← I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST
How to Raise Conservative Kids in a Woke World PLUS Charlie’s New Book with Katy Faust
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A
Ladies and gentlemen, Just got back from Florida, was down there with my friends from TP usa. Erica Kirk invited me to come down and pray and do a tribute to Charlie at their annual donor meeting at Mar a Lago. It was two nights. The enthusiasm was really off the charts, despite the heaviness of losing Charlie and that evil event which occurred three months ago tomorrow. Right now, it's December 9th. Also this day. December 9th, is the day Charlie's book has been released. It's called Stop in the name of God, why honoring the Sabbath will transform your life. Charlie sent me this book in August to edit it. I did not have to edit hardly anything. The kid. The kid, 31 years old. The man was brilliant. He did such great research on this. It took him at least a couple of years to write this. And it's really more than a book about the Sabbath. In fact, I had a subtitle for him, but I gave it to him too late. I said, charlie, after I read this, it's not just about the Sabbath. Stopping the name of God. The subtitle was something like that I thought would be some. It was something like the solution to your anxious, pointless life. Something like that. And he goes, well, I really like that. It's probably too late to change it now. And this book is not just a book about the Sabbath, although the Sabbath is the focus. It's really a book about why Christianity is true. There's a few chapters in the beginning about the evidence for Christianity. I'm blessed that he starts out, I think, chapter two talking about I don't have enough faith to be an atheist and the impact it had on him. And then he really dives into so much of the Christian worldview and why we really ought to take a day to focus on the Lord. Shut this thing down for a day, your iPhone, and really concentrate on the Lord in your family. And as busy as Charlie was, he would do that every Friday. He'd take his iPhone, he put it in the drawer, and he'd say to Erica, I'm free. And they would have a full 24 to 30 hours, however long the Sabbath was with each other, with the Lord, with their kids, and it really helped recharge him. So I urge you to get this book. This isn't so much about whether or not the Sabbath is obligatory, although he has two chapters. One chapter in the book is why it could be considered obligatory, and another chapter is the 10 reasons why it's not. But his point isn't whether or not it's obligatory. The point is it's a great way to recharge. And if your Sabbath isn't Saturday, he said you could pick a Sabbath any day you want. A day where you focus on the Lord and your family and it will help you. And there was nobody in my life any busier than Charlie Kirk. So if Charlie Kirk can do it, any of us it so today the book comes out. You may have seen Erica last night on Hannity. She's on Fox and Friends this morning. She's out promoting this for very good reason because it is a great book and there's a lot of personal stuff in here from Charlie. So you're going to really enjoy this. So get Stop in the Name of God Today by Charlie Kirk. It's available on Amazon. Wherever you get books, you can get the Kindle version, the hard copy, whatever you want. Trust me, you'll enjoy the read. And it may just be life changing. It was life changing for Charlie and Erica and their family. I continue to pray for them. There's so much misinformation and noise on the Internet that is just not true, ladies and gentlemen. It's just not true. And you'll see when the trial comes out. So much of the conspiracy theories put out there by Candace Owens and others just not true. All right, so check out the book and it'll it's be a great gift too. We're coming up on Christmas. So get stop in the Name of God by the great Charlie Kirk. You know, Charlie was all about conservating what we know is true. And last week we had the great Katie Faust on and she's back again and she brought her crowd again.
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B
She brought her crowd.
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A
They're very obedient. I just told them to shut up.
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B
I never go anywhere without my adoring fans. I take them with me everywhere I go.
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A
Katie, we had a wide ranging discussion and we talked actually a lot about divorce on the last program and that was kind of a wake up call for so many people out there. But I have your book here that you co wrote. It's called Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke Teaching Historical, Economic and Biological Truth in a World of Lies. This book isn't just for parents who have kids, although it's very helpful for that. This book will prepare anybody to live in an anti Christian environment. And I was reading this morning a chapter in the book about what happened to your daughter when she you took her for a sports physical. She's 15 years old and the doctor had to talk to her privately. According to Washington state law. You're in Seattle. You need to tell the audience what happened, cuz this is pretty amazing. Tell the audience what happened to your daughter Miriam when she was 15 years old.
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B
Well, generally I have found that doctors can't be trusted. I need them as consultants for medical information. And every now and then I need them to dispense me some medication, but I try to hop around from pediatrician to pediatrician, so none of them feel like they have too much of a claim on me or the kids. So. But there's one area where you can't avoid it, and that's sports physicals. You have to take your kids to get a sports physical from a doctor. So this was after Covid and. Or like kind of mid, late Covid. And we hadn't been to the doctor for a while, and it was the first time my daughter went after she was 13 years old, when state law requires that the doctor talk to the child alone without the parent there. So, you know, we. Part of our parenting philosophy is you give kids a heads up, you help them to be experts. You want them to be prepared for what's coming. You want them to hear it from you first so they're not surprised when it happens. And then when it does happen, they turn back to you and go, my mom knew that was gonna happen. Now I can identify her as an authority on this topic. So, like, all of that's coming into play. So we're heading to the doctor. And I said, hey, FYI, the state requires that the doctor at least offer to meet with you alone. That is your decision, and it's up to you. I trust you. Do whatever you like. And she goes, okay, thanks, mom. So we get to the doctor and we go all of the charts and kind of the medical history, and he's done height and weight and all of that. And then he goes, okay, Mom, I'm gonna have to ask you to step out of the room now. Like, sorry I have to do this, but you know, it's what I gotta do. And I said, that's my daughter's decision. Miriam, are you okay? What would you like? And she goes, I'll be okay, mom, thanks. So I go out in the hall and I'm kind of like walking around looking up.
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Oh, and the door opens and the doctor says, yeah, you can come back in now. I'm like, oh, okay, great. So on the drive home, I said, hey, what happened while I was out of the room? And she said, well, he shut the door and then he, like, scoots his little, like, wheelie stool over to me. And he goes, okay, now, like, like, now we can finally talk now, you know, you're, you're free to be really honest now that your mother's not in the room. And he said, so how many sexual partners have you had? And she looked at him and she goes, I haven't had any. And he goes, mm, you know, scroll a few things on his notes. And he goes, well, are you doing drugs or are you drinking alcohol? And she goes, nope, I'm not. And he writes something down. And then she says, can I ask you some questions? And he goes, oh, yeah, of course, of course. Oh, finally she's gonna like come out and reveal her gender to me or tell me the things that she feels like she can't say in front of her mother. And she said to him, if I was having sex or doing drugs, would you tell me to stop? And he goes, well, you know, only if it was a problem. And she said, isn't it always a problem for a 15 year old if they're having sex, using drugs or drinking alcohol? And he's a little flustered? And he goes, well, sometimes doctors can do some things to help, give you something to help. And she said, don't you think it's my parents that should be helping me? You didn't know who I was a half hour ago. And he just was like.
