Stop Waiting for Preachers to Speak the Truth — Demand It: My Interview with Pastor Allen Jackson

Okay, everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk Show, my friend Alan Jackson joins the show. A special thank you to Alan Jackson Ministries for presenting this episode and for people to go to alanjackson.com.
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Hello, everybody. Special episode of The Charlie Kirk Show today.
One of our great partners and really great men that I learn from and look forward to learning even more from is Alan Jackson from Alan Jackson Ministries. Alan, great to see you again.
Good to be with you again, Charlie. Remember, we had you on the program maybe six to nine months ago, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, it was about that. Before the election, I know that.
That's right. So why don't you take a second just to reintroduce yourself to our audience? Yeah, I'm a pastor.
I serve a congregation just outside of Nashville. I've been there for almost 40 years, from a tent until today, so we've seen a lot of change there.
But really since COVID, I think we've been a lot more engaged with culture. You know, it feel like the curtain got pulled back when COVID happened, and places that I had trusted for information, places that I thought were like rock solid, like the CDC, proved to be a little less so.
And it really started me on this adventure of trying to engage our culture from a biblical worldview. And so your voice is such an important part of that.
It's an honor to have some time with you. Thank you.
Well, I look forward to continuing to learn more. You're in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Is that right? That's it. You got it the first time.
World Outreach

Church. So I got it the first time.
I deserve points for that. So tell me about your ministry

journey. You said you started in a tent.
How old were you? And was this a church that you started

with your wife? Tell me the story. The backstory is probably worthwhile.
I'll even go back further than that. My parents had a Bible study in their home for 12 years, and the church came out of that.
But the real root of that was when I was eight years old, my mom gave birth to my youngest brother. I've got two brothers.
We went to church every Sunday, but we weren't Christians. Sitting in church doesn't make you a Christian.
And when she was in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed her with cancer and said she had six months to live. And they wanted to do some pretty dramatic surgery.
So my parents scheduled a flight to Mayo Clinic. In Rochester, Minnesota? Yep.
And on the flight, my mom said a prayer. They were the youth leaders, actually, in the Methodist Church at the time.
And the pastor came to visit her, and he didn't believe in heaven or hell. The problems we have in the churches today are not new.
They've been there for a long time. Wow.
So she's flying to Mayo Clinic and she said a prayer that if there was a God, he would let her know the truth before she died so she could tell her sons to be Jewish or Baptist or Catholic, whatever that truth was. She didn't have any imagination that God could heal.
And they did a four-day workup at Mayo and the doctor came in her room late at night and said, Mrs. Jackson, you had cancer.
We have pictures of it, but we've looked for four days. We can't find it.
Go home and raise your babies. So my mom lived to be 88.
The doctors missed that by 50 plus years. And so that's not six months.
That started our journey into Christianity. And so we, my dad brought us to Middle Tennessee for the Tennessee walking horses and started a vet practice and they opened their home for a Bible study.
And when we moved to Middle Tennessee, the schools were still segregated. It was a very different place than it is today.
And so they opened their home to, it looked like the Isle of the Misfit Toys, people from different nations, different colors. Most of their lives had some pretty gaping holes.
And that was the genesis of the church. So for two or three decades, I just put my head down and served people.
And then I really, I didn't like television ministries for a lot of apparent reasons that we could probably all talk about. And I certainly didn't want to be one of them.
And I understood that the assignment was directed that way. So I started to change some of my behaviors and patterns.
And we started getting involved with some things in the media. But at the end of the day, it's hard to see people engage with God.
God changes lives. You know, when I grew up in church, ministers wore long black robes, investments.
I never remember seeing a pastor smile. And I thought, you know, I can't do that.
I was on my way to medical school because I thought I couldn't do that. But I realized that faith was the most important thing in my life.
And so we

just pushed all the chips in the middle of the table and said, let's go. And we're still playing

that handout today. And so explain to me how it has grown.
You guys started with what, 100 people?

They started with 29. 29 people.
And what is the size you're at today? On a typical weekend, there's about 15,000. Wow.
And not counting the millions you reach. No, that's not the broadcast side.
But the community's grown. Middle Tennessee's grown.
It didn't happen in a vacuum. So that would be misleading.
And to be honest, for the first 10 years, nothing changed too much. We had about 200 people, and it stayed that way.
I had to learn. I thought church was a mystery.
I thought God was a mystery. And when I came to understand that spiritual change is as intentional as making a medical diagnosis or putting together an effective political campaign, it's really not a mystery.
It's hard work, and it's intentionality, and it's incremental, and it's a choice you make every day. And when I understood that, then I began to understand how to help people.
And the more that happened, the more people show up. So part of your cultural change project is to bring a biblical worldview to the country.
Yep. Is that correct? Which I totally share.
You said something quite interesting that I want to spend some time on. Sitting in the church doesn't make you Christian.
A lot of people think it does. Yeah.
The label I usually use is a generic Christian. You don't declare yourself Buddhist or Muslim or agnostic.
And in our culture, Christianity is still the predominant probably spiritual voice. So people just self-identify as Christian.

