Embracing God’s Truth in a Hostile Culture (Part 2 of 2)

Today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly were continuing a really important conversation about what it looks like to stand for God's truth in our culture. Here's Rodriguez I was traveling with my interpreter young Christian woman, married with a little child at home was pregnant. The time to do an interview and she said rock you know I really struggle as a Christian mom I try to talk to my friends, even my Christian friends about struggles I have as a wife and mom and they just don't understand that I say that my husband and I are arguing, they say. I will give it to force put your son back and take care to be happy.

Look for yourself and tell him I am happy, I'm happy being a mom. I'm happy to be a wife but it's not always easy, since they don't understand that life involves good life involves struggle. John, our conversation yesterday was so intriguing and I know some people may go wow you know I'm in the middle of her. My kids down a job and all those normal things that we have to do, but I'm telling you, if you read the newspaper or you're creating online content about the culture and where Bratton hearing from various sources, you know, the country feels different, something is askew.

It's hard to put a handle on it but something's different traditional values.

There changing. I mean, the attitude of the people about embracing those values and the institutions like we talked last time, the media, universities, even big business now. It has really embraced the woke culture and we discussed that last time were to pick up the conversation today with our guests and continue to hopefully live by truth, not by lies on which is the title of his book. That's a great reference to the book that Roderigo wrote he's written a number of books and the one that will form the basis for conversation today is a New York Times bestseller live not by lies, we can send a copy of that to you make a donation if you can I just stop by the show notes for all the details. Rod welcome back to focus screed to be back so good to have you here in IE. I feel like I'm a bit of a culture nerd because I knew I mended this and I get excited about it because I think it's a very exciting time to live, even though things look a little gloomy when it comes to religious freedom, religious liberty, expression of faith people that may not like what were thinking or expressing. And that's kind of the baseline you mentioned soft totalitarianism explain again what that is referring to and how we're experiencing it here in the US sure well when people think of totalitarianism. We think of the Soviet Union.

We think of Gulag, send prisons and secret police.

We think of George Orwell's 1984. What we don't have that today so people wonder why. Can you call this totalitarianism well I'll tell you why totalitarianism is an ideology that emerged in the early 20th century, and it takes authoritarianism as system in which only one leader or one party has all the political power and it expansive to cover all of society.

In other words, almost society becomes political. You can have this kind of system.

Even within a liberal democracy.

When one ideology gains control of all of the heights of culture were seen that happen now. So what were seeing is people being driven to affirm this single ideology, which we call woke mask, but is being threatened by being sent to prison for at least not yet. So, but it is totalitarianism not give you a comic example provided through this past summer I was in Hungary on no fellowship and I was talking to the Minister for family affairs everything up. She told me that they were about to introduce them to parliament. Two days hence a bill to prohibit LGBT propaganda for children and minors. And I said all of you heard about the Blue's Clues pride parade. What I explained to them. Blue's Clues is a popular American kids cartoon for pre-k kids and they had just this summer during LGBT pride month put out a pride march about all the different kinds of rainbow families, transgender families, polyamorous families, etc., to colonize the minds of children who all the Hungarians they couldn't believe what they were hearing and I said This is normal in America now because the woke stores are not content just to conquer politics. They want every aspect of life to be political, and we also see this to you in the way that the critical race theory of bespoke ideologies are classifying people. According to race, gender to sexuality and so forth.

