Save America Ministries

Guest: This is Viewpoint with attorney and author Chuck Crismier. Viewpoint is a one-hour talk show confronting the issues of America's heart and home. And now with today's edition of Viewpoint, here is Chuck Crismier.

Chuck Crismier: Anchor your seatbelt, my friends. Put on a shoulder harness because we're going to take a speedy journey down memory lane. A kind of memory lane that perhaps you don't want to remember, but we need to remember. And we're not talking about 9/11. Today, we're talking about how moral decline whispers until it eventually wins. Moral decline whispers until it eventually wins.

That's the title of an article written by Joseph Stewart a few months ago, and quite frankly, it speaks to our situation today here in America and in the UK, all over the Western world. And today, we're going to take a look at it. It's painful. It's painful to look at the past and see what we've actually done to ourselves. It's painful to look at the past and see how we've justified that which is unjustifiable, while screaming and hollering against a jury that decided they were going to acquit until one decided, "No, I'm not going to allow that to happen even though I admit, I admit, that they have not proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt." That's what the eleventh juror, that's what the twelfth jury decided, a juror decided that he, in fact, concluded they have not proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, why? Because killing is murder.

Well, we're not going to spend our time talking about that here today on Viewpoint, because we did yesterday. And I urge you to listen to the entire program and try not to listen with too many predisposed ideas because that program, if you've not listened to it, will challenge your presuppositions. It really will, and if it doesn't, you got a problem. You got a moral problem from the very beginning, and you have a law and order problem. And you're talking to someone here, listen to someone who is a law and order guy. I do believe in law and order. I do believe that the only way that we can have and protect from chaos in our country and protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is to truly have law and order and a legal system that at least insofar as possible protects the people that the law is designed to protect, which is we, the people.

The problem is that we the people are not all that great. In fact, we're going to see how we the people are not great at all. Notwithstanding what the politicians tell us about how great we are and how wise we are. No, we're not. We're wicked. Actually, you don't want to admit it, but indeed it is true. Jeremiah was correct. The prophet Jeremiah said, "The heart of man is desperately wicked, who can know it?" Jesus put it differently. He said, "He knew what was in man and therefore he did not trust man." He knew what was in man. He knew what was in man's heart, and he could not trust them.

So, how can we trust a jury? How can we trust anybody? How can we trust law? How can we trust anybody? How can we trust a judge? Judges have bias. Human beings, all human beings have bias, including you. And as I listen to talk show hosts across the country, some very, very popular, I see that in spite of all of their pontifications, they don't even know what they're talking about. They don't know what law is, and they don't know how law works. They don't even know what murder is. Yet all murder is killing, but all killing is not murder. That may come as a surprise to you, but it's actually true according to the law. Listen to yesterday's program, and you'll begin to understand what I'm talking about. But today, we're going to take this matter further. We're not going to focus on the Clancy trial. We're going to focus on the trial of our own lives. We're going to focus on what's happening. Well, you can call it the culture wars, but it's not actually the culture wars. It's the spiritual wars that are deep in our minds and our hearts.

The reason why we actually need, desperately need to be overcomers, because the reality is we've been overcome. And we're being overcome every single day, every single week, every single month as we listen to the whispers of a declining culture and its import and power in our lives. So today, I hope you'll stay tuned. This is Viewpoint. Viewpoint does determine destiny. Your viewpoint is determining destiny. The the viewpoints of the various pontificators in our country are determining destiny. And interestingly, when two of the most revered, honored, believed, and trusted lawyers in the country said before the Clancy jury ever came out with a verdict, before the case ever went to the jury, they said, "This jury has an impossible case."

Now, why did they say that? Because it would be impossible for the jury to truly get inside the mind and heart of the woman, the mother who killed her children. Couldn't do it. There would be no way. All you could do would be to take a look at the evidence, the testimony, and so on, and try to make your best determination as to whether or not the case had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And even the holdout juror said he concluded that the case had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. So then why did he have a holdout? One reason, and here it is: "The woman killed her children, it's a horrible thing, she's guilty as sin, and therefore should be prosecuted. Convicted." That's the thinking, and that's the thinking of the majority of Americans today.