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I think we're done here, you know, open the door. Okay, mom, you can come back in. And we share that story in the chapter called the Slow Handoff. Because that's not something that you can just give your kid in an instant. It is the kind of thing that you prepare them for. You don't know when those kinds of things are going to happen. You don't know what is going to be said. But if you want a teenager to be able to push back against a. Progressive adults stand alone among their peers. If they need to push back against a lie that's coming at them through social media or in the classroom, that doesn't happen in an instant. It happens through a long, slow handoff that we really identify as sort of a discipleship process. And that's what we all want. We want our kids to be able to stand firm, to not be taken advantage of, to be able to understand their convictions and address them in real time. So it was just one example of our kid totally slaying it.
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A
Yes. And you point out in this book that it's really the parents job to prepare their children for conversations like this, to be ready to deal with issues like this or questions like this. And you want your child to hear these controversial issues from you first. Why is that, Katie?
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B
Well, there is a principle called the Founder's Principle. We actually got this from Hilary Farrer of Mama Bear Apologetics. And the idea is the first person to introduce a challenging, controversial, emotional topic to a child automatically becomes the expert in their life. And so they need to hear about these things from you. If the first time they know that porn exists is because a fourth grader shoves a smartphone in their face at recess and they have follow up questions, they're not going to you, they're going to the fourth grader. If the first time they hear that the word bisexual is in their fifth grade health class, they're not going to go to you. If they want to know more about what is bisexuality, they're going to go to their fifth grade teacher. So even if you're not going in depth about a lot of the distortions of truth that they're going to find in their world, they need to know that, you know, you need to say the words to them. You need to give them a heads up, even in those early elementary school years, because that is the way that they know. My mom knows something about trans. I know, I've heard, she's talked to me about it. I know that. I've heard her talk about it with her friends. I can go ask her some questions. When my teacher says that boys can wear dresses, that's what you want. So it's getting to them first at age appropriate, appropriate ways so that they are not taken captive by hollow and deceptive philosophies.
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A
And then you don't have to isolate them from these issues. They're kind of inoculated, not a really good word now with the COVID vaccine, but you get the idea. Yeah, they're inoculated from these issues because they already know what the true answer is. And they are ready for this false philosophy that's being imposed on them by the world. So their, their dukes are up when that happens, Right. They go, oh, mom told me this was coming. Right.
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B
Well, and my co author, Stacey Manning and I, we talk about how there's different stages right there. You want to generally you're not like, fill your, I'm sorry, When they're in elementary school, your job is not to tell them all of the details about the chemical and the surgical abortion options. You want to tell them the truth. Simple, truthful, but not jarring of. Hey, there's some people that believe that babies can be Killed in the womb. And it's very sad. It's called abortion. And if you ever hear something about that, you can talk to your dad and I. Okay? Like that's what you're doing in elementary school. But generally you are filtering out a lot of the distortions around these key conservative principles because in that phase of child development, they're not made to be critical thinkers. They are made to sponge up uncritically everything that an adult that they really love is telling them. And so that is the time where you want to fill them with good, true and beautiful. Part of that is tipping them off to the lies that the world is going to try to feed them. But it doesn't necessarily mean going into detail that happens in middle school.
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A
Yeah, the section of the book that I just, another section I just read this morning had to do well. The title was this Better Too early than five Minutes too late. What does that mean, better a year.
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B
Too early than five minutes too late. And the idea is, look, how horrible that all of us have to be talking about transgenderism and homosexuality and the gruesome aspects of socialism to our children in elementary school. But the reality is that the world is talking to our kids about that. And it is better to get it to them a year too early than to be late even by five minutes when somebody else has gotten to them and said, yeah, Marx, he's a hero. Or, you know, or if they hear something like, yeah, you know, Churchill was the, the big demon of World War II. Right? Like, you just need to make sure that you are getting to them with these controversial, especially trending topics first. Because when somebody else introduces it, you are no longer the authority or you're going to have to wrestle back authority. And what you want is you want to be the authority. And you do this laying the foundation in elementary school by tipping them off in middle school by downloading like a, like matrix, download massive amounts of detail about the nature of man and woman, about abortion, about socialism, about critical race theory, about the distortions of American history. I mean, like, you are going to make sure that we tell our kids in, in middle school, you need to be the authority on this subject. You should know more about this than all of your friends. And the payoff is I have a conversation with my 18 year old while he's heading out the door. And yesterday, like, he can't get enough words in before he leaves, but he's like, tell me about, like, do you really think that I know that Europe is under a Muslim threat? What's going on in the United States. Yeah. Okay, well, we don't have, you know, we've got these concentrated areas. Assimilation is a really big problem. Well, even if you deal with foreign immigration, you still have the problem, like the homegrown terrorism. And what are you going to do about the people that are already citizens? How does that interact with our Constitution? Because they seem to be exploiting the principles of liberal democracy to smuggle in an ideology that will abolish liberal democracy. So does that mean that we have to look at our Constitution? Okay, I'll see you tomorrow. Make sure that you pack your lunch. That's the kind of relationship that you're gonna develop with your teenagers if you can establish yourself as the authority when they are elementary schoolers and middle schoolers. So, like, this is very high stakes, but you can do this. Like, we've got a system. Stacey and I and our husbands have kind of distilled these principles down. So even if you're in a very hostile place, even if your kids are going to public school, even if you don't have supportive, extended, you can inculcate your values in your children and make them warriors.
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A
The first chapter of Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City with my guest today, Katie Foust has to deal with what is conservatism. And you mentioned that it's conserving what's true. Right. And beautiful. We're conserving it. We know this is true, so we need to conserve it. This is why generally Christians need to be conservatives, because we're conserving what's true. Right. And beautiful that we know not only from the Bible, but we also know from natural law. And in this first chapter, I just want. I want you to give me kind of a rapid fire nugget or two on each of these subtitles, if you could, Katie. And if you got to elaborate, that's fine. But in this first chapter on the nature of conservatism, you have a little subsection on the nature of America. So what main point are you trying to get across there? How do conservatives think about America?
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B
Well, first let me back up and say that we've gotten criticism by some people saying, well, why didn't you say raising biblical kids? Well, why didn't you say that you were raising virtuous kids? And the answer is, because I actually think there's a lot of great parenting books out there for Christians. But we wanted something that could be for the freaked out parent who maybe doesn't go to church.
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Sure.
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And we wanted to really emphasize that There are certain values that need to be conserved, whether or not you identify as a Christian or not. So in that first chapter, Stacy and I kind of outlined there's lots of wonderful things that need to be conserved. These are the things that specifically are under attack right now that you must establish yourself as the authority on and equip your children about, because this is where their faith, their worldview is going to be undermined. So the first one is the nature of America. We're not colonizers. It's not an inherently wicked country. It's actually one of the most incredible founding. The founders had some of the most distinct principles that led to freedom and prosperity and thriving. And many other nations have chosen to follow suit in terms of our founding documents because it is testable and repeatable, and it's not something you should ever be ashamed of. You need to be proud of it, and you need to defend it.
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Yeah. If America is such a bad country, why does everybody want to come here? Why are there no caravans going from Texas to Venezuela, ladies and gentlemen?
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Yeah, exactly.
