Allen Jackson NOW

Allen Jackson: Well, good evening and welcome to Nashville. I'm Allen Jackson. There are waves of deception that are crashing over our lives in this season. When you see what's taking place in society, it's confusing. It's disorienting. I've used the reference before regarding the theater of the absurd. We've watched lots of releases from the theater of the absurd, and the hits seem to just keep coming.

We had a trial that gained national attention recently with a mom who killed her three young children. The mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy murder case has exposed something much bigger than a disagreement inside just one Massachusetts jury room. Because in the days since the verdict collapsed, an astonishing amount of attention has shifted away from the three children who were killed and toward the one juror who refused to acquit their mother.

Instead of being respected for refusing to surrender his judgment under enormous pressure, he's been publicly vilified. His family's been harassed. Even his Christian faith has been pulled into the argument by the media as though a biblical worldview somehow makes a person less capable of sound reasoning and good judgment.

That should concern all of us. Since when did a juror following the evidence and his conscience become an indication of extremism? And when did Christianity itself become something that has to be explained away before a person's judgment can be taken seriously? Frank Turek has written extensively about what happens when a culture begins separating truth from reality. His latest book is called The War on Reality. Frank joins us now. Welcome to the show, Frank.

Frank Turek: Allen, it's always great being with you, sir. It was good seeing you just last week there in Nashville. Thanks for having me on.

Allen Jackson: You are welcome and congratulations on your book. The War on Reality is, I understand, now a New York Times bestseller. Way to go.

Frank Turek: Yeah, you know, my wife can't even live with me now because of how important I am that we made the New York Times bestseller list. Although I do have to say this, Allen, one of the problems with being a New York Times best-selling author is that the New York Times and your name are associated together. Every day I read the Bible and the New York Times just to see what both sides are doing.

Allen Jackson: It's a pretty good habit. The title on the book is pretty self-explanatory. The War on Reality: Recovering Truth in a World That Celebrates Lies. What prompted you to pick up this title and do the work?

Frank Turek: About a year before Charlie Kirk was murdered, my co-author and I, Phoenix Hayes, who is a brilliant writer, by the way—there are a lot of actually witty insights in this book because when you're on the road to dystopia, you have to laugh a little bit, Allen. But we were writing this book, and it really came out of the identity issue, particularly the trans issue. There is an infinite number of genders, and men can have babies and all of this.

It just grew from that. We said there are so many ways people are denying reality, and we need to address this. People are saying men can have babies. People are saying math is racist. That just doesn't add up with us, Allen. People are saying that reason and logic are tools of oppression. If you're a Christian, a heterosexual male, you're automatically an oppressor. Yet if you're LGBTQ, or you're a Muslim, or a non-Christian, you're automatically oppressed.

By the way, regarding Lindsay Clancy and that trial, part of the reason people react that way is because they bought into cultural Marxism. They are siding with the perpetrator of a crime rather than the victim of a crime because they think the perpetrator is somehow oppressed according to cultural Marxism. If anybody is having bad judgment, it's not the Christian out there. The Christian understands you judge people based on their behavior, not based on what identity group they're in. But that's what cultural Marxism does, and that's why it's a war on reality.

Allen Jackson: You put a chapter in the book on seven rules of reality. Talk about that. I thought it was brilliant in helping us frame that.

Frank Turek: Let me just deal with one of the seven rules, and one is that reality does not have pronouns. What I mean by that is there's not my truth and your truth. I know people will try and say that you have your truth and I live my truth. It sounds so Oprah, when in fact, it's more like doperah. Anyone who says that there is just my reality and your reality is uttering a reality that they think is true for everybody.

There's no such thing as my reality or your reality. I mean, there's not my law of gravity and your law of gravity. There are not my laws of logic and your laws of logic. There are just the laws of logic. There are not my laws of math and your laws of math; there are just the laws of math. There's not my law which says thou shalt not murder, but you have a law that says you can murder. No. The law thou shalt not murder is the law which comes from God's nature, and it applies to both of us whether we believe it or not.

We can deny it. We can try and suppress it as so many people do, but it's still there. Reality is undefeated. Yet people fight against reality all the time, and eventually, they're going to smack into reality, and it's going to hurt. Instead of fighting reality, we ought to surrender to reality. The author of reality, of course, is Jesus himself.

