The Eric Metaxas Show - Ryan Helfenbein
Episode Date: August 21, 2024Ryan Helfenbein is the Executive Director of the Standing for Freedom Center and the Vice President of Communications and Public Engagement at Liberty University. www.standingforfreedom.com ...
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Welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show.
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Now, here's the host that you hate to love, the man who was the first.
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Welcome to Tuesday. Chris Himes, welcome to Tuesday.
Happy Tuesday. Is it a super Tuesday? Nah. It's just a regular Tuesday. It's just a regular Tuesday.
Yeah. But we have two great guests today and one really crummy guest. No, that's not true. We just have two guests, two great guests. I'm sorry we couldn't come up with the third crummy guest. We only have two great guests. We only have two great guests.
Today in Hour 1, Brandon Strock.
Man, what a hero.
He started the walkaway campaign.
We've got Brandon in hour one right here in the studio.
Yeah.
Also, right here in the studio, my dear friend, Ryan Helfenbine, he's at Liberty University,
another hero.
So we have two.
Yeah, they're doing a lot of cool stuff.
Spectacular guests today.
Later today, Tuesday, I fly to Nashville.
Yeah. And so do you.
Yeah.
I think we're on the same plane.
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If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.
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Yeah.
And I'm packing an extra jug.
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Yeah, well, this is sort of back to
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And by we, I mean my wife. But I do actually help out a little bit. But it's actually really
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Hey, folks.
I am always very, very excited to talk to my next guest.
His name is Ryan Helfenbine.
That's a real name, by the way.
He's the executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center at Liberty University.
Ryan, welcome back.
Listen, you're a friend.
And people say, like, Eric, you only have your friends on the program.
It's like, no, no, no, no.
people who are doing stuff that gets me flipped out excited,
I often become friends of those people.
So you and I become friends because what you're doing at Liberty,
I mean, I've known you for a number of years, it's exciting.
I want people to know about it.
And I mean, if people on the, you know, when I'm traveling on the country,
people talk about, you know, Christian universities.
And I go, you know what?
There are very, very few actual Christian universities.
I can no longer say to somebody like, you should go to Wheaton.
I can't say that anymore.
I can't.
So people say, what do you recommend?
Top of the list?
I say, liberty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's nice.
So there are Ceno institutions, Christian and name only, right?
I mean, these are institutions.
Chinos.
Don't be a Chino.
Don't be a Chino.
Don't be a Chino.
Yeah.
Perfect.
I copyrighted that, by the way.
And if people use the term chino, I get 25 cents.
If you wear a pair of chinos, I get 25 cents.
I want to be clear.
That's perfect.
That's true.
Yeah.
And I'll tell you, the other part of my day job, so executive director
the Standing for Freedom Center, but Vice President of Communications and Public Engagement at Liberty University.
And, you know, the argument really is why you should send your son or daughter, grandson, granddaughter, to Liberty University.
Christian education matters now probably more than ever in this country.
The battle lines have been drawn in terms of the culture, in terms of what people understand about society, about truth, about beauty.
beauty, about all of it, right? And at the end of the day, if you have an institution that doesn't
believe in the inspiration and authority of scripture, doesn't believe in the Christian faith,
doesn't believe in the building blocks and the bedrock of freedom, how are they going to promote
that for the next generation, right? And so Liberty has 700 degree programs, 16 colleges. We have a
school of law. We have a school of medicine. We have a school of nursing. We have a school of
engineering. It's not just a liberal arts institution. It's a full-fledged university.
So we have the highest enrollment numbers ever in the history of our institution. We're just
52, 53 years old. We were founded in 1971 by Dr. Jerry Falwell.
The great Jerry Falwell. We could talk for two days about Jerry Falwell. What a hero.
An amazing man of God, a man of faith, you know, he found a church in 1956. He's 23.
years old when he starts this church.
And he's 38 years old and says, hey, I have a vision for starting a Christian university.