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I mean, please wake up. You're living in the greatest country in the history of the world, and it will not stay that way if people who come here don't assimilate Right. It just won't. Go to Minneapolis, go to Dearborn and see if you like how those locales are going, or you can go over to Europe and see what's going on over there. Unfortunately, this is just history. Wherever Islam goes, freedom goes away. Charlie was wearing a freedom church the day he was murdered, and the two days before that. We were talking about the problem of Islam in America, that macro Islam was a problem, not necessarily micro Islam. You might know individual Muslims who are agree with freedom of religion and all this, but on a macro level, it takes away freedoms. And America will not be a prosperous, free country if Muslim ideology read Sharia law takes over. That's just the fact of. Of history. It's a fact of. Of what Islam is about. Islam's not about peace. It's about submission. And the next point you talk about in the book is freedom of religion, freedom of conscience. Unpack that a little bit for us.
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B
Well, that is one of the foundational principles of America. And honestly, what it means to be a thriving human is you have to be able to ask big questions and answer big questions. And our founders recognize that. So freedom of conscience, freedom of religion is foundational, and it's absolutely under attack. Under attack from a variety of different angles. But that is something that is a cornerstone of what it means to be a conservative. And that is something that you need to instill in your children early on that this is a critical freedom that deserves defending.
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A
Also, how about the nature of man and women or man and woman? That's obviously been under attack for at least the past 10 years, if not longer. What do you say about that?
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Well, this is pretty important because if you don't get man and woman right, you're not going to get any of the other anthropological questions that are coming at our kids. Right. As well. If you don't understand man and woman, you can't address transgenderism, you can't address homosexuality. If you don't get the nature of man right, you can't address abortion, you can't address euthanasia or a doctor assisted suicide. You can't even address like AI properly if you don't understand what is the nature of humans specifically that we are made male and female. So understanding the importance of the differences, the equality and distinctions between men and women is foundational. And we offer a lot of tips in terms of how do you teach that in elementary school and then how do you introduce the distortions in middle school? But you, if we were writing a book 20 years ago or 50 years ago or 2,000 years ago, you would never need to have a chapter or a principle on how do you defend the differences between men and women. But this is one critical piece of the natural world that we need to conserve and teach our children how to conserve.
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A
Yeah, and as you mentioned before, Katie, the reason you don't need to say biblical kids is because these principles are true whether you believe the Bible or not. I mean, it's a bigger tent to say conservative because there are people, regardless of their religious views, that might agree with you. Like, for example, Mormons might not agree with every theological, they don't agree with every theological point the Bible agrees with, but they would still agree with many of these conservative principles. So would Jehovah's Witnesses, so would just secular conservatives. So when you say raising conservative kids in a woke city, the title of the book you're pointing out this is a bigger tent than just Christianity, than just say conservative Christianity. There are atheists who are conservative because they, they might not be able to ground why they are or ground these principles, but they know that. They know what good is and they, they want to conserve good. You have a section here on the nature of marriage. We talked about this in the last show. If we don't get this right, nothing else matters. Because if the biological two Parent, family erodes to a great extent. It doesn't matter what we do elsewhere, the whole society's doomed. So unpack that for us.
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B
Well, simply that when you understand the nature of male and female, the logical conclusion is that marriage is a distinct critical relationship that is not only essential for national thriving, it's actually a matter of justice for children. Children come from a man and woman and you know, there are certainties in life, death, taxes, and the fact that all of us have two parents, a man and a woman, and you know, we recap at a child level all of the ideas of our first book, them before us. Why we need a global children's rights movement to talk about how that man and that woman do things for children that no other adult are going to be able to do for them. And that is why marriage is special. And the government or the culture or technology can say what they want about children and who they belong to and their parents. But biologically speaking and sociologically speaking, you'll never gonna be able to redefine the institution of marriage. Children come from a man and woman have a right to that man and woman benefit from being raised by that man and woman, find their biological identity through that. Man and woman are most likely to be safe in love when they're raised by that man and woman. And that is why marriage has to be defended with incredible vigor. Because children are the victims when we don't.
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A
You mean a Head Start program can't bring a kid up? Katie, what's wrong with you?
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B
I know, it's just bigotry in action. All of these, all of these biological essentials that I refuse to stop talking about.
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A
It's not bigotry, ladies and gentlemen, it's just biology.
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B
That's right.
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A
How about the nature of the parent child relationship?
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B
So this is really important that it is important to talk to your kids. Like I just said, that marriage provides children with their own mother and father. That is the sociological purpose, that is the state's interest in marriage. It's not how two adults feel about each other. It's that this man and woman create the next generation. And that man and that woman have a pre political relationship with the child that is distinct. It's not something the government can't substitute. If we try to substitute it with adoptive parents, we make them go through incredible rigorous background checks and screening because we understand that it is very hard to replace what the child's own genetic parents are going to bring to them, which is higher level of investment, connectedness and protectiveness. So because those are sociological universals. We privilege the parent child relationship. So you need to talk with your kids about why they belong to you and you belong to them in ways that they're not going to belong to any other government entity, teacher, counselor or other adult. This is really important because the state is encroaching on this critical relationship and they are targeting the parent child bond because they understand that parents are the greatest shield against.
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Government indoctrination and they would like to erode that relationship.
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A
You know, it's interesting. We have government schools. Why don't we have a government church? And if we did have a government church, would anyone go to it given the values that the government believes? Depends on who's in government, obviously. But it's interesting we have government schools but no government church.
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B
Well, it's interesting because in Seattle I feel like we've got a lot of government churches.
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A
In what sense?
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In the sense that a lot of the churches simply reflect back the culture. Like there's nothing special about those churches. They can.
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Why go, why don't you stay home and why don't you stay home in your pajamas and watch. Watch msnbc.
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That's exactly right. Why? You see, you know, a lot of mainline Protestant denominations crumbling because they don't offer anything distinct. Like what you're going to hear at church is exactly what you're going to hear on npr. So don't go churches. Don't be a government church.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm gonna have Megan Basham on here shortly because Megan has un covered so many of these so called evangelical entities that are taking money from the government to take care of immigrants and that distorts their theology. They tend to highlight verses in the Old Testament and ignore others, even in the New Testament in order to say, yeah, we should allow everybody in the country. And we're not going to tell you this, but we're getting millions of dollars from the government in order to do this. So we now have a vested interest in reinterpreting certain Bible passages to our benefit, even though that's not the true meaning of the passage. So we're going to have Megan on to talk about that. So keep an eye on that. Friends. Also you have in the first chapter of raising conservative kids in a woke city another conservative principle. And that is the right to life. The right to life is the right to all of the rights. Ladies and gentlemen. If you don't have life, you don't have anything that's critical. What say you, Katie Faust?
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B
Yeah, it's just one of those primary issues that is under attack in a variety of different ways. And so it's very, very important to instill in your children, when they are very young, the beautiful distinctives of life. And that it is not dependent on somebody's ability level or stage of development or age or location, that this is a fundamental right. And there's so many incredible ways that you can reinforce this and teach it when your kids are in elementary school, so that when it's middle school time and you've got to introduce and really discuss a lot of the ways that the right to life is under attack, they've got a really sure foundation and understanding of the beauty of life and why every, everybody, regardless of age or location or developmental ability, is worthy of dignity and protection.