But being a Christ follower is an intentional choice to yield the authority of your life to Jesus of Nazareth. It's not about joining a church or a denomination or a style of worship or even a day of the week when you get to gather or a building you sit in.
It's a decision about a person, a historical figure. And your relationship with him is what defines you as a Christ follower.
If Jesus isn't Lord of your life, it doesn't matter to me where you sit on Sunday morning. And I think there's a great deal of misunderstanding around that.
And I think the reason our nation is in such trouble. For several election cycles, I would hear people talk about the sleeping giant of the church if it woke up.
And I'm not really certain that sleeping giant lives there. You know, I've read enough of Dr.
Barna's statistics. Yep.
Enough to make you a little depressed. And I think we have to understand that it's informed our heritage.
But that is the nature of faith. It's the story of the Bible.
God does something remarkable for a group of people, and they enjoy the opportunities that brings, and then they wander into the weeds, and they get in trouble, and then they cry out for help, and God raises up a voice, and He delivers them. That pattern is repeated throughout the story of Scripture, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
And I think we're the 21st century edition of that. We just about lost the freedoms and liberties that generations before us sacrificed for, because we lost our worldview.
We lost our grounding. We got so confused, we were reluctant to say that there's only two biological sexes.
And I mean, that's like Bible 101A. That's not political.
That's like fundamental Christian stuff. And so we've got to bring life back into that biblical worldview, or the political changes that we're seeing happen in Washington are not sustainable.
If we don't have heart change amongst the people, this will be a very temporary blip on the radar. If we have one of those seasons where there's a significant realignment along values and character and family, then I think what we're watching could actually bring wonderful things for our children and our grandchildren.
I agree with all that. The battle between good and evil seems to be escalating.
It is easy to blame politicians, government, or poor leadership, but behind all of that is a spiritual battle. Pastor Alan Jackson's new book, Angels, Demons, and You, talk about the reality of this battle and the spiritual realm that exists around us.
It has a real impact on us every day. As you read, you will discover that angels and demons are not imaginary.
They actually exist. You can find them playing a variety of roles throughout the Bible, and they're still influencing the world today.
We don't need to be afraid, but we do need to be aware and prepared.

Angels, Demons, and You provides valuable insight, practical tools, and biblical truth to help you recognize the spiritual battle around us

and become a difference maker in our generation.

Get your copy today at alanjackson.com slash angels.

Hear from people whose faith directly impacts our culture on Pastor Alan's Culture and Christianity Podcast. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's talk about the church, which is a big category. A lot of different buckets.
There are some that are true and courageous, some that are trembling and fearful, some that are traitorous, I could even say, that are against God's wishes. Give me your analysis of the landscape of the current Western or American church.
Wow. Well, let's talk about church with a capital C.
So we're not talking about a particular congregation or even a particular denomination. We're talking about all those people that would stand under that umbrella.
And there's two or three things that I think really define your status in that place. And they aren't the traditional things.
Our theology schools, most of our theology schools, we lost them long ago. Totally agree.
So if you accept the authority of Scripture as being our rule of faith and practice,

and you believe in the uniqueness of Jesus, the incarnation,

that he was the incarnate Son of God, that he died on a cross,

that he was raised to life again, that's the redemptive work of Jesus.

If you accept those things, we'll call it Christianity, Big C Church.

If you don't accept those things, I think we have to—it isn't popular, but I think we have to have a different set of language. It's a false church.
You know, they may have ecclesiastical language. They may have ecclesiastical architecture.
They may use religious words. Good music.
They may have good music. But absent the authority of Scripture and absent the uniqueness of Jesus, it doesn't meet the biblical standards for church.
And that's an awkward place because we have major expressions now of mainline American Christianity, evangelicalism, that are denying the authority of Scripture. I don't want to say it's a majority.
I don't think we're there yet. But it's a growing minority.
It is. I hope you're right.
So, yeah please interject and disagree. Well, I live in a small town outside of Nashville, Tennessee, which is about as close to the buckle of the Bible Belt as you can get.
Right there. And we have many of the historically leading churches in the community where I serve who have rejected biblical authority.
They'll endorse same-sex marriage. There's been a tremendous amount of cultural—you know better than I do how much cultural pressure there has been to go along.
I shouldn't be shocked, but I would think in the greater Nashville area, churches wouldn't be embracing homosexuality. You would think that, but the reality on the ground is we have.
And I've been in more than 20 cities in the last 12 months, 18 months, doing pastor's conferences. And when I go in with the message that the church has to engage our culture with biblical authority, and the truth of this, not in an angry way, not in a belligerent way or a condescending way, none of those things.
The audiences are about 50-50, about half accept it and half get mad. Sometimes they follow me the car and say, you offended all of us.
Pastors will say that. Pastors will say that because they've been educated that way.
In the same way, I think the challenge we have in education is our teachers have been educated in universities where they have a woke ideology far too often. Many of our pastors have been educated in systems where they don't respect biblical authority.
I'll give you a fun example. CRT, critical thinking started in biblical studies long before it made it into the racial arena.
And so they started breaking the Bible apart, trying to deconstruct it, to take away its authority. One of the books that got so much focus was the book of Isaiah.
And the scholars in the most celebrated universities, Vanderbilt, said there was no Isaiah. You know, there was a school of Isaiah.
So there was three or four or five or six or 10 Isaiahs. And the book of Isaiah is a compilation of all these Isaiahs.
And you can't trust it. It's not authoritative.
The oldest copy we had of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, was from about a thousand A.D. Hand Hand copied by scribes.
About 1,000. No, I know.
When did they say this? Recently? Yes. Really? This has been leading scholarship.
And so they said that that copy was corrupted because it had been hand copied, and Christians made insertions into it, and yada, yada, yada. So when they found the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948.
Well, that's was going to ask what year this was because 48 changed everything. So this was prior to 48.
Yes but it still feels, they didn't back up they're just like the Russian collusion media. Nobody ever apologizes.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are 3,500 years old if I'm not mistaken. So they found this copy of the Scroll of Isaiah intact.
It was more than a thousand years older than the oldest copy we had. And it was almost letter for letter verbatim to the one we had.
So it blew up 100 years of scholarship, and nobody apologized. They just doubled down on the stupidity.
And so I think it's much easier to believe there is a God than believe there's not. And to invite people into that arena is the assignment of the church.
God doesn't want to take something away from you. God doesn't need anything I have.
I heard Elon Musk do an interview at CPAC a week ago. He's getting closer to Christianity.
I could say that. So they said to him, people say you're stealing your Social Security numbers and they're afraid you're going to get into their accounts.
And he dropped his head for a minute and thought. He looked up and he said, I think I could buy some pretty good things without your money.
And I feel that way about God. I don't think he needs the money.
No, I don't think he needs my check. You know, I don't have anything that God needs.
The invitation is all one-sided. The creator of heaven and earth has invited me into a relationship.
And that's the greatest honor of my life. So being a Christ follower isn't a diminishment.
So I don't think of it in terms of a set of rules or regulations. It's like I have the designer's manual for how to flourish in my journey through time.
Why wouldn't I pay attention to that? It's beautifully put. Let's talk about pastors, if you don't mind, a little bit more for a second.
And by the way, your website for people to check is alanjackson.com. It's A-L-L-E-N.
I want to make sure we plug it throughout, alanjackson.com.

