The State of the Churches

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Wo. In today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing the state of the church again. We've done a few episodes in the last five months or so where we talked kind of about the church in general. We did a recent episode we talked about apostasy as kind of the tail end of some of the heresies that slipped into the church. This is gonna be another episode where we're talking about the answers that Christians have to a series of questions been asked by two different polling organizations. The first set of data that we're going to be using is the Pew Longitudinal Survey from 2014, and the second is going to be a survey conducted most recently in 2022 by Ling and your

1:26 Ministries. Both the surveys were in the United States. They talked to people both who were Christians and non-Christians. We are principally going to be focusing on the data from inside the church. And the reason that we're doing this episode today is that There have been numerous times in the past where we will talk about things like teachings of demons. We'll say that there are certain things that are very clearly heresies. We will sometimes say very specifically that if you believe this sort of thing, you can't be saved. And those And those are all scriptural approaches, but as we said in the judge not episode or the episode on judgment, we dealt with the fact that while we as Christians living today are not

2:09 only called but equipped to act as jurists in the matter of is a statement that a man makes true or false. That is not the same as judging the final disposition of that man's soul. So So for example, in the episodes on Bonhoeffer and MLK, we stated with absolute certainty those men are in hell right now. Because there was nothing remotely Christian about their confessions. Their confessions were explicitly anti-Christian. Most of the things that we deal with, we're dealing with inside the church. Those men were completely outside the faith entirely, demonstrably. When we do episodes on things like baptism and communion and some of the other things like election, where there are disagreements among various

2:51 Christian denominations, we obviously make the case from scripture that we believe to be true about what those things are. And that God says one thing, scriptures says one thing, and then the churches have disagreed in some cases only recently, in some cases for a very long time, about which of those statements is true, which of those is in accord with scripture. And obviously we care a great deal about that. But at the same time we don't say if you get baptism wrong, according to us, in our book based on what scripture says, we don't believe that means that someone who gets baptism wrong is going to go to hell. Do we believe that they are saying something that's contrary to scripture? Yes. Do we believe that's a sin?

3:31 Absolutely. God forgives the sins of Christians, even the ones where we're stupid and we get things wrong because we ignore or we've never been taught properly. There are all sorts of reasons why someone who's been baptized, who's a Christian, who's confessing the Christian faith, is still going to misunderstand things, get things wrong. And it's important to separate errors, things where just no one's ever been taught the specific thing that scripture says. That's the case in a lot of our churches. As we just recently did the episodes on inheritance and on tithing and a few other things, you know. You know, not huge issues, but a number of guys have said, thank you for doing that. You know, jealousy is another one.

4:11 Guys who had never heard things put in those ways, in a number of cases, have started doing things differently in their own lives. Like, oh, I never heard anyone explain that teaching that way. That makes sense. I'm gonna treat my neighbor better now. I'm gonna do something that I wouldn't have done before because I didn't even think about it. And now that you explain that and you explain scripture, I want to do something good. And no one thinks they're saving themselves. It's just, hey, it's in the Bible. Somebody reminded me with this in the Bible. I believe what's in the Bible. I should go do what it says. That's it. And so no one's saving himself by doing stuff. We are saved because God gives us the gift of faith.

4:50 And so as we work through these specific questions today, this is a grab bag of all sorts of things, and some of them are very clearly separating men from either being Christian or not Christian, even within the survey data where we're specifically focusing on what self-identified Christians say. Many of their answers are very, very, very clearly not Christian, not by a million miles. I want to reaffirm that when we point to these things, the most that we can say, in the case of someone who's alive and we don't know what else is going on, we can say that such a person has no promise of salvation. That doesn't mean that they're damned. I we can't judge that. I don't know. Because there are things that you can get wrong and God will

5:34 forgive it. And we don't have a list of here's all the stuff you can get wrong, and God is still going to say you're a Christian. One of the things that we hope to get across as we're just discussing all these errors that exist inside numerous churches, is that Rather than us continuously pursuing the definition of the minimum viable Christianity, how about we focus on getting as much as we can from Scripture? That's our goal. That's the goal of Stone Choir. If God says all these things about all these different subjects, we should believe them all. As a Christian, even if you've never read the whole Bible, which frankly most people haven't, you can still as a Christian say, I believe everything in the Bible.

6:14 Because like any other book that has ever been compiled, if you confess that God is God and you confess that Scripture is God's word, then it naturally flows that your confession is that I believe every word of scripture, even if you haven't read it, because you know as a Christian with faith, it's not your intellectual ascent, it's not that I've reviewed all of these things and I've marked it up and I didn't find any errors, so then I can say yeah I agree with that. If you confess that God is God and that this is his word, you're naturally going to confess, I believe everything in there. And that is the framework that Christians have for approaching everything else. And then we have some of these disputes and discussions, and some

6:54 things are really hard. Some questions are tricky and they're tough. And some things, you know, a lot of people just get wrong. This happens in every other discipline in the universe, in the entire history of humanity. Guys get a lot of things wrong. Somebody gets it right, and hopefully eventually the right answer catches on. But it doesn't always. You know, look at things like nutrition. There's constantly a battle in the nutrition space where people keep discovering new things and forgetting old things and coming up with all these new scams and fads and it's almost impossible for most people to distinguish what should I be eating from what's killing me slowly or what's, you know, giving me cancer, some terrible thing.

7:33 If we can't even get that stuff right, it shouldn't be a surprise that we have trouble with Christian doctrine. And we see this beginning in the pages of scripture itself in the New Testament, Paul and Jesus and Peter and Stephen and Timothy, they're all dealing with errors among believers, where God says one thing in Scripture, the teacher, who's the faithful teacher, is saying what's in Scripture. And then when you look at what the people are responding with, they're getting things wrong. This it's always going to happen. We're humans, we're fallible, we're sinful, we're going to make mistakes. And so today's episode as we go through these individual line items, some of them are very clearly you cannot be Christian if you

8:16 believe this, and we'll highlight those. And a lot of the others are well, there's clearly a right answer here. And I hope to God that the people who get the answer wrong, that they're forgiven for that, and that God still accepts that they have a Christian faith, that He's given them again, because it's not us trying to get a high score. A quote that I've used number of times from a Lutheran pastor: sound doctrine is not about getting a high score or about winning arguments on the internet or anywhere else. It's about having more of the gifts that God has given us. And so when we have concerns about sound doctrine, it's not flexing of one denomination over another. That's not remotely the point.

8:56 The point is if God has revealed these things, we should want as much of that as possible. We shouldn't be concerned with can I get the least possible amount of Christianity out of the Bible and still get to heaven in the worst possible station in heaven because you're rewarded for what good you do and how faithful you are. You don't get there that way, but scripture's clear that there are rewards in heaven. And so you know if if you want to be jealous of greater glory, I don't not even sure if that's a good way to look at it, but if you do the right things, God will reward it. Now, is your purpose of doing the right things and believing the right things to get more rewards? I don't I I don't think it should be.

9:39 I think it should be focused on God. Like it he's God. He's the creator of the universe. Let's just listen and believe him. And I think one of the things is missing when we're talking about discussions of doctrine and what's in scripture is that We're very casual when we're sitting here reading the Bible and reading through verses and passages with the idea of saying, Well, I don't really believe that. Consider the fact that you're effectively doing that directly to Jesus' face. Because when he was physically present on earth, walking in a human body, his body, an eternal body now, he was talking face to face to men, and he was telling him things. And And the response that many of us have today is effectively

10:25 the response of the rich young man. He came up and he was keeping the entire law. He so he thought. And Jesus played along with that. It was obviously false, because as he said in the Sermon on the Mount, no one can keep the law perfectly, because if whatever's in your heart is what makes you guilty of the sin, and whether or not you commit the sin, you've committed the sin in your heart. So there's no such thing as man keeping the law perfectly, but Jesus didn't. Jesus didn't argue with the rich man and say, Well actually you that's not possible. He said in effect, okay, sell your belongings and come with me. Because he knew that in that man's heart, his wealth was his idol. And then whatever else he was getting right, he was unwilling

11:07 to listen to God, to listen to Jesus. And so that man wandered off, you know, probably in disgust or disillusionment or disappointment. He wandered off. He turned about face from Jesus and he walked away. That's effectively what we are doing when we read scripture and say, Well, I don't believe this. That's really what you're doing to God. God is speaking to you in the words of scripture and you're turning around saying, Yeah, I'm not into that. This is where our concern is when we're talking about whether or not someone has a promise of salvation. Because the man who cries out Lord, Lord, you know, you know how that passage ends. Jesus said to some of them, I never knew you, even though they were casting out demons or performing miracles in his name, even

11:51 though they had the right words, their confession was false because they did not believe in the true God. And rather than again worrying about what is the least amount of what God says that I can believe and still be saved, we should be greedy. We should be zealous for the word of God and say, I want as much of this as I can stuff in my face. Lord, just give it all to me. I want more. That should be our approach. And with that approach, even if you get things wrong, you're still going to be in so much better shape. And again, like we don't know among these various church bodies who's going to heaven, who's going to hell. In some cases, it's clear. The people who flat out deny that Jesus is God, definitionally those

12:33 people are not Christian. But then you look at some of the other answers given to very similar questions and they contradict themselves. And And that's the reason that God alone can judge a man's heart and judge those situations. We can't. And so we're not. We're not here to say that X, Y, and Z denominations are all going to hell. Because it's not true. There's always going to be Christians wherever the Word of God is preached among them. We've said before one of the miraculous things about the Constitution of Stone Choir's audience is that many of you are from very different backgrounds than Lutheranism, and yet you're agreeing with a lot of the same things that we're saying that are in the Bible.

13:12 And while generally we take a Lutheran approach overtly to these things, it's all rooted in scripture. It's not rooted in some particular version of Christianity. It's just what does God say? Let's believe it. That's it. It's a two-step process. Did God say it? Okay, I believe it. Anyone who agrees with that is usually going to land on the same page. And so as we work through these things, just keep in mind that we're not damning anyone, but we are going to damn some of the answers, and they'll be pretty clear to you just how bad they are. And that's the other purpose of this episode is that when people say that they're Christians, when they self-identify, it's almost meaningless. I hate to say that, but we've said before it's true.

13:57 This data is going to demonstrate why we hold that contention. We're not being mean. We're not trying to name-call people. It's literally these things are contrary to the Christian faith and they're on the lips of people who say they're Christians. Only God can sort that out. But we as believers and we as neighbors of these people who think they're believers should care very deeply about that. Because if someone says I'm a Christian, the best thing I think we can do in a lot of cases is to agree and amplify. Say, okay, you're a Christian, great. Let's talk about what the Bible says. And if they don't want to do that, you know what kind of Christian they are. They're not a Christian at all. If they have no appetite for God's word, okay, so it goes.