Even think people that seem to be wise. They just don't get it. They don't get it that when you fight the very laws of the nation that are designed to protect against chaos, protect the rights of people, you actually are becoming lawless in your own right. In other words, you are deciding that every, what you determine to do, regardless of what the law says, you're going to do what is right in your own eyes. And that's what that that final holdout juror said. "I'm going to do what is right in my own eyes because I determine that if the kids were killed, and she did it, therefore, she is guilty of premeditated murder." Doesn't work that way, friends, but that's what he concluded, and that's what an awful lot of people are concluding. And they're saying also that if you don't convict her of premeditated murder, then what you're actually doing is setting the stage for repetitions of these copycat murders all over the country. And of course, that's exactly how you want to be judged when something happens to you and you want the nation and the people to clamor for your conviction because of the effect that it might have on the rest of the country. Not the effect it would have on you. Not whether or not it was true that you did or did not do what you're accused of. That's no longer the issue. The issue is, "Well, what might the effect be on the rest of the country?" Friends, that is not law and order.

That's not law and order. That's an ulterior motive that's causing you to judge whether somebody should be convicted or not. That is not law and order. That's disorder. And we'll be back to talk about how moral decline whispers until it eventually wins, taking the opposite look at this very issue. We'll be right back.

Chuck Crismier: Welcome back to Viewpoint. I'm Chuck Crismier. Before we go further and escape the Clancy case, let me just say this. An awful lot of people are saying, "This is misplaced compassion." That it's misplaced empathy. No, it might be for some of those jurors, and you don't know, and I don't know, because you're not inside their minds. You can think you know, but you don't know. And that's the problem. Only God knows. Did you know that? Only God knows. And he knows exactly what's in your mind right now. And he knows whether you watched pornography last night. And he knows whether you lied to your boss today and told them that you were sick and you didn't show up to work.

Now, just think about the impact of one decision like that that it makes over time to justify more and more and more immorality and immoral decisions. That, my friends, is how moral decline occurs. Now, was the Clancy case a matter of moral decline? Maybe, and maybe not. And you don't know. You think it is, but you don't know. So what you're going to do is superimpose your own viewpoint over what the law says. You're going to superimpose your own viewpoint over what the jury heard. And some are saying, "Well, you know, there are a bunch of women on the jury." And therefore, they decided right up front that there should be an acquittal. Okay, why did they do that? The fact isn't, the problem is not that they decided early on that there should be an acquittal. The issue is, "Why did they decide that?" Is it because they were convinced that the case had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt? It could be. But that's not the way it's being presented by talk show hosts. The mere fact that some of them decided early on that there should be acquittal, to them, is a determination they didn't listen to the case and they didn't care. They just wanted this woman to get off. I don't know whether that's true or not. And you don't either. In reality, you don't know that. And if you say you do, you're a judge.

And I thought you believed in judge not that you'd be not judged. You see the problem that we have, friends? We really, really have a problem in our own minds and our own hearts. This was not a matter of compassion. This is a matter of law. Was there a murder or not? Murder is not, all murder is killing of a human being, but all killing is not murder according to the law. You need to listen to yesterday's program, and you'll understand why that is. And anybody who thinks otherwise does not know the truth, does not know law, does not know how these things work and is ignorant. And you're superimposing your ignorance upon a very serious situation. That's why these two famous judges, excuse me, attorneys, who had no ax to grind in the case, no dog in the fight, said, "This jury has an impossible task." And they were right. They were right.

