Is religious freedom being threatened? What is going on in Western Civilization? Os Guinness has some guides.

Travis and Os Guinness discuss humor, American vs. British culture, modernity, the state of the modern evangelical church in the West, and cultural revolutions happening all around us. Os and Travis also discuss Os's new book The Magna Carta of Humanity and how the only hope for the West is to not look at the American Revolution as a template for solving society's ills, nor is the French Revolution, which is actually much more dangerous and representative toward what is going on in our world today. There is only one solution and you have to listen in and find out!

Get The Magna Carta of Humanity

Learn more about Os.

Get some of Os' other books.

Check out other episodes dealing with Western Civilization:

#61 | The Magna Carta of Humanity, Pt. 2 | Os Guinness

#168 | Revelation Movement | Vishal Mangalwadi

#176 | The Air We Breathe | Glen Scrivener

#177 | Magnetic Points With Our Culture Pt. 1 | Daniel Strange

#178 | Magnetic Points With Our Culture Pt. 2 | Daniel Strange

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Takeaways:

• Os Guinness articulates the profound connection between the biblical narrative and the foundational principles of freedom that underpin American democracy.
• The discussion highlights the importance of understanding modern cultural movements, particularly how cultural Marxism influences contemporary society.
• Os Guinness emphasizes that freedom is fundamentally a means to an end, specifically the glory of God, rather than an end in itself.
• The conversation underscores the necessity of a biblical framework for understanding and engaging with the issues of freedom and justice in today's world.
• Travis Michael Fleming and Os Guinness explore the historical significance of the Magna Carta, linking it to the concept of human dignity and freedom.
• The podcast reflects on the current state of evangelicalism, urging a return to deep theological roots and engagement with societal issues.

It's watering time, everybody.

It is time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host.

And today we're having one of our deep conversations, a deep conversation with one of my heroes, Dr. Oz Guinness. If you've been born in the 21st century, you probably don't know who Oz is, even though his books are all over the place.

But if you've been around any period of time, if you have really wrestled with your faith and want to understand things and go deeper, then you are undoubtedly familiar with Dr. Os Guinness. I want to tell you a bit about Oz. He is an author and social critic.

He is, get this, the great, great, great grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer. He was born in China in World War II, where his parents were medical missionaries.

And it was there that he completed his undergraduate degree at the University of London and his DPhil in the social Sciences from Oriel College, Oxford. Oz has written or edited more than, get this, 30 books. I could go through all of them, but that would take some time.

Today we're actually going to be talking about his book Magna Carta for Humanity, and it is Sinai's Revolutionary Faith in the Future of Freedom. It's a big title and it's actually pretty deep subject.

And we're going to get into it over the next two episodes that we are talking together in our deep conversations, because there are a lot of layers to this book. It's not easy to always understand. Oz is a deep thinker. He shows he looks at things just with a whole different lens.

But when you stop and kind of stare at it, get down in it, you find out that he's usually right. But let me tell you a little bit more about him.

He lives with his wife Jenny in the Washington, D.C. area. Now, the reason that I wanted to talk to Oz is because he's fascinating to me. This man is brilliant. He's a great thinker.

Doesn't mean everything that I that he says is right or perfect, but he is a phenomenal person.

He's just really fascinating to have a conversation with because I think he is one of the most insightful social critics today and one of the elder statesmen of evangelical Christianity. I like Oz because he sees things that people don't often wait, I mean, don't often see way before other people do.

And in my opinion, his insights are present and need to be discussed today. And in our conversation, we talk a bit about his background, his book, the Magna Carta of Humanity.

But we also talk about the Great American experiment, Colin Kaepernick's Kneeling and the Effect of Modernity upon the church today.

Thanks for having me.

I can't tell you how excited I am to talk with you. You're one of my heroes. So I'm going to have a little bit of a fan girl moment here and just wanted to say thank you for coming on the show.

No, truly a privilege.

So here we go. We do a segment here called Fast5. These are five things about you. And are you ready for these five questions?

I hope so.

Okay, here's the first one. When you came to America, what was your biggest cultural shock?

The number of parking lots in Northern Virginia. Just horrifying to me.

Okay, that's an easy one. And what year did you first come.

To the U.S. well, no, I first came in 68 as a visitor tourist. Came here to live in 84. That was when after three months, I had a huge culture shock.

All the endless parking lots and especially in Northern Virginia. Okay, so.

And I know this is going to be a question that some of my people have wanted to know because we've talked about this being you are the descendant of the brewer Arthur Guinness. So here's my question. Do you drink Guinness?

Of course I do. I like wine as a regular drink more than beer, but I drink Guinness a fair amount. Yes. And I like it.

Do you get it for.

Likes it. And my son loves it. We all three love it.

Oh, that's good because it's. Well it should. It's family.

That's.

I mean, you know your history there. Okay, so here we go. What's your biggest pet peeve you have of Americans?

That's a harder one to say.

Or how about when you first came, was there a certain pet peeve that you picked up right away?

Not really. Not really. I mean, what appalls me now are things like the lack of interest in history and in book reading and in things like that.

But that didn't come, you know, when I first came. You know, I grew up with Americans in China.

The first chocolate I ever tasted, there was none in China was Hershey bars thrown out by GIs from motorcycles and so on. So I've sort of known Americans forever, as it were.

