We Will Not Be Silenced Interview Part 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. The American ideal of free speech is in tatters.

Now it's only free if you agree with the mainstream media. Freedom is in mortal danger even when we worship, as police knock on church doors like they did in Nazi Germany. Today, more reasons why we will not be silenced. A discussion with Erwin Lutzer about his crucial new book.

Stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Now, along with Pastor Larry McCarthy, here is Pastor Lutzer.

Well, once again, welcome to Running to Win. We have a very special program for you today. I've written a new book and discussing it with me is Larry McCarthy. Larry McCarthy is on the pastoral staff here at the Moody Church responsible for compassion ministries, local outreach.

Perhaps you're acquainted with Larry because he's been on our program before and we welcome you again today, Larry. Pastor, I'm delighted to be here as we discuss this new book. We will not be silenced, responding courageously to our culture's assault on Christianity. And today, I'm really curious to see what you're going to say about this issue of freedom of speech. You know, Larry, freedom of speech has always been a great hallmark of America.

It's enshrined in the Constitution. And Rebecca and I lived in Skokie, Illinois, which is a suburb of Chicago in 1977. Some neo-Nazis were going to come to that suburb because there were so many Jewish people who had gone through the Holocaust who were still living and they wanted to incite some kind of violence. And the city of Skokie said, don't come. But the ACLU said no matter how offensive it was, they should be allowed to be there and they were. Now, today is a different day. We're living in a day when freedom of speech is being censored.

Now, last time we talked about cultural Marxism and the idea of freedom of speech being censored is really based on Marxism. Here's what happened, Larry. You had a philosopher by the name of Marc Cuzzi. I remember him in the 60s. I mean, I didn't know much about him.

I haven't even read too much about him. But he was a very committed Marxist. And he said this. He said, as long as we have freedom of speech, the capitalists can win the argument. They are using their position of power to win the argument. He says, we will never have a Marxist state as long as we have freedom of speech. So he said that only oppressed people should have the right to speak.

And if you go on and read his writings and you say, now, wait a moment. Who are these people who have a right to speak? He said it was the mature people.

He was looking at himself and a number of others who were Marxists. We have the right to speak. The others do not because we have to win this debate. Well, this has seeped into academia today. So what you have is professors who are saying that it's very important that only the oppressed have the opportunity to speak. If you're a capitalist, if you're somebody who is an oppressor, which oftentimes is a white person, then you shouldn't necessarily be allowed to speak. And in fact, I quote a contemporary writer who says, in effect, clearly we need a double standard so that if we are going to bring about the kind of cultural revolution that Marxism would insist upon, we cannot allow unfettered freedom of speech. So you present this as a philosophical perspective as opposed to political, I think. So what's this philosophical basis for the turn?

Larry, that's an excellent question. People think to themselves that philosophers are people in an ivory tower somewhere, spinning out all these theories that nobody reads and dealing just with metaphysical issues that do not touch life. What they don't understand is philosophers sometimes shift the attention of an entire society in a different direction. I mean you think, for example, Karl Marx.

Think of the implications of him. And we're still not finished with him in these interviews because later on we're going to talk about Marxism and socialism and so forth. So what you have is you have university professors, you have teachers who have never – and students certainly – who have never heard of Marcuse. But it has seeped into the academic framework of many of our universities and it is being taught. So it is a philosophical issue and then of course it becomes a political issue and all the other things, racial and whatever, but it actually is resting upon a Marxist foundation that there should not be such a thing as unfettered freedom of speech.

Why is this so important? Well the reason that this is so important is because you think of what's happening in our universities where oftentimes you have a conservative speaker who is not allowed to give their point of view. As a matter of fact, they are sometimes disinvited if they were invited at all or there's even been violence against people who hold a point of view that is not accepted by the norm of the university, the cultural stream, an issue that we are going to have to talk about. As a result of this, people are intimidated and oftentimes they don't want to even express their point of view. They self-censor themselves so that they aren't speaking their mind because they are fearful of what is going to happen. And it is amazing to me, Larry, that the university which always prided itself in liberalism – liberalism taught that we should hear all different points of view – is now oftentimes the institution that is so concerned about issues that they will not allow an alternate point of view. And if students hear something that they disagree with, they need to find a safe place, not because they have fears of themselves physically but they need a place where they can nurse all of their wounds because of their unappreciated oppression.

And so that's the kind of people oftentimes that have very important responsibilities at our universities. Peter Larry, I absolutely love this. All of us know the name of Rushdie. He wrote the book entitled The Satanic Verses and for that he received a fatwa. That means that he was destined to be killed if somebody found him. Now that apparently has been lifted but he still lives in an undisclosed location. But he gave one of the best defenses of free speech that I have ever read.