When you deal with pastors, do you come walking away with the opinion that the problem with Capital C Church is their boards, the seminaries,

or the pastors themselves?

Because we've diagnosed the problem, but what is the root cause of such problem?

That's a really good question, and I think all three of those contribute. People frequently say to me, my pastor won't talk about current events.
And I say, well, I don't really think the pastor—I wish the pastors all had the courage to say, I could lose my job, and they'll do the right thing. But I don't think that's a realistic expectation as a general rule.
Most churches have a board, a presbytery. There's a group of business people that are the decision makers, because in most churches, the pastors rotate three years, five years.
And the authority structure there has seen many pastors come and go. They see this person as a temporary assignment.
And in most systems, if you're in a denominational system, you can get a promotion if you just don't cause disruption. So there's a real emphasis to come in and maintain the status quo, make the power brokers happy.
So if you really want to change a local congregation,

you've got to change the attitudes of the business people that control the church.

So there's a board issue. The pastors ideally would be leaders of strong enough character and

great enough faith that they would be change agents, and they would initiate that change.

But that's not the reality on the ground in most places. There are some notable exceptions.
I think many pastors go into the ministry because they have a sincere desire to help people. But they have to run the gauntlet between the formal education that's required, and it usually isn't helpful.
Then they run into these administrative boards that are meat grinders that want to control the speech. And it's career suicide if you buck that system in most places.
I serve an interdenominational independent congregation, so I don't have an overlord. I mean, I have an administrative board that sets boundaries and limits.
So there was no advancement for me if I was a good boy in my little place. Yeah, there's no FPC USA or whatever.
No, it's like we landed on the island and we burned the boats. If we were going to have anything good, we had to make it for ourselves.
And most people aren't in that circumstance. So typically, though, throughout the history of the church, the awakening, the renewal, the vibrancy does not come from with the institutional system.
Right now in our culture, the voices for truth, for the biblical worldview, are not rising mostly from the churches. They're coming from desks like yours.
Brandon Tatum, Allie B. Stuckey, I mean, this band of merry people that you spend so much time with, they're speaking more truth into our culture right now than most of our pulpits.
And it's biblically-based stuff for the most part, but they're engaging culture with the truth that will bring a better future to the kids and the grandkids, and they're having to do it because the church has failed. And that really is closer to the model of how God's brought renewal to his people in every generation.
Talk about that. Well, we know a bit of the story, I think, here.
The United States, the first great awakening. You have a picture of it right here? Preceded.
With field and Edwards, yeah sure do. We have the sinners in the hands of an angry God.
We have it framed here for a reason. It was the founding before the founding.
It was the founding of the founding. It was the moral authority that made the American Revolution possible.
Without the Great Awakening, no America. Second Great Awakening precedes the Civil War.
We had a moral change of heart that gave us the courage and the fortitude to do the hard work that the Civil War represented to change the trajectory of our nation. I think we're at another one of those pivot points.
That's not new to me by any means. I totally agree.
But I think it's one of those inflection points. I think what's happening in Washington today, as wonderful as it may be, with Doge, I don't believe it's sustainable unless we have a heart change of equal and greater magnitude.
I couldn't agree more. And the founders agreed.

The Constitution was written only for a moral and religious people.

It's totally inadequate for the people of any other.

Our system won't work if the people don't have a heart change.

And I don't even think it takes a majority.

There is an authority in truth.

I know you need the majority in the election, so I don't want to diminish that at all.

But the truth is there is an authority when the truth is told.

