The Eric Metaxas Show - Ken Fish - Part 4 (Encore)

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

The encore interviews highlighting miracles continue with Ken Fish sharing his latest adventures in the wonder-workings of God; then, Eric focuses on the heroes in his new book, "7 More Men."

Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Please keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times. This is your final warning. Now here's your host, Mr. Thrill Ride himself, Eric Mataxis. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show, as we like to call it. My name is Eric Mataxis. We just tacked on the word show because we think of this as a show.

You might not. But it's the best we can do, okay? Stop riding us. Now, listen, I have a very special guest, actually two special guests today. Albin, of course, is here. Chris is here, but we have a special guest. You know him as John the situation, Zmirak. We've got him right now.

Then we're going to go to Ken Fish, and then we're going to come back with John, the situation, Zmirak from the Jersey Shore. So right now, let me welcome again, my friend, John, the situation, Zmirak. John, you just got out of jail. I understand you've been partying and whatnot. Everything cool. You've been working on your guns, working out in the prison, in the prison gym and stuff.

How are you doing, my friend? I'm fine. Listen, I work from home. My life has not changed very much with this virus, except that I can't eat at my favorite restaurants inside. So I'm going out of my way to order out from all my favorite places to help them stay in business, buying bottles of wine I don't even need, tipping 33%,

trying to keep the places going so that they're there whenever, you know, the Reichs Commissariat for Health declares that we're allowed to walk down the street again. I wish I could be generous that way, but I have lost all my income, all the speaking engagements. I would be traveling hither and yon, yon and hither,

mostly hither, but also yon, and it's all been canceled. Oh, sorry. It's just bizarre. So we are, I hate to say it on the air, but we're eating dog food. Yeah. Actually, you know what, that's not true.

I always get confused. Our dog is now eating dog food. I apologize for confusing people. But no, it's a tough time for, a lot of people financially, I realize that. And anybody who has an extra dime in their pocket, the economy needs your help. So please do what you can. Now, John, you wrote a piece at the stream called What a Friend We Have in Maluk. That is so funny of a title. I just died when I read. It's so

gruesome and horrible and funny at the same time. It's vintage John's Merak. So can you tell us about that article. Now, Malik, to those who haven't been steeped in this stuff, was the Canaanite God that demanded infant sacrifice. And it was the worship of gods like Malik that got the Canaanites on God's smite list and led God to tell the Joshua and the Israelites delete the Canaanites and do not adopt the Canaanite religion. Now, wait a second. I just want to be clear. You know, when we talk about gods like Malik demanding child sacrifice, these children were burned alive, this happened. We know this from history.

And we also know that the god, Malik, is actually a demon. It is not a god. It is a demon. And I want to be clear that false gods are demonic. And this was a particularly horrific demon. And this really happened 15 centuries ago. 14 centuries ago, just as Joshua and the Israelites were moving into Canaan at the Lord's behest, this is why, in some cases, it seems to us, very draconian and horrific, but he had them, you know,

kill everybody. And that's a story for another time. But tell us about your article. So at one point when this lockdown began, I had a happy, encouraging thought. So of course, it turned out to be wrong, but I had the thought, well, they're going to close non-essential services. They're going to stop non-essential medical procedures. They're not doing knee replacements. They're not doing root canals. Obviously, they're not going to do abortions. What?

And since there's more than 3,000 abortions a day in America, and if you want to see the number, I think you can you go to how many abortions.com, and it has a ticker that rolls in front your eyes, and it just breaks your heart. more than 3,000 a day. Now, obviously, if you don't have surgical masks for COVID nurses, if you don't have gloves for doctors treating the Wuhan flu, you're not going to waste these things on abortions or sex change operations any more than you're going to waste them on Botox and tummy tucks. So I thought, well, you know, interesting. Maybe abortions will stop right around the feast of the enunciation.