And by the way, I want to make this institution for evangelicals similar to what Notre Dame is for Catholics or Brigham Young University is for Mormons.
I want to create this institution.
I want it to be excellent.
I want it to be world class and academics, division one sports, football, you name it.
By the way, that is being fulfilled.
That dream is being fulfilled even now.
We were at the Fiesta Bowl just last year.
For those who pay attention, that's a big deal.
That's a really big deal.
The top Division I schools that are competing in the playoff system, Liberty actually got in there.
We won the first quarter.
We got annihilated at the end of the game.
but I'll just tell you that nothing had ever been achieved like that before in the history of our school.
But the most important thing is when people are saying, oh, my gosh, we look at the future of the country,
we look at the way leaders are going, we look at the youngest generation, two out of three are abandoning the Christian faith that grew up in church.
How do we address this crisis?
Well, it's easy, I mean, in one sense, and it's obvious.
Um, that's education is the most important thing.
It is discipleship.
It is disciple making.
It is evangelism.
It's all there.
Um, if you, if you basically hand education over to public schools, to teachers unions,
to the department of education, um, you are essentially putting your child in a position
where they may not come out.
Yeah.
And there's a two third chance that they won't.
That is why Christian education is so important.
Well, and that's K through 12.
And what I find horrifying is that you can have done all the right things with your kid.
And then he said, okay, we'll send them to, you name it some quote-unquote Christian college.
And wokeism has infected many of these Christian colleges that 10 years ago would have been like,
oh, send your kid to this one or that one.
They're great.
Now, and folks, this is serious.
I mean, think about what we're talking about, that they're not.
standing against the lunacy.
Wokism is what? It's cultural Marxism. It's atheistic. The roots are from hell.
The roots go all the way down to hell. And a lot of them have opened the door to this lunacy.
Liberty has not. And that is why I can sit here and rave about liberty. I'm not faking it.
I have been there many times. To fight the good fight on the college level, that is just a big deal.
And I want to say, I want to caution parents and grandparents if your kids are at one of these other Christian schools.
A lot of them, they're in the battle.
They have professors on there that are not on board with what most of us are on board with.
And it's bad.
And so Liberty is not only fighting the good fight, but Liberty is big.
It's not, you know, like I often raved similarly about Hillsdale.
But Hillsdale is like, I don't know, 5,000 undergrads or 4,000.
It's small.
I think it's $2,500.
But yes.
Okay.
So it's small.
So it's great, but it's small.
Liberty, you've got, how many students?
So we've got over $15,000 on campus when you look at K through 12 online as well as.
K through 12.
We have K through 12 online.
We have about 18,000 students across the country doing homeschooling online.
K through, yeah.
You know what?
I forgot about this.
I wasn't expecting to talk about this, but that's like even more crazy.
Yeah.
That is amazing.
Yeah.
So this is.
This is using the digital sphere to bring people into education in California, in New York.
I mean, so you think about parents who are saying, oh, my gosh, what do I do?
There's answers for this.
We have actually solved for this problem, this challenge in education.
COVID was a huge on-ramp for online, remote homeschooling.
Romans 828, folks.
Think about it.
COVID, the nightmare of COVID led many, many parents.
parents to see what was actually going on. They would have never known if it hadn't been for the
nightmare of COVID. And now their eyes are open. And they said, you know what? I'm not going to
feed my children poison. I'm not going to let my kids get fed poison. I'm going to take this
into my own hand. So yeah, homeschooling has, I mean, exploded. And so obviously, as you've just
reminded me, Liberty is also involved with that. But how many students, when we're talking about
the campus, the college, you said there are 15,000?
there, but you've got a huge online.
Yeah, it's well over 100,000 online.
Well over 100,000 online.
This is unbelievable.
Yeah, it's a modern miracle.
And so when you think about the vision of Dr. Falwell, I don't think he ever envisioned it being that big.
And we're just getting started.
Well, because he can envision like online enrollment, the fact that people anywhere.
That's right.
