We Will Not Be Silenced

Let me say it loudly and clearly. We will not be silenced. We will not be silenced. That is the title of a brand new book by Dr. Erwin Lutzer, and he'll be joining us at the bottom of the hour. As we talk about cancel culture, as we talk about the rising tide of cultural Marxism, and then the question, what can we, as followers of Jesus, do about that?

We will not be silenced. 866-342-866-348-7884. Have you run into cancel culture yourself? In other words, you are afraid to speak up on a certain subject because of the potential consequences, your job, your school, your reputation. Or you have spoken up, or you've stayed at your conviction, and it cost you dearly.

866-348-7884. If you've encountered this, or your kids have encountered it in school, I'm writing a book that is very different than Dr. Lutzer's in terms of it's totally taking things from different angles and different strategies. But it's very similar in terms of addressing the silencing and the culture and the tyranny of big tech and things like that. And to be candid, I just have to have a separate file. I'm throwing in numerous, numerous headlines and stories to say, okay, how do I incorporate it in the book?

Now, when I'm writing a book actively about things happening in the world around us, I'm always having other files, and I'm throwing in links here and links there and keeping an eye on what's happening so that when the book comes out, it can be as up-to-date and relevant as possible. But I've got to be honest. This one, there's such a flood. Almost every day, I think, I've got to add to this chapter. Oh, I've got to add to this chapter. We've got to say more here. I mean, who's the latest one to get cancelled? Have you heard? Dr. Seuss. Yeah, let's throw this story up.

Start here. Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Numerous books, six different Dr. Seuss books that have been read regularly as a reading cycle.

You know, the presidential administration has said, no, no more of that. And schools can't read Dr. Seuss. Yeah, here's a report on Daily Wire. Six Dr. Seuss books yanked over racist and insensitive imagery. We were just looking, my team and I, we were just looking at some of the pictures involved that were allegedly racist, and it's caricatures. The Seuss book is full of caricatures.

And when I think of what children are reading with sex-ed curriculum in their schools and little children exposed to stuff that would cause adults to blush in some cases, and that's fine and dandy. And kids coming home from school, we heard it last week, crying because they're white. They've committed the sin of being white. And I'm sure there are black kids in past generations that went home crying because they were black and discriminated against.

Now it's a sin to be white. I mean, when are we going to learn, friends? You've got all kinds of crazy stuff taking place in our schools, but, oh, Dr. Seuss, gotta go.

Now, I haven't looked at all the pictures and the storylines and all that, so I will look at that, and then perhaps if I feel inspired, write a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss about the canceling of Dr. Seuss. You know how things have gotten, they've become so extreme. In the book I'm writing on this, which is scheduled to come out early next year, the book I'm writing on this, I deal with what's happening on college campuses. I deal with what's happening in big tech and the larger society and come at it from different angles and the assault on our children. But I have quite a few quotes from liberals, from feminists, from lesbians, from popular entertainers, none of whom profess Christian faith, and people who would probably differ with me on point after point after point of belief, but they are sounding the alarm on cancel culture.

And one of the aspects is that it's totally unforgiving. 20 years ago you said something stupid. 15 years ago when you were 17 years old you posted something inappropriate. And you've grown since then. Hey, I was shooting heroin and breaking into homes for fun when I was 16 years old. If we had social media then, the idiotic, ridiculous, foul things I would have posted, I can't even imagine.

You get penalized for years and years later. It's getting so extreme that you even have people like Bill Maher, Bill Maher famous or infamous for a whole documentary attacking religious faith in America. And in a certain level a real God mocker. He may be doing it completely in ignorance and he may have a Saul of Tarsus type of encounter.

That would be wonderful. But things often get so extreme that he'll speak up as well. Listen to what Bill Maher had to say about cancel culture. Liberals need a stand your ground law for cancel culture so that when the woke mob comes after you for some ridiculous offense you'll stand your ground.

