November 25, 2025 Show with Dr. Eric M. Wallace on “The Heart of Apostasy: How the Black Church Abandoned Biblical Authority for Political Ideology–& How to Reclaim It”

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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 Tuesday on this 25th day of November 2025.

We are going to be addressing a very important and yet very controversial and sensitive issue today that is no doubt going to eventually evoke perhaps even anger and rage in the hearts and minds of some who hear this broadcast, but the truth is infinitely more important than the feelings of men, and so we are going to take advantage of the opportunity that my guest today, Dr. Eric M. Wallace, had the courage and commitment to God and His Word to write the book that we are discussing today.

Dr. Eric M. Wallace is an author and president and co-founder of Freedom's Journal Institute, and we're addressing Dr. Wallace's book, The Heart of Apostasy, How the Black Church Abandoned Biblical Authority for Political Ideology and How to Reclaim It, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio for the very first time, Dr. Eric M. Wallace.

Hey, Chris, glad to be with you.

It's an honor, sir, and first of all, tell us something about Freedom's Journal Institute.

First of all, the name comes, we're named after the first black newspaper called Freedom's Journal back in 1827, and when I found out about it, I still have not memorized the quote that they give as to why they started it, but it's something like they were tired of hearing other people speak on their behalf.

They wanted to speak for themselves and about issues that were important to them, and when I read that, it resonated with me as a black conservative because it felt like others were speaking for us, at least in the black community, supposedly representing the black community.

They didn't represent me, and they didn't represent a lot of the black conservative friends that I had. So we had decided to do a magazine. We called it Freedom's Journal Magazine. It's a little redundant because a journal is a magazine, but we wanted to keep the identification with the history, right?

And then after doing a magazine for a couple of years, and it was a flip page magazine, I had become a Mac user, and when I bought a Mac, there was a thing in the, I don't know what came to the internet or what, but it was talking about Macworld, and you could get a digital version or you could get a paper version, and I said, oh, a digital version sounds cool.

So I got the digital version, and I saw that, and I said, you know, I could do a magazine that way, and decided to do a digital magazine like that. So after a couple of years, we decided we wanted to do something more crucial, substantive than that, to speak to the community.

So we decided to start an institute and just meld the magazine into the institute and talk more about, I mean, continue to write and put out articles and op-ed pieces, but also to do like a black conservative summit.

We've done that a couple of years. We've done a TV show called Kingdoms in Conflict, and then I wrote this book, and we got a couple of things that are coming down the road that we hope God will open the door for us to do, but I felt like the book was something.

So I've written a couple of books. So this is obviously the latest one. I've got one on my testimony called Integrity of Faith, which talks a little bit more of my testimony of how I got involved in ministry, how I got called into the political arena and stuff like that.

So we wanted to speak to the church. So we always say we speak to the church in general, but the African American church in particular, to vote our values and to stand for what we say we believe. Our mission, hold on a second here, our mission is to educate, engage, and empower individuals on matters of faith, race, and public policy based on a biblical worldview.

We feel like too many folks are doing a lot of different things, but don't have a biblical worldview, and so we're trying to educate folks. Let them know. Biblical worldview means finding out what the Bible says about a particular issue, and then living by that, understanding how we vote, understanding how we live, that every area of our life should come under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Amen. And if anybody wants to explore the website of Freedom's Journal Institute, go to freedomsjournalinstitute .org. Freedomsjournalinstitute .org, God willing, we'll be repeating that towards the end of the program.

Salvation Testimony and Early Call to Ministry

And before we move on to the main theme of our show today, which is your book, The Heart of Apostasy, I'd like you to do, as all of our first-time guests do when we have them on the program, they give a summary of their salvation testimony that would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

And I would love to hear your story.

Well, I came to know Christ when I was 16. Now, I had, you know, my parents used to take us to church and send us to church, but I don't think I ever really heard, I mean, maybe it was given, but I'm not sure I ever heard the gospel actually preached from the pulpit.

I actually ended up coming across another individual. So this one summer, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, right? Where I wanted to go to college, what I wanted to study.

