Defending Faith, Family and Freedom Podcast

Gary Bauer: Hi, this is Gary Bauer, senior vice president for public policy and culture at the James Dobson Family Institute. Welcome to our podcast, Defending Faith, Family and Freedom. I am glad you are with us. Tell your friends about us.

There is a lot going on here in Washington, D.C., but there is a lot going on around the country that is related to what goes on in Washington, D.C. What I am referring to is the congressional elections this year. The entire House of Representatives gets elected, a little over a third of the Senate, and a whole bunch of governors and state legislatures. It is a very important election. People tend to focus on presidential elections, but these off-year elections end up determining what presidents do and don’t do and whether much legislation gets passed.

Dr. Dobson always wanted Christians to be involved in the public square, to care about our government, and to vote religiously in their voting, meaning that they should show up every election day just the way you hopefully show up for church.

I get paid to watch all the stuff related to government, and you probably have picked this up because it has been making a lot of news. It is ironic because this is the 250th birthday of the founding of the United States. In this year of celebration of this great country which was built on ordered liberty under God, and that God was and is the God of the Bible, during this year, it ends up that in a lot of the primary elections that have been held around the country, socialists and even Marxist candidates have been winning some of the primaries.

They are running on a platform that is outside of the mainstream. They have a crazy platform. Some of them want to abolish the United States Senate. The thought struck me: if one of them is running for the Senate, do you actually elect a senator who wants to abolish the Senate? That doesn't seem to make much sense. They want to abolish the Supreme Court, or they want to put five, six, or seven new justices on the Supreme Court because they don't like the way the Supreme Court has been making decisions. That's not the way the system works.

They want to defund our military. What do you think would happen if we did that? Then they want to defund the police. That idea has been kicking around for a while. That started to be one of the big goals on the political left back in 2020. Some cities even deeply cut the police and crime went up. Who knew that if you took police off the street and didn't hire as many of them, you'd end up with more criminals?

They want to open our borders again because that's what we all think we need: another 15 million people to walk into the country and sign up for all the various welfare programs. Who pays for that? That is you. You pay for that. You have to take care of your own family, work hard to do that, and then you have to come up with money for higher taxes to pay for all the different things that people walk into the country and expect to get.

As a Christian, the most important thing for us to realize is that when a candidate is a Marxist or socialist right adjacent to Marxism, they’re godless. I’m not exaggerating about that. Karl Marx didn't believe there was a God, and his followers over the years have shared that belief. Marx said that God or religion was the opiate of the people. That meant that religion and God make people dumb, like they’re on a drug or they’re in a trance; they don't really understand what's happening to them.

The only time communism likes churches is when they take over the churches. They take the real clergy out of the church and they put in the church communists who are actually working for the government. When you show up as a Christian in a church in the old Soviet Union or today in Communist China, the person preaching to you is often a communist acting like he’s a Christian. I can’t even imagine that. We have talked before about how there are some pretty far-left wing people out there today trying to take the Bible and say it supports abortion or same-sex marriage.

Marxists don’t support religion or God, and they certainly don't believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. If you don't believe in God, then you don't think God had anything to do with America, the founding of America. That God was everything; He had everything to do with the founding of America. The whole country was built on this idea that our liberty doesn't come from government or from politicians like these Marxists and socialists, but that our liberty and everything that we hold dear are gifts from God. Our rights are gifts from God.

These candidates that are winning these primaries are the vanguard of the radical left that has been pulling America out of the rich soil of Judeo-Christian civilization. We have seen over the years that Dr. Dobson used to get pretty emotional about what was going on on America's university campuses. There are more socialists, self-identified socialists and Marxists, on the faculties of our university campuses than there are self-identified Christians and conservatives on the faculties of our campuses. That is why you see so much anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism on our college campuses.

I was thinking about this the other day because I always try to come up with a way to help you understand this. I worked for Ronald Reagan, and he used to come up with these word pictures or tell a story. That's what Christ used to do with parables. If you go outside to your garden and pull the roses out of your garden, and then you cut off the roots of them and you plop them in a vase and put them on your dining room table, they will look beautiful for a while.

In short order, they're dead. They begin to smell, and mold grows on them. They have to be thrown away. It was predictable they would die once they were pulled out of the garden and the roots cut off. They were separated from the rich soil that nourished them and gave them their beauty. That is what the Bible and Christianity are to America. They are the roots of our nation, the roots of the philosophy that our founding fathers believed in. That great gift is being destroyed right in front of our eyes.

At a time like this, I’m always reassured first of all that there's a God in heaven. He was there when the nation was founded and He's still there looking over us. But we have to do our part, too. The other thing that always reassures me is that there are Christians in Washington, D.C., in high places: at the White House, people that I work with every day, and people on Capitol Hill. One of the most prominent ones is Speaker Mike Johnson, who is Speaker of the House of Representatives.

I know Mike Johnson pretty well. I knew him when he was a kid in his early twenties and he volunteered on my campaign when I ran for the Republican presidential nomination in the year 2000. He rode around Louisiana on the campaign bus. I had almost forgotten about that until he was made Speaker of the House a few years back and he reminded me.