Stop apologizing because I can't keep up anymore with who's on the list. Cancel culture is real, it's insane and it's growing exponentially and it's coming to a neighborhood near you. If you think it's just for celebrities, no. In an era where everyone is online, everyone is a public figure. And 62% of Americans say they have opinions they're afraid to share. 80% of Americans, young, old, rich, poor, conservative, liberal, white, minority, all hate the current atmosphere of hypersensitivity. Yet everybody hates it and no one stands up to it because it's always the safe thing to swallow what you really think and just join the mob, Abraham Lincoln, who's now canceled in San Francisco and they're thinking about it in Illinois. Yes, the land of Lincoln might cancel Lincoln. Memo to social justice warriors, when what you're doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop.

Onion being a satire website and that is Bill Morris point. Look, here's the deal. If so many people think it's wrong, then if we just speak up, then that does away with cancel culture. You can't cancel everyone at the same time. You can cancel a voice here or a voice there, that's too extreme or that's too loud or that's too controversial.

But you can't cancel millions and millions of people who have the freedom to speak up and do speak up. Hey, this is not like communist China where people get, quote, disappeared. They use it as an active verb. I mean, that's how it's become.

I don't mean in China, but that's how the verb has been used. And not just to disappear, but you disappear. So someone they're gone. What happened to so-so? They were disappeared. They were taken away.

That's not the case in America. Right now, no one is disappearing me. No one is shutting down this radio feed and this internet feed. And there are many, many other voices.

No one shut down Bill Morris. Yeah, there might be consequences if one or two speak up. You may get fired from your job. You may lose your pension here. There can be negative consequences. People are suffering.

The list of people getting canceled is frightening. But it's primarily because most people don't speak out. I don't mean being nasty.

I don't mean being mean-spirited. We use wisdom. We don't just speak to get in trouble.

God forbid, we are peacemakers, not troublemakers. However, if we are true to our convictions and speak our heart and speak our mind, then the cancel culture gets canceled. I want to play another voice that is a surprising voice in that you would associate President Obama with many of the causes on the left. Former President Obama is at a symposium, and he has some very interesting things to say about the judgmentalism of today's culture. This is, what, 2019.

Let's listen to what he had to say. But I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that's enough. Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because, man, you see how woke I was? I called you out.

I'm going to get on TV, watch my show, watch Grown-ish. You know, that's not activism. That's not bringing about change.

If all you're doing is casting stones, you're probably not going to get that far. That's easy to do. Exactly. Exactly.

If that's the primary thing that we're going to do is just cast stones and look at us, our smug self-righteousness, it's going to come back to haunt us, and it doesn't accomplish good in the process. Oh, there are things to call out, and there are things to address, but we have gotten into a hypersensitive culture, and then it seems that those on the left are the most hypersensitive of all because this is the way it's driven. In other words, Dennis Prager made the point that he's invited endless numbers of leftist activists and others to join him on his radio show, and he's basically had two people take him up over the decades of him being on radio, and yet whenever he's invited and his schedule prints for him to go on a leftist show, he takes the opportunity in a heartbeat.

In a heartbeat. Why? Because he wants the open dialogue, and others often want to suppress it. Listen to what Dr. Ben Carson had to say. He's being interviewed on a radio network on Sirius, a Breitbart station, and Dr. Carson is asked about the cancel culture, and in terms of transgender activism, the interviewer, Alex Marlowe, says it seems like this one issue, people are just not being vocal enough. If you're vocal, your book gets canceled, you get thrown off of social media, you can't say a man is a man or a woman is a woman, or else you're risking cancellation. What are we going wrong here?

Where are we going wrong here in terms of our activism? Ben Carson says this. Well, you know, it's in our national anthem, and the last line of the first stanza, it says, the land of the free and the home of the brave. You cannot be the land of the free if you're not the home of the brave.

You've got to be willing to stand up. Dr. Carson said maybe there's some consequences, so what? There were consequences for our founders, but if they weren't willing to accept those consequences, we'd still be under British rule. So stop being chickens and get out there and fight for what we believe in. If we just allow them to have a platform and to dictate everything without resistance, then they win. And he said if the opposition wins, America loses.

