A Conversation with Randall Murphree

TNG Radio, where today's culture and timeless truths come together. It's reasoned relevant content apologetics, worldview, and answers to the questions that you need to know. From Alex McFarland Ministries, this is Truth for a New Generation Radio. And now the man who preached in 50 states in 50 days, speaker, writer, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland.

In the Old Testament book of Proverbs, chapter 25, verse 25, it says like cool water to a thirsty soul is good news from a far country. Well, today we're going to talk about good news and somebody who helps make the news, and that's our guest today on Truth for a New Generation. I'll introduce this friend in a moment, but I want to welcome you to Truth for a New Generation.

I thank you for listening. This is Alex McFarland here. And, you know, it's interesting. In recent years, there's a term that's come into the common vernacular, fake news. And when I first heard that phrase, fake news, I was thinking about a quote from years ago. A scholar that I love to read was a man named Mortimer Adler. Mortimer Adler, in his lifetime, was one of the editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. And I had a professor in graduate school who had met him a few times. And Adler, you've got to understand, he was one of the most literate men of the 20th century. And he became a Christian before he died. But Mortimer Adler, many years before he became a Christian, he wrote a warning about what today we might call fake news. And here's what he said over 60 years ago. Mortimer Adler said, the great storm of propaganda that beats on the citizen 24 hours a day, all his life long, the distortion of the news, said Adler, means that our democracy will fall to the loudest, most persistent propagandists, or America must save itself by learning to think critically, apprise the issues, and be intentional about seeking truth. Now, the reason I gave that lengthy quote to start the program is because I have before me in the studio a colleague and a valued friend and a brother in Christ who, in a world of fake news, this journalist prints the truth.

His name is Randall Murphree. And for a number of years, he's been the publisher of the American Family Association Journal, the AFA Journal. And Randall, I want to say for one thing, thank you for making some time to record with us. Thank you for your Christian witness and testimony. But I want to say thank you for exemplifying excellence as a publisher and a journalist, because you do print the truth. And I just wanted our listeners to meet you and hear about your service for God and country. So thanks for being with us on Truth for a New Generation. Well, Alex, you're welcome, and I'm grateful. I'm humbled and honored by the accolades. But I have a good staff that does some work on the AFA Journal, and they do all the hard work and I take the credit. If you turn to the masthead, your name is right up there at the top. In the fine print.

Yes. So for those that may not be aware, what is the AFA Journal? AFA Journal is a monthly print publication of American Family Association.

It's the current iteration of the newsletter that Don Weilman first established when he founded National Federation for Decency in 1977. So we've gone through some steps of changing the names and refining the product. Growing and growing. Growing and yes. So we still print, usually it's 32 pages a month.

It's not a big magazine, but we try to cover 8 to 10 or maybe 12 issues in every month that we send it out. Now how did you and he meet and how did you come to be on his staff? Well, I had become aware of his ministry about probably five or six years after he founded it. He was in North Mississippi.

I was in North Alabama. And I had a friend who worked for him, moved to Tupelo, Mississippi to work with Don in the ministry. And when Don advertised on the front of his old-fashioned newsletter that he was looking for an editor, I thought well, I don't really meet the professional criteria that he says he wants, but if I don't try, I certainly won't be in the running. So I followed up and sent him a resume and an application and he called me for an interview and here I am 38 years later. Well I was going to ask you 38 years you've been with this ministry. 38 years. What a testimony.

God bless you. What was your career track before the American Family Association? I worked in the public school system in North Alabama in my home county just north of Birmingham, Alabama. And I had taught high school English and journalism.

I had taught part-time for the community colleges at night and worked in school administration for the county system. I was looking for something. I knew God was moving me.

God was calling me outside the public school arena. Do you remember the first one or two stories you worked on for the American Family Association? You should have given me questions in advance.

No, I don't. It would have been television analysis because when I first came here, we were focused mostly on television programming, primetime hours. So we were already recording the three main networks every night on VHS tapes. And then depending on what we read in the secular news, there were certain series that we would follow just weekly.

You know, the sitcoms or drama series that we would record every week and go back and review those and then address the issues with the advertisers who appeared on those. And you know what? I mean, that is speaking in the language that corporate America responds to. I mean, it's not love of God or country, but it's the bottom line dollar that you guys, I know then and now you were helping promote good, wholesome, decent truth because advertisers knew that if Don Wildman, you know, called out something, consumers would spend their money elsewhere. Folks would probably be surprised to see the old four drawer file cabinets packed full of his letters and correspondence to and from big corporate America. And that's in the late seventies and early eighties. And that, you know, that kind of decreased as the years passed. But I'm amazed sometimes to go back and just go through those files and see how much conversation he really did establish with a lot of corporate entities.