Now, all that having been said, I want to dig further now into this article by Joseph Stewart, "How Moral Decline Whispers Until it Eventually Wins." Because, friends, this is really where the rubber meets the road. The rubber meets the road on a very long road. The road that leads us to the kinds of things that we're discussing on air today started a hundred years ago. Started actually in the mid-1800s with Darwinism. When Darwin decided that we were not created in man's God's image, and that God didn't have anything to do with it, so man basically just issued out of primordial slum, a slime, and therefore we just evolved and we were not created, we were not created in God's image. So now, friends, with that understanding, starting in 1859 with The Descent of Man, that book, history changed. All of the moral anchors of history changed. Even the law changed. The very practice of law changed. The very manner in which law was taught began to change. Law used to be taught on the basis of basic natural law and God's law. Then, starting in 1859, the drift of evolution shifted into the American legal training system. And here's what happened. Now, we no longer taught absolute law. We taught relative law, based upon what? Evolving case law.

So, when yours truly went to law school for four years at night, every single day, every day was consumed with reading and briefing cases. Why? To follow the evolution of law. Not to establish true law, but to establish and find the evolution or progression of law. Now, where did that lead? Well, in 1973, it led to Roe v. Wade. In 1947, it led so-called nine reasonable men on the Supreme Court to establish the separation of church and state that didn't exist in the law. Didn't exist in the Constitution. It was just holy made up. People don't realize that because it's been so ingrained now in the mind and heart of we the people that somehow that's constitutional. It's not. Everybody knows it's not. Roe v. Wade was not constitutional. And everybody knew it was not constitutional, but when you've got nine people on the on the bench, supposedly nine reasonable people that have immense bias based upon the drift of culture rather than law, they're going to determine what the law is and change it when they want to. So one judge came out and facetiously said, "What is the law? It's what I say it is." Do you see what's happened to us? It's not just about law. It's about our thinking. It's about our ways. And the ways of man are not in accordance with the ways of God. We've walked away from this for a very long period of time, at least starting with 1859 with Darwinism. You believe in Darwinism and you cannot believe in God's creation. Therefore, you have basically undermined mankind as being made specifically in the image of God, and being accountable to God.

And when humankind is not accountable to God, who are they accountable to? You? And if you're not accountable to God, then everybody's just accountable to themselves. So everybody does that which is right in their own eyes, right? That's what Israel did. Israel did that which was right in their own eyes in the days of the judges. It wasn't pretty. It was chaotic. And we're doing that today. And then we use law as a cover for our independent ideas that are not lawful from God's viewpoint. Now you can begin to understand why John Adams, a lawyer and our second president, said, "Our government is made for a moral and Christian people. It's wholly inadequate to the government of any other." He said, "There's no government like ours that's armed with power to be able to prevent the onslaught of wickedness and immorality and passions of human beings that are not governed from within by God." He was very clear about that.

John Winthrop, another lawyer, said, "We will either be governed by the Bible or by the bayonet." What did he mean? That either we will be governed internally by the authority of God's word for righteousness or we will have to have a level of government that is so severe that we will only be governed by the threat of the sword or some other kind of disciplinary action, maybe a guillotine, or maybe a hangman's noose. Friends, we just don't get it. We don't get it. We do not understand the trajectory of history and where we stand right now in this country. We're not a nation of laws anymore, but a nation of men who decide what things ought to be. Not according to what God says, not even according to what the laws of men say, but according to what they want or think they ought to be. And that's where our problem is. Much of our problem. Morality doesn't have any roots anymore. It doesn't have any authority anymore, because, as the Democrat Party says and most of those in the Democrat Party say, "Law? Well, that's evolving. It's just what it needs to be in our culture. There's no absolute law. There's no absolute truth. It's just evolving. It's whatever we want it to be."