14:39 But even where someone is in error where they get some of these things wrong, in a lot of cases, if they say, I believe God, I believe in Jesus, I believe in the Bible, they've never read it, they've never heard it explained correctly. And when that happens to them face to face with someone talking to them, in a lot of cases they'll like, okay, that's what I believe. That is the essence of evangelism and it needs to happen inside our churches too. It needs to happen among our churches because some church bodies are in far worse shape than others. And as we wrap up this episode, that's really gonna be where we pivot to that when we're talking about oh, I want to spread the word of God and I want as many people many

15:20 people as possible to believe in God. Yes. Amen. Absolutely. Where do we find them? You don't find them six thousand miles away. You don't even find them a thousand miles away. You're gonna find them in your own town in some of the churches where people are showing up and they're not believing what's in the word of God. Those people, some of them are lost. Some of them say they're Christians and they're damned. And we all know if you believe the Bible, that's perfectly in accord with what God says happens. It's true that there are some people who say they are sons of God who are not. The same thing happened with the Jews. They said, you know, we're sons of Abraham, and God said that's not what that even means.

15:58 Like it was the faith of Abraham that was credited to him as righteousness, not his lineage, not even God's promise, but the promise was a promise of faith, and he kept that faith. And that is his righteousness, not his correct answers. So we're principally going to focus on two main groups and then a third group. The first will be evangelicals, mainline denominations, and then the Roman Catholic Church. I think we all know pretty much what evangelical means in the American context. If you don't know, basically it just means Bible-believing, more conservative. And then mainline is pretty much the churches that have rainbow flags. So in most cases, most of the mainline denominations A are dumpster

16:45 fires and a lot of cases are overtly not Christian. Nevertheless, there are some Christians among them, because people just stay with their denomination for inertia. It's a problem, it's one we need to work through, but it happens. And so the fact that a place like Elka for Lutherans or Pacusa for Presbyterians is a complete heretical dumpster fire, doesn't mean that there's zero Christians among them. But it means that almost all their answers are absolutely horrific. And so the contrast between those mainline denominations and the evangelicals will be the principal one. And then in some of these answers, we're also going to refer to the Roman Catholic answers simply to demonstrate, not to pick on

17:25 Roman Catholics in particular, but to illustrate when you look outside of the very rad-trad, very conservative culture, at least, diocese and parishes in Roman Catholicism, what you find is that Rome in this country is a mainline denomination in almost every case where Rome's answers differ from the mainline, from Elka and Pacoza and the Methodists and the other rainbow flag churches, where Rome doesn't agree with them, they're even worse. They're not better. They're not nearly as good in terms of what's provably the correct answer as the evangelicals. So we'll highlight that in some places, but for the most part when you hear mainline, really we'll probably just highlight when Rome is differing from them because it's gonna be the same.

18:13 And again, we're not just picking on those guys, it's just that that's one of the major separate groups that's outside of these other two big bodies of Protestantism. These answers are going to tell you what's going on in those churches. Regardless of what they have on their websites, regardless what you read on Twitter or anywhere else, this is the fruit downstream from the preaching in all of these places. To further couch this episode, I want to point out three Latin words that I suspect you probably already know by now, and those are notitia, ascensus, and fiducia, Notice, ascent, and trust. We are essentially speaking about the first two in this episode. And the reason I want to emphasize that is because everyone always

19:00 wants to focus on a couple of core issues in the Christian faith. Do you believe in the crucifixion? Do you believe in justification? That's not the fullness of the Christian faith. You cannot narrow down the Christian faith to just one or two things. Look at the creeds. The creeds state far more than one or two things. And so what we're dealing with primarily in this episode would be those first two issues, which is the notice essentially means what is the content of the Christian faith. What are the tenets? What are the beliefs that constitute the actual Christian faith? And then there is the ascent to that, the conviction that those things are true. And so in focusing on those, we can compare Across denominations to

19:52 some degree, but more generally, as Woe was saying, we can focus on the state of the churches primarily in the US, although this is also true for many other parts of the world, it's even worse than most of the rest of the world. But this shows the reality on the ground of what people who claim to be Christian believe, and in some cases those who claim to be the more conservative Supposedly traditional Bible-believing Christians, and you will see that does not always correlate with right belief, even on issues that are abundantly clear in scripture. And so as Woe was saying, and as we'll emphasize later in the episode, looking at these data, looking at this information, should help to guide us in determining what we need to do as Christians,

20:42 where we should be expending our efforts, to whom we should be reaching out, and sharing the Christian faith, because in some cases, the man who needs evangelized may be the one who is claiming to be Christian But if you scratch a little deeper than the surface, you'll realize he's not a Christian at all. Because he doesn't have any of these. He doesn't even know what the content of the Christian faith is. He just says that he's Christian, and maybe even attends a church, we can debate whether or not it's an actual church. But just because someone says, I am a Christian, and even if he also attends church, that's That does not necessarily mean that he is actually a Christian. The distinction there, and this is one of those issues that is

21:30 often raised by atheists and others, particularly on social media, they try to say it's the no true Scotsman fallacy. The problem with that is if you are Scottish, you're Scottish biologically, you're Scottish by blood. That's not a matter of believing certain things. You are or you are not. The same is true if you pick a species. You either are a dog or you are not a dog. It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of essence, it's a matter of being that thing. When it comes to something like Christianity, it is a matter of believing the tenets of Christianity, the tenets of the ideology. And so, for instance, you can't say that you are a libertarian if you believe none of the things, although in the case of

22:18 libertarians none of them agree, but you can't say that you're a libertarian if you disagree with absolutely every tenet of what that ideology advances. The same is true for Christianity. There is a content to the faith. And in order to be a Christian, there is some minimum somewhere. We're not going to find that minimum today, and we would actually say you shouldn't even attempt to find that minimum. Because the goal should never be to be minimally Christian. The goal is not to just barely squeak over the finish line as it were. I've used the example before the illustration of a cliff. The goal is not to come as close to the cliff as possible, which would be to believe as few things as possible about

23:04 the about the Christian faith without believing one too few and falling over. The goal is to avoid the cliff, to stay away from the cliff, to be a faithful Christian. And so all of these issues we are going to discuss today matter. Are they all absolutely essential to salvation? The answer is no. But we cannot give you a number where, oh, you have to believe X out of Y in order to be saved, or you can't believe all of these and none of these. There are ones where that's very easy. There are some questions where it is a simple matter of if you believe this, you're damned, or if you don't believe this, you're damned. But for many of these, that is not the case. What we are saying with regard to that is do not have

23:55 that mindset. Do not look for where the little line is where, well if I get as close as possible, that's exactly wrong. And quite frankly, it's sinful to be looking for that line. You want to avoid that. You want to have the fullness of the Christian faith, so you want to get all of these correct, not because it is absolutely essential, but because one, it is your duty as a Christian, and two, there are blessings from God From God. And yes, there are blessings for getting things correct as well. It's not just doing the right things in life. God does reward those who believe correctly about Him. That is again part of your duty as a Christian. And so these are important questions, some more important than others.

24:43 But that tendency to want to find the line, that line drawing obsession that can be particularly pronounced sometimes in our circles on the political right. It should not have a place here. That's not what we are discussing, that's not the point of the episode, it's not the point of the Christian life. What God has said is true, and we should believe it. And so there are correct answers to all of these questions. We should want to get all of them right, and we should want to help our neighbor get all of them right. We should want to go out and evangelize those in our communities who get these questions wrong, who've maybe even not been taught the correct answers, because as we'll see with some of these questions,

25:31 the respondents probably didn't even understand what was being asked in a full sense of the term. That's a problem That's not just a problem with the state of our churches, it's a problem with the state of our teachers in our churches and outside our churches, and the fact that many Christians are clearly not reading scripture. Because some of these, if you read scripture, you are not going to get them wrong. So this is an episode about a bunch of data, as I mentioned. These are from two studies. The links will be in the show notes. I highly encourage anyone who's interested to go click through and dig around yourself. We're just scratching the surface on the data. We've cherry-picked some questions and go directly to our thesis, which is

26:17 that most of the people who say they're Christians are not Christians in the United States. And that's a big deal. And that will matter in in future episodes, but you know, as we made the case in the apostate episode, obviously it can happen. Here's where we're seeing it on the ground. So So we're gonna try as much as possible not to give raw numbers because it's a podcast. You can't see charts and graphs and trying to keep a bunch of numbers in your head is crazy. So visualization, it's entirely on the web. It's self-serve. Go have a ball. It's really interesting data. Like I said, there's there's a lot more there than we have any interest in covering here that will raise a whole bunch of different questions that are not on the table today.

26:57 You will be shocked and horrified at how bad some of these things are. The first question that we're gonna tackle is this is the this first set is all gonna be from the Pew data from twenty fourteen. First question is belief in God. And the answers are absolutely believe, fairly certain God exists, not certain God exists. Evangelicals, about ninety percent, absolutely certain. About ten percent fairly certain. So virtually no evangelicals deny that God is real. Good news. Mainline drops to two-thirds are absolutely certain, and a quarter are fairly certain, and about four or five percent, not certain at all. So already there's a huge gap between ninety percent and two thirds just between the evangelicals and those who are, you know, the mainline,

27:47 the rainbow Christians. Probably use that term here just for the sake of clarity. And then Rome, sixty-four percent also two-thirds. So the absolute only only two thirds of Roman Catholics and main lines believe that God exists. And then another quarter of them are fairly certain. That by itself is catastrophic. That's right off the top. If you can't say you're absolutely certain that God exists, as I said, I don't see how you can possibly have any promise of salvation if you doubt that God exists. Because that doubt, everything else that could possibly, every other question that could possibly arise in the Christian context is necessarily downstream from you having a creator. A man who doubts that can't get anything else right.

28:35 So th this is the first of every case where the evangelicals are gonna be as close to Christianity as possible. The main lines are going to be some flavor of dumpster fire. And then Rome is going to be either in the same dumpster or in an adjacent one. And you even have two percent with each of the mainline Protestants and the Roman Catholics who say they do not believe in God. Not just that they aren't certain, not just that they don't have a fairly certain belief. They literally answered they do not believe in God One in fifty mainline Protestants and one in fifty Roman Catholics in the United States does not even believe in God. That's absolutely insane. The idea that you would even claim to be a Christian and

29:27 then deny a belief in God. But that's the state of affairs today with regard to the to the mainline churches and the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. And that's not even including the percentages that say they don't know, which is as bad as saying you don't believe in God, if you say I don't know if there's a God. Everything else, as well said, is downstream from that. If you don't believe in God, how does any of the rest of this make any coherent sense whatsoever, why would you believe anything in the Bible if there's no God? If there's no God, if the Bible is not written by God, then you may as well believe the menu from your local Thai restaurant, or a random science fiction book, it's just as compelling if

30:18 there's no God. The reason we believe in the Word of God is because it's the Word of God. So fundamentally you have to start with a belief in God. And notably for the evangelicals, it is zero percent for anything below not too certain. Which isn't great, that's one percent there, but there are no respondents who say they do not believe in God or they don't know. And the absence of that data is important because a church should be unwelcoming to someone who denies God. Not in the sense of being actively hostile, but they should feel like they don't belong there in the sense that I don't believe anything that's here. I don't believe in God. How can someone who doesn't believe in God go to a church?

