Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast

Seth Gruber: We've just forgotten our mandate. What are we for? What were we made to do? It's Gideon in Judges 6, isn't it? He has to tear down the Baal statues and the Asherah poles, child sacrifice and the goddess of sex, Ishtar. They're always together.

Allen Jackson: It's not a new ideology because the enemy's the same, but the fundamental solution is to come back and lead a biblically-informed life.

Seth Gruber: And we're quickly learning, aren't we, in the 21st century that when the church doesn't do that, the enemy exercises dominion. Land of the free, home of the brave, 250th, God bless America. Yeah, I'm not sure if he's going to bless America when the sewers of our country run red with the blood of our children.

Allen Jackson: So what can we do?

Seth Gruber: We've got to remember who we are before we can save our land.

Allen Jackson: Welcome to Culture & Christianity. I have a friend with us today, Seth Gruber. Welcome back.

Seth Gruber: Thanks, Pastor Allen. One of my favorite pastors and prominently featured in the new film, *The Last Stand*.

Allen Jackson: Prominently featured. Well, welcome to Tennessee. You're a new resident of Middle Tennessee.

Seth Gruber: I am.

Allen Jackson: You escaped the plains of Kansas.

Seth Gruber: Yes, and before that, California. So it's good to be here.

Allen Jackson: Now you're in the midst of the humidity of Tennessee in the summer.

Seth Gruber: It's what, two months? It's not bad.

Allen Jackson: Exactly. You hold that thought. We are glad you're back. For those who may not be familiar with Seth, he's the founder of the White Rose Resistance, the fastest-growing pro-life organization in the nation.

Seth Gruber: I think so. It was a year ago, so it’s kind of hard to keep track of the metrics. Either way, the Lord's breathed on so much of what we've done. You know how it is when the Lord breathes on something and you're like, "Whoa, I can't keep up with this," and it's like, "Wow, but God, praise God."

Allen Jackson: But it's safe to say you're an advocate for the unborn.

Seth Gruber: That's right. Pro-life, pro-family. All these issues go together. We've talked about this a lot when you hosted a screening of my last film, *The 1916 Project*. You can't understand abortion without understanding sexual liberation and the sexual revolutionists, but you can't understand sexual revolution and the seedbed of abortion without understanding cultural Marxism. How does that operate and why did they always push weird sex stuff and why was that always an obsession with the revolutionaries?

Allen Jackson: Except now Marxism is on the ballot in a bold, brazen, unapologetic way. You mentioned *The 1916 Project*, which was a film you produced and had how many million views?

Seth Gruber: We had five million in English on X for four weeks in 2024 and seven million in Spanish, and that was just for four weeks on Twitter. Then we had over 1,100 churches host a screening of it globally. Now it's streaming on DailyWire+ and once that contract's up, we're going to get it on some much bigger platforms. So that's still changing hearts and minds and going places.

Allen Jackson: Absolutely. We screened that here at the church.

Seth Gruber: That was our biggest screening in the country of *The 1916 Project* with you, me, and Metaxas. That ended up being the largest attended screening in the country. It was very fun.

Allen Jackson: When Eric takes his meds, he's a great guy. He was here two weeks ago with his new book.

Seth Gruber: I know, we were hanging out when he was in town.

He's written another tome, *Revolution: The History of the Greatest Nation*—or *The History of the World*. It's such a Metaxas title, I love it. But you've got a whole new book and the documentary that goes with it, *The Last Stand: Christ or Chaos, the War for the West*. Where can people get copies of this?

Seth Gruber: If you want to buy it and support a pro-life Christian ministry in doing so, go to thewhiterose.life, to our store. If you want to support the Sodomite and leftist rainbow revolutionaries at Amazon, it's also available there.

Allen Jackson: Seth is short on opinion, you'll gather that if you've never listened to him before. He has clarity on what he's advocating for and what he is intending to not cooperate with, which I think is important. Tell us a little bit about the film, what it's about. I know you were in Europe and filmed a big chunk of it with Dr. Grant.

Seth Gruber: Rome, Paris, and London we filmed in. There's so many different ways to answer this question. Our hope and prayer, Pastor Allen, is that this film will be for this generation what Schaeffer's *How Should We Then Live?* was for the previous. That's Pastor George Grant and my prayer. Pastor George Grant of Parish Presbyterian in Franklin, a mutual friend of ours, he's the primary screenwriter on the film. It's really our baby. This is really our film that we've made together.

Of course, Dr. Grant was discipled by Schaeffer and Sproul. So there's this long line of faithfulness that we also trace in the film. We don't understand ourselves and our calling, what we're faced with, how those before us faced the same things, how they operated, what was their blueprint for cultural and political engagement. We can't even fully understand our place, our faith, what it means, unless, like Doc in *Back to the Future*, we've got to go back.

That's what we wanted to do with this. We wanted to say ending abortion, saving babies in and outside the womb, stopping the sexualization of kids, stopping drag queen story hour in the public square—you know they were doing drag queen story hour in ancient Rome in its final days? They were doing drag queen story hour in the Palais Royal with this guy named Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins.

Even drag performances in the public square with weird readings by gender-bending queers, that's not a new thing. Christians have been fighting these various things—the state trying to raise your kid, the state intervening in the parent-child relationship—every single one of these things that I'll call them cultural lynchpins, the civilizational bedrock of a society, they're all really ancient.