That's fascinating.

And by the way, just as an aside, I actually am reading your book the Dust of Death right now because it was re released by ivp, so it has some of those references and nuances in there. And I really appreciate that.

That period is the key not just to understanding that crucial decade, but to understanding today.

I agree. Let's going back for the Fast 5. What's one non academic hobby you have?

Non academic. Oh dear. Now I'm not a scholar. So my whole life is non academic. I'm not a scholar.

I made a deliberate intention when I was finishing my doctorate at Oxford, I analyzed what I call the knowledge industry and we got magnificent scholars in the church and of course millions of faithful people. The gap is in the middle. So I made a commitment to, to work on what I call the missing middle.

To try and make serious thinking intelligible and practicable to ordinary people. So I am totally non academic.

Okay, okay, point taken. Point taken. Now here's this one. This is the last question that I have of the Fast Five.

You wrote a book called Fool's Talk and you talk about recovering the art of Christian Persuasion, specifically using satire and humor. So here's my question for you. What is your favorite joke?

Oh, no, jokes are very specific to certain audiences. I agree moments, and they don't translate across different countries. So I can't say what is my favorite joke.

I have a whole number of Winston Churchill stories, and he had a great sense of humor. You know, my mentor, as you know, is Peter Berger, who wrote a great book on humor himself, but he said most books on humor are humorless.

And so he insisted on adding jokes almost every page. And I love that. But that's relatively rare. I can't think of any joke that would just be my favorite across all your.

Go to space. Well, how about this? How does the sense of humor differ between the UK and America?

Well, British humor is much on the whole, because there are different types of humor in Britain, but much subtler. Yeah, much subtler. American humor is much more open, sometimes even crass, but much more open and obvious.

That's good to know. That's a really good insight, too. Now, let's go back. You mentioned you were born in China, and where did you. Let's hear your story.

And you repeated it in different places. We know that you were born in China, but let's hear your story.

Well, I'm very grateful for my family heritage. You mentioned Arthur Guinness. He came to faith through John Wesley. So our branch of the family, ever since then have been people of faith.

Cut a long story short, O'Connell was a duffer, but he hit the counselor and killed him.

And the young widow was 22, with children, was left penniless in a huge scandal, went over to Scotland thinking of committing suicide, but heard a plowman singing and whistling hymns and was rebuked. Decided to change her mind, went back to Dublin, and she met and married my great, great grandfather, now their son.

Oh, here's the important point, though. Every day, the family journal show us she prayed for 10 or 12 generations of us. I pray every day for my son's grandchildren. He's single.

She prayed for 10 and stretching down, our family has kept the faith, you know, almost without an exception, in the generations since her great prayers. So, you know Diderot's famous remark that if you summarize the Enlightenment in one word, it would be reason.

And we have newspaper accounts of his preaching to 20 or 30,000. No microphone, standing on the back of, on the top of a carriage, and the spirit would fall.

And the police records show that in the north of Ireland, of course, Ireland wasn't separated politically in those days.

Both my parents were born in China and I was born in China. And with my parents and my two brothers, we lived in north central China.

So I grew up with incredible death and destruction and famine and cannibalism and all sorts of things all around me. We then moved to Nanking, Nanjing today, which is the capital of China.

And knowing the book that's coming out, the Magna Carta of Humanity, and even your last few books, you've talked a lot about freedom, do you think that was where it was really shaped for you? You saw the destructive nature of an ideology gone wrong?

Do you think that laid within you even as a youth, just this desire to understand and freedom?

I mean, when did that really start to germinate in your mind that you, because you said, I'm not going to be an academic, but you really do try to understand the currents that carry us along that we don't even realize, and you seek to reverse that.

You know, one of my principles in apologetics is contrast is the mother of clarity.

Yes.

When you see the alternatives, wow, the gospel shines brighter and richer than anything else at all.

Now, clearly, I don't know that I had a great sense of freedom when I was young, but I saw the horror of the alternative, you know, when Lin Bao's Red army came in. Well, I first got a clue of this when I was about 7, and the sermons in church went on and on and on they got so boring, I didn't understand.

I said to my dad, what is this?

He said, don't you realize they're teaching because they know the persecution is coming and they're going to face false accusations, indoctrination and maybe persecution, jail and execution. And they did. And I remember the reign of terror beginning. So I grew up with a horror of Marxism.

Now, interestingly, Travis, when I was at Oxford many, many years later, one of the tutors at All Souls College was Sir Isaiah Berlin, the great Jewish philosopher of freedom. But we became friends for a simple reason. We discovered talking.

No one would ever have thought that, that America would have any form of Marxism at all. I mean, Americanism was seen as the surrogate for socialism. So Communism would be unthinkable.

And now we look at cultural Marxism that's come in from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School and so on. It would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but it shows how rapidly America's changed.

And it has changed greatly, obviously. I mean, Even in the 20 years that I've been in pastoral ministry, I can't believe how quickly things have deteriorated.

I can't say that I'm surprised simply because of where we're at as a culture. Which leads me to your book, the Magna Carta of Humanity. My question is, why this book now?

I mean, why is the topic of freedom such a central or crucial thing for Christians in our world today? Because many Christians around the world have survived, if not even thrived, under conditions that were anything but freedom.