31:06 They can only go to a church where it's perfectly alright not to believe in God and where they're hearing things that are consistent with that. The next few questions are kind of about the Christian life, not so much about belief. But they're useful because they're an indication of even the possibility of spiritual health. And so the first one is attendance. How often do you attend church? The evangelicals once a week is about sixty percent, once or twice a month or a few times a year is about thirty percent. It's like a two to one ratio of all the time, sporadically or somewhat often, and only about one in ten said seldom or never. Contrast that with mainline, where instead of sixty percent, it was

31:48 one third at ten once a week. That's a huge difference statistically. That's basically virtually a two to one ratio of going once a week evangelicals versus mainline. And then the once or twice a month goes up from thirty percent for the evangelicals to over forty percent from the mainlines. And then a a quarter of the main lines seldom or never attend church at all. And Rome is right there with them. They're 40, 40, 20. 20% of Roman Catholics never attend church. And when you understand some of the specifics of their doctrines, that makes sense because they're Roman Catholic. If you are already in the club actually going to mass, some of them come to the conclusion that they don't need to do

32:33 that. So it's a significant difference from the evangelicals. No, these are again, these are all churches that are teaching all these various things. And these are very coarse groups because I said in the intro, evangelical, like Pew correctly separates LCMS and Wells from ELCA. They correctly separate OPC and PCA from Pacusa, PC USA. So when the main lines they put the libs in the mainline bucket and they put the conservatives in the evangelical bucket. And even with the evangelicals, not even two thirds actually attend church every week. I think that's kind of wild. The The next one has to do with group prayer and group study. So it's basically you know in the either on Sunday or during the week, apart from just attending the church service, how often

33:25 do you get together with other Christians? Now most cases it's probably gonna be something like Bible class on Sunday morning. Not necessarily, maybe it's something in the midweek. Evangelicals, nearly half do it once a week. Uh over twenty percent do it once or twice a month, and about a third never do it. That kind of jives with my observation over time. There's some people just will never come to any of those things. Some people show up occasionally and usually about half of people get to church show up, you know, pretty regularly, almost every Sunday or every Sunday. Mainlines goes from almost half to less than 20% do it once a week. Another one-fifth, another twenty percent, once or twice a month.

34:09 Sixty percent of mainlines never do any other study or group prayer or anything like that with others. That's a huge difference in the Christian life. The idea of gathering together with other believers, apart from the church service proper, which is vital, but getting together with other Christians where you're being taught, where you're discussing, where you're praying, any sort of engagement with your faith community. That like that's a thing. Your brothers in Christ should be there with you and for you. And talking these things through is the mutual consolation of the brethren. It's how we reinforce good teaching. And it's the opportunity for good and faithful teachers to reinforce many

34:49 of the things that will simply never come up in a Sunday morning sermon. Because the sermon is not nearly as long as a class is going to be in most cases at something that some denominations still stick to. They used to be that you know Lutheran sermons were an hour, two hours in some cases. Now if a pastor goes beyond fifteen minutes, people start tapping their watches. It's very conspicuous for some people coming into Lutheran churches if they've experienced longer sermons elsewhere. I think we're on the wrong end of that stick. I don't think an hour-long sermon necessarily makes sense, but you know what? That's an audiophra. There's not a prescribed amount of time. However, the investment that the individual Christian has and I want more

35:30 is absolutely a fruit of their spirit and is going to be a fruit of the teaching in a congregation. And even for the evangelicals, that one-third who never or seldom participate in these things, that's abysmal. But for the Roman Catholics, it's two-thirds. And part of that, of course, is going to be some of the doctrinal and structural differences. There are fewer classes in the Roman Catholic churches than certainly some of the evangelical churches. But But two-thirds of Christians, Roman Catholics in this case, never engaging in prayer or scripture study or religious education, which are the the three categories under this question, that really does bring into question the seriousness of that faith.

36:23 Because if you are a Christian, there are certain things that are going to flow from that living faith. You are going to want to read the Word of God. You are going to want to pray, not just because you're commanded to pray, but because you're given the opportunity to pray. God tells you that He hears your prayers and He will answer your prayers. And if you believe that, you're going to pray, and we see similar things with the frequency of prayer. Now, the frequency of prayer thankfully is higher than this participation and scripture study, with 60% of Catholics actually praying at least daily. I imagine part of that is the ritual of the rosary and the prayers like that, which I'm not saying that it's bad to

37:13 have a ritual when it comes to prayer, because obviously that's going to increase the frequency with which one prays. That's an important part of establishing that habit, which prayer should indeed be a habit. I would disagree with some of the content, of course, but that is a tangential topic. But for evangelicals it's eighty percent. Pray at least daily. It should be one hundred percent. If you call yourself an evangelical Christian, if you say you're a Bible believing traditional Christian, you should pray every day. It doesn't mean that every single day you will pray all of the daily offices as it were. You're not going to necessarily do your morning prayers and afternoon and evening. But at some point during the day, you should say a

38:00 prayer. Even if it's just the Lord's prayer, it's a good place to start. So perhaps some of those who are listening have had problems in their prayer life or establishing that habit. As we have recommended before, say the Lord's Prayer before every meal. It's an easy place to start. It takes barely any time to say it. You probably already know the prayer. If you don't, it takes minutes to memorize. Prayer should be a part of your Christian life. And we see in these data that it's really not for a very large percentage of Christians. For the main line it's about half, say they pray daily, and then it tapers off from there. Again, this should be 100% for those who claim to be Christian, for those who are Christian, it should be one hundred percent.

38:56 Prayer is part of the Christian life. And again, it's not because we're saying that oh works save you, and prayer is a work. No. These things flow from a living faith. And so when you see this sort of behavior, when you see this lack of response, you start to question whether or not the faith is living. You look to all of the warnings in scripture about a living faith versus a dead faith, or what is a good tree? Well, a living faith is a good tree, it's going to produce fruit. The fruit it produces is good works. Well, one of the things it produces is prayer. So this is a very good metric. For how seriously these groups take their faith. And when it comes to the mainline Protestants, about half don't really

39:50 take it very seriously at all. It's a little better, again for the Roman Catholic sixty percent. That's still not very good. These are not the numbers that we want to see among our Christian brothers, those who claim to be Christian at least We should want to see the actual fruits of a living faith in those who are saying they are Christian. And so when we see, as we've mentioned before, these calls to go overseas and send money all these various places and you know, oh we can go and build wells in Africa, whatever it happens to be. We have millions of our own people right next door who are claiming to be Christian, but in reality probably are not. Those are the men we need to be evangelizing.

40:42 We need to be reaching out to those God has placed in our lives, our literal neighbors. Because again, just because someone says he's Christian, dig a little deeper. See what he actually believes, see what he actually does in response to that claim of being a Christian. The next question in the pew study we want to highlight is the source of right and wrong in a person's life. And they broke it into categories of religion or philosophy and reason, common sense and science. I'm just gonna lump everything in either religion or philosophy, common sense science as one. Because it's really either philosophy or it's man-made. That's really those all those are saying this is a human creation. We did it.

41:31 Which is a big problem when you're talking about morality. Because if your source of right and wrong is a man instead of an eternal God, well, that's the next question about absolute right and wrong. When is something always wrong versus And you know, it could go either way. and you know there's an ambiguity to that question because maybe there's situations where it's simply not clear, but that's usually where people are gonna go scurrying to paper over their sins. I think one of the best examples of that is abortion, infanticide, murdering infants in the womb. People want to say, well, it's usually wrong, but sometimes you just gotta kill that baby. Now he was coming right at me. No. Anytime you kill a baby, you're a murderer.

42:18 You're the worst type of murderer imaginable. It's a sacrifice to Satan when that's done. And the idea that, oh well, there's some extenuating circumstance where it's okay. No, this isn't we're not talking about the medical case where the mother The mother and the child are both going to die, and the only thing the doctor can do is save the mother's life. Those edge cases do not inform the moral question. So in the question of where do you get your right and wrong, among evangelicals, sixty percent say the right and wrong comes from religion, which would obviously be Christianity. And mainline Romanists say thirty percent. Everything else, the other forty percent for evangelicals say man made, and

43:01 seventy percent for the main lines for the Rainbow Coalition says it's for man. That's wild. If only thirty percent of these non-evangelicals Believe that right and wrong comes from God. It really kind of explains everything else downstream, doesn't it? That's crazy. The idea, the morality, the right and wrong are something that is it's a philosophical question or a scientific question. As soon as you crack that door open, there's no limit to the man-made wickedness that is going to enter into people's lives. And the in the case of the absolute morality, it's fifty-fifty for evangelicals and one third to two thirds for the others, or one third. Say it's very clearly right and wrong. Evangelicals fifty-fifty.

43:48 The rest of it is situational or could it be either? That's crazy. Only half of the evangelicals, you know, the the good guys, the conservatives, only half of them believe that morality is always absolute and fully fully two thirds of the mainline rainbow papists think that that's fine. It's whatever, man. It's situational. You don't you don't have to get bogged down in right and wrong all the time if you need it for you know for flexibility. Once you understand that these are the answers in the hearts of people who self-identify as Christian, a lot of other things start to make sense. Just the sheer fact that amongst the mainline Protestants and the Roman Catholics, 50% say that common sense is their guidance for right and

44:36 wrong is insane. On one level, it doesn't mean anything. How is it that common sense can possibly guide your moral decisions? What is the source of that common sense? On what are you grounding this? Because bear in mind, religion is one of the options here, so if they say common sense instead of religion, they're choosing common sense to the exclusion of religion with regard to their source for moral guidance. It's an absolutely absurd statement, and yet fully fully fifty percent for the mainline Protestants and the Roman Catholics say no common sense is my source of morality. It's my guidance on what's right and wrong, not religion, not Christianity, not this faith I supposedly profess, no just common sense, what I

45:26 happen to think. And a full ten per cent, surprisingly, perhaps more of the Roman Catholics than the mainline Protestants, a full 10% say science is my source of morality. As if science has anything to say with regard to morality. Science is, at best, amoral. It provides no guidance whatsoever for right and wrong. It can inform the ultimate decision on what is right and wrong, insofar as, for instance, it can help you determine ethical issues with regard to medical treatment. But ultimately, the decision is a religious one, because ultimately it is Christianity that guides what is right or wrong. You can gain information from the others, but the decision rests with religion. And so the fact that you have two thirds saying that

46:22 other things are the source of morality instead of the Christian faith. It really tells you the dire situation of both the mainline Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The next question is how frequently are you engaged in scripture, how often are you reading the Bible? Evangelicals, two thirds say at least weekly, and about twenty percent say once in a while and twenty percent say never, which is by itself awful. Like that's for twenty percent of people who are the conservative Christians to never open their Bible as just bonkers. And again, does that mean they're going to hell? No. Does it mean that their faith is at best on life support? Absolutely. What are you doing with your life if you never touch scripture?

