Watchman on the Wall

Host (Male): Welcome to Watchman on the Wall, a daily outreach of Southwest Radio Ministries and swrc.com. God is still on the throne, and prayer changes things. This week, we're learning about the spiritual war against Israel and the latest headlines from the end times. Today we'll kick off a brand new month together and announce this month's mission outreach campaign.

Have you been searching for solid biblical answers in a world filled with confusion and uncertainty? Then make plans now to join Southwest Radio Ministries for Prophecy in the News Live, September 18th and 19th at Cornerstone Church in Northfield, Minnesota, just south of the Twin Cities. Best of all, admission is free. For two powerful days, you'll hear trusted Bible teachers and researchers explore today's headlines through the lens of Scripture.

Discover what God's Word says about end-times prophecy, Israel's role in God's plan, defending the Christian faith, and the biblical truths that bring clarity to today's rapidly changing world. You'll also have the opportunity to meet our speakers, fellowship with believers from across the country, browse ministry resources, and be encouraged in your walk with Christ. This is more than just another conference. It's an opportunity to strengthen your faith, deepen your understanding of God's prophetic word, and leave equipped to stand firm in these challenging days.

Registration is free, but we encourage you to reserve your seat today. Visit swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144. We look forward to seeing you September 18th and 19th in Northfield, Minnesota. Our guest today says the evidence is clear. When nations embrace biblical principles, they flourish. And when they abandon them, they begin to unravel.

Dr. David Haskell is a sociologist, professor in Canada, pastor, and author of *Christ or Collapse*. His research challenges many of the assumptions driving today's culture and offers a compelling case for the enduring value of Christianity. Dr. David Haskell joins us now with our host, Dr. Larry Spargimino.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: Hi, I'm on the phone with Dr. David M. Haskell. He is a Canadian and certainly knows a lot about Canada and the US. He is the author of a new book, a tremendous book. It's entitled *Christ or Collapse: The Case Against Godless Government*. The author looks deeply into the post-1960s breakdown of society and presents a clear path toward renewal. Thank you, David, for being on the show. You and I have spoken before and emailed each other. I know this can be an exciting show.

Dr. David Haskell: I'm really looking forward to it, Pastor Larry.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: Tell us about your personal journey. I understand you were once a self-satisfied liberal Christian. Tell us about the revolution in your thinking. How did that happen?

Dr. David Haskell: As you pointed out, I have had a conversion experience. I would have called myself a Christian but of the liberal variety up to about 10 years ago. In fact, if you read my published work, I actually had a bit of condemnation for those who were conservative believers, for the people who were taking the Bible literally.

I came to my own conversion experience, not like the road to Damascus and the Apostle Paul, but very gradually through the sociological evidence. What I began to see is that even though I rejected the traditional biblical norms for sexual ethics and the traditional biblical norms for gender roles, I looked and I saw those Christians who followed the Bible as it was intended for the last 2,000 years, they had the greatest levels of flourishing in their families.

They had the greatest levels of partnership, satisfaction, and stability in their marriages, and even during times of crisis, they had the greatest life satisfaction. I thought, what is going on here? These things that I thought wouldn't matter really did. Eventually, I just had to follow the evidence. It was really very convincing to me that the closer that someone adhered to the traditional doctrines of Christianity, the better their life was, the better their family was, and even growing outside that to the largest society, the better their nation was.

And I'll be honest with you, Larry, the research backs that up. Eventually, I said if I want to be rational, I have to follow where the evidence leads. Where the evidence leads is that these ideas, these traditional norms and values of Christianity inspired by beliefs that come from Christ, nothing equals them. They are unmatched. I found myself saying, okay, I am going to stop pretending that I'm God, and instead, I'm going to let God be God. That was a real revelation for me.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: Amen. Beautifully said. I know in your book, you have a lot of empirical evidence, studies showing that people who follow the Word of God and traditional values, they flourish. They do well. They have happy marriages. You give a lot of proof of that. That's one of the things that caught my eye when I first looked through your book and just kind of read a summary of it. You can talk a lot, but when you have all the evidence, that's very, very powerful.

In chapter one, you identify the problem: societal decline in America and Canada. There has been a move from foundational principles of morality. You say that traditional conservatism is the solution. Tell us a little bit about traditional conservatism and how it relates to Christianity.

Dr. David Haskell: Right. I wanted to write a book, Larry, that was evidence-based, even though I myself, I am a traditional Christian and I take the Bible as the Word of God and as authoritative. I do that now. But I wanted it to be a book that relied on the empirical evidence. I promoted this notion, I've called it traditional conservatism. I'm saying, listen, I want you to agree that the norms and values of Christianity should influence policies and laws of the land. I want you to do that based on the empirical evidence.