And are we trying to advocate from a position of power? I mean, what was the impetus behind this in your thought process?

Take St.

Augustine's idea that you understand a nation put in modern terms not by the size of its army or its GDP or the strength of its population or whatever. You understand it by what it loves supremely. Now is there any question that what America loves supremely is freedom?

To understand America, you understand freedom. And so this is my third book looking at the challenges of freedom, free people, suicide and so on. This is my third one.

But what I discovered is that people don't understand the core of the issue today and they really don't understand how the best of America, I understand the worst slavery et Cetera, the best of America through the Reformation comes from the Torah first five books of the Bible. In other words, Exodus, Deuteronomy 2 is a repeat of Exodus. Exodus.

What I call the Sinai Revolution is quite literally the once and future key to freedom in America. It's the once key, as it were. You don't understand the American Revolution. Where did the consent of the government come from?

Where did checks and balances, separation of powers come from? Where did the Constitution come from, the covenant and so on? Americans have no idea of the richness of the Old Testament background.

Now those things are incredibly relevant to the crisis today. So this book is more constructive. It's negative in the sense that it compares the Sinai revolution with. With the French Revolution.

And a lot of Christians have no understand. You take say I was on. I've had a whole series of zooms with pastors this year. Many of them have drunk the Kool Aid.

In other words, we see in something like the George Floyd murder a horrendous evil and injustice.

But while both the radical left and Christians see injustice and agree things are injustice, the difference with how you tackle them is night and day. And many pastors and young evangelicals have made huge mistake of not understanding. So part of the book describes where cultural Marxism came from.

Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, the long march through the institutions and so on, right down to today. And the other half of the book is on the way.

The biblical understanding of freedom, God's way, is so much richer and deeper in addressing our present crisis.

You do bring that out having reading through it and you talk a lot about Sinai and you rely a lot on Rabbi Sacks and his insights, which I find to be very, very fascinating.

As we go through, my question is then, knowing where this thought process comes from, what are you advocating for Christians to do is to stand up for this freedom that we have to re. I don't say reintroduce ourselves, but rediscover it perhaps to uphold it or. I'm trying to understand where we're.

Because I've loved your stuff and I loved your insights into the culture.

I'm trying to help because I too have been pastoring and I've too seen a lot of the different pastors and how they've respond to this and they get caught up in the Kool Aid, as you've mentioned, and I totally, totally agree.

So how do we remain biblically faithful and yet we give a listening ear to those who are struggling, but yet not adopt the ideology that seems to really, as you mentioned, cultural Marxism that I know. Even many of the Christians that I interact with, they hear the term, but then they shut down. They don't know exactly what that means.

They don't know how to think because they're so busy. They're so caught up with so many different things, and their faith is very. Not very deep. So how do we. I mean, how do we respond to this?

To rediscover it. Yes. But then to do what with it?

Well, let's go wider, Travis, for a moment. You know, we're called, clearly, to be rather like David's men. Read the signs of the times.

Yes.

Where our Lord rebukes his generation. They could read the weather, but they couldn't read the signs of the times.

And his great lament over Jerusalem, all, as one version puts it, they missed God's moment when it came. Or you have the counterexample of King David in Acts 13. He served God's purpose in his generation. What a magnificent idea.

In other words, we got to know where we are. What a time we're in.

The crisis and decadence of the west, this enormous crisis in the American Republic, the world's lead society, the rise of China, totalitarian atheism, and the prospects of singularity and transhumanism coming down the pike. What a moment in history.

And here in America, the scandal of the Church is we're the majority still, and yet we're less influential than tiny groups, people we admire, like the Jews, people we disagree with, like, say, the LGBT people. We're a huge majority compared with them. And we are called to be salt and light. We're not salty and we're not light bearing.

So we need to start by recognizing, of course, really understanding the Gospel, but recognizing where we are now. Freedom. And I'm also, as you know, concerned with religious freedom.

Yes.

Neither of them are absolutes. Freedom is a means. Religious freedom is a means to an end. The end is the glory of God.

But freedom means the capacity, the ability to be who we are, to speak as we want to speak, and so on. So freedom is a means, not an end. So as you said, the church thrives under persecution. I mentioned that. Look how the Chinese church has grown under.

So I'm not real Pollyanna Ish. But America represents the closest to ordered freedom that was once rooted in the Bible.

And so anyone concerned with humanity, freedom, justice, stability, peace, community and so on has to take seriously where the American experiment is. I'm not American.

Right.

So last year I was criticized as a, quote, christian nationalist. Nonsense. Yeah, that is nationalism, which is an idolatry, and patriotism, which is love and loyalty to a place and its ideas, the best of them.

And so I do stand for freedom. Now, freedom I love for another reason. I mentioned justice. Both the left and Christians and almost everybody agree certain things are unjust.

Our difference there is over how you tackle them. But with freedom, that's not so. The Jewish and Christian view, in other words, the biblical view is pretty well unique.

The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and let's be clear, the secularists. You look at modern atheism, freedom is a fiction, chance a necessity. Atheism is totally deterministic.

Freedom is uniquely biblical and we should be the defenders of it. Thank God. Now, as I said, it's a means, it's not an end. You've got to put the ends in. As Isaiah Berlin said, you have negative freedom. Freedom from.