One of the most recent examples to me that I thought really was when Trump said about Gaza, what we've done in Gaza for 70 years hasn't worked. We need a new plan.
Once he said it, it was so clear. It unwound all the debates and all the arguments.
It completely recalibrated what we're going to do in Gaza and I think in all of the Israel proper. And that's a statement of truth.
That's the assignment of people of faith. Stop waiting for the preachers to do it.
Start doing it at your own kitchen table. Do it in the bleachers when you're sitting watching your kids and your grandkids play ball.
You go to the school board. You tell the truth.
I think if those people who have had, we've been cowards. You know, we've been afraid of the pushback from the culture.
We don't want to be canceled. Cancel culture is not new.
By the time you get to Acts chapter 4 and 5, they're bringing in Jesus' closest friend, saying, if you don't stop saying this, we're going to do to you what we did to him. And they said, you do what you need to do.
We're not going to stop telling the truth. The 21st century edition of the church needs the same courage as the first century edition of the church did.
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That is YREFI.com. So you make a very profound point that the voice of, let's just say, moral guidance, with the gospel also peppered in, which I do, but it's not the only thing I do, is coming from a community of podcasters, social media influencers.
Thankfully, church attendance is going up slightly. Slightly, we've seen the last couple years, but I wouldn't give the church any credit for that i think it's a work of the lord if anything else you and i both i almost assuredly agree that in order to have revival you must have repentance in your what 30 years ministry 40 years approximately right when you see mass repentance amongst the people you deal with, what message do you deliver to be able to prompt repentance from your congregation or from any individual? That's a good question.
I'd say it a little differently. I don't think there is meaningful change without repentance.
I couldn't agree more. Okay.
Repentance carries two meanings. The Hebrew word for repent is to physically change directions.
It's an old language, and it's very earthy. In Greek, it's a change of mind.
So together, Greek's the New Testament language, Hebrew's the old. Together, repentance is a change of how we think about something and then how we behave.
And without repentance, there really is no significant change. You may get caught doing something, and there punishment.
And so you think, well, I don't want to keep doing that for the moment, but I'm not going to stop doing it. I'm going to go right back to it.
So the biblical prescription for a better pathway is repentance. If you're engaged in some behavior that's self-destructive or some relational habit that's punishing a family, the reason we're invited to repentance is not to diminish our fun.
It gives us a change of thought and a change of behavior that puts on a pathway towards a better outcome. And it's what's been missing in our culture.
When the mainstream media screams for three years, Russian collusion, and it's proven to be completely false, there is no repentance. Nobody comes forward and says, we were thinking the wrong thing and we said the wrong thing.
They just move right along. So we try to live through our mistakes.
And if you live through your mistakes, you carry the baggage of them. You're like Jacob Marley when he came to visit from the ghost of Christmas past.
You're dragging all the chains of your sins along with you. And the beauty, the invitation of our faith is that if you will say, I was thinking wrong, and that led me to behave in a wrong way, you can be free.
You can have new thoughts and new behaviors and a new future. And I think that's what we're all striving for.
We want to see our kids educated in a way that sets them up for the best possible future. We want to see some of the absurd things that have been dominating the public conversation for too long now to be turned back.
It's not that we're angry at people. Those pathways don't work.
We have to think differently, and it's not arbitrary. It's not just what Alan thinks or Charlie thinks or what we sit down at the desk and hammer out.
There's an authority beyond ourselves that we have embraced because we believe there is a God and that he is the creator of heaven and earth. And there's a lot I don't know, but there is some I do know, and I'm going to build my life plan based upon that.
And from there, so repentance is such a powerful thing. If we could just say as a nation, we've been uniquely blessed.
We've had more freedom and more liberty and more opportunity, and we have squandered it in the most selfish, absurd ways. But we would like to come back and accept the responsibilities of those freedoms and liberties so that the generations who follow us have even greater opportunities than we had.
I think we'll see God move in a way that will change not only our communities, our nation, but it'll impact the world again in a positive way. Is there a sermon or a message that you give, and I'm asking for a reason, where you see repentance that follows? What is the essence that a pastor needs to say or teach to foster a culture of repentance? Well, I think we have the same challenge in the church that we've had in the political realm.
We've had some really bad messages. You know, seeing Mr.
Trump willing to say the clear truth, the plain truth, is so disruptive because we've lost that ability. And we've got to bring that back into our churches.
We've had a gospel of salvation that we've said to people for a long time now, if you'll repeat this sentence after me, you will have accomplished your God business. And perhaps we'll chase that with a dip in a pool, and we'll call it baptism.
And then here's your certificate. Welcome to heaven.
And you're good to go. It's life insurance.
It is. It's a fire insurance.
Yeah, eternal fire insurance. It's eternal fire insurance.
Oh, I like that. That's even better.
You're right. And it's really a misrepresentation of the gospel.
Because being healthy spiritually is like being healthy physically. I make a decision every time I pick up a fork.
And I make a decision every day if I'm going to be healthy spiritually. And I think if we come back and say to the people, listen, there is no free ride, but there is a better way to make the journey.
And let me show you that. Life creates enough stress points that if you'll talk to people truthfully when there's points and say there's a better way than keep doubling down on stupid, you can make life great again.
I mean, that is the gospel message. Yes.
You know, and it's not about joining my church or where are you at Sunday morning at 11 o'clock. But allow me to interject.
So there's a big pastor, Rick Warren, whatever, and I followed him growing up and he'll always say hey i'm responsible for 130 000 baptisms or whatever good for him right great but is that therefore is the church can say we've baptized tens of millions of people are you contending of which i would agree that it's actually much than that? It's much deeper than just having a bunch of people show up and check the box and then show up once or twice a year. No, yes.
I mean, the short answer is absolutely it's deeper than that. What does it look like? I think the analogy would be, Jesus described it as being born again, so there's a new birth.
There's a spiritual birth when a person comes to faith. It's the greatest miracle that will ever touch a human life because it changes destiny for you.
It moves you from one kingdom to another. It's in John 3.
It is. But it's a point of initiation the same way physical birth is.
I've been to the hospital. I see hundreds of babies that were born.
You look through the little glass wall and the little bassinets, and they're red and they're wrinkled. And the grandparents look through

