March 6, 2025 Show with Dr. John G. West on “Stockholm Syndrome Christianity” (Part 2)

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this sixth day of March 2025.

And today we are going to be entering into part two of a discussion we began last week with my guest, Dr. John G. West. Dr. John G. West is an author, filmmaker, and vice president and senior fellow at Discovery Institute, and today we are addressing part two of a discussion on his book, Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, Why Christian Leaders Are Failing and What We Can Do About It.

And we're going to be focusing primarily during this second part of this discussion on the subtitle, What We Can Do About It, because we had so much to say, or should I say, Dr. West had so much to say last time that we ran out of time before we delved very deeply into what we can do about it.

So I'm delighted that he has agreed to return to the program for part two of this discussion, and welcome back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. John G. West.

Chris, thanks for having me back again.

And I want to remind our listeners of our email address. It is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

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Well, things like that we would obviously welcome anonymous questions. In fact, when specific churches are mentioned, we would insist upon it. But the email address again is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

So I think it would be wise for us to start off, Dr. West, with a recap of what we discussed last week in part one, and then as I said, shift gears over to discussing what we can do about the situation of pastors, church leaders who are failing.

Yeah. So, well, my book basically is focused on the idea that we often like to blame secularists and atheists as why our culture is disintegrating. And I think that although that's true, I became more and more concerned of just how Christians, particularly leading Christians in churches, in the entertainment industry, in politics, in academia, how much leading Christians were actually enabling the cultural decline.

And that it really starts with the lack of biblical faithfulness, and that goes into all sorts of areas which I talk about in the book. Our views of race and poverty, our views of sex, our view of whether we're willing to stand up for religious liberty, and our view of science from things like abortion and transgender issues and the mutilation of children and adults, for that matter, but also the idea, is God really creator?

Is he sovereign? Does he guide the development of life, or are we really the products of a blind, unguided process, or a God who really didn't care? And so, in all those areas, I talked about symptoms, how leading people from the former head of the NIH, Francis Collins, who was a leading evangelical Christian, but he didn't act like that while there, or pastors like Andy Stanley down in Georgia, who teaches and trains ministers across the world, who basically calls the Old Testament the obsolete testament, or Christian apologist Mike Lacona, who basically thinks the New Testament was inspired by true events, like a movie about someone in history, but then the gospel writers were really creative in changing the facts, changing what Jesus said.

So, basically, the first several chapters is just showing how much Christians have been involved, or self-identified Christians, have been involved in aiding this cultural collapse. Even in the area of homosexuality, where the reinvention of marriage, the redefined marriage as a constitutional right to have gay marriage, which, of course, the Constitution doesn't actually provide that, that was handed down.

The person who wrote that opinion was a church-going Catholic who was known as a goody-goody in his private life, appointed by Ronald Reagan. So it wasn't an atheist Democrat who came up with that decision.

And similarly, many of the people, the bakers and florists and people who've been persecuted because they don't want to actually participate and support gay weddings, they're being persecuted by judges and by attorneys generals who are self-identified Christians.

So anyway, the big deal is that we need to look in our own house. If we really want to change things and have a better culture that's more God-glorifying, we can't just blame the atheists. We have to look about, well, what are we doing?

How are we training our own leaders? How are we training our own families? How are we governing our own churches, our church schools, our Christian colleges? And why is it that we produce people who are in leading situations but who don't act like it?

And what can we do about them? That's the next part of the book. So yeah, it's sort of the first part is an indictment of where we're at. And also in each of those chapters, I do try to delve down into, well, what is the historic Christian tradition going back to the Bible and even the early church?

And on many of these issues, although I'm sort of a Reformed Protestant, on many of these cultural issues, I would say that the uniform teaching of the church from the time of the Bible, including Catholics as well as Protestants as well as Eastern Orthodox, has had the same teaching.

And so I try to actually acquaint people with that, that the things that we're turning our backs on now, like a biblical view of the family or of life or of the need to obey God even if your government or someone else says you shouldn't, these things are things that I think what C .S. Lewis would have called mere Christianity.

They're things that faithful Christians have held to for the past 2 ,000 years that in many cases we're abandoning now.

And just out of curiosity, I know that this deterioration, even apostasy that has occurred, this is not just a modern phenomenon. And we can look at the collapse of the Ivy League schools that were rooted in Puritan and biblical thought and teaching and that are now teaching the most horrendous and horrific and grotesque, satanic, leftist ideas that you can conjure up in your worst nightmare.