We love to say there's nothing new under the sun, and yes, that's a powerful, beautiful Bible verse, but how many Christians can actually tell you what that means? If I say there's nothing new under the sun, I feel like there's nothing new under the sun, Pastor Allen. Okay, all right, Christian, now tell me when in history they were doing infanticide, transing the kids or trying to make them do sexualized dances, and the state coming to raise your kid because they're a better parent. Give me some specifics about how we faced that before. We love to say there's nothing new under the sun, but most Christians would go, "Well, I mean, I feel like it's happened before."

Schaeffer said the ignorance of the church is more dangerous for a culture than the decadence of the world. That's way more so. Like Simba in *The Lion King*, we've got to remember who we are before we can save our land. So that's what this book's about. It's about tracing the glorious heritage of Christian resistance against all the same evils that we're facing today and the stories of these heroes that we've forgotten who faced this stuff and they pushed out the darkness.

They sacrificed and they laid the foundations for renewal and reformation in our day. We need their courage, we need their witness, we need their stories in order to be faithful in our day.

Allen Jackson: We haven't just faced it once. It has been faced repetitively because our adversary uses the same playbook. It's like the Book of Judges with the cycle of retribution. It's a rinse and repeat cycle. We have seen the things we're facing are not new to the 21st century. The church for two millennia has stood against them, but even prior to the church standing against them, the people of God were called to stand against it. So your book is more about the church than it is really just the abortion issue. It's a much broader story.

Seth Gruber: It's our story. It's the story of the church. It's the story of the faithful men and women who came before us. Even pro-life sidewalk counseling—you know that didn't start in 1973 with *Roe v. Wade*? It started in the third century with a guy named Callistus. He was a Christian slave who had been freed by a generous benefactor after being sentenced to hard labor in the mines of Sardinia.

He was made a deacon and assigned a piece of real estate by Pope Zephyrinus. It was the first piece of real estate the church ever owned. It was a cemetery along the Appian Way. Paul refers to those of Appia in Acts 28.

Allen Jackson: Which is a road coming into Rome.

Seth Gruber: The main way in and out. I filmed on the Appian Way and there's some stones on that street that are original, OG, like Paul's barefoot OG stones that are still there. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm standing here." It's not that far from downtown Rome, but it was the main way in and out of Rome. All the disciples, all the apostles would have traveled that.

So there's a cemetery along the Appian Way and Callistus gets assigned by Pope Zephyrinus to run this ministry. It was a haven for the poor, taking care of the poor, but it brought these travelers into conflict with this robust faith. It was like, "Whoa, you Christians don't just burn your bodies? You bury them? You have reverence for the body?" So it was a bold witness for Christianity.

But his positioning off of the Appian Way outside of Rome brought Callistus into conflict with the infanticide walls of the ancient Roman world. These are your local abortion mills. It was fully legal—not just legal, it was socially expected—that if you didn't want a baby for whatever reason, like a lot of dads they wanted sons. So there's all these recorded stories of fathers writing letters to their wives like, "If it's a girl, expose it."

Allen Jackson: They would abandon a child.

Seth Gruber: Just place it there. They were called foundlings and they would get eaten by an animal, they would die from the weather, they would be "rescued" by a pimp. This was very common. Justin Martyr wrote a lot about this. He probably wrote more about the sexualization of kids and infanticide in the Patristic Age than any other Church Father.

Justin Martyr wrote about how most foundlings, infants that were abandoned, he said most of them were not rescued by Christians because the Romans were abandoning their children at a rate that the church couldn't keep up with rescuing them. He said most of them were not even eaten by animals. Most of them were "rescued" by pimps who run local brothels who understood what a great way to get future sex slaves. Go find people who abandon their babies and raise that kid in a brothel.

So you know what this led to, which is happening today? Accidental incest. That's a concept that we could wrap our minds around. Well, a lot of these fathers who abandoned their children on infanticide walls, they thought their baby was dead. They didn't know that the brothel that that degenerate, unfaithful dad just went to visit 15 years later—he had no idea he just paid to have sexual intercourse with the daughter that he left on an infanticide wall 14 years ago, who was raised in a brothel by a local pimp.

This is not Seth Gruber's opinion. Justin Martyr wrote about how most foundlings were raised in brothels to become sex slaves. Why should we know our history, Pastor Allen? Because accidental incest is another byproduct of unmoored, wild sexual revolution today in the 21st century. Accidental incest is happening not just all across the West but across America too. How is it happening? Wild sexual revolution.

Because the gays can't have kids, what do you have to do? You've got to go get sperm if you're a lesbian. And there's these sperm donors—there's no such thing as a sperm donor, listeners, by the way, you get paid for that, so don't use the word donor. Many men have fathered 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 biological children. That's pretty common.

So if those children that get birthed from the lesbians or the single mother live in a relatively close area to their biological father, siblings might accidentally end up dating. Multiple stories on mainstream news headlines in America—and I cite one of them in the book—girls on Tinder, she meets a guy, they go on a date, they have a fling, she finds out later she had sexual intercourse with her brother.

Accidental incest as a result of what? The dehumanization and mistreatment of unborn babies and the wild sexual revolutionary mindset that demanded orgasms without responsibility. Same things happening all over again, and most Christians are not aware of it or not willing to fight it. So this is what Callistus encounters, these abandoned babies on infanticide walls right outside of Rome. This is the 200s, third century.