47:13 And so that's just the evangelicals. When you look at the main lines, instead of being two thirds at least weekly mainline three and ten thirty percent and romanists are a quarter one and four so it's like I said the only time the Romanists differ from the main lines from the the rainbow coalition is when they're even worse. It's particularly understandable in the case of scripture because when you understand Romanist doctrine, it is the magisterium and tradition and then scripture. And so as long as they have some of the other things, scripture is less important to them definitionally. Now it's not to say that it's less important in the lives of certain individuals. Clearly, twenty five percent of Roman Catholics are reading their Bible at

47:54 least weekly. Great. That's a good thing. I hope that they understand it. I I hope it's in English and not in Latin, unlike their mass. And then when you look in, you know, once the the so the evangelicals occasionally or never are basically 20% each main lines, a quarter once in a while will read their Bibles, and nearly half never read their Bibles. That's huge. That's more than double the evangelicals. The main lines just never crack their Bible open. So it's make makes perfect sense while you see the rainbow flags and all the other crap, because what do they care? Their source of morality is common sense. And common sense says the rainbow flags are better for my tax deductibility. And then Romanus once in a while, 20%, never over 50%.

48:39 So again, you know, they don't need the Bible because they have their magisterium, they have their tradition, the Bible, like whatever. Someone else can explain that to them. Not a good place to be for any Christian. And yet it's kind of the historical norm for them. It's one of the things that the Protestant Reformation was fought over. The Reformation was not intended to be a battle, but it became a battle because Rome for centuries had been murdering men who tried to read their Bibles. It was illegal to for you to possess one in the vernacular. Men were executed for that stuff. So that hangover from five, six, seven centuries ago is still with them today. These errors that creep into churches, they'll stick around for a long

49:20 time after anyone remembers the history, because the pattern of life, once it's established, it just sticks with you. And it's just what everybody does, and it becomes common sense. And when that happens, why would you go looking for anything else? I already have everything figured out. Why would I open my Bible? And you still see some of the more obnoxious apologists for the papacy, particularly on social media, defending not reading the Bible, which undoubtedly plays into this, because as Woe said, there is the idea that will no, I need someone to interpret this for me. I would encourage those who believe that to take a step back and look at the logic of what is being said there. If someone else needs to interpret scripture for you, and I'm not

50:05 saying that Saying that teachers are unnecessary because of course teachers are a good thing. That's what we're doing here, we're teaching. However, what a teacher says, you still have to understand. So when you say that scripture needs to be interpreted, what you are really asserting is that God is less clear in His communication with man than is man. God gave us His word so that we can understand it. He gave us his word because it contains things he wants us to know, things he wants us to do, things he wants us not to do. God is capable of communicating in such a way that we humans can understand what He communicated. And so it is vitally important for Christians to read Scripture. More than half of any group claiming to be Christian, not reading

50:57 scripture at all, is unconscionable. It's simply anti Christian. Yes, you still need teachers, yes, it's important to still attend those services and to attend classes or otherwise study the scripture, but you need that foundation. You have to have actually read the scriptures yourself. That's part of this. If you were going to discuss any book at a book club, you would probably read it first. You should most certainly read the Bible, if you are a Christian. God gave us a book. God wrote a book for us, transmitted it through a number of men down through the centuries, but He gave us a book containing the things again that He wants us to know, do not do Why would we not read that? The idea that anyone should avoid reading the Bible is crazy.

52:00 What does Scripture say about Scripture? Scripture says that it's necessary. Scripture says that it prepares us for various things. Basically most things in life, particularly being a Christian, it is the content of the Christian faith, and all of these questions we're discussing today, perhaps the numbers would be better on a lot of them if this particular number weren't so bad. If men were actually reading the scripture as they should be. Because even for the evangelical Protestants, even for the group that is the best at this, as Woe said, 20%, seldom or never read the scriptures, and seven percent is several times a year which maybe we can doubt the memory of those who say, Well, I read it a couple times last year.

52:57 So it's basically a quarter who virtually never read the scripture, even amongst the most Christian group in the United States. That's simply unacceptable. This is an enormous problem in all of our churches. This is not just a problem in the mainline Protestants or the Roman Catholics. Because those numbers that I just gave, that we've gone over a couple times now, are the best numbers. These are the most Christian among Christians, who still are barely reading their Bible in many cases. And these individuals in this particular group don't even have the argument that some of the Roman Catholics have that the Magisterium told me don't read it, or they said they'll interpret it for me. That's not the case for evangelicals.

53:48 One of the core beliefs amongst evangelical Christians, as Wo said in the introduction, is believing the Bible. If you believe the Bible you should probably read it so you know what's in it. You don't read it so that you can believe it. You believe it, therefore you should read it, and you believe it because it's the word of God. So the fact that we have a quarter of those who most firmly affirm, who most firmly believe, that the Bible is the Word of God, are not reading it, is an insane state of affairs. And yet we still have these individuals claiming to be staunch Christians, but not doing any of the things that Christians are supposed to do. This next question answers where some of that gap comes from, And

54:39 that is the question of interpreting scripture. The first category of answers is scripture is the word of God, literally. The second is the word of God, but not all of it. And the third is it's not the word of God at all. And so evangelicals, the superstars of Christianity, only 55% say it's literally the Word of God. Another third say it's the Word of God, but not all of it. And twelve percent deny that Scripture is the Word of God. So that's going to be the bulk of those who don't read it all the time. Why would they? If scripture's not breathed out by God, yeah, why would you waste your time? Maybe there are books like you enjoy Cosmo or something more. You don't why would you waste your time with your Bible?

55:20 That's what we're talking about there. So like this is in evangelical churches. These are the these are the hardcore conservative Christian bodies, not the conservative Christians among them, but again, that's the problem. When you're looking at the numbers game, I'm not gamifying salvation, but that's the term for it. When you're just looking at raw numbers, this is what we see. The most conservative bodies, one and eight, don't believe scripture is the word of God. They don't believe it's scripture. They think it's the Bible. They think it's a collection of books written by men, and maybe there's wisdom and stuff, but it's not breathed out by God. And so contrasting the evangelicals, the top out of fifty-five percent believing

56:02 it's literal, mainlines, less than a quarter. And Rome, also right at a quarter, believing it's literally the word of God. Twenty-five percent of mainlines and Roman Catholics believe scripture is breathed out by God. That's completely catastrophic. And everything downstream from that, elsewhere in their lives is a function of that denial of scripture. Now Rome has a get out of jail free card that they got the Pope and other stuff, so they need to worry about it. The main lives, they don't like God is he's a wax nose. God is whatever they need him to be to feel good about themselves. And so, you know, for the main lines, a quarter believe it's literal. 40% believe it's the word of God, but not all of

56:45 it. Rome is it the same. And then over two-thirds of both deny that Scripture is the word of God. Over two thirds of mainline, over two-thirds of Roman Catholics expressly deny Scripture. They say this is not breathed out by God. That is apostasy. To deny that Scripture is from God is to deny the Christian faith. That is to say that more than one-third of those in Rome and mainline denominations, just by this one question, have no promise of salvation. Are they all damned? I don't know. I hope not. But where do they go from there? If they deny scripture, where are they getting anything? And so And so this starts to make sense of the the answer about morality. Well of course they need to get their morality from TV, from

57:31 common sense, from science. They can't get it from scripture 'cause it's just made up by God. Or it's it's made up by man, it's not from God at all. That's all this stuff all these things are interlocking pieces, which is why we're going through a number of these different questions, because by itself, one question doesn't illuminate everything. It certainly doesn't tell you in most cases if someone's saved. But when you start to see the questions shining lights back at each other, suddenly the whole picture becomes clear. It's like, well, yeah, of course they don't believe this because they deny this. And that is when it becomes clear that we're not just talking about a few errors, but we're talking about a significant portion of

58:09 many major church bodies in the United States that simply aren't Christian. Again, we're not declaring damnation. We're just saying if there's Christianity here, there's no evidence for it. It's like pointing a telescope at the moon. You don't see anything moving. There are no heat signatures. You can state there's no life there. And then you go and you look and like, yep, there's nothing here. If there are no signs of life, that is itself proof of the absence of life. Now, spiritual life is slightly different in that only God can actually see it and discern it, but you can detect it. I don't need to judge your heart to know if you're lying about God. I don't need to judge your heart to know that you're living

58:51 a life that's profligate and wicked. And some of the other questions we'll get into get into some of those specifics where these people that deny scripture, of course, they're gonna deny that morality is fixed, that it's absolute. That is license. Once you've done that, that's your permission slip from whom? Not from God, because there's basically no God. You have a permission slip from yourself and from reason and from Neil deGrasse Tyson, that you can do whatever doesn't hurt anybody else. Do as thou wilt. That's kind of where we see a lot of people in our churches today. Not necessarily our churches, probably most people listening to Stone Choir are members of these bad congregations. And they're bad congregations, even in the most conservative evangelical bodies, there

59:35 are horrible, wildly left wing congregations that are openly enemies of God. There's no no one gets a clean bill of health here. So when we call out specifics, it's just like this is an example we should all flee from. And when you f when you flee to another church body and you find the same crap in smaller numbers, you gotta put out that fire because it's going to take people to hell with it. As Will mentioned in a recent episode Being a Christian, if you don't believe it's true, is an absolutely insane choice. If you don't believe that Scripture is the Word of God, why on earth would you be a Christian? It isn't going to make your life easier, in virtually all cases. It is going to make your life more difficult, significantly more difficult,

1:00:26 in some cases. It's going to prevent you from doing some of the things the flesh tells you it would like to do. And well if there's no God, as we showed many believe, and if the Bible isn't the word of God, then why not just go do those things? Hedonism makes a lot more sense, insofar as there's any sense whatsoever in a meaningless universe, if that's what you happen to believe. Why would you be a Christian if you don't believe any of the things Christianity teaches, any of the tenets of the religion, it doesn't make any sense. Yes, there's that force of inertia, particularly when it comes to some of the mainline churches, but particularly in the case of the Roman Catholics. You'll get those who will say, Well, my family has been

1:01:16 Roman Catholic for fifteen generations or twenty or however long it happens to be, as far back as you can trace. But if you don't believe any of the things that Christianity actually teaches, why on earth are you still going to church? Why are you saying that you're a Christian? There's no point. It doesn't make anything better for you. In fact, the only thing it can potentially do is if you're wrong, it's going to make things worse for you. Because falsely claiming that you are a Christian is worse than just not being one. Just as it is worse to commit an evil act with full knowledge than it is to commit it in ignorance. And so if you don't believe that Scripture is the Word of God, if you don't believe there even is a God, why would

