December 19, 2025 Show with Marcus Pittman on “The Christian Response to the Deaths of Anti-Christian Public Figures”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

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The Christian Response to Rob Reiner's Death and the Art of Unbelievers

No doubt, most, if not all, of my listeners have heard the horrifying news five days ago, December 14th, that Rob Reiner, the globally known actor and film producer and writer, he and his wife, Michelle, were brutally, gruesomely murdered by their own son, Nick.

And there has been even controversy surrounding the way people should be responding to this, including in the Christian community. And I thought it would be a good idea to conduct a program today on the Christian response to the deaths of anti-Christian public figures, and do Christians have the liberty to enjoy the art of unbelievers, lessons to be learned from the recent horrific murders of Rob and Michelle Reiner at the hand of their son, Nick.

And today, I think I have an ideal guest to conduct such an interview. It's been a long time since he's been on the program. His name is Marcus Pittman, co-founder of Lore TV, a platform that allows indie filmmakers to fund and distribute their movies and TV shows.

He's a former executive producer and showrunner for Apology Studios and Abortion Now, a former head of video for the agency that handled Pure Flix digital advertising. And the producer and director for three pro-life videos.

Number one, Babies Are Murdered Here. Number two, Babies Are Still Murdered Here. And number three, Pro-Life Spider-Man. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, Marcus Pittman.

Thank you for having me, man. How are you? I'm doing better than I deserve, brother. Although I have definitely reached an age where it is more frequent that I am getting sad news from friends and loved ones that other friends and loved ones have passed away.

It's coming with more rapidity at this age in my life. And today was the funeral of a very dear friend who I've interviewed on this program many times. Reverend Roger Salter, a Reformed Anglican minister originally from Tasmania, but he was pastoring in the Birmingham, Alabama area, St. Matthew's Anglican Church.

And I strongly urge everybody listening after this live program, of course, that you look up in the archive of IronSherpaandZionRadio .com my past interviews with Roger Salter. Just type in his name, Roger, and his last name, S-A-L-T-E-R, and you'll have a number of interviews that I'm sure will bless you.

Well, tell us, oh, first of all, I know that there's congratulations in order. You and your wife are in the process of adopting a child, correct?

Well, not any child specifically. We're raising funds to do the process. Right. Well, yeah. Yeah, we are doing that. So we've been doing that, I think, about maybe a year and a half ago, we started raising money and we got our home study approved.

And now we're just kind of—we raised enough to be able to do a private adoption without an agency. And, you know, I know that a lot of people at abortion clinics all over the country have our name on the list.

But that's always so rare. You just kind of sit and wait, you know, and you just wait on the Lord, really, legitimately, because it's a miracle whenever a woman at an abortion clinic decides you're going to give their child up for adoption anyway.

And there's a lot of people waiting, too, so we're trusting the Lord on that. Our hope is to raise enough money to go through an agency that would guarantee the speed up of the process. But ultimately, you know, God is sovereign and that child is out there.

And if he chooses to deliver one to us, we can't really rush that process no matter what, whether it's, you know, a private adoption through an abortion clinic or whatever.

OK, well, tell us about Lore TV and even how that name got chosen by you for this organization.

Yeah, that name is actually—it comes from the word folklore. It's usually spelled L-O-R-E, but we spell it L-O-O-R because we want to be cool and hip. But what it means, what it actually means is it comes from the term phrase or to give an award.

So the idea is that our users, our subscribers, monthly subscribers, can donate money and fund independent movies and TV shows from young, unknown, independent artists who don't want to make stuff for 65-year-old, life-weight Christian bookstore shoppers.

And so we're trying to expand the market of Christian entertainment and conserve—broadly conservative, not just Christian entertainment—broadly conservative entertainment to a younger Gen Z generation.

Great. And if anybody wants to find out more about that organization, Lore TV, go to L-O-O-R dot TV. L-O-O-R dot TV. And God willing, we will repeat that later on in the program. Every Christian should know that Ezekiel 18 .23 reads, "'Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked?' declares the Lord.

Rather than that, he would turn from his ways and live.". If God doesn't take pleasure or delight in the death of the wicked, obviously we who are seeking to be his obedient followers and disciples should not rejoice when wicked individuals die—those who reject Christianity, who reject Jesus Christ.