Traditional conservatism, as I've defined it, is the norms and values of Christianity influencing the laws and policies of a nation. This is not anything new, by the way. This was what every Western country did up until the 1960s. Then we abandoned it. Our people who the Founding Fathers of America and the original planters of Canada, they said, okay, Christian norms and values, they have led us this far. Let's incorporate them into our laws. They did. What happened? They had the greatest successful nations in the history of the world.

So I'm just calling us back to that. Even though I'm doing this as a political project, this political project wouldn't survive unless we have strong churches and committed Christians. But I'm appealing to the empirical evidence as I move through the book.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: You definitely rebut the claim that the US and Canada were intended to operate as nations in which Christian teachings were excluded from law and restricted to private life. Hurray for that. That's an important point.

Dr. David Haskell: Thank you. Yes, I'm glad that you noticed that. In chapter two of *Christ or Collapse*, I go through the legal documents, I go through the founding political arguments, and you can see that in the United States, it was never intended to be a country that would be based on secular values. Even among people often Thomas Jefferson is pulled out as someone who was a deist, and he was, I'm not trying to change the history.

But even he recognized that Christian moral values needed to be the bedrock of the laws of the United States. He showed this by providing money to Christian chaplains so that they could go and minister. He provided declarations of Christian holidays. He knew that without the Christian norms and values, society just couldn't hold together. He was the exception in that he was kind of reluctant. Other people like John Jay or Alexander Hamilton, they were very explicit.

They said absolutely, this is a Christian nation, and Christian world values need to inform our governance. Because it did, the United States had fantastic success and greater freedom. This is the other thing that people often miss, Larry. Christianity has this formula that is able to map the greatest amount of personal freedom to the greatest amount of common good. No other ideological system or religious system can do it. Christianity is unique.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: Indeed it is. Now about chapter two, maybe you could give us some examples of how traditional conservatism built the United States and Canada. I agree with you there, but people like to say, give me an example of it. So maybe you could throw out an example or two because I think that would be very important.

Dr. David Haskell: Absolutely. What I'll do is a historical example. Alexis de Tocqueville, he's a French philosopher who's coming to the United States in the mid-1800s. He notices something very peculiar, something he didn't see in his own country of France. He sees that the religious attitude of people actually inspires their civic behavior. For example, people, because they were really enmeshed with their Christian beliefs, they knew that every job was a vocation that could honor God.

So the craftsmanship and the honesty of even typical blue-collar workers astounded him. He thought that people just took for granted that you would volunteer. They just took for granted that you would provide to charity. This was all based on their Christian doctrine. This Christian doctrine, de Tocqueville said, actually allowed for a society that didn't need a lot of government regulation because the people were guided by an internal moral code that allowed them to be honest and to be civically minded.

He'd never seen anything like it. There's an example of someone coming in and observing the United States and saying, this is incredible. The Christian faith has made them into a nation of honest, hard-working people.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: This is all very interesting. You cite, this is in chapter three, a psychological principle that if you stigmatize something, even if it is objectively good, the society will want less of it. I think that is exactly what the mainstream media is doing along with the cultural elites today. Tell us about the parable of the butter study.

Dr. David Haskell: The parable of the butter study. That's something I put into chapter three because I open the chapter by saying I am going to show you study after study proving that Christianity is unmatched for providing individual and societal flourishing. That raises the question, well, why isn't it more popular? I point out that if you stigmatize something, you'll get less of it. I use the example of butter.

What we saw is there were some experiments done in the early 1900s in Russia. The experiments found that when you fed rabbits butter, their arteries clogged up like 4:00 on a freeway. It would kill them. They would die of heart disease. That study then was compounded by other studies and it moved on and other people replicated similar studies. They said, okay, we've got to stay away from butter. Butter is going to kill you. It's going to give you heart disease. Everybody start eating margarine.

You fast forward to the 1980s into the 1990s, and they find out that everything that we've learned about butter was wrong. It had been stigmatized illogically. You see, rabbits aren't supposed to eat butter. These first experiments were completely flawed. They couldn't process it. So the idea that it was going to cause cardiovascular trouble, it wasn't founded. In fact, Rutgers University, when it did a meta-analysis, which is an examination of hundreds of studies, they said, turns out that butter and cream actually can have a preventive effect on heart disease.

But you know what is really terrible for you? Margarine. The point I'm making in that particular parable of the butter study is we've been told that Christianity does harm to society or does harm to nations. Just like butter, it's been a lie. We've been told to eat margarine, which is the secular progressive ideology that actually does harm.