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A
Then you have a section on race. I have to read a line at the end of this. I love this line from the book Raising Conservative Kids in Woke City. Here's the line. It is immoral for society to sow distrust between its citizens by requiring less or more of one subset of humans than another. True racial progress is measured not by equity, but by equality of opportunity. Say more about that.
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B
Well, this is an area where, unfortunately, the left has dominated the conversation because the right has said too little. And the truth is, we, especially as Christians and conservatives, not only have the answer, but have depth of answer in a way that extends dignity to all and actually creates social cohesion, whereas their perspective on race creates social division. Not just social division, but it really is going to create, like, heated, warring factions. And for as much as I despise Nick Fuentes, what he's doing, the reason why he's gotten so much traction is he's tapped into a cohort of young men, especially young white men, that have been so utterly demonized for their skin color, and now they are rising up and saying, you have wounded us, you have hurt us. And now we don't. We don't even need to be rational. We don't need to be principled. We're just here to destroy you because you destroyed us. And that is the problem. That's one of the problems of misunderstanding the nature of race, which is it is a part of your identity, but is not the basis of your identity. And that we, just like male and female, are equal, deserving of dignity. Even if there's distinctions in terms of our experiences, none of that should be elevated to the level of an immune, of a characteristic that says, this dominates who you are and that we need equal opportunity, the ability for every. We should remove barriers if there are hindrances to somebody because of their race, absolutely. That is equality. Equity is making sure that everybody gets the same amount, regardless of rates or favoring some groups above others, which is where you're going to get that kind of tribal mistrust and aggression that we're now seeing not just from the left, but from the right.
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A
I heard of a business meeting here in Charlotte. I wasn't there, but I heard about it where the CEO got up and he said, I'm for Jedi. You know, they added a J to dei. J stands for justice. So it's justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. Sounds so good, doesn't it? I wish I was there because I would have raised my hand to the CEO who said, I'm for Jedi. Sir, does your secretary make as much as you? No. Oh, well, you're not actually for equity then. You're for justice. Do you know that equity and justice are opposites? Justice is you get what you deserve. Equity is everybody gets the same. You don't believe in equity, otherwise your secretary would be paid as much as you. You believe in justice because you deserve more, because you bring more into the company than your secretary does. You're the one that took all the risk to start this company. I mean, people I. Well, no one ever accused the left of being consistent. Justice and equity are opposites. Sorry, go ahead.
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B
It's what, it's what Rob Henderson calls a luxury belief. Something that the elites like to say because it gives them some level of like social credibility, but it's not something they, they would ever personally live by. They would never live by the philosophies that they're promoting. Right. They will say, abolish the police because they live in gated communities. They'll say, well, you know, all relationships are equal, but they themselves have the highest rates of marriage and lowest rates of divorce because they themselves are never going to subject their kids to that kind of family breakdown. So they, they proffer all of these different woke ideas because it makes them look good, it gives them some level of social standing, but they themselves are never going to have to suffer from the ideas that they are promulgating.
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A
Well said. Also on the race issue, friends, you don't defeat old racism with new racism. That's just creating another problem. And critical theory, all it is is a theory of conflict. It just puts citizens in these different categories that fight one another. You're never going to have a common unity, a community, if you put people in the so called community at odds with one another. And that's what this whole thing does. How about the section on economics? You have a section here on economics, Katie, what do you have to say about that? What's the conservative view of economics?
- [32:26]
B
Very few, like wonderful, sweet Christian parents, go into parenting thinking, I need to know a little bit about the government means of production as it relates to, like, industry. But unfortunately, the idea of the free market is under attack. And this is not just, oh, here's two different, you know, ways of managing the economy. There is a moral system and there is an immoral system. There is a system that's going to lead to freedom and prosperity, and that is the free market. And there is a system that leads to slavery and very often extends to tyranny, and that is socialism. And socialism is being so heavily promoted in schools and online. And now, obviously, we've seen with the election of, you know, prominent mayors in, in major US Cities, that this is the kind of thing that your children need to be prepared to understand and to fight, because it is going to seep in, in innocuous ways or even glorified ways where they would say, well, this is about justice. This is about helping the poor. And your kids need to know a little something about gulags. I mean, they need to know a little something about the mass elimination of people in all of the places that have been heralded as socialist utopias. They need to know enough to say, I know that what you're saying sounds good on paper, but it's never working out in reality. So those are the kind of ideas, economic ideas, you need to know enough about to prepare your kid for the distortions they're going to hear. And then as they grow and as they fade, greater questions about it. You guys can learn together.
- [34:01]
A
Yeah. And you have a line in here that I really love, too. At the end of this section on economics, you say America is in decline because American parents have raised too many children. You have that in italics. Childish adults who cry for safe spaces when they are presented with ideas they might be against. As parents, we must approach parenting with the mindset of raising adults capable of defending what they are for. Yeah, you're really not bringing up kids. But you are. You're bringing up adults. The question is, are you bringing them up in the right way? And are you talking about these issues they're. They're going to be accosted by in the culture? And I gotta ask you this, Katie, too, because Jonathan Haidt, who is not a Christian, teaches at nyu, wrote the book Anxious Generation. It has to do with what, what the iPhone and social media and the like are doing to our kids. They're making it making them anxious. One of the reasons why Charlie's book, even for adults, is so important to put the iPhone down, get off screens for a day, because it makes us crazy too. You know, we weren't really designed to have an opinion on a world event that happened five minutes ago where we don't even have all the facts. And people are asking you to virtue signal on everything that happens.
- [35:19]
We're not made to do that yet. That's what the iPhone does for us. So my question to you is Jonathan's answer was, I've never given my kid an iPhone, at least not until they're 16. I can't remember what his exact age was. What do you and Stacy think about the iPhone and social media for kids?
- [35:37]
B
We've got a section in there on phones. And what you need to understand is that when you give your kid a phone, you are very likely handing over your ability to be recognized as the authority on these topics to your children. You are introducing multiple other authorities. So when you give your kid a phone, it cannot be, here's a phone. It is. I'm going to train you on how to use this phone. You use the same slow handoff technique as you do with everything else that you want your children to master. What is that slow handoff? It is I do you watch. I do you help you do I help you do I watch. So whenever you choose to give your kid a phone, which I agree should be later on in life, we gave our kids phones sooner, but not necessarily access to social media. Stacy waited longer to give her kids phones. My 16 year old has a phone but not social media right now. But we would say that actually is not as much about what age it is. How are you training your children to approach this device? So it should be number one, I do you watch. First of all, they should spend years watching you use your phone responsibly. Show you show them. This is what I'm listening to. This is what I'm posting. These are the limits that I'm putting on myself. And then I do you help. Hey, I am about to post this on social media. Hey, I'm not posting this picture because sometimes pictures like this can be misused or misunderstood. So here's something. Hey, I'm going to respond to this comment on Twitter. Do you want to look it over and let me know what you think here? Like, let them help you. I for the longest time before I had more sophisticated tech. I Would do a lot of work in my car dictating into my. My AirPods about like an email or a tweet or something like that. And then I would hand it to my child and say, edit this for me. So, like, they're helping me. They're getting all of the content that I am saying. They're reviewing it, they're helping me. So they're a big part of, like, how I'm using my phone so that when they do get their own phone, they have an idea about what's appropriate in terms of what you're looking at, how much you're using it for the sites that you're accessing. But then you're still helping them. You are connected to any account that they have. In our family, we all have the same password on our phone. So anybody can pick up anybody's phone whenever they want and look at anything. So, like, we all just will all have the. Even my adult children still have the same password on their phone that our family has. So it's like there is helping. It's not just a handoff. And then you should get to the point where they're high schoolers, where we did with all of our kids, where they were doing it and we were watching. We didn't feel like we needed to be monitoring. We didn't feel like there was areas of mistrust there. We would definitely check in. But to me, it's more important to train the child on limits and using it appropriately than necessarily the hard age of when to give them a phone.