This is straight out of the communist playbook in 1918, the head of the secret police in the new communist state in Russia told his agents in Ukraine to go out there and don't look to see if anybody actually committed crimes against the Soviet Union. Just check and see what their social classes that will tell you if they are an enemy of the regime needs to be killed or sent to prison. In a similar way. This kind of totalitarianism is coming into being here in America through our institutions again – not coercion yet, but it's still happening yet. Let let me ask you though of course in November there was an election in Virginia that got a lot of press coverage obviously but one of the things that we found out through the media reports is that the current administration encourage the Department of Justice to apply the patriot act to work against these parents to surveilled these parents to you now see what they were thinking and what they were doing what they were talking about, I guess, but I mean that's beginning to tip beyond soft totalitarianism. Just as an example of how government can turn on its own people and begin to put a chilling effect on freedom of expression exactly I mean the people who came to this country from the communist country say that totalitarianism may be soft now, but it's not can stay soft forever and what you bring up is a great example of how the government is starting to turn in a harder way. I just emphasized soft totalitarianism to wake people up who are looking for Orwellian signs and are not seeing too many of them I want to let them know that.

Wait a minute.

This is more like Aldus Huxley's brave New World style totalitarianism give you an example. When I was in Budapest reporting on this book. I was traveling with my interpreter young Christian woman, married with a little child at home was pregnant at the time and were heading to do an interview and she said Rod you know I really struggle as a Christian mom I try to talk to my friends, even my Christian friends about the struggles I have as a wife and mom and they just don't understand it. I say that my husband and I are arguing. I say I will get a divorce.

Put your son back in daycare. You gotta be happy live for yourself. She said I try to tell him I am happy, I'm happy being a mom.

I'm happy be in a wife but it's not always easy.

She said they don't understand that life involves a good life involve struggle. I looked at her and said Anna, it sounds like you're fighting for the right to be unhappy. She looked at me and said that's exactly where to get it. I went to chapter 17 on my smart phone of brave new world of Aldus Huxley's book, and not in that case the dissident in this fictional dystopia confronts the world controller for Europe and he is not threatening to torture the guy he's like why wouldn't you want to join our society. You're Happy all the time you're Comfortable with drugs and entertainment. It's great.

Why don't you want to be part of it in the dissident says because it's not human. He says I want suffering.

I want beauty. I want love. I want God I won't send another words he wants to be human while the controller of this world says you're welcome to it.

This gem is a totalitarianism we're facing now the totalitarianism that wins people to it by promising them comfort: security over everything and if we have raised our children to believe that any thing that makes them anxious is wrong and should be avoided and we are setting themselves up to be drones and that's coming totalitarian dystopia, Rod. Let me ask you, that's soft totalitarianism must talk about surveillance capitalism. That's an interesting term.

I think I understand a bit what is it me, while the term comes from a woman named Shoshana zumba.

She was a former Harvard business school professor, not a believer. She read this book called the age of surveillance capitalism and what she meant by it was that around the year 2000, Google figured out a way to monetize all the they call it exhaust all the data generated by people doing their normal activities online.

There was nothing that could be thrown away. They figured out a way to figure out how to read the data that people generate despite a Google search as by where they go in the world. That is all tracked on later on smart phones figure how to sell people things that way. We have become a country that is willing to give over all of our information to Facebook to Google to Microsoft, Apple, etc. and it tells them where we are who we hang out with what our preferences are and we don't even notice us were doing this because it makes our lives more convenient. What Shoshana zumba says is that we are setting ourselves up to be ruled by a dictatorship. One day because all of this information is being saved and what happens if Google were one of these big companies decides that you are a domestic terrorist because you go to, you protested against the school board. They have ways to tell the estate with you carried your smart phone in your pocket to put on the list, the government is collecting all this information to I been told by people in the intelligence community. It is being saved is not being used against us now but in the future if they want to use this against us, they'll be able to where I think this is all going gem is something called the social credit system into child. Right now you know about this after in China the totalitarian state is using the fact that everybody in China is wired into the Internet to control the people they know everything you do. Everybody you meet everything you buy etc. now China is almost a cashless society so all transactions. Almost all transactions take place electronically. The government also gives each citizen a social credit rating. If you do things the government considers to be positive.

Then Mike download the speeches of sheet and paying for example get a higher rating and more privileges. You can travel more.

