In Other News Beyond the Pandemic

In other news, beyond the pandemic, Victor Davis Hanson joins us today on The Christian Worldview, where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and to share the good news that all people can be reconciled to God through faith in Jesus Christ.

I'm David Wheaton, the host, and our website is thechristianworldview.org. Thanks for joining us today as we talk about other news beyond this coronavirus pandemic. Now, there has been wall-to-wall coverage of this pandemic the last two months, whether the focus has been the spread from China or treatment options, cases and deaths, protective equipment or the lack thereof, stay-at-home orders or trillion-dollar government payments. It's been COVID-19 all the time. So this week in the program, we're going to examine some of the other important events taking place in the world that are getting less attention, such as how will rogue regimes like China, Iran and Russia react to changing global dynamics?

Will the U.S. ever be the same after this enormous rescue spending that's been taking place? And how is the pandemic being used actually to advance political ideology in America? Our guest is noted geopolitical analyst Victor Davis Hanson. Victor is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

He's the author of many books. He's a syndicated columnist and a frequent guest on national media outlets. Now, it's rare for us to have a guest who is not a professing born-again Christian, and I asked him about his beliefs in the last couple of questions today, but I think you'll find his analysis of current events helpful and insightful. Let's get to the first segment of the interview with Victor Davis Hanson. Victor, it's great to have you on the program for the first time. You wrote a recent column entitled Pandemic is But One of America's Security Concerns.

And I want to read just the first couple sentences of that column and then follow up with a question. You write, The world was a dangerous place before and will be after the coronavirus pandemic. While Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection's origins, nature and trajectory, they may have tuned out other, often just as scary news. Now, Victor, people have wildly different views of this coronavirus pandemic, and it's clear now that it's really divided along political or worldview lines. Those on the left think it's a threat to our lives, worthy of shutting down society for an indeterminate period of time, no matter what the other consequences. Those on the right think this has now become an overreaction by government based on either faulty modeling or something more nefarious, like the achievement of some leftist objective socialism and so forth, especially as they compare the statistics of the coronavirus to something like influenza. And right now there's been nearly 50,000 COVID deaths, according to the CDC in America, and not necessarily we can trust that based on the fact that there's been some talk about inflation of those numbers, but there's been about the same from influenza just this season. So the first question for you is, could you describe the worldview divide going on right now?

And in your view, how serious of a health threat this is? It's serious because the divide is multifaceted. It's geographical.

People tend on the two coasts to be tied in more with the global community. They're more progressive in these blue states, and they feel that life has been very good for them, and they have markets of 7 billion people for their products, whether that's intellectual or technological or legal or whatever their particular skills and professions are. And in their view, they want no chance of being infected whatsoever, and they're much more prone to, I think, the fears that have been generated.

And no amount of reasoning that all the models without exceptions have been downgraded and all of the denominators without exceptions have been enlarged and all of the statistics on lethality per cases have gone down, not up. And yet, in their worldview, that's not enough. And then politically, whether we like it or not, the whole debate now is weaponized and politicized, and people feel on the left that Donald Trump may have finally met his Waterloo in a way that Robert Mueller and impeachment for them disappointed them, and that he's in a lose-lose situation. If he goes back too soon, then he got people killed for money, and if he goes back too late, then he's another Herbert Hoover who ruined the economy, and they're satisfied with that. So they like the status quo.

They think each day that he's losing traction, and this conservative Trump nightmare will be over in November. That's another fault line. And then there's cultural and social. People in the interior of the country tend to be a little bit more entrepreneurial. They're living a little bit more on the margins. They're more middle class.

They don't have guaranteed jobs at universities or foundations or media or professional employment. And they've seen a little bit more tragedy in their lives, or at least it's a little bit closer to them. And then their way of thinking, they own a pizza parlor, if they're a trucker or they have to go out and drive Uber all day, whatever there is, they feel that they can take that chance. When they get data that says, you know, one out of a thousand, not four out of a hundred are going to die if they're infected, they can live with that because they live with a lot greater risk every day.

