Ep. 2291 - FLASHBACK: Biblical Masculinity w/ Voddie Baucham

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Well, today is Yom Kippur, which means we don't have a live episode, but we do have a flashback episode with Vadi Bakum.

He passed away last week.

Vadi was an amazing person.

I did a Sunday special with him just a couple of years ago, and I wanted to release it now for you again on RSS and YouTube.

So here it is.

Enjoy.

Christians hear things like social justice and, you know, racial justice.

And it's like, yeah, you know,

of course, you know, we're for that.

Marriage equality.

Well, am I for marriage inequality?

And when you have weak and faulty worldviews and then seductive language, and then you have leaders

with unclear voices

you end up in the mess that we're in

raised by a buddhist single mom in los angeles dr vadi bakam came of age during the height of malcolm acts and felt a pull toward the growing black nationalist movement however a conversion to christianity in college completely reshaped his worldview badi is a skeptic who came to christ an outsider who speaks the language of outsiders he is a man worthy of respect vadi is a former pastor author and educator currently serving as Dean of the School of Divinity at African Christian University in Lusaka, Zambia, a university that seeks to transform Africa through biblically based education.

Whether teaching on the history of the Bible or marriage and family, he aims to help ordinary people understand the significance of seeing the world through a biblical lens.

Anyone who's heard him preach knows his conviction of word and spirit.

He's unafraid to challenge the current social justice movement, continuously demonstrates the Bible's enduring relevance without trying to reshape God in man's image.

On this Sunday special, I sit down with Vadi to discuss his unusual path to faith, biblical masculinity, and the woke pastors who have infiltrated Christian churches around the world.

Plus, he explains how he came to find his true calling to live and teach in Africa.

Hey, hey, and welcome.

This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

We are so excited to welcome Vodi Bakam to the show.

Vodi, thanks so much for stopping by.

Really appreciate it.

Absolutely.

It's my pleasure, man.

So let's just jump right in.

One of your big sort of causes is the fight over social justice.

Obviously, the term social justice is very contentious.

So how do you define social justice and what do you think is wrong with social justice?

Yeah, I mean, I think social justice classically is defined as the redistribution of wealth, privileges, and opportunities.

Social justice is about equity.

Not equality, right?

Not what we all grew up with, you know, equal opportunity, but equity, equal outcomes.

So it's redistribution with a view toward achieving equal outcomes for various specified groups.

Again, there's a lot more, you know, involved in that, but that's the basic definition of it.

And how do you think that that comes into conflict?

Because he talks a lot about this, with Christianity and religious practice generally, because there are obviously a lot of social justice-infused Christian teachings.

It's awful, but I think the clearest conflict is seen, you know, when Jesus in one of his parables talks about the parable of the talents, right?

And you have the owner who gives, you know, different talents to different workers, right?

There's one, and then, you know, there's two, and then there's five.

He comes back, and one of them has done better with his talents than the others.

And he doesn't take from the one who did poorly or take from the one who did well and give to the one who did poorly.

He actually takes away from the one who did poorly and gives it to the one who does well.

I refer to that parable because it really flies in the face of the idea that the Christian attitude ought to be equal outcomes.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Christian attitude is justice writ large, right?

God's justice,

the righteous and equal application of God's law.

law, but not equal outcomes.

So when it comes to group redistribution, which is really what I think social justice is very into, obviously, social justice has an individual component.

There are people who believe that every individual should come out evenly, which essentially amounts to communism.

But it seems like in today's day and age, it's more about group redistributive justice.

There are certain groups who have been put upon, there are certain groups that have more systemic power.

So,

how do you reconcile the reality, which is that certain groups have been put upon and certain groups have discriminated against those groups, with solution-making that doesn't violate the precepts of individual justice?

You know, I think for most of us, we would say, show me the injustice and I will gird up with you and we'll go deal with it.

So, but what people are doing is they're not saying, no, no, no, there's this law over here and this group of people is being put upon by this law over here.

Because you and I would both, right, say, let's go.

No, no, no, no, no.

They're saying

there's disparity in outcomes.

and that in and of itself

is the injustice.

And so now we're fighting ghosts, right?

Because there could be myriad reasons that we have those kinds of disparities, and not all of them are things that we need to do something about, right?

I mean, Austrians make great violins, right?

I mean, that just...

Thank God for that, right?

We don't just say, hey, you guys, you know, stop making so many violins and we're going to make...

No, we just say, hey, they're good at that.

You know, most people are not as good at that as they are.

Praise God for that.

Let's go get violence from them.

But this idea that somehow any kind of disparity among groups is, you know, just sort of a de facto injustice, that's hugely problematic.

And how do you think that that's impacted, particularly black Americans?

So this has obviously come up in the context of multiple groups, but most prominently in the United States,

the issue that the Biden administration has taken up is the idea that black Americans have been left behind by the system, and now we have to have systems that are put in place to redress this.

You see on a more specific level in California, in Illinois, there are places that are actively talking now about, for example, slavery reparations to make up for the injustices of the past.

How do you deal with that?

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things.

Number one,

if there are individuals who've been put upon, if there's been injustice, then there should be legal redress for that injustice.

However, my family, you know, I have this nice, wholesome German name, right?

My family

were slaves.

My family's been in America since, as far as I can tell, around the early to mid-1700s.

So if we were talking about, you know, at the end of slavery, saying and doing something at the end of slavery for those members of my family who experienced that, then I'm, yeah,

I'm all with you.