You also have positive freedom. Freedom for. So we as Christians are clear that our biblical views shape the freedom fall. Not just any old freedom. It's not libertarian freedom.

It's not get the government off my back, don't tread on me, that sort of thing. Not in my backyard, nimby, not in my backyard, you don't. No, no, that's not freedom. That's purely negative freedom.

We have a positive view of freedom.

So in our positive view of freedom, I mean, how do we have that freedom, positive view of freedom, in a culture that seems to want freedom, but you would probably say a negative freedom. LBGTQ and then there's this idea of acceptance of that ideology.

And how do we then respond to that when it seems like our freedoms in that regard are being taken away? How do we fight back without being partnering it with the very structures that are bringing it down? I know you're familiar with to change the world.

And in the book, he talks about how we talk about changing the individual, or that's how many have thought about it. Then you change their worldview and you change the world.

And Hunter's thesis was, no, you can't necessarily do that because you don't understand the elites and the power structures that are there. So how do we go about that in being just faithful Christians in our churches, in our families and going through our everyday?

How do we stand up in that regard when our culture says, okay, we want freedom and you're denying us freedom, but you're saying there's a negative freedom? And in the book, you also mention their freedom comes with limitations.

How do you then import those or have those type of Freedoms or get people to recognize them, I suppose that's my question.

Well, James is a good friend of mine, but I've always said to him, and more widely, that faithful presence, which is his final answer, is not enough. Our Lord was much more than present faithfully. He was very active. But again, start wide.

You know, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, rightly, the bookends of history politically are authoritarianism, which is order with no freedom, and anarchy, which is freedom with no order. Now, interestingly, have both of those. The Tower of Babel and the conditions before the Flood.

And of course, we know from history that humanity can't stand anarchy, lawlessness, the war of all against all. So every time you verge on anarchy, you swing to authoritarianism. And that's where we are today.

Now, if you look at cultural Marxism, God is dead, truth is dead. It copies post modernism there. The only principle left is power.

So you set up an endless conflict of power, and the end result is what a Roman historian called the peace of despotism. In other words, the only peace you have is when one power that can put down all other powers becomes dominant.

But that's incredibly dangerous for the world. Now, if we understand that you see all of that in Genesis 1 to 11, the way of God, as he calls Abraham a family and then a nation.

Exodus is about the forming of peoplehood, nation building. Now, let's be frank.

As evangelicals, you had an extreme year before last when a very famous pastor you could quote asked us to unhitch our faith from the Old Testament. That's wrong and stupid. Now take, among other reasons, we've copied the early church. Of course. They had zero freedom to move in the Roman Empire.

You had an imperialism, authoritarian, not totalitarian, but authoritarian. They had zero room to move politically. So we've got a huge amount to learn from the Old Testament and the Reformation did.

And if you look at Calvin, Zwingli, Bullinger, Knox, Cromwell, Bradford on the Mayflower Compact, Winthrop on the Arbela, and then John Adams and so on, they picked up the notion of what the 17th century called the Hebrew Republic. In other words, in Exodus, there's a tremendous amount about community building. We can't be ourselves by ourselves.

Freedom is never purely individual. It is covenantal.

And we need to have theologians and pastors who ransack and ponder the Exodus and Deuteronomy to show that in our local churches and where we're influential in our communities and please God, eventually winning America back to what it once was close to, we can see a restoration of Covenantal freedom. So I'm hopeful, but more thoroughly realistic. In other words, at the moment, America's departing fast from any notion of biblical roots.

Joe Biden talks about restoring the soul of America, or Trump talked about make America great again, but neither of them ever said what made America great in the first place. And there isn't a single voice I know in public life, and I'm living in Washington who's doing what Lincoln did.

Now, we do have some who are capable of it, but they're not doing it. So if I'm not going on too long, Travis, put America's current situation in three words.

Revolution, question mark, oligarchy, question mark, homecoming, question mark, revolution. And we could go into that separately, the whole radical left, cultural Marxism, please the Lord, no.

That's the end of the republic and the end of democracy both. The middle challenge oligarchy.

What you're seeing with the present administration is the consolidation of politics, the media, academia, woke capitalism, the bureaucracy, various things to create a ruling class of experts and a growing gap with the people. This is oligarchy, or aristocracy at best, of expertise, nothing to do with democracy. So that represents. And I would say again, please Lord, no.

How about the third one, homecoming? As you know as a pastor, the Greek word for repentance, an about turn, is a change of heart and mind and so on.

But the Hebrew word teshuvah has another meaning too, and that is coming home. So sin and wrong are alienation and eventually exile and repentance.

Turning back from the false gods and ways of life to the true way to the Lord is a homecoming. That's what America needs. In other words, the republic goes forward best by going back first.

So taking that for consideration for a moment, and I appreciated you bringing that out in the book where you talk about that being the homecoming. And I thought that was a fascinating insight that I had not seen before. So I was really pleased with that.

But seeing that, do you think that we have culturally moored too far away from the foundation, meaning that the roller coaster has already gone over and it's on its way down. And I know you've advocated for a Christian renaissance at times because you are hopeful that there can be be a pivot and journey back.