And nine months later, a lot of kids are. going to get born around Christmas who wouldn't have been born. And I had this hopeful thought. So of course, Mollock's foot comes and stomps on my head that in only like six or seven states have governors declared abortion a non-essential procedure. I'm proud to live in one of them, Texas. And in all the other states, they're going as normal. And Planned Parenthood's doing like a bake sale.

Please send us rubber gloves and masks and help us in any way you can with our our vital work. And I thought, wow, in a time of crisis and pandemic, the human sacrifice doesn't stop. The church is closed, the sacrifice of bread and wine on the altar, that sacrifice stops, but the infant sacrifice doesn't. And I thought of G.K. Chesterton's amazing book, The Everlasting Man. In it, he talks about how Carthage and Rome, you know, we remember the Punic War. Often we kind of root for it. for Hannibal because he's the underdog. He brought the yellow...

Well, most of us don't remember the Punic War, because it was a little bit before my time. But in all seriousness, most of us forgot what we were supposed to learn on that test. So remind us about Hannibal and the Punic War. Okay. The greatest rival, the Roman Empire, or at the time the Roman Republic, ever faced,

was the Empire of Carthage, which was based in North Africa. At that time, North Africa was green and rich and lush, and the Empire of Carthage control the southern half of the Mediterranean and was trying to move in to Italy and Spain and impose its rule instead of Rome's rule. Now here's the problem with Carthage. It came out of Canaan. It had the Canaanite gods. It carried on the Canaanite human sacrifice that Joshua condemned and we saw the Israelites fighting against.

So you had this infant sacrifice from the little villages in Canaan was not. now being practiced in a world empire, a rich, militarily powerful, sort of market-driven capitalist world empire. Sound familiar? China? And the U.S. Us. We have it, too.

That's the horrible irony. We are Carthage, not Rome, in this scenario. And in his great book, The Everlasting Man, which C.S. Lewis said was the greatest Christian apologetics he'd ever read. In the Everlasting Man, Shesterden speculates that. that God allowed the Punic War because he wanted Rome to wipe out Carthage and end its human sacrifice. Now, people say, well, that's a tenuous connection. We're not doing a religious sacrifice.

Oh, but we are. I found an excellent article at the website, 1 Peter 5, that documents there are religious rituals for abortion on the Internet for Christians, for Jews, for Buddhists, for pagans. in order to make your abortion experience more nurturing and life affirming. They have candles. They have prayers. They invoke Jesus. They try to make it into a sacrament. This sacrament, this demonic sacrament, has not ended during the virus.

And what's really interesting, I know we all, most people you think of the Aztecs, you think of their human sacrifice and victims on those pyramids. the Aztecs were doing that out of desperation. They thought their gods were dying and needed human blood in order to live. And if their gods died, everyone would die. So the Aztec human sacrifice was more like the climate change hysteria. But the Carthaginian human sacrifice, the Canaanian human sacrifice, was voluntary. The gods wouldn't smite you if you refused to do it.

People did it to get ahead. You gave your first baby with the assurance that Molly and, would make sure you'd have five more and they'd be rich and prosperous. So it was a self-help thing. Just the way people now have abortions so they can finish law school or so that they can continue with their job or for financial reasons because the man won't support them. But again, it's not life-saving. It's not at the point of a gun.

Almost all abortions in America are based on economic or personal or career motives. It have nothing to do with saving the life of the mother or dealing with the result of a That's all just empty rhetoric. This is child sacrifice like Carthage, like Canaan. There is no Carthage. There is no Canaan. I wonder how much mercy God's going to have on our country. If we keep putting, we're using our gloves and masks to keep up the sacrifice even now.

Whoa. John, can you stay on if, do you have enough time just to stay on with us? Okay, we'll see what happens. Folks, we'll be right back. Hey there, folks. It's Eric Metaxas show. Well, Ken Fish, what are you still doing here? You didn't kick me out yet.

