I recently got invited back, amazing that, to be on Joel’s podcast, Worldview Legacy. He has a great ministry called the Think Institute, and I love his tagline:
The Worldview Legacy Podcast is the show that helps Christian laymen become the worldview leaders their families and churches need.
That’s exactly what the church and society needs, more godly patriarchy, men who lead their homes and raise the next generation of warriors for Jesus and the kingdom of God. He further explains his vision:
Join Joel Settecase as he answers the questions the world is asking and discusses the Christian worldview with teachers, preachers and theologians. Together, they will help you build a legacy for your family: you, your kids and your wife will be able to confidently give answers from the Bible and see Jesus change lives as you share your faith.
I love it! He’s a great young man with a growing family, and we had a blast of a conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Here is the YouTube recording, and he’s on every podcast platform in case you just want to listen to the recording.
Looks like I’m on a politics role of late. Always keep this in mind: if you want politics not to be important in your life, it first has to be very important. Our enemies on the left and the Uniparty deep state want to control and rule over us, and we fought a revolutionary war 240 years ago to not be ruled by a king, but to rule ourselves. It is now time to take back our rule, and as Christians it is important that we understand the interplay of culture and politics, something it’s taken me many decades to understand.
The late great Andrew Breitbart was famous for saying that politics is downstream from culture, meaning our entertainment, education, media, etc., determines our politics. That is of course true, but in fact one-sided. Just as significantly, culture is downstream from politics. This is something conservative Christians, and conservatives in general, either miss or completely dismiss. I know I did until not too long ago.
When I became a born-again Christian in the fall of 1978, I was apolitical, knew nothing about it. I was only 18, so that’s understandable. It was coming across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who Is There a couple years later that made me realize I was a conservative, and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 confirmed it. Given my penchant for grandiose ambition, after I graduated I figured I would change the world through politics. That didn’t last long. Living in southern California at the time, I got involved in the 1984 campaign of B-1 Bob Dornan for congress in Orange County. While Bob and his wife and staff were great, I got completely disillusioned with the Republican Party in California. The so-called moderates despised the social conservatives and were determined to shut us out of the party, and many of those I met were not attractive characters. That hasn’t worked out real well for the Republican Party in the once great state of California. Politics as a career option was no longer something I saw myself doing.
While I was no longer involved in politics, I still voted and thought the conservative movement was the means to real political and cultural change in the country. Only, there was really never any change in our direction. We’d put our hope in this or that politician, and be continually disappointed. In 2000, one of those politicians was George W. Bush, and in hindsight that was a big mistake. I was glad he was reelected in 2004, especially with Republican majorities in both houses of congress. Did anything change, of course not, but just like golf, politics seemed to be hope over experience. Then in the 2006 midterms we got wiped out. After 20 years of putting my hope in politics, nothing had changed for the better. That’s when I had my cultural epiphany.
I’d put my hope in politics for cultural change, not realizing the dynamic between the two. As Christians and conservatives we’d lost the culture first as it secularized, then that led to political defeat. So, I decided we needed to re-focus on the culture, and I started a non-profit to fight for cultural change called The Culture Project. I got a few guys on board and we did some conferences and writing and things, but it basically went nowhere. I was glad to see, though, over the next years that Christians and the conservative movement in general was finally starting to understand the importance of the culture in the battle for America. Politics, however, is the distribution of power in a society, and I realized in due course that just focusing on culture was naïve. Those who have power drive policy which in due course drives culture. How does it do this?
Throughout my life I’ve heard non-Christians declare that “you can’t legislate morality.” They clearly don’t understand that laws are morals backed up with the force of the state, so legislation is morality. And what is morality? Right and wrong, and laws are about what is right and wrong, morality, passed by legislators as the elected representatives of the people. What is perjury but thou shalt not lie. In this way laws do reflect the people, but law is also a teacher, it educates and instructs in what is right and wrong, in other words morals.
As secularism slowly took over the culture in the twentieth century, the laws began to reflect this. But secularism, like wokism in our time, was driven from the top down. It wasn’t average Americans who took prayer out of government schools, but lawyers, eventually nine of them who sit on the Supreme Court. It wasn’t average Americans who thought dismembering babies in their mothers’ wombs, literally tearing them limb from limb, was a good idea, a constitutional “right,” but lawyers, and again, eventually nine of them who sit on the Supreme Court did. In due course because of these laws (which a court has no constitutional right to pass), Americans came to accept that God wasn’t relevant to public life (the lie of the separation of church and state), and abortion is merely a “medical procedure” like any other.
In this way as laws are passed and courts distort laws or make them up, the plausibility structures of the people are affected. What seems real and normal, right and wrong, are changed. Homosexuality is just one very obvious example among many. First homosexuals and their lobby pleaded for tolerance. That was first given, then codified into law (at the same time becoming ubiquitous in culture, movies, TV, etc.—it’s a symbiotic relationship). Next it was insisted we accept it as normal as sex between two people of the opposite sex. Then it was demanded we celebrate it as wonderful and good. Anyone who didn’t was a bigot and hater. It was this process in law and culture that quickly made “marriage” between two people (why only two, we’re not told) of the same sex culturally acceptable, and now “the law” in all 50 states.