I have it here in my hands. A fundamental decision needs to be made. Do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies, people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other's positions.

I have to keep reading. People have the fundamental right to take an argument to the point where somebody is offended by what they say. It's no trick to support the free speech of somebody you agree with or those to whose opinion you are indifferent. The defense of free speech begins at the point where people say something that you can't stand. If you can't defend their right to say it, then you don't believe in free speech. You only believe in free speech as long as it doesn't get up your nose.

Isn't that great? I wish that every university would read that. Here's what happens when students turn against a professor because they have said something that is too conservative or deemed racist. The university always publishes something that says, you know, we want to commend our students for eliciting a conversation that is needed about this, that or the other thing. We believe in free speech and then it goes on to talk about why they really don't believe in free speech.

So this is so critical. Larry, we're going to have to transition to another chapter. That other chapter is on the topic of propaganda.

But first of all, I want to say this. I want to respond biblically to the free speech issue. You think, for example, in the book of Acts, chapter four, where Peter and the apostles were told no longer preach in the name of Jesus and they were threatened. We know that they were beaten and all the rest. And what did they say? They said we cannot help but speak what we have seen and heard. What they were saying is you can give us all the threats that you want, but we are going to speak. And the title of my book, by the way, is We Will Not Be Silenced.

They said we will continue to speak no matter what. And what an example they are to us. And we think, for example, of Martin Luther. You know that he happens to be one of my heroes. But here he is at the Diet of Ormes and he's asked to recant. He's been told that if he doesn't recant, he knows he's to be put to death. And he stands up and says these words, which I've quoted many times, but I want to get them in right here. I will not and I cannot recant.

To go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me, God.

Amen. Now, the thing is, he was standing against a thousand years of church history, a thousand years of tradition, and yet there he stood. And I just cry out to the Church of Jesus Christ today, let us not be intimidated. Let us stand, stand firmly, but stand we will and then we take the consequences.

And I might add this, you look at 200 years of church history, centuries after centuries the church did not have freedom of speech like we do in America. And they kept speaking, you know. You take the consequences and that's the way we need to respond.

Boy, what a call to action. Confront or compromise. You know, so you lay out this case that freedom of speech has been curbed and that we're not really pursuing truth, that there's only going to talk about the things that advance a particular cause. It brings up this word propaganda.

That's what this sounds like, but am I using that correctly? What is propaganda? You know, propaganda. All right, I'll summarize it in a single sentence or two.

Propaganda is to so change people's perception of reality that even when confronted with a mountain of evidence, they will not change their minds. And so what you have to do is to create what I call, I don't know anyone else who uses this phrase, but I do. What you need to do is to create a cultural stream. And that stream has to be powerful and it has to be a stream that people buy into and a stream that people accept.

And once it is accepted, this is the result. Now you think, for example, of America, and I'm taking this now by memory, but I know that it's in my book. You have, for example, the Philadelphia Inquirer. During the riots that were taking place in the United States, and you have, you know, looters and so forth, the editor allowed an article to be published entitled Buildings Matter Too.

And the point of the article was lives are more important than buildings, but buildings matter too, and look at the desecration that's happening. Eventually, that editor had to resign because the very idea that maybe the riots were illegitimate because they were destroying buildings went against a cultural stream that has been created in this culture. And woe to the person who has the nerve to stand against it. You will be canceled. And so our present society says this, oh yeah, you can exercise your First Amendment right, freedom of speech, but if you say the wrong thing, we will cancel you.

And throughout all of this time, we have a number of different examples of the canceling culture that is taking place because you have this cultural stream. Now, I do want to get into Hitler. And the reason is he is a great example of how propaganda works. And not only that, but the homosexual movement back in the 1980s said that they were following Hitler in some of their propaganda because Hitler said that with the right use of propaganda, you can make hell appear like heaven and heaven appear like hell. And he pulled it off.

Let's just take a deep breath and ask ourselves, how did this happen? First of all, what you need to do is to target an enemy. And in his case, it was the Jews.

So lies were told about the Jewish people, how that they are the ones that are to be blamed for World War I and Germany's loss in World War I. What you have to do as much as possible is stimulate hate against people. You need to then target those people. And not only that, it is very important for you to also instill fear in people, fear that if you are standing against the regime, you will pay the consequences.