I'm gushing like Jimmy Fallon.
Forgive me, folks.
but it's it's I listen because you guys are doing this at this level I want I want everybody to know
because a lot of times people are you know they ring their hands I mean you mentioned Notre Dame
Notre Dame you know there was once a day where if you were a faithful Catholic you'd say I want
to send my kid there that place has gone liberal woke nuts you don't want to send your kid to
Notre Dame you you don't it's like Georgetown they've been taken over
by the left. And, you know, Yale University was founded as a Christian institution
in the early 18th century. Well, guess what? They're like a Marxist training ground now.
You know, so those who have stood firm like Liberty, and it's a big deal. Yeah. It's a big deal.
It's huge. And so as we go on, I mean, we're pursuing excellence in every area. So this is the
important thing is fully accredited, right?
all the degree programs. It's not like, oh, I'm getting a certificate and something, you know, online. No, you can get a business degree online.
You can get a number of subjects that are covered online remotely. But I would just encourage people to check that out at liberty.edu.
The most important thing you can do is give your son or daughter a Christian education. That's essential.
Going back to what you said about Yale, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, these were all divinity schools originally.
Yes, they were graduating lawyers. Yes, they were graduating physicians, but they had a theological Christian founding.
It wasn't just that it was muted or it was downplayed, you know, the Christian faith.
It was literally about for Christ, for truth, for his glory, upholding the Christian scriptures, right?
The Gospel of Jesus Christ.
So Liberty University was founded in modern times addressing the liberal drift.
And then now you're talking about smuggling in wokeism.
We see that even in Christian churches.
Oh, forget it.
That's why we have to stand firm.
All right.
Listen, we're going to, we've got plenty more.
I'm talking to Ryan Halfenbine.
In the meantime, you can go to liberty.
dot edu.
Liberty.edu.
We'll be right back.
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Welcome back talking to my friend, Ryan Helphenbein.
Is that a real name?
Yeah.
Today it is.
I'm so sorry.
No, that's Helfenbine.
Ryan Helfenbine, you are the head of the Freedom Center at Liberty.
But what was the, you have another title that I always forget?
Vice President of Communications and Public Engagement at Liberty.
Okay, what does that mean?
That's great.
Just messaging, public relations, external, internal, news.
So you also have a podcast.
that I've been on many times.
Give me liberty.
I was on it recently.
Yeah.
It's just called Give Me Liberty.
Give Me Liberty podcast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we're talking about Christian education.
We're talking about Christianity and the American University.
So the center, the Standing for Freedom Center, is the Webhouse.
I mean, I'm sorry, the website is standing for freedom.com.
dot com yeah so in the vision of dr fallwell uh he he wants to found a modern christian university
he wants to excel in areas of academics and athletics the other thing he said quite clearly
this is in his autobiographies in the 1990s that he wanted a christian institution that was not
just conservative theologically he wanted it to be conservative politically and he was
absolutely clear he was you know pro-fifes
free market, didn't want it to sort of succumb to the left-leaning or liberal drift, as other
Christian universities had done in the past. There was a Christian ethicist. His name was Ronald
Nash, and he wrote a lot of books in the 1980s. One of the things he said in a speech, it was about
the ACLU. He was giving a speech, and he said, if you wanted to ensure your son or daughter
became a liberal, send them to a Christian university. That was Dr. Ron Nash in the 1980s. This is
something where Dr. Falwell was seeing something
was happening culturally, politically.
You go back to 1971.
There was evangelicals for McGovern, Ron Cider, and others that were creating.
This is exactly like evangelicals for Harris.
Oh, you know what it's like?
It's like pacifists who are for guns, pro-gun pacifists.
Like your head explodes because the policies of McGovern, and those are nothing compared
of the policies, Harris-Waltz.
But, I mean, the fact that there are people who don't understand,
who do not understand that you cannot do that.
If you vote for Harris-Waltz,
and if you have any understanding of how policy works or anything like that,
you can't be a serious Christian.