Callistus mobilizes the local church, Pastor Allen, to set up something called life watches. What's a life watch? He would position Christians behind the bushes on the perimeter where these infanticide walls were, where this is where you would go leave a kid. So a Christian would stand and watch for a Roman family to come abandon their infant to be eaten by animals, and then a Christian who's assigned on the life watch—literally watchmen on the wall—to rescue that baby, place it into a Christian family, and raise that child in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

Thus pro-life sidewalk counseling and the adoption movement gets launched at the same moment in the third century. We're not talking about 1973 *Roe v. Wade*, the pro-life movement goes back to the cross of Calvary and all of history has been a battle for life ever since.

Allen Jackson: It goes back to biblical Jerusalem when they were offering their babies in the Hinnom Valley in the fires to Molech. So it predates what we call Christianity. The devil hates human beings and will destroy us from birth onward, and it's only a biblical worldview that will help us protect our children.

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So we come back to fundamentals. God designed sex, but He designed the context wherein it is beneficial to humanity in the context of marriage. Prior to marriage or beyond marriage, it's destructive. Once you cross those thresholds of ignoring God or disobeying God or blatantly choosing your own path, then we're easy prey to a cascading set of decisions that leads us further into perversion and darkness, to sacrificing our children to cover our sin.

It's not a new ideology because the enemy is the same. But the fundamental solution beyond repentance and forgiveness is to come back and lead a biblically informed life, which isn't necessarily fashionable even amongst the churches, which is a tragic story.

The solution of this will get reflected in the political realm, but the solution will begin with the people of God living like the people of God. Van Til said that culture is religion externalized. I might put it this way: dominion is inevitable. Dominion will be exercised, it will be. Today they call you and I Christian nationalists, which really means you're a Democrat in 1968. You're pro-life, you think it's better to have Christians wielding political power because the Christian understands they're going to stand before God one day and give an account for how they wielded power, for how they stewarded everything.

Also, that whole thing about the American Republic and the early colonies, how you had to prove your membership at a local Protestant church before you could appear on the ballot. Christian nationalism built this republic. You had to prove what Protestant church you went to or you couldn't run for office. Anyways, I digress. So if you believe what every Democrat believed in 1968, they call us like a theocratic chauvinist Christian nationalist or something like this.

When really we just understand that when Christians don't exercise dominion for righteousness to steward what God has given us as a sacrifice back to Him—the parable of the talents, to whom much is given much is required, or Spider-Man's uncle, with great power comes great responsibility—then it's not like we're going to have a neutral, pluralistic public square where we all just learn how to get along. We're not going to learn how to get along when one side goes, "We want to chop off the genitals of the next generation," and the other side goes, "Can we not?" and the other side goes, "Yeah, kids can be trans and they should be encouraged to experiment with sexual identities," and the other side goes, "Can we not?"

There's no live and let live there. Someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. When sex becomes God, children are always the required sacrifice. That's why you can't understand the whole abortion fight that I've given my life to in my ministry without understanding the sexual revolution and all the weirdos that were laying the groundwork of this. It's Gideon in Judges 6, isn't it? He has to tear down the Baal statues and the Asherah poles, child sacrifice and the goddess of sex, Ishtar. They're always together.

So much of this is going to start in the walls of the church when pastors find their testicular fortitude and we get a million Allen Jacksons in pulpits around America preaching fidelity, preaching sex within marriage, preaching reproducing like papists, like spitting out dragon slayers, like arrows in the hand of a warrior, and then not sending them to public schools. We'll take over the whole country for Jesus, for the unborn and the family.

Allen Jackson: We shouldn't be abandoning the public schools, but you know what I mean. It's a gamble if you don't know. I call it playing Russian roulette with your kid's values. But yes, we should have Christians taking over the public sectors. The kids are going into the world; you can't shelter them from the world.

Seth Gruber: Well, my eight-year-old's memorizing Chesterton and listening to all of my talks.

Allen Jackson: We can pick that one up on another podcast. The idea of tolerance has become almost a worshipped idea. Tolerance means everyone's entitled to an opinion, but it doesn't mean that everyone's opinion should be treated as equal. Some ideas are just bad and some are wrong and some are evil. If you're tolerant of evil, it makes you evil. So tolerance is not the ultimate goal. I'm tolerant of everybody having an opinion, but I'm not going to treat every opinion as if it's the same, and the church has been co-opted by this. I think we have genuflected at the altar of tolerance.

In fact, you make the point, but the church has a long tradition of resistance. John 17 was not Jesus' only prayer or His only statement when He prayed for the unity of the church. He was praying for the unity of the like-minded who have yoked themselves to a common cause. But we are not to be unequally yoked; we're not supposed to be supportive of ungodliness and immorality. The church has a long heritage, but we've lost that. More than 90% of the churches do not mention a pro-life position at all.

Seth Gruber: About 90% of churches don't even have any formal pro-life expression.

Allen Jackson: How can that be? That 90% of us don't even stand up for life.

Seth Gruber: I'm reminded of something John Stott said. He said our Christian habit is to bewail the world's deteriorating standards with an air of rather self-righteous dismay. We criticize its violence, dishonesty, immorality, disregard for human life, and materialistic greed. "The world is going down the drain," we say with a shrug. But whose fault is it? Who is to blame?