And my mother, they had connections to Howard University. She used to teach at Howard University, and so did my dad. I'm trying to remember whether they were still at Howard or not during this time, but there was this summer program for kids interested in engineering, and Howard University was trying to get more black kids interested in engineering, whether it was mechanical or electrical engineering, civil engineering.

And so I spent two weeks on campus at Howard University, and it was great to be able to, you know, at 16, get away from the house and stay on the college campus. And so while I was there, interesting thing is, you talk about the providence of God.

So in the dormitories, on the far ends, you had two rooms attached through a bathroom, and I was supposed to have a roommate, but my roommate never showed up. So I had a room all to myself, and the adjoining room, so you go to the bathroom, then there was another door, went to the next room, dorm room, and one of the young people in there was a preacher's kid, and he had these tracks called The New Birth.

So he was born again. His dad was a Baptist preacher, and he gave me at some point a copy of a track called New Birth, and I read that bad boy a couple of times. I asked Christ into my life a couple of times, because I didn't know how it was supposed to work, right?

Right. So I remember one day coming up, there was some kind of dance at the school, and I was down at the dance, and I didn't see Walter. His name was Walter Bell, and I didn't see him. So I went back up to the room, and I was like, you know, where are you, Walter?

We're having fun down here. I opened up the door of his room, and he was on his knees praying, and I'm like, wow, okay. I want whatever it is he's got. And so, you know, after the two weeks was over, I went home, and I think I ended up praying and asking Christ into my life again, and I had this dream, this weird dream that I was at the high school football game, and I was looking—I actually wasn't looking at the football game.

It was going on behind me. I was looking at the bleachers, and between me and the bleachers was this image of Satan was standing out. He had the horns and the pitchfork and all that, and he was looking at the bleachers, and so he wasn't looking at me.

I was standing behind him, you know, a few yards away, but all of a sudden, he started to turn his head like he was going to look at me, and I was scared to death.

Now, you weren't at a New Jersey Devils hockey game, were you?

I was at an Arlington High School football game, and all of a sudden, I woke up in a cold sweat, pulled the covers over my head, and said, God save me, and I don't know. After that night, I actually felt like it stuck, like whatever I prayed for, you know, because I didn't—again, I wasn't in a church.

I wasn't going to church at that time. All I had was this tract that told me to, you know, say this prayer and confess my sins. I was going to be a Christian, but after that weird, strange dream, I felt a sense of comfort after it was over that God would protect me.

I'd given my life to him, and I was going to live for him. Hallelujah.

By the way, I wish the local college football team here in—actually, it's, I believe, the high school football team here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, would change its name. They are the Blue Devils. I don't understand the fascination of people who want to name their athletic teams Devil, but praise God.

From Preaching to Politics and the Burden of the Black Church

Now, what led to you wanting to become more involved in ministry and even in the political arena to the point where you founded, as we were saying earlier, the Freedoms Journal Institute?

Well, I preached my first sermon. So once I came saved, my mother was trying to help me find a church that was close by because I was going to Walter Bell's church, which was in Washington, D .C. I lived in Reston, Virginia, and so it was a little bit of a drive.

So she found this church that was meeting right down the street from us. It was a church planned in a school. So I went there, found the pastor putting books out on the chairs, and so I began to help him.

And shortly after that, I can't remember how long, but I know it was 17 years old, I gave my first sermon. I didn't know anything, by the way. I know nothing about preaching. So it was more about just my testimony.

So I started telling folks they needed to be born again, because for me, it was life changing. I wasn't out there sinning and doing all these different things. Obviously, I was a sinner, but I wasn't taking drugs.

I wasn't chasing girls. None of this. It wasn't this dramatic turn. It was just that I felt a sense of purpose, and he saw something in me, and he let me get up there and preach. And I remember my dad being in the audience.

He started crying, and some other people started crying. And I would say later, I didn't know whether the spirit was moving or it was just so bad that everybody was crying. But that was kind of the impetus that started leading me in that direction.

I ended up going to Howard University for a couple of years, but I felt a call to ministry, and my grace kind of showed it. Because I wasn't really motivated. I didn't want to be an engineer anymore. I wanted to be involved in ministry.