If America loses, the world loses. Take a stand. He doesn't mean go out and fight with weapons.

He means take a stand for what's right, and if there are consequences, so be it. Dr. Carson says to each of us, stop being chickens. We've got some encouraging words for you when we come back.

Stay right here. Thanks for joining us, friends, on the Line of Fire. Yeah, I just saw a post on Facebook telling us about the book that Dr. Erwin Lutzer wrote, We Will Not Be Silenced.

I mentioned it at the beginning of the broadcast. He's going to be my guest in about 15 minutes, so the bottom of the hour, we'll be joined by Dr. Erwin Lutzer, and he'll tell us about his book, We Will Not Be Silenced. I want to encourage you to be people of principle, first and foremost, to be people of principle. Here's the Jesus principle. If you save your life, you lose it. If you lose your life for my sake and the gospel, you find it. That's what Jesus said. It doesn't just mean martyrdom, being willing to die for the faith.

It's something much more practical on a daily level. In other words, I'm going to save my life because I'm going to avoid controversy. I'm going to save my life because I'll compromise rather than take a stand. I'm going to save my life by putting my light under, hiding it under a basket rather than be ashamed as it shines. I'm going to save my life.

I'm going to preserve my career. Jesus said, you lose your life. You become a slave to human opinion. You become a slave to what people desire. You kind of put your finger up and say, which way is the wind blowing and the wind of the culture? You don't go against the grain.

You don't swim against the tide. You save life. You've lost your life. You're not free. You're not a person of conviction. What happens to those convictions on the inside of you, the backbone, the integrity?

That's all gone. So by trying to save your life, you lose it. But by losing your life, you find it by saying, hey, I'm going to stand up for what's right and true. If I get rejected, I get rejected. If I get fired, I get fired. If I lose my career opportunity, I lose my career opportunity. If I get deplatformed, I get deplatformed. And ultimately, if I die, I die.

When you have that mentality, you're free. You've now found your life, and no one can take it from you. And it's interesting. Jordan Peterson, if you go back five years, was a little-known professor of clinical psychology at University of Toronto. He had written a book. I think he worked on it several hours a day for 13 years.

It came out 1999. Was it Maps of Meaning? 564-page academic volume. So he was one of hundreds of thousands of professors in North America, and little-known, right? Respected, but little-known.

He'd lectured at Harvard and things, and he was high caliber. Anyway, Canada, they pass a national law, and it's going to enforce certain speech regarding transgender activism. Dr. Peterson protests against that, says, well, he's not going to comply. The university can't make him comply, and does some interviews about it, explains his views in leftist ideologues and things like that.

And if you tell him he has to do it, he's not going to back down. He's going to go to prison, put him in prison, and go on a hunger strike, but he's not going to allow you to tell him what words he must use and phrases he must use. He wants to be reasonable and accommodate people, but he also wants to be a realist. And he had studied communism for years. In fact, in his youth, he had been really into socialism and thought that was the solution. And then he saw the oppressive nature of communism and the thought police and the speech police.

So he saw all of that, and he thought, whoa, this is dangerous stuff. And when he saw it coming through leftist activism, he resisted it. I remember having him on the radio shortly before he became famous, and I thought he was a beleaguered Christian professor, kind of be like, no, it's really hard, and I'm having a hard time. First, if he is a Christian now and really knows the Lord fine, but he was not coming primarily from a Christian perspective. He valued the Bible, but was not coming from a born-again Christian perspective.

And the last thing he was was beleaguered, or like, poor me. It's like, whoa, this guy is strong and bold and courageous. Next thing, he becomes internationally famous. He writes a book, 12 Rules for Life. It becomes an international bestseller, is sold over five million copies worldwide. He goes from nobody knows him or a small circle of people know him to some say the most influential public intellectual of our time.

How'd that happen? He said no to cancel culture. He stood by principle. And before you know it, the thing exploded for good around the world with much good wisdom and really taking down a lot of the radical leftist ideologies.