Stott said let me put it like this: if the house is dark when nightfall comes, there's no sense in blaming the house. That's what happens when the sun goes down. The question to ask is, "Where is the light?" Similarly, if the meat goes bad and becomes inedible, there's no sense in blaming the meat. That's what happens when bacteria are left alone to breed. The question to ask is, "Where is the salt?"

Just so if society deteriorates and its standards decline until it too becomes like a dark night or a stinking fish, there's no sense in blaming society. The question to ask is, "Where is the church? Why are the salt and light of Jesus Christ not changing and permeating our society?" I think that the command to be salt and light is just a New Testament recapitulation of the Genesis mandate, the cultural mandate, the dominion mandate: to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it and exercise dominion.

And we're quickly learning, aren't we, in the 21st century that when the church doesn't do that, the enemy exercises dominion in reverse. And so it's a call to stand. The reason I called it *The Last Stand*, Pastor Allen, that wasn't just hyperbolic red meat to try to get people to write me large checks like, "Oh my gosh, we don't have much time left!" I actually believe that. I sincerely believe that in my bones, that we don't have a ton of time left to save Western civilization.

Neil Ferguson, the celebrated historian, said, "My sense is that history has been against any republic lasting more than 250 years." So this American Republic is in its last republican phase. The average lifespan of a civilization is about 250 years. This guy J.D. Unwin, he's an Oxford anthropologist and ethnologist, he wrote a study in 1934, 92 years ago. It's called *Sex and Culture*. It's kind of a tome. It's boring because it's a study, so his research methods, his conclusions, the whole thing.

Studies are kind of boring to read, but if you can get through it, it's like an absolute humbling slap in the face to Christian leaders and the pulpit in America. He looked at 86 civilizations over 5,000 years. Of course, most Christians believe the world is 6,000-ish years old. So he's looked at most of history. And he asked the question, "What causes civilizations to rise and thrive, and what causes civilizations to decline and fall?"

And his findings are historically ruthless and remarkably consistent. None of this will surprise Christians with the findings that I'm about to relay—not Andy Stanley Christians, you know, not like people who use pronouns in the kids' church at North Point Bible Church, but like Christians who actually love Jesus and read the full counsel of God when you're not unhitched from the Old Testament, if you know what I mean.

But he said that once a society codified total sexual freedom—and by the way, these are J.D. Unwin's terms, not mine, and he has all the academic and intellectual PhD bona fides that the liberal establishment usually likes, but because he reached conclusions that the secular establishment doesn't like him to reach, he's been buried and he's not taught in universities today.

He said once a society codified—which is interesting, so there's a legal aspect to it, it's not just like *Will & Grace* is a popular show, it's not just like a cultural change—the codification of what he called total sexual freedom. He said once a society did that, 86 civilizations over 5,000 years, no one escaped this rule. If they didn't do anything to change it, to right the ship, to change the laws, within 90 to 100 years they were done.

And they were replaced by another civilization that still had greater social energy. Yikes! He also said that the most powerful culturally energetic, productive civilizations in all of human history had one thing in common: they combined prenuptial chastity with absolute monogamy. So don't have sex before you get married, only have sex with your spouse after you get married, and reproduce like papists.

He said if they held those together, prenuptial chastity with absolute monogamy, he said these civilizations gave us the greatest of everything: art, philosophers, literature, architecture, culinary arts he said, actually. Their food was better. Better lattes and dinner. The highest form of everything was produced by civilizations that—well, this was my message last time I was at World Outreach Church on a Sunday—who basically observed the Genesis 1 through 3 like Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve; Eve is taken from Adam's side, so marriage is only a man and a woman; therefore, the children that are created of those parents, parents have a right to their children, children have a right to their parents; and no orgy stuff, and the sanctity of life, so don't kill babies.

If you follow that and that's codified and respected, you get the most culturally energetic, productive civilizations ever. J.D. Unwin, 5,000 years, 86 civilizations.

Allen Jackson: So when did America codify total sexual freedom, if at all?

Seth Gruber: I think it was 1973. I'm going to make my homeschool intellectual ADHD argument to you. So what happened in '73? *Roe v. Wade*, baby killing. So watch this. J.D. Unwin says once you codify total sexual freedom. Do you have total sexual freedom if you still have to take responsibility for the products of your sexual freedom—babies?

No. I would argue that you're totally liberated—now we're not talking freedom in the sense that our founders meant it, of course—but you're totally sexually free when you can treat abortion as birth control. If you can murder the baby, now you can really sexually do whatever you want and take no responsibility, so you're free. So, '73, *Roe v. Wade*. What else happened? The Endangered Species Act.

The same year we declared open season on the smallest humans, the same stinking year, we gave greater legal protections to sea turtles and porpoises, which fulfilled G.K. Chesterton's prophetic warning that wherever there is animal worship, there will be human sacrifice. And then what else happened in '73? The United States Supreme Court removed their obscenity laws and for the first time in American history, porn became legal. Make it, ship it, sell it, it's all good.

*Roe v. Wade* sounds like Molech. Animal worship sounds a lot like Baal, like a half-animal-looking god that they worshipped. And then *porneia*, sexual liberation, Ashtoreth. In the same year, all three legally codified. Could it be, bro, that America came into agreement with a demonic trinity in 1973? If I'm right, that that's when America codified total sexual freedom, and J.D. Unwin's research, not one weird lib has ever been able to counter it, '73, '83, '93, '03, 2013, 2023.

