Roger Marsh: Hello and welcome to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh, thanking you so much for joining us and thanking you for making us a part of your day. Well, today here on Family Talk, you are in for a real treat. You're about to hear a very compelling presentation from today's guest speaker, Charlie Kirk. Charlie was recently here in Colorado Springs at an event organized by our own Dr. James Dobson. Over the next couple days, you're going to hear Charlie's firebrand presentation given from the main stage at that event. Then on Wednesday you'll hear our own Dr. Dobson take the stage and join Charlie for a one-on-one conversation about the current state of culture in America, what they think the future holds and what we can do about it.
Now, if you're not familiar with Charlie Kirk, let me tell you a little bit about him. He is the founder and president of Turning Point USA, which is a national student movement organization that empowers teens and young adults to embrace conservative ideals. Charlie hosts a daily national radio talk show called The Charlie Kirk Show, and the podcast version has over 120 million downloads this year alone. Additionally, Charlie also produces a radio program centered on Christian issues called Saving America with Charlie Kirk. That broadcast is simulcast on Real America's Voice television news network. Charlie Kirk is a best-selling author. He's a columnist for Newsweek and The Hill and a frequent contributor at Fox News. He reaches over 100 million people on social media every year and was named in Forbes Magazine's 30 under 30 list recently. He has also been awarded an honorary doctorate from Liberty University for his exceptional leadership and is outspoken conservative voice. Charlie is married to Erika and they have one daughter. Here now is Charlie Kirk on today's edition of Family Talk.
Charlie Kirk: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you. It's always very intimidating to get the standing ovation before the speech, so it's very hard to live up to that. Honored to be here. Dr. Dobson, thank you. I made a special effort to be here. I've been following you for years and you've made a huge impact on my life. My mom would always play Dr. Dobson's radio program on Moody Radio in Chicago and again, just made a huge impact on the way I thought about things and my socially conservative values and speaking out on the issues of life and family and marriage when it really mattered most. So it's an honor to be here truly. Thank you. And thank you for your leadership over the many decades. It's awesome. Thank you.
There's a lot of friends I want to point out tonight as well, and it's really fitting where we're talking about the American family here tonight. I got married a year and a half ago and we have an eight-week-old at home. The real hero is my wife that let me come tonight, but that should be a compliment to you Dr. Dobson because she said, "You're going to go do that speech because if there's any person that really we want to honor and participate and fight alongside, it's Dr. Dobson and this wonderful group and this organization."
I want to talk about a couple things tonight. I want to talk about the worst prediction I've ever made and what I learned about that, and how I think this room can change the country within a year. I think this room... If every single person in this room made a very simple commitment and agreed upon kind of a plan of action, it's not going to take a huge plan or a business plan, just a couple of courses of action, I think the country could take a very serious, very significant turn for the better.
So the worst prediction I ever made. I do a podcast. We're blessed, it's one of the top podcasts out there. At least once a week, we're talking about the gospel, bringing people to the Lord, specifically young people. Over 120 million people listened to our podcast last year. That doesn't count radio, it doesn't count all of that. And so I was doing a podcast right as the Fauci virus started to spread across our country and I made a prediction. Now mind you, I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade at Christian Heritage Academy in the suburbs of Chicago. Most important decision I ever made in my life. School founded by the great Wayne Grudem. Every year as I got older, my commitment to the Lord meant more and more. It grew in understanding and beauty and I wanted to continue to spread the gospel. And I'm sure a lot of you could resonate with that, where you gave your life to the Lord. That was just the beginning of your journey to really understand what that means, what grace really is and how that impacts your life.
And so I've always been a Christian, I've always spoken out about these things more and more so in recent years, but I was never in the Christian world. I'd only spoke at a church or two before the pandemic. I knew a couple pastors here and there, but I had some assumptions about American Christianity. So here I am, I do this podcast and you guys can look it up. It's one of the great failures ever in American podcasting, where I say and I proclaim that the American church loves liberty, that they won't put up with these lockdowns. That the American church won't allow Easter or Pentecost to be stolen from them, that the American church won't put up with some local mayor to come in and enforce mask mandates. And I do this long podcast because I thought the American church was ready for battle.