So for them, it's let's get back and let's get to work. And somewhere in all of this mess is the truth. And the truth is, it seems at least that this is a very scary virus for people over 65 that have immune problems. And it can be very torturous in the way it sickens and even kills people. And yet the truth is also that for most people, and I shouldn't say most, for almost everybody, the lethality rate based on the latest samplings here in California conducted by USC and Stanford and in New York seem to suggest that the death rate for infection is about 0.15, 0.2, one or two per thousand, which is about what the flu is. And people will say, in my generation, we went through the 57 flu, we went through the 68 Hong Kong flu, we went through the 2017, the 2009 flu, and we didn't do this. And yet the death rates, especially given the size of the population was as grievous or more grievous than it is now. And I understand that we have a spike and that people got sick very quickly in the cases multiplied and the social distancing help keep the numbers down.

But it still seems to me that we're not going to meet the expectations of the modelers. And it is legitimate, at least in cases of lethality, to reference the flu. And it's no longer politically incorrect to do so. So how is this justifiable based on what you said then to continue these shutting down of the economy? It's justifiable in two ways.

One is, if you think Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the country, then never letting a crisis go to waste is justified as a noble means to get a noble end. And that's part of the reason. And then part of it is, if you're secure and you're not going to starve, you're going to do pretty well. And your biggest worry is your 401k went down some, but you are getting paid, then you're under no compulsion to get back to work. And you're less sympathetic to others because, as I said earlier, life is pretty good and you don't want to take any risk at all.

Why should you when you're getting your full paycheck or your full salary? And the guy who drives all night in the semi who brings your toilet paper to Walmart or the woman who's all morning at the ER, these are sort of abstractions. These are the people keeping us going, but they still remain to be abstractions. So I think part of it is we're sort of a postmodern society that doesn't want to take any risk versus a premodern society that hasn't forgotten that each day you get up is a gift and that a society ultimately succeeds or fails on whether it feeds itself, whether it has fuel for itself, whether it has shelter for itself, and whether it has, you know, some health care for itself.

And all the rest is in times like this is superfluous. Victor Davis Hanson with us today on the Christian Real View radio program. He is a historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, also an author and editor of 24 books and a nationally syndicated columnist.

You can find out more at his Web site, VictorHanson.com. You concluded that opening paragraph or so of your column by saying, while Americans debate the proper ongoing response to the virus and argue over the infection's origins, nature and trajectory, we already talked about that, they may have tuned out other often just as scary news. So let's get into some of this other news beyond the pandemic. How major of a threat is this, the reaction to the pandemic from an economic standpoint, but also from a constitutional liberty standpoint?

Well, we've never done this before. You know, the B-29 project, bomber project in today's dollars cost about $3 billion. Excuse me, it was about $2 billion then, it cost about $40 billion. And the Manhattan Project was about $25 billion. Space program was about a trillion. I think even this joint task of fighter, the F-35 will cost a trillion. World War II cost us about $5 trillion in addition to about 400,000 lives. But we have never, and these are all in today's dollars, we've never willingly shut down a $22 trillion economy. And I think so far the estimates that I've seen in lost GDP, lost market liquidity, distortions in consumption and borrowing by the federal government, this is up to $6 and $7 trillion. And so even if we get out of it in May or June, that debt is going to be passed on to another generation, and it's really going to end certain things that we expected.

I think from now on, if you have a passbook account and you put money into it, you're not going to get any interest, especially adjusted for inflation. And if you were to get interest and you'd get inflation, if you got inflation, we could not service the size of a debt. So we're kind of in a paradox there, and that's going to be really hard to get out of. Also, I'm worried about the social ramifications of having Americans locked in their homes well above spousal abuse, familial abuse, substance abuse, anxieties, depression, wrecked businesses, suicides, all of that.