And you mentioned repentance and you mention it being collective, but within our society. Now I look at the church and the world Seems to be more in the church than the church does in the world.

And my question is, how do we then stop that if we can?

Or are we so far gone that individuals such as Rod Dreher in his book, or he talks about the Benedict option or Live not by Lies, where he's calling for a removal for a period of time and it's gained some footing. And there are his critics for sure that some say that's actually very dangerous to be able to journey down that road. But where do we go?

How do we stop that? I mean, I understand the collective nature, but I'm trying to break it down. What do the pastors need to do?

What do these leaders need to do with their congregations to show that freedom is a treasure, but yet to speak of that at times within our current society, who controls much of the narrative? Let's say they are then grouped into. You are outside of the mainstream norm of where the cultural Marxism is headed. That.

I mean, with the scandals, with the hypocrisy, with all of the different issues that are there, that you've lost your ability to witness and testify to Christ because you've cited and you've basically, your bedfellow is politics and you've lost credibility. How do you respond to that? That's a huge question.

We are called to be countercultural. Yes. Remember the first word to Abraham. Remember the bookends that were wrong? The Lord had to start again. First word is negative. Leave.

And as Jews say, Abraham was called to leave his country, his culture, and his kin. All very radical, the three formative institutions. And so first he's a family, and then, as I said in Exodus, a nation.

And now under our Lord, it's a people across the whole world, we are called to be countercultural. So Exodus 23, you don't worship their gods and you don't live the way of life that they live. We are called to be different.

Now, the trouble with the American church, it's not different enough. So I would say just focus on pastors. That one thing. Let's leave politics for a minute.

You know, the Puritans had, what was it, a quarter or so of their sermons were practical.

The application, I think the trouble with a lot of American preaching I've heard, not my own church here in Washington, but others I've heard around the place, the preaching, even where it's good. I mean, there's a lot of very bad preaching in this country.

I grew up with John Stott, Martin Lloyd Jones, people like that, great evangelical preachers of The Word. Thank God I knew them. Some of the tripe I've heard in this country is a disgrace to the name of evangelicalism.

No, but let's talk about the good stuff. Yeah, good stuff often just floats away because it's biblically solid and spiritually orthodox and all that, but it's unapplied.

Totally agree.

And so I think. I'm not a pastor. I occasionally preach. I always try. You preach the Word, say, three quarters of the time the last quarter.

You have to make the congregation aware of the world. So whatever the Word says, the world will disagree with. And you know, the root meaning of faith includes the idea of tension, tautness.

We're stretched between the Word calling us to this and the world calling us to something else. So whatever we're preaching, we should make the congregation aware of how difficult it will be.

Now, you've been, obviously, love your enemy, right, or anything to do with truth. The world's totally against everything virtue, which we stand for. But we've got to have the courage.

If our faith is true, if the gospel is the good news, it's the best news ever. We must unpack it and explore it, raise the contrast and get people off the back foot. We shouldn't be defensive.

All the deep questions of the day have no answers in modern terms. And the answer in the scriptures.

You take civility, or I listen to the elites complaining that evangelicals, followers of QAnon and conspiracy theories, and I come right back with the crisis of truth, postmodernism and so on. There's no truth, no objective reality, no certainty anywhere.

So, yes, populous people are vulnerable to conspiracy theories, and the elite press are vulnerable to fake news. This is dangerous right across the board. Without truth, there's no freedom. And who's the one who says that?

Our Lord, you know, the truth, et cetera, et cetera. So this is an incredible moment for the Gospel.

It is.

But you mentioned, and I've known you've been at, you've talked a lot about the perils of modernity and that it's a mechanism that carries people on and they don't even realize it.

And I think that that idea is definitely within the church, but has the church, and I'm talking about the larger evangelical church in the United States specifically, because evangelicalism around the world, I mean, the numbers for evangelicals are so great around the world. The United States is such a small part of that, but it carries a great deal of influence.

But has the church so married to the spirit of the age with modernity that it has lost its prophetic witness because instead of going to the doctrinal side of things, and there are those sides because I've interacted with such a spectrum of individuals.

But I'm seeing a lot of the mega churches have lost in many ways their prophetic witness because they've become much more pragmatic and therapeutic in their approach to get people in the door rather than being countercultural. But how do we then regain that and help people to see that so that they can be faithful witnesses where they're at?

But, Travis, as you know, we were talking before we started, one of my dearest and closest and longest friends. I never say old friend. He gets offended. It's David Wells.

Yes. One of my heroes.

He and I have said for 40 years the danger of modernity. In other words, the average Christian could smell bad ideas of my love. You say relativism or secularism. The isms.

Yes.

But modernity and its seductions and its shaping power, they were unaware of. Now, I wrote on that 40, 50 years ago.

Yes.

Been trying to say it ever since. So that is certainly one of the biggest problems.

And that's an area where pastors need to teach the Word and show what the world's doing differently, you know. So who were the first voices against the megachurch movement?

You know, when I gave Dining with the Devil, which was a single talk I gave at a church growth conference, I got in tremendous trouble, and one of the leaders of that group wouldn't talk to me for four years, he was furious. Now, I was appalled.