- [38:25]
A
Yeah, it's. I guess it's going to be a judgment call based on their maturity of the child. And if you're been doing your job right in the elementary and middle school years, they might be able to handle it earlier. But what do you do about boys who might have access to pornography on a phone? You know, how do you. How do you screen that out?
- [38:47]
B
Well, obviously you do your due diligence and put as much obstructions. And I mean, I've told my kids forever, you are not looking for porn, but porn is looking for you. And I think anybody that's online has encountered porn. Even if you put up all different kinds of, like, parental controls and things like that, whether or not they're looking for it. What is really important is do you have the kind of relationship where your children love to tell you if they have seen porn that is so critical. And that is what we spend a lot of time focusing on in the high school portion of the book where we say, you Are now you should be done with. Let me tell you the basics of male and female. And I want to talk about the free market versus socialism. You've already established the basics and you've already introduced them to the distortions. So now what you're going to do is you're going to capitalize on what I hope is a really deep emotional connection during high school where kids love to tell you when they have seen something online, heard something from their teacher, had a conversation with their friends that makes them uncomfortable, that maybe they know have even violated the principles of the home. But hopefully what you've done over the course of elementary school and middle school, and we talk about several ways that this happens. One of them is called the no flinch rule. We have a whole chapter on the no flinch rule where what you're trying to do is you want your child to associate talking with you with relief. Even if they're saying, I saw porn the other day, even if they're saying I shoplifted, even if they're saying, I overheard so and so's parents talking about something called swinging. And I don't know what that is. Okay? You want them to associate talking with you or disclosing with you with relief. And you do that by rewarding them with connection whenever they disclose something to you that normally you would freak out about. Because a lot of this is worth freaking out about. So hopefully you've built up the place where. Because even if your kids don't have a phone, they can access pornography. Okay. It's really not a question of if they're going to find porn, but when. So what kind of relationship are you going to have when they see porn and will they want to tell you about it? And the answer is yes. You can build a relationship with them so that they can come to you and say something like, I stumbled upon this. It made me sick. I just had to tell you because I. I've just been thinking about it for the last five days. Or they can say, I have a problem and I've been secretly looking at this and I just realized that it's tearing me apart. And I had to tell you and dad. Like, I know good parents whose kids have come to them with that kind of disclosure and they find relief. Thank you so much for telling me. I would never want you to bear this alone. I am so sorry that I wasn't and dialed in enough to recognize that something was wrong. Let's figure out what we need to do to move forward. Like, you know, or the dad can say Hey, I have been there. I have struggled with that, too. I understand the kind of prison that it can put you in. I understand the kind of bondage that you feel. But here's the pathway to escape, because I've done it myself. So I would say there's perils everywhere. I mean, porn for the boys, for the girls. The social contagion that is leading young, especially white girls to have the highest levels of anxiety and depression and distress among any of the other teen cohorts. So there are abundant dangers of, you know, pick your variety. The question is, are you going to be emotionally close enough to your children? Have you developed the kind of relationship with them? So if they encounter something that is distressing or something that is enslaving online, they know they can go directly to you?
- [42:27]
A
Yeah. The no flinch rule means you don't freak out when they come to you with something like this. Because if you do, why are they going to come to you again anyway? Right. You want to be a safe place they can go. And you still, ladies and gentlemen, are the most influential person in their life up to about the age of 17, according to the data I've seen, anyway. So you need to be engaged with them from the beginning. And there's no time like now to start this. If you've blown it to this point, you may want to go apologize and reconnect with your kid because you're always going to be their parent. So it's very critical that you do this. And raising conservative kids in a woke city will help you do that. I've got another big issue I want to bring up with you, but I got to make one point here before we do, Katie, and that is for our viewers and listeners. You know that now that we go to college campuses, we're going a lot more. Even now, after Charlie's tragic murder, our security costs have tripled. We didn't have security prior to Charlie. Now we do. Now it costs us about $5,000 to go to a campus. Prior to Charlie, it was about 5,000. When you put in, you know, the flights, the hotels, paying the videographer and all that, it's about five grand to go to a campus. Now it's about 15 grand or more. We've got 15 of these events scheduled, and that's not all of them. There's more coming in for the spring coming up. So you can see this is creating an issue because a hundred percent of an event is paid for by donors. It's not paid for by the kids. It's all free. To them. So we need your support here. At the end of the year we have a 300000 matching gift, which means any money up to $300,000 will be doubled. So you know what that means. Go to crossexamine.org click on donate. You can donate via credit card. You can send us a check, you can do E check. There's a whole bunch of different ways. PayPal, all that kind stuff of stuff right on our website. It's tax deductible. 100% of what you donate will go to ministry. 0% to buildings. We're completely virtual. We don't have any buildings. So if you would go there, that would help us out immensely. At the end of the year, 30 to 40% of the donations we get come in in December when people make their donation. So thank you for supporting us. Thank you for considering cross examine.org also want to mention that we have a bunch of online courses. We have 40 online courses. Now if you go to crossexamine.org, click on online courses, you'll see them there. This is a great gift for people around the holidays. Give them a self paced online course. And I think we're going to do I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. In the spring coming up, that'll be a premium course. I'll be your instructor. We'll have some live zoom sessions together. If you want to take that, keep an eye on our website for that. So go to crossexamine.org, click on online courses. You will see them there.
- [45:13]
And I do want to mention that Southern Evangelical Seminary is where I went to school. If you really want a degree, that's the place to go. SES Edu. Elisa Childers goes there. Tim Barnett has gone there. Tim Barnett, Red Penn Logic, you may have seen him. There's a lot of folks that have gone to ses. That's where I got my degree in apologetics. So check out SES Edu as well. Now Katie, there's a, there's an issue.
- [45:36]
B
We're not moving on yet. What I want to say, you guys need to give Frank money.
- [45:41]
A
Oh, well, thanks.