I mean, you can think you're a Christian.
You can believe in the resurrection of Jesus,
but then you're voting against that.
And so this has been going on since the early 70s.
That's why Liberty University was founded.
That's exactly right.
So the 1960s protest culture, you think of Rudy Dushka, who basically said we need to do a bit long march through the institutions.
They went from the streets into colleges and universities and elsewhere, right?
They went into the high rises in Manhattan.
They went on to the board of trustees for major Fortune 500 companies.
And they started systematically changing things and transforming.
It's kind of the liberal progressive gaze, if you will, the perspective, the lens by which we interpret reality.
That was shifting.
And in the 1970s, Dr. Falwell, I mean, today we see, oh, yeah, that's obvious.
But you don't just create an institution like this overnight to scale where you're educating 140,000 students.
You can't just do that overnight.
You have to build that up.
So he recognized he had the forethought and the foresight, and I think the Holy Spirit gave it to him,
recognizing this is what we have to do in order to ensure that the foundations of freedom exist for the next generation.
So the Standing for Freedom Center is a part of that answer in terms of theologically conservative, politically conservative, defending life, liberty, and truth.
So, yes, evangelicals for McGovern, that was like the first iteration of what you're seeing today, Evangelicals for Harris.
And the entire purpose of that is to not focus on policies, public policy, not on substantive issues like abortion, like parental rights, like medical freedom, like education, instead just focus on personalities.
Do you like this person better than you like that person?
Let's not think about the 10,000 other reasons.
It's personnel, it's policy makers, it's appointees that go into an administration.
Don't look at that.
Instead, do the Solilinsky tactic of isolating, freezing an individual, attacking them, and ultimately rejecting them.
So that's the whole purpose behind evangelicals for Harris is just to put the focus and the attention on Donald Trump, not the policies.
And listen, evangelicals for Harris, I mean, I'll be real clear. You cannot be a serious Christian and vote for Harris. Now, you can think you are, but the fact of the matter is you're participating in evil. So it's like saying, I'm a serious Christian. Oh, yes, I commit adultery. Yes, I steal. Oh, but I believe in the resurrection. I believe in the Nicene Creed. If you believe in those things, how do you do these other things? And so there's this disconnect.
where people just say, you know, and I've talked about this a lot, they say, what's about faith? It's about faith. It's like, no, you're twisting what faith means. Faith without works is dead. If you are not living out your faith, then God doesn't see it as faith. He sees it as an illusion, a delusion that you have faith. But if you're not living out your faith, and there are many people today that have been deceived, and they think that somehow, well, politics is separate from
my faith. Well, no, you're in the United States of America and people, patriots have died so you can
vote biblical policies, biblical leadership.
Anyway, we'll be right back. We're talking to Ryan Helf and Bine. You can find him at
Standing for Freedom.com or Liberty.edu.
Welcome back, talking to my friend Ryan Helfin Bine. That's his real name.
Ryan, how long have you been at Liberty University? Five years. Five years.
years because I've known you, you know, in this, I visited Liberty so many times and I've spoken
for the Freedom Center and I believe, I clearly, people listening, they know how strongly I believe
in what you're doing. And also, because it's so rare, because so many Christian colleges and
universities have drifted woke or they're just, you know, it's, it's kind of like the way Yale
was in the 80s when I was there.
It was conceivable that you could avoid it, the bad stuff, but it wasn't going to be easy.
And a lot of Christian colleges and universities that I would have recommended 15, 20 years ago,
I can't anymore because you could be sending your kid into Marxist lunacy, into wokeery
at the supposedly Christian school.
It's pretty crazy.
So there's just a tiny handful of schools that have.
have stood really firm and at the top of the list is liberty. So I have to say I'm just grateful
to everybody at liberty for making that happen because it's been tough. Yeah, the real challenge,
I think, in our modern times is not, we want to say true to the faith, right? Once for all,
delivered to the saints. We have to stand unabashedly, unapologetically on the Word of God.