I didn't kick you out. So we may as well continue our conversation. It's always so fun to talk to you. You're doing, you're filming courses for a ministry school to teach people how to do some of the stuff we're talking about. That's right. Okay. What about that? When is that going to be available?

Okay. So the school should launch either the very end of March or early April. So we're just about there. I spent most of January in the studio filming every day, like eight, ten hours a day. It's exhausting, by the way. I've never done anything so tiring. But anyway, I spent every day of the week for almost four weeks filming the content of this school. So when we launch the school, it will have two major buckets.

First subject will be healing, and it'll have three levels, level one, level two, level three. they're meant to be taken sequentially. And then the other subject will be prophetic ministry, level one, level two, level three. And so we'll be doing a lot of scriptural teaching. I'll be talking about how these things work, how to unpack it, how to start getting activated. There'll be lecture notes, there'll be quizzes, there'll be all of that that will be part of the school. And once a month we'll have an online interactive class for those that are enrolled in these schools where we can debrief and unpack what we're doing. We'll also have a once a year gathering, but that'll obviously need to wait a bit. So we'll have these two subject matters. And then later on,

this year, we will launch two more around inner healing and deliverance, again, with three levels of each. And so this is all you doing teaching on all this stuff. Right. And when you say a school, what is it, people just go to the website and they find it there? Yeah, so this school, we're already using the new name. In the last segment, we were talking about how I'm going to change the name from Kingdom Fire Ministries to Orbis Ministries. Orbibis. And you're going to sell fishing tackle and some clothing? No, that's Orbis. Oh, Orbis. Orbis. Right. Okay. It's actually a Latin word, and it means unto the world. So anyway, we're starting to do some promotional through Instagram,

Facebook, so if people look for Orbis School of Ministry. Orbis, Orbis School of Ministry. Right. They will, their search engine will help them find it. And they can start tracking. We'll have some free content to give people a sense of what it's like. And if they like it, they can sign up and join us. And so, anyway, we're launching that school. And the objective is to train more people to, well, John Wimber used to say, do the stuff. You might say what stuff?

Well, healing is sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, driving out demons, operating prophetically. These are all part and parcel of what's supposed to be the normal Christian life. For a lot of people, you know, they can't get to my meetings or they're They may have listened to recordings, but they want to go further. They want to learn more. They need some additional equipping. And that's what this is designed to do from the comfort of your own home or on the beach or in the park or wherever you want to sit and watch the classes and do the homework and so forth.

Now, you're here in New York this weekend. This will air after all this stuff happens. But you're here this weekend. You're doing a thing tonight and then all day tomorrow. That's correct. So tonight, like, how do you normally do, when do you do, you know me. I always, I'm always impatient. I want to, I want to do the stuff.

I want the prayer and the ministry because I get excited by that. And a lot of the teaching I've heard. And so I'm less excited about that. But it's obviously important you do it. But typically that's what you do, right? You teach and then you pray. That's right. Okay.

And so you're doing that tonight. And tomorrow, what do you have? Two sessions tomorrow? Three. Three sessions. Yeah. So it'll be a four. session event, and I'm teaching on evangelism, which a lot of people go, but I'm trying to do it,

so it's both fun and engaging, but also hopefully it looks a lot more like biblical evangelism, where the spirit of God is working alongside of us in order to activate people, and I could say, effectuate our evangelism so that people come to faith. Well, of course. I mean, if you go to somebody to pray for them or you're talking to them, and God tells you something about, them, or you pray for them and they get healed, they're going to take what you're saying about God and Jesus and the Bible a lot more seriously. I mean, it's obvious that that's all through Scripture. Jesus did that, and all the apostles did that.

So it's not, I mean, the only question is some people say, well, are we supposed to do that? We're supposed to just preach out of the word. And you and I would say nonsense. There are plenty times that this is exactly how God and His mercy wants to reach people. I like to say the Bible is a book of examples rather than exceptions. So a lot of people want to say, well, that was then. This is now it's an exception to the rule. No, this is the way it's supposed to be, and you've just allowed yourself to be, you know, dumbed down to the way things are in the world around you.