And, you know, we could even go back to Thomas Jefferson who had his own version of the Scriptures with all the miraculous removed. But I mean, do you have any idea of certain pivotal points in history when the erosion and the corruption really began to have headway in the church at large here in the United States?

Yeah, I'm so glad that you raise that because I do think this is, you know, we are sinful still, this side of heaven, and so this is a struggle throughout history and even before the United States. I mean, if you think the pivotal things in church history, the things that led to, say, the Council of Nicaea and the Nicene Creed, well, that was because there were really some serious issues happening.

But in the American context, you're exactly right when you point out that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, which no one thinks of today as Christian institutions, yet they were founded as explicitly Christian institutions.

In some cases, as missionary efforts to the Indians, I think actually Dartmouth had part of that in their mission, but they were founded as explicitly Christian, God-honoring institutions. But by the end of the 19th century, most of them were not.

And so then that led to—so I think in America, you have had this continuing effort. And so you had the First Great Awakening, George Whitefield, a lot of people did go back to church, but then by the time of the American founding, a lot of Americans like to think, oh, we were founded as a Christian nation.

In some sense, that's true, but in other senses, it's misleading. So at the time, 1790s, early 1800s, a lot of Americans were endorsing the French Revolution, which was anything but Christian, and they were basically embracing Unitarianism, rejecting Jesus as God.

And in fact, in New England, the Congregationalist churches were largely taken over by the early 1800s and displaced the Trinitarians, the people who were Orthodox believers, with Unitarians that were then funded by the state.

And in Virginia, you mentioned Thomas Jefferson. Of course, Thomas Jefferson was a Unitarian, and he particularly hated, if you read his private writings, Calvinists. Those were his bugaboo. He and John Adams were equally—in their ending years of life, in the 1820s, you can read their private correspondence, of the Christians that they particularly hated was Calvinists and Trinitarians, I mean Orthodox Christians who believe in the Trinity.

So we faced that. In fact, many evangelical Christians at the time, they thought, you know, Christianity was going to be destroyed and wiped out in the United States. But then God had something else in store, and there were problems with what became known as the Second Great Awakening.

I know, in fact, a lot of people in the Reformed tradition have problems with some of it. On the other hand, I think there was certainly something genuine, so that what you saw by the time of the Civil War, America was actually in church attendance at churches who believed that Jesus was God, who believed that Jesus was sinless and their Savior, believed the miracles of the Bible.

You had more people attending church in America by the time of the Civil War than you did in the 1790s when there was this falling away. And so I think one of the first falling away was after the founding where you had, like I said, people were gravitating towards deism and Unitarianism, but then God did his work, and groups that even exist today like the American Bible Society, that's when they were formed in the early 1800s to help counteract this.

And there was just a panoply of voluntary associations outside the churches to work to convert prisoners in prison ministries. Things like Prison Fellowship today, there was an analog in the early 1800s where Christians were to rescue women from prostitution.

I mean, there was just hundreds of different societies where Christians gathered together, and all the Protestant Christians especially, Presbyterian, Congregationalists, even Episcopalian back in the days when Episcopalians believed in the Bible.

And so it was an amazing work, even though there were also, I think, some things that weren't helpful. Okay, then what happened? After the Civil War, you have another, partly because of Darwinism, Marx, Freud, and then Nietzsche, you had, again, a lot of the Christian institutions that had been founded earlier in the century fall away.

And so Christians, to their credit, I think God did another work, and a lot of the self-identified evangelical Christian universities today were actually established. I know that the place that I used to teach at, where I was a professor, Seattle Pacific University, was founded in the 1890s, and it was part of a new re-founding of seminaries and colleges that were going to carry on the work that places like Harvard had left behind.

So they re-founded new institutions, and that did a lot of good. But then, again, I would say, I'm papering over some things, but by the 1920s and 30s, you had the theological liberalism begin to creep into some of those institutions, and then certainly by the 1960s and 70s, you had a lot of falling away.

However, I'd say in the 70s, with the 60s and 70s, with people like Francis Schaeffer and a number of other people, Harold and Sel, the people who argued for inerrancy of the Scriptures, which is the traditional view, I would argue, of Christians, but there was an emphasis on that because that was being lost.