And then all of a sudden I looked around and I said, "What's going on? Why is it that the church is cowering in fear and listening and they're quoting Romans 13, they don't even know what it means." And like, "Well, we have to submit to all leaders in authority." And I think to myself, "Wait a second, who's in authority in America? Who's the sovereign? Is it the mayor or the governor or a congressman? Or is it we the people, and it's that the mayor should be submitting to us and that we don't submit to some sort of government authority? What are we doing here exactly?" And so it was a very quick learning lesson for me. And so then I started to reach out to some amazing pastors, some of you know them. Pastor Jack Hibbs had me speak at his church and pastor Rob McCoy. And there was this remnant of some pastors that decided to open up their church in defiance to these awful unconstitutional orders, where of course strip clubs were called essential, marijuana clinics were called essential, liquor stores were called essential, abortion factories were called essential. But if you wanted to celebrate the Pentecost Sunday or Easter, they're going to come after you with restraining orders, police, and you guys lived through all of that. And I just looked in awe at how ill-equipped the American church was for that moment.
But there were some great pastors. I started to speak at churches across the country, spoke at over a hundred churches in the span of a year and a half. And I learned a lot about American Christianity, about where the church was and what was needed. And because I have a different perspective, because here I am, a political guy who is a Christian coming into the church with fresh eyes kind of being like, "What are you guys doing? You have no idea what you're entertaining and the ideas that you guys are now letting in."
And then of course, not as if there wasn't enough going on in the year 2020, Floydaplooza happened, where we decided to burn our entire civilization around a complete lie from the enemy that somehow America is systemically racist. It's the opposite. We're the least racist nation ever to exist in the history of the world, period. And I started to see pastor after pastor after pastor all of a sudden take knees for atoning for their institutional racism, or they're saying like, "Well, we need to use critical theory as a way to analyze theology." Or one church after the other saying that we're going to go march in the streets with Black Lives Matter. And I said, "What is going on?" And in a year where the American church was needed more than ever, we have to be very honest as Christians, it was a failure. It was an abject failure.
When the world was looking for moral guidance, when things were getting confusing and it was chaotic, was the church there to stand bold? And when I say the church, I know a lot of you say, "Well, my pastor is great, my pastor is great." Let's be honest. The vast majority of churches did not pass the test. Vast majority of churches stayed locked down. They submitted, I think, immorally to these government authorities. They did these things they shouldn't have done. And so here I am, I said, "Man, there's something that we got to do that's more." And there was obviously some phenomenal churches that I think did the right thing. And what I learned throughout all of that, and I think some of you agreed, is that we saw in real time what Dr. Dobson has warned for decades and what many others warned. Is that if the American church does not rise up and does not stand up, the country falls apart very quickly.
And American Christianity has had it so good for 40 years, worrying about budgets and baptisms and buildings, worried about tithes and offerings and praise God for all that stuff. But I think it was a reckoning moment where I said, "Well, the civilization itself that we are inheritors from, actually very well might crumble and fall apart if we do not take bold and courageous stance."
Roger Marsh: I'm Roger Marsh and you're listening to Family Talk. Today's guest speaker is Charlie Kirk. Charlie has a passion for politics and also for educating young people. He's the founder and president of Turning Point USA, which is a national student movement organization. He has been sharing motivating words about why our country is great and the significance of preparing our younger generations to carry our nation into the future. Let's go back now to Charlie's presentation as it continues here on today's edition of Family Talk.
Charlie Kirk: I believe there's three types of churches in America and the first type of church is the courageous church. We need more pastors to be in the courageous category. Honestly, it's less than 5% of all American pastors. Here's a test. And Victor Marx knows this because Victor speaks at a lot of churches for us. Did your pastor celebrate Roe v. Wade being repealed? If not, find a new church. It's that simple. Let's start there. If they did not do a party, a celebration. How about this? Has your pastor spoke out about how there are other churches having drag queens in their church? You guys know this, right? Hundreds of American churches now have drag queens and transgender activities happening within the church. Is your pastor mentioning that, talking about that? Or is it just complete in total silence? So the courageous church leans into current events with always having Jesus at the center.