Allen Jackson: Frank, I know you spend a lot of time on college campuses, but a lot of this nonsense is percolating out of those classrooms where the leaders have advanced degrees. What do you say when you're on those campuses talking to students?

Frank Turek: Typically, I'm going through a presentation and then taking questions. That's why Charlie Kirk and I were working together because I'd been doing it for many years and Charlie wanted me to mentor him in what we call Christian apologetics, evidence for the faith. Now, as you know, Allen, it can be difficult to mentor somebody smarter than you, but not with Charlie because the only thing that exceeded his intellect was his humility.

The few things that I knew that he didn't know, he wanted to know. He was very open, and I wasn't his only mentor. You were a mentor to him. Jack Hibbs was a mentor to him. Dennis Prager was a mentor to him. There are people further down the road than he, and he knew he needed to learn from them. What Charlie and I were trying to do was to be better able to make the case for Christianity on a college campus and then answer any question from any angle. That's what we were doing together.

Allen Jackson: Frank, we need to take a short break. If you'll stay with us, we'd like to continue this discussion in the next session.

Frank Turek: Yes, sir.

Allen Jackson: We'll be right back.

Allen Jackson: We're back now with the President of cross-examined.org and the author of the new book, The War on Reality. Frank, you mentioned Charlie and his death. It's been a year since Charlie was hunted and murdered. What's your takeaway over that 12-month period while you've walked along with Erica and the whole turning point team? We are going forward, but what are your learnings?

Frank Turek: Three things are much more prominent since the murder, Allen. Number one is the real existence of evil. I obviously knew evil existed prior to that. It's in my own heart. It's in all of our hearts. But when you see someone you love murdered right in front of you, we don't often see that in America. But it happens more frequently in other countries. There are 50 Charlie Kirks murdered every day in Nigeria, and the media doesn't care.

Evil is much more prominent. Secondly, the importance of eternity and the gospel because, as you well know, if there is no eternity, if there is no afterlife, if there is no God and no judgment, it doesn't ultimately matter—ultimately matter—whether you live as a missionary or a murderer. It doesn't ultimately matter if you live like Charlie Kirk or Tyler Robinson if there is no God or no afterlife because we're all going to wind up in the same place: nowhere, out of existence.

The third issue that has become much more prominent in my mind is whenever I start feeling sorry for myself or thinking this is tough to get through, I think of Erica, who has it a thousand times worse than anybody else. Second Corinthians 1 says the Holy Spirit comforts us so we can comfort others. I just try and reach out to her and help her as much as I can, whether it's a passage, whether it's an insight, or whether it's just encouragement because she has it far better than anyone else.

Let me tell you, she wrote the foreword for The War on Reality. If you just read the foreword, you're going to think this woman is brilliant. Charlie did not marry Erica just for her beauty. She is a brilliant, strong Christian woman who is picking up the legacy that Charlie and her established, and she's carrying it forward to make heaven crowded. As you know, they were concerned about three things: God, family, country, in that order. They're doing it, and she continues to do it.

Allen Jackson: You mentioned family. You bring that up in your book, and I think it's a very important question to process. Can civilization survive without the family?

Frank Turek: No. Civilization is grounded by the biological two-parent family. If you destroy the biological two-parent family, you're going to destroy civilization. We point out that Satan is attacking the family because Satan knows that's the ground of civilization. Imagine if everybody had to live out on their own. There were no parents, and everyone was sort of disconnected from everybody else. That is a recipe for chaos. Yet the left wants to destroy the family.

That's why Christians need to be engaged. We need to be engaged in the three institutions God created. He created the church, of course, but he also created government, and he created the family. We've got to be concerned about all three of those. We can't be one-third or just two-thirds of a Christian. That's why I admire the work you're doing, Allen, because every week you preach the full counsel of God, whether the issue is political or not, because everybody needs to become a disciple, not just a believer. You're involved in doing that, and that's why I appreciate what you're doing.

Allen Jackson: Well, thank you, Frank. It is time to tell the truth. When you mentioned family, I want to go back. We talked about Lindsay Clancy a moment ago. I've got a little video clip I want you to see, and then I've got a question.

Guest (Female): We knew that this was a turning point, and this would be something that could change something to make it better for other women in the future, for other families. We really thought this is an opportunity to get people talking. That's all we really thought: get people talking.

Allen Jackson: We've got two jurors that voted to acquit a woman who strangled her three children because they want to initiate a conversation. That's terrifying to me if that's the best response we've got. What do you think?