Doesn't mean you have to agree with everything he says, but it's the principle I'm talking about, friends. Look, think back to the Civil Rights Movement. What was the spark in the modern Civil Rights Movement that ignited public consciousness of the horrors of segregation in the South and that became the picture, became the image that was associated with the Civil Rights Movement? It was Rosa Parks. Here she was just a regular worker at a day job, not some political activist with a platform, not someone on Dr. King's team and going around the country giving speeches or something like that. And those involved in civil rights, black Americans were waiting for the right scenario.

There was a heavy the right person at the right time. Rosa Parks is tired. She's been working long hours. And she had predetermined, as I remember the story, that if she was told you've got to move, a white person needs your seat, move to the back of the bus, she was going to say no. On that particular day, she says no, she gets arrested for it, and all of America knows her name to this day. And every civil-minded American considers her a heroine, someone who stood up for what was right.

She refused to live as a canceled person. And in doing so, helped spark a movement that shook America out of its sin and complacency. Here, let's look at something not so dramatic, not so dramatic at all. And I'm not making the comparison between one and another, between Jordan Peterson and Rosa Parks or this next one, just using different examples. Senator Josh Hawley, he writes a book on the tyranny of big tech and how Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the other social media giants are acting oppressively and are affecting elections and things like that. And really, it's undeniable that those things happen. Where I look at election issues, it's not so-called election fraud, I look at the influence of social media and left-wing media and what they reported and didn't report and what they suppressed and let go forward.

In any case, he writes a book on the tyranny of big tech. And on January 6th, he, along with Ted Cruz, just a few senators, were saying, for the good of America and so that everyone can feel confident about our electoral process moving forward, let's have a full review of our past election, let's examine the charges, let's have a hearing, and then you can put the thing to rest. Okay, it was fair, let's move forward. It wasn't fair, now we have big questions.

How unfair was it? Let's at least flesh the thing out so that we can have a way to move forward. And then the storming of the Capitol happens and Hawley gets blamed as if he somehow incited it or was part of it, even though, of course, he flatly and plainly condemns it. Well, what happens is the next day, his publishers, Simon & Schuster, one of the biggest publishers in the industry, they announce they're dropping his book. And because of the dangerous conduct of Senator Hawley on that day, they're dropping his book. Now, frankly, I had not heard about the book before then.

I didn't know he was writing the book. Then announcement comes out about the book because it's getting canceled. And I said to myself, conservative publishers are going to pick this thing up.

Somebody's going to pick it up and it's going to get a whole lot more circulation than before. Sure enough, Regnery Books, probably the largest conservative publisher in America, going back to the days of William F. Buckley, Regnery says, we're picking up the book. That was, what, about 11 days later, January 18th, and they decried what happened with Simon & Schuster just bowing down to the woke culture and the cancel culture because, in fact, Hawley did not engage in unpatriotic or dangerous behavior that day. Well, they're going to put the book out in May of this year. Simon & Schuster is going to have it out in June. Regnery's moved the date up a month to May. But I just checked on Amazon presales and it's doing very well. It's doing very well with presales.

I could almost guarantee you. I mean, I can't absolutely guarantee you because we don't have empirical data in front of us, but I could almost guarantee, I mean, 99.9% sure, that that book will do far better now and will do far more in sales and will get far more attention because it got canceled than if it never got canceled. Here's the deal. People are hurting right now because they have been canceled. There has been oppression.

There has been suppression. There are real challenges and they are not to be downplayed. And those of you who have been hurt, my heart goes out to you.

It's not easy. Those of you who have been deplatformed, those of you who lost friends, those of you who lost a promotion, those of you who get kicked out of programs, it's not easy. God bless you for doing the right thing and holding to your convictions. And He will give you grace. You may not have the same story that these others have had with this amazing bounce back or result or platform, but you honor the Lord and He will honor you. And if you stay free from bitterness and anger and hatred and obnoxiousness and bless those who curse you, God's hand will be on you.

His smile will be on you. I want to say to everyone else, don't look for a fight. Don't look for trouble.

