An Author Interview from Books At a Glance
Greetings, I’m Fred Zaspel, and welcome to another Author Interview here at Books At a Glance.
We all know that our culture is in upheaval, but a failure to appreciate the pressures this is placing on the church would be fatal. In his timely new book, We Will Not Be Silenced: Responding Courageously to Our Culture’s Assault on Christianity, Dr. Erwin Lutzer writes not so much to reclaim culture but to reclaim the church during this cultural moment. He writes with his usual clear insight, and it is an excellent read. We are glad to have him with us to talk about it today.
Dr. Lutzer, welcome – great to have you with us!
Lutzer:
Thank you so much, Fred! Glad to be with you.
Zaspel:
I have to tell you, the first book of yours that I read was back in 1978 when it first came out. It was in my undergraduate days while I was working at a Christian bookstore. The title was, You’re Richer than You Think. It was thoroughly enjoyable. Was that your first book?
Lutzer:
I think it was the second. It had to with our inheritance in Christ. The things that come with the Gospel. I’m glad that you mention it because that was a book from long ago and I’ve been writing ever since.
Zaspel:
Okay, here we are several dozen books later, We Will Not Be Silenced: Responding Courageously to Our Culture’s Assault on Christianity. First, tell us what your book is all about and why it is important for today. What is the contribution you hope to make?
Lutzer:
One of the things I have learned is that the radical left in America does not believe America can be fixed. It must be destroyed and built upon a humanist, Marxist foundation. You frequently hear that but the unique thing about this book is I take the time to show how cultural Marxism, which is distinguish quite a way from classical Marxism, where you have the revolutions in China and Russia. Culture says we can achieve the same goals incrementally by capturing education, media, law, voting for the right people. What I do in the book is show how this is applied to history and our history. It is the attack against the Judeo-Christian traditions that we have, the tearing down of monuments, and the vilification of our history. How important that is because on the other side of this revolution you are going to have a new society where there will be no white supremacy, no income inequality, and no racism. Then I apply it to race. Critical race theory is thoroughly built on Marxism, it is founded with the intention of keeping the races in perpetual unending conflict without resolution. I apply it to freedom of speech. It is cultural Marxism that says you have no right to speak because you are the oppressor and the oppressed only have the right to speak. Then I wrote a chapter on propaganda, the sexualization of children, and the destruction of family, which is so important to Marxist agenda.
Fred:
So, it is the same utopian dream but instead of guns were capturing the culture. It centers to control them and move the whole society that way.
Lutzer:
Exactly and this is happening, and people have this utopian dream as you referred to it and they believe that somehow equality is going to be brought about. Another chapter of course is socialism. I show why it’s so attractive and why it cannot and will not work.
Zaspel:
You dedicated the book to all who willingly carry the cross of Christ. Tell us why you chose to say it that way – what does cross-bearing mean, and how is it relevant in this context?
Lutzer:
I believe that sometimes in saying “carry your cross,” people think it refers to, “I have cancer and that’s my cross.” In a sense that is a cross as well. But I think that when Jesus said, “carry your cross, my cross.” I think He was talking about the trouble we are in because we are followers of Jesus. This is something we as Americans have not had to accept because we had so many freedoms. The culture is closing in on us and there is no place to hide. We need to recognize that the day of casual Christianity is over. I talk about cancel culture and a collective demonization which we see happening right before our eyes. This is where someone is deplatformed and everyone must chime in. We are not used to that. Just the other day I heard about a Christian ministry again that is being deplatformed. We need to recognize it is a new day in America and we must stand for Christ. We must take the criticism, shame, and vilification that may come.
Zaspel:
How did we get to this point in America? And talk to us about cultural Marxism.
Lutzer:
What happened is Marx had this utopian vision that we already mentioned. Marx believed that the key to history was oppression. If we could just remove external oppression of people, they would live together with all this utopian dream, even without laws because everyone would be so willing to obey a high standard. To remove oppression, Marx attacked the nuclear family. He said that husband oppress wives, parents oppress children. They take them to church; God is the ultimate oppressor. If we can get rid of the family, we can have happiness. Of course, he emphasized women working outside the home, the government raising children. I mention Black Lives Matter in the book. Do black live matter? Of course! All black lives matter. However, on their website the organization that takes that mantra and admits expressly that they believe in the absolution of the family. They also admit they are Marxists. What we have today is this Marxist idea that is sweeping in. We have attacks on our history. The monuments, history vilified. In the book, I quote Arthur Schlesinger, who was a confidant of President Kennedy. He said, “history is to a nation, what memory is to a person.”
Now if a person loses his memory, he becomes what others tell him he is. They want us to lose our memory, to vilify the Judeo-Christian tradition. To pretend they are exempt of all the failures and weakness of those who have preceded us. They have a special space of virtue. People are asking today, “am I woke enough to be seen as a person of virtue?” So, what we must do is to vilify the past. The 1619 project is intended to vilify our history. Part of this has to do with localism. The uniqueness of America must be dethroned, we need a worldwide open border policy. A borderless world. All part of a Marxist vision. I hope we can still talk about how this is now applied to race.
