The Sean McDowell Show - Is America Doomed? Os Guinness Speaks Out

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Is the West, specifically America at a breaking point? Today, I have renowned social critic and author Os Guinness here to talk about his latest book, Our Civilizational Moment. Using history, philosophy, and faith, he believes that unless the West returns to its founding spiritual roots, decline is inevitable.READ: Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds by Os Guinness (https://a.co/d/areQybY)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Is the West at a pivotal crisis point, a civilizational moment that will determine its destiny? As America failed itself and its duty to God and the world. Social critic, Os Guinness, is the author of a recent book, Our Civilizational Moment, that has a startling wake-up call for the church and the wider world. As, thanks for coming on. It's always a treat to chat. And I always want to have you on when you have a book out because you're a thinker, I want to know what you're thinking.

So thanks for coming on. Well, mutual pleasure, Sean. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, let's start with your story because it really seems to shape who you are and the sense of urgency behind this book. So how is your message shaped by being born in China and quite literally witnessing the Chinese revolution of 1949? Well, I'm sure that plays a part in my thinking.

because I was born in World War II in the middle of war, famine, violence, death, and then, of course, the Chinese Revolution. So my first 10 years, of course, when you grow up as a kid, whatever you experience, you think is normal. But looking back, and I realized it was an incredible schooling in the realism of things like Marxism and so on. And so I came away with an incredible sense of needing always to know where we are.

You think of the men following David, who read the signs of the times to know what Israel should do. You know, like a dog with sensitive ears, I think I've always been read to have a sense of where are we so that we can be faithful in the time we're living in. Tell me a little bit about the sense of urgency in this book because you're an academic and you're right with just deep understanding historically and culturally speaking, and yet there's just a sense of power in the words that it's like you're speaking with a prophetic voice in our moment. So where does that urgency come from? Well, Sean, I should say I'm not really an academic at all. I've never taught. You're an academic. I can see your university sign behind you.

Anyway, it's a pleasure to be with you. But this sense of the moment and many people don't appreciate it they look short term they don't have a sense of history they don't have a sense of the global world and so you know i've always been drawn to thinkers like Winston Churchill or historians like Christopher Dawson who have a big picture view of the challenge of our time and the idea of the civilizational moment comes from Christopher Dawson. You know, the idea that every civilization rises by some inspiration, some dynamism, but there's a point at which it loses touch with whatever made it great. And when that happens, there are only three broad options, a renewal of the original inspiration, a replacement

of the inspiration by something equally solid, or decreasing. decline. And if you think for a minute, all the great civilizations of the world, apart from the West, are in ruins and museums and history books. In other words, they came to that moment and they declined. Now, if you look at the West, what clearly made the West our inspiration, we owe a lot to the Greeks. We owe something to the Romans. But the principal inspiration is the Christian faith. The conversion are the barbarians in Europe. And yet, for 300 years, the West has systematically set out to repudiate the Christian faith, beginning with the intellectuals, and now spreading far wider in most of the West. And the alternative was

supposed to be enlightenment secularism. No God, but you had reason. and progress and we could do it all without the lord and that's failed so the west is at this extraordinary moment now unless there's a reawakening of the inspiration and dynamism of the christian faith rooted of course in judaism the west is in decline now there's some people that you talk with your book that would disagree with your assessment and take on the west and some would say it's not really a concern whether America rises or falls because we should be focused on global citizenship. What's your take on that perspective? Well, that's very much the enlightenment idea. We should give up any notion of everything

particular. So your particular nation or whatever and consider ourselves global citizens. And that's, of course, the ethos of Davos, the World Economic Forum and people like H.C. Wells who wanted a one world directorate and so on. And I think that's exceedingly dangerous. You know, the fact is that love, reason, is universal. Science, technology are universal. But certain other things are not, above all, love. It's right, we love a particular person, not everyone.

We love a particular nation, that's patriotism, and so on. So the universalism of the Enlightenment is actually extremely dangerous and leading towards authoritarianism. And if you look at Davos, they start with global problems. Then you have to have a global solution and you have to have global institutions to carry them out. And where do you end up? One world government. And there's a logic behind what they're doing. And I think that's an extremely dangerous idea. Of course, you do have, say, Stephen Pinker at Harvard. they look at all the problems today and say, no, no, these are not real problems.