- [45:42]
B
I want you. You need to go donate so he can keep doing these campus events. Earlier last year, Charlie came to the University of Washington and I hadn't been following Charlie too much. I kind of knew like younger Charlie, where it was more firebrand, a little more like political. But my son and his new friend, who was raised in a Muslim home, who has come to Christ because my child and the other Cohort of high school boys found him and grafted him into our church world. And then he was baptized. You know, I mean, he had found Charlie and a few other conservative influencers and they wanted to go see Charlie. So we went to the University of Washington event. And I will tell you, it was just straight truth. But it wasn't just politics, it was faith, it was morals. And I listened to Charlie speak to this packed room of a thousand kids when there was still a thousand people outside that couldn't get in. And he would say, he said, hey, boys, I know that you want to be good men. That means that you quit porn, you never go back, you never do it again. And everybody got on their feet and cheered. And I was like, holy cow, what is going on here? And then he said, hey, young women, you guys are brilliant, you're smart, you're at University of Washington. Nothing that you're going to do in your life is going to matter as much as getting married and having children. And everybody got on their feet and cheered. And I just thought, how on earth did this guy get to the University of Washington? To a place that is a desert. Like, it is a dry and weary land where there is no truth. But these campus events get people to places where they are thirsty. And you literally are funding a cup of cold water for so many of these people that don't have access to this information elsewhere. So I just wanna say, like, it's missions. Like, if you think about having a missions budget, you probably should allocate some of it. This is like domestic missions for the next generation. So like when Frank says they need your support, fund them. Frank should not go to this place without incredible security. And he should never stop going to these places. So fund them.
- [47:48]
A
Oh, thank you so much, Katie. In fact, the security isn't just for me, it's for the students. You get somebody in there who's a shooter, right? The students are in danger too.
- [47:55]
B
Yep.
- [47:56]
A
So that's why we need to do that. And by the way, we'll be assisting TPUSA on their college tour. They're going to continue as well. In fact, Erica just announced that the other night at Mar a Lago, so there's going to be a whole bunch of events coming out. So from our ministry, from their ministry, we're not giving up on the college campus. We're redoubling our efforts, friends. And that's the most anti Christian real estate in America is the. The college campus. And by the way, that's why you need to raise conservative kids. And that's why this book, Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City, will help you do that when they go to college or even just in their own public school. Katie, a lot of your kids went to public school. They were ready. They had no problem dealing with public school. They knew what was going to happen and they were there with answers. So they were beacons in a public school. You want your kid to be a sheepdog in a public school? Fool, not a sheep.
- [48:47]
B
Yes.
- [48:47]
A
And you know, you don't want them to be slaughtered. So you can help that by getting them ready, by getting the book Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke Culture. And also a book like I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Because in addition to the conservative principles, you want them to know why Christianity is true and be able to deal with the arguments that people bring against Christianity and have them ready with the arguments that show Christianity is indeed true. But Katie, this is an issue that I know is near and dear to your heart. A lot of Christians don't know a lot about. Seems like it's a pro life issue, that it's positive for life, but in reality, the way it's most often done, it's not pro life and that's in vitro fertilization. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? Because a lot of people don't know about it.
- [49:38]
B
Well, if you listen to them before us radio on American Family Radio over the weekend, you know a lot about this. This because we do spend a lot of time talking about IVF and why it's actually sort of the other side of the coin when it comes to abortion, that these two things have a lot in common, that ivf, the best that we can ascertain because we don't have a lot of data. It's so interesting because the baby taking industry of abortion and the baby making industry of IVF don't like it when we have the numbers on exactly what they're doing to these little, little lives. So our best estimate is that IVF destroys maybe four times the number of embryonic lives every year, as Planned Parenthood does that. Why is that? Because when you're counseling a woman who is considering abortion outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic, you're trying to save one baby. But when a couple goes into a fertility clinic and then comes back out after a round of IVF or a round of embryo creation, you might be talking about 5, 10, 15, 25 babies. Why?
- [50:38]
A
How does that work? How does it work?
- [50:40]
B
Because the fertility world is going to encourage you to make as many children as possible. They're going to encourage you to harvest as many eggs as you can or purchase as many eggs as you can, fertilize as many as possible because they want to whittle them down. They're going to screen them all for genetic abnormalities. They're going to sex select and then they're going to grade the embryos based on how, how well they develop or how far they develop at days three to five. So then they're going to grade the babies A, B, C, D, E, no E. But they'll throw out or encourage you to discard the lower grade embryos, transfer the ones that are the highest grade, that are the sex you want, that don't have any genetic abnormalities, that maybe have the right eye color if you did that kind of testing too. And then they're going to encourage you to freeze the surplus embryos. And so maybe that first round is going to succeed, maybe it won't. Maybe you're gonna have to go through two or three more rounds and whittle down your stock of 12 embryos down to six before you get a live birth. And then maybe you'll do it again and you'll get twins out of that transfer. But then you've got four left. And so what do you do with those four? So do you understand like there are so many. There's like a gauntlet that children have to go through between the different screenings that takes place. Sex selection, the grading, the genetic.
- [51:59]
The genetic pre implantation screening that they're undergo. There's now like several services that will allow you to do a total genome screening of your edit to screen for 900 to 1200 traits of the child. Medical, but also superficial as well. I mean really what you're talking about is mass producing children not so you can design them, but so you can eliminate the ones that you don't want. And so it is eugenics, it is destruction of life on a mass scale to the point where our best estimate is about 2 to 3%. 2 to 3% of lab made babies will be born alive. The vast majority are not going to make it through the process alive. So if you believe that life begins at conception, big fertility is a greater threat to children than abortion is.
- [52:48]
A
Even if you don't believe it, it's true, right? It does begin at conception. Okay, so does anybody, do you know of any Christians that you know, they don't think they can conceive naturally, that do this properly and just create one embryo and implant it.
- [53:03]
B
Okay, Everybody asks Me that because all of us know people that have been struggling with infertility. Maybe they have infertility, they desperate. We know these people, they'd be amazing parents. We want them to be parents. But they, and, and, and these parents are told IVF is your only way to have a child, which is not true. There's something called restorative reproductive medicine, which seeks to identify and resolve the underlying fertility issue so you don't have to be reliant on a technician to get pregnant. IVF clinics, even your allopathic doctor, they're not going to tell you that. They're going to say, they're going to shuffle you into the IVF pipeline because it's so lucrative. So everybody, wherever I go, speak or talk or the letters that we get written in, we'll say, but I can do it in a way that's pro life. So what does that look like? Only creating the number of embryos you intend to immediately implant without any kind of pre implantation screening. No sex selection. Doesn't matter what the grade of the embryo is. You transfer all of them, you don't freeze them, and then you carry whatever children to term, even if they twin or triple in utero. And that's possible. You haven't violated any child's right to life. You haven't violated any child's right to their mother and father. You haven't frozen any children, which when children go into the freezer, they usually don't come out. Okay, very, very often don't come out. So that is the pathway forward. And then I say, nobody does that. It's so cost prohibitive that why would you do that? Since there's such high failure rates for every implantation, it's better to have a bank of children that you can go back to when the first, second or third transfer fails. Further, your own doctor is going to counsel you against this. They don't want you to create a limited number of embryos because then they do not have you dependent on getting your children out of the freezer and transferring them again. And you won't have the money to go through the process of doing IVF a second time when it's 15 to $25,000 per round. Better to get 12 children out of that than two so that you can then just pay for the transfer in the future after a failure or four. So I've gone around the country and I've said that's the way to do this, without violating right to life or right to their mother and father and not freezing And I've had. So far, I've spoken to thousands of people. I've had about five that have come up to me and said, that's what we did. We only created the number of embryos that we immediately implanted. We didn't do any genetic screening or sex selection or testing or anything. I said, thanks for letting me know. I'm glad your children are okay. Are you absolutely loaded? And they're like, yes, we are. We have a lot of money. We are millionaires. Because that approach that, that quote unquote pro life approach is simply out of reach for most people. Most people go into debt for ivf. They don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that embryo creation every time they want to do a transfer.