So we're trying to help people move into functioning in this way for a more authentic experience of Christianity without taking away from, you know, the important things like preaching the word of God in church the way we're commonly used to hearing or taking communion or receiving. baptism upon conversion, etc. Right. The, well, there are plenty of wonderful Christians who haven't touched on any of this stuff we're talking about. Bonhoeffer never gets into this stuff. Wilberforce doesn't. You know what? You can be an extraordinary Christian without moving in this stuff.

But my question is, why would you want to be? I mean, this is, if this is real and this is really God, why would you not want it? Well, that's another story. I want to talk to you a little bit. a little bit about the prophetic in our time. There are so many people that make statements about politics or the future and that kind of thing, most of which I find very interesting, some of which I find annoying and off-putting because they're kind of sloppy. And I've experienced a lot of sloppiness in the church among prophets where they will say stuff and that it doesn't happen,

and they kind of backtrack and say, well, it's because you didn't pray or it's because they give you some excuse and I think, no, you, okay, we're not going to take you outside the camp and stone you to death, but you need to understand that that kind of prophecy is sloppy. It doesn't honor God. You have to be really precise because what you do is you drive people away from God when you prophesy. I think that the fireman prophet, Mark Taylor, he prophesied that Trump would be elected and a lot of interesting stuff. But then he said, some things that I guess I feel some of it is true. He was talking about the draining of the swamp and how a lot of things are going, a lot of things are going to happen and this. And I think a lot of it was real and

true. But then he says something like Obama is going to go to jail. Hillary Clinton is going to jail. And I thought, look, anything can happen. If God actually said that to you, then it'll happen. But the idea of a president or a former first lady going to jail, that would tear the country apart, no matter how you slice it, are you sure you heard that from God? And there's certain times when I think people are moving in this prophetic stuff. And as I was just saying, they're sort of sloppy. They don't seem to understand that. People are going to hold you to what you said.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. So there are some prophets who prophesy what I would call risky words, and some of them come to pass. and some people become known for, you know, hitting it on the head, even with risky words. Other people don't get it right, and after a while their own credibility declines, and it, you know, becomes a source of mockery, derision. Well, as it should, to be honest.

Now, why don't people simply say exactly what God is saying, or why don't they simply say, I think God might have said this, but I don't know? Why wouldn't they do that? Yeah. Well, mainly because everybody's looking to attract eyeballs to their social media. Okay, that's despicable. Well, I'm just telling you. Yeah, but I'm telling you that's despicable. When you are working for God, and, you know, this is really a gift from heaven,

and if you use it in that kind of way, that's really despicable. And because it's going to drive people from Jesus. Frankly, what could be worse than that? Right. So in the book of Romans, it says, if anyone prophesies, let him prophesy according to the measure of faith. So, you know, what faith, another word for faith, could be in this sense, confidence. And I know that there's a lot of theological content behind faith. I'm well aware of that, but in this moment, I'm speaking of that aspect that is

confidence. So if anyone prophesies, let him or her prophesy according to the measure of confidence that they have. So some people might get a word, and it's, You can see what I'm doing with my hands. I might say the word is out here. If they don't have the confidence to prophesy there, they should prophesy here and stop short of that. But sometimes people get a word, I'll say it's here, and they prophesy way out here. And I would have said in my business years, they were grandstanding. And so some people want a grandstand, but they're actually prophesying beyond the measure of faith they've been given in an attempt to, well, hopefully,

It comes good and I get lucky. I don't know. Anyway. Well, I mean, who was it? There's a woman, Kat Kerr, is that her name? She's the one with the kind of purple hair and stuff like that. She was prophesying that Trump's going to get two terms and that his vice president, Michael, Mike Pence, is going to get two terms. And then Pence's vice president is going to get two terms.