We're on the verge of the golden age of humanity. And I think they are dead wrong. All right, we're going to get into more and more of that critique, which is really helpful. There's a few provocative lines in your book. And you say, for example, faith has largely been canceled in serious discussion today, not only by secular thinkers, but even by, many religious believers. And then further down on that page, it says, weak or powerful, absent or present, faith is the decisive issue for the West today. So on one, you say it's been canceled.

Second, it's decisive. So two questions about this. Let's start with why is faith so decisive for our civilizational moment? Well, if you look at all civilizations, there's something that's important geographically. You take, say, the Nile for Egypt. And then there are things like institutional strengths, say the chariots for Egypt, and things like that, the Roman sword. But always in a civilization, there is a way that it answers the basic questions of human existence. In other words, it's faith. And it's clearly in the West, the Christian faith is the central dynamism. And that's why Lord Acton, the great historian of freedom, religion is the key to history. So Richard Newhouse used to put it, behind culture, there is a cult. And always the very deepest thing is

faith. So I have no answer, no question at all, that religion is the key to history, whether by its presence, its weakness, or its absence. Now you go back to the first half of your challenge, One of the effects of secularization, now not secularism, that's a philosophy, secularization of process, what it does is banish religion to the subjective and the private sphere. So it's privately engaging publicly relevant. And so you don't have, you go back to say the 60s, you had great theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr who openly talking about theology. in terms of American public policy

and in terms of American public life. Who does that today? You can't. Even Christian thinkers don't do that today. Now, I think that's a tragedy. I personally think, in my next book, actually the one after next, is going to be on the cross

as the way of healing America's race problems. Now, you look at the American church, we have made the cross private. and spiritual only. But if you think Calvary, and in the Old Testament, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Day of Atonement came in to answer the national problem of the Golden Cove. How many American Christians really think that the cross is the answer to the problems of American guilt and so on over slavery and racism. We've got to make our faith public again in ways that are really powerful. I love that. That's really at the root of secularism and that distinction between secularization

and secularism is an important one. Now, this book came out, it seemed like, towards the end of 2024. And I still call it a recent book because you're making a broad cultural kind of critique. And yet, One of the lines that you said is faith has been canceled in serious discussion today. Someone could argue, and I have, that there seems to be a resurgence of interest in faith. Some of the thinkers you've interacted with, like Jordan Peterson, Barry Wise, Jonathan Rouch. We've seen big conversions of faith, people like Ayan, Herssey Ali, Bible reading is up. a case can be made that there's a renewed interest in spirituality today. And according to people like Ross Douthit at the New York Times and others,

there's kind of an awareness that secularism is dead. Do you agree with that assessment or do you view it a little bit differently? No, I agree with that. Secularism as the intended replacement for the Christian faith has died. Above all in the early 20th century, you think of the rise of the grand ideologies like communism, fascism, Nazism. Each of those clearly has atheism as heart, but they led to murderous outcomes, and clearly they were a disaster. They were all anti-Western, of course.

Now, I would say not only do we have this civilizational moment I described, we have what used to be called barbarians within the gates. And so I describe what I call them the waves. You've got the red wave of cultural Marxism. You've got the rainbow wave of the sexual revolution. And you've got the black wave of radical Islamism. And they are all powerfully working within the West against the West.

So secularism and its enlightenment pretensions has failed, despite people like so. Stephen Pinker and Yuval Harari is failed. And there is a turning to faith. I know some of the people you mentioned. So, say, Ian Hirsi Ali, who is a friend, was often attacked as being, quote, a cultural Christian. That's totally unfair.

But there's no doubt that that idea of cultural Christianity, the idea that unless you have the Christian faith, you lose the culture, because otherwise you're a cut flower civilization. That's true, but cultural Christianity is not the real thing, of course. But it is an important halfway stage. So it was people who saw that if we lose certain things, we lose a lot more. That in the search for that came to faith.

And Ion and her husband, Neil Ferguson, were both baptized last summer. That's pretty remarkable that both of them have for so many different reasons. One piece that I don't see in your book, and I'm curious your take on this, is I totally agree about the sexual revolution, radical Islam, critical theory. But it seems to me a lot more people believe in kind of new age beliefs and kind of a pseudo-Christianity than they do secularism. What's your concern about that renewed interest it seems like in things like reincarnation and tarot cards and psychedelics seem to be coming back? How does that fit into your broader civilizational, you're concerned about our civilizational moment? Well, my concern is basically leadership and the key things of public life.