Missed doctor's appointments, cancers undetected, cardiological problems not known. But we're also paying people not to work, and you can already see people like AOC who remarked about that as a sort of a good thing. So whether we realize that we're not, we're undergoing a massive redistribution of wealth from future generations, but also from people that worked their entire life.

In fact, they put maybe $100,000 in the bank, and they're just never going to get any interest on that money ever. And so we haven't even figured that out yet. I wish some team of economists was at that press conference along with Fauci and Dr. Birx and just said, look, this is the danger as well. We don't want to look just at cases and new lethalities, we want to look at new economic dangers because they have health consequences.

We're talking about other news beyond the pandemic that's somehow related because the pandemic is driving all the news pretty much nowadays with regards to economics, politically, geopolitically, militarily, what the world is moving towards as a result of it. So Victor Davis Hanson has, I think, excellent insight on many of these different issues related to this. But we have a lot more to get to on the program today with Victor Davis Hanson, so you can stay tuned. And we have a couple more segments coming up with him, then some following by some commentary as well. You're listening to the Christian Real View radio program. I'm David Wheaton and we'll be right back after this.

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I'm David Wheaton, the host. Our website, as always, is thechristianworldview.org. We have lots of resources there for you to take advantage of. Some of the Ray Comfort resources are recent. We have the How to Be Free from the Fear of Death booklet available. That's been a very popular resource. We're also going to get to later in the program today an interview with Lydia Kaiser again from Child Evangelism Fellowship on our website.

We have linked over to some resources they are have for during this time with your children and grandchildren for COVID-19. So that would be something we'd encourage you to do. But we'll get more into that later. Right now we're talking with Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford about another news beyond the pandemic, whether it's economics, civil liberties, China, politics.

So let's get back to the second segment with Victor. What about the constitutional liberty standpoint? It seems pretty unprecedented that you can just have government telling people to stay home. You can't get together. You can't do all these things. You can't go to work. Are you concerned at all about what the long-term ramifications is and how this will be used?

If it's used once at this time, will it be used again? And churches being closed down, you can't get together even in drive-in services. What are your thoughts on that aspect of this? I'm very worried about it because I was so worried this morning I read the Constitution again. And there's nothing in the Constitution. I mean, there's executive powers that are delegated to the states that the president doesn't have.

But any fair reading doesn't include those. And we pretty much decided that the First and Second Amendments no longer apply. Right of assembly, right of free speech, right of expression, religious expression as well, the right to bear arms. The L.A. County sheriff just arbitrarily, for I think two weeks, shut down all gun stores. And then he let out 1,700 prisoners.

That's illegal. I mean, these people were sentenced in the majority of cases and they were serving terms and he just commuted them. And we're having laws directed at free speech called against fear-mongering, whatever that is. So it is scary because it's all justified by this is something we've never, never, ever encountered.

And every day, whether it's the CDC or the National Institute of Health or the FDA or the WHO, whatever alphabet group it is, the truth keeps changing. Never wear a mask. Sometimes wear a mask.

Always wear a mask. No human transmission. Some human transmission.

Always human transmission. First patient zero, not until late January, not until mid-January. In California, not until mid-March.

Now it's early February. And two million are going to die. And the people want a little humility. We think before you destroy the Constitution, be a little bit more accurate in the reason or the justification for it.

Because while we're willing to listen to you, you're not symmetrical. If we say, wait a minute, it looks like it can be comparable to the flu. Or maybe there is some utility if you're an extremist with hydroxychloroquine.

Or maybe we don't need as many ventilators as you told us. Then all of a sudden you're a dissident or you're a troublemaker or you're a reactionary or you're a denier. And that is really worrisome. I guess what I'm saying is that people are so surprised how quick the Constitution evaporated with this threat. And it wasn't a threat, I don't think, comparable to what the country went through in 1918 or the Civil War, World War II.

At least yet it hasn't been. And yet they were so ready to scrap the Constitution in their fear and panic. Yeah, if people don't understand that ultimately government is forced, they should know so now.