He says once a civilization codifies total sexual freedom, if they don't do anything to change it, within 90 to 100 years they're done. Bye-bye, dodo bird. And they're replaced, which means the Islamist uprising in Dearborn, Michigan, and Frisco, Texas, around the West and around America, is that a canary in the coal mine? Is that an early warning that we're seeing the early signs of civilizational replacement? And if so, why?

Because we didn't deal with the baby slaughter and the sexual liberation that always precipitates the decline of a civilization. Unless the church flatulent becomes the church militant, it will become the church irrelevant.

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What we're talking about is a different imagination of the church because our lifetime would coincide with the discussion of the church that was about salvation and the recitation of a prayer and getting your ticket to heaven and then really doing your best to desperately not notice. Let's drop the shades on the building and let's gather faithfully and let's write another worship chorus, which I'm not opposed to worshipping and I'm an advocate for gathering in the church.

But we have an assignment to engage our culture, and there's an abundance of evidence that suggests we haven't been doing that as efficiently or effectively as we might. Courage is expressed and observed generationally, and so is cowardice, and we have momentum in a direction that isn't helping us. It's going to take a different kind of boldness.

Seth Gruber: I asked Pastor George Grant when we were making this film, Pastor Allen, and you've had him out here as well. I asked him because he's kind of my mentor and I think he's the smartest man alive in Christendom today. And I said, "I want to put this statement in the book, Pastor George. Do you agree with it? I want to say the first 1,900 years of church history is an indictment against the last 100."

The academic philosopher and historian George Grant said, "Yeah, I agree with that." We've just forgotten our mandate. The problem in the church is as Pastor George Grant says, we start our gospel in John 3:16 instead of Genesis 1. What are we for? What were we made to do? Well, the dominion mandate is the first job description given to human beings. The very first job description: be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it and exercise dominion, and then he repeats the word dominion, I think two more times, three times.

What does that mean? Subdue? Well, that means to bring into subjugation. So we're supposed to bring everything into subjugation, including evil, I guess. If you're being fruitful and multiplying and it's just Adam and Eve, and then everyone keeps being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth, eventually you have a lot of people. So I guess with a lot of people you probably have to build a school and we probably need to figure out some laws, got all these people, we probably need to figure out how to safeguard society.

Assumed in the whole dominion mandate is the assumption that we will be the builders of civilization, and this is a good thing. We're supposed to walk into this sort of wild, forest teeming with life and turn it into a garden city, to turn it into something beautiful, to steward it. I think one of the most powerful sections in the New Testament that gets to what you're talking about—you were saying just worship and say the sinner's prayer and be saved and try not to notice—one of the most powerful scenes in the New Testament that counters this sort of evangelicalism in the 21st century and throughout part of the 20th that just kind of washed its hands of the culture and political fight is when Jesus takes His disciples to Caesarea Philippi.

And He asks, He says, "Who do people say that I am?" and some say, you know, one of the prophets or Elijah. "But who do you say I am?" and Simon Peter says, "You're the Christ, the Son of the living God." And He says, "Blessed are you, Simon bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but our Father in heaven. And you are Peter, and on this rock I'll build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it."

What we sometimes forget, but what a lot of lay evangelicals forget, bro, is He took them to the Sodom and Gomorrah of the ancient world at that time. Super far to the north, this is not downtown Jerusalem. And from the earliest days, it was a place where pagan worship orgy-hosting child sacrifice events occurred. And there was a cave there where they worshipped the Greek god Pan—that's where Peter Pan comes from, by the way, this little person that comes and takes children away up into the stars, that's where Pan comes from, it's really creepy.

The local residents believed that this rock cave was an entrance to Hades. They thought it was an entrance to the underworld. Wait, that sounds like the gates of hell. This is why history is so fascinating, isn't it, Christian? Like you've heard the scene, you've heard the story before. Now, if you listen to Pastor Allen you're like, "Shut up, Seth, he's already told me this, I listen to Pastor Allen preach, this is an amazing story."

But if you haven't heard it, here's Jesus asking His people a question about His identity and their identity, and He takes them to where babies were murdered and kids were sexualized and all manner of perversion. And it's there that He says, "You are Peter, and on this rock"—and He's standing on a rock cave that's an entrance to Hades—"I will build my church and the gates of hell"—so His people are thinking, "He's standing at the gates of hell, that is the gates of hell!"

He's standing at the gates of hell and He says, "And the gates of hell will not prevail against the onward good force that is my church." Whoa, that means a little bit different. Why didn't He just take them down to some neutral public square area where all faiths and religions are welcome? He took them to the centerpiece of pagan idolatry of the ancient world. He was setting His disciples up for global assault against the minions of darkness, and we have forgotten that.

Allen Jackson: Go back and repeat your statement about the 19th century.

Seth Gruber: The first 1,900 years of church history is an indictment against the last 100. It was somewhere in the early 20th century during the Fundamentalist-Modernist crisis where the modernists become your United Methodists, the modernists become your scientifically obsessed Fauci rainbow cult, but this is the early signs of that, Francis Collins' people.

And then your fundamentalists, so focused on the fundamentals of the gospel and protecting orthodoxy, Christian orthodoxy, from these rising waves of heresy, end up focusing so much on "the gospel"—you ever heard people say "keep it gospel-centered"? That's a thing at the Gospel Coalition, which is Tim Keller's brainchild, this completely irrelevant—that becomes sort of an excuse for political and cultural engagement.