So in the 70s and early 80s, you had a, I would say, whether you call it a revival or not, a major, you know, many people stood up. And then we lived in the light of that. But now, I think, we're in another key place where those reforms of the past, we have a new generation, and they have fallen away, and in some sense, maybe fallen away because some of the prior things were so successful in staving off things.

But now, I think we're in a similar situation where the church was in the 1970s, when even the evangelical churches were getting, were really becoming un-evangelical and not trusting in biblical authority and not defending it.

That was happening in the 1970s. I talk, actually, about one of the cases in my book that is little known in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and people stood up, and that had a good impact. But now, the current generation needs to realize we're in a similar time, and the choices we make now are going to determine, I mean, obviously God is going to determine, but the choices we make are important about whether we go to another era where we have some live reformation of going back to the biblical faithfulness or not.

And if we don't, well, all you need to do is look in the Old Testament and the pattern of ancient Israel and what happens when people finally turn away and don't turn back to God. God lets them suffer the consequences of that.

Now, one more thing before we move on to what we can do about it. Would you say that one of the reasons that the world, and specifically this nation, is doing things and adopting into law things that we didn't even, many of us would never have dreamed would ever happen, at least in our lifetimes, like same-sex marriage and things like that?

Things that even our current administration is not opposed to or trying to overturn. Do you think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the world has stopped looking to Christian ministers and theologians for the answers to life's most critical issues?

And one of the reasons that they're not turning to ministers and theologians is because many of them, especially those in places of higher learning and academia, are saying the same thing that the secularist leftists are.

So why even go to Christian pastors and theologians for answers when you could get the same answers and maybe even more articulately spoken and written by secular know-it-alls and people in ivory towers?

Yeah, I certainly think there is some truth to that, but I actually would say that I think the sad fact is that not all, but many of the leading Christian influencers, if you will, basically have been saying the exact same things as the secularists.

And so there's been no reason to listen to them. So that gets to what you were saying. But I think the most serious thing is not that the rest of the world isn't looking towards pastors of the church, it's that we're not discipling members of the church.

Again, the number of Christians who I think naively think that, oh, if we just had more Christians in places of power, everything would be great. We have loads of self-identified Christians in every culture-forming arena in America at some of the highest levels of both politics, the arts, everything.

But they're not letting it out. I mean, Christianity, it's personal, but it's not public, and their public actions are not consistent. So I think that the biggest failing is that we have not been discipling the people who come to our churches.

So it's not just that people outside the churches aren't listening to the church, it's we're not discipling the people inside our churches. And until we get that fixed, I think it's going to be hard to have a larger influence on the world.

Okay, well, let's start giving our listeners things that we can do about this.

Yeah, so I have about six or so chapters that delve into this in various ways. So the first one is in a section of the book called Causes, but it's a cause so that you can also understand what you can do.

And the issue is, who do we listen to? And this comes about, even from my own experience, of people who I've known who've ended up becoming lukewarm or end up over the years, they start out as biblical Christians, and then suddenly, they're sort of giving the talking points that you hear in the New York Times or CNN or even Fox News on a lot of cultural issues.

I mean, if you're a biblical Christian, there's a lot of really not great things there, even in so-called some conserved outlets. And so why is that? Well, they're aping those talking points because that's where they're getting their information about the world.

So I think in that area, one thing you can do, obviously, is we should all be like the Bereans who, when they heard the gospel, it talks about how they went and compared it to what the Bible, what the Scripture said, and so they were discerning, and so that's part of it.

But part of it is also making sure you, your family, your church, if you're a pastor of your church, are getting good information sources. And the good news is, and people don't even need to buy my book for this, and this isn't exhaustive, but if you go to stockholmsyndromechristianity .com, my book website, and go to the section titled Resources, and then scroll down to the tab on News and Information, I'll give you a list.

I'll talk about some of them here. We, in this information-saturated society, fortunately, there are lots of good things. I mean, you're listening to a show that actually brings that, but for general news, like there's a Christian ministry that does a news service that will tell you about persecution of Christians around the world and the plight of Christians everywhere.

These are things you're not going to read in the New York Times or not read in the Washington Post or see mostly on social media, but you can go there. That resource is there. There are places like the Christian Post or World Magazine, or even in politics, there are things that may not be specifically Christian, but are much more likely to be accurate and also cover issues of interest to Christians.