1:02:12 you claim to be a Christian? Yet that's exactly what we see a significant percentage of those, particularly in the mainline Protestant and the Roman Catholic Church, doing. It's an absolutely insane state of affairs. Yes, it's terrible at the same time. Because we have those who are ostensibly brothers and sisters in Christ who don't believe any of the things that the Christian faith teaches any of the things you have to believe to actually be a Christian. But it's also just wildly illogical. There's no reason to be a Christian if it isn't true. The reason that we are Christians, the reason we do the podcasts, the reason we cover these topics is because we believe these things. If we didn't believe them, what we're doing, what we're saying, all

1:03:03 of this would be insane. What is the benefit of sticking out your neck? Because that's really what you're doing, if it isn't for the truth? There isn't one. It is behavior that is worthy of being committed to a mental institution. And yet that's what we see with a significant percentage of those in our churches. This is an abject failure of teaching. We have pastors who are not doing their duties. We have teachers who are not doing their duty. Apparently, teaching is just not a thing in many churches in the United States, because these are issues that should be addressed in the first class for a new member, or the first Bible study the person attends? How can you possibly attend a church that is supposedly faithful

1:04:02 and not believe that the Bible is the Word of God? How can you arrive at that conclusion? We have a great deal of faithless pastors and faithless teachers in our churches, and they need to be removed. Because they are the reason that this sort of thing is happening. These numbers are the result of wolves in sheep's clothing. And yes, there are souls on the line here. Those who are taught incorrectly, or maliciously in some cases, and wind up believing these lies as Wo said, they have no promise of salvation. It doesn't mean they're necessarily damned. But is that the standard you want? Is that the sort of comfort you want to give? Is that the position in which you want to find yourself or others? Well you aren't necessarily damned?

1:05:04 I think we would probably hope for something a little more comforting than that. And if you don't believe the Bible is the word of God The word of God, and if you don't believe God even exists, you don't have a promise of salvation. The next two questions go directly to the context of salvation. The first one is do you believe in heaven and do you believe in hell? And hilariously the numbers aren't the same in both cases. I'm just gonna give the don't believes 'cause it's a very simple question and it's either do you believe or you don't believe or you don't know. And if you don't know, that's the same as saying you don't believe. So it's the same thing. Among evangelicals, ten percent, slightly over ten percent, don't believe in heaven.

1:05:50 None of them are going to heaven. If you don't believe in heaven, you're not saved. These are both in the creeds, these are both in the definition of Christianity that every Christian must accept because it's straight from scripture. If you don't believe that there's a heaven, you're going to go to hell. So ten percent of evangelicals don't believe in heaven, twenty percent of the main lines don't believe in heaven, fifteen percent of Roman Catholics don't believe in heaven. Seriously? Again, how is that even possible? As Corey just said, they're being eaten and devoured by wolves in their churches. No Christian can possibly go to a church and believe this if it's a Christian church. Any Christian church is going to make it unavoidable that there's a

1:06:37 heaven and that there's a hell, also in the creeds, also in scripture. And so evangelical denial of hell is 20%. Mainline denial of hell doubles 40%. 40% of the rainbow people say there's no hell. Bad news for them on judgment day, 100% of them are gonna end up in it. This is a do not pass go question. You can't say that there's no hell and have any promise of salvation. It's not gonna happen. And Rome is right behind him at 30 seven percent. It's basically four.% for both main lines and for Rome. And then obviously the believe is the flip side of that. On one hand, it's bonkers that you have eighty to ninety percent saying that heaven does exist, and yet only sixty to eighty percent saying that hell exists.

1:07:25 That clearly shows that a lot of people hold a mercenary faith. They're Christian because they want to go to heaven, but they don't believe in that hell stuff. That's not their God. Their God doesn't do hell. He doesn't do damnation. There's no judgment from their God. Bad news from them. Because on judgment day, on the judgment throne is the judge of the world. That's Jesus Christ. He's sitting there judging us. And that's good news for Christians because we know that our robes are washed white in his blood that was sacrificed on the cross. Everyone else doesn't have white robes. They have robes that are stained filthy with the sins that we all accumulate throughout our entire lives, beginning the moment we're conceived.

1:08:09 Without Christ's sacrifice, you don't get heaven and you do get hell because those are the only two options. This also excludes annihilationism. There's some folks that try to split the difference. They decide to say, well, yeah, if you're good or if you're Christian, you go to heaven. If you were bad, if you weren't a Christian, well, you just vanish. You just disappear from the universe. Scripture is very clear that that is not true. It is a definition of the Christian faith that there is a hell that was prepared for Satan and the goats are going to be thrown in with him. It's what God says, it's what he promises. If you believe in God, you have to believe that. Like this isn't bad news. This like when Christians say these things, people like, oh wow, it's

1:08:52 fire and brimstone. It's literally just in the Bible. Is it fire and brimstone if you're on the wrong side of it? Well, yeah. So the solution is get on the right side of it. Accept Christ's sacrifice for you. Receive the gift of faith. God wants everyone to have faith. God offers it to everyone. We have to reject him continuously for our entire lives. And a lot of people are clearly pulling it off. And they're pulling it off even inside churches that call themselves Christian. This is a good point to emphasize something Wo just mentioned in passing. The Creeds. We've gone over the importance of the Creeds before, but perhaps in this episode more than any other, the vital importance of the creeds

1:09:38 is demonstrated with almost every question. Because the creeds address most of these issues If you recite the creeds and if your pastor properly teaches the creeds, because that should certainly be part of it, you shouldn't just recite the creeds and then oh I'm good, I'm done. There should be teaching about what exactly each part of the creeds means, references to scripture, and we have that information. We can add that in the show notes. But the creeds are a vital part of Christianity because they teach the basics of the faith. And when you recite the creeds every week, you are reciting that faith, you are reinforcing your belief in that faith, you are stating what it is to be a Christian, what is the content of

1:10:30 the Christian faith. And so some of these errors, it would be very difficult to continue believing these, to persist in these particular errors, if you are reciting the creeds. And that's why it's such a problem that certain churches have abandoned the creeds. In some of the more egregious cases, some churches have altered the creeds. I know some of the mainline churches, the more demonic, quite frankly, ones, have changed it in order to fit their ideology. If your church does not use the creeds, you should probably consider asking your pastor why. With what statement in the creeds do you disagree? And if he has an answer to that, and if he gives you a part of the creed with which he disagrees, you need

1:11:20 to find a new church. Because every single thing in the creeds is from Scripture. They are simply creedal forms of what is taught in Scripture. They are formulated as a creed, so they can be memorized, so they can be recited in the service. They're not new doctrine, they're not reformulations, they are simply a statement of what is in Scripture, and so a Christian cannot disagree with the creeds. And we can see the consequence in certain denominations of abandoning the creeds. There are errors that creep in that are explicitly addressed in the Creeds, that would not creep in if the creeds were still used. The last few questions from the Pew survey have to do with moral questions in secular life.

1:12:19 Uh the first is on abortion. I don't think there's a lot to say about this, just give you the raw numbers. Evangelicals, one third believe that abortion, the murder of infants in the womb, should be legal. One third say, yeah, go for it. Kill that baby. Mainline, it's nearly two thirds. In Rome, it's fifty fifty. Does someone who wants sacrificing babies to Satan have a promise of salvation? No. no, they don't. That's not even table stakes for Christianity. And it's not that we need to add abortion to the creeds. It's that even the pagans know better than this. Even pagans have to have gone very far down the path of absolute satanic abject depravity before they're gonna start killing their babies.

1:13:10 And today it's been normalized in our society, the point that among evangelicals, among the conservatives, forget what the church bodies teach. The individuals sitting in the pews or not in the pews, depending, those who identify as Christians, one third of evangelicals say kill the baby, two thirds of the mainline say kill the baby, half of Roman Catholics say kill the baby. Even though you know Rome is is putatively anti-abortion and thank God for it because at least that dicta from Rome is enough to keep some people in line. You know even at that half of them are like yeah kill the baby. The next one is sodomy. Should it be accepted? Should it be discouraged? Should we not care? A third of evangelical, say accept it, that's great.

1:14:00 Over half, so they should be discouraged, and about ten percent are just totally indifferent. Mainline, two thirds accept it. So again, you see the same ratio with abortion as with this other wicked depravity. One third of evangelicals say, yep, it's fine. Two thirds of mainline say, yeah, it's fine. And Rome is even worse. When it comes to sodomy, seventy percent of Roman Catholics say go for it. And only a quarter say discourage it. The rest are indifferent. That's absolute moral catastrophe. And then when you look at the side of my unions, I'm not even going to call it marriage because that's it's obscene. That's not a marriage at all. Over a quarter of evangelicals say yeah there's we should have gay

1:14:47 marriage. And only two-thirds are against it. Mainline, it's nearly sixty percent are for and a third against. Rome identical. Again, these are self-identified Christians overwhelmingly in support of something that Obama, when he campaigned in 2008, was against. This is something that's missing from a lot of the moral conversations we have in our churches today. Just how quickly the world slid into complete wickedness and the church was in lockstep. These are Christians. We're in 2024 today. In 2008, a presidential candidate, the most liberal candidate probably who'd ever run, when you look at like the things that he viewed, he was publicly against it. Now in private, of course, he was for it because he himself

1:15:36 is not. He's the public acceptable view for the Democratic Party in 2008 was we had to condemn sodomite marriage. And today, overwhelmingly, in among Christians in America, it's seen as something we should accept and be for. This is not Christianity. When Corey and I talk about the new global religion, this is what we're talking about. Because this is a moral question. Do you permit abortion and sodomy and sodomite marriage? Or do you forbid it? Do you punish it to the full extent of the law. The Bible says one thing. Christians have always said the same thing as the Bible until, in some cases, the last 50 or 60 years, in some cases the last 16 years, where something that was so radical that a Democrat

1:16:26 couldn't run for it in two thousand eight. Today, the majority of people in churches in this country say, yeah, go for it. That is apostasy. That is the complete abandonment of God. And no, these things aren't in the creeds, they don't need to be, because they're written on our hearts, and they're everywhere in scripture, condemned in the strongest imaginable terms. God could not have been any more clear when he condemns these things. And Christians have always known it, and Christians still know it to this day. Those who do not know it show themselves not to be Christian, whatever else they confess with their lips. And the abortion numbers don't even capture how bad the reality actually is. Because that question is about abortion specifically as a procedure.