I show in my book in chapters four and five, anytime you embrace secular progressivism, it leads to societal decline. So there's the parable of the butter study actually applied to society.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: Amen. Friends, you can have your own copy of *Christ or Collapse* by calling our toll-free number, 1-800-652-1144. This book is a penetrating analysis of woke and progressive ideologies. It is a well-written, thoroughly documented work, good reading that will be useful for anyone who wants to intelligently confront a movement that is drawing converts in alarming numbers. Our toll-free number, 1-800-652-1144.

As we go to chapter four, let's talk about the origins of progressivism, its opposition to Western principles, and the rise of Marxism. How did all that take place?

Dr. David Haskell: I won't be able to do it justice here, so I do commend people to pick up the book themselves. But what we see is that like so many things, the beginnings of some of the progressive ideas actually start with almost Christian notions. I quote G.K. Chesterton, who says that many of our progressive ideas are just Christian virtues gone mad. Indeed, that's what we see with progressivism. It begins with socialism.

There was a real need back in the late 1700s, early 1800s, through the 1800s. There was abuse of workers. Workers who were being abused were women and children. So there begins this movement called socialism that says we've got to take care of the rights of workers. It was actually Christian Scripture that inspired some of the initial socialists. But then you fast forward to the late 1800s, and Christianity no longer is part of the socialism movement.

In fact, it becomes a very atheistic movement. It's at that point that we begin to see people like Karl Marx come in and actually become hostile to Christianity. What Marx wanted to do, he converts socialism into communism. What he says is I want people to be jealous of one another. I want people to covet that which is created by others.

He begins to form an ideology where he takes socialism and he says I'm going to add a revolutionary quality to it. I want to see violence attached to it. So we move from socialism into communism. It has its heyday. We see it in the Soviet Union and it begins to build and we know the results there. It results in mass murder because that's where a godless ideology will lead. But then it begins to percolate in North America again.

People are wise to the ideas of communism and Marxism. So they've got to change the name. They say, we're going to change the name, we're going to soften it down, we're going to call it progressivism. We're going to call it democratic socialism. Or here's another word that your listeners will be familiar with: we're going to call it social justice. Who doesn't want social justice? Justice itself is such a lovely word. But it is a corruption of real justice.

To just take your listeners, I'll say it begins at socialism, it moves into Marxism and communism. That becomes a disaster to sell. You can't sell it anymore because people see how terrible it is, so they change it into social justice. But social justice is not God's justice. God's justice says we must be impartial in the law. Social justice says we must show partiality because of skin color, because of sexual orientation, because of country of origin. That is antithetical to God's justice.

What I've tried to do is really quickly condense where we see socialism moving into Marxism and communism and now into social justice. Now, we've even changed the name social justice into diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the bottom line, Larry, is that it is antithetical to God's justice. It's a corruption of God's justice.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: That's right. Absolutely. You speak about contemporary progressivism harming society. The governor of New York state, which is my home state, by the way, wants to remove the words mother and father from all state documents. The mother is now called the gestating parent. The governor also has some other bizarre terms. Kids cry out, mama, mama, I'm afraid. So what does the government now want? Gestating parent, gestating parent, please help me. What planet is this governor from? I mean, can you imagine?

Dr. David Haskell: Well, we know ideologically where he's from. Ideologically, we know he is rooted in communism, and this is Marxism 101. If you read the *Communist Manifesto*, Marx himself says that the goal of his project is to destroy the family. One of the key ways you destroy the family is to destroy the definitions of the family. I've often heard it said that really the whole project of progressivism, which is communism, which is Marxism, is to redefine the language.

If you can make people forget definitions, you can make them forget to defend what is really valuable. To be able to defend something, you need to be able to define something. If you can remove the definition, you can remove the ability to defend it.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: That's really well put. Time is moving, but I want to jump to chapter seven, "Sameness is our Strength: The Historical Grounding for Nationalism." I like the Christian political principle of ordered loves. You speak about that. There's the priority of one's family, community, and nation over the interests of foreigners. We should not care for the world and neglect our family. Pope Leo XIV disagreed with Vice President Vance on this point. But Pope Leo, as well as Pope Francis, is at odds with traditional Catholicism on many points. These men are Marxists with a sprinkling of Christianity.

Dr. David Haskell: That's so true. If you look at the history of the Popes, for example, the Popes were actually at the forefront of trying to defend Christian nations. Now, I don't agree with the Catholic position that a Pope should be a military leader. I really think we should separate that, and within Protestantism, we've always had these separations. But at the same time, I appreciate that the traditional Catholic position has been you do need to defend a Christian nation. You do need to recognize that there is something unique and that you just can't open your borders. You simply can't.

The leading Catholic thinkers, people like Thomas Aquinas, they actually write this out in very clear ways in the *Summa Theologica*. They talk about ordered loves, as you've mentioned. They say first, you do have to care for your family. Then you do have to care for your community. Even in terms of immigration, Thomas Aquinas himself says there are three types of immigrants. There's the sojourner who comes in and goes, and don't abuse them, but don't offer them anything beyond hospitality and fairness.