And so that started somewhere in the beginning of the 20th century and led to seeker sensitivity, it led to, frankly, *Christianity Today* gets launched out of this. And it was a new framework for how the church engaged culture. I think in general, it's okay with me, but I think we need a bit of a more nuanced understanding or that statement fuels the notion that now we're at the end of the age and it's time for our eschatology to kick in and there's nothing we can really do about it because the car's going to go over the cliff anyway.

And therefore, we don't have to engage culture because we're not going to turn it back, the Antichrist is going to emerge, and dispensational theology then takes over. And a bit more of a careful telling or a more nuanced telling of the story is all those places where there has been a Christian worldview, there is an ebb and flow to that. It was true in the British Empire. There were seasons where there was tremendous godlessness and there was reform or renewal.

I think we need a bit more nuanced telling of that story or we feed this dispensational eschatology that says we're really powerless, we'd be pushing against the purposes of God, and I don't think we can afford that.

Seth Gruber: I love how my friend Pastor Jack Hibbs deals with that. I think it's such a beautiful, simple take, but it's very encouraging to the believer. He's said for years, he said, "While I believe that Jesus Christ could come back at any moment, I'm living like He's not, because when He does, I want to be found very busy and faithful about my Father's business."

I would just add to that, because the scriptures tell us that no man knows the day or the hour, why don't we fight evil and engage the culture as if He's not coming back for 2,000 years, but waiting with hopeful anticipation that He's coming back tomorrow? And so let's plant seeds to grow oak trees the shade of which our great-great-great-grandchildren will enjoy. Amen. If we're going to use that eschatology to give us a passive approach to evil, then let's take the locks off our homes and leave the keys in our cars. Let's assimilate it fully into our lives and not just our theological lives.

So I agree with Jack on that point. I think we want to live as if the return is imminent, but we want to prepare as if we've got to live it out, and then either way we win.

Allen Jackson: Our time's going to slip away from us. We are more than 50 years since *Roe v. Wade* and millions of children have been lost, and the Supreme Court has unwound that decision and we're still having an abortion rate that is climbing. A lot of things about that are unsettling. I don't think in the Christian community, I think it's pretty widespread that we think abortion is wrong, and yet we continue to perpetuate it and we argue nuance and subtlety to our own diminishment, to our own great shame.

And I think we're going to have to find a way to say that human life is either sacred or it's not and own that, and that should be reflected legislatively when we get it right in our hearts. The reason we can't get any agreement on the legislation is the Christians don't believe that fully. We have all of our exceptions as if—because I think we've listened to grace so much and I'm an advocate for grace, if you look it up in the theological dictionary, my picture will probably be there.

But I think we've had such a grace-centric message that we don't imagine there are any consequences to sin. So therefore, we tend to just kind of wink at sin and think, "Well, it'll be okay, we'll say we're sorry and then we're going to be golden." And so we continue down our merry way endorsing immorality and ungodliness and just not talking about abortion.

Seth Gruber: So more babies are being killed right now, Pastor Allen, in America after the overturning of *Roe v. Wade* than were being killed in the decade leading up to *Dobbs*, the overturning of *Roe v. Wade*. That should be incredibly sobering and unsettling for any Christian who actually wants to see righteousness restored and babies protected. And so what has happened—I mean, by the way, I think it's okay to celebrate the overturning of *Roe v. Wade*, but I viewed that as the beginning of the pro-life movement, not the end of the pro-life movement.

Because now states are not hamstrung, right, their hands aren't tied behind their back. Feckless Republicans used to be able to get away with doing nothing by saying, "My hands are tied, *Roe v. Wade*, federal decision, I have no control." Well, now states can do whatever they want. So some states are moving to codify abortion through point of birth into their state constitution, and we're fighting these amendment fights around the country.

And other states have shut down the surgical abortion mills—for example, Idaho, Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, go down the list, Oklahoma—but the abortion pill is being shipped in against the law, by the way, which is kind of crazy. Technically, on paper, it's against the law. And the abortion pills, RU-486, Roussel-Uclaf, the French pharmaceutical company that created the abortion pill—coming across the border illegally is against the law, but we're compassionate so we let it happen 40 million times and we don't think that's a problem either.

Well, I heard someone once say there's a problem with college-educated white Christian women, toxic empathy treated as sort of some sort of federal virtue that we all need to bow the knee to. Well, babies are being murdered and the abortion pill's being shipped in to Tennessee here, Pastor Allen, into every other red state that has shut down their surgical mills. Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood's statistical research branch, they're reporting this was two and a half years ago that 60% of the babies being killed are being killed by the RU-486 abortion pill.

Well, that was two years ago, so now it's 70% or more. So you're talking over a million babies are being killed every year in America right now. Land of the free, home of the brave, 250th, God bless America. Yeah, I'm not sure if He's going to bless America when the sewers of our country run red with the blood of our children and the pulpits are largely silent. And so how are we going to end this?

And how is this happening in America, in Tennessee and all these red states, Pastor Allen? Because, and here's the uncomfortable answer that I have to say on the program and this will make people upset, but you need the truth: Republican lawmakers, often at the behest of pro-life organizations—and very big ones in America, who, and I have the letters, this is not hearsay, I don't just say stuff, when I say stuff I have all the receipts—and these pro-life organizations will write letters and make phone calls and they'll pressure Republican lawmakers in red states to not support bills that would criminalize abortion.