1:17:15 It does not cover abortion as in its totality, which would include hormonal birth control. Because one of the ways that works is as an abortive facient. That is one of the outcomes. And what you morally risk, you are morally guilty of it. And so the use of hormonal birth control is the sin of abortion. That is what you are risking, and so that is what you have morally done. And the percentages of supposed Christians who are going to support that, I guarantee you they are higher than those who say they support abortion, when you use that word. And just for the record, for those who think that this is a relatively modern issue, the church has always opposed abortion. You can go back to sermons of the church fathers and they

1:18:10 talk about abortion. John Chrysostom condemns abortion in some of his sermons. This is not a new issue. The church has not changed positions on it. This has always been the stance of the church that it is murder, that it is impermissible, that it is high-handed sin. It is a violation of the fifth commandment. And it is subject to the penalty in Genesis 9.6 The last question we wanted to mention from Pew is about evolution. We did the entire six thousand years in counting episode dealing with the fact that the only possible Christian view is that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Whatever timeline you pick, it cannot possibly be any older than that. To say otherwise is to directly and literally deny scripture.

1:19:07 Because as we point out very simply in that episode, could have been a three-sentence episode. The only way evolution works is death. Death Death entered the world with Adam's sin. Therefore, evolution and Adam's sin cannot both exist on the same timeline. You either believe the Bible or you believe in evolution. And so what we find in this question, they broke it down by natural evolution versus designed evolution. I don't know. Or man always existed, or I just don't know anything. They're two different don't knows. That's how that's how messed up the survey data was. I'm just going to give you the always exist because that's the only Christian answer in the in the list. Evangelicals, the conservative Christians, fifty-seven percent say the man has always existed

1:19:55 in the current state. That's fifty seven percent believe that Adam was the first man created in the perfect image of God. Fifty-seven percent. Just barely squeaking past half. Mainlines, the Rainbow Guys, thirty percent. Rome, twenty-nine percent. Less than a third of the Rainbow Papist Coalition believe that Adam existed. Now you tell me who can be a Christian in that state. Seriously, how many times has Adam come up in the Bible? It's like Adam vanishes after the genealogy talking about what happened in the garden In the garden. Adam is central as a character in the Bible, not because he's a fictional character, because he's our father, because we inherit his sin, a specific real sin that happened on a certain day of the

1:20:46 week, six, seven thousand years ago. When it happened, the universe fell, we fall because of it. Every Christian must believe that. Now, as we send that episode, we're not saying you're going to go to hell if you disagree with us or even with scripture, because like we're pointing at scripture, it's got nothing to do with some podcast or things. The only way that someone can have those beliefs is to deny scripture. As I said in the intro, if you deny scripture, you're basically standing face to face with God and calling him a liar. You're saying, this is crap. You're just making up stories, I don't believe any of this. I have scientific evidence that tells me that you're wrong, that we evolved. Obviously, that stuff is stupid.

1:21:31 I'm not a rube. I know better. That's when this becomes a matter of salvation. And men can't answer the question. All we can do in point is say, dude, you're calling God a liar. You're taking the Lord's name in vain by saying I'm a Christian, but I don't believe God. That's the worst possible thing you can do. At least just be an open enemy of God and not be a hypocrite on top of it. But to take his name on you as a Christian and then to call him a liar when he tells you what he did, how he created you, it's as bad as it could possibly be. Will he forgive it? I hope so. Like, I we're not declaring damnation in these things. It's just scripture says one thing, and 70% of Roman Catholics and mainlines deny what's plainly in the Bible.

1:22:21 They deny that Adam ever existed. That's a do not pass-go situation. So moving on now from the Pew data to the ligoner data, the first question in those survey data was God is a perfect being. And this is not formulated as a question, the first statement, and you agree, disagree, either strongly or just plainly, God is a perfect being and cannot make a mistake. Obviously, as Christians, we have to strongly agree. Because God is perfect. This is just essentially the definition of what God is. The idea that God could make a mistake is so wrong it's practically incoherent. And yet, even for evangelicals, you get eight percent who disagree with that statement, three

1:23:23 percent who weren't sure, which isn't a great state of affairs either, but this is a freebie. This one should not be difficult for anyone to answer. Anyone who claims to be Christian, this should be trivially easy. And yet if you look at the totality of this survey data, which includes all of the claimed Christians who responded to these questions, to these statements, you have a full quarter who disagree with that statement. One in four are saying, no, God's not perfect. God can make a mistake. That isn't God. You cannot believe that God makes mistakes and be a Christian. Because that's not God. The thing in which you have a belief is no longer God if you believe that thing makes mistakes, because God does not make

1:24:19 mistakes. The second statement, we won't go through all of the statements, but we'll go through some of the key ones. There is one true God in three persons God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This again should probably bring to mind the creeds, since if you recite the creeds, this is again a freebie. This is one all Christians should be able to get trivially easily, and just for the sake of both brevity and because the data is displayed in kind of a funky way, we're going to focus on the evangelicals. Because focusing on the evangelicals gives us sort of the cream of the crop when it comes to the Christians who give the right answers. And so, thankfully, with this one, ninety-six percent do agree

1:25:14 with this statement. But that means 4% do not strongly agree with a statement that is a freebie. This is just one that any Christian should be able to say, of course, yes. This is just basic Christian doctrine. And yet we have four percent of the best of the best Christians, as it were, the ones most likely to know Christian doctrine and give a correct response, four percent still get this one wrong. And I strongly suspect that when Lingonir was doing this survey in cooperation with the company that they hired, the their set of evangelicals was probably closer to actual Orthodox Christian beliefs than would be found in the Pew data. The list of denominations in the Pew data for evangelical was pretty

1:26:07 broad. So these data sets are not directly comparable, but as Corey just said, like this is the very best case. This is the steel man for the super conservative Christian. And as we get into in a few more of these down the road, the answers go off the rails. The statements themselves. Only an Orthodox Christian can have a single answer, and yet we see some really bad data. So question two was the Trinity. And thankfully ninety-six percent agree with the Trinity. Good. Table stakes for Christianity. Yet the very next question, true or false, God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Only thirty two percent, only one-third of evangelicals disagree with that statement.

1:26:53 Only one-third of evangelicals are not universalists. So look, you have one question that says, Do you deny the Trinity? No, almost everyone gets that right. Do you deny that the Trinity is necessary for salvation? Two thirds get it wrong. So that's what we're talking about. Like even in this very best case, when we're steel manning the cream of the crop of North American Evangelical Christianity. Two-thirds of them give an answer that is functionally universalism. God accept the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. That's inclusive. Buddhism, Shintoism, you name it, Pakamama, they're all there feeding at the same trough. This is a universalist answer, and two-thirds like, yeah, that's me.

1:27:37 My Christianity is a universalist Christianity. It's unconscious. And this goes back to Corey's earlier comment about teaching, about teachers versus wolves, about how this sort of confusion can exist inside congregations. Now, if the only God that you ever hear about a church is a loving God, yeah, that would make sense. I uh if all I know is a God of love who loves everyone and he loves us so much and loves all the time, every day, enough of them. love, love. When someone says, does God accept their worship of other people if they're trying? Like, sure, of course. He's a loving God. Why would he reject the Muslims? You know, they try to behave except when they're dealing with Christians. They don't, you know, they don't cheat.

1:28:17 They don't drink, except when they do. Like you can make all sorts of excuses as soon as you delete the Trinity in the basics of the Christian faith. And so that's that's why we're drilling down on us on this day is that when you look at the details, it it swings wildly. In one moment, these guys are saying that the Trinity is God, and the very next two thirds of them deny that the Trinity is salvific. Moving on to statement five. This is again one that is a freebie. Biblical accounts of the physical, bodily, resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate. This event actually occurred. For those playing along Playing along at home, this is kind of the core of the Christian faith. And again, the creeds do include this.

1:29:06 Thankfully, if you limit the data to those who are evangelical in their affiliation and evangelical in their beliefs, 96% agree. That's still four percent who aren't really sure. 3% percent somewhat agree, and one percent they're just not sure. This again is the core of the Christian faith. You can't possibly not believe this and still be a Christian. This is literally if someone asks you what the gospel is and you want to give the shortest form of it, it's Christ crucified for sinners, and they're denying the import of that. When you unfilter from just evangelicals and look at all of the Christian respondents, including evangelicals, you get only two-thirds, less than two-thirds, strongly agree. That's completely insane.

1:30:01 That's one-third. They cannot affirm over one third, almost forty percent, it's closer to forty percent, cannot affirm that the bodily resurrection of Jesus happened. It's real. It's a fact in history. There's no Christians there. Now again, this that wasn't evangelicals. That was every respondent who said I'm any sort of Christian. But that's what's happening in our churches. When we talk about being concerned about the fruits of the teaching that we're seeing in various places. This is why I frequently say if you tell me you're Krishna, it doesn't tell me anything. This is why. I've had this we've known about this data for years. You know, a lot of times Corey and I will say things that seem to be off the cuff and they seem to be

1:30:44 these these darts, these very narrow, very hostile things that can't possibly be substantiated. We are two of the only men you're likely to ever encounter that don't just run our mouths. When we say something, we can back it up. If you ask me the same question ten times to try to get me to reveal what I'm thinking, I can give you ten different answers. Not because Not because I'm changing my position, but because if I think you can handle going deeper into it, I will give you more of what's going on. And the deeper that you dig into why I said something bad to prove to you that it's really bad, the worse you're gonna feel. It's why I treat it as a progressive thing. I'm not gonna just unload on you because it would just completely

1:31:27 blow people away. Yet at the same time it's entirely permissible for a man who knows for a fact most people who say they're Christian, even the evangelicals and they accept the Trinity, they'd then confess universalism. We're in bad shape as a church. The church, capital C, all believers, also has in the church, the denominations, a whole bunch of people who claim to be sheep, but they're actually goats. And that's the immediate concern that we have here. Because some of those goats are in our pulpits. Some of our goats are in seminaries. They're teaching men to go out and lie and deceive others. And so when we make these seemingly flippant, harsh comments about most of these people aren't even Christians, well, here's the data backing it

1:32:10 up. I wish we were wrong. Like I wish we were just jerks. I would be I would be a much happier person if I were just mean and ornary and didn't like anybody than if I was right about reality. I wish that were the case. Unfortunately it's not. The next question is Corey and I kind of disagree about how bad the question is, but I want you to just listen to this. This is a true or false. Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. Now when you filter by just evangelicals, the cream of the crop of the most conservatives, seventy percent strongly agree with that. Less than one in five strongly disagree with this. Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God, is literally the Aryan heresy.

1:33:00 And less than one in five, less than twenty percent of the very best Christians in the United States are not Aryan heretics. Now Corey can give you his impression about how this is worded, but I think the table stakes there for me is that to say that anything is created by God is necessarily to say it's not God. At the end of the episode that we did on Eastern Orthodoxy, we talked about the uncreated light and the the weird stuff that they get into that's completely pagan, completely non-Christian. There's no such thing as a creature that is God. Jesus is eternal. His body was something that was in creation, but the second person of the Trinity is eternal and is co-eternal and co-equal with God

1:33:48 the Father. And so to say that Jesus was created by God, the problem, apart from the Arian heresy from the third, fourth century A.D. is that Bonhoeffer and MLK could accede to this too. This was MLK's teaching, that Jesus was the greatest being created by God. You know, first you might have had to wiggle around a little bit, but greatest certainly. That was MLK and Bonhoeffer's teaching. What wasn't it? It wasn't Christian. Because they thought he was just a great teacher. He was a great man. he became one with God with his divine teaching. When you start trying to make something that's not true sound really Christian, you can trick people. Over 80% of evangelicals confess the Arian heresy.