We've got to take a brief break. This is Alex McFarland with Truth for a New Generation. We're talking with Randall Murphy, the publisher of the AFA Journal. How can people find the AFA Journal?

AfaJournal.org. We'll explain more when we come back. Thanks for listening.

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Alex McFarland here. We're talking with Randall Murphey. And, you know, I started with Proverbs 25, 25, like cold water to a thirsty soul is good news from a far country. I think part of the service you've provided for Americans and the body of Christ has been, yes, the good news of Jesus, but also the true news of making people aware of things that they're simply not going to see covered in the mainstream media. Randall, do you see your job and your role as coverage and analysis that people probably just wouldn't get anywhere else?

We hope so. That's what we strive to do. And because AFA has always been an activist oriented organization, an activist oriented ministry, Christian ministry, we like to give with every story some kind of action, either a place to go for more information, a place to become an activist or to learn about being involved in the culture. And that's one of our main goals is to try to urge, encourage and just push our readers to be involved locally, statewide.

I mean, run for local office, run for the school board or run, you know, volunteer to serve on the local public library board. Oh, yeah. Do you know what, and I'm glad you said that because the libraries of our country have become very politicized, haven't they? It's just, yeah, it's discouraging sometimes. Yeah, it is.

But do you know what? One of our founding fathers, it might've been John Adams, would frequently speak of, quote, the animated contest of freedom and light and truth and of course the gospel, but just American liberty. It's never static. I mean, we have to fight for it in every generation, don't we? True. That's true. It, yeah, it's just, there's a battle between good and evil. There is.

I mean, that's the world. Yeah. Now you have staff and I want to talk about your staff and your writers, but in the beginning when you first came to work for Dr. Wildman, did you have staff or was the publishing department you? No, it was pretty much Don Wildman and me. There was one other staff member who did a column for pastors in each issue of the journal. But during those days, Don had already established relationships with a number of writers and journalists and Christian columnists who just allowed him to use their columns, their commentaries liberally. Well, he had many good friends who said, sure, use anything that I've written.

So we did reprint a lot of commentaries, insights from other sources. And now you have ample staff and I don't know all the names, but I will tell you when I get the journal every month, my wife and I read it, but one that I love and I'd love to hear how you acquired this talent is Ed Vitagliano. Ed Vitagliano. Brilliant. He is brilliant. Now, we have a, you know, there's a little tension now because he used to work for me full time and they took him away from me, Alex. So I have to just kind of follow him around. And he is in the leadership of this ministry.

Exactly. He's one of our vice presidents now. He's in the position where he needs to be.

But I have to kind of follow Ed around and push him. I need another article from you for AFA Journal because our readers do respond well. He handles any moral, social, cultural issue with excellence. Well, you know, speaking of the issues, you know, we talk about moral issues and goodness gracious, I was just reading about the illegitimacy rate. It's so sad because the state of any nation is directly tied to the state of the family. And one moral issue is the illegitimacy rate in our country, fatherlessness, abortion, transgenderism, the mainstreaming of that which 6,000 years of human history tells us is deviant. There are a lot of issues. What are some of the issues that God-fearing Americans not only Christians but just people who value our freedom and our country, what are some of the issues, Randall, that people need to be mindful of these days? Well, you hit I think the major thing if we take the word family as the umbrella and the disintegration of the nuclear family, the disintegration of family as God defined it and established it. That's I think the greatest issue of our time. And, you know, with the conservatives and the evangelical Christians and the people who may still subscribe to the same moral values that we do but may not even be Christian, we can recognize that the family, the loss of the family structure is the big thing that has just caused our culture to plummet downward.

And the progressive, the left, the tolerant group are pushing it ever farther into the gutter. You know, just everything moral, there's an evil force against it in our time. Why does morality matter to a nation? Morality matters to a nation because true morality is based on God's Word and God's principles. If that's not enough to say that's the right path to take, then we don't have any hope unless we base our culture, our institutions, our families, our individual lives, unless we base those on the principles of God's Word, there's no hope for us. You remember that quote, a very famous quote, Edmund Burke said, All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

And that's true. Passivity and silence will just by default allow the culture to slide further on it. We've grown so comfortable that, and we don't like confrontation as a group. I think Christians don't like confrontation.

We don't like having to bring up the issues or to debate them, or we're just, that's beyond our comfort zone. We're talking with Randall Murphree. He is the publisher and editor and the leader of the American Family Association journal, AFA journal. And I want you to stay tuned because we've got some exciting content that you're going to hear when TNG radio, Truth for a New Generation, returns. Stay tuned. Are you tired of liberal agendas ruining our country, but you don't know what to do about it? That's why Truth and Liberty Coalition was founded. We want to equip you to take back our country and impact the world. Here's how we do it. We educate through broadcasts, conferences, and our website with resources that inform, equip, and motivate. We unify by collaborating with like-minded organizations like the Family Research Council, the Family Policy Alliance, and My Faith Votes. We mobilize by providing practical tools you can use to impact your local community.