But talking about that now, I think it's inappropriate for a number of reasons.

number one because how do we determine you know who and what those individuals are but number two there have been a lot of legal redresses over the years

to to to address those issues and i think thirdly there are issues in the black community for example that we know contribute to some of the disparities for example when you have almost 75 percent of black children born out of wedlock um and and and we know that regardless of a person's ethnicity there are consequences to that.

There are consequences in terms of incarceration, in terms of dropout rates, in terms of drugs, alcohol, violence,

and all these sorts of things.

Well, if we know that those things are there, my big problem with the social justice crowd is if everything goes back to social justice, then there are some things that ought to be addressed that don't get addressed because we blame the wrong cause.

So how do you think that message has been received?

I've seen it received in a couple of different ways in the United States, obviously.

One is that people feel actually empowered by that message because it suggests that they actually have more in their hands than they thought they did.

It's not sort of shadowy, nefarious forces that are out to get them.

Most of these decisions are actually things that you can do in your own personal life.

There's no shadowy historic force that's forcing you to impregnate a girl and take off.

That is a decision that you actually have to make yourself and a decision that conversely you can avoid making.

So some people seem energized by that.

Other people seem enervated by that.

They almost seem empowered by the message that society is discriminating against them.

It gives them a sense of purpose.

It gives them something to direct their opposition to.

How do you think the message is actually received?

You know, I usually get eye rolls, and here we go again with the victim blaming.

I usually get people who will

accuse me of being out of touch.

Of course, here I am, and obviously,

I don't know what it's like to have some of those kinds of disadvantages.

And those people obviously don't know me, who I am, or where I'm from, because I very much know what it's like to have those kinds of disadvantages.

But I don't worry about that.

I don't worry about how people take that as much as I worry about

doing

something.

about the problems that exist.

I believe that black people are capable.

I don't believe that black people are utterly dependent on the government or people of goodwill.

I believe that black people are absolutely capable.

I was raised by a single black mother who was absolutely capable, who did everything that she could do to see to it that I had advantages that she didn't have.

So

I don't worry about, you know, the talking heads who would immediately dismiss that idea as much as I worry about people who would hear and people who would respond and people who could be helped actually

by addressing these issues that need to be addressed and can be addressed individually and within families.

So how was your value system shaped?

Because obviously, given the experiences that you've talked about a little bit here, and I want to hear more about those

from your childhood and growing up, the vast majority of people who grow up in those circumstances don't end up at the same sort of conclusion that you do politically or with regard to values.

So how did you end up with this set of values?

You know, there was a long and winding road.

You know, when I was younger, I would have been more in the sort of black nationalist vein.

If you think about, you know, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I would have been more on the Malcolm X black power side.

But I came to faith late in life.

I never heard the gospel until I was in university.

I was raised by a single teenage Buddhist mother in south central Los Angeles.

And so that was kind of of my faith reference point.

And, you know, I heard about Christ.

I heard about Christianity.

And

I believed the gospel.

I believed

in Christ as my Lord and Savior.

And it changed my life.

And slowly it began to change my worldview as well.

And so it was a process of

recognizing the things in my life that I had believed, that I had taken on board because of what I had been told,

much of which was not accurate or true, and then looking at the scriptures and being serious about what it meant to be a follower of Christ.

And so slowly

that that began to change my worldview.

And then of course, you know, through my education and other things, and then through being a student of history, that just began to change my worldview as well and becoming aware of,

in some instances, you know, nefarious actors who benefit greatly from convincing black people and others that our problems are from outside.

So again, it was a process.

Part of that process was when I got old enough to find a little trouble, and this is before I even became a Christian, I got old enough to find a little trouble in Los Angeles.

And my mother shipped me out and got on a Greyhound bus for three days and went from Los Angeles, California to Beaufort, South Carolina, and lived for about a year with her oldest brother, who was a retired drill instructor in the Marine Corps.

He had done 22 years in the Marines,

two tours in Vietnam.

It's first time having a man in the house, and it was a life-altering experience.

He was a man's man.

He was self-reliant, you know, taught me how to hunt and fish and

everything else and taught me how to train a dog.

You know, those sorts of things.

And that, you know, had a great deal to do with it as well.

So let's talk about that for a moment because obviously we now live in a society that really disparages the value of fathers.

Mothers too.

I mean, the basic idea is that any family formation unit is totally equivalent, that you don't need a mother, you don't need a father.

Two fathers might do it, two mothers might do it, seven people might do it, a society might do it.

But what the studies tend to show is that the best outcome, particularly for young men, is if they have a father in the home and if they don't have a father in the home, then a surrogate father nearby.

And

why do you think society has moved so far, so fast away from this when it's so obvious?

I mean, it is perfectly obvious that the effect of not having male figures around is devastating for young men.

Because we're more moved by and committed to ideologies and narratives than we are to truth.

especially when you start talking about, you know, social justice movement, critical theory.

You know, when you have

as a foundational idea

that

people who are appealing to absolute truth are part of, you know, this oppressive hegemonic power,

that's one problem.

But then when you also have this powerful narrative that men are unsafe, that the patriarchy is inherently oppressive, then that tends to override any evidence to the contrary.

So you talk about these studies that point to outcomes for young men.

That just doesn't carry as much weight as the passionate feminist who sees the patriarchy as the root of all evils.

