Why Are Atheists More Involved In Politics Than Christians? – With Lance Wallnau

Rick:

You find your way to the intersection of faith and the culture. WallBuilders Live, where the hot topics of the day are discussed from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. That is so desperately needed right now in our country. We’re watching chaos happen, both at the government level to the COVID crackdowns and then of course, in our streets.

And this is an important time to remember, you have an influence and what our nation looks like, how it works, what our government does: you have a voice, we, the people and we as believers have to be engaged in this process. And for too long, we’ve let people who don’t have a biblical worldview infuse their poison into the culture. And that’s what we’re seeing a result of right now. Whether it’s the left wing politicians that have seized power in the COVID crackdowns or it’s the leftist movement that has created a divide in our country, based on race, based on class, all the things they’ve tried to do to divide and destroy us, it is because we’ve given up on these institutions out there.

As Christians, we’ve withdrawn from those institutions for too long. That’s why it’s so important for us to let our voice be heard and to be that positive, godly influence on the culture: true salt and light. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, is that that atheists tend to have more political activism than people of faith and we’ve got to change that.

I’m Rick Green, America’s Constitution coach and a former Texas legislator. And I’m here with David Barton. He is America’s premier historian and he’s our founder here at WallBuilders. Tim Barton is president of WallBuilders and a national speaker and pastor. And guys later in the program, we’re going to have Lance Wallnau with us, we’re going to be talking about this issue of believers influencing the culture.

Tim:

Well, probably for atheists, they haven’t had their leaders telling them for years that politics was dirty and stay out of it. And that’s not what the point of purpose of life is. And there’s a different calling where for many in the Christian community, the idea was if you want to serve God, you serve in many other areas, but politics is not really, really that important, because for some people, the thought was that, you know, we have a higher calling, number one.

Disengaged Christians

Number two, we’re not really living for this world, we have an eternal perspective, which certainly is true. But the notion that we’re going to sacrifice any earthly responsibility, earthly duty and earthly involvement and the perception or pursuit of things that are, “spiritual or solely eternal” is really a faulty and even unbiblical thought. But this is where for so long Christians have been disengaged, sometimes because of the teaching and training of faith, but sometimes, just because we have a fairly apathetic culture.

And one thing that is true about biblical perspective and principle and it should be true for those of us that read and study the Bible, is that we read and study the Bible, it should encourage us to engage in culture even more, because we want to interact with people, we want to help people. And one of the ways that we can help people the most is by helping get good policies in place that will have a great impact on people. So, politics should be a very high concern for Christians. It’s just statistically, we see that most Christians aren’t very engaged, which would seem to indicate they’re not all that concerned or they would maybe do something about it.

David:

Yeah, there’s a lot of ways of measuring non-involvement. We certainly know it among pastors by polling. We know what among citizens by just voter turnout. Since the time of Ronald Reagan over the last several presidential elections, we know that the winning candidate for president in November will be chosen by one out of every five Americans said, that’s it. One out of every five being the other side, but we’re looking at two out of five Americans who vote for president. That’s 60% non-engaged. I mean, that’s not acceptable.

So, and Christians tend to be, you know, I’d like to say they’re better than that, but they’re not. They tend to be average Americans in that sense and so they’re not driven by any greater desire. And Tim, I think you really, really hit it. Just our love for other people should say, you know, if we really want to help and serve others, part of what you need, that’s a government stays out of your way and does not teach bad things, does not enforce bad things, which means we need righteous leaders.

If even simple Bible verses like Proverbs 29, when the righteous rule, all the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, all people groan. Get good government, you’re going to have happier citizens. So that should be something that should motivate Christians more, but Tim, as you said, it doesn’t seem to do that.

Tim:

Yeah, and you know, one of the guys who has been a very active individual, active voice maybe so to speak, of helping challenge and call Christians to get engaged in the process of battle is Lance Wallnau. Now, Lance is one of many guys who has done this. We’ve known Lance for many years, we have done some things with Lance. And he’s somebody, even back going into the Trump election, he was somebody who was trying to help Christians understand that God could use a Donald Trump in the White House, right as a leader for America.

Christians Supporting Trump

Because a lot of Christians were very hesitant based on what was perceived to be the moral failings of Donald Trump and certainly in his life. He’s had many of those moral failings and even, right as a president, we can look and see that absolutely, he is not a perfect person. Look no further than his Twitter. Right? I mean, certainly, there’s things that would grieve many Christians that he tweets. But his policies have, by and large, been very constitutional, have been very beneficial, right. So many things that came from…

Nonetheless, Lance Wallnau was somebody who said, we think this is going to be the guy and for years, Lance has been encouraging Christians to get more engaged and involved in the process. And so, Lance was somebody we thought would be really good to talk about, how do Christians respond? What should we do based on the fact that polling and, right, this article identified that atheists tend to be more involved than Christians when it comes to political areas?