And I don't think the New Age has anything like the influence there that some of these other movements do. Now, I've followed the New Age. You know, my first book on The Dust of Death, back in 1971, I have a chapter on the New Age movements and on the Eastern movements. And, of course, they're extremely powerful where you live in California. Well, I wouldn't say they're powerful, say, in Washington and really shaping the future of the world. In other words, much of the new age is privately engaging, publicly irrelevant.

And sadly, when the Christian faith is pressed back to be privately engaging, publicly irrelevant, it's no better than the new age. And so we need to recover that integration, the Lordship of Christ over every sphere of life to show that the faith really is relevant everywhere. So the New Age is important and dangerous at the personal level, but I don't think it's shaping American national life. Those who would be in the more secular camp, at least many that I've interacted with and read, will kind of raise the flip concern of what you have here. in terms of not too little faith, but too much. I was interacting with kind of a leading atheist from a state recently, who founded the atheist movement in kind of the 1980s,

and he was just deeply concerned about Christian nationalism and the encroachment of secular rights, et cetera. The flip side, I get here, somebody say, you're talking about this renaissance of faith, the root in faith, how important it's been in Western civilization, but my big concern is Christian nationalism when it goes the opposite direction. How concerned are you from a civilizational level towards Christian nationalism? Well, there's a tremendous need for thoughtful Christians to express the faith in the most

constructive ways. And so often it's left to people who are angry and insecure and fearful and their expressions of faith are taken to be the real thing. And that's a tragedy. But Christian nationalism is surrounded by a lot of unfair talk. In other words, you mentioned the Enlightenment earlier. All the universalism of the Enlightenment is against every nation. Now, I follow, I think, a much more biblical approach, which George Orwell, who's an atheist, he would say patriotism is good.

Nationalism is bad. In other words, patriotism, we all need meaning. Your whole apologetics is about that. We need meaning, belonging, and purpose. And all, we have to have a place to give us a sense of belonging. And that's not just a neighborhood, but also a nation. And so I think patriotism is very, very important and very, very good. But when patriotism becomes my country, right, wrong and then it becomes an idolatry that's nationalism and that's very dangerous now the critics don't have any distinctions like that so every christian who supports their country is a christian nationalist and that's wrong now there are people who are really wild and they are dangerous and i think they're idolatrous and they're putting america before the gospel in the way they speak and that is dangerous but I would defend patriotism while attacking nationalism. That's a fair distinction, of course. When it comes to Christian nationalism, we have to define what's meant by it.

And there's about three or four different definitions that are often used. I've done about three or four shows here and just not convinced it's as significant of an issue as many people claim that it is. But that's in many ways a conversation for another time. Okay, so back to secularism, you make the point that reason absolutized carries the seeds of authoritarianism. What do you mean by reason being absolutized, and why would it carry the seeds of authoritarianism? Well, back to Christopher Dawson again, way back in the 1930s, he predicted the growth of authoritarianism. He said in countries that had a bad background, say Germany with its military background, or Russia with its autocratic background, they would develop an authoritarianism that was harsh totalitarianism. But Western countries, Britain, the U.S., with a liberal background, in other words, loving freedom, they would develop a soft totalitarianism.

And by that he meant you take things like the framers' fear. of the encroaching state. That's the sort of thing they meant. Or take, say, the managerial revolution. With management studies, you can figure out how everything works, a business, a country, a family, you name it, and we'll figure out how it works, and we'll figure out how to work it more efficiently, more smoothly,

and you have systems for running everything. And eventually, you just stamp out freedom. And the managerial revolution, the managerial state and so on the nanny state as maggie thatcher called it you see a creeping authoritarianism over the whole of life now huge pushback at the moment often not in the wisest way but it's a pushback against that creeping rationalization of everything so we've conquered nature through reason and now we want to conquer the whole of human nature and figure out everything and be able to control it that's not i mean

If you absolutize freedom, it becomes anarchy. But if you absolutize reason and figure out how everything works and then you can control it, it becomes authoritarianism. How concerned are you about authoritarianism? I guess this ties to the Christian nationalist question a little bit earlier. But you are kind of unflinching in your critique of the Catholic Orthodox and Protestant Church in the past in its failings and its abuse of authority. So how, when we talk about authoritarianism, how concerned are you about the church?