1:34:31 That's my read on it. It's really bad no matter how you slice it. Aaron Powell I think that this question, perhaps more so than any other in these data, reveals the fundamental problem we have with teachers and pastors, which is to say that we have mostly inept ones. Because this is something that immediately any Christian should recognize, oh, Arian heresy. You should know that immediately. There should be no doubt in your mind that that is exactly what this question means. That is what is being asked here. Because of the word created. But I think when you take this statement together with the next one, statement seven, it reveals the major failure here is a failure of teaching. Because the questions are related, six and seven.

1:35:21 They more or less ask the same thing, approaching it from different angles. But more Christians who responded to this survey get seven correct than get six correct. And so it seems like some don't understand the import of the word created. That is a major problem with regard to teaching. We confess in the creeds that we believe in God the Father Almighty, maker or creator of heaven and earth. It is kind of incumbent on us to understand what created means if we are confessing a belief in the Creator. And yet it seems like many Christians responding to this don't know what it means to create. And to contrast this we can see with statement seven, Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God. A significant percentage strong not a hundred percent, which is a problem,

1:36:20 but a significant percentage strongly disagree. The numbers shift from the last question. About sixty percent strongly disagree with that if you're limiting it to the evangelicals again. This should be a hundred percent. We confess that Jesus Christ is God. We also confess he's a great teacher, but we can clearly answer this. This is a freebie. If it says he was not God, well that's wrong. That's very clearly against the core of the Christian faith. And yet the best of the best of Christians, the most serious of Christians, the Bible believing Christians, still get this wrong by more than a third. So it's better than the last statement, certainly, but it's still abysmal. This This really highlights just how bad the state of teaching is in our

1:37:17 churches. These are basics of the Christian faith. These aren't even difficult questions. These aren't things you need to attend a class or a seminar or something advanced in order to understand. This is something you should know just from attending the service. And yet a significant percentage of Christians get these wrong. We have some very real problems when it comes to teaching in our churches, when it comes to what those who are claiming to be Christian actually know about the faith. Because as we've stated before, part of the Christian faith is knowledge. Yes, it's faith, but faith in what? You have to know the thing the knowledge, the information, the facts in which you have that faith.

1:38:08 And many Christians clearly don't. Statement eleven is The Holy Spirit can tell me to do something which is forbidden in the Bible. Now I think the the way they phrase some of these questions was good and it was maybe clever, but maybe in some cases too clever by half because while they're clearly right and wrong answers, it's hard to tell which side of the horse the people who got the wrong answer fell off of. So the Holy Spirit can tell me to do something the Bible says I can't do Two-thirds of evangelicals strongly disagree with that. Two-thirds got it right. But one-third strongly agree. And there's almost no middle ground. And honestly, I think what might have happened here is that the

1:38:54 the twenty-five percent who said that the Holy Spirit can tell me to do something forbidden in the Bible, maybe they're thinking that there's like this is me being charitable, this is me trying to sugarcoat and and make to baptize this as a Christian answer. I think maybe they thought I know that the Holy Ghost is God. If the Holy Ghost tells me to do something, I have to do it because I'm obeying God, which correctly confesses the nature of the Holy Ghost, but it fails to confess the nature of Scripture because Scripture is breathed out by the Holy Ghost, is breathed out by God. And so God does not contradict Himself. So the Holy Ghost can't, not because God can't do something, because God's omnipotent, it's because God does not disagree with Himself.

1:39:39 God is not a house divided against itself. The Trinity is not a war. When we try to describe the three persons of the Trinity, it exceeds the limits of human reason. And so I hope that in some cases when the folks, the 25%, the quarter who said the Holy Spirit can tell me to do something that is forbidden in the Bible. I hope that they were trying to obey God and just misconstruing what scripture is. that's the nice version. The bad version is that over a third of people think that somehow God is set against himself. It's scary no matter what, but the best case is it's what Corey was just saying about teaching. The worst case is that some people are in a really horrible state, in a state of confusion.

1:40:24 Because like it's a question that you could sort of puzzle a little bit, but the error is going to reveal which like if you get it wrong, you're gonna still be committing one of a couple possible errors. And that's what we don't see in the answers. I would actually like to examine the thinking of some of the respondents with regard to this statement, statement eleven and statement nine, because fully a third of evangelicals said that the Holy Spirit is not a person. So I don't know how this possibly reconciles in the mind of those who get really either one of these wrong or both of them wrong. But the incorrect answers with regard to statement nine almost makes one want to say we should recite the Athanasian Creed every

1:41:11 single Sunday until that number drops to zero. Yeah. Well I think it's because of the way it was phrased. The Holy Spirit is a force but not a personal being. And people don't know what persons are. It's teaching again. Yeah, it's a technical term. It's a term of art that is not typically used in modern discourse. People don't talk to each other this way. I think the Holy Spirit is a force but not a personal being. There's clearly a right answer, but I think it probably just confused me because like you said, like they've never heard the Athanasian Creed, they didn't recite it often. They've never been taught. Like, here are the limits of what people can say about the inner workings of God.

1:41:47 They're very narrow. It's God. It's God revealing Himself, bits and pieces of Himself. When I say pieces, I mean that God is can be subdivided, but like when God tells us something and then he tells us something else a both about himself, even when they're contradictory, we have to confess them all and just say, Okay, you're God, I can't make any sense of it and that makes sense 'cause I'm a creature. I'm a I'm a hairless mostly hairless mammal. You've made me to worship you, and I'm just gonna do the best I can and fall on your mercy if I screw something up. I think that's the generous constructive case for when we get these things wrong. And God is a loving God. When I said that earlier it wasn't clearly it was a mockery

1:42:29 we've did an entire episode on specifically the errors that are lurking there. But it's important because when you get these sorts of things wrong, when you can't defend the faith as it's revealed in scripture, in these kind of seemingly fiddly details, other stuff is going to happen downstream, other errors are going to creep in. Why? Because all error comes from Satan. Satan uses the smallest error to sneak in and then he builds on it. It's like if you get water in a foundation in your house, like water, a little bit of water. What's the big deal? Well, water with a freeze thaw cycle, suddenly, after a few seasons, your foundation is split apart. A few drops of water that comes seeping in can fracture concrete.

1:43:11 Satan does the same thing with air. He's very good at this. He's been doing it from the beginning. Look at the air he crept into the garden with Adam and Eve. He'll do it to us. And when we have these things about the inner workings of the Trinity, that the most intelligent man can only confess, he can't understand. It's not like if you get smart enough you can fit God in your head. To do that would make you God, which would mean you're no longer a creature going back to the earlier question. Statements twelve and thirteen are more or less the same question. They're very closely related, and the percentages are almost identical, so I will read both and then we can go over them together. Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.

1:43:56 Even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation. About forty percent disagree. Again, this is a core part of the Christian faith. This is asking about original sin. In In the case of statement twelve, most people are good by nature, it's sort of tangentially getting at it there, but even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation. This is basic teaching about the nature of sin. Any sin incurs an infinite debt. And that is why, of course, the death of Christ, which is of infinite value, was necessary to pay for sin. It covers all sins, because of course, infinite value. But any sin creates an infinite divide between man and creator.

1:44:56 This is basic teaching of the Christian faith, and forty percent disagree. Six percent aren't sure. Not great either. This is a condemnation of the state of teaching in our churches that basics of the faith like this are more or less a coin toss. Basically 50-50. Maybe they'll get it right, maybe they won't You would practically get the same response if people were guessing. And these are the again, the best of the best. These are the Christians who are the most serious about their faith, the most serious about the Bible. The numbers are much worse if you look at the total response. Statement fifteen continues on on the subject of they don't directly say but original sin. The statement is everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.

1:45:54 And here two thirds of the cream of the crop of conservative Christians deny original sin. Two thirds agree that everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. They deny original sin. They deny that we inherit Adam's sin. That is a foundational, absolutely crucial part of the Christian faith. And it's one that's missing from a lot of churches. I remember a couple of years ago, Tucker laughed. He was disgusted by the idea of original sin. Somehow it came up and like he he was just he was really offended that someone had said something about babies being evil. Because you look at a baby and it seems cute and poopy and crying and not hurting anybody. How can that be sinning? Well, if if you just look, if you use your reason, if

1:46:39 you use your common sense, yeah, common sense says the babies aren't sinful, at least not for a while. But scripture says otherwise. And that's why all the questions that had to do with the nature of Scripture and whether it's the Word of God and all these are a moving machinery. They're the machinery of faith. They're interlocking parts. And when we set one aside or we break it, we bend it somehow, it's going to cause all these other things to break downstream, which is how you get people just flat out, two-thirds of evangelicals denying original sin. And the next one I think probably kind of explains some of that. Statement 16, the Bible, like all sacred writings, which yeah, b by itself I would had to strongly disagree.

1:47:23 Maybe that's why some people strongly disagree. As someone who is actually literate, I would have disagreed on the basis of the Bible, like all sacred writings. Right there I can't agree. Contains helpful account of ancient myths, but is not literally true. A quarter of the respondents, a quarter of the evangelicals agree that the Bible's not literally true. And that's consistent with the pew data that we had earlier. What's hilarious when you get to statement 17, the Bible is 100% accurate in all that it teaches. 90% agree with that. How can a quarter of people say it's not literally true and then ninety cent percent of those same people say it's a hundred percent accurate? I think maybe that gets into the middle ground of the notion

1:48:09 of human reason and common sense. Even if scripture isn't inspired by God, if it's a lot of really wise teachings that have been passed down by really wise men, and we've you know we've edited it and we've winnowed it down and it's been improved on over time. Maybe it can be human or originated wisdom. I think that's the only possible conclusion when a quarter of people deny that scripture is scripture. Some of these answers are extremely schizophrenic and statement eighteen continues that trend in a particularly noteworthy way. Modern science disproves the Bible. And so we have those who say that it's accurate and that it's true, but it's not, but science disproves it, and a full 30% of evangelicals say that modern science disproves the Bible.

1:49:04 Seven percent Well they're not sure. Again, this is approaching coin toss territory on something that is an easy answer for any Christian. Can science disprove the Bible? No. And so obviously science does not disprove the Bible. The Bible is true. Again, as Woe mentioned earlier, we do not believe the Bible because we go through it with a red pen or a highlighter or whatever, and we mark up all the little bits and pieces, and we make sure that they all agree perfectly with everything we know about the world. Some of you have already noticed the problem. We believe the Bible because it's the Word of God. So everything it says is true. If we think that some part is in error, we are the ones in error.

