Faith over Facism: Why Faith Matters

Please welcome, former NFL football player, Jack Brewer, National Director for Priests for Life, Father Frank Pavone, and activist and founder of Yaaku Buoyan's Ministries, Yaaku Buoyan's. You know that person? I love him. We can meet afterwards. Well, guys, the topic that we've been asked to discuss for the next few moments is why faith matters and before we begin, though, I just want to let you know, the CPAC guys, we checked with Matt Schlapp. He said, all of you religious guys up here, we cannot take up an offering, so we can't do it, you know. Just want to set the record straight. Guys, I cover these stories all the time on my radio show. I believe, as John Adams said, and this is our starting off point, and Jack, we'll start with you. John Adams, our second president, said that our Constitution, our way of governing is holy and adequate for anyone other than a moral and religious people, and over the past couple of decades now, there's been an effort to remove God out of what we do in this country, and I think that's one of the reasons that we've had such chaos in the culture, and Jack, we're going to start with you. I want you to weigh in on that, and we're going to open it up at that point, gentlemen. Amen. First off, it's an honor to be here, everyone in this building. As Americans, we should all feel thankful for the opportunity to gather like this, particularly to talk about the word of God. You can clap. The word of God, glory to God, amen. It starts with repentance. When Christ started to preach the gospel, the first thing he said was, repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand, and so it starts with that, and we don't start to get on our knees a little bit more and repent and really seek God so that he can show our world and have that anointing on all of us. Right now, we are under a curse, so let's not play games with what we're seeing. My young cousin was just slain in the streets four days ago to die, 25 years old. A month ago, two thugs walked into the barbershop next to my youth center where I take fatherless kids and treat them and shot the man in the face. This is the world that we live. This is what America looks like right now, especially for a lot of people that look like me, and so my comment is as we're talking about these policies, as we're talking about politics, let's remember to take it back to scripture because making America great again in the flesh is just not good enough. It's just not good enough anymore. It's time to make America great again in the spirit. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. We have to teach our kids and demand that our politicians and the people around us seek eternal life first. Our decisions must be made eternally, not physically. Prosperity is not just about how much money you get or things that you get, covetousness and idolatry. That's not prosperity. That's not American prosperity. American prosperity has been able to seek our father in heaven and represent him and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, period. Father Frank, I remember a time back in the 1950s when there was this spiritual revival that swept across the land. You had Dwight Eisenhower, who was actually baptized before he took the office at the National Presbyterian Church. You had a famous Catholic priest who was on the radio airwaves preaching the gospel as well. What do we need to do as a people to get back and find that religious fervor, that revival, as we call them? Well, you know, Todd, the first thing we have to do is as people of faith, stand up and protect our faith from being abused by certain public officials. I am sick and tired of hearing Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi claim to be faithful and devout Catholics while they're throwing the teachings out the window. And as far as the issue of communion goes, they better not try to come to me because they will be refused. But no, the thing here too that's involved in this is when are the clergy going to speak up? I think the renewal has to start with us and say, hey, we can't be afraid to address politics. Now I address it all the time because I'm saying the difference between the parties now is not just about policies, it's about underlying principles on which the church cannot be silent. And when the church stands up to politicians and parties, stop killing babies, stop suppressing the freedom of the church, stop indoctrinating our children, stop destroying our country. When the church stands up and talks about that in the political realm, that's not the church being too political, that's the church being the church. Dr., weigh in on that. Yeah, Todd, thank you and thanks everybody. Matt Schlapp, thank you so much. I'm gonna start with this. We are spiritual gluttons in America. We get fed a sermon Sunday to Sunday, the discipleship is non-existent and nobody knows how to take the word of God into the public square, into policy, into the boardroom and go live the word of God because we have an identity crisis. If we look at sex trafficking, we fight trafficking, it's always a child with an identity crisis. Fatherlessness, it's a child with an identity crisis. Our nation has an identity crisis. We do not know who we are. There's no vision. A man without vision will perish. A people without vision will perish. So yes, we have to get into the word of God, but we're in an hour in America where the time is up. The lukewarm will be spewed out. This is an hour of the remnant where you better learn quickly, brother to brother, how to live that faith out in the marketplace, the boardroom, the classroom, and not hide behind Christianity. I wanna know today, I wanna see the guy, brother, that will go onto the battlefield for a single mission and put all political