Maybe if more and more Christians get power in our country would have the reverse kind of authoritarianism and have that negative effect again in the modern culture today. Well, go wider, Sean. Go back to our friend Nietzsche, at least on our great enemy, Nietzsche. If you read his last book, The Will to Power, the last sentence of it, what is my view of reality? The world is the will to power and nothing else besides. Now, what's he saying? The Christian faith subverted pagan and Roman power.

That's what led Tom Holland to come to faith. You mentioned the intellectuals earlier. He was not just struck by the resurrection. No, he said there are myths of dying, rising gods everywhere. But there is nothing like the cross and its subversion of power. Now, Nietzsche's point is simply, that is what he calls. slave morality, Christian faith, the Jewish faith. So we want to get rid of that and go back to the glorying of power. That's the world today. Authoritarian power. Now that's incredibly

dangerous. In this country, postmodernism. Truth is dead. Everything's power. So you've got a power on the left, but now you've got a power on the right. So President Trump, make America great again, there's an omission there he never says what made America great in the first place and it was a principal view of freedom you got from the framers it wasn't military power wasn't economic power his assertion of power without principle is deadly dangerous but it's on the right not the left so that danger of power is on both sides and if Christians think and the Temptation is we've lost the consensus. We've lost our dominant place in the culture. We have jocals. So we grab power. No. We've got to exercise power in a biblical way because power

is the world's greatest danger today. That's, you know, there's a shift from the West to Eurasia, as it's called. In other words, the greatest landmass in the whole world is Eurasia. And Eurasia is ruled by totalitarians with Putin in the West, Xi Jinping in the east, North Korea and the northeast and the Ayatollahs in the south. Eurasia is ruled by totalitarianism. And that is the greatest danger in our world. And if Christians mimic that, it's horrendous. So freedom depends on a limit to power. Separation of powers, checks and balances, come. in the Bible. Many people don't, they think of it as Montesquieu. They don't, the Jews, they call it the three crowns of authority, the king, the priest, and the prophet. The prophet was the guardian of the

covenant. So the prophet had the right and the responsibility to be able to challenge the king. Take, say, Nathan to David or Elijah to Ahab. And so you had a separation of powers because Because power is the greatest danger in a fallen world. And we're going back to that today. Christians better wake up. Power. You know, Lord Acton, power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Power not only oppresses the weak, it corrupts the powerful. And that's the danger. Since you're looking at this from such a top-down cultural moment perspective, what role does or should politics play for Christians as they think about, you know, getting America and the West back to its Judeo-Christian roots? What role does politics play within that? Well, a very important part, but we need to start with the old maxim. The first thing to say about politics is the politics is not the first thing. In other words, the politicizing, turning everything into politics first came from the left in the 1920s and now it's followed

even by the right and that's incredibly dangerous. But let me start because often I go, I was not long ago in California. People said to me in effect, you know, I don't want to be like the early church. I want to be faithful, keep my head down and be faithful to the Lord and right out the storm. But I'm not going to vote and people tell me they vote for their father or their best friend or someone you know who's lincoln or whatever i say that's dead wrong because the early christians were under an imperial dictatorship they had zero room to move politically that's true but the american republic is largely based on the hebrew republic exodus deuteronomy and one of the key ideas you

you see there is the reciprocal responsibility of everyone for everyone. The covenant was not just made between the Lord and Moses, it was the Lord and everybody and everybody with everybody else. Long before the Three Musketeers, it was all for one, one for all. In other words, every Jew is responsible for every Jew. That's their maxim. And in the same way, Christians who opt out of politics. It's a failure not only of discipleship, it's a failure of citizenship, because every American is responsible for the American Republic. And when Tockville, Alexei de Tocqueville was here in the 1830s, you know, he says religion is the first of the American political institutions, although it was disestablished. Why? The churches were the schools of citizenship. They didn't

demand political power all the time but they made the difference that was important so we've got to go back to getting politics in its place politics is very very important but it's not all important and the key to revival and social renewal is always the culture in other words families churches schools they are what needs to be renewed and revived if the country is to be renewed and revived. So parents are critical. Teachers are critical. Coaches of sports teams and so on are critical. The culture matters more than politics, but politics is important. That's fair. That's a helpful balance way to look at it and approach it. One of the things that you don't hold back on is the failures of the church throughout history.