Frank Turek: I think what they're doing is they're confusing condition and cause. Yes, there were conditions that may have led to some difficulties for Lindsay Clancy, whether it was too much medicine or not enough help or whatever. But she is the cause of the murder of her three children. If you confuse condition and cause, what you're doing here is you're exonerating people from their moral accountability. That is a disaster for any civilization. If you do not judge people properly and punish people properly, you're not going to have a civilization; you're going to have chaos.

Allen Jackson: Speaking of chaos, the Democratic Socialists have moved to prominence in America. It's hard to imagine. I think the fundamental premise of that is that we're all oppressed and someone needs to relieve the oppression. Can you respond to that misguided idea?

Frank Turek: We have a whole section in the book on cultural Marxism. If you have certain qualities, you're automatically an oppressor. If you're a white Christian male citizen, and you're heterosexual, you're automatically considered an oppressor regardless of your personal behavior. On the other hand, if you're, say, a woman, you're LGBTQ, you're a non-Christian, you're a non-citizen—bonus points if you came into the country illegally—you're automatically considered oppressed.

Regardless of your personal behavior, you should be heard and the oppressor should not. This is, by the way, why you actually have some people siding with illegal immigrants who are violent criminals. They will not prosecute these violent criminals because they're considered an oppressed class, and we can't send them back to their country of origin.

This is absolute madness. When you do not punish the guilty, you wind up punishing the innocent. You wind up punishing innocent people who are not having these thugs taken off the streets by their appropriate government. That's a big problem, and Christians and other reasonable people need to stand up and say no. We need to judge people not on their identity group; we need to judge people based on their personal behavior. That's what the Bible says. That's what common sense says. That's what Martin Luther King Jr. said. He famously said, "Let's not judge people on the color of their skin but on the content of their character." What are we doing now? We're going backwards. We're now judging people on the color of their skin, or their sex, or their religious beliefs, or whether or not they're a citizen. It's madness. But that's cultural Marxism. It's madness. All it does is tear down something that's good because that's all evil can do. It can't build up; it can only tear down.

Allen Jackson: Frank, we need to take another short break for our sponsors, but we will be right back to continue this discussion in just a moment.

Allen Jackson: We're back now with Frank Turek. We're discussing his new book, The War on Reality. It's worth the time to read. Frank, we're talking about this conflict and some of the absurd things that are coming from our universities and cultural leaders and politicians. The most distressing part to me is too much of this is being reinforced from pulpits. How do we have so-called leaders in the Christian church reinforcing ideas that clearly have pagan roots? It's hard to explain.

Frank Turek: It certainly is, and they're actually some of them are siding with socialism. You know what Charlie always used to say, Allen? He would say, "How many caravans do you know that are going from the United States to Venezuela?" Yeah, the answer's zero. They're all coming in the opposite direction. Or, "How many people do you know who are getting on rickety boats in Florida to escape to Cuba for a better life?" The answer is zero. They're all coming in the opposite direction.

Or when the Berlin Wall was up, how many people do you know who tried to escape from West into East? None. They were all going in the opposite direction. Why? Because socialism doesn't produce freedom. It doesn't even produce food. It killed 100 million people in the last century. Yet you now have an entire party with a plurality, actually a majority, of Democrats saying that socialism is a good thing and they have a negative view of capitalism.

Yet capitalism or the free market society is the one system—not a perfect system, but it's the best system—that brings most people out of poverty. Yet people want to go back to socialism. It's absolute madness. Many pastors are now supporting this not realizing that when the Bible talks about taking care of the poor, it's not talking about the government taking care of the poor. It's talking about individual church members or individual members of Israel taking care of the poor.

Allen Jackson: And the poor were understood as those people in community. It's not just random strangers entirely, but it's a bizarre thing. You ask a question in the book I want to unpack just a bit. It was in your eighth chapter, and you said, "Are people basically good?" I think the socialists try to convince us we are and the government's the oppressor, or the accomplished are the oppressor. Tell us how you answer that from a biblical worldview.

Frank Turek: Three things. Number one, the Bible talks about the heart being deceitful and wicked; who can know it? Jesus said it's not what goes into a man that makes him unclean but what comes out of a man: sexual immorality, theft, greed, and all of these things. So the heart is wicked.