Just the News is something run by some veteran journalists that tends to give a lot of backup, like they not just write about it, but then they'll link to the actual thing so that you can dig deeper if you want to.

So the key thing is there are lots of information sources, and there are alternatives to Wikipedia. I mean, this is another of these information sources that even Christians use, and Wikipedia isn't always bad, but unfortunately, when it comes to talking about Jesus or abortion or anything culturally consequential, it is terrible.

And so you shouldn't be getting your information from Wikipedia. Fortunately, there are other encyclopedias out there. There are Christian sites like AllAboutGod and GotQuestions that actually have all sorts of articles that are pretty closely vetted.

So again, I give examples of this. Similarly, there are better search engines than Google. Google curates the results. So again, why is this important? You may think that you have a solid biblical view, but if you're getting your information about current events, about what's happening in your community, what's happening in your nation, and from people who have a non-Christian worldview, they're selecting the stories that—first of all, they're not covering a lot of stories that Christians should want to know about.

Well, for example, if you're a listener, do you know that just in the last couple of years, there have been more than 500 attacks on churches and pro-life centers? 500 attacks. Wow. You know, from arson to—and I write about this in my book, and if you get my book, you can go to the website that actually creates a list of these.

That's not covered by the news media, because—.

I didn't even hear that on Fox News, as you were saying before. Fox News isn't necessarily a bastion of all truth.

No, especially when it comes to cultural matters, because a lot of them are culturally not Christians.

Practicing homosexuals, too, some of their favorite talking heads.

Yeah. But this highlights one thing, is that it's not just biased information. There are all sorts of ways. Agenda setting is one of the most important functions of the news media. That is, if someone tells you, well, what are the five most important things that happened in the last week?

If you are godless, if you don't believe God exists, or you don't believe in the God of the Bible, you're going to have a different view of what the five most important things are. If you're a Christian, well, let's say we come across and we're on Easter week.

Well, if you're a Christian, probably one of the five most important stories of Easter week is that we celebrated the resurrection, that churches, Christians, millions around the world celebrated the resurrection.

But if you're a non-Christian, that's not even a blip. And I talk about, actually, the coverage of Easter, other things. At one point in America, they actually covered sermons preached on Sundays in major churches in our newspapers.

So one of the biggest ways that you're manipulated, that you don't even think about, is not just obvious bias. It's the selection of the stories they cover and those they don't. And so my chapter actually goes through all these ways so that you can be aware of how you're being manipulated.

But again, on the other side, I try to equip you to, there are sources that you can go for for better information. That alone, if you just make sure that you get better information sources about the world, and your kids do too, and you train them.

Or if you're a pastor, you try to train your church members the importance to do that. That will be such a great defense against Stockholm Syndrome Christianity. You know, it's not a perfect defense, but that's one thing you do.

Where do you get your information from? Another thing in the section of my book on causes, but actually it's also about a solution, which is, who do you aim to please? So it's not just who you listen to, and this hits home for me when I was a Christian college faculty member, and I saw that too many of us were aiming to please, oh, were you written up in the New York Times?

Or, oh, did you get a government grant from a government agency that's funding all sorts of terrible stuff? Or, you know, are you liked by the secular professors across the way in our city? If you're aiming to please people who don't want to please God, or people who are sellouts, or whatever, if that's who you're aiming to please, it's going to be the gift that keeps giving.

And so one thing you can ask yourself, who am I aiming to please? And of course we should hope to please God, but even in the world, who's our peer group that we're trying to get approval from? That will tell you a lot.

So then the last area in the section on causes, which is also a solution, is, and I think this is one of the biggest things, and I've seen this in institutions, is do our accountability structures actually hold people accountable?

And where I saw at the Christian, historically evangelical Christian university that I was at, we had a solid board of trustees who were biblical Christians, but they decided that from cowardice or something that they would not uphold and make sure that the faculty and staff adhered to the mission of the university.

And when push came to shove, they basically just allowed the university to self-destruct by their choices in who they allowed to be hired and who they refused to fire. And so this is true not just for Christian universities, but for churches.

I mean, I go back to Andy Stanley, who is now calling the Old Testament the obsolete testament, arguing that it should be moved to the back of the Christian Bible, that we should reorganize our Bibles.

He has a board of elders, and presumably not all of them are as heterodox as he is because they were there when he wasn't so heterodox, but now that he is, why are they tolerating it? I mean, so the lack of accountability structures, and it's not just on the area of biblical faithfulness.