1:49:56 In fact, that has happened a number of times, particularly with regard to archaeology. Because historically, there would be those who claim, oh, there was no battle that happened here or that place didn't exist, and then we found it. There were archaeologists who claimed that certain Egyptian cities didn't exist, and then we found them. The Bible is true with regard to everything it says, because it is the Word of God. That is an easy answer for any Christian. It is something that every teacher of the Christian faith should be teaching in unambiguous terms. And yet we have 30% of evangelical Christians responding that science can disprove the Bible. And has disproved the Bible. Not even that it just can, it has disproved the Bible.

1:50:45 Another particularly wild example of the schizophrenic nature of some of these answers is that an earlier statement that we skipped past was but we skipped it because it was spot on. The question was God created male and female. It was like ninety eight percent said, Yeah, absolutely, that's correct. It's quoting the Bible. And yet, statement twenty-seven, gender identity is a matter of choice. A third of the people who said male and female he created them affirm the gender identity is a matter of choice. They deny male and female he created them. Now, is it gender that confused them versus sex? Is it identity versus reality? Whatever it is, it's blasphemous. They're straight up denying how God created them.

1:51:26 And this is again, this is the very most conservative Christians pretty much on the planet. You're not going to find more conservative Christians than you find in the conservative church bodies in the United States. Maybe equal. I'm not saying we are superlative, but I don't think that our best is beaten by anyone because it's just Christianity. Like there's not it's not like you can level up. It's just how much of the Bible do you believe? These people who say they believe the whole Bible, a third of them say that gender identity is a matter of choice. That's catastrophic. And then they go on from there. Statement 28. The Bible's condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn't apply today. Twenty eight percent

1:52:05 agree. Which is the wrong answer. Of course we know why so many disagree with this, which is to say, disagree with what the Bible teaches on homosexuality, teaches about sodomy. Because you have so many false teachers, so many wolves out there, attempting to explain away those verses, oh no no no, it's fine today. We can legalize this and decriminalize this. Scripture is abundantly clear. There is no ambiguity in any of those narratives, in any of those prohibitions, and they are not just in one place or two places, they are throughout Scripture. Homosexuality, sodomy is condemned in the strongest of terms. It is an abomination. It is condemned in the strongest of terms in scripture. And yet, the best of the best when it comes to Christians,

1:53:00 twenty eight percent, think that those prohibitions they don't apply today, because we're so enlightened today. We've moved beyond these things. The same Christians who will affirm that they believe Scripture then deny that it applies. On the subject of affirming Scripture, the statement thirty, the Bible has the authority to tell us what we must do. Eighty five percent strongly agree. Okay, that's pretty good, but it should be honored. Up here where we're talking about the evangelical vanguard, how is it not a hundred? The Bible has the authority to tell us what we must do. Well, when you look in the next question, it becomes a little more clear or more confusing. Statement thirty-one says religious belief is a matter of personal opinion.

1:53:51 It is not about objective truth. And just over half disagree with that. Just over half disagree their religion is not objective. So yeah, it makes sense that 85 only 85% would say the Bible has the authority to tell us what to do. Like the numbers don't add up, but it's it's confusing as you're listening. It's no less confusing when you're looking at the data and looking at these charts. It's it goes from almost everyone saying that the Bible tells us what we must do to almost a coin toss about whether or not the religion is objectively true. So we'll close out with statement 32 from these survey data. The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe. Among evangelicals, one hundred percent agree.

1:54:47 Now it's only ninety-nine percent who strongly agree. One percent they just agree. But that's still good. Because we have a hundred percent who agree the Bible is the highest authority for what they believe, which is exactly what Christians should say. The Bible is not the only authority. We've never said that, we never will say that. Because God does reveal truth in other ways. There is truth in nature, because God is the God of nature. But when the Bible speaks, on those topics on which Scripture has something to say, it is final. There is nothing in nature, there is nothing in science, there is nothing in philosophy, there is nothing true upon which the mind of man can alight, can grasp, can discern, can divine, that will disagree

1:55:46 with Scripture. Because Scripture, when and where it speaks, is absolutely true. And so yes, it is the highest authority for what we should believe. And so thankfully, this one is a hundred percent. But very obviously we have some work to do. When looking at the actual questions with regard to the teachings of Scripture, it is very clear that many of those who claim to be Christian do not agree with Scripture. They say that the Bible is the highest authority for what they believe, and then they don't believe what the Bible teaches. In many cases, undoubtedly, this is the result of false teachers, of wolves, in some cases just of particularly inept teachers. There are also those. It's not always malice.

1:56:39 Sometimes it's just stupidity. Although if you're a stupid teacher, you're sinning by being in that position and you need to resign. But obviously there is a lot of work to be done. We have a lot of our fellows, a lot of our neighbors, a lot of our brothers and sisters in Christ, who may be sitting next to us in the pews, who do not know what it actually means to be a Christian. They don't know the content of the Christian faith. They know Jesus. They know the cross to some degree, although some of the questions Raise some issues with the understanding of what the cross means, what it represents, why it is important. They know some things, they have this nebulous understanding of what it means to be a Christian, but they do not know the concrete

1:57:31 aspects of it. They do not know the facts, as it were. They don't know the truth of the Christian faith, the content of scripture. And that is what we need to be teaching. We need more good Christian men in our congregations teaching these truths. We need men in their homes teaching these things to their wives and children. Headship comes with responsibilities. If you are a father, if you are a husband, you are in a position of headship, and it is incumbent on you to see that these things are taught correctly in your house. If you hold a position of authority in your church, it is incumbent on you to see that these things are taught correctly in your church, and that includes, for those men in the congregations who

1:58:23 have positions of authority, it is incumbent on you to ensure that your pastor teaches correctly, and to remove him if he does not. If of course he does not respond to correction. You should attempt to correct him first. That is one of the duties of Christian men. These numbers are bad. We've made that point repeatedly. We aren't going to sugarcoat it. We aren't going to say, well, it could be worse. No, these numbers are catastrophic. These numbers are awful. Basics of the Christian faith are coming down to effectively a coin toss as to whether or not someone gets it right. That should not be the state of affairs in any church. It should most certainly not be the state of affairs in the most conservative, traditional, Bible believing churches, at least as they claim.

1:59:19 One hundred percent say the Bible is the highest authority. There is a lot of work to be done, and I'll say that another time. There is a lot of work to be done. We shouldn't take that as cause for despair. We should view that as an opportunity. God has given us the opportunity to correct these things. If you have the talents to teach, you should use those talents to teach. If you have the position, of course, of headship, it is incumbent on you to do so, and so you don't really have a choice, then. You can enlist the help of others. God has put talented men in positions where they can exercise those talents, where they can use those talents to teach the faith. Part of this undoubtedly is going to be removing false teachers, removing

2:00:15 wolves. Because we have many of them in our churches, and unfortunately, we have many of them in our pulpits. If we are going to restore actual Christianity, which includes, of course, foundationally right belief in the basics of the Christian faith. We are going to need more faithful men, and we are going to need to remove the faithless ones. As mentioned earlier and a number of times, one of the ways that you can start to work on addressing these problems in hopefully not in your home, but perhaps in your home, perhaps in your congregation. Use the creeds. They are a gift from God to the church, because they are just restatements of what Scripture says. They address ancient heresies, which some of these questions were just ancient

2:01:14 heresies rephrased, and they address many of the problems with regard to knowledge of the Christian faith. If every individual responding to this survey knew and believed just what the creeds say, this would have been a fundamentally different podcast episode. Because these would be fundamentally different survey data. Virtually every one of these is addressed in the Creeds. Yes, some of the social issues so called or not. The Creeds don't address abortion. But the fifth commandment certainly does. If you actually teach the reality of what abortion is, including birth control, hormonal birth control, chemical birth control. And so as Christians, we need to look at the state of the churches.

2:02:04 We need to look at the state of our fellow believers, some of whom are in name only. And we need to care for them. We need to care for the churches. We need to care for our neighbor. These are not issues that we can just sweep under the rug and ignore. These are matters of salvation. In many cases, not every one of these, as we've said, is going to damn you if you get it wrong, but some of them will. And the goal isn't to find that line and just barely squeak by, just barely not fall off the cliff. That's not what we want for ourselves. It's certainly not what we want for our families. It is not what we should want for those sitting in the pews next to us. And so we need to ensure that the basics of the Christian

2:02:51 faith are taught. How can you move on to the more advanced parts of the faith? How can you move on to the difficult questions if you can't even stomach spiritual milk? If you can't even answer that the Holy Spirit is a person, that God is triune If you can't answer the very most basic parts of the Christian faith, how can you expect not only to move on and understand the more complex parts of the Christian faith, perhaps the more subtle parts of the Christian faith? Those are a gift from God to understand those things. It's the fullness of the faith, and you want to mature Sure, you want to move from milk to meat. But if you can't even digest the milk, if you can't understand the basics, not only are you limiting yourself and those under your

2:03:43 care, but how are you going to share the faith? How will you respond to questions? If you can't even state the basics of what it means to be a Christian, of the content of the Christian faith, you can't respond to questions from those who are wondering about the Christian faith, who perhaps have an interest in the Christian faith, or those attacking the Christian faith, or if your children come to you with a question, or someone else in your congregation, these are not trivial matters. These are matters of the utmost importance. Because again it is that tripartite division. It is notitia, ascensus, and fiducia. Fiducia is what saves you. But you can't have that without the foundation. Because you can't believe in that which you don't know is true.

2:04:40 And you can't you certainly can't believe that something is true if you don't even know what it is. And so if you don't know the content of the Christian faith, notitia, you can't assent to the fact that it is true, ascensus, and so then you can't have faith in that fiducia. Yes, faith is a gift from God, but it is faith in something, and he has given us his word in order to teach the truth of the Christian faith. And so if we're going to say, as it seems like, the evangelical respondents do, the Bible is the highest authority for what I believe. We need to know what the Bible actually teaches. Because just holding up a book and saying, I believe this doesn't mean anything if you've never opened it, if you've opened it once,

2:05:32 if you don't read it, if you don't know what it contains, if you don't know what it teaches. And so we need to know what the Christian faith is, what the tenets of the Christian faith are, what the contents of Scripture are. It's the Word of God. As has been said many times in the past by many Christians, prayer is us talking to God. Scripture is God talking to us. We should take that seriously. God wrote us an entire book via the hands of many men over many centuries, in order to tell us what he has done, what he is going to do, what he wants from us, what he wants us to do, what he wants us not to do. So much is contained in the pages of Scripture. And yet it seems like many of our fellows, and again many

2:06:26 teachers and pastors, are ignoring this treasure. That needs to change the bigger.