And you make a point about how secularism is largely brought on by the failings of the church scandals in the past and in the present. Explain that and talk about that for us, if you will. Well, you can see that more clearly, say, in other countries. You take the collapse of religion in general, but faith in particular in Canada because of the unearthing of all the problems in the schools. The same was true in Ireland, you have, which is the country my ancestors come from, you have the most rapid secularization in European history, almost one generation, and throwing away the church from the high 90s down to appalling little effect. Why? Because of the appalling scandals of the priests. Now, we have milder equivalence here. You just think of the television evangelists and other things like that. They have besmirched the name of the church. So, you know, I include myself. We all have to, we are witnesses.

The Lord says to his people and to us, you are my witnesses. And if we don't live his way, we're giving a very shadow, shabby impression of all that he is. So it's the church that is the real problem. Much of the American church is in an appalling shape. yeah it's it's sobering to let that sink in for a minute i want to let that pause for people to hear what you said about the state of the church today and you include yourself in that and so do i it's not just pointing fingers outside i think that's that's a really powerful point to make uh let's let's shift back earlier you talked about three narratives that could

replace, say, kind of Western civilization. Let's maybe take them one by one and talk about why they concern you. One is the Red Revolution, I think you call it, referring to Marxism. Do you mean Marxism? Do you mean cultural Marxism? Why is that such a concern today? Well, communism has discredited itself by its appalling record with over a hundred hundred million deaths on its hands, mainly in Russia and in China. And so the cultural Marxist, Antonio Gramscian and George Lukach, their revision of Marxism. So it's not looking at the cross struggle, but the various other struggles all centering on the victim, the victim racially, the victim sexually, the victim in whatever way, and then

notions like intersectionality where people can be victims across various groupings, since the West has done so much wrong, we are vulnerable to that critique. So you just take say European colonialism. Post-colonialism is a very powerful tool in Europe because of the huge guilt in Europe over colonialism. Now you ask, what's America's greatest sin? And there's no question. I I'm not American. You could answer it for yourself. Almost everyone would say racism and slavery. That's an appalling record, including the church in the South, justifying slavery theologically. Now Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Revolution, a movement did an incredible amount in changing that legally, institutionally, and in attitudes. But there was still a lingering

residue of American guilt. And then, of course, King died and didn't complete much of his movement. And so the radicals knew that was an open wound for them to exploit. And they have done in many ways. And that's guilt still unaddressed. You know, the great historian, Jacob Burkhardt. He says, if you leave evils unaddressed or wounds unaddressed, they're kind of like a minefield. If you leave mines at the end of the war, an innocent civilian can trip over one or an enemy can set them off.

And that's what the guilt over racism is doing for America today. So America is incredibly vulnerable to the cultural Marxist critique, which is classical communism, but just in a revisionist form. Do you have a sense that cultural and Marxist,

racism often called wokeness is somewhat dying. And this is something that Trump has taken a shot at, even pulling funding from certain universities that support the EI. No. I don't. In other words, a massive pushback. You think of, you know, Bud Light or Target or these various things. And then Trump's tackling Harvard or other universities like Columbia.

But if you think, where is it strong? It's strong in the universities, in the ideas. You can't change that by removing the funding. You're actually cementing it even more deep. And it's also backed by super funders. You think of George Soros around 2000, realizing he could create a whole movement on the left, ever-morphing, pop-up this, that, and the other, if he superfunded them, including a lot of Christian organizations, which are superfunded by some of the people they shouldn't have taken money from.

So, no, Trump is giving you a massive pushback. Yes, thank God. But you can't deal with wokeism like that. It's an idea. You can't cancel ideas. Okay, so let's shift to the second one. which you call the Rainbow Revolution. There's a whole chapter on this. I've heard you talk about this before, but maybe get to kind of the heart

of what the sexual revolution was and why you think it's kind of in conflict with a Christian view of the world and sexuality. Well, you take the sexual revolution, most people think, ah, the 60s, Playboy, the pill, permissiveness, you know, and things like, which were an important mind.

in it. But actually the sexual revolution goes back to the same place in Paris, the Palais Royal, where the ideas of the political revolution came from. And they were very radical. The idea where they want to subvert 3,000 years of civilization, that was the Jewish centuries, as well as the Christian centuries. So it's a very, very radical idea. And you read people. people like Wilhelm Reich, who popularized the term the sexual revolution, he's quite clear. It's a little paperback. Anyone can read it. He says, we have two main enemies, the church and parents. So, for example, how will we undermine parents? Well, we'll have sex education at three and four. And you think of all the things that started in the schools and the way parental rights

have been undermined. They've done an incredibly damaging job. So if families, along with schools and the churches, are essential for a free society, the sexual revolutionists undermine that with incredible intentionality, much more radical than people have realized. Tell me how so. And by the way, when you say more radical than people realized, I have my students at Biola, I teach an undergrad class, and just last week had him read the opening section of the sexual revolution by Reich, which of course he writes, I think, in the 30s. And they were just stunned at how modern it sounds.