and go, they're geniuses. But it would be, we all understand how naive it would be to say, you know,

that life has been fully expressed. It's going to take nourishment, care, training, growth, maturity.

There's going to be difficulties and challenges and disappointments. Sickness, yeah.
But everything

is in front of that life. It's not a fait accompli.
I love that. And I think the mistake we've made is we've said to people, if you'll do this, if you'll walk to the front of the church with me and you'll say this prayer, which I believe in conversion, initiation, salvation, the new birth, whichever label is preferred.
But that's the beginning point for a journey of growing up spiritually. And we have been reluctant to say that to people because we have this microwave culture

that we want everything in a drive-thru bag, supersized,

and we want to move on to the next thing.

And we don't really want God intruding on us.

And so I think we've got to have the courage to come back and go,

no, the ground at the foot of the cross is level,

and it's free access, but it's not cheap.

There's so many things where we've capitulated to the culture.

People say to me frequently, you know, Jesus came to bring unity.

That's not what he said.

He said, I came to bring division.

Turn father against son.

Yeah, and we've wanted so badly to be accepted by the culture

that we've stopped confronting the culture with the truth. It's like a doctor that doesn't want to tell any of his patients bad news.
We call that malpractice, and we'll pull your license. And we have been operating as people of faith, and we don't want to say to the culture around us, that's a destructive habit.
You know, all of us have weaknesses and failures and struggles. And I mean, none of us have a perfect resume, myself included, for certain.
But that's why we are stories of redemption. And that's the hope that we hold out to the world, that no matter what broken place you find yourself, it's the ironic part of Mr.
Trump. And I don't think there's any question God's using him to make an impact in our nation.
No different than Cyrus. Or Samson.
You know, Samson's my favorite. In Hebrews.
Samson's my interesting character. He had this crazy strength that nobody could explain.
He's got great hair. And he had this moral character that maybe you didn't want your kids always to completely duplicate, but God used him in a powerful way to bring freedom to people.
And we're watching that, and I'm most grateful for it. You know, I don't for that.
So the message to people is, we're not asking you to submit to a set of rules. We're asking you to choose a way of life that will bring a hope and a vitality to you and your future that you can't find any other way.
If you want to make sense of the change and the chaos happening around us, you're going to need God's help. That's why Alan Jackson Ministries, a friend of mine, created the Culture and Christianity podcast, the Culture and Christianity conference, and their weeknight news show, Alan Jackson Now.
Millions of people also listen to Pastor Alan Jackson's powerful sermons each week, I do, on radio, television, satellite, and online. In today's world, there's desperate need for truth.
and Alan Jackson Ministry. I'll see you next time.
is to help people become more fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ, which is the most important thing, giving your life to the Lord, including here on the Charlie Kirk Show. Go to alanjackson.com slash charlie.
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This is our time to make a difference.

Check it out right now.

So kind of going more to current events here,

everything you teach, you always say through a biblical worldview, that the authority is Scripture. And we try to do the same here on this program always.
We call them conservative principles, but if you go a layer back, they're biblical principles that express themselves via conservatism. Right.
And I do that on college campuses, which is a mission field, as you can imagine, right? And by the way, we've brought thousands of kids to the Lord. It's amazing.
And that's an unintentional downstream effect. And I will agree with what you said earlier, that we're not pastors, and I am not a pastor, but the result or the fruit is things that pastors should be doing.
I agree. Going into the campuses, speaking these hard truths.
And at least from our experience, I don't care what people call me. I don't care the names.
But I will say, though,

the vast majority of people are not nearly as offendable as you think they are.

And they are willing to hear things that might be a little bit politically incorrect.