Susan B. Anthony List, Concerned Women for America, National Right to Life, Students for Life, and they will actively work against legislators—often godly men, like Christian men who don't have a big podcast or following because they're just state lawmakers. And these state lawmakers, they're just trying to end abortion. So four or five months ago in Tennessee, there was a bill we had enough votes to get it out of assembly and it would have given preborn babies legal protection.

Because as it stands, the mother, the aborting mother, has legal immunity. She has like a shield almost and it's written into the pro-life law that shut down the abortion mills in Tennessee. It was written into that law where if she takes that abortion pill, murders her baby—it poisons the baby, it starves the baby to death, and the second pill forces her uterus to have contractions and she flushes the baby down the toilet, and now they're finding trace elements of mifepristone, the first abortion pill, in our drinking water.

Yeah, there's consequences to murdering babies and flushing their bodies down the sewage system. So if we want to remove those shield laws so that it's actually a crime—it's not about hating women, it's not about wanting to throw mothers in jail. We just want to make the statement it should be illegal for everyone to kill anyone. It should just be a crime. If the boyfriend slips the abortion pill in his girlfriend's drink without telling her, that should be a crime.

If the grandma drives her teenage daughter to go get abortion, that should be a crime. If the father drives his daughter and forces her, that should be a crime. If she takes it willfully, of her own volition, intentionally to kill her baby, that should be a crime. We just want that baby to be protected in law. And so here was a bill earlier in 2026 in Tennessee, America at its best. This was a great opportunity to show America at her best.

Like what if Tennessee was the first state, Pastor Allen, to end abortion? We could save the babies! And then Tennessee Right to Life and other pro-life organizations came in and started promising to pull endorsements of Republican pro-life lawmakers in the next session and promising to replace them with new incumbents if they voted for an anti-abortion bill that would have ended abortion in Tennessee. It wasn't Planned Parenthood sending down drag queens to pressure lawmakers. It was Christian pro-life organizations betraying the unborn and their donors who think those donors think they're giving to end abortion that led to the killing of a bill in Tennessee that could have ended abortion.

So this is the fight before us. And if we remember what the church has always been fighting and all the Patristics, by the way, all the Church Fathers, called to treat abortion as a crime, they called to treat it as murder. So in the years after *Roe v. Wade*, people forget this. So people are now calling me like a wild abolitionist or something like this, which, William Wilberforce, he was a wild abolitionist, so I guess I'm fine with that. But there's an abolitionist sect in the pro-life space that believe that immediate action is—so like it has to be completely banned and criminalized, anything short of immediate action is sin.

I'm not in that camp because in Oregon, I would love to see a bill pass that would end second and third-trimester abortions and I would support that because there's no way you're going to get a ban in 2026 in Oregon. So I'll take some righteous saving of life. So I'm not a full-blown abolitionist in the way that that is used in the pro-life space. But in a red state where we have Republican supermajorities, yes, we should push for a full criminalization bill that would just end abortion.

And so I just released an equal protection statement recently, was covered by the *New York Times*, it was very interesting. It was like, "Growing movement on the right calls for criminalizing women." Actually, Christians meant what they said for 50 years, that abortion is murder and they want it to be treated as such. And so there's these pro-life orgs who hate me and White Rose Resistance now, Pastor Allen, because they're saying Seth wants to criminalize women.

I thought we wanted to criminalize abortion, I don't know what that means to criminalize women. When in reality, if you ask post-abortive women, "When you got an abortion, would you have done it if it was a crime?" 100% of the women who have had abortions who are healed now and they're fighting for life that I've asked that question to have said no, there's no way I would have ever gotten an abortion.

Beautiful! So you're saying that the law can be used in a loving and compassionate way? You're saying it would have stayed your hand and you would have never considered it? We can do this in Tennessee, we can do this in red states, bro. All we need to do is educate enough Christians to get involved in the political sweatwork, and that means phone calling, that makes calling your state legislator, it means showing up at his office, it means door knocking to fight for these babies like the gun lobby fought for guns.

You know constitutional carry—you remember this, right?—constitutional carry used to be radically unpopular. And so, and this is the argument we hear from pro-life establishment groups, they say, "Seth, the culture's not with us. We have to wait to get the culture. We can't push for criminalizing abortion when the culture's not with us." The culture wasn't with constitutional carry when that when they were NRA and the whole gun lobby was pushing for that.

But political power and cultural influence doesn't go to the majority that represents 51%. It goes to the minority of people who are willing to mobilize politically and apply political pressure on a lawmaker to get stuff done. And then as constitutional carry started getting passed by what? A patriotic group of gun-toting Americans who were willing to do the political sweatwork to get stuff done.

After those laws started getting passed—fascinating story, we can tell it another time, but the short version is—constitutional carry got more popular after it got passed. So yes, Andrew Breitbart, "Politics is downstream of culture," but culture's also downstream of politics. It's a two-way street. Politics is the scaffolding upon which culture builds itself.

Politics decides what the scaffolding looks like and what kind of culture is allowed to be built or not be built, and we do that legislatively. When sodomy used to be banned, guess what? Gay stuff wasn't a part of our culture. Why? Because the scaffolding called politics determined what kind of culture was allowed to be built or not. We could give this with a 15 other examples. Maybe tomato and tomato, but I think the scaffolding is worldview. Yes, of course. Ultimately, upstream, culture is religion externalized.