Because what can people really do? I mean, if you start disobeying these government edicts, you're going to have someone come up to you and arrest you. And you're going to really lose your freedom. And so it really is a shocking era, the line that we've crossed here in this country.

I want to go overseas now. Again, Victor Davis Hanson with us today on the Christian worldview talking about other news beyond the pandemic. China, where the virus came from. You write in your column, China's overseas brand is tarnished. Importers can never again be sure of the safety or reliability of Chinese exports.

They will know only that their producer is a serial falsifier that is capable of anything to ensure power and profits. Beijing should expect that lots of industries will return to the United States. Thousands of Chinese students and researchers will likely go home too. Their absorption of American science and technology was critical to Chinese industry.

Last paragraph. China, however, will not meekly accept its new reduced post viral status. Instead, it will act even more provocatively and desperately than ever. Rumors have spread that China may be conducting nuclear tests in violation of zero yield global agreements. If true, it reminds us that our adversaries are most dangerous when cornered and wounded.

That's from your most recent column. So, Victor, what should we expect from a rogue regime? And that's what they are like China when they lose this manufacturing, when they lose money and influence. Well, we should expect anything because I think we all have a feeling that they react like we do and that they're embarrassed. They're humiliated.

They lie. They got caught on it. They probably bribed the World Health Organization. The origins, the transmission, the nature of the virus were never really fully disclosed. They blight about the patients that were infected, the deaths, the role of the or not the role of the wet market or the role or not the role of the Wuhan lab.

All of that. But I don't think they react that way at all. I think they say, you know what, let's not let a crisis go to waste. We had a little setback.

But you know what? We've got one point four billion people and we have a very different view of human life than the West does. And we can lose a lot more people without going into a panic.

And let's start doing things why the West is absorbed with this epidemic. And so what have they been doing? They've sort of renounced de facto international rules about low-yield nuclear testing, apparently. They're renaming islands in the South China Sea with Chinese names. They're cracking down on Hong Kong. And they are really pushing forward on military projects. They're telling their clients in the Belt and Road or the so-called Silk Road Initiative that they're going to have to pay no matter what. And they're calling us racist and running a very sophisticated propaganda campaign against us.

So they don't see any downside in the second phase. They say, we got knocked down, we're back up and we're much more resilient and we're really going to stick it to the United States. And from our point of view, we've got problems because Donald Trump says we're going to decouple. But he also doesn't want to offend China when we're in the process of decoupling because they could say tomorrow, we need those ampicillin orders.

We're not going to give you your chemotherapy, just forget about the vitamin D, things like that. So we have to decouple in terms of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, rare earth technologies, but not quite yet. We have to build a parallel supply chain before we cut the one we have with them. And then most importantly, we have a very disjointed higher educational system. So we're spending vast amounts of American capital into areas of social activism, diversity, identity politics, sociology, studies courses that our competitors don't invest in. And what I mean by that is we don't have enough mid-level engineers, technology people to implement the type of industries and technologies and scientific discovery with our top echelon, which is excellent, can do. And so we've been importing these Chinese students and people from India.

And if we want to get control of the whole supply chain, we're going to have to radically recalibrate American universities and the value system of students that go into them. That is going to be an uphill battle for where they are ideologically today. Again, Victor Davis Hanson with us on The Christian Real View, a senior fellow in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

You can find out more and sign up for his podcast by going to his website, VictorHanson.com. You mentioned earlier in the interview today about how the left is now focused on trying to use this pandemic crisis for political ends. What should listeners be watching for from those from Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, other leftist activists, what are the top three or four things they're going to try to do in the midst of this pandemic?

Well, they give themselves away because they use a limited vocabulary. And you know what it is, it's that we're not going back to normal or there's a new normal or this offers an opportunity or we have to change. When you hear that type of jargon, you understand that basically the menu of issues that were voiced during the Democratic primaries, the new Green Deal, a wealth tax, a very high income tax, Medicare for everybody, complete medical care for illegal aliens, open borders, subservience to international organizations, restoration of the Iran deal, the Paris Accord, all of that I think you're going to see voiced again. It didn't get 51 percent public approval.