I mean, one of the most quoted people in evangelicalism, I won't mention his name, but he said back then that the key to understanding how we speak is that the audience, not the message, is sovereign. I'm quoting his book. That is absolutely appalling. The word the Lord is sovereign, not the audience and the seeker. Sensitive overreaction. Yes.

You've got to be aware, my parents were in the China Inland Mission. You know, Hudson Taylor started because in the 19th century, missionaries from Europe and America sat in the treaty ports wearing European clothes.

And he said, no, no, no, we've got to go inland and learn the dialects and wear Chinese dress and eat Chinese food and so on and so on. We've got to be incarnate, all things to all people, to win them to Christ.

So the megachurch movement went badly wrong, and we're reaping the bad harvest of it. And that's true in 20 areas you and I could spell out if we had time. So modernity has completely emasculated much of evangelicalism in America.

So how do we go about separating that?

And I know this is devianting a little bit from your book, but I still find that in order for the church to be that prophetic witness, they're going to have to shed some of that aspect of modernity to step back in its place. And there's no better individual. I mean, no other factor that really can do that except persecution. And it seems that.

No, no, that's not true.

You don't think so? Okay, well, correct me.

Persecution can do that. But remember, go back again to the Torah and to the Old Testament.

You have there the instruments of renewal, because the hardest thing for freedom and faith is transmission. Make sure the torch is passed down. So, you know, it's hardly ever mentioned, but every seven years they had to read the Covenant aloud.

And then you have the times of the drastic breakdown. You take, say, the obvious one, Ezra and Nehemiah reconstituting, rededicating the people after the horrors of the exile.

So you have the notion of a regular renewal and then a special renewal, and then the drastic ones too. And we need to take that seriously, as we should take seriously revival and reformation. Now, you mentioned persecution. Revival is the positive.

The church in America is desperately in need of genuine revival. I don't mean a week's evangelistic campaign or some renewal where parents turn back to God because they want their children to have values.

No, no, those things are purely discernible sociologically. I mean, like my great grandfather saw an outpouring of God's Holy Spirit. Now we also need reformation, a rediscovery of truth.

So we have in the scriptures, Reformation, revival. We have it in scriptures, we have it in history. That's the positive. Yes, you're right. Persecution can do a lot too. But I prefer to be positive and.

Pray for that and, you know, going with where we're headed as a culture.

And you're talking about how we are countercultural, how then do we speak and be countercultural without aligning ourselves with a politic that seems to be. I feel like we lose our witness and the authenticity of our witness by siding with those. Let's go with the Trump factor.

Someone who was giving religious freedom, but yet himself so personally was so devoid of it.

Because in the churches that I've served, I've seen such a division because we had so many different ethnicities and they came with their own different politics for the church and there wasn't one line across the board. And I'VE seen this played out ad nauseam. It seems like every time I turn around and I hear people say, how can you testify?

Or say you unite with someone like that and yet you lose some credibility in the long run. I mean, what is your insight on.

That going forward, Travis, when you say you came with all the different ethnicities for their own different politics.

Yeah.

In other words, their cultural politics, whatever. They were left, right, or wherever. I'm talking about starting with a biblical politics. So the word takes on the world. Now we gotta do that.

It's tough with politics.

Now.

Evangelicals have a very poor view of politics. You know, we identify with the early church, which had no political role, and so they concentrated on other things, and we identify with that.

So I first came to this country in 68. As I said, I only met one person. Here's the high noon of the 60s, this radically culturally formative decade.

I only met one person, Carl Henry, who understood what was going on. Those people I met, evangelicals were just out of it. They shocked, lamented, disagreed. They were out of it.

If you look politically, it was set of evangelicals in the 60s that they were privately engaging publicly. Irrelevant. So we started pietistic and privatized and mostly apolitical. The 60s woke people up and abortion was the factor.

And then 75, the rise of Moral Majority. We swung from overly privatized to overly politicized. Now turn that into American history.

If we get our people in power, we'll be fine. So you look at the George W. Bush administration.

You had an evangelical president, evangelical attorney general, secretary of state, leader of the House. They were all inept. Didn't make any difference culturally at all.

Now, you mentioned Trump, his policies infinitely more beneficial to the gospel and the church than the Biden ones. Agree, Biden ones could be absolutely pernicious on religious freedom in all sorts of areas.

But evangelicals should have said, we support your judges, we support Israel, we support pro life, et cetera, et cetera. But, Mr. President, you've got to cut down on those insulting tweets. In other words, if you look biblically, evil, speech is tantamount to murder.

The rabbis stress that.

And you mentioned that in the book.

Who have high view of truth and loving our enemies and the high view of words. Words create worlds, words destroy worlds. We should be the champions of civility. Mr.

President, your tweets were disgusting, and we will not back you if you go that way, and so on. In other words, we should have said, here we support you, here we question you. We're not just unquestioning supporters.

If we'd done that, we might have come out better. We got to do that. The left has got to do that. With the Biden administration now, the Never Trumpers haven't given up on attacking Trump.

They're still doing it. Where are the voices showing the implications for the gospel of the present administration.

Now? Taking that and going back to truth for a moment and freedom.

You mentioned, and you wrote this, I quote, truth and trust are dying in postmodern America, and freedom, too, will inevitably die. Then if that's the case, I mean, are you saying that we don't just let it die, we're to fight for it because we need it?