We have to recognize that there's no part of education that is isolated from the other, right?
What you're seeing with Marxism, what you're seeing with wokeism is the fragmentation.
It all gets isolated, it gets broken down through deconstruction.
We no longer have a scientific method, right?
Medical science is about the affirmation of someone's psychotic delusions, right?
And I'm not, you know, I'm not using radical terminology.
This is real.
We're seeing this, where you take a child and you have adults that have all kinds of delusional beliefs, and then, you know, that child could be castrated.
It's ridiculous.
This is what we're seeing in society.
The scientific method was invented by Christians.
Correct.
Right?
And nothing is isolated.
And all of human thought, you can't take one thing and say, well, we're going to be faithful to sort of uphold, you know, the indefinitely.
integrity of science or, you know, the integrity of scientific discovery, if at the end of the day,
that discovery leads you to understand, hey, there is a divine maker, there's an intelligent
designer.
Let's personalize it.
His name is Jesus Christ.
And he created all of these things.
That is why it's so critical to have a Christian education, a full-orbed worldview, a totalizing
worldview where you recognize all these things are connected. Leftism wants to hijack Christianity
and wants to utilize it for its own purposes. It wants to appropriate Christianity.
I want to say, first of all, in my book is atheism dead, I talk about the undeniable fact in history
that modern science was created by Christians, by devout Christians. You can look at
Look it up in my book, is atheism dead?
Most people don't know that.
And so what we call modern science is reality-based.
God created a reality.
He created the universe.
He wants us to explore it and investigate it because it leads to his glory.
So it's about truth.
It's about reality.
And what we're seeing now is when ideology takes over.
And you saw this in Nazi Germany.
They started saying, like, well, we don't want some science we don't like.
So we're going to call it Jewish science.
And then Aryan science, that's good science.
So they started, it's where insanity invades, and you create this ideology.
So any book, any science, anything that came from a quote unquote Jewish source was labeled bad.
So they were no longer interested in truth.
They were interested in their ideology.
So you get Nazi science and you had scientists and doctors going along with this.
You have the same thing happening now where you have trans ideology, you have woke ideology.
It's infected the medical world, the scientific establishment.
So again, this is why we have to, what you're saying, we have to have a holistic view of reality.
It can't be, I have this ideology.
And if the facts bother me, I'm just going to blow off those facts and I'll get new facts.
That's basically what's happening.
And so it's an interesting moment.
why we need a real Christian education. And by the way, courageous Christian education,
Christian education that says we're not going to allow these things to come in, which many,
many, and I say it again, folks, many Christian colleges and universities, some of them led by
friends of mine, you know, they're in a battle. Wokism is pushing in to these Christian schools.
And so you guys at Liberty have stood the strongest, and I have to say right now it's a
bigger deal than ever. I mean, in 2024, this is a big deal. And I would, I would add to everything you just
said that the, that education is an offensive strategy, meaning that you have to recruit,
you have to train up, you have to build. Let's be honest, education takes a long time. There's a
methodology, a pedagogy. You don't just start and you do it like, oh, I'm going to do it in 18
months, you know, I'm going to train up the next generation. No, it starts from the time a child is
born, right? And you have to bring them up. That's why K through 12 matters, but that's also why
college matters. It takes a long time to do it. China has a hundred-year plan, a hundred-year
strategy. The leftists, it's like they have a 50-year strategy. I mean, they really are about
capturing the institutions, culture-making institutions, whether it be entertainment. Obviously,
we have these digital platforms. They own a lot of big tech. But
But, you know, they also want education.
That's a big component of it.
As conservatives, we have this defensive strategy, Eric, where we just focus on, well, this is the next election.
And we got to win this.
And this is the biggest election of our lifetime.
That's true.
That's true.
But what about the next 50 years?
That's why Christian universities matter.
Right.
And if we don't win this election, there will be no next 50 years.
Exactly.
So we have to win.
But then we have to do the hard work of undoing all.
all of the damage that has happened in the culture and in schools.