All righty, so let's talk about manhood.

It's a very peculiar moment for sort of what manhood means in society.

We've had full-scale feminist assaults on what men are for.

The answer for many feminists is nothing.

Like war, it's good for nothing.

And then you have a simultaneous sort of backlash that has come in the form of actual toxic masculinity, meaning men acting poorly.

Pointing out that men have sort of been robbed of their initiative, that men have been robbed, and all that's true.

But then the reaction is, okay, so the more muscular I act without actually taking on responsibility,

the more I'm a man.

So you're seeing the sort of manosphere online, which has picked up a lot of

hypermasculinity.

And what I've said about it is that they're getting a lot of the diagnosis right, and they're getting a lot of the prescription wrong.

They're correctly pointing out that men have lost their weight.

They're correctly pointing out that men have been feminized.

That a lot of what men were supposed to do has been taken away from them.

But their answer is not to sort of restore traditional manhood.

Their answer is to almost take advantage of the failures of the system.

So be as promiscuous as you want, nail as many tricks as you want, go out there and experience life and

never settle down, never have kids, never take on obligation.

Because after all, that's what the world wants of you.

What do you make of the state of men right now?

Because it is true that across the country, men are in crisis.

I mean, they're not going to school as much as women.

They're not in the workforce as much as women anymore.

They're not getting married.

They're addicted to pornography.

I mean, these are serious crises.

Yeah.

And part of that is,

you know, when you take manhood and try to look at manhood in isolation,

you've already got a problem.

The God who created us, He created us male and female.

And so you cannot understand maleness apart from femaleness, right?

You have to understand what it means to be a man, first of all, by what it means to be made in the image of God.

And second of all, by what it means to be made as this counterpart to a woman.

And this idea that God created us to be priest and prophet and provider and protector.

God designed us that way.

And when you take us away from that, like, you know, we're bigger than women, we're stronger than women, you know, we have, we have all of these things that allow us to take advantage of women.

They get pregnant, you know, we don't.

We can just walk away from it and, you know, leave them with that.

There are so many things that if left unchecked, they do allow for this.

toxic version of masculinity.

And so what we have to call men back to is this understanding of manhood that is outside of themselves.

And you being a man is not just about who you think you are or even who you want to be.

It is about you pointing back to the one who made you.

It's about you pointing back to the purpose for which he made you.

And it's about you pointing back to the relationship that he intends for you to have with the opposite sex.

And, you know, one of the things you mentioned is men not wanting to be married.

That's an incredibly important part of the picture of what it means to be a man.

This idea that we would be in a relationship, that we would be the head of a household, that we would be, like I said, priest, prophet, provider, protector within that context.

All of that gives us not only purpose, but it gives us greater understanding of what masculinity is all about.

And it also keeps it in check and it protects women.

That's the irony of all of this.

You know, people are fighting against the patriarchy.

People are fighting against marriage.

People are fighting against traditional roles.

And the result is you leave women unprotected and you leave men unchecked to do whatever they will with those women.

So let's say that you've talked to many, many young men, obviously, across the nation.

And let's say that you're faced with a young man who's been brought up in a family without a father, just by a mom, somebody like you when you were young.

And that person is saying, listen, I've had a rough life.

I haven't been able to get ahead.

My opportunities are limited.

And now you're asking me to take on all of these burdens.

Make me the case that I should take on these burdens.

First of all, that's what you were created to do, right?

Secondly, it's what you yearn to do.

Like, if a man is honest, men don't yearn to just sit in their mother's basement and play video games.

In fact, when we sit in the basement and play video games, we like to play those kind of video games that simulate, you know, the actions and activities of masculinity, right?

And so that's the first thing I want to say to him.

You were made for more than this.

There's a God who created the world and a God who created you.

And so I want you to come back to that.

The second thing that I want to say is that

don't buy the lie that says you have to have it all figured out before you can begin to exercise any kind of manhood.

Nothing could be further from the truth, right?

I don't have it all figured out.

You don't have it all figured out.

But this process, even this process of growing as a man is part of what God has put in place for us to figure it out, right?

The other thing that I would say is you're not called to do this by yourself.

You know,

the Bible says like iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

We need each other.

We need other men.

We need other men in our lives to mentor us, to disciple us.

We need men when we're younger, you know, to corral us, to check us.

You know, we need that.

So those are some of the things that I would want to talk to a young man about and ultimately to point them again to the God who made them and to point them to Christ who wants to redeem that manhood.

Christ who is the ultimate picture of manhood.

All of the stuff that you're saying, the feminist movement says, obviously, this is antiquated.

It's not worth it.

It's patriarchal.

It's discriminatory.

When you're calling on men to do all these things, what you're doing is you're taking away female initiative.

You're robbing them of their individuality.

How do you respond to the feminist movement that makes claims like that?

I respond by by saying that kind of manhood

is

a protective

entity.

It's a protective

force, if you will, that allows women to flourish.

Listen, if men are unchecked,

Women are not going to flourish.

They're going to be victimized.

And that's exactly what we're seeing.

We're seeing women being victimized by men whose masculinity is unchecked.

They're not being trained.

They're not being discipled.

They're being told that all of the things that real masculinity is about are the things that they need to jettison.

And as a result, they live more like animals.

Obviously, I agree with all of this.

I come from a traditional religious background.

Obviously, I'm an Orthodox Jew.

We take all of this, what we're talking about right now, incredibly seriously.