That's why it died with the candidates that embraced it. But now under these new terms of panic and hysteria, they believe at least that they can start drafting legislation to introduce these issues. The main thing, though, of course, is they feel now that they can continue the 2018 momentum in the House, take the Senate, take the presidency. And unlike Barack Obama, who entered office in 2009 with a supermajority in the Senate and the House and who didn't, they feel, fully manipulate that, they will because they've learned from it. So that's, I think, what their agenda is to use this crisis to push through a vision that otherwise American people in normal times would not approve of.

Victor Davis Hanson is our guest today on The Christian Real View. You can see as you watch this pandemic that the reaction just from the regular people out there very much falls along political ideology. If you're on the left, you're all for what some of these government shutdowns are for. You think they should continue on no matter what the consequences are economically.

If you're on the right, it's just the opposite. We need to get back to work. It's really reverted down to political ideology. We have more coming up with Victor Davis Hanson after this. It is a pain to know that there are people who do not know Jesus. It is a greater pain to know that oftentimes Jesus and Christianity is being distorted. Your destiny is calling out.

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Your email and mailing address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time. Call 1-888-646-2233 or visit theChristianworldview.org. And back on the Christian Worldview radio program today, we're talking with Victor Davis Hanson. He's a senior fellow in residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He's got quite a resume and on all the various topics we're talking about today whether economic, civil liberties, China, other places in the world, politics. He really is really quite insightful.

You can connect with him and his podcast and his writings by going to his website, victorhanson.com. We're getting into other news beyond the coronavirus pandemic that's somehow related to it because almost everything in the news is related to it today. We have one more segment with him so let's get back to the remaining moments with Victor Hanson. Now you've talked about China in your column, Iran, you mentioned that, we won't get into that. Talked about the Democrat Party, globalists.

All these groups hate Donald Trump. He's been a big disrupter to their intentions for the world. To what degree is evicting him from the presidency driving just the reaction even from a state-by-state level that they're continuing these lockdowns even longer, maybe hoping beyond hope that this will somehow turn against Trump or maybe it sounds a little more conspiratorial, but is it even possible that the source of this virus coming from China, is there any evidence that this was released in a way as to create lots of trouble in America and possibly stop him from having a second term? It is true we were engaged in an existential war over trade with China and it was true that the American left was very frustrated because they had had a series of spars, showdowns with Donald Trump and they'd lost every one of them, whether it was the voting machines, the Emoluments Act, the 25th Amendment, Mueller impeachment, Stormy, you name it. And so here this virus came, I don't believe it was in a wet market. I think that was the narrative that the Communist Party provided because a lot of the animals that they said were being cut up were not close by and it was just too much of a coincidence you had a level four viral lab that was there, but that doesn't mean that necessarily they may have been enhancing its accessibility into a host, but I don't think they were making a biological weapon, but I'm not ruling that out. Nothing I'm ruling out yet until we have the data, but I think it's more likely that this escaped and then they covered it up because they didn't want to endanger their brand and they thought they could control it. They do what they always do with the World Health Organization. They got the party line and then when it started to get out, they shut down Wuhan on the 23rd of January, allowing people from Wuhan, of course, to come straight to San Francisco or New York or Los Angeles and over 15,000 in total from China kept coming here when they wouldn't let people travel within China. So they were very reckless and then at some point, I'm not ruling out the fact that somebody went to President Xi and said, you know what? This is out of control. It's going to devastate the world economy.

We're going to really suffer. And they just said, let it go. Just lie about it. Say the United States caused it, that their military did it. Label them racist, label them xenophobic.