Don't be obnoxious. Use wisdom. Always speak the truth in love. But when the opportunity is there and the Holy Spirit is leading you or when you are required to take a stand or when your conscience is convicting you, let's not be chicken. Let us take up our cross afresh and say whatever the cost, whatever the consequence, we are going to follow Jesus and we are going to do what's right and we are going to hold to our convictions. What's one of our ministry mottos? Hearts of compassion, backbones of steel.

Let's live it out, friends. Let us cancel the cancel culture by speaking the truth in love without compromise regardless of cost or consequence. Your voice of moral, cultural and spiritual revolution. Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. We will not be silenced.

That's our theme today. It's the title of a brand new book by Dr. Erwin Lutzer. He served for well over three decades as pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, best-selling author of numerous books. And if I just read the endorsements for his newest book, that's what we do for the next half hour. But it's so good to have him on the air. I bought the book for myself before we were even having him on because it's of such interest to me and I'm writing on similar topics.

So we really want to explore this. We will not be silenced, responding courageously to our culture's assault on Christianity. So without further ado, Dr. Lutzer, thanks so much for joining us on the line of fire. I'm so glad to be with you again, Michael. God bless you and thank you for holding to the truth and preaching it far and wide. Only way to live, sir.

I'm with you. Yeah, so you write certain things out of intellectual interest and topics that you find you want to look into, share with in a pastoral way, but then you write other things because there's a holy alarm going off inside of you and you feel the need to shout that warning to the nation. What happened to you, stirring in your own heart, to cause you to write, we will not be silenced? Michael, when I began to realize that the radical left in America does not believe that America can be fixed, it has to be destroyed and built upon an entirely different foundation, a cultural Marxist foundation. And once that happens, you will have the end of white supremacy, the end of income inequality, and the end of racism, and everybody, so to speak, will live happily ever after. Now, once I began to understand that, what my book does is it applies that to history. That is to say, why is it that our history in America, our Judeo-Christian history, is being vilified?

What's the long-term goal there? And one of the reasons I wrote it is also to help parents to understand why it is that when we send our kids to university, why do they come back hating America? But I also apply it to race, and show that the diversity studies are not intended to solve anything or to bring about reconciliation.

They are intended to keep the races in perpetual conflict and accusations and all that. That is intentional, because in the Marxist view, the oppressors have to be overcome by the oppressed, and we can talk about that. Then I also apply it to freedom of speech. And since you have a copy of the book, you'll know that I also have a chapter on such things as propaganda. And the purpose of propaganda, of course, is to so shape people's perception of reality that even when faced with a multitude of counter-evidence, they will not change their mind.

And then the rest of the chapters, you know about the sexualization of children and on and on. Yeah, so it's really interesting when you describe cultural Marxism that you point out the utopian goals, that people say, hey, we just have to have equality. So it's not just an equal playing field, but equal results.

And everyone should have the same. And there's certain things that in the Marxist utopia sound very appealing, but in the end, it ends up being a tremendously oppressive system. So do you actually think that we need to take warning from what happened in communist China, what happened in the Soviet Union, that we need to really look at what happens when Marxism becomes the dominant way of life and is government-sponsored? Is that a real threat here in America?

Of course it's a real threat. And cultural Marxism says that we can bring about Marxism without a bloody revolution. What we have to do is to capture views of the family, and I discussed that. In Marxism, the family has to be destroyed because it's a unit of oppression. So we have to capture the family, we have to capture the media, we have to capture law, and we vote for the right people.

And pretty soon, Marxism begins to take place incrementally, and before you know it, that's where we are. Now I have to say, even though it's appealing, it has tremendous flaws that we can talk about, but I want to just say right out there that the Bible is not a socialist book. Not even God treats everyone alike. God did not treat Hammurabi the way in which he did Abraham.

And Jesus, you remember, told a parable about the man who had ten talents, another had five, three, two, and one, and so forth. So the idea that we're to have uniform outcomes is, of course, nonsense, and can only be attempted by the oppression of a state. Now, we should seek equal opportunity. You know, in this book I distinguish between biblical justice and social justice. So what we have to do is to seek for equal opportunity, but the idea of income equality and seeking similar outcomes is, of course, not only impossible, but it can only be attempted by the most oppressive regimes and the most oppressive laws, and yet that's the big dream that is happening in our country, and people think that that's something that should really be worked toward.