And my religion essentially tells me that practice precedes belief, right?

I mean, we are big into you perform these commandments, and whether you believe in these commandments or not, you are going to perform them.

And then the belief comes later right there's whole sections of the Talmud that are devoted to this idea that basically before you believe you you got to practice you got to do the things and then when you find yourself walking in the ways of God then you realize that the ways that you're walking are in fact God's ways and then it means something to you we're a society without patience though and that wants the belief very often to precede the actual action and so what we forget is that

If you're not acting in a godly way, you are acting by definition in an ungodly way.

And so if you do that, then you will end up in that belief system as well.

It's not just impatience.

It's also arrogance.

You know, we don't believe that we need anybody to teach us.

And as you were talking about that, I was thinking about in the New Testament, Ephesians chapter 6, right?

You know, children, obey your parents and the Lord, for this is right.

Honor your father and your mother.

It's the first commandment with the promise that it may be well with you and you may live long in the land, right?

And then verse 4, fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

What's interesting about that is before the text talks about the relationship between husbands and wives and it's pointing to the gospel.

It's assuming that you're Christian.

But that section right there, it really points to law, the idea that children, when they're being brought up, they have to be taught how to behave before they believe.

Exactly what you're talking about here.

And

in order for that to happen, you've got to have a structure.

And not just a structure, but that structure of the family actually has to have a direction.

Otherwise, children are just sort of left to their own devices.

So again, this goes back to what we're talking about with the idea that we need structure, that we need order, that we need leadership, that we need mentoring, that we need discipleship, but that we also need a standard.

We have some more of Vadi Bakham in a moment.

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You know, one of the things that is so odd about sort of the current moment is that we constantly say what we pursue is diversity.

We want diversity and we have to recognize other people's diversity.

But what we've actually done is we've flattened human beings into androgynous widgets who apparently have the same level of development from the time they are one to the time that they die.

And so we treat children like they are adults, but they are genderless adults who can make full decisions about everything on their own at the age of five without any sort of previous roles or structures.

And that's not the way that life actually works.

I mean, as you are pointing out correctly, in my view, life is a series of roles.

And those roles are provided to you by your biology, which was implanted in you by God.

And that is the way that society works.

And when we sort of arrive on this earth and we're told, make your own way without any of those structures, you're no better off than, and there's an actual phrase that's used in Hebrew called Tinoch Shanishba, a baby born in a forest.

The idea is that a baby born in a forest has no actual moral obligations because there's no structures around them.

It's literally the biblical excuse for not being responsible for your own sin.

And we've created an entire society of babies in the forest by deliberately removing the parents and the home and the church and structures from around them.

And then we wonder why people are wandering around aimlessly.

And they're insecure, and they have more problems with mental health than any other generation has ever had before.

You know, I'm sure you remember the famous experiment.

It's been done a number of times.

You take children out for recess, you know, and there's no fence and the children all stay huddled closely together by the building.

But the minute you put a fence, the children wander all around the yard and play.

The idea there is those boundaries make children safe, and it makes children feel safe.

And we have a bunch of children growing up without boundaries and they don't feel safe.

And here's a news flash.

If they don't have boundaries, they're not safe.

Let's talk about why it seems that religious leadership has kind of abandoned the playing field.

It really is an amazing thing.

It used to be that religious leaders would make very strong statements on behalf of the values that we're talking about right now.

And now it seems as though if you do, you're immediately labeled a bigot or terrible.

And so religious leaders seem to have almost abandoned the field.

They instead talk about vague ideas about tolerance and niceness, and

they'll talk about human dignity, but not in any sort of deep and abiding way.

They use buzzwords rather than actual hard-nosed rules.

And, you know, what do you think happened?

Why is that happening?

I think there are a couple of things happening.

Number one,

I think the people pointing the cameras like to point the cameras at those people, right?

There are

many out there who have not bowed the knee to bail,

but people don't like to point the cameras at them.

I think that's number one.

I think number two, there are a lot of people out there who are enamored with success.

They read their own fan mail.

They like to be liked.

I mean, we all like to be liked, right?

And so you just sort of start carving off the edges of the truth at first until eventually you're doing things for clicks and for likes and not for your calling.

I think another thing is the academy.

I think for, you know, over a generation now, we've had people, you know, people in the ministry, people

in our churches, it's not like

they're born and dropped into a theological training institution, right?

No, they're born and the overwhelming majority of them are educated by the government all the way through university.

And then maybe they'll go to seminary.

But the worldview that these guys are taught from, you know, beginning almost to the end is this, you know, sort of Gramscian, neo-Marxist, you know,

worldview.

And it infects the way that they view the scriptures.

It infects the way that they view their calling.

And then I think the other thing is there's just

a lot of pressure out there.

And a lot of people just, they can't take that pressure.

I don't like it.

You know, I don't like being, people think that I like being called names or, you know, that I like, you know, whatever.

I don't like that.

The only reason I do it is because

there's something that's more important, right?

There's a calling that's more important.

And I think people are struggling because of this and suffering because of it.

Now, back to what we talked about earlier with social justice.

You know, Christians hear things like social justice and, you know, racial justice.

and it's like, yeah, you know,

of course, you know, we're for that.

Marriage equality.

Well, am I for marriage inequality?

And when you have weak and faulty worldviews and then seductive language, and then you have leaders

with unclear voices,

you end up in the mess that we're in.