Also, there was a megachurch—I don't know that I wrote about this in my book, maybe I did, and I won't name it because they've moved on and they've tried to do the right thing now— but they were a large evangelical megachurch, and their senior pastor at the time, it later came out, had a history of molesting young boys.

And the elders had gotten lots of complaints on it and had swept them under the rug. The only way it came out finally was that one elder, it got too much for him, and so he went public and said, you know, we need to investigate this.

And then all heck broke loose, and he was demonized as a Judas. But it forced an actual investigation, which I think the church thought they could sweep under the rug, but it turned out that the evidence was overwhelming.

He resigned. He later died. But it was a lack of accountability structure. If you're called by God to be an elder or a board member, don't accept that charge if you're not willing to do what comes with it, which is holding people accountable.

So those are three things that are some causes of Stockholm Syndrome in Christianity, but then solutions. But then we can also get into—I should pause here because you probably have some more questions— but we could get into more things in the section of the book where I actually talk about solutions, and I actually have 21 things people could do.

Great. Well, we'll go to those 21 things, at least as many as we can fit into our allotted time, after we will begin doing so after we return from our first commercial break. And once again, if you would like to get in line with those that have already submitted questions that they're waiting to have answered, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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Well, we are now back with my guest, Dr. John G. West, and we are discussing his book, The Stockholm Syndrome Christianity. Why Christian leaders are failing and what we can do about it. This is part two, as I said, of a discussion we began on February 27th.

And I urge our listeners to, as soon as you can, listen to part one of that discussion, because it covers a lot of things that we don't have time to address today, because we ran out of time last time we were discussing this in part one and could not get heavily into what Dr. West addresses in the book in regard to the subtitle, what we can do about it.

So we hope that you listen to that soon. And again, our email address, if you have questions, is chrisarmson at gmail .com. Chrisarmson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least. City and state of residence and country of residence, if you live outside of the good old USA.

Before I take any listener questions, why don't you move on to another one of the points that you have of what we can do about it.

Yeah, so I have a chapter called A Call to Wisdom, and there I actually try to talk about sort of seven things to beware of, or to be wary of, to be careful of, that may help you be misled into Stockholm Syndrome Christianity.

And these are also things that can help give you guidance when you're dealing with people. So the first one actually deals with to beware a Hollywood view of evil. And that's because I think when people are dealing with error in the church or in the culture, they have this Hollywood view.

Many Christians have a Hollywood view of evil that, you know, you want this terrible villain character. You want Darth Vader or you want Adolf Hitler. And if it doesn't look like Adolf Hitler or Stalin or, you know, something like that, then it must not be bad.

That's a Hollywood view of evil. You know, going back to Augustine, you know, Christians have recognized that evil is a twisting of something that's good, because the devil can't create anything. All he can do is twist that which God creates.

But that has an implication. That means that errors may have at their very, you know, kernel of truth, because error and evil have to twist the truth. So don't be surprised when you see things that are errors that have a smidgen of truth.

Or it may even have an important truth, but it may be twisted in the wrong way. And so I think sometimes Christians are unsuspecting because they're expecting a Hollywood villain when they don't realize that in the real world that evil is a twisting of the truth and good, because God is the only one who can create things.

The devil can only twist things. And so that means that, again, even the most evil things, and this is how you get things like a misplaced sense of love. Yes, we're called to be loving. That's true. But in a biblical sense, it's not the loving of validation, no matter what someone does, even to their own self-destruction.

That's not loving. Or that violates God's commands or how he's created us. And so this is where it's so important to understand that when you're looking to discern evil, it's not just Hollywood villains.

It's even things that may have a kernel of truth may go wrong. And so you need to be discerning about that. Another thing on the area of wisdom is really beware the use of language. So we've seen this where people redefine certain words to try to, whether it be gay, Christian, or they redefine words in ways to get you to come along or to confuse you.

And that's usually another warning sign. One actual example I talk in my book is there are groups who are trying to redefine pro-life to mean if you buy into everything about global warming. And so you may be a politician who has 100 pro-abortion voting records.

But if you vote for climate change actions, you may be called pro-life. That is a sinister move. The people and the Christians who try to redefine what pro-life means to cover up, really, what people are doing bad things, they're misusing the terminology.