If we’re to counter this, then Christian morality must be codified into law, as it once was in America. Secular morality took over the policy and law in the latter half of the twentieth century and given us the disaster of the twenty-first. There is no such thing as political or moral neutrality. Some version of morality has to rule a society, and if it isn’t Christian morality, it will be anti-Christian. There is no escaping this fact of existence. Christians have been beaten into submission, sometimes literally, into believing our faith and worldview can’t impinge on the public square, separation of church and state and all that. That’s a lie of the devil. This won’t be easy, given we’ve ceded the public square to our enemies, but if we don’t things will only get worse.
I try not to delve here into politics too often, but we live in perilous times when politics just won’t leave us alone, and the days of us expecting others to save us from the bad guys is over. Also, Christianity has been consistently losing culturally and politically since the turn of the 20th century, and those days are over. They must be over if we’re to have a country that resembles America, liberty and justice for all, for the generations to come. If our Christianity doesn’t affect the society in which we live in ways that honor God and lead to human flourishing, that’s a Christianity our forefathers would not be familiar with. For the Christian everything is spiritual, including the dirty business of politics.
All of this is why I would encourage you, strongly, to listen to the first hour of Charlie Kirk’s show from last Tuesday (I’ll explain why in a moment). To give it context, I have to share a story I’ve told many times, but it’s more important than ever for those of us who refuse to give up America to Marxist woke revolutionary totalitarians.
After the election of 2020 was egregiously, in-your-face-stolen from President Trump, I was deeply depressed. It wasn’t just that election fraud was committed, but that Democrats and RINO Trump hating Republicans didn’t care who knew it. Then if anyone was foolish enough to question the purity of the election, they were called delusional conspiracy theorists, and cancelled post haste. This response of the corporate leftist media and political establishment was enough to prove the election was in fact stolen.
In God’s providence I stumbled upon Steve Bannon’s War Room, and as I always say, he got me out of the fetal position, and to mix metaphors, he talked me off the ledge. More importantly, he gave me hope for the future of our country for the first time in my adult life, literally. The reason is that he preaches agency, that we can change things. We are free beings, not slaves or robots, or pinballs batted around by forces beyond our control. And all it takes to change things is action, action, action! The days of sitting on the sideline and complaining and voting as if that would accomplish anything are over. As “they” say, desperate times call for desperate measures.
I don’t care if you can’t stand the sound of Donald Trump’s voice, or spit on the ground when you hear his name: this isn’t about Donald Trump! MAGA is a movement that started in Europe with Brexit prior to his election, and began earlier in America with the Tea Party movement in 2009 in response to the election of Barack Obama and the Uniparty destruction of our economy. That movement was stillborn, but became MAGA and Trump was the right man at the right place at the right time to ride the wave. All the conservative Trump haters must at least thank God he saved America from Hillary Clinton, and they can thank him too that Roe was overturned.
I’ve written recently on the triumph of secularism and leftism, and how those peas in a pod bring death and destruction in their wake. We are in the rushing torrent of several hundred years of the growth of their ideas in Western culture, and the pair have achieved their apex in this third decade of the 21st century. In this is our opportunity because things are so bad it is causing tens of millions of Americans to finally wake up to the threat. And frankly, I’m tired of doomers whining and moaning about how bad things are. That’s another thing I learned from Bannon. We are in an existential war, culturally and politically, for America and Western civilization, and either we fight like it or go meekly to the gulags our enemies are preparing for us. Which brings me to the American Revolution.
Thomas Paine at the lowest point of the war wrote these immortal words in his pamphlet, The American Crisis, and they speak as powerfully in our day as we fight to take back our country, as they did in theirs to found it:
THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
These words turned a doomer and defeated army into victorious warriors against the most powerful military the world had ever known. I believe the odds against the American Founding generation were far more daunting than against us, but way too many on our side speak and act as if things are hopeless—they are not!
Now to Charlie Kirk. Again, please watch it. He clearly articulates that our enemies, the Democrats, are playing a different game than Republicans, a Marxist revolutionary game. While our team, the Grand Old Party, gets out the Tiddlywinks, the Democrats are playing MMA, and they fight to kill, remember that, take no prisoners. As Bannon always says, they play smash mouth politics, they play to win. We play representative republic niceties and we lose, all the time. Kirk explains all this, most importantly, how we win, clearly, better than anyone I’ve heard or read, by far.
Since the stolen election I call the conservative establishment (magazines, think tanks, consultants, etc.) Con Inc. because we were all conned by them for decades, that they really wanted to change things. In fact, all they wanted, and did, was conserve the secular and progressive gains of the last one hundred plus years. Con Inc. is a grift, and they caused me for entirely too long to be defeatist and depressed. That Fox News (which we haven’t watched in three years, thank God) would summarily dismiss Tucker Carlson like a minimum wage laborer is evidence where their loyalties lie.
My eyes, as for many of us and tens of millions of Americans, are fully wide open now, and as the great Roger Daltrey sang, We won’t get fooled again! No, no!
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