I wonder also if religious leadership, and this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, if what religious leadership started off by doing was worrying because there were kind of members of the flock who were on the fringes of the flock and they started wandering away.

And so they followed those members of the flock into the mountains.

And they worried so much about making sure that they bring those people back in that they decided the only way to actually keep these people members of the flock is to broaden essentially the fence.

Like, keep expanding the fence, and then if you definitionally change the fence, then even though this member of the flock is way the hell away, they're still part of the flock because the fence is now five miles wide.

And so the idea is that they're so focused on the exception to the rules, they forget about the maintenance of the rules.

And in the process, what they end up with is being able to titularly say, We have lots of people who adhere to our version of the church, but nobody who actually goes to church, nobody who actually follows any rules, no actual interior coherence to the ideology.

I see so much focus in the religious leadership community on what in Hebrews called Kiru, sort of the outreach, and so little focus.

Yeah, exactly.

So little focus on here's the rule, and we stand by the rule.

And listen, we want to help you understand the rule and understand why the rule is not changing for you and why maybe you'd be better off conforming to the rule.

And we understand everybody sins.

We understand we all fall short of the grace of God and all of that.

But the rule doesn't change just for you.

But we're so concerned with if we say that to somebody, the person may run.

And we forget that if you get rid of the rule, everybody runs, and then there's nothing to adhere to in the first place.

Exactly.

And eventually,

we have nothing that we're standing on, right?

We're just on shifting sand.

And again, I just want to say that there's thousands who have not bowed the knee to bail.

And there are, you know, good, solid folks out there.

Unfortunately, most of them don't get cameras pointed their way.

But there was a movement really in the 80s and the 90s, the church growth movement.

And you just basically described it to a T.

It was all about doing whatever was necessary to get people into the doors, to keep people in churches, you you know, we're growing like gangbusters.

All of a sudden, you've got churches all over the place, you know, that are running thousands.

And, you know, there's a saying, whatever you do to get them is what you're going to have to do to keep them, you know?

And so the compromise is just continued.

But, you know, but I'm hopeful because

I do.

I know a lot of those guys who haven't bowed the knee.

And I run into people all the time who are looking for those guys.

They're saying, where are those those guys near me?

Right.

And a lot of people are looking at and listening to and following people online.

You know, everybody sort of bashes social media and social media deserves bashing.

But the fact of the matter is there are people who are finding those voices, you know,

and then they begin to look for other voices.

So I'm encouraged.

I don't think this is going to last.

It can't last because it's built on sand.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

And then what happened, I was going to say this earlier.

So, you know, the social justice movement, it was happening.

It was blowing.

It was going.

Everybody's sort of running in that direction.

And then all of a sudden, people started screaming about Christian nationalism.

Like you're upset about this, but what are you going to say about Christian nationalism?

Do you know what I had to do?

I had to go, wait a minute.

Christian nationalism.

What are you, what are you, what are you talking about?

Let me see what you're, I may agree with you, right?

Let me, let me see what you're talking about.

But this goes to what you were saying earlier about people not wanting to speak up because now there's that label.

Oh, you're, and it's not just Christian nationalism, it's white.

Christian nationalism, right?

And, you know, I don't know if you've seen, I know you've seen these oppression wheels, right?

These wheels where they have, you know, the various groups and, you know, on the outside, there's the oppressed group and the inside, you know, there's the oppressor group.

And, you know, whatever these wheels are, and however many oppressed groups they have,

one of the oppressor groups is always white.

One of the oppressor groups is always Christian.

And one of the oppressor groups is always nationalist, right?

So when you talk about white Christian nationalism, you have a triple oppressor group, right?

Just in the name.

And so now if people want to, you know, celebrate the overturn of Roe v.

Wade, all you have to do is say white Christian nationalism.

And all of a sudden they back off.

Right.

And so they're muted.

You know,

again,

I've got no patience for it.

Yeah, no, it really is pretty incredible.

One of the great leaps that you hear constantly, particularly in the abortion debate, is you can make an entire...

argument about why the life of the unborn should be protected without reference to the Bible, without reference to God.

I do it literally every day on my program.

And And the minute that you say that you are pro-life, they immediately say, oh, you're doing that because you're a religious bigot.

You say, well, I never mentioned God.

I never mentioned the Bible.

I mean, I'm happy to mention the God.

God, I'm happy to mention the Bible.

I'm happy to talk about Psalms.

I'm happy to talk about

the book of Deuteronomy.

I'm happy to talk about all that stuff.

That's totally fine.

But that's not what I'm talking about right now.

But you are so eager to hit.

How do you think that being a religious person turned into an actual insult and dirty word that is supposed to forbid you from public life?

It used to be the opposite.

It used to be in the United States that if you were a person who was not of faith, then this was considered not okay in polite society.

Right.

Now it's flipped completely.

In many of the early colonies, you couldn't serve in office.

Right.

You know, it was a religious test in the state constitutions

of the early colonies.

But, you know, when people do that, what I always do,

I bait them.

I always talk about God in the Bible when I'm talking about my pro-life convictions because

I want to bring them in, right?

I just, you know, it's a rope of of dope, right?

Come on, come on, talk about the religious argument.

Because what I want to do is I want to show them that they're liars because Stacey Abrams was going to churches,

right?

Quoting scripture, making her argument for abortion, and nobody was saying, oh, you know, you can't bring your religion into.