Allen Jackson: Be not afraid, be not discouraged. It's a biblical phrase you may be familiar with. It's also the title for our new devotional and prayer book, a 30-day tool to help you overcome fear and discouragement in your life. Look, we can walk through some uncertain times, whether it's in what's happening in the world around us or in our own personal lives. But God's word and the Spirit of God will give us the courage to face every challenge with the assurance that we can be triumphant in Christ. You'll enjoy the book.

Fear and discouragement can leave us feeling overwhelmed and uncertain. That's why Pastor Allen created *Be Not Afraid, Be Not Discouraged*, a practical devotional filled with scripture, encouraging insights, and prayers to help strengthen your faith throughout the day. This resource will help you find renewed courage, hope, and confidence in God's faithful care. Request your copy today with your gift of $15 or more at allenjackson.com or call 800-880-5102.

The question we always ask is, so what can we do? And as I'm listening to this, it seems to me from my seat, and I'll limit to that, see I don't have the imagination that politics will save us. I think we have to have a transformation of hearts. The business I'm in as a pastor is to see lives transformed. And that's more than just getting your ticket punched to go to heaven and saying the sinner's prayer.

It's taking a biblical worldview and living that out in your home, with your friends, in those expanding spheres of influence that God entrusts to all of us. I believe if we do that, then politics reflects that. I think if we want politics to do something we're not willing to do ourselves, we're hypocrites of the first order. We want politicians to be more bold or more courageous or more unified, and we're not willing to have these conversations at our holiday tables, then we're hiding from the reality.

I think the simple answer is we become advocates, we become pro-life voices in our homes, at our kitchen tables, at our holiday tables when we gather with our friends groups, at school boards—but if you won't do it in those other places, I don't want you going to the school board. Don't step out beyond what—if you're not willing to have it around your table, I don't want to visit you on the school board.

Seth Gruber: I do think that there is a theological problem, though, in the church, Pastor Allen. Because I have met so many Christians, Pastor Allen, and encountered them online who they will have those conversations with their children, their grandchildren, and their liberal family members during Christmas dinner. But they don't think that what they believe about those things and how they disciple their children to live out God's design for their life and be courageous—they don't think that it transcends into the cultural sphere.

So you're right, many people are cowards in the public square because they're cowards at their dinner table and they're not discipling their children and their family to live out God's design. But there's also—because I talk to way too many of these Christians who catechize their kids, Bible study, God's design for your life, be courageous, bring up truth at the family dinner table even when gay Uncle Bob is over for Super Bowl Sunday—but they don't think that there is a role for the church in the public and political sphere to run godly men in local elections, to door knock, to apply political pressure about what God has said about children, about marriage, and say that this should be reflected legislatively to honor God and to protect babies from being raised by two dads, to protect children in the womb from abortion instruments.

They'll say, "That's political, we're not called into that arena." But it was politics that legalized abortion and led to the slaughter of 55, 60, 65 million babies in 53 years. So I think that it's what you're saying is absolutely true, but I've also just seen a mindset with too many millions of Christians who would say amen to the boldness in the home, but they don't think there's a role for the church to fight evil in the public square and restore legislative protections to babies that we've declared open season on. And that's part of the reason I wrote the book.

Marriage is not a political issue. Human sexuality is not a political issue. Those are biblical issues. The definition of a nuclear family is not a political issue; it's a biblical issue. And we without any question have a responsibility and assignment, we're called to be ambassadors to take those issues into the public square wherever that leads you. And if you're hiding from that, you're not just a coward, you're an unfaithful Christ follower.

We want pastors and Christians to watch this film and remember who they are. The film and book go together. The book goes way deeper, obviously, because it's longer. It's a 90-minute documentary. So you can screen this for free in 2026 at your church or your school. You go to thelaststand.film, thelaststand.film, and if you're a pastor who follows Pastor Allen, if you're a Christian educator, homeschool co-op, Christian school, you can host a screening of this for your congregants, your students for free in 2026 by going to thelaststand.film.

You can also see our screening schedule of where, if you live nearby in a city that's already screening it, happening all around the country, hundreds signing up. And we try to get a rapper and an ambassador for White Rose there if possible and kind of give a call to action and a call to arms. And we have resistance chapters all around the country. You can find that on our website if people want to do something in their community to stand for the babies, to stand for the family.

You can find those chapters at thewhiterose.life or if you want to launch a unit, a resistance chapter in your city out of your church and you're like, "We want to get trained to love babies and get them protected," you can let us know as well. But start with hosting a screening of the film for free, thelaststand.film, and it features Pastor Allen Jackson, Pastor Jack Hibbs, Allie Beth Stuckey, Katie Faust, and many other wonderful friends. Seth, thank you. Welcome to Tennessee. Thank you for your unrelenting advocacy for the children.

And thank you, remember our Christianity has to be lived out in the culture or it's just a myth. If we'll do that, I believe we will see God bring victories and breakthroughs that will secure the future of our children and our grandchildren. I'll see you soon.

Thanks for joining me today. Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic too. If you haven't yet, be sure and subscribe to Allen Jackson Ministries' YouTube channel and follow the Culture & Christianity podcast. You can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith. We can change our culture. I'll see you next time.