And I figured if I was going to go into ministry, I needed to get some training. So my pastor told me about Washington Bible College. So I ended up going to Washington Bible College for undergrad. Then they got a master's degree, and it wasn't until I was finishing up a PhD in biblical studies that I started the whole idea about getting involved in politics.

Because after I finished, I was like, Lord, what do you want me to do now? I had done some adjunct teaching, but there really weren't a whole bunch of jobs available. And I started thinking, Lord, what do you want me to do?

So I watched for the first time a Republican convention where I think it was Bush, his second term, and he was getting teary-eyed about something to do with a military person who was sitting up in the crowd.

And I looked at him. I said, you know, I could follow this guy, because I believe that he had claimed to be born again. Whether you agreed with all his politics or not, I thought he was a sincere believer.

And then I saw later, after this was over, something in the Chicago Tribune where I think it was Jesse Jackson Sr. and others were talking about trying to figure out how they could affect the next election for the Democrats.

And I was wondering to myself, why is it that these people who said they're involved in same thing that I see, not only in Bush, but in the Republican Party? And I started to think, you know what, I've got letters in front of my name.

I got letters behind my name. It may open up some doors that other folks can't walk through. And I felt like I should be called, felt called to get involved in, oh, and also looking at Illinois politics.

It was so corrupt. It's not funny. So, you know, you can't ask somebody else to do what you're not willing to do. So I started getting involved in the political process and started thinking, why is it that 90 percent of African-Americans are always voting for the Democrats, whose platform does not mirror anything I can find in Scripture?

So I kind of felt like my duty, you know, to try and do something about it.

Amen. And well, we praise God that your organization is now in existence. And I know that it probably was brewing in your heart and mind for quite a while as you got increasingly frustrated, sad and angered, dismayed, heartbroken to see how leftism has dominated the so-called black church.

And as I have been promoting this, I believe you even saw one of my comments. Somebody was protesting when they saw the title of your book, and they said, there's no such thing as the black church, God's church has no color.

I agree with that. But obviously, there is also something called the common vernacular of the day. And those are very frequently used terms when you're speaking of churches that are predominantly occupied by people of one skin tone or another.

But I'm sure that you were dismayed seeing how leftist the dominant voices, especially in the media, how leftist they are representing in people's minds, you and your family and your church, when they are really not.

And I'm sure that eventually it led to a breaking point where you said, I've got to write this book, The Heart of Apostasy. Tell us about the compelling factors that led to that.

Let me address the black church piece. So I agree. Ultimately, there is only one church, and that's the church of Jesus Christ. And it's his body. There's one body. However, there are cultural differences sometimes.

And the way people worship, the language people use to worship in. I mean, I've got a Korean church down the street from where I live. I don't think anybody's running around saying there's no such thing as a Korean church.

There are Spanish churches where they speak Spanish and Ukrainian churches where they speak Ukrainian. So sometimes we segregate ourselves in the areas where we're culturally comfortable. And especially if we don't speak, if English isn't our first language.

So there are reasons sometimes that we that we do that. The problem is if you decide that you're only going to let a certain people in, you're sometimes we self-segregate for particular reasons. Not that we're excluding anybody else, but we want to have a church service in a particular way.

Now, unfortunately, our history has been that there has been segregation in the churches, unfortunately, and some African-Americans left those denominations and started their own. Right. Because they didn't want to sit in the in the balcony or sit in the back of the church.

And so that's unfortunate. Some of that still persists today. The idea that we need to have something separate. There are those churches today that that are well mixed. And that's that's a cool thing, because that's how heaven's going to look.

There won't be a black section and a white section and Hispanic section. Right. Korean section. I mean, people will be worshiping together. And that's a beautiful sight. And I think that's what we ultimately want to do.

Even if we're on Sunday, we're worshiping separately. It doesn't mean that we can't come together some at some point and do some evangelistic stuff together, some teaching together, things like that. So I do want to say that.