They don't have a problem with religion.

They don't have a problem with the Bible, right?

They don't have a problem with Raphael Warnock when he does it, right?

He's a pastor, you know, everybody's worried about, you know, churches getting involved with, you know, politics and whatever.

Here is the Reverend Raphael Warnock.

Nobody has a problem with it.

And what that does is it exposes the lie.

It exposes the hypocrisy.

You don't have a problem with God.

You don't have a problem with the Bible.

You have a problem with my position and my ideology.

And you're just using that as an excuse.

So that obviously, the sort of perversion of scripture is something that drives me absolutely up a wall.

My friend Dennis Prager is fond of saying that the biblical commandment not to bear the not to take the Lord's name in vain is not about saying GD it.

God doesn't care about that.

It's about speaking in the name of God, something that God clearly is not saying.

And this has become habit from politicians on a routine basis that they will cite the Bible to a proposition that is completely anti-biblical.

You'll get Barack Obama citing the least of these in reference to transgenderism or gay marriage.

While the Bible has more to say about these particular topics than a rather vague verse from the book of Mark, is it?

But I see, again, I welcome that.

I want to have that conversation.

I want to do that.

And especially as a black minister, right?

Because, again, everybody wants to point to the civil rights movement and everybody wants to laud the civil rights movement.

Everybody wants to point to

the Reverend Al Sharpton and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

And nobody has a problem with it until you are not spouting the leftist, progressive, neo-Marxist ideology.

Then all of a sudden, you know, separation of church and state, and you need to stop.

And

I just call it.

I got no time for it.

So as you've mentioned a couple of times, the neo-Marxist ideology.

Do you think that's what's really sort of provoking all of this is the infusion of neo-Marxism?

Or is it more almost an infusion of Freudian sexology?

It seems like a lot of what what's all of the above.

I think, yeah, I think all of the above.

I think there's sort of this conflation of things that happen.

You know, you have people like, you know, John Money with his fraudulent experimentation.

And, you know, you have Kinsey with his, you know, fraudulent research.

And people who are holding to

this neo-Marxist ideology,

this oppressor-oppressed mentality,

in the neo-Marxist ideology, religion in and of itself, there's no absolute truth, right?

Religion is just the tool

that enforces the hegemonic power, right?

So these guys want to use this, you know, Freudian, you know, Keynesian ideology to basically say,

here's the truth, here's the reality.

It's the opposite of what you religious prudes have always said, but of course it would be because this is science and that's just science fiction, you know, that you call religion,

when actually the opposite is true.

Those guys were the frauds.

It seems as though we're in the midst of a revolutionary moment.

The progressive movement, I've retermed them on my show, the transgressives, because it really is not about progress.

It really is about transgression itself, which is sin, obviously.

But the basic idea is the institutions of life hem you in.

They prevent you from being truly free.

They don't allow you to find your subjective sense of self-worth.

They tell you that you can't do things that you want to do.

And the only way to fight a system that oppressive is to blow it up.

We have to transgress all the rules.

It is actually necessary to transgress all the rules, which means that the point isn't that we believe what we're doing is right.

It's that what you are doing is bad and wrong.

And so we will go out of our way to do anything we can do to undermine the institutions that you promote.

And then, of course, the results are dire, and

their immediate move is to blame the bigotry of of the institutions that they've been steadily attempting to undermine.

And then to establish their own institutions so that they can exercise the authority that they just said last week was inherently evil.

So what kind of institutions do you think they're seeking to set up?

Because it's unclear to me exactly what their utopia looks like.

I know that right now their first step is destroy everything, level the ground.

It's almost nihilistically destructive.

It is.

Not almost.

But you're suggesting that they do want to build new institutions in place of the old institutions.

What do you think those are?

They want the same institutions.

They're not that creative, right?

They're not that creative.

They're not that smart.

It's not that they have this idea of new institutions.

They just have the idea of them being in power of whatever institutions exist.

Okay, so how does that manifest in terms of politics?

So we've been talking a lot about religion and the religious community, the hijacking of churches and sort of the hollowing out of the church.

But

in terms of politics, obviously this has led to an extraordinary amount of political polarization in the United States.

As you get rid of the social fabric that used to be shared in church, people are now rushing to political party to sort of fill that gap.

What do you see as the future of politics in the United States right now?

Boy, I don't know, other than chaos.

You know,

I don't know.

But I think we get a glimpse of it with academic institutions.

Because I think it has happened in the academy that the radicals of the 60s, right, right, again, these radical neo-Marxists of the 60s take this long march through the institutions.

And today, the institutions exist as their power structures.

It is hard to find

conservatives in the academy.

And the academy is turned absolutely upside down.

You know, they call good evil and evil good.

We're proliferating the number of degrees that people can can get and all of them are absolutely worthless.

There's almost nobody going into STEM anymore.

We don't trust the classics anymore because they're too white.

We don't trust theology anymore, right?

The queen of the sciences.

Again, because it's the hegemonic power.

So you go on the average college campus today, and I think you have a glimpse of what it could look like or what it does look like rather when the inmates run the asylum so you know one of the big moves obviously in college campuses when you have professors who who say they are smarter than your parents than your pastor than everything else is they they rely on the fact that they have degrees to basically say that everybody who's religious is stupid this is this is this is the lead attack on religion right it's it's not really on religious values What they're doing is an excuse for overriding those religious values and allowing you to experience whatever subjective pleasure you wish.