You can shop in the best stores, etc. but if you do things that the government considers to be antisocial, like go to church like spend time with people who have low social credit ratings get a low rating to and eventually it can get so low that you are not able to buy or sell participate in the economy. I don't have to tell this Christian audience. What that means. We now have the technological means to make it impossible for people to buy or sell if they don't sign off on the ruling ideology. I fear that this is going to come to America to and it's not gonna come primarily from the government it's going to be instituted by major corporations.

You know, this idea of spine is so critical right now. I heard from a friend who has a friend in the Ivy League law school and Ivy League law school and he is part of the committee that reviews applications ANOVAs nine or 11 member committee of the faculty and what he is observed and has not responded. He's quiet. He's a Christian, but is on this committee.

Nobody on the committee knows is a Christian, but these applications if there's a mention of the missions trip or omission of any church affiliation.

This Ivy League law school rejects that application and that's done behind these closed doors with these nine or 11. Faculty members are reviewing it and he has not yet found the spine. According to my friend to say wait a minute. This is not right. In fact, it's illegal.

You can't discriminate based on religion right and yet they do it and it appears like it's happening every day in the workplace or in schools happens all the time.

I hear constantly from people in big business and universities in the military who are talking about this very thing that Christians or anybody who is a social conservative, are being systematically discriminated against. Beneath the notice of anybody else. I wonder if this your your Ivy League friend of a friend from a friend. I wonder if it might be the same person who reached out to me six or seven years ago Ivy League law school faculty but closeted Christian.

He told me the Christians in this country have no idea what's about to head a second. This was 2014. I believe he said that here at his law school.

Nobody is a Christian except me.

I'm in the closet. He said that the people who at this law school who produce the elite class of lawyers who go on to populate the federal judiciary. They don't know anybody who's religious they don't understand why religious liberty is important, and over time, this is going to matter. Let me reference something and get your response to this. I was at the National religious broadcasters and they had a breakfast panel and I was added at the last minute because somebody who they had to plan for. Couldn't be there and I get there and it's a discussion very similar to this. How do we fight the culture war.

How do we push back on the culture and I mention I'm not in the name of the person's name that was the moderator because it doesn't matter, but I mentioned the story to him on this panel discussion where I was in China I spent a week or 10 days there, meeting people, leaders in the church, etc. as I was dropped off by this internal missionary couple, so Chinese husband and wife to drop me off at the airport and they said all Mr. Daley will be praying for you in America and I just had the presence of mind turned to them and say will have. How do you pray for us and I never they look like. Oh, I shouldn't answer the question.

I said no head to how do you pray for us and the gentleman said well we pray for greater persecution because from where we sit Christians in America are very weak. Why share this on the panel in the host who is a radio personality that all the listeners would know said to me, that's hogwash. Theology is serious and I I sat there immediately as he attacked me for that. I started getting text from people in the audience saying you are absolutely right. Keep saying that and I I just find it amazing that we in the Christian community wouldn't understand what suffering in Christ is all about. One thing that occurs to me, and I've use this myself to bolster my own faith. When I been discouraged.

I think about the man I talked about in the book call Sylvester Creech, Mary.

He was a young physician who was part of the underground church in Slovakia. He was the right-hand man to father Carlock of it and sure enough the secret police grabbed him off the street in 1951 or 52 to take him to prison. He tells in his memoir that he laughed when I got them in the secret place of are you laughing he said because it is an honor to suffer for my Lord and I went he went to prison without added on it and he said that he knew that if he pitied himself he would come fall apart as they kept him in prison for 10 years and they tortured him. He said I told myself every day that it is privileged to suffer for Christ and I am God's probe here in the prison. I'm here to learn more about myself and deepen my own repentance and to serve others.

So he went forth. Pray for people to witness to people he did not complain even though he had every right to.