They're like, this felt like it was written maybe in the 60s at the latest. But this goes way back before World War II and defines us really kind of a Freudian idea about what it means to be human, what's wrong with the world, how we fix it with his understanding of sexual liberation. But back to your point, what do you mean it's far more profound its influence than many people realize? Well, they really are out to subvert the Christian West. And it's as clear as that. And they're doing it. So many Christians just don't look at history and understand the roots. So I live in Virginia. We have a wonderful governor at the moment, Glenn Yonkin.

He partly got in because of the controversy stirred up in Loudoun County over parents and a sexual revolution. Now, when that happened, many Christians thought, ah, that goes back to Harvard and Derek Bell and an idea. No, no, no, goes way way back before the 70s, before the 60s, before even the 30s who you've got your students reading about, way, way back to. 1789 in some cases earlier and so we've got to have christians who understand where the ideas come from and what some of these architects are out to do because they are doing it that's helpful i uh one of the points that i made with my students is things like same-sex marriage did not expand what marriage is it fundamentally changed it it's no longer sexed institution, it means something very different. Now we've got to reinvent parenting. Now we have to

reinvent a whole bunch of ideas that stem from this, which of course is in conflict with a biblical idea. Okay, let's shift to your third one is what you call the black revolution, radical Islamism. Explain that one and why you're concerned about it. Well, Islamism in that radical form goes back to a key meeting in November 1941, literally the month after I was born, in which Hitler invited the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to Berlin, and they created an alliance against the Jews. And that was very, very powerful, and that was behind the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and various other groups.

So there's a huge difference between, say, moderate or more moderate Islam, although Muslims don't generally like the word moderate. And the radical Islam, which is the caliphators who want a one global caliphate and they're fighting for it, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. Now, what you saw after October the 7th in the protests at Columbia and many of the other Ivy League universities was a convergence of radical Marxism coming from Gramsci in the 1960s, the long march of the institutions converging with radical Islamism coming from that meeting between Hitler and the Grand Mufti.

And they are quite specifically, out as the Ayatollah said very clearly, were not only against the little Satan, Israel, we're against the big Satan, America, and the West. And you can see that very clearly in a lot of the radical rhetoric coming from the campuses today. All right. So these are the three big concerns. I can imagine somebody listening to this saying, all right, this feels incredibly overwhelming. Like what could I possibly do to resist the sexual Revolution, radical Islamism, you know, the march through the universities with CRT. Next year, I'll have two kids in the university, and so it helps that I teach it by all, but a lot of people go, and I can barely afford to send my kids to the university, let alone resist this.

What's your hope and encouragement for Christians kind of in this civilizational moment? Well, think of the idea of civilization. What is the civilization? It's a culture that rises high enough, spreads far enough, and lasts long enough, and people go, wow, it's a civilization, Chinese, Egyptian, Babylonian, Roman, Greek, whatever, Western. Now, what's behind that? What's a culture? A culture put very simply is a way of life lived in common. The whole Jewish notion of Khalaka is the way of life under the law of the Torah.

Our Lord says, I am the way, the truth and the life. In other words, we are followers of the way. And so none of us can be the answer to the whole big picture. It's quite beyond us. It's beyond any of us to understand it, let alone respond to it. But if we're faithful to the Lord and live his way, so I challenge people to map their lives. They have a home, the neighborhood, community, a workforce, and then most people have some influence somewhat beyond that.

So you have your podcasts, a doctor has patience, you name it. If we each have these fears of influence in our mind, all we're responsible for is to live faithfully in the spheres of our life as disciples. Now, living faithfully though, we've got to recover things that have been lost. So you just take the supernatural. At the heart of what our Lord told us to do is things like healing, at the heart of Paul or at Daniel is that some of the things in the world are the principalities and powers. So we're talking about the grand ideologies.