So what you have is a powerful cultural stream. And also, I discuss how language is manipulated. For example, you can have phrases that mask a great deal of evil. When Hitler starved children, he called it putting them on a low calorie diet. You know, he never talked about killing Jews.

He talked about the idea of cleansing the land and places where people were put to death were health specialty centers. And you think for example of how that works today by the way, we think of abortion. Nobody ever talks about abortion as the killing of a preborn infant, right? It is a woman's right to choose. It is reproductive justice. It is a health issue. So language is brought to bear to create these cultural ideas that all of us from time to time might be subjected to. You mentioned like the misunderstanding of the word love. Is that what you have in mind here when you talk about propaganda? Larry, this is so critical. Now you're talking about evangelicals.

What happens is this. People justify same sex marriage for example. I mean after all, shouldn't we have more love rather than less? And I heard a very famous pastor say that wherever there is love and he was talking about same sex relationships, wherever there is love, there is God.

Well this is a time for us to just back off, take a deep breath and ask ourselves this. Is this biblical? What we must recognize is that when Adam and Eve sinned, they did not stop loving. They continued to love. They became lovers of themselves, lovers of money, lovers of pleasure.

And that's what happened. And so just because somebody loves, it doesn't justify it. And there are many people – and this again is where I try to help the church think through some of these issues.

We seem to be caught between – we don't want to be known as being judgmental. We want to be known as loving. And so love sometimes is used to interpret issues in a very unbiblical way. But we want to be loving. But I want to remind people of the words of Jesus Christ who said very clearly, if you love me, keep my commandments. So in the Bible, love is not some sentimentality that is cut off from content and so forth.

We have to be lovers of God but the simple fact is that ideas like this are used today and they are used in a way that is very wrong. You're heightening our sensitivity to this issue of propaganda, how words are used, what isn't being said. But I got to ask you, so where does that leave us as the church?

Where do we go from here? Well clearly this time in history in America, this is not for the faint-hearted, is it? And I'm afraid that we are so intimidated by the culture.

We are so afraid of being called unloving that oftentimes we can make compromises in the name of love. And I think it's very important for us to recognize that sometimes, speaking of propaganda, and by the way, in the book I talk about how words are used today to continue to talk about even crime in San Francisco. We don't want to call anybody a criminal. The idea is it's Marxist. If we're nice to people, people will be nice to us because any crimes that they commit are all external to them.

It's because they are oppressed. But we have to hurry on to your question about the role of the church in the midst of this. As I thought about propaganda, I had to ask myself the question, Larry, are we as a church even advertising correctly or are we deceptive in our advertising? We say that this is a church where the gospel of Jesus Christ is going to be proclaimed with balance, where we are going to balance truth and love, where we are going to be instructing people on how to live in this culture. And people sometimes come and they see a very well-timed worship service, they see very enthusiastic music or whatever, and then they have a talk from the preacher. But what they don't hear is this is the word of God. Darrell Bock Uh-oh. It got quiet out there, Pastor.

I don't know. Tom Hanks The name of the book is We Will Not Be Silenced Responding Courageously to Our Culture's Assault on Christianity. In all of these chapters, we're just doing a flyover. We're hitting the top of issues such as freedom of speech, issues that have to do with propaganda. But my desire is that people might understand what is happening and to give some kind of instruction to the church on how to respond to what is happening in our culture. From my heart to yours today, thank you to all those who have listened. We're so grateful for all those who support the ministry of Running to Win. And always remember our intention is to help people to make it across the finish line.

What I want to do is to leave behind a legacy that says I was a lover of the gospel and hopefully I devoted my life to helping all of us think through what that means in a culture that very clearly has lost its way. But I'm excited about the fact that God has given us this culture to witness to. Free speech is fading and propaganda is rising, but it gets worse. Next time on Running to Win, how the powers that be want to sexualize your children and compel their allegiance to the transgender and gay agendas. The cell phone in your teenager's hand does more to shape his or her view of culture and sexuality than an hour of Sunday school and an hour of church.

Amen. And the comprehensive sex education curriculum is really designed to create sexual confusion. It is totally antithetical to all biblical values. It touches children very deeply at the depth of their being and is really in many respects destroying them. So parents out there, let me say this again. Don't throw your children to wolves.

Amen. Why would socialism be attractive in a place like America? Yeah, capitalism is the disease.

Socialism is the cure. That's what we are being told today. Don't miss this high-impact broadcast. Pastor Lutzer's new book, We Will Not Be Silenced, will be sent as our gift to you as you support Running to Win at this crucial time with your gift of any amount. Just call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. Or write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. Online, reach us at rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.