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We talk with Randall Murphree. And before we go too much farther, I want to remind you, coming up is the Truth for a New Generation biblical worldview camp. Now, we've been doing this for a lot of years, folks.

The kids love it. Middle school and high school, this is summer camp for your soul worldview. July 17 through 22 is our next Truth for a New Generation worldview camp. And the theme is unashamed, unashamed building your biblical worldview.

Space is limited. Go to my website, which is alexmcfarland.com, for complete information. And I want to see you next July as we drill down deeply to make an impact for God and country. Well, somebody who has made an impact for his whole adult life, for the gospel, is Randall Murphree. And Randall, Romans 12, verse 2.

Romans 12, 2 says, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. You're helping renew people's minds by publishing truth. And I know you, and I know most, if not all, of your staff. And I would bet that you probably pray about what you're going to cover. Do you ever pray over that file before you send it off to the printing press and where all those magazines are going to go?

I do, Alex. That's an important part of the process. We just do it prayerfully. By the same token, a lot of times when we're working on a given issue of the magazine, say the March issue, we wind up as it all comes together and each writer is turned in his or her feature stories. We are startled sometimes that two or three of them have quoted the same scriptures in their various articles on totally different issues.

We're just surprised sometimes to discover that, hey, there's a theme in here that we didn't even plan. In fact, there's an executive editor above you. Absolutely.

The Holy Spirit? I depend on him. Amen. That is wonderful. You've interviewed people. Who are some of the more memorable folks you've been able to interview? One of my very favorites of all time over the decades is Dr. Jim Dobson.

I know he's a hero of yours, too. I owe my career to Dr. Dobson. I just very much was blessed with the opportunity a few years after he had founded Family Talk. In more recent years, I got to go to his office and sit down with him.

It was just a rich blessing that I had longed for for a long time. He's very authentic, isn't he? He is. On the other hand, a lot of the favorite interviews that I've done are of people whose names you would not know, but somehow somebody else introduces us to a ministry or to just an individual. One of my favorite recent stories was a man named Rory Groves. He's a guy who was involved in corporate computer work for various corporations and just felt called to do something different. He and his wife bought a few acres of land south of Minneapolis, which they were living in a Minneapolis suburb.

They move out in the country, they start having their family, and they now have five kids at their homeschooling. He's written a book on what he calls the family economy and looking at possible needs for families to become more self-sustaining. Just a fascinating track of thought. I'm discovering that there are others looking at that as well these days. People are looking at what's happening in our nation and they're thinking, we need to be ready to take care of our own children, make our own way, and just to run across people like that with such strong Christian roots and just committed to traditional family values and biblical values. Do you recommend young people to go into journalism?

Yes, if they are called. Journalism is a challenging field for a Christian journalist today. So if they feel led in that direction and they have the gifts, then I would encourage them to pursue that course just prayerfully and carefully, knowing that God's leading them that way. Whether you're reading or watching the news on TV or watching the news online, you've been in publishing and journalism for three decades plus. Do you see things that just really make you squirm? Are you able to see when it's not just facts but it's spin? I think that's becoming really more and more clear if one reads carefully and just analytically if you analyze what you're reading, if you go back and look at it again. However, the danger is that so much of secular media is that way.

It is spin and it isn't balanced. So we're not accustomed to expecting that from the secular media anymore, from television news or online news sources or daily newspapers. And by the way, folks, if you're just tuning in, we're talking with Randall Murphree, the publisher of the AFA Journal, just an incredibly good magazine that I, for 20 years, has been like my cliff notes that I read and cram before I go to a panel discussion or a debate or an interview. I frequently consult the journals, so I'm very indebted to you, Randall.

Oh, bless you, brother. Well, hey, very often I'll get some statistic or quote or information out of the journal and then I'm up on a stage and it's exactly what I needed to respond to sometimes hostile questions even. And folks, again, seriously, I don't recommend anything that I myself don't read and use. And in the strongest possible terms, I urge you to become a reader of and subscriber to the American Family Association Journal. Tell us again, where can we get the AFA Journal? AfaJournal.org. .org. And I would recommend you get it for your church. And look, if you read it, you will become an advocate for it.

You won't be disappointed. Randall Murphree, God bless you. Thanks for being with us today. And thank you for all you do for God's kingdom. Folks, you can find us online at AlexMcFarland.com.

1-877-YES-GOD and the number 1. Or give online at AlexMcFarland.com. While you're there, listen to program archives, read Alex's blog, invite Alex to speak at your event, or contact Alex with a question or comment. AlexMcFarland.com. Thanks for listening today and join us again next time as we bring you more truth for a new generation on TNG Radio.