Maybe those talking points will be picked up by Trump's enemies and if we can come out of this with Trump gone, the United States equally hurt, then it will be a draw and we won't lose. I think that's a plausible exegesis to explain the baffling behavior. I know that communists innately lie, but ostensibly, we all say, well, why would they not control this better when it would only hurt them? The answer is they may have been incompetent or they may not have known what they're doing or they may have been arrogant. But once it got out, they didn't show an effort to work with people, to bring in international experts to go to the UN and explain what happened, go to the World Health Organization, bring in Americans who had helped pay for that. They almost just threw up their hands and said, it's all yours now. And that, I think, they felt would aid them.

I think that's a possible scenario. Again, Victor Davis Hanson with us today on the Christian Real View Radio program, a senior fellow in military and classical history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. You can find out more about him at his website, victorhanson.com. Final question for you, Victor. You conclude your column and we have it linked, by the way, at our website right now. You say the virus may burn out, but an even scarier world continues.

Sort of an ominous ending to this column. And so I'm going to ask you just from a personal standpoint, when you put your head on the pillow at night and the privacy of your own thoughts, what gives you reason for hope going forward? And what is that hope or your worldview base that you have optimism going forward for like where this is going to take us now in the world? Well, I have about three different levels of hope. On the most superficial, I've been really worried about China.

I really have. I just thought, you know what, 1.4 billion under a communist regime that has bragged about taking over the world is scary. And I think this was a wake up call. No longer is Donald Trump some eccentric nut warning about China and a voice in the wilderness. People are going to listen. It's a wake up call.

That's reassuring. The second thing is, for all the mistakes we've made and all the panic and all the weaponization of the crisis every day, I either read or hear or I meet nurses, truckers, farmers, people who are quite brave and they remind me of prior generations. And then finally, I live in a house that had six generations and I grew up with stories of how they survived the 1918 flu out here and how my aunt got the polio epidemic of 21. And she stayed here for the next 60 years, crippled in the living room and all the things they went through.

My father flew 40 missions over Tokyo in a B-29. And I remember all of the things they did and they all had confidence in the United States and they had a sense of transcendence. That's very important that they believed in a God, the Judeo-Christian tradition, that all of what we're doing in some ways will be a reflection of where we are permanently. And that means that you get a brief chance on life to display heroism and virtue and that is not forgotten.

And that in itself makes people better people. And I think we kind of lost that in this country. And we deprecated people that were in the shadows that did really important tasks. We got arrogant. We got very affluent and complacent.

We got agnostic and atheistic and we were living sort of to gratify the appetites. And I think this comes around and it says all of what you were doing was sort of a joke. The impeachment was a joke.

The Mueller thing was a joke. These were all side attraction. This is an existential threat, either the virus or the reaction to it. And how you behave in it is not just important, but it's a chance for redemption that you can show yourself to be virtuous and have a soul and have a God and worship and know that you're not alone. That there's past generations are looking at you and they're with you. And I think that's kind of reassuring. I think a lot of people are feeling that, that while we're a sympathetic people, we get into cul-de-sacs and detours and we have to be slapped back onto the main course and maybe this will do it.

And hopefully it will do it without a lot of human loss of life. Yeah, this is a Christian program, so we've discussed this angle to it, you know, the providence and sovereignty of God that the Bible teaches that God either causes or allows everything to happen, everything's under his purview in the world. Is that part of your worldview, like religious beliefs, you know, your view of the authority of scripture or Jesus Christ? How would you describe that for yourself?

I think I would. I'm also a classicist, so I spent most of my life reading classical literature, many of it forming the basis of the New Testament and Christian exegesis, you know, neoplatonic thought and stuff. And they're very similar to my religious views and by that it was be very careful, pride goeth before the fall, but be very careful of hubris because nemesis follows. And so it just seems to me that when I have most of my life, I always look for paradox and irony and when things go good, I always say be careful and be humble.

If you can, don't get taken because if you don't, something is going to happen to you and when you're down, don't give up because there is some providence in the world that sees that. And I've been in some pretty bad situations overseas in my life, ruptured appendix in Libya and malaria in Egypt and E. coli poisoning and things like that. And each time I felt that I wasn't alone and that prayer and knowledge of how the world works was a great benefit. And I really do believe the world in a religious sense that becomes aware even to people who are not religious.