But. Because, like you said, there's common vernacular that a lot of people that pretend predominantly black churches talk about the black church. Matter of fact, there was a thing called the Black Church Pack that during the time when they had the Democratic convention here in Illinois, in Chicago.

I saw it being advertised, this thing called the Black Church Pack, and it kind of blew me away that the three things they were talking about. That they were interested in pursuing was mass incarceration.

Voter suppression and gun violence. So I looked at that and I was in I was I was amazed that these these are the three issues, you know, mass incarceration. Go ahead. Did you want to say?

No, I was just laughing.

So mass incarceration is a problem that so we're like 13 percent of the population, but there's like 50 percent, you know, high of high volume of of of blacks represented in the in incarceration. I said, well, if they do the crime, they have to do the time.

And we all know that the people who suffer the most from that are actually blacks because that's who they're perpetrating the crime is committed against. And then number two, voter suppression. A lot of that is just voter IDs.

Right. And most black people, if you ask them whether requiring somebody to have an ID to vote is somehow voter suppression, they'll laugh at that. That's that's ridiculous. As a matter of fact, it's generally white liberals are the ones who think somehow we're unable to go get IDs.

Yeah, it's really an insult, isn't it?

Actually, it is. And and generally speaking, white liberals are pushing that kind of crap. And then you've got and crap is a is a high definition. You know, one of those terms that these days use a lot of crap.

So I know the third one was gun violence. And generally speaking, that's gang violence. It's not gun violence. Guns don't shoot themselves. Right. So gang violence. I understand that. But they don't talk about that.

My thing was we should be talking about marriage and family in the black community. Only thirty nine percent or less than thirty nine percent of blacks are getting are getting married these days. We should be talking about pro-life because a large number of black children being aborted.

We should be talking about education and school choice because a lot of black folks want school choice. Unfortunately, they're locked into these schools that aren't teaching their children anything. And then entrepreneurship and free market.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks these days are talking about socialism, saying that the fruit market doesn't work for us. And that's a lie. That's one of the biggest lies. So I decided to write it because I got tired of listening and watching.

Black people in general, but especially the black church, black Christians voting against their own interests, against their own their own values. One of the one of the books that I highlight. And so there's a section that I talk about in the book that talks about different voices that are that are speaking to the churches.

And we do we need to change that and stop listening to those voices. One of them is called Steadfast Democrats. Where they try to study, it's done by Democrats, they try and study how or figure out how the the Democrat Party has held on to black votes, black voters, because they're very conservative.

And they went through and even talked about it. And they went through and they talked about, like, when it comes to the Second Amendment, when it comes to, you know, welfare reform, when it comes to abortion, when it comes to.

Government assistance, they were all like in the 70 percentile talking in agreement with us, so they're actually socially conservative. Yet they continue to vote for for for people who are not. And so.

I wanted to talk to these folks, my brothers in the Lord, brothers and sisters in the Lord, and say, look, if you don't agree with this, why do you continue to vote for people who don't share your values?

And in this book, they said that one of the things that keeps blacks from voting. The Republican Party or voting their conservative values is this thing they called racialized social constraint, that was their term, racialized social constraint.

Which basically just meant in simple terms, peer pressure. There's peer pressure because you got the HBCUs, you got black radio, you got black TV, you got black Twitter, which I didn't know existed until I until I this.

But also you've got black organizations, fraternities and sororities all singing from the same sheet of music, right? So much so that that Biden could say, if you don't vote for me, then you're not black.

He didn't he didn't get any pushback for that because it's true. I mean, many people believe that you have to stay in line and vote a particular way or else you're a traitor to your race.

Yeah. In fact, the the leftists very widely adopted the nickname for Bill Clinton, our first black president. This is before Barack Obama was elected.

Yeah, that's that's that's hilarious, too, maybe because he could play the saxophone. I would say the other part, but I shouldn't go there. So so anyway, yeah, so. So and then there's another one book that I talk about in the in my book called Conservative But Not Republican, and she tries to argue that the conservative blacks won't vote Republican because the Republican Party is seen as is not being sensitive to the needs of black people and have a history of not of not voting for issues that are important to blacks, though, you know, I put I think I put a footnote that she's not that's not actually true.