More importantly, he is a devout evangelical Christian. He has frequently said that his biblical worldview is the first guide for him in both his personal life and in the political decisions he makes. The civil liberties crowd and the separation of church and state crowd start screaming that he can’t do that. He can do that. There is nothing in our Constitution that says a Christian cannot take his biblical beliefs and his faith into office with him.

If our founding documents said you can’t do that, we wouldn't have had any founding fathers. That's exactly what they did, was take their faith into their deliberations in Constitution Hall. Speaker Mike Johnson is guided by the Bible. In fact, when he first won the speakership, he was asked repeatedly by reporters who didn't know much about him what he believes and where he gets his ideas. He said, "If you want to know what I believe, after the press conference is over, go home or go to the library and just get the Bible off the shelf and read it. That's who I am. That's what guides me."

I loved it when he gave that answer. He's not ashamed about giving that answer. All of us as Christians should be that bold in our faith and in saying what guides us. A few days ago, Speaker Johnson was on Fox News interviewed by Kayleigh McEnany, and they talked about this very disturbing development of socialists and communists winning elections and why young people are voting for them. Here is a brief clip where Speaker Johnson answers that question.

Mike Johnson: Sadly, young people have not been taught the truth about socialism and communism. It's a dangerous road, and this is one of our efforts to make sure people know that.

Gary Bauer: Young people are voting for these candidates, as Speaker Johnson said, because they haven't been taught about what communism, Marxism, and socialism is. That's just obvious. I've looked at textbooks. I was undersecretary of education in the Reagan years, so I got used to looking at textbooks and seeing what's in them. I complained all the way back then in the '80s that we were not doing an adequate job teaching about Marxism and socialism.

It didn't get any better after Ronald Reagan left office. For decades now, we have not taught young people about Marxism, communism, socialism, and the threat those things represent to our liberty. In fact, to make it even worse, we've got Marxists and socialists and communists on university faculties teaching the kids. Speaker Johnson strongly believes that even though this is not a presidential election year, this may be one of the most consequential elections in our history. He is asked in this interview if this is really Marxism, and listen to his answer here because this is the core of the entire interview.

Mike Johnson: Well, that's right. And of course, it's Marxism. Karl Marx believed and he taught and said, socialism is a step towards communism. It's a process. They thought communism would be the utopia, the perfect society, but it begins with the wrong premise. Communism is anti-American. It's the opposite of our ideals. We're one nation under God. Communism begins with the premise that there is no God; the state is the God effectively.

On the website, what we do is we show a summary of the history of this, going back beginning 1918 to Soviet Russia and going through history of the 20th century to Communist China, ending in Venezuela, the Eastern Bloc in Europe. It never works, and it ends in poverty, destruction, political violence, and human suffering. That is the story of communism. When you go out on the campaign trail and you promise free stuff to people, young people, that's a siren song to them. No one is telling them they have to give up their freedom in exchange.

So this election really does draw a contrast in a sharp way for the American people. If somebody had told us 10 years ago, Kayleigh, that on the 250th anniversary of the greatest nation in the history of the world, we would be debating whether or not we would maintain the constitutional republic or go down this dark, dangerous, deadly road to communism, you and I would have argued with them and said that's not possible. But that's where we are right now. These insurgent left candidates are winning the Democrat primaries all across the country. The barbarians are inside the gate. It's very, very serious stuff.

Gary Bauer: We are one nation under God. It is Marxism, as Speaker Johnson just said, that we're being threatened by right now. But it's not Marxism in Communist China, although that's a threat too. The barbarians are inside the gates. He pointed out just then that these ideologies never work. They just simply never work. They end up taking away liberty and freedom eventually, but by then, it's too late.

This is a very dangerous time and what's happening out there in these primaries is quite frankly very scary. He points out we're not talking about a handful of people here. Speaker Johnson said there's probably been at least 40 outright Marxists that have already won their elections because they've won their primaries in heavily Democrat areas, and that means they're going to get elected in November. That alone is an historic event and something pretty scary. Then let's just look at another 10 seconds here that will help make the case.

Mike Johnson: The answer is not turning everything over to the government because that never works. That drives prices up. It leads to famine. It leads to human suffering and poverty for everyone. The answer is limited government and individual freedom and the rule of law.

Gary Bauer: Speaker Johnson hit it exactly right. The alternative to socialism, the free markets, opportunity, the ability to think your own thoughts, to be a free individual. Don't turn everything over to the government. If we vote to turn everything over to the government to give us everything free that we want, you'll find out that not only do you not get it free, it ends up disappearing. You don't get it at all, and then in addition, you lose your liberty.

That's our message today. There's still a few more months of primary voting and then there's a huge election in November. I am just begging you, wake up, Christians. Wake up, church. Everything we believe in is up for grabs, and a good bit of it could be settled in ways that it's hard to imagine until we experience it if we don't show up to vote this November. God bless you. Thanks for being here. Be back for our next podcast.