So it's evolved from one man, one woman for life, from Genesis chapter 2, God creating humankind in his image, male and female created he them for procreation and so on, to "No, we can have sexual relationships with men upon men, women upon women. It's cool because that's what we've evolved to accept." It didn't just happen, friends. You know when that really began to happen in the United States of America? In the early 1980s. You know what it followed on the pathway of? The divorce revolution that began in the early 1970s. Once the divorce revolution began and people began to remarry when their spouses were still living contrary to the word, will, and ways of the Lord, as expressly stated in the Bible, then homosexuality began to become normative. To the point where the homosexuals by the end of the 1980s were arguing against evangelical Christians and so-called conservatives that were asking calling for law and order, saying, "What do you mean law and order? You don't even believe what you say you believe. If you believe the Bible, then you would not be divorcing, and you would not be approving remarriage because it's called adultery." And the Apostle Paul said, "Whoever is, don't don't be deceived, neither adulterers nor fornicators nor practicing homosexuals and so on, are going to inherit the kingdom of God." That's 1 Corinthians chapter 6. So they said, "You don't believe that. So why do you expect us to submit to what you won't even believe yourself?"

You want to see how this has worked? I'm telling you how it's worked, friends. I watched it happen from Southern California. The very heartthrob of all of it. Where I ran twice for the state legislature, trying to urge law and order, where I practiced law for 20 years, 80% of the clientele come through with a broader body of Christ. And I saw how the body of Christ had had morality completely eroded from their life space. The only thing that mattered is what I wanted. The only thing that mattered was what my flesh called me to have. The only thing that mattered was what would build churches. Bring more people into the churches whether or not they were walking in righteousness and holiness and walking with the Lord as Savior and Lord. Didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was a secondary agenda, building churches. So we were willing to accommodate, willing to accommodate things that were totally contrary to the word, will, and ways of the Lord in the in the name of the Lord to accomplish secondary agendas like building big churches. That's how it happened. And then even that was not significant enough. So then we had by the 1990s to go into the seeker-sensitive movement that became even more liberalizing concerning God's moral law.

Thus, transgenderism began to make its way in. These things are not a mystery, my friends. Please understand. I want to go back to this article by Joseph Stewart. He said, "Decline rarely announces itself. It whispers until it eventually wins. This is what happened in the House of Lords in Great Britain." Another whisper. He said, "In case you missed it, in Great Britain, the House of Lords voted to advance proposals that would remove criminal penalties for women undergoing abortions after 24 weeks." Friends, if killing is murder, these women were all murdering their kids. The 65 million babies that have lost their lives in America since 1973 at the minds, the hearts, the determination, the will of their parents, their grandparents, their pastors, were they all complicit in the murder if killing is murder?

There is so much more about Chuck Crismier and Save America Ministries on our website, SaveUS.org. For example, under the Marriage section, God has marriage on his mind. Chuck has some great resources to strengthen your marriage. First off, a fact sheet on the state of the marital union, a fact sheet on the state of Ministry, Marriage and Morals. SaveUS.org. Marriage, divorce, and remarriage. What does the Bible really teach about this? Find out all of this at SaveUS.org. Also, a letter to pastors, the Hosea project, SaveUS.org. And many more resources to strengthen your marriage. It's all on Chuck's website, SaveUS.org. Again, you can listen to Chuck's Viewpoint broadcast, live and archived. Save America Ministry's website at SaveUS.org.

When Joe Biden three years ago said, "We believe in truth, not facts," what he was essentially saying is, "We don't believe in truth. We're going to define what truth is according to our own ideas. We're going to define what morality is according to our own ideas, not God's ideas." So great is this problem, friends, that in 1997, William Jefferson Booth, I.e. Bill Clinton, excuse me, William Jefferson Clinton, I.e. Bill Clinton, said this. He went to Southern California to speak at a known, exclusively homosexual agenda. It was the first time an American president had ever done such a thing. Even though he carried about his big fat Bible for photo ops, this is what he did. He went there and in his speech, he made this statement, and I quote verbatim: "We are in practical ways changing the immutable ideals that have guided us from the beginning." That was in 1997, friends. That was four years after we formed Save America Ministries, and the Lord spoke to my heart, "Son, you you've got to stop pleading the cause of men. It's time to plead my cause in the land as a voice to the church declaring vision for the nation." We were completely out of control at that point.