Some of these things we can barely see the outline of their danger, but we can pray. and we should be praying about the situation of the world. So my financial influence is tiny. My other influence is not much bigger than that, but our prayers can go all the way around the world. So if we think of all the spheres in which we are active and ask ourselves, is our way of life faithful to the Lord in every one of those,

each of us can make a difference. And that way, now let me bring it back to the big picture, again. The great historians like Arnold Toynbee say that what creates a civilization is a creative minority. And when you reach the civilizational moment, the question is always, is there a creative minority powerful and constructive enough to make a difference or not? Now, our Christian terms is a remnant that's faithful. We've turned that word remnant. We've turned that word remnant. into something defensive, this sheltering, huddling, rather fearful remnant. Whereas you turn it in, the historians, a creative minority.

That's salt and light. So we are the key, faith is the key to history. Now, the book we're talking about is actually one of four, but I want them all four to come out later this year. The second one's on America. the third one is on the racial issue we mentioned and the fourth one is on a Christian response to the whole thing that's what's coming up so this one you this is the first book I've seen that I think you've self published if I'm not mistaken by Kildare. I'm curious the reasoning

for doing that and if your next books will be as well well well very simple reason that is I mean my 80s okay if you wait for the normal course of publishing you know nine months a year I wouldn't be alive to see them out I've written a quartet and I've got two others too on the way so I thought let's if you go on Amazon print on demand the book's only available on Amazon but you can find it on Amazon you can publish one you know I handed that book in on October the 24th and one week later got where you have in your hand now you compare that with the normal publisher in other words it's a purely practical thing i want to be

able to put them out and if god gives me the life and vigor to argue for them while they're out i love it that makes that makes total sense and by the way it doesn't look like a self-published book sometimes you can just tell with the cover the wording uh the editing it doesn't have that feel at all like none of the quality is sacrificed in this i want to make sure viewers know i only knew that because i'm familiar with the publishers you've used in the past and was like wait a minute had to look into it and and figured out so that makes that makes total sense uh let us know when those are out if it fits in your schedule would love to keep having you back i think your message is really really important for today if i can ask you one last question how as christians can

we balance. There's kind of an inward focus that you seem to talk about in this book, which is concern for faithfulness, concern with our own failings as a church and individuals. But then there's also this outward concern about things like cultural Marxism, sexual revolution, radical Islam. Seems like one mistake can be to just focus on the outward or just focus on inward. It's both. what does it look like in your mind to do that well and what encouragement would you give for people to try to balance those well that's not an easy balance because our world is so big in the global world and it's changing and moving so fast so the world has never been more overwhelming than it is today but i think the heart of discipleship following jesus is both

outward and inward. So we begin every day with our personal worship, you know, what used to be called the quiet time. But an hour above all with the Lord and the teaching of his word to center us and get our perspectives right, that's all inward. And then much of the rest of the day is outward and rushing around and doing all sorts of things. So actually the normal life is both all the time. And the challenge is to make sure we don't lose the inward. Most people, just by the pressure of life, are pulled here and there, and they do pretty well in the outward, the challenge is to make sure that, say, personal worship every day and worship every Sunday, the Sabbath and the Shabbat, you know, is always kept.

You know, I think the whole essence of the Shabbat, as the Jews teach it, is the day we cease. from striving activism and so on putting our will to work on the world and we recognize on Sunday no the Lord is the Creator and we're only creatures and we're very small people but we constantly need that balance and some people you know balance with fasting say or retreats so but whatever the balance is needed we need to make sure that each of us are doing it but certainly the daily one That's great. Well, Dr. Oss, Guinness, always enjoy having you on insightful, encouraging, eye-opening your book, Our Civilizational Moment. I'll hold it up here. It sounds like it's available on Amazon. People can get it delivered on a drone this afternoon if they need it really quickly. But Lord be with you with these last or the next four books that you're working on. Keep us posted. And if you're up for it and available, we'd love to have you back. Thanks for coming on. I'd always enjoy being with you, John.

Thanks so much. God bless. Blessings. And folks, before you click away and make sure you hit subscribe, you heard it. Good chance. We'll have Dr. Guinness back. But we also have a lot of other shows on apologetics and culture and evangelism coming up. You won't want to miss. You want to learn how to defend the faith lovingly in your family, your community,

potentially as an academic. We would love to have you at Talba School of Theology. I teach in the Apologetics program. and it's a fully online program now information below think about joining us we'll see you next time again thanks for coming on us