And especially young men want to be challenged towards becoming a better version of themselves. Do you find that as well? I do agree.
I think the church has failed men. This is one of the things I know you...
Masculinity is not toxic, and it's an embarrassment the way the church has dealt with it. You know, for most of history, there have been two categories.
There have been boys and men, And almost every culture has had a transition point. I was in Kenya, and I spent some time with the Maasai, those warriors that you see on National Geographic that jump like they have springs in their shoes.
And they've stopped it now because of our conservation. But there was, for hundreds of years, when a young man was a Maasai, when he was going to move from being a boy to a man, they gave him a spear and he had to go kill a lion.
The Spartans had a similar initiation. Exactly.
In Judaism, it's the bar mitzvah. Well, we have in recent decades, we've created a third category.
It's adolescence, that you're not really a boy or a man. There's this nebulous place where you have all the physical attributes, but you're not asked to take any responsibility.
And because we didn't have an entry point at an exit point, now we have people that are well into life and they're still behaving as an adolescent. And the church has betrayed men.
We have a responsibility. Men have three primary assignments in life, as I understand it, to be the spiritual leader of their home, to provide for their family and to protect them.
The conversation between men and women is not about better or worse, greater or lesser, weaker or stronger. We're different.
And I happen to think the differences should be celebrated. If the government made human beings, we would all be the same.
We would all be gray. I just came from San Francisco.
That's their goal. It's androgynous men and women that look like men.
There is a oneness that they want to try to achieve. You're exactly right.
There is a deterioration of the distinct. Absolutely.
It's a mind-numbing, disruptive. It's also very ugly.
I mean, not just physically, but spiritually ugly. There's a darkness to it.
It's evil. If we really get to the root of it, it is so destructive to the human being that God created.
Because in our differences, there's something to be celebrated. Of course.
And there's a complementary component to that. When God created man, he said he's not good.
It's incomplete. There's something that's not finished yet.
And he created a woman.

And that's God's design. And again, when you rage against the design of something,

you're not going to get to the best outcome. And I think the church hasn't had the courage to say

to the men, I think the reason we got to the point where we have men and women competing in

sports together is the church didn't have the courage to talk about gender roles.

Please keep going. I completely agree.
I mean, I don't blame the Democrats.

I blame you. Just objectionable.
Is the church didn't have the courage to talk about gender roles. Please keep going.

I completely agree.

I mean, I don't blame the Democrats.

I blame the church.

Absolutely.

So tell me. This is not a political problem.

This is a spiritual problem.

We have assignments by God.

We have roles to play.

Again, not greater or lesser, not diminishment one or the other.

There are times and seasons where life circumstances means we stand in other roles. I get all of that.
I'm not issuing an edict. But those differences are inherent within us.
We're not the same. We're not the same physically.
We're different emotionally. We have different strengths.
We are complementary. We need one another.
The church's unwillingness to do that. I live in the midst of people of faith all the time, and I hear the parents say to their daughters, you can do anything a boy can do.
Don't ever let anybody tell you you can't do it. That's just not true.
It's absurd. And you may want your daughter to play with the local high school football team.
But the principle that you're putting in place is what has landed us at the place where now we're at the theater of the absurd watching men and women boxing in the Olympics. That's exactly right.
You know, I went to Vanderbilt Graduate School of Religion, and inclusivity was a very celebrated thing there. But if you say to a man that it's inappropriate

to ever use physical violence against a woman,

which I would agree with.

I don't have any problem with that.

I have a principle of that,

unless it's in extreme forms of self-defense,

which is incredibly rare.

Okay, so if you put that on the table

and you say that to boys,

you can never use physical strength

or authority against a girl.

And then you show them the Olympics,

and there's a man in the ring

beating the love of Jesus out of a woman in the ring. 20 seconds in.
You have created seeds of

confusion in all the boys and the men that are watching. Those two things are not compatible.

And so if you don't start with a moral base, if you don't have an absolute that's guiding your

decisions, you wind up in these absurd places. And it's been the church's absence in the dialogue, because we've understood that our buildings were conflicted, that we had people that were not consistent, and we didn't want to lose any of our audience, so we would avoid the discussion.
The truth is not always comfortable. Sometimes it is disruptive.
Often it is disruptive. But we're going to have to have the courage to come back and say, we need one another.
We complement one another. We help one another.
Men have behaved abysmably towards women at different points in history. But we've arrived at a point where the discussion is so absurd, we need the church to help recalibrate.
So if you're at one of your pastor's conferences and a pastor raises his hand, Pastor Allen, it sounds great.

I'm afraid of losing my congregation, losing my audience.

How do you reply?

Well, I think you have to decide the audience that you are working on behalf of.

You know, who is it you're trying to please?

If the message that I'm delivering, I think, honors God,

and it's in accordance with the principles of Scripture,

then I have to tell the truth and find an audience that wants that message. If you look at your audience and you take a poll and then decide what you believe, you can be welcomed into the uniparty, but you're not going to be welcomed into the church.
And unfortunately, we've all been behaving that way. We've allowed the cultural values to shape what we said we believed.
And we're watching. It's uncomfortable for me when Roe v.
Wade was overturned, and there weren't celebrations in the street. I couldn't agree more.
For weeks, I walked around and go, we've got a lot more work to do than I understood. In fact, Pastor, we estimate at TPUSA Faith, based on some research, it's not too in-depth, about 80% of churches didn't say anything.
In fact, we could point to more churches in Phoenix that gave a, I know this is a very traumatizing week for you sermon, than a hallelujah, hallelujah, praise the Lord, hallelujah.

Right. But that's understandable.
We gave up our moral authority in the church a long time ago.