- [55:52]
A
I can hear we have something on.
- [55:53]
B
Our sub stack if you want more information about this.
- [55:55]
A
Yeah, let's put it in the show notes. Can you.
- [55:57]
B
Yeah, is IVF pro life or, you know, can I do ivf? And it's kind of like, let's look at all the risks. Let's look at the way that this would actually have to look. And the answer is you can, and nobody does it.
- [56:07]
A
Yeah, I can hear friends of mine that have done this and they have these beautiful children. And so they're immediately going to be sort of defensive to what we're saying. But that doesn't change the fact that if you went through the traditional method, you probably destroyed some human beings.
- [56:24]
B
And they probably weren't aware of that going into it. I mean, especially when you're talking 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, there was not as much information and we were back in the I can trust my doctor kind of phase. But the people who have done IVF probably know what I'm talking about because they do have embryos that are still in frozen storage. And they're absolutely distressed over the fact that those are their very real children. But now I'm 47. I can't carry a pregnancy safely, but I can't donate them to research. I can't thaw and discard them. I can't donate them to another couple because those are my children and I don't want my biological children. So they're just paralyzed. I mean, we hear from those people all the time.
- [57:07]
A
What do you say?
- [57:09]
B
You're cooked.
- [57:13]
What is the way out? You can do something called a compassionate transfer where they will transfer the children into your womb at a time when you're not able to.
- [57:23]
With environment that's inhospitable. So the children will not implant you can have them adopted to another couple, but you still have the problem of those children probably coming back to you someday, saying, I look a lot more like you than the children that you chose to have. You raised your kids in Beverly Hills, and I was raised in a trailer park.
- [57:44]
I mean, those kids are gonna have questions that are gonna be very, very hard to answer in the future. So a lot of them understand that there is no way out. There's no way out in terms of protecting children's right to life and right to their mother and father and their own desire to raise those children. Big Fertility has absolutely victimized not just scores of children, but intended parents as well.
- [58:07]
A
Well, the only way out morally is to repent and put it under the cross. May have been well intended at the time, but, yeah, speak up and sound.
- [58:18]
B
The alarm and tell other people about how the IVF industry preyed upon your desperation and created all these victims. I was speaking at a Catholic church last month, and I had this group of nuns come up to me, and they're like, well, we teach these ethics classes, and so we talk about, like, the church is teaching on ivf, and we've got, you know, children there that are created through ivf. And we don't know what to say when they ask us, why are you saying that I am less than. And the answer is, you are just as worthy of protection in life as every other human child that's ever been created. I just wish I could have met your siblings. I mean, that's the answer is you. When you meet a child born through ivf, you are meeting this sliver, this fraction of the children that were actually made in a laboratory. And all the other children were just as worthy of life, just as worthy to be cherished and protected and even just to have a chance to be implanted. And probably 90% of them never even make it to the womb, because this predatory industry is about mass producing and manufacturing children to increase the bottom line.
- [59:26]
A
Give me. Give us just a minute or two on what President Trump tried to do. It sounded like a pro life proclamation he was making about, we need more kids. We do need more kids. That's for. Certainly for sure in our country. The question is, how do you get them? What was President Trump trying to do with. With IVF?
- [59:42]
B
Unfortunately, there's a lot of confusion among the GOP about IVF. That was very apparent in 2024, when the Alabama Supreme Court handed down the most pro life decision that we've ever seen, recognizing that if a couple frozen embryos were destroyed through accident by the clinic. The parents could sue under a wrongful death claim as if those were their actual children, because they were their actual children. The result was the entire industry ground to a halt in Alabama. And the doctors and the hospitals and the clinic said, whoa there. If destroying embryonic life is going to be something we're held reliable for, we cannot do ivf. IVF is built upon the destruction of embryonic life. They will not do this. Hey, people, this is the enemy telling you exactly what they're doing. If children have a right to life from the moment of conception, IVF doctors and clinics will not operate in that state. That's what happened. But the response was not to protect parents or children. The response was protect the industry. And unfortunately, there were a lot of Republicans like Senator Cruz who came out and said, we're going to have the protect IVF bill. We need to protect IVF because we want families to have children. And President Trump picked up on that. He said, I am going to be the, the grandfather of ivf, the granddaddy of ivf. And so his executive order in February of this year said, here's my executive order. We're going to make sure that IVF is more accessible and affordable. The 90 day window passed for that executive order to be fleshed out. And when they did roll something out, it was, we're going to make some medications cheaper that lead to this. But thank God it wasn't a mandate for ivf. And I think that's because there were a lot of people that wised up between the Alabama decision and his executive order. And they go, what the hell? This actually is anti life and it is not pro child technology. Some children are born of it, but it is anti child, both in terms of the scope of embryonic destruction and that you're treating children as designer products, not as gifts to be received. Not only that, not just the massive loss of life, but anywhere from one third to two thirds of children that are born alive are going to lose their mother or father in the process. That when you are subsidizing ivf, you are subsidizing the creation of more children who won't be born, and you're subsidizing motherless and fatherless babies in the process. So IVF is not pro life, it's not pro family from the child's perspective, and it doesn't even increase birth rates. The places that we have that actually have subsidized ivf, the companies or the states, they are not seeing increases in birth rates. They're seeing women put off childbearing longer and maybe have the same number of children and just do it later in.
- [62:20]
A
Life and do it without a husband.
- [62:22]
B
Sometimes do it without a husband, which.
- [62:24]
A
Means without a father.
- [62:25]
B
That's exactly right.
- [62:26]
A
Okay.
- [62:27]
B
IVF is not. I'm sorry, you guys all need to know about ivf. Ivf. If you believe children have a right to left, you have a true front, a two front war on your hand. You need to be anti abortion and highly critical of ivf.
- [62:41]
A
Go back, go back to what happened in Alabama then. Did the Alabama court or the Alabama legislature try and protect the industry or what happened?
- [62:51]
B
Republican led coalition in their legislature decided to completely give Big Fertility a blank check. They protected the industry and now if there is a problem or a death, death because there were embryos that were mishandled, it will be the clinics that are protected, not the parents and not the children. This is something we say at them before us a lot. The victim determines the policy. Whoever you identify as the victim, you're going to create the policy around them. So they didn't see the parents as the victim and they certainly didn't see the children as the victims. They saw the doctors as the victims. They saw the clinics as the victims. And unfortunately Republicans were behind that very often. Because we say we need to protect IVF because in our mind we're thinking about the sweet Christian heterosexual couple next door that we really want to have a baby who's obviously not going to be using somebody else's womb or somebody else's sperm. But unfortunately, big fertility gets an awful lot of mileage off of our misunderstanding of the level of child victimization that takes place through ivf.