Of necessity, it must fail. You know, one of the longest chapters in my book is on socialism, and I show why of necessity, though it's attractive, it must fail. Yeah, and through the book, when you deal with race issues, you deal with them with tremendous sensitivity. You so repudiate America's past sins, you don't just slip them under their rug and sweep them under the rug and deny evils in our past.

You recognize these things full on. I mean, in very compassionate, gracious ways, I was struck by how you went out of your way to speak up for justice and to stand against the inequities and sins of the past, and yet you're saying that the way things are going today in critical race theory is ultimately gonna be counterproductive and will not produce biblical justice. And in this, you keep bringing things back to the church, and you emphasize that you are much more focused on redeeming the church, getting the church to live right, than reclaiming the culture. How have we gotten some of our emphasis wrong? Well, if you talk about social justice, it sounds right, because everybody's in favor of justice. But when you begin to take it apart, what you discover is that what the label says and what's in the package is entirely different. But getting back to the church, Michael, this is so important for people to realize, that the church has an answer that critical race theory, which intentionally divides the races.

I can't say that too often. Critical race theory is answered in the church where we say, you know, there isn't that much difference between us. We are all sinners. We all come to the foot of the cross with great need.

We all admit our sinfulness and then having received God's grace and becoming members of the body of Christ, we now ask, what can we do together to make things better? That's not what social justice teaches. Social justice based on Marxism puts people into different categories. If you're white, you are a person of privilege. If you're not, then you're a person who isn't a person of privilege. And someone like LeBron James, who's famous, who has lots of money, is not a person of privilege because of the color of his skin. But the poorest white child born in poverty is a person of privilege because of his skin color. This is totally opposed to what Martin Luther King taught when he said, we should judge one another, not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character and that is being lost today and that is being vilified in all of these diversity studies in our university. Now, you've pastored for years a multiracial church, so what's your take on the systemic racism question? Well, you know, if you ask, is there racism?

Yes, there is, because everyone has had racist thoughts. But here's the point. It's not as if one group has all of the vices and the other group has all of the virtues.

That's the big mistake. The sin of trying to use other people for our benefit is part of original sin. It is born within us. So it's not just those that are white that may have some racial tendencies. We have to see that this is across the board. You know, you look at history and you see that there's always been conflict between the races.

So some of my black sisters and brothers can tell me instances of systemic justice in Chicago, and I've listened to them very carefully and I realize exactly what they're talking about, so I'm not denying that. But is the answer to be shouting at one another across racial fences, dividing each other into groups as if we are part of a caste system, blaming one group for all the failures of the other and one group having to take full responsibility for all the failures of the other? That's not going to bring about harmony and so forth.

You're right. At Moody Church on any Sunday morning, when I was there, and that would still be true if the church were open today, but on any Sunday morning, we had people from 70 different countries of origin because the Bible says that in heaven there are going to be people from every tongue and nation and group and they're going to be giving thanks to God. So that's what the church is all about. But critical race theory, let me put it as clearly as I can put it, critical race theory tears apart what Jesus Christ died to put together. Just expand on that. We've got a minute before the break. That's too profound to leave there.

Take another minute, please. Well, the point is simply this, that Jesus died to show that all of us are sinners, that we can come together at the foot of the cross. You look at what the Apostle Paul talks about. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond-free, Scythian, barbarian, whatever. We're all one in Christ. And critical race theory says we cannot be one. We have to be torn apart and put into the different Marxist categories until the oppressed overcome the oppressed.

So it must be a continual conflict. Yeah, and friends, the gospel has a solution for everything. And that's why Dr. Lutzer speaks of biblical justice. David Jeremiah wrote the foreword to this book, and he said this, if I could, I would put this book into the hands of every Christian in America. We will not be silenced responding courageously to our culture's assault on Christianity. Dr. Owen Lutzer, you can get it anywhere online, I'm sure.