Zaspel:
You talk about this attempt to rewrite our history as an attempt to delegitimize our Judeo-Christian heritage. What is the agenda here?
Lutzer:
The agenda eventually is to change the constitution, which is a barrier to the Marxist vision. I quote the Harvard review of January 2020, where they outline how you can change the constitution. It means adding more people to house of representatives by dividing Washington into various states. They do not even pretend they are neutral in this. They say these districts in Washington D.C. are reliably democratic. So, in this way they can then control, and they will take care of the senate in ways we will not go into. They can control and rewrite the constitution because it is the great barrier to Marxism, and they must get rid of it. That is part of the vilification. After all it was written by these white Europeans and whiteness is to be attacked.
Zaspel:
Racial tensions are high right now, but you argue that we have some cultural ideologies that promote racial tensions in our society. Explain that for us.
Lutzer:
Exactly here in Chicago there was Saul Alinsky. He was a committed Marxist. He did not believe in solving problems. He said, “Let’s not solve problems, let’s use them.” He saw Marxism could be applied to race. It would bring about tension and conflict that would be unending until the oppressed were to overcome the oppressor. So today in universities we have diversity studies. Studies on gender and race, the whole intention is to not bring about any kind of reconciliation, but to keep people divided. Critical race theory says, if you are a white person you are privileged even if you were born in poverty, still privileged with white skin. If you are not white you are not a person of privilege. Lebron James, who has millions of dollars and is famous, would not be considered privileged because of skin color. They divide up the races and you put them in these categories. The hope is that eventually, the oppressed will have cultural dominances over oppressors. So, you foment all this racial tension. It is intentional. It is not intended to solve problems of bringing the races together. I am going to explain very quickly why the Church becomes so critical. I point out in my book that even in mathematics, normal reasoning is being attacked. It is given a cultural justice twist because mathematics believes in objectivity and objectivity is racism. They say we should not be objective in what we believe. Very quickly, what is the answer of the Church. The Church says we have an answer because we are serious about reconciliation. We do not have that many differences between us because we are all sinners. We all come to the foot of the cross.
We receive God’s forgiveness and then having done that we ask ourselves how we can work together to make things better. We do not have to spend all of our time shouting at one another across racial fences. The body of Jesus Christ brings us together. At the Lord’s table there are black, white, and brown faces. We need to show that the Gospel is a message of reconciliation. The bottom line that Christianity teaches we do not have a skin problem but a sin problem. That is the agenda we need to promote. Here at Moody church on any Sunday, of course before COVID shut things down, we had people from 70 different countries of origin every Sunday. Revelation 5 says in the end people are going to Heaven from every tongue, tribe, and nation. We want to illustrate that already on earth.
Zaspel:
In chapter 5 you warn us about propaganda intended to obscure reality. What is that all about, and how does it work?
Lutzer:
First, a word about freedom of speech. Herbert Marcuse was a Marxist in the 60s. He said that if we have freedom of speech, the capitalist will always win because they are the oppressors, and they will take advantage of freedom of speech to perpetuate oppression. So, what we must do is to say that the Marxists have no right to speak. The oppressed have the right to speak. So, he introduced the idea of two differing views of freedom of speech. That is why you have in the universities conservatives who aren’t allowed to speak because they are the oppressor.
The purpose of propaganda is to so shape people’s view of reality that even when confronted with a mountain of evidence they will not change their mind. In this chapter of the book, I illustrate how propaganda works. Amid propaganda you have two very important things, hate and fear. What you need to propagandize a nation is somebody to hate. Here I use Hitler because the sexual revolutionaries back in the 80s said they were using his principles. Hitler said that with the right use of propaganda you can make heaven appear as hell and hell appear like heaven. They use fear and hate and part of that has to do with collective demonization that I referred to earlier. It was perfected in Russia. Once the government deplatformed someone everyone had to chime in.
They would write letters supporting the government because what they were saying was, “we are on your side don’t come for us.” I also wrote a book on Nazi Germany and some of the German churches put swastikas on their doors because they were saying, in effect, “when you come for the Christians don’t come for us because we are on your side.” Today when someone is deplatformed everyone else must chime in and say, “we all need allies. You deplatformed this person, they were friends with that person. 25 years ago, they said this and that. We need to de-platform them,” all in unison. This is collective demonization and punishment. I quote Churchill who made the statement, “an appeaser is someone who feeds the alligator with a hope that the alligator will eat him last.” What you have is this appeasement and gaslighting. The simple fact is that we are to believe that which is absurd. We are told if you do not believe this absurdity, you will be punished, and we want you to live in fear.