And I thought that's probably preposterous because, well, I mean, that would be wonderful. Mike Pence is wonderful, but it's just amazing to me. Oh, we're going to a break. We'll be right back to continue the kooky conversation with Ken Fish. Heroes and role models have always been tremendously important to me. In my new book, Seven More Men, I tell the uplifting and inspiring stories of Martin Luther, George Whitfield, William Booth, George Washington Carver, Sergeant Alvin York, Alexander Solzhenitson, and Billy Graham. Each of these men have the courage to surrender themselves to a higher purpose for the sake of others. Become acquainted with these seven incredible heroes and your life will be immeasurably richer.

Order your copy of seven more men today. For more info, go to my website, Eric Mataxis.com. Christian bestselling author and speaker Richard E. Simmons does not shy away from the big questions of life. His latest book is called Reflections on the Exist of God and it tackles the biggest question of all, Does God Exist? I've read this book and I've got to tell you, I'm a little biased. But you can imagine that I like it a lot because Simmons offers insights for those grappling with life's biggest questions. Where do we find meaning in life? Who determines what is evil?

Can we be moral without God? Does God even exist? Former White House aide Wallace Henley says, I've taught apologetics for many years and I've read every scholar mentioned in this book. Of all the books on apologetics, Simmons is the best I have ever read. This book is easy to read because it's divided into a series of brief essays perfect for a devotional or discussion with a friend. I highly recommend that you add a copy of reflections on the existence of God to your pandemic reading list. Simmons asked questions that speak directly to one of the most important things you possess your worldview. Folks, you know how important this is to me. Your worldview is going to impact the way you live your life for better or for worse.

If you want to challenge yourself to spiritual and intellectual growth, and I hope you do, then be willing to ask yourself life's toughest questions. in today by picking up a copy of reflections on the existence of God right now. Go to existence of Godbook.com. That's existence of Godbook.com. Okay, folks, final segment with my friend Ken Fish, kingdomfire ministries.org. We were just talking about Kat Kerr, K-E-R, whatever. You don't have much confidence in her. She seems a little wiggy to you. I get very annoyed at people like this, that they're not more careful. I know that there are a number of people I have watched, some of them seem to be sober-minded and have a sense of the tremendous

gravitas to speak for God. And others don't. They seem kind of like jugheads who have no clue that what they're doing is a sacred trust. That's correct, yeah. You know, I think, let's shift to a different prophet. He's now with the Lord. His name was Kim Clement. Yeah. And, you know, Kim was known for his astoundingly accurate prophetic words. One that he gave, I believe it was in 2013, but I may be off on the year. Somebody could, you know, look it up and search it. But I believe it was in 2013. He said that there would be a man elected president named Donald. And this was before anybody was thinking of Donald Trump as president. Now, I'm not hereby endorsing Donald Trump or disendorsing him.

I'm just saying Kim Clement gave a word and it came to pass that there is a Donald who's been elected president. And yet, Kim Clement, who is, I would say, widely reckoned to have been one of the more accurate profits of our time. He died of a brain aneurysm. I think it was three years ago now. Kim Clement, on a few occasions, not many, but a few, he would go on the air because he had a TV show, and he would say, I prophesied this, it didn't come to pass, I admit it, I was wrong,

and I own it. Boom. And I think if people would just do that, it would clear up a lot of the Flotsam and Jetsam. So people would say, well, Kim, how did you miss it? I mean, you're a prophet of the Lord. And this is a ultra-important thing, not even super important. It's like beyond that, okay? Kim Clement said, I missed it because in my heart, I really wanted it to be so, and I let my own passions sway me. Now, this is a true prophet of the Lord that most people consider to be one of the best prophets of our time. What does that look like? Well, when I teach on prophetic ministry, I talk about something called spiritual neutrality. And what that means is we need to be in our internal man or woman, depending on the gender of the prophet, we need to be,