capital, all relational capital on the line for the sake of the least, for the voiceless. That, Todd, we just have to get to a place where we understand that God ordained and said this land will be. It's here and set apart for Him to defend and protect Israel, to defend the weak, to clothe the naked, to widow the orphan, to feed them, to take care of them. That's in the street. It's impossible to please God without faith. Faith without works is dead. We're not saved by works, but we better get to work really quickly in this country. Amen. Jack, a few days ago, I wrote a story about an NFL player, retired. He's an evangelist. He was in a public school, talking to young people and sharing the gospel message. A group of out-of-town atheists complained and the school apologized. I said, it's never gonna happen again. Just yesterday in San Diego, they told a church they would not be allowed to rent a public facility for their Christmas production because they said the church's Christmas production was too religious. And I thought, well, praise God for that. But what do you tell Christians who are facing these kinds of attacks in the public marketplace? First off, if you are not facing attacks and persecution, you are not serving Jesus Christ. We must remember that the persecution that's happening to our nation right now is supposed to happen. It's scripture. It may not feel good, right? You must love the Lord more than your kids, more than your country, more than your house and car. And so if we don't get back to that, and like my brother said, serve the least of these. And the reason, and I heard you before on the panel talking about CRT, conservatives that have a kitchen table to speak to your kids at, conservative that have a decent home and money in the bank, remember the least of these. Let's stop talking about how CRT is affecting our kids. Let's talk about CRT affecting the kid that is fatherless, the kid that doesn't have parents. When they go to school, the school tells them that they are too stupid to learn math. The school is telling them that they don't have to make A's and B's, it's okay to make C's and D's. Let's start talking about the least of these when we set our policy. Fathers out there, let's go serve the fatherless. We got 18.6 million fatherless kids in America. Every man in here should be angry because you live in a country like that. We have to take this, amen. We should be clapping for that. We're better than that. We should be taking these issues on as Christians on the battlefield. They should be persecuting us every single day because we're standing up for the fatherless kids in this nation when 70% of our young black kids are born without a father in the home. And you go in our prisons and there's over two million guys in prisons and jails and we're spending billions of dollars and not rehabilitating them. That should make us all angry. When we see what's happening in our streets, crime waves through the roof. You go on social media, you'll see people fighting police officers, fighting police officers. And so at some point, as a nation, we have to learn, especially conservatives, because we're Christians at the end of the day. Let's replace the word conservative with the word Christian. And let's start standing on our Bible as the truth so that we can save this nation. That's the only way it's gonna happen. Doc, it sounds like what we've got, the issue here in America is not a political problem, but it is a spiritual problem we're dealing with. A hundred percent. Backstage, I told Jack, Jack, we will not solve a single problem with policy in this nation if that policy was not first brought to us by the Holy Spirit. It will not work. And I'm sorry for the politicians out there. We've tried it and we will try it again. And we'll win the White House, and then what? Four years later, it swings again. It is time to start redeeming and claiming territory back. Spiritual territory. If we say, if we say my father owns all the cattle on the hills, mind you, he owns the hills too. He owns it all, and it's about redeeming, and this is not about shaming and ostracizing people, but it's standing on the truth, understanding when David walked to Goliath, he walked as a man of authority. Understand if you say you're a Christian what that means. What was the price he paid on the cross? Something very practical we can do tonight to change this nation is if every father starts instituting relationship and real conversation in his home. Sit down and have FaceTime, not the app, real FaceTime. Start talking, start earn your daughter's hearts so a predator won't earn it. Earn your son's hearts. Stand in the gap for your sons. Share your faults freely with your children. That's an athlete, I played pro sports. I promise you, I'm not even gonna look at him. He learned more from games he lost than games he won. We can learn from our mistakes, and when a son looks at a father and says, dad, wait a minute, you made a mistake? What happened? God pulled me through, son. Your mom, your mother. I'll close with this. For the women in the room, let me share a secret with you. You take your lipstick tonight, and you write on your husband's mirror where he brushes his teeth, man of God, man of God. You do it 21 days in a row, and you're gonna start seeing a guy walk like a man of God. You call a man into his destiny. He will rise up if you do that. Father Frank, we talk about wanting the churches to engage the culture, and what is it? The Bible tells us to be salt and light, but I think a lot of American churches are on a sodium-free diet these days. How do we do that? How do we get the churches re-engaged in what's happening in the culture? Well, you know, that's what our ministry, Priests for Life, has been trying to do for decades. I think in some senses, the problem