And the reviews pouring in have been tremendous. He's graciously agreed to stay a few more minutes with us, so we've got another segment. I've got a bunch of questions for Dr. Lutzer. If you'd like to ask him one, maybe we'll open the phone line. It's 866-3-4-truth.

Maybe I'll take a call or two. It's the Line of Fire with your host, activist, author, international speaker, and theologian, Dr. Michael Brown. Your voice of moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution.

Welcome to the Line of Fire. I'm speaking with Dr. Owen Lutzer. So thrilled that his new book, We Will Not Be Silenced, is getting a lot of attention. And Dr. Lutzer, in the book, you basically argue that the whole idea of political correctness is a deception. In what sense? Well, it's a deception in many respects. First of all, it uses language to reorder our view of reality. That's one thing.

When you get into the he, she, gender kind of debate and all of that nonsense, what they're trying to do is to reorder the fundamentals of society. So that's one example. The other example has to do with the cancel culture. You know, in the book that you're referencing, We Will Not Be Silenced, I have that chapter on propaganda. And people must understand that there is collective demonization.

Collective demonization was perfected in Russia. The idea was this, that when the elites took somebody and they deplatformed them, they'd have used a different word, of course, everyone else had to chime in. And people wrote letters affirming and cursing out this man, even if they had never heard of him or knew anything about what he said. What they were saying is, when you come for us, I'm on your side. You know, Michael, you know that I wrote a book about Nazi Germany, and I know that you know a lot about that period of history.

You've had a great deal of interest in it. But you know, there were German churches that put a swastika on the door of their church saying, in effect, when you come for Christians, don't come for us because we are on your side. You know, it was Churchill who said that an appeaser, an appeaser is someone who feeds the alligator with the hope that the alligator will eat him last. So what you have in political correctness is a desire to control the culture, what we can say, and if not, we'll be universally condemned and also universally punished.

And by the way, Michael, I'd like to make a prediction on your program. I'm not a prophet, but that which is cancelled today is going to be criminalized tomorrow. That's where we are going, because when the Bible says that there are those who call evil good, that's only half of the equation.

They are not finished until they take that which is good and call it evil. So the whole political correctness is a form of controlling people. So what we can say, what we can't say, what is appropriate, what is not appropriate, and people are so fearful that they keep their mouth shut, because, you know, any remark can be twisted and suddenly held against you, and thanks to social media, you can be vilified very quickly. Yeah, you get vilified and now you're cancelled, your accounts are gone, you are now, you can't, you're too toxic to be hired and no one will go near you.

It's extraordinary. I actually played a quote earlier in the broadcast from Bill Maher, so you don't get much more liberal and anti-Christian, anti-God than Bill Maher, decrying the cancel culture and where it's actually going. You even have more and more liberals speaking out, lesbian feminists and others speaking out, because they see what's happening and they see that this thing is feeding on itself. And when you set up this cultural elitism, you might be next. You know, I read about, with Stalin and his oppressive regime, that he would give a speech and everyone would clap, and the clapping would go on because the first one that stopped clapping would be the one that they'd spot and the person would be executed.

So you just better keep clapping. And I'm looking at a Facebook comment from one of our viewers and listeners. Pastors are afraid to say what this man is saying. Sir, you pastored for decades, you had a radio voice as well, and you paid a price over the years by determining to speak the truth in love regardless of cost or consequence. But for many pastors it's difficult because you may have a small budget and some people get offended and leave and now you can't pay this one or you can't keep up the soup kitchen and then people kind of calculate like, well, I better keep my ministry and stay away from controversy, and in the end they end up losing their own souls in the process, spiritually speaking.

And you know the other thing that's very important is that I know as a pastor that you don't want to put up unnecessary stumbling blocks to the Gospel, okay? You want to be loving and hopefully as inclusive as you can be, but the problem is of our view of love. You know, not all love is of God, some of it is evil. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, they didn't stop loving, they just started to love the wrong things, lovers of pleasure, lovers of self, and so forth. So pastors, and this is the heartbreak and I know that you have it too, are so concerned about coming across as loving that they sacrifice truth and we've had some examples recently of that, I'd rather not mention names, but the point is that that is a dilemma.