Rick:

Stay with us, folks, Lance Wallnau, our guests when we come back on WallBuilders Live.

BREAK

Many of you out there are under stay-at-home orders by your governor or your local health officials and maybe you’re looking for something to do during this time. One of the most important things you can do as a citizen is to make sure that you know your rights, you know when they’ve been violated and you’re the better prepared to defend and assert them. To do that, you’ve got to study the Constitution and the history behind it.

Constitution Alive with David Barton and Rick Green does exactly that. We take you into the WallBuilders library, we bring all those resources to life. And then we go out to Philadelphia, the Independence Hall and right there in the room where the Constitution and the Declaration were put together, we bring it to life, we relive it and we make sure that we as citizens know what our part is in preserving these freedoms for future generations.

At this time in our nation, it is so important to know the proper role of government and what we as citizens should be doing at this time. If you haven’t done Constitution Alive, check it out at wallbuilders.com. You can get the DVD set there, we’ll get it out in the mail to you as soon as we can. And you can study it at home or you can go to constitutioncoach.com and become a Constitution coach today. We’ve got a free license for you right now where you can sign up as a Constitution host and be the catalyst in your community to bring back these biblical and historical and constitutional values.

Constitution Alive!

And what you do is you sign up as a host and then you get your friends and family together on Zoom. We coach you on how to do it and you’re able to create community and also study the Constitution at the same time. Do this and we will be able to pick up the pieces on the other side of this crisis and rebuild our nation even stronger than it was before. Check it out today at constitutioncoach.com.

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live, thanks for staying with us today. Good to have Lance Wallnau back with us. Hey, brother, thanks for some time today.

Lance:

Wow! Good to hear your voice. My gosh, you always talk that fast?

Rick:

I try to make myself slow down. But I get excited when I get to talk to guys like you, because you just like, you know, kindred spirit on the same page. I mean, Lord is doing great things. You just, you are one of the few early on to say Donald Trump is the man God is going to use, I mean one of the very, very few. And boy, brother, He has used him in a mighty way. Has He not?

Lance:

Yeah, he has, you know, as I predicted he will be the wrecking ball to the spirit of political correctness. And as of today, he has even a main, yet again with his threat to social media platforms that they don’t straighten out, this is what he’s going to do, I don’t know, take a wrecking ball to them next. It’s fascinating.

Rick:

It is. And he’s been unafraid to take on the tough battles. Right? I mean, everything from, you know, LGBTQ, whatever, the letters have become, to the transgender stuff in the military. I mean from day one, he took on battles that frankly, I can’t think of another Republican that would have won the presidency that would have been able to take all of those on at once.

Lance: There’s no one. And I fear that unless we have a transfer of that spiritual testosterone into the body of Christ that our detachment and apathy will be our undoing. Especially when you look at the politically activated atheist community, which was… some data, I’m shocked by this. I mean, I would have thought, I assumed this was true, but I didn’t know we had numbers for the research.

People of Faith Should Be Active

Rick:

Well, exactly. I mean, you would think that people of faith would be the ones most active when they see the climbing culture and they see all the things happening. But the opposite is true. It’s almost as if the atheist community smells blood in the water and says, okay, the more active we get, the more we’re going to be able to win the culture over to us.

Lance:

Oh, and what Christians have to stop and realize is if you’ve got 41% of atheists that respond to these polls say that they’ve contacted public officials or that 24% say they’ve marched or protested. You know, unfortunately, we’re trained in our faith to, the whole idea of turning the other cheek has produced an army of pacifists, because we don’t feel like we should ever be upset about something enough to demonstrate our resolve to correct it. So, we have odd problem. Atheists are trained to act and we’re trained towards a false peace.

Rick:

You know, that is so true and yet I’m sitting here trying to think of examples in the Bible that would follow that, right? I mean, it’s like, we’ve been trained to this model of Christianity that isn’t reflected in our biblical heroes in the Bible.

Lance:

And of course, not, no, it isn’t. And unfortunately, we read about the riots and we read about the imprisonment and the jail breaks and stuff and it never occurs to us that those evidences of conflict with culture are just as realistic as our present day conflict with culture. And somehow we change the game around so that we’re no longer in the same world that the book of Acts was. But we’re heading right to that same chapter.