We've been winking at fornication. We thought, well, boys will be boys, and girls will be girls, and people will be people.
And so we didn't want to talk about biblical standards of human

sexuality and behavior, because it was uncomfortable. You don't have to be filled

with anger or hate or condemnation. Again, it's not the best way to go.
It's not going to bring you to the best outcome. And because we abandoned those things, then we arrived at the point where abortion has touched all of our lives directly or indirectly.
Everybody's been touched by it. Sixty million children, no family has escaped this at some level.
And there's so much guilt and shame that people are, they just don't want to say anything. They'd rather look the other way or act like they don't notice.
And I think we've got to come back to our word repentance again. You see, it doesn't matter where you've been.
You can say, I thought wrong, and I did wrong, and I'm sorry. And you have a fresh beginning.
And if we can help people come back to that, you can be free of guilt and shame, no matter how dark the past, no matter how far we have wandered, no matter how intentional the misbehavior, we can be free. That's all of our stories.
That is the good news of the gospel. But it's a different way to walk.
And the church is going to have to have the courage to bring that back to the forefront and lead with our faith in all the arenas of our lives. We've got to bring it back to the corporate boardroom.
I'm ashamed. I truly am.
I'm ashamed that on my watch, the years that I have provided a voice, that we so quietly withdrew from the public arena, the corporate boardroom, academia. You know, they said to us, if you bring your faith to work and one person raises their hand and says they're offended, that you should withdraw.
And yet we found ourselves today where the corporate setting or the academic setting or the political setting, they all bring a worldview. Always.
And they drive it down the heart of the organization, the institution, professional sports. And I think they've got more determination promoting their worldview than I had promoting mine.
And I'm embarrassed. But I have repented.
I've changed how I think and how I speak. And here we go.
And I think I know where that came from. I'm not saying for you, obviously.
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That is Y-R-E-F-Y.com. There's this belief that Christians must be nice, which is a word that does not exist in the Bible.
And that somehow there's, and I was raised around this hypothesis of modern Christianity. So this was in the suburbs of Chicago, gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade, Christian Heritage Academy, amazing institution.
The guy who ran it now works for us at Turning Point, amazing. But as I started to little bit older the kind of cultural christianity here what here was the equation that the the world we're in the majority the world doesn't like us a lot so we need to be really nice to them and never point out any faults or any moral guardrails or not and that we're going to win the world for Christ, not by challenging, but by affirming everybody and being everybody's best friend.
Has that worked, Pastor Allen? I wish it had. We'd be having a different discussion.
But we see the almost complete deterioration of the family. We see our educational system failing.
We see the—there's a verse in Isaiah that says, truth has fallen in the street. In our culture, whether it's politically, it's in the media, we don't even recognize the truth any longer.
We don't even imagine that's the standard to be, that we strive for. All of those are failures of the church because we have accommodated evil.
That's why I think we have to talk in terms of a true church and a false church, not based on denominational labels, not based upon styles of worship or the wardrobe of the person leading the room, but on our orientation towards the scripture and our orientation towards the role of Jesus. So if I have just a very easy left hand side true, right hand side false, I can switch them, but what would be three characteristics of a true church and three characteristics of a false church for somebody in the audience to apply this formula to their own experience? Right.
I have a little practical formula in my head. Please, yeah.
Which doesn't. It's if you and I could disagree on a point and we would both still enter the kingdom of God, then I'll extend to you a hand of fellowship.
We may disagree on when we take communion, what style of music we sing, whether we worship on Friday or Saturday or Sunday, whether we can come in shorts or we have to wear a suit. But if we disagree on who Jesus is, if I say he's the Son of God and you say he's not, that's going to change destinies.
So on those points, we can't afford to disagree. We have to engage the dialogue until we understand the difference and work through that.
So if I were going to give you three that define the true church, it has to do with the role of Scripture, that it is authoritative in our lives. It has to do with the uniqueness of Jesus.
He said, no one comes to the Father except through me. So Jesus, Buddha, and Allah cannot be seen as equal options, many pathways.
And then I think we have to understand his redemptive work, that it was something that was done on our behalf, that we don't earn it, deserve it, qualify for it. It's not merit-based.
It's a gift. And then my life is what I'm willing to exchange.
I'm willing to use my life as an expression of gratitude for that amazing gift. You have here in this prompt, and I know that we're running low on time, but I just wanted to get to two or three more topics, if that's okay.
Yeah, let's roll. It says, demons and evil spirits have one purpose, to deceive, diminish, and destroy God's people.
That's you and me. How do demons, what does the Bible tell us about demons, and how do they manifest in our political space, in our world? Because whenever you talk about demons and evil spirits, some people get a little on edge.
Explain biblically. Well, we just published a book on demons, angels, demons, and you.
That's why I'm bringing it up, because we're helping promote it, which everyone can find at alanjackson.com. Angels, demons, you.
And the most important part of that title is the and you part. You know, if we talked about diet and exercise, that's a safe discussion.
But we talked about diet, exercise, and you, now it gets really personal. Don't involve me in this.
It's the and you part. And I think my objective in the book was to help people imagine more fully that there is a spiritual dimension to our lives, that we are dimensional beings.
We have five senses. My academic career started in the basic sciences.
My dad was a veterinarian. I'm good with science.
But our five senses are how we interact with our material world. You're incredibly naive if you don't understand there are things that exist beyond the scope of your five senses.
There are things I can't see that are real, the coronavirus. There are levels of sound that my human equipment can't hear.
We all understand that. Well, in the same way that you have a body with those physical senses, you are a spirit, and your spirit is eternal.