Now how do you do that? I personally never endorsed a political candidate or a political party, but I spoke about issues and I always made sure before God that my heart was right, that I would preach with a sense of humility and brokenness, leading of course with the cross of Christ, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and in this way what you do is you're instructing your congregation, but you're also helping them to understand what the issues are. Think of how terrible it is, just to mention one thing, that our president would, I think on the first day of office, say that biological men can compete in women's sports if they so identify.

This is absurdity, but Michael, we're living in a day and age when absurdity no longer is an argument against anything, in fact the most absurd it is, probably the most quickly it should be believed. So here's what you can do, you can preach these things about gender, Genesis 1.27, you can preach that this is God and you recognize that there are those who struggle with dysphoria and there's confusion there and they need help and they need counsel, but you stay with the Word of God, you are welcoming but you're not affirming, and that's the line that pastors have to walk. Now, I differ from some pastors because I think a pastor has a responsibility to talk to the congregation about the controlling realities of the culture.

That doesn't mean that he's going from topic to topic, but when the culture is swirling around you, for you to ignore it, I think is a mistake. It can be done, and if you pay the price, well then you pay the price. One of the things that I emphasize in the book that we're talking about, we will not be silenced, is that we as Americans, have me on some other time Michael and we can talk about this in detail, we as Americans have to rethink our whole concept, we think to ourselves that we should always have freedom. Well you and I know that through 2,000 years of the history of the Church, the Church has not had freedom, and you don't even need freedom to be faithful. Just ask the martyrs. Yeah, and you start your book off quoting from Matthew 16 where Jesus says, if you save your life, you lose it, what good would it be to gain the whole world, lose your own soul? Verses that I talk about constantly in this very context, and our freedom is found in obedience to God, then we really live, and whatever the cost, the consequences. Look, the Gospel is thriving around the world in incredibly oppressive, difficult situations, where Christians are dying and being tortured and imprisoned, and the Gospel has thrived for centuries in that setting, and yet we've got this convenience Christianity America, where Jesus comes to make us into bigger and better images of ourselves, and we've lost the heart of it. And friends, Warren, no time to get to this call asking about the proper way to prepare congregations. It's an important question, but friends, read the book. Read the book. We will not be silenced, because it will give you boldness, and it will give you understanding.

I want to go back to one last thing. We didn't even touch on in any depth the sexualizing of the children or so many of the other relevant chapters in the book, but you said what's being canceled today would be criminalized tomorrow. I began saying in 2004, speaking of particular groups of gay activists, that those who came out of the closet fighting for what they felt was equality and freedom wanted to put us in the closet. And I was mocked for saying that for years. And then I noticed a shift where people began to say, people like you belong in the closet. One of my Christian attorney friends said, Michael, take it one step further. Those that once went to jail for their views will put us in jail. Well, I said that on Christian TV and got blasted for it. But then when Kim Davis was put in jail for refusing to write a same-sex marriage certificate, people were cheering and comparing her to ISIS. So last 30 seconds, you're not exaggerating in your warnings at all.

No, not at all. And you know, if you ask me in the last 30 seconds, the last chapter of my book is the words of Jesus to Sardis, strengthen what remains. And there I suggest a letter that Jesus might write to our church today, to the American church, and it would be a letter dealing with some of our issues. And then it ends by saying, but there are still some of you in Sardis, even though the church was dead, but there are still some of you in Sardis who are walking in white, and you are worthy. So my last challenge is let's be among those who still walk in white and be worthy and stand true and take the consequences as a badge of honor. Well said. Dr. Lutzen, we've got to do this again. Thanks so much for spending time with us. The book, friends, we will not be silenced. Essential reading today, and friends, we won't be. In Jesus' name, God bless you. Thanks again. Thanks, Michael.