- [63:49]
A
Go back for just a minute to the.
- [63:53]
Treatment that somebody can get if they are having trouble conceiving. What is that called? And where do people learn more about it?
- [64:00]
B
You can look up restorative reproductive medicine, rrm. Now the problem is that a lot of people, they will be diagnosed with infertility, which is 12 months of unprotected heterosexual sex that doesn't result in a pregnancy or live birth. And they'll go to the doctor and say, we have been struggling to get pregnant. The doctor will say, oh, you've got unexplained infertility. Here's a recommendation. Go to this IVF clinic. The reality is that most of those people don't have unexplained infertility. They have unexplored infertility. There are causes for infertility. There is dozens of reasons why your Body is not working the way it's supposed to work. It might be a hormonal imbalance, it might be endometriosis, it might be pcos. There might be a problem on his side as it relates to sperm count or sperm health. There's actually things that you can do to rectify and fix a lot of that. Some of it is simple, some of it's not simple. Some of it is a lifestyle change. Sometimes you need to lose weight. Obesity is a real barrier when it comes to fertility. Some of it is you missed your childbearing window and it's gonna be very hard to get pregnant as a 42 year old. And so one of the things we need to be doing is telling young women especially and pastors and parents to encourage young women to prioritize marriage and motherhood early. Their career is gonna be there later. A woman's career pathway should look much more creative and probably peak later than a man's. Her fertility window is very short. But if it's not the fact that you missed your prime reproductive years, and if it is where you're under 35 and you want to get pregnant, there's probably a problem that can be solved. So restorative reproductive medicine, on the other side of it, you probably won't have debt, you will have a healthier body, and there's a higher likelihood that you're also going to have a baby and be able to have more babies in the future.
- [65:50]
A
By the way, for people that get frustrated with what politicians do on these issues.
- [65:56]
I want you to ask yourself this question. And that is, has my pastor ever talked about any of these issues? Did your pastor say a word when Roe v. Wade was overturned? If not, please don't blame Donald Trump or the Republicans for what they do, or the Democrats for that matter. Because if your pastor isn't talking about these issues.
- [66:17]
Why do you hold politicians to a higher standard than your pastor? Yeah, I don't think you ought to be. You ought to be. Yeah, go ahead, Katie.
- [66:26]
B
I understand why, especially on reproductive technologies, pastors don't talk a lot about it. When my husband went to seminary in, you know, from 99 to 2003, I remember he had a course on.
- [66:39]
Like, IVF, but it was. It was pretty surface level and it was just a little drop in the bucket compared to everything else that he was learning. Things have changed. I mean, right now this is actually a major front on the war for human dignity. And it's something that pastors need to be experts on. So I understand why you Might not have heard a lot about this, but that just needs to change.
- [67:03]
A
Yeah, no, it's, it's not just ivf, it's just the whole pro life issue per se. Because I hear a lot of Christians complaining. Well, you know, someone like Donald Trump is not as pro life as we'd like him to be. Is your pastor as pro life as he should be?
- [67:15]
B
Yeah.
- [67:15]
A
You know, if you're, if you're holding a politician to a higher standard than your pastor, then it seems like you've got something wrong here. If your pastor isn't talking about, say, the pro life issue, why do you expect a politician to be more pro life than your pastor? You're probably going to the wrong church.
- [67:36]
B
And it's very important for us to understand. You know, I've written about this on Substack and on Twitter and I talk about it a lot. Child protection is the business of the church. Everywhere that Christianity has existed in every century and in every country, it confronts threats to children. The threats change. You know, in China, it was foot binding, you know, mutilation of little girls in terms of their feet. In the Islamic world, it's female genital mutilation, mutilation of children for the sake of Islamic practices and female control. In the industrial age in the uk, it was conscripting poor street children to work in factories for 14 hours a day. It was all across the world where Christians started orphanages, some of the first orphanages that ever existed in some of those countries to care for unwanted children. It was confronting, in a variety of different countries, the, the widespread practice of infanticide of girls or disabled children. Everywhere Christianity has gone, they have stood athwart whatever is the current cultural threat against children. And two things happen as a result. Adults get pissed and the rights and well being of children are elevated. Everywhere Christianity has gone. So what's happening in our culture today is matters of life and matters of family. Are the current cultural threats against children the most potent ways that we are trying to deconstruct children? Elevate adult desires at the expense of child rights. So every Christian, especially every pastor, must now become an expert on this. Why? Because this is your opportunity to step into the great cloud of witnesses of Christians that have gone before, the ones that we talk about in Harold, you know, like Amy Carmichael, who went in and snatched those girls that were being trafficked as sexual slaves in, in temples and brought them into her home. Like, we revere those people. It's our chance to be like them. And it is going to be socially costly it's politically costly in some ways. Welcome to Christianity. This is what Christians do.
- [69:47]
A
That's right. Check the show notes of this show, ladies and gentlemen, because we've touched on a lot of issues, we're going to put some links in the show notes. Katie, you do great work. Then before us is the website thenbefore us.com thenbefore us.com the new the book that just came out a couple years ago is called Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City. We'll put a link to that on there. Don't forget about the link to Charlie's new book, which is Stop in the Name of God. Fabulous book as well. In fact, we'll put a couple of links in the show notes. Erica talking to Hannity about it. Also Fox and Friends. We'll put that in the show notes as well so you can see much more. Katie, any final thing to say to our audience?
- [70:26]
B
I just want to say hello to the five Christians that listened to my conversation with Frank last week who live in Seattle, you know, all five of them. And round of applause for the five. There they are, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, I know like Frank Durk is reaching these, the little remnant of those of us that are still here. So, yeah, shout out to those who are living in hostile places, not because they don't have an option to leave, but because they love the people here and understand that this is their service to God is to carefully pray for the welfare of the city and transform the city by their presence.
- [71:04]
A
Stay there and fight for Jesus there. Absolutely. Yeah. We can't all, we can't all leave to paradise. We need to be missionaries in our own country.
- [71:13]
B
Yep.
- [71:14]
A
So thanks for what you're doing then before us dot com, ladies and gentlemen, thenbefore us dot com. Great stuff as always, Katie. Check her out as well. She's got a radio program, American Family Radio Network, a podcast. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. So check all that out, ladies and gentlemen, and look for us in the next podcast. Be with the great Lee Strobel. He's got a new movie coming out on Miracles just in time for Christmas. It's coming out next week. We'll tell you about that on the podcast coming up. Then we'll have Megan Basham on. We're going to have several other great interviews. So keep an eye on the I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist podcast and we will see you here next time. Don't Forget about the $300,000 matching gift. Go to cross examine.org click on donate. Thanks so much. We'll see you next time.