COVID has contributed to the idea of this and the whole idea of control and fear. It sets us up to be very gullible to the demonization and of course propaganda. One other thing about propaganda is they hide what they are doing under platitudes. When Hitler starved children, he said it was putting them on a low-calorie diet. When he killed Jews, he said he was just cleansing the land. Children who were put to death were taken to children’s specialty centers. Today you have abortionists saying we are simply having reproductive justice or reproductive equality. You never expressly say what you are doing, but you call it by something noble. Often it masks what is very evil.
Zaspel:
Several issues related to sexuality are prominent today – what is at stake in all this?
Lutzer:
This is huge, everything is at stake. I begin that chapter on sexualization of children. I begin talking about the cell phone in your teen’s hand. It does more to inform his or her view of reality, the world, and sex than an hour of Church or Sunday school. But what Marx would want us to do and what the contemporary issues are, is they would like us to sexualize children. Here in Illinois, we have a curriculum which even for 4th graders in basically pornographic. What it does is it begins to introduce ideas of transgender and it begins to confuse young people. We know teens are confused already, they are going through emotional turbulence and issues of identity. They begin to have self-doubt. They think maybe I am a different gender. There is a friend of ours who said there was a girl who said that she was a fuzzy, a fuzzy is a cat. You cannot really argue with her because after all we are living in a time that is deification of the self. You get to identify who you are, God does not, you do. I emphasize the fact that when you have the idolatry of the self, idols always break the hearts of their worshippers. Back to the curriculum and what is happening. I read an article recently, there is now a throuple, three people in a marriage, or more than three. After all marriage is simply an arrangement made where people are seeking their own happiness not knowing they are destroying civilization and the very soul of what it means to be a person. And what is coming down the pipe, I can tell you, articles are being written justifying pedophilia because once God is no longer in people’s lives there is no place that they can stop.
Zaspel:
Let’s talk economics. Is capitalism the disease and socialism the cure?
Lutzer:
That is one of the longest chapters in my book. Socialists always talk about dividing the wealth, they never talk about creating it, it can’t create wealth. Once you are in a certain job or caste system and everyone is paid the same. It takes out all creativity. If you have a pie. You divide the pie very carefully among everyone so they each get an equal piece. When the pie is gone there are no more pies. The only thing the government can do is print more money and make up for this supposed pie. What you have in socialism is always a paradise or parasites. People who wake up in the morning and do not do a day’s work but get paid the same. I use Russia as an example, back in the 80s when Rebecca and I were there. Doctors were not paid much more than other workers in the hospital. They had a shortage of doctors. It is based on such a false view of human nature. Every place that it is tried it really ends badly. To summarize the issue, have you ever wondered why it is that mice die in mouse traps? It is because they do not understand why the cheese is free.
Zaspel:
Okay, what can we learn from the church at Sardis, and what is the exhortation you give us in your final chapter? What should be the Christian response and resolve considering this cultural moment?
Lutzer:
At the end of each chapter on each of these issues I give a response of the Church, how we should respond and interact but in the final chapter I take the words of Jesus to the church of Sardis, “strengthen what remains.” Jesus said that you have a reputation that you are alive, but you are dead, so what I do in this chapter because I mention the problem with the church at Sardis is that they no longer saw the world as an enemy. It bought into its culture. What might Jesus say to the church today? That is where the issue of the Gospel is paramount because in the book earlier, I distinguish between the Gospel and social justice.
Biblical justice vs. social justice. How we must be clear on that issue and what the Gospel really is. The whole issue is of our concessions to sexuality which is happening in the Church. The pressures for same-sex marriage and other things and then Jesus would talk to us about purity and wholeness. Many people say, “pastor my church is dead and not involved in all these issues. What is your answer for me?” It is interesting that in this letter Jesus goes on to say, “there are still some of you in Sardis who haven’t soiled your garments and you shall walk with me in white for you are worthy.”
I challenge people that even if your church is not what it should be, you as an individual and as families need to make sure that you are walking with purity, standing against the world, and doing what you can. I give examples of that in the book, people often ask, “what should we do?” Every person must answer that question differently. The businessman must ask, “am I willing to write a letter apologizing for my whiteness and how horrible it is?” I give examples of the kind of issues people face. Faithfulness might mean something different for everyone. A teacher in Chicago was told, “it is not enough for you to tolerate same-sex marriage if you don’t celebrate it you can lose your job.” Is he going to celebrate what God has condemned? Each must ask what to does faithfulness look like for me. My bottom line is simply; we are not called to success; we are called to faithfulness. The church needs to be faithful despite legal and cultural storms that are already here.
Zaspel:
We’re talking to Dr. Erwin Lutzer about his very timely new book, We Will Not Be Silenced: Responding Courageously to Our Culture’s Assault on Christianity. It’s biblically insightful, and it’s very important reading for our moment. I wish every Christian in America would get a copy and read it carefully.
Dr. Lutzer, thanks so much for your faithful ministry and for talking to us today.
Lutzer:
Thank you, Fred. God bless you.