So quick question.
How long has Liberty been involved in the K-12 online stuff?
So this has come up in the past 10 years.
This is something that we've started.
It's recent.
Yeah, it's very recent.
But I just want to mention that because we're out of time,
but it's so amazing to me that that's another option.
So liberty.edu is the website.
You can also go to standing for freedom.com.
Ryan Helfenbine. Thank you. Thank you, Eric.
Ryan, before I let you go, you were just talking to me off the air about this initiative, Liberty First, whatever.
Tell my audience about that. Yeah, so I mean, this basically is a new imprint of Liberty University, the Standing for Freedom Center.
It's called Liberty First. We're going to be putting out our inaugural issue like now, essentially.
It'll come out. You probably hit some mailboxes in the next month or so.
But there's a chapter out of your book, Letter to the American Church.
It's entitled, Speak the Truth in Love.
And so appropriate for the times that we're in, I think that people need to have the courage to stand up.
We appreciate so much what you do on your program in your books to steal the spine of Christians to be courageous.
We have to be courageous.
And we have to tell the truth.
I think that one of the things about love is that people have defined it as kind of this mushy-gush,
feelings-based thing. But no, love includes facts, right? Love includes the truth. Yeah.
And so Jesus was full of grace, full of truth. And we have to recognize as Christians,
that means that there's this balance. I don't mean that we have less grace or more truth or
more truth and less grace. Literally, he was all of those things, right? Full of grace, full of
truth. And in this cultural moment, we have to say what is true.
And when we are worried about, you know, sparing people's feelings, we then pull back from that.
And I think you do it so well, you articulate it so well, and letter to the American Church.
Well, I didn't know that the inaugural issue of Liberty First is about my book letter to the American Church.
But I'm happy to see it.
And I'm happy that you're talking about this stuff.
Now, if people want to want to get this, how do they get this?
It's a monthly thing?
Yeah, it's a monthly thing.
So go to standing for freedom.com and sign up there.
You can contact us and be added to our subscriber list.
We have a newsletter list.
We do digital newsletter twice a week.
But this is going out once a month.
Okay.
So this is a Hillsdale puts out something called imprimis.
Yeah.
Which is fantastic.
And this is kind of like that.
Very similar.
Yeah, very similar.
You know, Hillsdale has charted a course,
have been doing something like that for over 50 years.
On campus, we have a convocation that happens twice a week.
We have speakers from all of the world.
You've come to our campus and have delivered multiple speeches.
You know, we have an opportunity to showcase the Christian faith, right,
at the intersect of culture, of politics, of Christian thought, like all of it together.
I think it's really important that people understand that we're not trying to
to just be an intellectual piece. We're trying to give a reason for the hope that is within us.
This is right out of 1st Peter chapter 3. This is about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that's
why we had to stand firm. Well, the one thing we haven't said is, again, I just talk about this
incessantly, but you have to live out your faith in every sphere. So people have this lie that
they have bought that my faith is just a personal thing. My faith is just some theology in my head.
it's like, no, that is not biblical faith.
That is not the faith that Jesus died on the cross and rose again for you to have.
He wants you to live out your faith in all spheres, which means you have to connect the dots.
What does my faith mean in terms of what I teach my kids?
What does my faith mean in terms of whether I vote, how I vote?
You have to connect the dots.
So it has to be holistic.
And Bonhofer called it faith in action.
Yeah.
And it's why I constantly talk about Bonhofer, because Bonhofer saw that.
He saw this a hundred years ago how churches were privatizing, and it became meaningless.
And they allowed satanic evil in the form of the Nazis to rise because they got this wrong.
So we need to get it right.
So it's very important.
So my book is Letter to the American Church, but I didn't know that the inaugural issue of Liberty First has this excerpt from my book.
And what is the website for people to get this?
Yeah.
Standing for Freedom.com.
standing for freedom.com.
Okay, highly recommended.
Thank you, Ryan.