But he said this is the mission the Lord has given me a tell another story in the book about this amazing Russian Christian and Alexander Rod McAuliffe who was a late convert came from a prominent communist family converted like in the early 70s and began holding prayer meetings in his apartment in Russia and Moscow. They threw him into the worst prison in Russia put them on death row. Even though we didn't have a death sentence because I wanted to make an example of an he went in there determined just to evangelize to witness to the hardest criminals in the whole all of Russia. He was so successful at it that they put them in solitary confinement to keep him away from the other prisoners and they began to torture him. I talked to him and Moscow. His face is still partially paralyzed from the beatings he done all Chronicle told me that he got really discouraged. He began to wonder Lord have you abandoned me here in Angel woke him up one night and gave him a vision in which he saw a prisoner being led to his execution with his hands behind his back by two guards and it was a real live vision. This vision came back night after night with the different prisoner of Veronica finally realized that the Lord was showing him the men who were being led to their execution condemned murderers, but they had accepted Christ because he had been there to witness to them in that prison and they were going to be with the Lord in paradise forever because he was there, and that's hello Garon, the cop got back his faith because he knew that the Lord had picked him to be his apostle, there to the wretched of the earth. This is the attitude that all of us Christians need to adopt from these precious believers who really suffer for Christ known that the summary statement of that is the purpose and suffering in Christ and we are you know again is a comfort oriented culture we are immature in understanding what that means. It's true believe in our churches.

So many churches are all about helping us to be comfortable with where we are.

There's that phrase you probably heard moralistic therapeutic deism. It's about a sociologist Christian Smith who said this is the de facto of religion of American Christians decided to philosophy, a sort of a feel-good Christianity that says God loves us. He wants us to be happy. He wants to be nice and he wants us to be successful and that's it.

This is what Aldous Huxley called Christianity without tears. It's Christianity without the cross. And this is by now percent is the deadly enemy of Christians and this is especially so as removing into the soft totalitarianism which operates by making us afraid of losing our status, our money and our comfort Rod, let me point this to the family as we come in for a landing, because again I've always said that when you look at the Lord and the Lord's work. There's three institutions that he established the church, the government and the family, and I think that's why the church and family are under such assault by the government right and the family in your book and you point out in the Eastern Bloc, under communism, how the family became a vital tool to maintain Christian discipline and that hope that you talk about and that does bring us back. I think to the Benda parents towards the one we work that in as to how they use the family rightfully to raise their kids in a healthy way.

I'm so glad you asked about them.

This is the most impressive family they live in Prague. Vaclav and Camilla Benda were the parents.

Vaclav died in 1999, but is Camilla still going. They were the only Christians in the inner circle of Vaclav Havel in the check dissidents. The Benda family raise six kids and communism. At a time when the parents were targeted by the regime because of their activism. In fact, the dad went to prison for four years, but they understood that the family had to be where the resistance to totalitarianism again. So what would they do when the kids are come home from school. They had to go to communist schools Vaclav the dad, a mathematician with sit down with them and help them to understand what they heard that day and to pick out truth from lies. Camilla, her main role was to read to the kids. She too was a professor and she would read to them two or three hours a day, even when her husband was in prison because she knew that to build their moral imagination is vital. So I asked her Camilla.

What did you read to them.

She said I read minutes I read the classics and I read a lot of Tolkien. Tolkien, my Tolkien, she looked me straight in the eyes and said, because we knew that Mordor was real.

I can't understand what she meant by that.

Yeah, that these children they couldn't understand Marxism Leninism. They did not get the details of this but they could understand the fellowship of the ring and they began to understand that the men and women who would come together to in their parents apartment to fight this Mordor. They were like the Fellowship of the Ring. I found this to be so important because all of these kids grew up knowing that they had a role a God-given role to fight for freedom. Today, 30 years after communism. All of the Benda kids have kids of their own and all of them are faithful Christians, even though the Czech Republic is the most atheist country in all of Europe. It all started in the family though with the family, the Benda family. The mom and dad consciously raising these kids to be countercultural the kids to talk to now adults talked about how their father and mother were such icons of courage for them. They saw their mom and dad taking tough stands and being willing to pay the price for so I just love this family so much. I dedicated a whole chapter in the book of them because they are a real model for all of us Christians today who may wonder how can we resist this year.