But how do we still then live in a truthless society? Or do we continue to go back to preach the revelation of God? Because without that, we have nothing absolutely.

As you preach the word. And a key part of the word is truth and trust and trustworthiness.

Put it very simply, in terms of freedom, where there is high trust, there is high freedom. Where there is low trust, there is low freedom and high surveillance.

China's the extreme with its 2 billion cameras in its social credit system, and you can see that's coming America's way. You need trust, which means truth, trustworthiness, faithfulness.

I say to my friends who are at the heart of promise keepers, promise keeping, their central idea, I don't think they realize it is the key to the American crisis and to its solution. You take covenantalism. At the heart of the covenant is freely chosen consent.

The Lord offers the terms, and it says three times in Exodus, all that the Lord says we will do. It's like the I do in a wedding. So that creation of a promise. Now, the trouble is, as you know, Travis, the Lord keeps his promises, we don't.

Humans are rotten promise keepers. They keep breaking down.

Which is why Machiavelli and David Hume both mocked at the idea of anything based on a covenant, because covenants are promise keeping. So you look at, say, take that in secular terms, the Pledge of Allegiance, you know, the kneeling controversy. I have an unusual position here.

I think Americans are crazy.

The kneeling convert is a disrespect of the anthem and the flag, both of which are symbols of the Declaration, which for Martin Luther King was the promissory Note, in other words, that disrespect in the kneeling is actually disrespecting the promissory note and the standard of justice by which you should be appealing the injustice. The radicals have got it all wrong because, in fact, they're not interested in the Declaration or the Constitution.

They're interested in alternative revolution, which is.

Where you go back to the French Revolution again. And that's how you brought that out again.

You're a pastor, you know, in Galatians, Paul says, who's bewitched you? You came to faith with one gospel and now you're following another gospel.

And what I'm saying to Americans, I'm saying, in effect, who's bewitched you? Your revolution is one thing. You're following something quite different. Many aren't aware of it, including many pastors.

Now, going back for a second, because you say, in America, who has bewitched you?

And there was a podcast where recently there were two evangelicals from America and two evangelicals from the uk and they were kind of talking through this idea of freedom and power. And it was in the heart of the election.

And one of the things that the British evangelicals brought to bear, they said, in America, you still have power, we don't. And we go about things very differently than you would.

Do you think that is true of the UK right now, where they're at not just America, but just the west in general? Do you feel like this is some blanket that's gone across all of it?

And I know America is the great experiment that's gone on, and what goes on here has repercussions in other places. But yet we've seen what happens in Europe also begins to make its way across the pond over here.

So how have those within the EU or in Europe, in the uk, how have they understood this idea of freedom? And are they in a similar place that we're at today?

Remember when I said the scandal of the American churches? You've got a huge majority. This is only Western nation where evangelicals are a huge majority. Nowhere else.

You visit any European nation, they're a tiny little minority.

Now, it's fair to say most European evangelicals, if the ball is dropped, the apple is dropped, it will roll towards the left, whereas here it will roll much more towards the conservative side of things. So there are huge differences. But my concern is most Europeans don't understand America, the ideas of freedom.

You know, you take the first of the five revolutions. The English, the French. Sorry, the English, the American, the French, the Russian, and the Chinese, the first two to many people look different.

The English one failed and the American one succeeded. But they're actually both the same in that both of them came out of the Reformation and went back to Exodus. The English failed.

It was called the lost cause. The Americans succeeded. It was the winning cause in New England, but they're very, very close. But the trouble is it didn't succeed in England.

So English notions of freedom are somewhat different. I would argue that the American at its best. Now let's put slavery in the original sin, the ultimate contradiction. That's put that in our thinking.

Otherwise someone else will chirp up and say that I'm totally wrong. But the American one was the closest to the scriptures in that sense. So it is the most like Exodus, it's the most fully developed one.

Now, that doesn't mean evangelicals today are defending it well or even rightly, but at its best it is the most like.

So do you see the same with Europe as well?

Europe is a long, long way. I mean the former Catholic countries like France, you have a secularism with an animosity to the gospel at its core. You know, let's broaden it again.

One of the great forces of our time is secularism. There have always been atheists. Psalm 14:1, the fool says in his heart. There's always been atheists. But European style secularity solves a mitzvin.

A hatred of God is more important than the economics of socialism. Where did this come from? Well, secularism is both a parasite on our best and a protest against our worst. Take the second, the French Revolution.

You remember Diderot, we'll never be free until we strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest. Church and state inclusion, both oppressive, so the revolution throws off both. You've never had that in America until the last generation.

So the reactions now, the rise of the nuns, it's an American equivalent, somewhat moderate, to the European revulsion against corrupt state churches. I'm Irish. The collapse of the church in Ireland, the Catholic Church is one of the most precipitous in all history. Why?

A reaction to the appalling abuse of children in the Catholic orphanages. And we got to say, lord forgive us, much of the rise of the nuns and the reaction against the faith is simply reaction against us.

So seeing a lot of the different scandals that have happened there, we're seeing our own scandals that are coming to the light now as evangelicals in many ways getting our comeuppance in some respect. And there should be lament, there should Be repentance. There should be revival. Revival, yes, revival.