the way I like to describe it, like a ball bearing on the edge of a razor blade. In theory, it's possible to balance that ball bearing and it won't fall off. But you're just a little one way or the other and it's going to fall off. Yeah. Okay. Where do we see this in scripture? When Jesus goes to Gethsemini, he doesn't want to go to the cross. He says, Father, if there's any way to let this cup pass from me, let it be so. Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done. And so he wrestles in prayer three times, ultimately sweating, as it were, great drops of blood. And then he says, Father, let it be your way. And he goes to the cross. Jesus clearly had. a point of view. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. But in the end, I'll do it. And so in that, because he's Jesus, because he's fully yielded to the father, he is that ball bearing on the edge of a razor blade. He hears the voice of God clearly. He says, fine. All right, I'll be crucified. I think because we are human, because we have passions and desires and wants, sometimes people don't hold themselves to that same standard. And

Yet we should. We should. And so in Kim Clement's case, when he realized, oh, I blew it, I didn't stay to that standard, he owned it and admitted it. Now, in the case of these words about, you know, Mike Pence will follow Donald Trump and Pence's vice president will follow him, there's really no way we're going to know about those except to let time go by. And pretty soon it'll be clear whether these words are going to fall to the ground or they'll be fulfilled because they were actually originally from God. Well, I think we can look at a lot of other stuff that Kat Kerr has said, and it just seems a little sloppy to me. And I just want to say to these people, the gift that God has given you is just a tremendously weighty thing. And you need to take it very seriously. And God forbid you would say anything that God didn't say, you know. And I really, it just bothers me.

There's a guy, Mike Thompson in Las Vegas, who's wonderful, very sober-minded. There's some people out there that have a tremendous gift, and they seem to have a sense of what this is. And there are other people, I don't know what they're doing. Their personalities really, they don't seem to be able to bear it in the way that they ought to. Yeah. Yeah. This is part of the maturation of somebody in their prophetic gift, and it has a lot to do with character. you know, being willing to be wrong, being willing to say, I don't have a word from the Lord

when you don't have a word from the Lord. You know, a lot of times people want to put you on the spot and, as it were, pull a word out of you. But, you know, I think it's worth noting that at least on two occasions in Scripture, and there may be others that I haven't even thought about lately, but I've been thinking about these two. On at least two occasions in Scripture, true, legitimate, authentic prophets of the Lord were asked, do you have a word from God? or words to that effect.

And they said, I don't actually have a word. I need to go seek the Lord. And then it says, many days later, the word of the Lord came to them. One of them is Elijah, the prophet. And it says, you know, many days later, the word of the Lord came to him. It's in 1st Kings 18. And then we see also in Jeremiah 42-7, the elders of Israel, come to Jeremiah, and they say, do you have a word for us from the Lord about what will become of Jerusalem,

what will happen in the war with Babylon. And he goes, I don't have a word from the Lord. Let me go inquire. And it says 10 days later, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. So I think there's a kind of soberness that you're talking about that we see in these two cases where these prophets, when they didn't have a word from the Lord, they just said, I don't have a word from the Lord. I got nothing to say. Yeah.

Well, that's the only way to fly, folks. We're at a time, my friend, Ken Fish. Thank you so much. Glad to be here, Eric. Hey folks, welcome back. We've been talking to Johns Mirak. We've been talking to Ken Fish. we're going to talk again to my friend John Smirak and to Albin Seder, except really we wanted to use this time to talk about my brand new book, Seven More Men. I'm so excited that the stories in this book are getting out to readers because there's so many people that they don't know the amazing story of George Whitfield, the amazing story of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the amazing story of George Washington, Carver. Now, John Zmirak, did you read the chapter on Carver? Yes, yes, I did. And I really found it amazingly inspiring. This is a man who was, I think he was the child of a slave. And he grew up

in the Jim Crow South when black Americans were treated, you know, not much better than pack animals and seen as a threat and disarmed by the government, you know, denied the right to vote, denied their right to carry weapons to defend themselves. They had to step aside on the street if a white man passed. They'd get off the sidewalk to make way. And if a black man looked at a white woman in a way that made her uncomfortable, he could go to jail or he might end up lynched at the end of a rope. I mean, it was a dark time in America.