Secondly, you can demonstrate this easily by just asking: is it easy to be bad or easy to be good? Well, it's quite easy to be bad. It's easy to be selfish. It's hard to be good. That's why we need to crucify the flesh because we're bent toward evil. It's very difficult to suggest that people are inherently good.

Yet, Allen, a majority of Christians think people are inherently good. When in reality, we are not. That's why Christ had to die because we're not inherently good. Then, finally, how this translates into socialism is that socialists think people are inherently good; it's only a system like a government that makes them bad.

Our question in the book, The War on Reality, is: if people are inherently good and systems like governments are comprised of all inherently good people, how does the government go bad? I mean, it makes no sense at all. If everybody's inherently good, you'd think the systems they build would be inherently good.

But we're not inherently good; we're evil. Also, people need to be incentivized to work. This is why Adam Smith said in 1776, "It's not through the benevolence of the baker, brewer, or butcher that we get our dinner at night; it's through his self-interest." Because the baker, brewer, or butcher knows that in order for him to eat, he's got to satisfy his customers. He is incentivized to provide a good product to people, and that's how economics works best. It brings more people out of poverty. It's not a matter of greed; it's a matter of self-interest.

Allen Jackson: That is so good. You know, secular Christianity, as it's presented and it's presented frequently, the cross is really an inconvenient reality: that we need a Savior, that sin has to be addressed and that it has to be addressed so directly. It seems to me we have to bring that message back to the heart of the Christian faith, or we'll never transform our culture.

Frank Turek: There are two major worldviews out there: the cultural Marxist worldview and the Christian worldview. The cultural Marxist worldview is based on rebellion, whereas the Christian worldview is based on repentance. The Marxist worldview wants to rebel against everything, including Jesus. This is where, by the way, you get Gays for Gaza, Allen, because the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The gays see themselves as aligned with another so-called minority, an oppressed minority, the Muslims. What they don't seem to realize through history or just common sense is that if Muslims ever take over, the gays are going to be the first people that the Muslims persecute. I mean, if they go to Gaza today, they're going to be thrown off a roof.

But they don't seem to understand that now. Instead of judging people based on their personal behavior, we're judging people on their identity groups, and that's a disaster. Rebellion is not the way forward; repentance is, and accepting the free gift of salvation which is what Jesus provided. When we accept that, we're not only forgiven but given his righteousness.

Allen Jackson: The book is practical and easily implemented. Maybe we wrap this up by you giving us some practical things that people can do to restore belief in reality in our families and beyond.

Frank Turek: We have many sections at the end of each chapter that help people do that. A lot of them have to do with just asking questions and also getting involved in our culture, getting involved politically. Let me just say one thing about that. I hear pastors and others saying, "I don't get involved politically; I just preach the gospel." To which I respond, "I guess you don't think the gospel's very important then."

They say, "What do you mean?" I say, "Because politics affects our ability to preach and live the gospel. If you don't think so, go to some of the countries I've been to. I've been to Iran. There's no world outreach church in Tehran, Allen; I checked, it's not there. I've been to Saudi Arabia. There's no First Baptist Church of Mecca. It's not there. I've been to Egypt. There's no Calvary Chapel in Cairo. Why? They don't want it there politically.

If for no other reason, we have to be involved politically because we've got to protect our ability to preach and live the gospel. We also love people by putting laws in place to protect innocent people from evil.

Allen Jackson: Amen. Well, the book is The War on Reality. It'll help you frame a response to some of the insanity we're exposed to on a regular basis. Frank, thanks for your time today. Thanks for your hard work on the book. We appreciate your insight.

Frank Turek: God bless you, Allen. Thanks for your leadership.

Allen Jackson: In a moment, some final thoughts.

Allen Jackson: Thank you for spending a few moments of your day with us. Your emails are always a highlight. Your thoughts and opinions, they matter. This is a favorite. It's James from Texas. No question today. Just immense thanks for having Ambassador Huckabee on as a well-informed guest and speaker.

We were grateful to have Ambassador Huckabee on, and I'll tell him that there's at least one person in the world that thinks he's a well-informed guest. He'll be encouraged. In all reality, your advocacy and mine for the Jewish people in the nation of Israel in this season is perhaps as important as ever. It has become fashionable to hate the Jewish people. Let's start a new fashion trend and be advocates for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. The government of Israel is not perfect, neither is ours. But the Jewish people have a right to that piece of territory because God gave it to them. Again, thanks for your time today. God's moving in the earth. Let's join him. Goodnight and God bless.