And the theory of the book, the thesis of the book and scripture is that the spiritual world engages us on a daily basis. So rather than be frightened about it, why don't we learn about it? I think angels engage with us on a very regular basis.
The Bible talks about entertaining angels and not knowing it. I can point to a number of places in my life where there were outcomes that I can't explain other than some force other than a human being was helping me get to an outcome.
And I don't want to deny that. I don't want to be weird.
If you're pulling onto the interstate, don't pray, look. You know, Christians get weird, and I'm't want to deny that I don't want to be weird if you're pulling onto the interstate don't pray look you know Christians get weird and I'm not interested in weird Christianity on the other hand I want to acknowledge that spiritual forces exist and I don't want to go into places you know I have friends do you believe in praying for the sick or doctors yes you know I'll go to the doctor if I need medical attention but I'm going to pray before I go because I want God to be engaged in the outcome.
God designed our bodies to heal. If I cut my finger, I can put a Band-Aid on it.
If my mom's available, she'll kiss it. And in two or three days, I'm good to go.
If the screen on my iPhone breaks, I can't put it in a dark room, and it's going to heal. God built us to heal.
We have denied the spiritual reality for so long, which is a relatively new experience in human civilization. That's 100% right.
Post-Enlightenment, Age of Reason. Even the Aztecs and the Mayans believed in some invisible world.
Absolutely. And I think we've got to come back to that.
Again, not to be weird or strange. You know, Don't stop putting gas in your car or plugging in your Tesla, whatever you prefer.
But to deny spiritual reality, good and evil, there are some things we watch in the world that I don't believe can be understood without acknowledging that evil exists. I went to the Israeli embassy in Washington and watched the surveillance tapes from October the 7th.
That is demonic. If you watch that and you don't believe in evil, I don't know how to have a conversation with you.
You can't explain that about human hatred. You should come to these campuses.
They say, oh, I've seen the videos. Nothing right.
I mean, it's unbelievable. That's what they teach at these universities.
You know, mutilating our teenagers for profit. Correct.
I don't know how to describe that other than evil. There are things that human beings have done to one another that force us to acknowledge there are other powers involved with us than just the force of our will or social constructs.
And so Angels, Demons, and You is an important manual for helping us navigate a season where there's so much discontinuity. We are trying to engineer a new future that we think will be better for our children and our grandchildren.
And we've got to bring a spiritual voice based upon the authority of Scripture back into that. A political solution alone will not bring us to the best place.
Finally, you mentioned, it's a perfect segue to the final topic I want to talk about here, which is Israel. Yeah.
So I go on college campuses. It's without a doubt the most widespread common question, meaning with great predictability, I will get one or two Israel questions on every American college campus, no matter where I go.
How should Christians think about Israel? What does the Bible say? And connect it to current events. I'll give you the shorthand.
The Book of Romans says without the Jewish people, we have no Bible, we have no prophets, we have no Savior, we have no story. So we are deeply indebted to the Jewish people and that God hasn't rejected them, which is a common theme among some segments of the evangelical community.
So I think we all owe a tremendous debt to the Jewish people. They have suffered horribly.
Anti-Semitism through history has been persistent and inexplicable. I don't think you can understand the history of the Jewish people without understanding angels, demons, and you, because there's been an irrational hatred of them.
15th century Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms. I mean, we can walk it back as far as we want to go.
We see today, one of the greatest shocks to me has been the anti-Semitism on American campuses universities that I used to call elite I refuse to call them that any longer you can't harbor that kind of hatred and refuse to address it and ask me to consider you to be elite anything they're propaganda institutions they're not elite training institutions any longer but I think the Jewish people have been treated very poorly. And from the Christian community, especially, we stand with them.
The New Testament says that we have been grafted in, that the status we have with God comes through the Jewish people. It's not apart from them.
My Lord and King is an observant Jewish rabbi who observed the Shabbat. You know, heaven's going to be a really awkward place if you hate the Jews.
Because when you go see the boss, there is an observant Jewish rabbi sitting on the throne. So I would make peace with that sooner than later.
How should we think about Israel the nation in kind of current context? Yeah, that's a good question. We'll come back and do that in more detail.
I believe God gave to Abraham a piece of territory. The Jewish people were given a promised land.
The non-Jewish believers in the world were given the land of God's promises. We don't have a territorial assignment, but we have the fullness of the covenants.
So that piece of territory, I believe, belongs to the descendants of Abraham. There was a Jewish king on the throne in Jerusalem 1,500 years before Muhammad was born.
So if we're going to talk about origins, the Jewish people are going to win that discussion. I believe they have a right to that land.
I don't believe everything they do is right. I think they're as divided and as polarized as the American political landscape is.
So it's not that I look at them with, when you land at the airport in Ben-Gurion Airport, you don't hear the flutter of angels' wings. Tel Aviv is the gay capital of Europe, and they advertise it.
And most abortions per capita of any country. So they have all the same moral challenges and struggles that we have.
Having said that, God has a covenant with them and a commitment to them. And so I think it's in the best interest of our nation and every individual listening to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, not the absence of conflict, but peace between the inhabitants of the land and the God who has given them that piece of territory.
And we have a mural on the end of our building with a picture of Jerusalem that says, pray for the peace of Jerusalem. And I think it's an important part of our assignment.
Alan, God bless you. It's alanjackson.com.
Thank you so much, Pastor.

We'll have you on again soon. Thanks, Charlie.
Keep up the good work. Check it out, alanjackson.com.

Talk to you guys soon. Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Email us, as always,

freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.