I mean, you can understand why the angry left oftentimes references this, because, you know, this is worse than the way women or Christians are treated. Saudi Arabia, you know, when we point the fingers, unfortunately, we do have to deal with the very, very dark past that we had. And when I read the story in doing my research of John, I'm sorry, of George Washington Carver, I was so moved at what he suffered, at his humility, the humility of this man. I mean, he was clearly a strong Christian, but his humility and his willingness to deal with this and just to keep marching, to keep going, and to keep studying. And It really is just such a moving portrait of somebody, and I don't mean my telling of it.

I mean, his story is a moving portrait of a life lived in a way that we don't hear about today. Today we hear about, you know, anger, dealing with people that oppress you with anger. This was a real Christian man who prevailed. He was oppressed and didn't respond with anger. Today, people are coddled and spoiled, and they're responding with anger. Carver was rejected from various schools because they wouldn't. The only local school wouldn't take a black child. He was obviously the most intelligent person in the room in virtually every room where he went.

And yet he was treated like a third-class citizen. And instead of punching people in the face, or if that would have been too dangerous, instead of giving up and crawling into a bottle or becoming a blues piano or just a drunk, which is, you know, how frankly I think I would handle it if I couldn't. on somebody in the face, I would probably just sort of give up. He didn't. He was a devout Christian, memorized the Bible, evangelized people, but mainly, as you point out, in this really moving chapter in Seven More Men, he looked at ways to help his fellow Black American citizen in a time of great oppression and privation and injustice. He looked for ways to make their farms more fertile,

to help them grow new crops, to help them cook healthier food, teach their children more effectively. He worked with another great hero, Booker T. Washington, who's much neglected nowadays, in the self-help movement to help these people who have often been born in slavery, or as the children of slaves, to acquire the dignity and independence and freedom that we associate with being an American, and that is it's our privilege as human beings made in the image and likeness of God. That's the amazing thing about the American founding that you pointed out in your book, if you can keep it. The American founding is maybe the first system of government that's explicitly based on the Christian vision of the human being as having dignity. And that dignity was denied black Americans because of slavery.

And let's remember, slavery had existed throughout human history, and it existed. around the world in 1776. Our nation was not unique for having slavery. That's the one way we were like other nations. But we fought a civil war and the ideals of our Declaration of Independence helped destroy slavery worldwide and even in the South finally. So George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington worked to make this noble ideal a reality in the day-to-day lives of poor,

illiterate, oppressed, malnourished children of slavery. It was a beautiful, beautiful story. And I didn't know anything about it. It was a privilege to read it. Well, I really didn't either. That's part of what's interesting about some of these books that I write. Is there some stuff I know and then other stuff I know nothing, but I'm intrigued and I do the research.

And it's so moving. What you just said brings us to the previous character in the book, in seven more men, it's George Whitfield. You know, if you want to understand why America. was founded on Christian principles, on why American-style self-government at its root has the expectation of virtue, which has the expectation of some kind of faith and something greater. You have to know the story of George Whitfield, because George Whitfield, when he preached the gospel of Jesus Christ, to people who thought they were already Christians, he was

showing them something that they had missed, something that they had never seen. before, an aspect of the Christian faith that ultimately, when we fought our civil war, we could say, yes, even though we allowed slavery, we never put it in as something that we were for. It was always something that we existed in spite of slavery. And that in large part is owed to George Whitfield. I think you also pointed out that the American Revolution and founding itself came out of Whitfield. He had been there before the Revolution, and he had preached. the liberty of the Christian, the direct relationship between the individual Christian and God,