By that, I mean a central God, the divinity of God, Jesus Christ, even the people who aren't Christian, the way that the world works can become evident to them. And I've seen that when people will say to me, I don't believe, but there is something going on in this world that I don't know whether we call it karma or divine justice or whatever it is, but they have a sense of awe that there is some type of effort to instruct people to be very careful and to use this very, very brief time they have in a material form very carefully. It's very important to how they'll end up forever. And I think that lesson is really brought home in times of crisis like this. When the thin veneer of civilizations peeled off, we see human nature for what it is, both good and bad.

And it's very important for people to be on the good side. Well, we appreciate your coming on the Christian Worldview radio program today, Victor. We appreciate your work and we will look forward to having you on again sometime in the future. Thank you again. Thank you for having me.

That was Victor Davis Hanson, everyone. You could see in the interview, we went from the geopolitical, political topics, economics, the pandemic to the last couple of questions. Got into a bit of the spiritual side and found out a little bit more about his world view. We'll spend a little bit of time after this break discussing that world view and then get into an interview, a short interview with Lydia Kaiser from Child Evangelism Fellowships, Child Evangelism Fellowship about some resources they have to be used with your children during the pandemic. Stay tuned.

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Perfect for sharing with others. To order, go to the Christian worldview dot org or call one triple eight six four six twenty two thirty three. That's the Christian worldview dot org. Welcome back to the final segment of the day here on the Christian worldview radio program. As I mentioned at the beginning of the program, I said that it's pretty unusual for us to have a guest on the show that is not a professing born again Christian.

I didn't get the sense that Victor Davis Hanson would consider himself to be that certainly has elements of a Christian worldview and his own worldview. But as he answered those last two questions, I asked him about what is his basis for hope? He talked basically about it's a wake up call for the country.

It's reassuring that people can respond to this and people. He meets people who are brave and he comes from a family where there's generations of survivors and they face difficult things like polio. And his father was in war theater and that there's a transcendent God and there's a brief chance to achieve heroism and virtue. In other words, this is a chance for redemption based largely on the fact that a God exists, but also people out there.

This is a chance to respond to a difficult challenge, to be brave. And then I asked him about, you know, what are his actual religious beliefs with regard to, let's say, Jesus Christ? And he said, I think I would believe that. But he went into he's also a classicist. In other words, he derives his worldview from the classical writers of the past, from Greek and Roman writers, you know, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and so forth. That's actually what his expert is in, his educational background. And that's what he is a fellow in at Hoover Institution at Stanford. He talked about it being the basis of the New Testament.

I would disagree with that. The New Testament was inspired by God, the Bible says, but that's a pretty common view for someone who doesn't believe in the inspiration of scripture, to see that scripture writers derive their content from the other literature of the day. There's also a little bit of karma in his worldview. He talked about being careful of hubris, hubris, because Nemesis follows.

In other words, kind of what you do if you get too arrogant, these things kind of come around to bite you. But he did talk about the prayer and the knowledge of, I think he said the knowledge of God is of great benefit. So there's a bit of a syncretistic worldview there behind him. Now, that being said, of course, the Bible says, Jesus said himself, I am the way, the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me. And so that is something that we can pray for with someone like Victor, if he hasn't put his faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and nothing else, that he would. He's highly respected, intelligent. You can see he's an insightful person on these particular issues. And we would just pray and hope that he would come to, I think, discarding some of the influence of the classicism or the karma or whatever else forms his worldview and come to focus on the only one who can save it. There's one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ. And you can have a worldview on these issues we talked about today, whether it's regard to economics and politics.