The second one is those who will stay. But if they stay, in keeping with the Old Testament idea of the book of Ruth, they must say your gods will become my gods, your people will become my people, which is to say they are going to assimilate. Then Thomas Aquinas actually talks about a third group. He says there are some immigrants who are so antithetical to Christianity they should never be welcomed.

So if we look at our traditions, our traditional writers of Christian doctrine or interpreters of Christian doctrine, we can find some really good lessons there. Certainly, Pope Leo is rejecting his traditional Catholic doctrine. He needs to read Thomas Aquinas, *Summa Theologica*. He'd be back on the right track. He and Pope Francis are weirdos. I know some Catholics who don't say that publicly, but they whisper it in my ear.

Dr. Larry Spargimino: Well, thank you, David Haskell, for this interview. Dr. Haskell will be back with us for a second interview and discussion. Please join us for our next Watchman on the Wall broadcast of Southwest Radio Church.

Host (Male): Friends, it seems like every day our culture drifts a little farther from the values that once made Western civilization strong. But what if the evidence actually proves that biblical principles don't hold a nation back, they help it flourish? In his powerful new book, *Christ or Collapse: The Case Against Godless Government*, Dr. David Haskell examines decades of historical and social science research to reveal the undeniable connection between Christian morality and healthy families, thriving communities, and strong nations.

He also tackles today's biggest cultural claims, challenging them with facts instead of feelings and data instead of slogans. If you want a biblical and evidence-based explanation for the cultural turmoil we're witnessing today, *Christ or Collapse* is a resource you'll return to again and again. Get your copy of *Christ or Collapse* today from Southwest Radio Ministries. Visit swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144. August is here, and we have a brand new mission outreach project. With the exciting details, here's Josh Davis.

Josh Davis: Friends, I invite you to join me on a mission trip coming up later this month. No, you don't need a plane ticket. We're not taking a boat, we're not even taking a bus. In fact, you can impact the lives of people halfway around the world without even walking out your front door. We're privileged to partner with our friends at TWR again this month of August to raise money to purchase radios to send to Africa. These are wind-up radios, and for your gift of $50, you can purchase one of these wind-up radios.

They don't need electricity, they don't need batteries. You can wind them up and they will play for a long, long time. That $50 will cover purchasing the unit, it'll cover importing it into the African nation, it'll cover the distribution of that radio right into the hands of those who need it the most. The TWR gospel partners in Africa will ensure that radio gets to someone who needs it. We're excited to partner with them.

We have set aside two days of broadcasting, August 20th and 21st, to partner with our friends at TWR. As we are approaching that time, would you prayerfully consider how you can be involved with this special campaign? Friends, the bottom line is this: Africa needs Jesus, and Africa needs you. TWR has some of the most powerful radio transmitters in Africa. But if the signals are going out and there's no radio to receive that signal so that someone can hear that good news of Jesus Christ from His Word, then what good is the signal in going out?

That's where you come in, that's where I come in. Can we prayerfully consider how we can partner with our friends to purchase radios for Africa? How many could you purchase, and how many could you put into the hands of people? Families will gather around a single radio. Workers will take radios into the fields and play it for others to hear. We can't be in Africa today, but we can put a radio there tomorrow. Radio is a passport for hearing God's Word anywhere in this world. So friends, we pray that you would hear with your ears and listen with your heart as Africa needs Jesus and Africa needs you.

We thank you for joining us in this effort. For more information, you can check out our website, swrc.com. We've got links and information up there right now that you can find out more details about this. You can give us a call at our ministry for more information, 1-800-652-1144. Please tune in August 20th and 21st as we take more time to look at these things in greater detail and understand how we can be a part of this vital effort. Africa needs Jesus, Africa needs you.

Host (Male): Have you ever stopped to ask why the Western world seems to be unraveling? Is it simply politics or is it something much deeper that's taking place? In *Christ or Collapse*, respected sociology professor and pastor Dr. David Haskell doesn't rely on opinion or political talking points. He follows the evidence. Drawing from decades of social science research, history, and real-world data, he demonstrates how societies rooted in biblical truth consistently flourish and what happens when those foundations are abandoned.

He also challenges many of today's most popular cultural assumptions with compelling facts and careful research. If you want a biblical and evidence-based explanation for the cultural turmoil we're witnessing today, *Christ or Collapse* is a resource you'll return to again and again. Order your copy of *Christ or Collapse* today at swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144. *Christ or Collapse*, swrc.com or call 1-800-652-1144. Watchman on the Wall is a production of Southwest Radio Ministries and is supported by you. Learn more by visiting swrc.com.