idea that that greed is at the heart of this industry, of mutilating children, just think about this, that there are people willing to deceive themselves. Well, we're only doing what the parents want.

We're only doing what the literature tells us is okay. Yes, that's exactly what the Nazis said. We're only doing what we're told. We're only doing evil is real. And that's what we're talking about. And when it's directed to kids, you better be paying attention, which is why we're glad to partner with you guys at the Herzog Foundation. And I want to say to folks, herdsockfoundation.com is the website. The article that you were referencing is at readlion.com.

We've just got about a minute left. What else might people find at readlion.com, Chris? I would say all the stories of the day, some of the most pertinent cultural stories you'll find at readlion.com. If I could quickly, Eric, I'll just give a plug for a brand new program we're offering this year, and we're going out on the road to do some trainings. If there are public school teachers in your audience, Eric, that think, you know what, it's on my heart to still teach, but I really want to do it in a Christ-centered school. We actually now have new trainings that we're offering.

If you can travel to our training, we'll pay for it all. Teachers, public school teachers, that would like to transition to become Christian school teachers. It's our new Making the Leaps seminar for teachers that want to stay in the profession. but in a Christ-centered way. So that and so many more trainings are available, too, at HerzogFoundation.com. This is just good news. I am thrilled that on the Erkin Texas show,

we're partnering with you at the Herzog Foundation. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're listening. I hope you understand this is wonderful that somebody is helping us, you know, to get our kids plugged in to good Christian schools, to start Christian schools, to homeschool, HerdsogFoundation.com, and readlion.com.

Chris Stigall, thank you. Eric, thanks for your friendship.