And I think he's really right on in that. But the most important issue above all of those is how can I as a sinner be made right with a holy God? And fortunately, the gospel gives us that message that by repenting of our sin and putting our faith in who Jesus Christ is and what he did for us on the cross, not faith in our own good works, but faith in Christ's good work on our behalf, God promises to forgive us and give us eternal life. Well, we have one more short segment. I believe we have time for it today. Lydia Kaiser is in corporate communications with Child Evangelism Fellowship. You may remember she came on the program for a short segment a few weeks ago, and we talked to her this week. There are some more resources they have that you can be using with your children and grandchildren as their home during this time of the pandemic. Let's get to that short interview with Lydia Kaiser.

Lydia, welcome back to the program. We wanted to get into more resources that Child Evangelism Fellowship is producing during this COVID-19 pandemic, resources for children, just to give parents and grandparents listening today an idea of what they can be doing with their children and grandchildren during this time. Let's go first to a resource called The Greatest Doctor. Tell us about that one.

Well, we have two tracks that can be used. The Greatest Doctor is more evangelistic, and then we have another one called Stop the Spread. The Greatest Doctor is a free PDF download and share it with others. It parallels the virus and how it keeps us from our friends with something even worse, which is sin, because sin separates us from God forever. As much as we might be concerned about the virus, we need to be more concerned about sin and the consequences of sin. It explains how Jesus is the world's greatest doctor and how we can try to wash away the virus and avoid it, but we can actually know how to have our sins washed away. What a great parallel to everyone being so worried about this virus, and there's reason to be so from a health standpoint. But the much greater pandemic, of course, is the sin pandemic that we all have and how God provides the everlasting solution to that through his Son.

What about Stop the Spread? That's about stopping the spread of, quote, fear. What is that one about? It is about the fact that we don't have to be afraid.

It is targeted for children, and it talks about how when you wash your hands and you have soap bubbles, you can pop those bubbles, and we have fears that we want to pop. We have fear busters is how we present these principles from the scripture and how not to be afraid. Both of these tracts are just really beautiful, lovely art. The first one is to remember God's love. Perfect love takes away or casts out fear, and it goes into that verse. The second one is to put your trust in God, Psalm 56 3. The last fear buster is how to have perfect peace from Isaiah 26 3.

If we keep our mind state on the things that God wants us to think about, he'll give us that peace. Again, Lydia Kaiser with us today, Corporate Communications for Child Evangelism Fellowship. Their website is CEFonline.com. We have all their resources that we're talking about today listed at our website, thechristianrealview.org.

You can direct link over to them from our website. Final thing I want to ask you about are missionary stories, using missionary stories with children right now. Why is that important? Well, when you go look at our resources, my favorite out of all of them is the missionary stories. I think that it's so important right now for children, especially in American culture, to hear, watch, absorb missionary stories, because our culture is so narcissistic.

We have social media and everything is about me, me, me, who likes my pictures, who likes what I'm wearing, and how am I being entertained. We really need to teach our children to have a burden for other people, to care about whether other people have heard the gospel, whether it's someone down the street or someone on the other side of the world. And these missionary stories help to hold up heroes of the faith who gave their all for Christ, rather than celebrities who are only famous because they can sing well or something like that. We need to help our children have good values as it pertains to what's really meaningful in life. Let's not let this crisis go to waste, as they say. Use it to try to build a biblical worldview into your children during this time. Go to TheChristianWorldview.org, click on these resources from CEF for COVID-19.

Also, if you missed any of the interview today with Victor Davis Hanson, it will be up on the website as well. We do live in a changing and challenging world, but there is one thing, Christian, that we can count on and trust in. Jesus Christ and His word are the same yesterday, today and forever. So in the meantime, think biblically and live accordingly. The Christian Worldview is a weekly one hour radio program that is furnished by the Overcomer Foundation and is supported by listeners and sponsors. Request one of our current resources with your donation of any amount. Go to TheChristianWorldview.org or call us toll free at 1-888-646-2233 or write to us at Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota, 5 5 3 3 1. That's Box 401 Excelsior, Minnesota, 5 5 3 3 1. Thanks for listening to The Christian Worldview. Until next time, think biblically and live accordingly.