We tend to think of resistance is only going out to protest or voting. In fact, the Benda say there are things that you can't do, and you must do in the daily life of your family to build this resistance and to care who it was so reinforcing with what you're saying is this innate understanding in our hearts as human beings, that there's good and evil. Even when academicians and others are trying to say no. That's a construct of religion, but we know you know what evil is when people treat other people so aggressively and so harshly when you murder somebody sure or many people right so it's interesting that they turn the literature that illustrated that concept of good and evil.

That's the whole struggle and you noted again the suffering thing comes back when Vaclav Benda was in prison he was there for four years.

At one point the government made an offer to him that he said, the government said to him, will let you leave the country with your wife and kids if you will just resign from the dissident movement, and he wanted to do it. He missed his family, you know, Camilla was struggling with six kids at home and he wrote to his wife and said, should we accept this. That lady wrote back to him spine of steel and she said no. If we abandon the people who are looking to us for courage and inspiration we abandon them to save ourselves by going west we will of abandon God. So stay in prison.

Keep praying will fight the fight on the homefront.

We this is the quality people that we have to become in the American church if were going to survive what's coming. If you're soft, it's not going to go well for us and we also have to be prepared to be persecuted from within in our own churches. I'm here in this to from a lot of Christians that so many people in churches pastors to just want to pretend that everything's okay. They don't want upset people. In fact read the signs of the times God is giving us freedom to prepare before the persecution starts and that some people think I'm being alarmist art. I hope I am. I would love to be proved wrong. But if I'm not wrong about this and we have not taken the time that the Lord has given us now in the liberty to prepare, then we are in serious trouble and in this is so good and I hope the people that are resonating who are listening and watching. I hope the they get it in the understand and what a great resource. Your book to equip people to better understand the signs of the times right is like debris in church understand what were in so that you can respond appropriately. As a Christian and help your children understand the environment that were in. This is a great resource and I hope you can feel that. And if you can help support FOCUS to do the ministry that were attempting to do one of those three institutions that God is created the family to help strengthen it.

I hope your encourage we had over 300,000 people come to Christ or Focus on the Family last year and we measure it every year. And that's when the gemstones of the effort here.

I never knew that we did that we started to measure it, and lo and behold, we found that so many people come to Christ to rededicate their life to the Lord through the ministry here focus. So help us be a part of it that's God's economy that were the engine, but we need the gas from year to make it happen. So if you can sign up to be a monthly supporter or a one-time gift will send you a copy of Rod's book live not by lies as our way of saying thank you for being a part you join the support team make your donation today ask for your copy of live not by lies.

A manual for Christian dissidents we have it here the ministry are numbers 800 the letter a in the word family 800-232-6459 or click the link in the episode notes in this reminder that we also have a great resource for you will arrive in your inbox every day Monday through Friday. It's called the daily Citizen sign up for that and that we will be able to read the times as we talked about today and stay up with the latest in cultural currents. Again, the link is in the episode notes right again, thank you so much for being here and helping us to discern the times that were in well thanks so much for having me this kind of thing is so important we Christians talk to each other and let us never forget that the lion of the tribe of Judah is the root of David, great note to close out our conversation you hope you enjoy your weekend with your family and your church family as well and plan to join us on Monday. Sen. James Langford discusses how you can reclaim your role in your child's education is most important person in the life of the jobs of their children will be able to even the classroom on behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team. Thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family I'm John Fuller inviting you back. As we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. You know, nearly 60% of American adults don't have a will in place big number. Having a well can leave a heavy burden for family left behind if you need a well but don't know where to begin.

Focus on the Family help download I resource 15 questions to ask when preparing a well it's our gift to you. Focus on the Family.com/prepare my well Focus on the Family.com/prepare my well