Some of my critics, they say, "Charlie, you want to make the church political." That is not true. Jesus should always be the center of everything we do. The most important thing is Jesus Christ, always spreading the gospel, getting people to believe in Jesus.
The second most important thing is to make sure we could do the first thing. To make sure that pastors are not raided by the FBI for praying outside of pro-life centers. To make sure that churches are not shut down and deemed non-essential. If we don't focus on the second thing at all, we say, "Well, Charlie, I just preach the gospel here." How many times have we heard that? "I just preach the gospel. That's all we do. We just preach the gospel around here." Coward. That's what that is. And that's the second type of church, is the cowardly. And if I'm talking too intense for you, sorry. I mean, you guys, you could bring it up with management. So the second type of church is the cowardly church. I love the cowards, and you should too, because coward's can be turned. Coward's deep down know that they're doing something wrong. Here's what they'll say. They'll say, "Well, it's really not clear what the Bible says about these matters." That's what I hear all the time. How about...
Here's three issues that every single pastor in America should step up and talk about immediately. God created man and woman. Period. There's no other genders, there's no gender fluidity, it's garbage. And by the way, I have very little compassion for these pastors. I'll tell you why. I go do that at the University of Texas, Austin. I'm asking you to do that to your congregation. I'm not even asking you to do it hostile. I'm asking you to say God created man and woman and there is no such thing as gender fluidity. There is a thing of gender dysphoria of people that suffer from a mental condition. We should have compassion for those people. We're not going to put up with a medical mutilation of our children. We're not going to put up with children getting administered Lupron like what's happening at Vanderbilt University Hospital or Boston Children's Hospital.
I ask myself, I say, "Why is the church unifying in big numbers against the real time medieval style female general mutilation equivalent that we see in the country?" And what I hear from some pastors is, "Well, that's not really our role." Isn't that interesting? And I ask, "Well, then, what is your role?" And they say, "Well, our role is just to bring people to Jesus Christ." And I say, "Well, how's your attendance been since COVID?" Vast majority, "Well, it's down." You know why it's down? Because your congregation doesn't respect you. That's why. Because they're going to not just hear about the gospel, but the gospel is truth. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was with God." The spoken truth is Jesus Christ. He didn't just say true things, He was truth. And if you can't just say a little bit of an inch of a thing to your congregation about biological reality, then you shouldn't be pastoring a church. Okay, that's the first thing.
The second thing is this. Life begins at conception. It's not that hard. We don't have to overthink it. And the kind of abortion debate right now in America is raging and a lot of people are getting fired up about it. The church should be leading on it. The church should be leaning in and talking about this every single day. And I had one pastor that emailed me and said, "Well, I'm going to lose congregants." Good. You should try to bring your church down to a manageable size and then build it back up with people that actually love the truth. If someone's going to leave because you're talking about life beginning at conception, you're not running a church, you're running a TED Talk with a rock concert wearing skinny jeans, trying to increase your tithes and offerings to sell more books for your fragile little ego. You're not a pastor.
All of us in this room can make a big impact with the cowards because the cowards need direct truth told gracefully. They could be brought into that courageous position. I've seen it. Barry Maguiar could tell you, we've seen it with some pastors that were in the middle. Mike Ingram has seen it. Pastors that were, "I don't know if I want to talk about it," but courage begets courage. And this is not the reason to do it, but I have yet to find a church in America from Jack Hibbs to Steve Smothermon, to Luke and Angel Barnett, to Ken Graves, to Gary Hamrick, to pastors in every corner that has taken a stance on these issues. And I think the Lord is sending us a clear message for anyone that will watch. Increased tithes, increased offerings, increased attendance. He is increasing the harvest for the upcoming battle of the churches that are leaning in. The churches that have backed away and gone wokey, all of a sudden they're cutting back on staff, they're closing doors. And so I think that's a message.