If you look at the history of the Republican Party, you know, they helped pass the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendment. Of Lincoln, part of their platform was entering ending slavery. When it came to the civil rights legislation, whether you agree that it was.

You know, so there's there's some debate about whether the civil rights legislation went too far, trying to tell people individuals who they had to. Do business with right, right, right, that people should have a right, they want to discriminate, they should have a right to discriminate and hire who they want to hire, do business when they want to do business and they'll suffer the consequences.

Yeah, right.

Exactly. You know, free market system. If you want to be stupid enough to only allow whites into your store or your restaurant, you're going to be eventually harmed financially by that. But in America, we are supposed to have the freedom to be stupid.

You see, Barry Goldwater agreed with that and he felt like the 64 civil rights bill went too far and actually he supported all the civil rights bills up to that point, but did not support that one. And that's what led to him actually losing later because they they beat him up over that.

But I think he was right that and he felt like if you wanted to fight against discrimination, you should be able to do it on the local level. So if you wanted to protest that that soup kitchen or whatever, not not doing business with blacks and say no blacks allowed or no at that time, coloreds allowed, you should have the right to do that.

And you should have a right to set up something across the street to compete against that person and actually drive them out of business. But the federal government had no business being involved in that particular thing.

So. But anyway, so the but the Republican Party helped push that through. Lyndon Johnson went to Everett Dirksen out of Illinois, the great state of Illinois, and he rounded up the senators to help push that across the finish line for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

If people would do their homework and go look at the voting record, they'll see how many Republicans actually supported that and how many Democrats did not. So Republicans overwhelmingly. So the woman who wrote that, I think her name is Philpott, starts to say, well, we're we're conservative, but we're not Republican.

But it's because of all the miseducation, all the. So the left has done a really good job at telling telling lies about the Republican Party and what they actually stand for. And I'm not saying there aren't any racists in the Republican Party.

I'm sure there are and have been. Same thing in the Democrat Party. We know there have been in the Democrat Party because they tried to they fought against they fought to actually hold on to slavery for a long period of time.

And then they fought for segregation. I mean, most of the Jim Crow laws were all in the South, and it was some of the Southern Democrats that actually pushed that. So but. But I argue that. So so the idea is that the.

Steadfast Democrats in this other book kind of talk about how the left has done a real good job by hanging on to to the black vote, even though many in the black community are conservative.

The Decline of the Black Church and the Civil Rights Era

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The Origins of Black Liberation Theology and Civil Rights Politics

Welcome back. If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Dr. Eric M. Wallace. We are addressing his book, The Heart of Apostasy, How the Black Church Abandoned Biblical Authority for Political Ideology and How to Reclaim It.

If you have a question, our email address is chrisorensen at gmail .com. Chrisorensen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. And we do have a listener in Hollis, Queens, New York named Deshawn or Deshawn.

And he says, where do you trace the origins of the decline of how blacks did church where, as you say, political liberalism dominated over biblical theology? That's an excellent question. And in fact, I've even had some conversations with Dr. Wallace before the show that there is an excellent book out there also that unfortunately is written by a brother who I doubt he would even be publicly stating the things that he wrote in this book today because tragically he became woke and he authored a book called The Decline of African-American Theology from Biblical Faith to Cultural Captivity.

I'm speaking of Thabiti Anyabwile and he traced in his book. And by the way, I interviewed Thabiti before he became woke and he traced the decline of African-American theology, as he phrased it, not only to the civil rights movement of the 60s, but even further back to the abolitionist movement when it ceased to be a Christian movement and became a secular movement.

Do you have any comments of your own about your theories and when this shift came?

Well, in my book, I really don't try to pinpoint exactly when it happened. I would have agreed that we know it happened during the civil rights. We know that some of those who were involved in the civil rights movement, and I actually have an excursus on the civil rights, on Dr. King and the civil rights movement, and on the Progressive National Black Convention, excuse me, Progressive National Baptist Convention.

Because in those in those things, there was the push that came and there's a good friend of mine, I don't know if you know, Chad Jackson, who's been doing.