the importance of congregational religion, the importance of decentralized power, and that his sermons helped create the political sermons that were preached through New England and Virginia that shaped the founding fathers in their demand for religious liberty and all other personal liberties as flowing out of that first freedom, which is the freedom to worship. It's amazing because I wasn't taught this. I was not taught this in school. And, you know, when I went to that dear old Yale, where I met you, we were untaught all of this stuff. All of the connections between the Bible and what we call American-style self-government and liberty, we were taught everything against that. When we come back, I'm going to continue my

conversation about my new book, Seven More Men. John Zmirak, please don't go away. We'll be right back. Hey, folks, welcome back to the Aircon Taxis Show. I still have John Zmirak with us. Albin is here. We're talking about my new book, Seven More Men. And Albin, you just reminded me of something kind of insane. Tell us about this. Yes, tomorrow as an encore presentation in Hour 1, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, who is the son of the big Solzhenitsyn himself, right? Right, the big guns himself, who's featured in seven more men. I was going to say this is kind of funny that I have met the son of Alexander Solzhen, had an amazing conversation with him about his father on this program.

We're going to be running that tomorrow in hour one. And then the last man in my book is Billy Graham. I am friends with his son and with his daughter and just interviewed him recently on this program. Kind of funny how that works out. Solzhenitsyn is another figure, John Smirak. It does not get more heroic than Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I'm just in awe of what it is that he represented to those of us in America during the Cold War. I would like to remind people of maybe some of the details of Solzhenitsyn's life they might not know.

He was a committed communist and a patriotic Soviet who wrote a funny letter. to a friend where he made fun of Stalin's mustache. And that got him sent to a prison camp near the Arctic Circle. That's what communism is. If you question the central authorities, even slightly, if you break the religious awe of the state and its communist apparatus, you might well end up working in the tundra and your fingers freezing off and living on fish head soup.

He went there and he was angry. He was bitter. betrayed, he easily could have died there a bitter man and a lost soul. It was by getting to know his fellow prisoners, many of whom were Christians who had been imprisoned for practicing Christianity, Jews in prison for practicing Judaism, authentic political dissidents who'd shown political courage. Here, he's decided to sit down and hear their stories instead of focusing on his own bitterness and listening to their stories and seeing their souls and focusing on their suffering actually pulled him out of himself, got him away from his bitterness and anger and began to

point him towards God. And here's the really heroic thing. He decided even if the system was going to throw these people into the shredder, he was going to try to preserve their stories. And he started to write down their stories on little scraps of paper and gather. them up and eventually smuggled it out of the camps. It got smuggled out of the Soviet Union. The Young Men's Christian Association of all places, the YMCA, not just a village people song. It actually was a real. You froze there, John. I'm not sure why. But. Yeah, right in the middle of the village people. We're coming to the end here anyway.

But the fact of the matter is what John was saying, it makes me real. Oh, there you are. John's back. But I was going to say. I wrote about Solzhenitsyn because I thought to myself, you know, my seven men book puts in all these heroes, but then I think of people like Solzhenits. And I thought, I've got to tell the world. There's so many young people don't know the story of Solzhenits. And so tomorrow we've got his son on the program. And of course, I write about him in my book, Seven More Men. John, you were just making a final point there.

Yeah, I was saying that his book helped discredit communism among anyone with any conscience in Western Europe. in the 1970s and 80s, and I think it led directly to the end of communism and the liberation of hundreds of millions of people. So what an honor it is to interview his son. And I've gained enormously from reading Solzhenitsyn over the years and, of course, from reading your account of it. I was relieved to see Solzhenitsyn and Billy Graham in your book, Eric, because ever since I read your book Miracles, I began to suspect that you might have found a trove of

unpublished C.S. Lewis books. and start putting them out under your own name. Oh, you're funny. That's how good your books are, Eric. God bless you. I'm so glad we're at a time because I'm going to blush horrifyingly. All right.

Folks, join us tomorrow, Ignat Solzhenitsyn and more Ken Fish.