is getting worse. The clergy are so afraid. They're so disconnected. They think, oh, faith doesn't have anything to do with politics. Maybe they'll start to learn when the persecution, Jack, as you were saying, intensifies to the point that they have no choice. Our ministry was brought all the way to the Supreme Court with a number of other groups some years ago, as you know, over the HHS mandate of the Obama-Biden administration. And the courts were saying to us, oh, you don't have to worry about signing that accommodation form. That doesn't violate your faith. And I said to them, excuse me, it's not the role of a judge or a government or a court to tell me what does and doesn't violate my faith. The believer says that to the government and says, your job is not to judge my faith. It's to protect my right to live it. So when, I think, when the churches and the religious ministries begin to experience that survival mode, it's like, I better do something now or else this ministry might be closed down. Maybe that's when the engagement will increase. You know, Jaco, they shut down the churches in the pandemic. I was stunned. I never thought that would happen. And I thought that it was a test, that the government was testing us and our pastors. And I think many pastors failed that test because they surrendered their civil liberties to the federal government. And many of those churches have yet to recover. And I'm wondering, why do you think they wanted to shut down those churches? Look, you can go back to Adolf Hitler and you can also look at the slave trade. In the slave trade, they said, when the people can worship God, they're happier and they're freer, but they have a voice. In order to shut America's voice down, you have to remove God from the culture. You have to get them to be subservient. You have to become the peasant that lives on the outside of the castle wall that works for the government. And you get to keep 10% and they take 90% because they know. I'll talk about a sex traffic victim. When that victim holds on to God, she survives. They must remove God from this culture and from the home. That's why they drive fathers out of the home. We talk about institutional racism. There's not institutional racism. I come from a country that had institutional racism. There's an institutional fatherlessness in this country. That's institutionalized. Now they wanna institutionalize a godlessness in this nation because when a people can go on their knees for themselves and the hour comes, they will not deny God. Some boys denied Christ. Some pastors denied him again in COVID. There was a lesson to learn and I think we failed that lesson. The remnant will rise up. I believe a lot of the remnant is in this room. Do not fail it again. Father Frank, 30 seconds. I want you to talk to the pastors, ministers, church people in this room. What is your encouragement for them? We've got the midterm elections coming up. What do the church people need to be doing? We have the word of God. We have the grace of Christ. We have been ordained to proclaim that gospel. That gospel is already victorious. I say to my brothers and sisters who are pastors, we are not just working for victory. We are working from victory. We start with victory because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. He has conquered sin. He has conquered falsehood. He is alive and with us. Glory to God. I think you got some Baptists in you, Father Frank. Amen. Jack, I'm gonna ask you to do something that might be a little weird, but I think it's important for us to do. And I think we need to be praying for our nation. We need to be praying for gatherings like this. And in our final moments, would you just lead all of us in a word of prayer for our nation? Glory to God and I feel the Holy Spirit. Everybody touch, please. Touch if you can. Touch your brother and sister next to you. Call on the Holy Spirit. Humbly, everyone. Take yourself to the most broken state that you can possibly go. Jesus, Father God, as a nation, we call upon you right now, Father God, on our knees. Father God, you are the Almighty, Father God. And before you right now, we ask that you give us the strength, Father God, to preach the gospel more loudly. Give us the strength, God, to lay hands on our children again, Father God, to anoint their heads with oil, Father God, even those that are not ours in the flesh to God, but that you have assigned us in the spirit. Father God, let us take on our spiritual battles, our spiritual battles, Father God, knowing that we cannot win them with flesh and blood, Father God. Let us have the strength, God, to go into our communities, Father God, and stand up against the lawlessness, Father God. Let us pray over our police officers and our fire departments to God, and all those serving our community, Father God, our president on down to God, our governors and our state representatives to God. May we lift them up in prayer, Father God, and may we all come together as a nation to put you back on the throne in our country, Father God. The Lord, we come to you in a time, the Lord of confusion, Father God, in a time that biblical truth has been questioned on the highest levels, Father God. The God, and we see your wrath, the God. We saw the lightning strike the White House yesterday, Father God. And as believers, we know what you're saying. We hear your message loud and clear, Father God. And we just ask you to keep us, the God, humble before you in all that we do, the God. Let us, the God, show that this nation was built on Christian values, Father God. Inspire and empower all conservatives in here, the God, and our brothers and sisters that are liberal. Let their eyes be opened, the God, to see the true victory in Christ Jesus, we pray. Amen. Ladies and gentlemen, our panelists. Thank you.