But if as that narrative though, continues to play out within our media, because every time I turn around it seems like evangelicals are getting another brick on the back, if you will. How do we respond and remain faithful in the midst of this?

Because it seems to be overwhelming at times, but yet you've taken a very positive perspective and a hope filled perspective that I don't find. I mean, I find that very few people have.

So how do we cultivate a hopeful perspective and not abandon ship, if you will, and retreat, as in many ways that Dreher is suggested in the Benedict option, that we retreat for a period of time, not forever, but to regroup, because we've become so compromised and we've got caught up so much in the culture that we don't even realize the mechanisms of modernity and the compromise that's taken place and taken root in our hearts and our minds that it seems to happen. It's the frog in the kettle in some ways.

Now there have been those voices such as yourselves, such as David Wells that have spoken out and even Peter Berger in a way. How then do we go about this in keeping our perspective and not losing the entirety of what it is that we have earned and procured over time?

Rod Dre is a brilliant writer and a good brother. I like a lot of what he says, but remember that his principles and precedent are the early church and history, not the Scriptures.

I don't see a single call to retreat and not to engage in the Scripture. The very notions of salt and light are symbols of penetration. Now, we all agree, take C.S.

lewis, and we all agree the only ultimate reason to believe it is true. Faith in God and in Jesus is true. Now if that's so, it would be true, Travis, if you were the last believer in America and all the rest of us.

Amanda, it would still be true if it were false, if every last American except Sam Harris believed it would still be false. In other words, the truth issue is still the fundamental one. Now, when it comes to evangelicalism, what is the truth of being an evangelical?

It's not cultural or political or anything to do with Trump or anything like that at all. It's to do with Isaiah 61, Luke 4, the good news of freedom and liberation which the Messiah Jesus brings.

Evangelicals are simply the people of that good news of liberation. In other words, it's spiritual and theological, not cultural. Now if that's so, it's never been more needed.

So I have a great respect for Catholic friends Michael Novak. I really loved Michael Novak. And I used to often speak on platforms, say, against problems, against freedom. We were one.

But I respect my Catholic brothers. But evangelical is deeper and earlier than the Catholic principle of universality. The same is true of orthodoxy with a capital O.

Evangelical is the deepest. You know, the reformers didn't call themselves Protestants. They were called that by their enemies. What did they call themselves? Evangelicals.

They were going back to the Gospels equally. When you remember when Francis Versis tried to live as closely as he could to Jesus, what did the Pope call him? Evangelical. And now let's be clear.

I am an unashamed, grateful, proud evangelical. You take the slavery issue. I was talking to people this week. So many evangelicals I know are ashamed.

They forget slavery in human history is the norm. Abolition is the exception and the novelty. And the great abolitionists were evangelicals.

John Woolman, the Quaker, William Wilberforce, et cetera, et cetera. We should be proud.

So again, as I said, evangelicalism for me, the gold standard for me growing up was John Start, man of impeccable character, humble submission to the Word. In the old All Souls Church, it's changed now because of modern seating and so on. In the old All Souls Church, you couldn't see.

But before John entered the pulpit, he was prostrate on his face before the Lord. He was preaching the Word.

Now, he never said that when he got in the pulpit, but you knew the humility and the authority with which he spoke came from his total commitment. Whereas I see young, I was horrified in New York to see a young preacher, hands in pocket, sort of podium over here.

And he occasionally referred to the Bible. He was a cocky young. The arrogance was absolutely appalling. That's evangelicalism in much of AmeriCorps.

I was in a mega church in California, not requiring somebody to be clear. They said, Barna says four times as much as they said the Bible says. I was absolutely appalled.

American evangelicalism is shallow, corrupt, confused, divided, uncertainty, scandal ridden. It requires revival and reformation.

What do you think that revival looks like?

The Lord knows that. I don't what it is.

It's an unmistakable pouring out of the power of the Spirit on his word, leading to genuine conviction and repentance and putting right wherever things need to be put right. And today it's across the board, some of the wrongs. But so I have no idea what it'd be.

And revival under you look, at every revival, there have been counterfeits. There have been, you know, smart aleck critics. As we know, in the 18th century and so on.

And you can imagine under the age of television and social media, the counterfeits that would quickly grow and so on. It could be horrendous, but. But the Lord is greater than all of that. But I have no idea what it would be, but it would be decisive and unmistakable.

His spirit, his word.

That's the first part of a two part conversation that I had with Os Guinness and it was a fascinating conversation.

And I would encourage you to tune in next week as we continue our discussion on religious liberty and really the state of, of evangelical Christianity or the church in America, the church in the world today and how modernity is affecting it because it is, it's carrying us all along and how do we respond to that? God's not calling us to be monks and withdraw from the world. How are we, though, to engage the world?

I would encourage you to tune in and listen for that discussion because it's really a fascinating conversation. And I want to let you know that this episode is brought to you in part by Kathy Brothers of Keller Williams Innovate. Kathy rocks.

First of all, I would ask that you hit that subscribe button, Share this episode with other people, leave us a review, interact with us on our social media pages and share this episode with other people. Did I say that? Yes, I did. And I'm saying it again because I want you to do that.

And I want to thank our team, Kevin, Melissa, Eliana, Rebecca and Donovan for helping make this happen. Water your faith, Water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered, everybody.