Rick:

Well, that’s a big part of what you have advocated for a long time with the seven mountains of culture and saying, look, we have literally abdicated these areas of our culture to people that don’t think like us and don’t share our values. Why would we expect any different than what’s happened? It’s time to get us into basically be evangelist in every area of culture, including entertainment, including all the things that we’ve kind of made off limits for Christians for years.

The Seven Mountains

Lance:

Sure. And perhaps we ought to make it a little bit more, you know, spiritualized vision and then what I originally started with seven mountains, I ended up with gates of influence, because I realized our battles against the gates of hell, it’s just that the gates are at the top of academia, entertainment, media, economics. So, if Satan is really where the gates of hell are located, then we shouldn’t be surprised that these high places are not neutral, but eventually become hostile and weaponized against Christians in particular, because we are the most irritating presence on earth to those gates of hell.

Rick:

No doubt. No doubt. Well, tell me what you see right now in the culture. Are Christians, at least some percentage of them waking up and saying, no, not on our watch are we going to see these things be lost? Is this whole COVID crackdown thing making pastors realize, wait a minute, I got the government telling me how I can serve communion, when my people can meet? I mean, they’re a chance here to wake up the church?

Lance:

I think you’re right. And I think that I was joking about it a year ago and it’s no longer a joke. I was saying that before there’s a great awakening, there’ll be a rude awakening. And it’ll be believers recognizing what is threatening them. Because let’s face it, some people are more motivated to seek God out of pain than out of potential. So, the church hasn’t been seeking God with the heart that could break those gates of hell down and now we’re being shut down.

And to your point, the States, now people are beginning to realize that politics can be a weaponized way of shutting down churches and some of the decisions made on what’s essential, what’s not essential. We should know that in the world’s eyes, we are not as essential as, you know, but as Walmart or in Michigan as the marijuana dispensary.

So, we’re at a place now where pastors indeed, I think there comes a point where it’s almost like when Lincoln was with the Emancipation Proclamation. He wanted to do something but he had to wait until public opinion was on his side. I think the pastors want to feel like the people are with them.

And I think we reached a point of the people were pressuring their pastors on taking a stand. And so, the pastors pretty much resolved that now’s the time to do it. And this was one time I wish, the President Trump wouldn’t help, because it’s like a parent. Every time that parents get steps in and does something for the kid, the kid doesn’t develop the muscle.

The Pastors Should Have Led

Well, the President went right out there to the Rose Garden on his way to a helicopter or something and goes well, you know, we’re going to have to open up those churches. Well, he was under pressure from a lot of us to do this, but it was probably not smart. We should have let the pastors own the initiative and let the president come behind them.

Rick:

Oh, that’s good.

Lance:

But you know, he jumped in there because he wants to let all the Christians know he’s like a shepherd will take on any wolf. He’ll take five at a time. What bothers me is we watch him, we critique him and we ourselves don’t recognize he’s not anointed to reform America. He’s the wrecking ball, we’re the ones that are anointed to build.

Rick:

Yes. Yes. Oh, that’s so good. I got to go back to your phrase because I loved it. We’re not going to have a great awakening until we have a rude awakening. And now we’ve got this Rude Awakening. I love that point that, you know, if pastors had had to flex the muscles a little bit and get out there, they would have become stronger.

And some did, of course. I mean, there were thousands that had said even before Trump spoke up that they were ready to go and they had opened even, some of them a week or two before. But that’s an interesting point, I had not even thought of it. I was so thrilled that he said it. I didn’t think about the fact that, you know, the movement was beginning and then he kind of took the fire from some of those guys that needed to do it on their own.

Lance:

And it’s our fault. I’m telling you, I won’t quote names. But our leaders were putting pressure on Washington because we support these organizations and they put pressure on the White House. The White House is very sensitive, evangelical issues. So, we basically said, hey, this is important and Trump went right out and dealt with it. We should have had the discipline to say it’s important, Mr. President, let the church do something and then you get behind it rather you get in front of it. But everybody wants Donald Trump to be the Messianic answer for their prayers. He’s not. He’s the reformer in the political secular sphere, he’s not the church.

Pastors Need to Stand Up

Rick:

That’s good. That’s good. Okay, what would be your word to our pastors out there that are listening and to those of us in the flock that we should be then reflecting to our pastors, what would you like for us to go say to them about standing up in this time?