The final type of church is the complicit church. And these churches need to be rebuked. These are the churches with the gay flags outside of them. These are the churches that are doing the drag queen whatever stuff in them. And I just want to make sure you all know this because we talked about it earlier, which is there are hundreds of churches across the country, Church of Christ in Tampa, Episcopalian churches and Lutheran churches where they have people in full drag outfits doing children participation ceremonies in the church. And if you don't know that, I encourage you to get more involved in really what's happening in American Christianity right now. They're teaching it in seminaries, they're teaching it all across the country. Now, hundreds of churches. That's not a minority. That's growing very quickly.
And so even that though, we have lots of pastors saying that we need to embrace these sort of homosexual ideas and this transgender agenda. And then they're the ones that flew the BLM flag during the entire deal. And these churches need to be rebuked. They need to be called out, they need to be corrected, and we need to challenge them repeatedly.
Now, I've heard from a lot of people and they say, "Charlie, I don't really appreciate at times the tone that you bring to this conversation." I'm sorry, a kid's private parts is getting chopped off in an operating room and you don't like my tone? Sorry, pal. I'll improve that when kids aren't getting medically mutilated every single day in hospital rooms. My tone is the problem? Anyway, so let me try to improve the tone.
Let me say this. Which is for doing this for 10 years, this woke ideology will destroy every ministry that you support. I cannot tell you how dangerous this virus is. And I do not mean COVID. I mean critical theory which comes from the postmodern ideology that I believe is a concoction of Lucifer, Satan, and the enemy. I'm telling you right now, you go read One Dimensional Man, go read Herbert Marcuse. If you don't know who he is, I encourage you to go just do a little bit of study. We talk about on our podcast all the time. There was a series of thinkers, I believe satanically inspired philosophers in the 1960s that came from the Frankfurt School. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, these people that came. And their core argument is everything that we should call out and understand that it's actually not political, it's biblical. Their core argument is this: everyone knows their own truth. That's it. There is no truth. You could determine it for yourself. That is their entire political movement.
And I think back to the Scriptures where it says men did whatever was right in their own eyes, and woe to those who called good evil and evil good. It's happening right now. And so for the pastors that are on the sideline, the question is, if there was not a more important time just to talk about, is there truth in the world? That's really the conversation because when I go to university at UC Berkeley, as we were talking earlier, I set up an entire table and I talk for hours to these kids. Victor was there when we did it actually. He'll attest to it. I'll talk for hours to these kids and hear what they have to say.
And you know what the common denominator is? Yeah, okay, they're pro-abortion and pro-trans and marijuana and all that stuff. No, no, no. That's all superficial. You know the core of it? They do not believe the two things we believe here tonight, that there is a God and you are not him. They reject both. They believe that there is not a God. "And if there were to be a God, it would be me because I'm the most important thing ever to exist." And as soon as you start talking about truth, their eyes get big. And they've been trained very well, paid for by their parents of course when they got sent to college, to respond with this, "Whose truth exactly? The white supremacist, colonial, heteronormative, misogynistic truth of the American culture?" They know how to respond.
And so you look at all these dynamics, it's not political. This is spiritual, guys. Everything about this is spiritual. From the transgender debate to the abortion debate, it's all getting back to the question of, is there truth? And we're supposed to now rely on secularists to do this argument for us? That's what the church has done. The church has outsourced the most important debate in a hundred years to secularists. And by the way, they're doing their best. God bless them. You know how many times I have kids that come up to me and they say, "Charlie, I'm not a Christian, but I don't know why pastors aren't fighting alongside me as I'm trying to fight for the idea that there might be truth out there." I say, "Good question. I don't know."