But the case that they make is essentially, if you believe in religion, you're an idiot.

That the only thing you can believe in is a materialistic conception of the universe in which you're essentially pre-programmed by biology to do particular things.

And your parents are a bunch of bigots.

Which is ironic, right?

Especially with all the trans stuff.

Because on the one hand, they want to argue that.

On the other hand, they want to argue that biology is irrelevant.

Right.

No, it's very weird Cartesian ghost in the machine sort of stuff from people who are biological materialists.

But

the the argument that they make is essentially you're an idiot to believe in God.

So a college student comes home, comes to your house, and starts telling you that God doesn't exist, that the Bible was written by a bunch of idiots in caves thousands of years ago.

How do you respond to that?

What's your chief argument to people who are purporting to object to the Bible or object more broadly to the existence of God and his providence in the universe on an intellectual basis?

Yeah, what I want to do is I want to show them that that's all based on presuppositions, right?

The last thing that I want to do is

get down on their level and say, okay, fine, let's just leave that aside.

No, I want to say to them, all of that is based on presuppositions.

You're taking leaps of faith back there in order to get here and make that argument.

Your presuppositions have been tried before and they've led to catastrophe.

Mine is based on presuppositions as well, but my presuppositions has led to Western civilization.

So that's the first thing that I want to say.

The other thing that I want to say is I'm not coming at this blind, right?

I choose to believe the Bible because it's a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses.

They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies, and they claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin.

So again, this is not just, you know, close your eyes and hope you feel something, you know, type stuff.

We do not have a God who calls upon us for blind faith.

We have a God who speaks.

We have a God who has revealed himself.

So those are the two things that I want to do, right?

Number one, just

get off your moral high horse because you've got presuppositions just like me.

And number two, look at what your presuppositions have wrought.

And then number three, let me talk to you about mine.

So let's talk

from the other point of view.

I'm going to play atheist for a second.

I'm going to steel man this thing.

And we'll talk about sort of the arguments that are made against religion.

So the one that's most common, made by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the like, is that religion has caused enormous amounts of human suffering, that you have wars on the basis of religion that have killed tens of millions of people over the course of history, that religious bigotry leads to intolerance, which leads to violence and oppression.

How do you respond to that?

I respond by saying it's a lie.

I respond by saying just look at the world.

Where are the most freest, the freest people in the world, the most prosperous people in the world?

Where are the people with the greatest levels of religious freedom in the world?

Where is that?

It's Western civilization.

And what built Western civilization?

The Bible built Western civilization.

So that's just, it's false on its face.

Obviously, we sit here.

You know, you,

as an Orthodox Jew, right?

Others, you know, I was riding in and I see other, you know, houses of worship and things things like that.

Yeah, I mean, I've been to the Middle East.

I've had the opportunity to preach in places in the Middle East.

And you get to go to a compound somewhere, right?

And

you better not let, you know, whatever it is that you're doing as a Christian.

You at least get to go to the compound.

You don't even get to fly home.

Exactly, that's correct.

And again, so it's so obvious.

You know, it's so obvious.

And the other thing that I want to do is I want to push back on that.

And I want to say, you know what?

You don't get to play that game.

Religion is too broad.

You can call anything religion and then blame religion for whatever you want to blame it for.

Don't talk to me about religion writ large.

I'm talking to you about my faith.

I'm talking to you as a Christian.

You see, once we do that, then because a lot of the stuff that they're talking about has

absolutely nothing to do with this world that we live in, with this environment that we live in, and with the amazing freedoms and liberties that we enjoy specifically because of the religion that made this culture.

So another argument that frequently comes up is the miracle argument, right?

You guys believe in a bunch of documents that contain in them a bunch of physical impossibilities.

You've never seen a person turn water into wine.

You've never seen anybody walk on water.

You've never seen a revelation on a mountain.

You've never seen any of this sort of stuff.

So why would you believe a document that makes claims that all of these miraculous things occurred?

And how literally do you take it?

Are we supposed to take it literally?

And if we don't take it literally, does that mean that we can take everything not literally in the Bible?

Yeah, a couple of things.

Number one, get off your moral hot horse because you believe in a big bang and you've never seen one, right?

So let's stop playing that game instantly.

Secondly, I take the Bible literally where I'm supposed to, right?

So when the Bible says that I should not kill, I believe that no matter how much you annoy me, I shouldn't snuff you out.

When it says that God covers me with his wings, I don't believe that makes him a big chicken, right?

So again, it's a document.

It's literature, and anybody who's asking that is not taking the literature seriously.

The other thing is, if you look at literary criticism, there is no department at any university, anywhere in the world.

You can talk about English lit, you can talk about, you know,

whatever kind of literature that you want.

None of them have the level of literary criticism that departments departments of biblical studies do.

It's not even close.

Nobody is more serious about tracing the origins and the authenticity of their documents than those of us who believe the Bible.

Okay, so one more argument.

The Bible contains all sorts of odd descriptions of supernatural characters, not miracles, but say the devil.

There's talk about in the Old Testament Satan, who's considered the adversary.

The Jewish picture of the devil is a little bit different than the Christian picture of the devil.

So how are we supposed to take that sort of stuff seriously?

The idea that there may be demons or angels or devils?

Should we take that seriously?

How do you read that?

We should absolutely take that seriously for a couple of reasons.