We were intentionally changing the immutable or unchangeable rules, laws, morality of God. For what reason? To please the people, for politics. And so Bill Clinton said this, "We are in practical ways changing the unchangeable ideals that have guided us from the beginning." Now, he first of all he said they're unchangeable. How could he, as the President of the United States, claiming carrying his big Bible, as his wife did, claim that we're going to change the unchangeable? Which what he was saying is, "These are the laws of God. These are unchangeable, they're immutable." But he said, "We're going to do it anyway." It is the most arrogant statement ever made by an American president, period. "We are in practical ways," in other words, on the ground, in reality, not just talking about it, we're doing it. We're changing the immutable or unchangeable ideals that have guided this country from the beginning. Need we say more?

That, my friends, is when homosexuality began to take root across this country. It didn't start there. It began to take root there with authority in the country. It was given authentication by the President of the United States. And then the subsequent president, Barack Hussein Obama, went around the world to promote homosexuality and tried to command Africa and African countries to embrace homosexuality so that they could receive American donations or largesse. And, in addition to that, he declared as one of his primary objectives through his through his presidency to carry the message of abortion around the world, which he did. Now, who did those things? Two major American Democrat presidents. And you want to find out how morality is changing in a country? It's not primarily about politics. It's about people who are in rebellion against God. For whatever reason, they're rebelling against God.

Now, I want to go back to this article by Joseph Stewart. He says, "In case you missed it, in Great Britain, the House of Lords voted to advance proposals that would remove criminal penalties for women undergoing abortions after 24 weeks." It does not negate the Victorian era law that establishes that late-term abortion is not legal. But it does eliminate the possibility of investigation or prosecution against any woman choosing to have a late-term abortion. In other words, they authenticated murder. If there's not going to be any prosecution or investigation, what they're basically saying is, "We're going to allow murder to continue without any legal process." He goes on to say, "This development does not seem surprising. There's a reason for the lack of shock. Without tracing every step of how abortion language became normalized, the fact is that legislation in the UK criminalized abortion at any stage of pregnancy in 1861. And 106 years later, it was legalized in 1973 in the United States." It took 106 years for the criminalization of abortion in our mother country to become legalized in America, the daughter of the mother country.

He said the same now could be said for the U.S. Abortion was outlawed in every state by 1910 and was legalized only 63 years later in 1973. What happened? How could something be deemed to be outlawed absolutely and now become legalized? He says, "The moral fade took time. While the U.S. took an overdue step back from nationwide legalized abortion through the Dobbs v. Jackson case in 2022, ruling that abortion is not federally protected, the fact is that the ruling significantly expanded abortion access in some states." Like Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey. And now in Virginia, that have allowed abortion with few or no gestational limits under law even up to the time of birth. And you wonder how these things happen? Friends, that's legalized murder. Because you said, remember, "Killing is murder." Remember what you said in the Clancy case? "Killing is murder." So why does it not apply here then? We're playing games, friends, just totally playing games with words. But God doesn't play games. "Before you begin to think that the premise of post-pregnancy abortion is ludicrous, remember that the idea of abortion at any point was completely criminalized." Even fewer years ago, the legal viability of euthanasia was extremely rare, and now both these issues are common and allowed. Not only in this country, but around the world in the Western world, the so-called Christian West.

"What was once seemed unthinkable, can over time become discussable and eventually defensible." Even in the name of Christ, "Don't you love people?" That's how it's done. "Yesterday's impossibilities can become tomorrow's policy debates. How long before the conversation of post-pregnancy abortion is discussed because of unscreened deformities or non-diagnosed diseases?" That's what Hitler did, friends. And you look down on Hitler. We're right there ourselves. As insane as the question may be, over time the culture of death will normalize it and push it to be law. That is the killing of people. Whether kids or adults. Because of some deformity? We'll justify any reason. Whatever reason we can come up with that sounds good for the moment, that makes me feel good. And the whisper of moral decay will continue. Sometimes it's loud, like so-called reproductive health, marches, and the like, but many times the shift is found on the inside pages of the national news that nobody wants to talk about. The whisper is a whisper until it's not. By the time you hear it, it may progress to a scream. And in many of those cases, by the time it's heard, it's already too late. That's where we are.