You understand that the people that are carrying the water of the most important debate literally against Lucifer aims and ambitions are usually not Christians. I can tell you this, it's not the Christians on campus. The Christian groups on campus totally woke off the reservation. And so there is this amazing call to action that I think all of a sudden we recognize and realize that we are not just in the spiritual battle, we're in all these implications happening here. And it comes down to that question, which is, how do you know a line is crooked if you do not have a straight line to compare it to? You remove truth from a society, all you have is power and pleasure. That is it. And you want to know why we have the most depressed, suicidal, anxious and psychiatric medicated generation in history? Because the church went to go try to be liked by the world instead of trying to spread truth to the world.
I heard for years, someone said to me, nice person, they said, "Well, Charlie, don't you believe that we should try to get the world to like us first and then we'll get them to like Jesus?" And I said, "How's that working?" No, seriously, we've tried that garbage for 30 years. The least religious, least married, most likely to commit suicide generation and least likely to have a child, least likely to go to church. And what have we done? We have watered down the gospel at every single turn. "Well, the kids don't want to hear about Leviticus. We have to cop that out" as Andy Stanley would say from Georgia. The Christian faith is more than the 66 books of the Bible. It's really just the testimony of Jesus of Nazareth. And I always ask the question is, well, if that's true, then why did Jesus quote Deuteronomy so much? I guess we have to know kind of what Deuteronomy is to know what he's saying. Like, "Oh no, we can't say that."
And it kind of goes back to this core... And I believe this in Barry and I have talked about this a lot. Is bad theology leads to bad politics. And this is where the woke thing comes in and Christians have no idea, most Christians what's going on. At the core of woke is an entire rigorous academic philosophy called deconstructionism. If you've never heard of deconstructionism, you have got to put on the full armor of God and get into the arena folks, because you're a not in arena. Deconstructionism. There are libraries dedicated to it. You know what it is? Training young people to pick apart anything that you think is true. They train them on it. There are entire volumes of training manuals to get young people to believe, "Oh, you believe the nuclear family is good? Let's try to deconstruct that." And it gets down to the elemental thing where you have an entire generation questioning their very existence.
When I ask an average college audience, "Do you think that there is goodness, truth and beauty in the world?" They say, "It's nothing but your opinion." Now they actually don't even believe that if you actually have a chance to have a conversation with them, but what an amazing trick of the enemy, isn't it? And this is the same sort of spiritual game the enemy does over and over again. So here's how I see it playing out. This is phase one, get the church totally confused, divided, complicit, complacent. And then a true authoritarian, tyrannical dictator can come in and it would make the 20th century look like child's play. And so we go through all these different dynamics and the call to action, and we could keep on talking about this, is really we need to challenge a lot of these cowardly churches and especially the complicit ones to be courageous again.
And I get asked all the time, they say, "Charlie, why is it that this generation is so liberal or so atheistic or so secular?" And yes, of course it's the colleges, it's all these sorts of things, but I think back to Billy Graham and Billy Graham called socialism Satan's religion. Did you know that? That he called socialism Satan's religion multiple times? When was the last time I heard an American pastor say that? Not recently. And you think about it, it's totally true. It is Satan's religion. It's a core belief that the state is god and that we must deconstruct it from within.
I have to say one of the reasons why I love Dr. Dobson's work and all of this, I got to say is we think back to the 10 Commandments. The only one of the 10 Commandments that involves your country and a promise is honor your mother and father. It's the only one out of the 10 Commandments that says, "Honor your mother and father so you may live long in the land of which you are in." And we have raised an entire generation to not just dishonor their parents but to curse their parents.
Roger Marsh: Empowering our youth will set the future up for success. And it is so important the work that Charlie Kirk is doing here in America to help further that goal. I'm Roger Marsh and we've just heard part one of a powerful presentation from Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA. To hear this message again in its entirety, please head over to drjamesdobson.org, and join us again tomorrow to hear the second part of Charlie Kirk's presentation here on Family Talk.
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Thanks so much for joining us today here on Family Talk and be sure to join us again tomorrow to hear the conclusion of Charlie Kirk's powerful presentation. Till then, I'm Roger Marsh. Thanks so much for listening to Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.