Lance:

I would say now is the time and you guys are great at doing this. Now is the time to put an extra demand on WallBuilders and other organizations to furnish the sermon outlines, illustrations and the support material necessary to answer the call the pastors are getting from their people to be relevant on the issues of religious freedom, relevant on the issues of life. But let’s even step back from that relevant on the issues of economics.

We’re going to have a massive Marxist sales package going on. From now till October, it’s going to be super socialism on sale and it’s not going to be called socialism. And so, we need to get a biblical worldview passionately articulated by competent leaders and they need to get some material in their hands now to prepare for the call that they’ve got to instruct the church on what to do in the next critical six months.

Rick:

That is so good. Oh, it’s so true. That’s super socialism on sale. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. Lance, best place for folks to go get some of your material because I know you’re equipping pastors right now as well on this?

Lance:

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re telling people you know, go to Lancewallnau.com, WALLNAU. But keep your eyes open, because we’re going to be mobilizing. I’ve got a lot of these great pastors and guys like Dave Barton and friends of mine, we’re actually going to be moving more intentionally together in alignment.

And so, keep your ear to the ground because there’s a unity happening in the body of Christ, which is this trumpet sound and I believe it’s an awakening in unity and we’re going to see America as one. We’re not going to let America be fragmented racially and economically. We’re going to stand in the unity of what God called us to be. So, we’re going to see this America has one cry coming up.

Rick:

I love it. I love it. And we’d love to have you back as that’s moving forward. God bless your brother. Thank you for some time today. Look forward to the next chance we get to visit.

Lance Wallnau

Lance:

Always love it, man. Let’s keep in touch.

Rick:

Lance Wallnau, stay with us. We’ll be right back with David and Tim Barton.

BREAK

Hi, friends, this is Tim Barton of WallBuilders. This is a time when most Americans don’t know much about American history or even heroes of the faith. And I know oftentimes we parents, we’re trying to find good content for our kids to read.

And if you remember back to the Bible, to the book of Hebrews, it has the faith Hall of Fame where they outline the leaders of faith that had gone before them. Well, this is something that as Americans, we really want to go back and outline some of these heroes, not just of American history, but heroes of Christianity in our faith as well.

I want to let you know about some biographical sketches we have available on our website. One is called The Courageous Leaders collection. And this collection includes people like Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Francis Scott Key, George Washington Carver, Susanna Wesley, even the Wright brothers. And there’s a second collection called Heroes of History.

Heroes Of American History

In this collection, you’ll read about people like Benjamin Franklin or Christopher Columbus, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Harriet Tubman, friends, the list goes on and on. This is a great collection for your young person to have and read and it’s a providential view of American and Christian history. This is available at wallbuilders.com. That’s www.wallbuilders.com.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to Lance Wallnau for joining us today as well. And our topic today, we’re talking about how much more than likely an atheist is to be politically active, to actually influence in some way the culture and their government than Christians are and how important it is for Christians to actually wake up and be a part of the solution. David, Tim, of course, this has been one of the goals of WallBuilders all these years is to is to rebuild those foundations and be like Josiah reading the scroll and going, wait a minute, that’s who we are. We need to come back to those things and the church is the right vehicle to do that.

David:

It is the right vehicle. But as Lance said, we’ve really trained an army of pacifist. We have trained people who are fairly lukewarm in many areas, they will not stand up in a lot of areas. And we just, I want to don’t say this as a put down, that’s just what polling shows right now. I mean, that’s what we see on polling. And as he said, the turn the other cheek mentality, we put up with a lot of unrighteous stuff when we should be standing for it.

And so, if it’s an individual offense to us, okay, maybe turn the other cheek on a personal insult. But I don’t turn the other cheek when I see one of my neighbors being injured. I don’t turn the other cheek when I see something being damaged or taken that as permanent. I can do it for personal offenses. If you insult me, I can turn the other cheek. But I shouldn’t be doing that for the culture. I shouldn’t be letting the culture be drugged down because I think turning the other cheek means don’t ever respond to an attack of wickedness. You just can’t do that.

The Book of Acts Christians

And so, I thought it was really significant, he said, you know, we’re no longer the same world as the book of Acts and that’s where the New Testament Church was birthed. We don’t do that. We’re just now starting to act like the world or starting to be in position to the world where it was in the book of Acts where Christians are being targeted and persecuted and singled out. We put ourselves in that position.

There is no reason that America should have any kind of similarity to the type of persecution that was going on in the book of Acts where the Christians are being singled and targeted out, because we are the overwhelming majority or have been in the nation. But if we continue to be unengaged, uninvolved, act like pacifist, then you can have a small group subset of America, the atheist have much more political impact and policies will look much more like what they want than what God fearing people want. So, that really comes back to us and I think Lance really put his finger on that.