The Clancy case, friends, is just an opportunity for us to open up something that's much deeper than just saying, "All killing is murder." From the legal standpoint, all killing is not murder. But murder has a very specific definition. And it involves a guilty mind. It it requires what is called a mens rea. In other words, the specific ability, not only the intent to kill, but the ability to form that intent rationally under all the circumstances that existed at the time that the killing took place. Not at some earlier time, not at some later time, at that time. That's why the Clancy case was almost impossible to truly be judged and condemned because there was no way any honest person could go in and say that a reasonable doubt didn't exist. Even the one holdout said that. "There was a reasonable doubt," he said. "But because there was such a killing, we can't let her get by with it." That's not the law. That may be your law, but it's not the law. Now, I don't know what should have been done there. I do believe if somebody intentionally kills another with malice aforethought and had the ability to form the requisite intent, they should suffer the ultimate penalty. They should. That's what I believe.

If the killing occurred negligently, that's a different story. If the killing occurred recklessly, that's a little bit different story. It may not be murder, maybe it's going to be manslaughter, maybe it's going to be second degree manslaughter. There are many different aspects, but not all killing is murder. But what we are doing is murdering morality. We are murdering morality in this country. No question about it. And we're doing it oftentimes in the name of Christ, from our pulpits, and behind the scenes in pastors' offices, and in our homes, when we justify abortion for whatever reason we choose to justify it. Do you not understand this, my friend? Now, let's suppose that you are guilty as sin in this regard. Let's suppose that you have a child that was involved in abortion or a grandchild or somebody and you supported them in that. Now, what are you going to do about it? Before God, what are you going to do about it? He's going to be the judge. What if you yourself had an abortion for whatever reason? You justified it. Somebody told you it was okay. When you knew it wasn't anyway, you knew it wasn't okay, but you did it anyway because somebody helped supported you in that. We like to support each other in our sins, don't we? We think it's compassion. That's not compassion, friends. Compassion will keep people from sinning, not support them in their sin. True compassion will pull somebody out of the fire, not keep them in the fire while telling them sweet nothings. Now, we have a lot to overcome.

This is just laying a little bit of an understanding about why we're in a position that we need the message about overcoming. And I urge you to get a copy of my book, The Power to Overcome. That came out long before the Clancy case, long before this trial. It's not even about that. It's about so many other things. What is the world? What is the flesh? What is the devil? What what are these things that are operative in our lives that are grabbing us, taking a hold and whispering a moral decline in every aspect of our lives? And we don't even get it. We don't recognize it for what it is. We're on a moral and spiritual slide into oblivion, and we think we're on the way to the pearly gates. Come on. God is not going to be fooled. "What men sow, they're going to reap," the scripture says. We want to walk in humility. We want to walk in repentance, a state of repentance. We want to come before God in in humility and realize, "Hey, Lord, I I I realize, man, have I been morally and spiritually out to lunch. I've missed it a country mile. Please forgive me. I want to walk in righteousness and in truth." And that's what he wants from us. A broken heart, a broken and a contrite heart. God will not despise. Indeed, will I. Get a copy of the book, The Power to Overcome. $25 will put it in your hands. It's such an encouraging book, such a book that just helps to like coaches into that which God is looking for us in these ultimate times before the coming of Christ. $25, right on our website, SaveUS.org. Call us 1-800-Save-USA. Write to us at Save America Ministries and $6 for closer to handling. Moral decline whispers and it ultimately wins.