Number one, there are things that happen in this world that are absolutely evil.

There is real evil.

I mean, right now, we're talking about this guy in Idaho who just murdered four college students.

You know,

look at the Holocaust.

There is real evil in the world.

The other thing is, if you have a problem with the idea of the immaterial, what do you do with your own mind?

You know, I'm not talking about your brain.

Right.

I'm talking about your mind.

So if you have a problem with the idea that there's an immaterial world, then you've got...

much bigger problems than me believing in real evil or real Satan or real,

you can't even explain your own mind.

So to go back to your personal story, you're growing up, single mom who's Buddhist, you get shipped off to her brother, who is a drill sergeant.

But how do you get led to the position that religion is all important to you and it's what you want to make your life about?

Yeah.

So

when I was in university, a gentleman came to me and

he shared the gospel with me, shared the message of Christianity with me.

And, you know, I really wasn't having it.

And the reason I wasn't having it is because I was a good kid, right?

I was that kid that, you know, other parents wanted their kids to be like.

Right.

And, you know, so I thought I was fine.

And he asked me a question.

He said,

when you die, do you think you'd go to heaven?

I'm like,

yeah.

I mean, I think if anybody's going to go, you know, it's me.

And he said, how sure are you?

And, you know, cocky 18-year-old.

I said,

95%.

And he goes, what if I can give you the other five?

And it was just that silent.

You know, I'm sitting there going,

what are you talking about?

And so he just starts, you know, sharing with me.

He spends about two and a half weeks with me talking about the Bible, talking about sin and redemption and

Christ and the cross and, you know, and

just sharing all these things with me.

I knew that I was a sinner.

I knew that I needed to be redeemed.

I knew that I couldn't redeem myself.

And it was through these conversations and me just really studying the scripture that I came to trust that Christ and his death on the cross was the only answer for my sin.

And I came to place my faith in Christ.

And it's interesting.

Immediately I began to talk to friends and family about what had happened in my life.

But there was a tragedy.

in my life earlier.

I had a cousin who was six months younger than me.

And

about a year and a half earlier, when

he was 16, he was gunned down in Oakland and killed in a drug deal.

And that really, that shook me, you know.

And, you know, so I think that was my senior year, you know, in high school.

And it just really just...

made me think about, you know, life and mortality and, you know, eternity.

And it was because of that that I didn't just come to faith, but I had an urgency about my faith even from the beginning

and began to live with that urgency and to talk to people about my faith with that kind of urgency.

And eventually ended up about a year and a half later, starting to preach some at my church.

And

one thing led to another.

And once I started preaching, it was like, I was like a fish who found water.

And, you know, that's my calling.

And, you know, that is the direction that my life went in.

And it's the direction my life's been going in ever since.

So now you founded a school in Africa.

So what made you decide to do that as opposed to dominantly basing yourself in the United States?

Yeah, yeah, it was interesting.

The first time that I went to Zambia was in 2006.

And again, growing up as a kid in South Central Los Angeles, growing up in this kind of black nationalist

environment, I'd always dreamed about Africa and going to Africa.

And I had a chance to go to Africa.

And it was just a few months after my father died.

I didn't grow up with my father,

but I was reunited with my father later in life.

He came to faith.

later in life, years after me.

So it was interesting, I got to mentor my father in the faith.

And then he just, you know, he just died suddenly.

A friend of mine told me about some work that was going on in Zambia, recommended that I go.

I went and I spoke at a conference there, me and my oldest son.

I came back in 2006 and my wife asked me how it went.

And I said, I think I want to be buried there.

And what it was, was it wasn't this, you know, mystical Africa motherland, whatever.

It was the work that was being done there

was of such a nature that the gifts, talents, and abilities that I had

were just a fit.

And so I started going back.

I went back almost every year from then until 2014.

They started talking about starting a university, a classical Christian liberal arts university there in Zambia.

And as it got closer,

my wife just, we went on a family trip.

Me, my wife, our seven youngest children.

And while we were there, she just looked at me and she said,

you need to be here.

And that was it.

You know, that was August of 2014.

We moved in August of 2015 to help start the African Christian University.

And it has been an amazing ride for the last seven years, you know, some days with a windshield, some days with a bug.

But

it really has been a rewarding endeavor for the last seven years.

What do you think are sort of the biggest distinctions between the kids who you see in Zambia and the kids who you're dealing with in the United States when you come and do tours?

Boy,

unfortunately, less and less all the time.

You know, because of media and especially social media, the world is getting smaller and smaller.

And America's influence is great.

And beyond the influence of America, the influence of the UN is incredible in Africa.

And so unfortunately, less and less.

But there are some things.

For example, there is more of a sense of respect for elders.

There's more of a sense of respect, you know, for family.

You know, on the flip side,

there is more of, you know, African traditional worldview and African traditional religion with its sort of animist roots and everything.

So there are some hurdles as well for the work that we're doing.

Another hurdle is that

the academic infrastructure.

there is not the same.

So we're not at the same starting point.

So for example, our university has a gap year program really to sort of get students up to speed and to prepare them for university level work so um you know some of those differences have been amazing and wonderful and some of those differences have been just incredibly challenging well bodhi you're doing amazing work both there and here thank you so much for stopping by it's really been a pleasure having you yeah this has been great thank you for having me

that was voddy bakam unfortunately he passed away last week The world is a sadder place because Vodi is no longer here, but his legacy lives on.

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