Tim:

And guys, one thing too, just acknowledging that Lance said that, cause when he first said, I thought, oh, I don’t know about that, when he said, you know, Trump has been the wrecking ball, which is what he believed Trump was going to be. And he said, look, he can be the wrecking ball for Twitter too. And so sometimes you’re like, okay, wait a second, I don’t really know if that’s the role of the President, right, to speak to this. However, you could look at the role of government in general. Because Twitter even though technically is a private company, they do get levels of tax breaks and subsidies or whatever else, because they are a kind of publicly used service.

David:

Well, they offer themselves as a public service, they offer themselves as a service for all people. And they hold themselves out in the position of being a public service, which is why they get the tax breaks, but somehow, they still tend to be private.

Stifling Free Speech

Tim:

Well, and one of the ironies now is as a private service, although they get the tax breaks as being a public service, which there seems to be a little conflicting thought there, you know, they started this thing where now they’re going to rate tweets, almost like now Facebook has these, “independent fact checkers” that can help verify the truth of an article that someone might share online. It’s just the independent fact checkers happening to be very Left leaning.

So, President Trump had a tweet and Twitter now has “independent fact checkers” that are going to rate the validity of the tweet. And so, they said that one of his tweets about they’re being corruption and voter fraud from mail-in ballots. They said, well, it’s not really accurate, that’s a misleading tweet. That doesn’t really happen.

Except that we know statistically, there’s greater fraud from mail-in ballots and any other kind of voting. So yes, it does happen. But the guy who fact-check that tweet also said that Trump is a Nazi, he tweeted Trump is a Nazi. So, the guy who’s fact-checking Trump, himself is saying things that are incredibly inaccurate.

And so, you can kind of see why, not only Trump would be frustrated, but he wants to do something about this. Nonetheless, not that this is the time to have a conversation about the role of government when it comes to entities like Facebook or Twitter, but that’s certainly something that as Lance pointed out, I thought, you know, I’m not sure that’s really the role of government, although God could use somebody like a Trump to help correct some of these courses.

But looking big picture, when you look at the policies and principles that Trump has in place, there’s not been a president who’s been more prolife, who’s been more pro-religious liberty, who’s been more pro-Israel, things that should be very important to Christians. And it would make sense that when you have somebody who’s upholding the policies that are biblical policies as Christians, you would want to support that and get involved and help defend those religious liberties, help defend the things that to this point, the Trump administration has upheld those policies, it would make sense that Christians out of want to get involved in this.

Trump is a Wrecking Ball

David:

Yeah, they should. And as Lance point out, look, Trump is the wrecking ball, he’s not the rebuilder. It’s supposed to be the church that rebuilds. So, he is changing institutions, changing structures, giving us opportunity to go in and get it done right. And I thought the point he made about even in the seven mountains, he said, you know, the seven mountains we talked about, this what Christians need to go into. But as he pointed out, those are also the seven areas that are being weaponized against Christians, whether it’s media, whether it’s education, whether it’s all these other areas.

And so, we’re at the situation now where from those seven mountains were saying, well, you know, in the eyes of the governor’s, church is not nearly as important as a Big Box store or is a liquor store or cannabis store, that’s been weaponized against Christians. And if Christians do not get involved, if they do not stand up and rebuild, because he’s given the opportunity, he’s torn so many things up and allowed them to be restructured.

But, we’re the ones that have to step in there and do something with the opportunity. And I think that that’s a really good call to action for all of us as believers. We should not let any other worldview be more active than we are in shaping worldview, whether it’s atheists or any other group. We need to be in there in the middle of this fight and we can make a difference in turn those seven mountains where they’re not weaponized against Christians anymore.

Why Are Atheists More Involved In Politics Than Christians? – With Lance Wallnau

Rick:

And that’s one of the most important things is recognizing that we can impact and we can have an effect on what’s happening in the culture. And why it’s so important for people to get educated. Listen to these programs, share them with your friends and family, become a force multiplier. Learn more right now at wallbuilderslive.com, that’s wallbuilderslive.com, you can get a lot of great information there and then also at our main website, wallbuilders.com.

But either way, we encourage you to come alongside us, help us amplify this voice so that we can get more people of faith to be a positive influence, positive salt and like out there in the community. You can do that by making a contribution right now at wallbuilderslive.com. It can be one-time or monthly, it can be small, it can be big, whatever you can do, help us out and that will amplify that voice and help us save America’s constitutional republic.

Thanks for listening today. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.