Rob Reiner was such a person. He was notorious for having many anti-Christian views. He was a politically active individual. But at the same time, he was an extraordinarily gifted man. Now, I'm not saying that if he wasn't a gifted man that we should delight in his death.

That's not what I mean by that. But what I do mean, though, however, is that Rob Reiner has left a legacy of art that many Christians enjoy, including myself. One of the classic works from his hand is the Princess Bride, which many Christians even may make it an annual tradition to watch with their entire family.

I know a Christian, a retired pastor, Buzz Taylor—perhaps he's listening today, he used to co-host this program years ago—Buzz Taylor, now living in Massachusetts. But he and his adult children have seen that film so many times that they've memorized it nearly word for word.

Perhaps I'm even wrong by saying nearly. They may have memorized it word for word, and they reenact it together. But tell us about this phenomenon. There are probably a minority of Christians. I don't think that it's an overwhelming number, but there are some Christians, perhaps especially fundamentalists and even those with stricter codes of ethics in the Reform community, would say that it is absolutely wrong for Christians to enjoy things like the Princess Bride and other things.

Now, I can't even remember. It's been a while since I've personally seen the Princess Bride, although I did thoroughly enjoy it. I can't remember if there was anything overtly wicked in there involving language and so forth.

But tell us about your opinion about Christians making use and enjoying the art of unbelievers.

General Revelation, Image Bearers, and Common Grace in Art

Yeah, I think, you know, foundationally, we have to kind of look at the world—I look at the world, and I think it's true to look at the world presuppositionally—in that everyone, every human is an image bearer, and they accidentally reveal that there is a God in their stuff.

So two things. First, when God created the heavens and the earth, He created the heavens and the earth, and the Bible says that that's a general revelation. It's not evangelistic. It's not enough to convert people to Christ in a salvific sense at all.

The Bible says it gives them knowledge of God so that they're without excuse, but it's not there's no magic in the beauty of the creation. There's no magic in it. So I think a lot of times, especially the Christian film industry, has kind of like really created this false idea, and it was created in marketing boardrooms and suites by executives, many of whom were not even Christian at all, but it was just about sales.

But this idea that all Christian movies are this evangelistic sort of gospel track sort of thing, and that would be like basically we're creating art as special revelation, right? And so special revelation is God's Word.

It completely has its own miraculous qualities to it. The heavens and the earth and the beauty of a small puppy or some sort of beautiful flower or sunset or sunrise is also God's artwork, and yet He has the freedom to create artwork that doesn't save.

And so I think in the same sense, we can do that. We can do that. We have that exact same ability. And I would say that every image bearer, whether they're a Christian or not, accidentally creates stories and messages that expose that they are, in fact, created in the image of God.

And so I think art is—first off, art doesn't make sense in any other animal species, right? Like, they don't really acknowledge it. Even though they do it, they don't acknowledge it. Yeah, I think there was a nature documentary a while back ago with birds that were just beautiful, and they were dancing.

And they were doing it to get a mate based on instinct, not because they actually believed that, you know, this was a magnificent or valuable or even, yeah, like financially we can benefit from. They're just doing it by instinct.

So animals who, you know, eat their own children, you know, still reveal the glory of God just in how they dance and their feathers and how they move across the plains of Africa. I mean, just, you know, you can watch those BBC documentaries, and they're like pushing evolutionary theory on it while you're watching this.

You're like, it doesn't add up, you know? And so, again, like by accident, they reveal that's like who God is. And the same is true with like Princess Bread. Here you have the same man who produced this terrible God and country documentary with Russell Moore, David French, and Phil Vish are absolutely awful and disgusting in every possible way.

And ironically, some of the men you listed are professing Christians.

Right, right, right. And yeah, but then he made The Princess Bride, which is this beautiful love story. You know, it's very much kill the dragon, get the girl, which, you know, has been said as the one-sentence summary of the Bible, the dragon being Satan and the girl being church.

And so you have this beautiful analogy of this, and all that is good and true. You have this relationship between a son and the grandfather, and he's reading his child this kissing book. And so, you know, it's a phenomenal story.

But also just in terms of how it's crafted, many film schools use the script for The Princess Bride as a basis of a perfect script. Really? There's nothing left. Yeah, there's nothing left unanswered in it.

There's no loopholes. Everything is tied up at the end, and all the characters have their art in some way. And it's just a beautiful story. Now, that story wasn't written by Rob Reiner, so I think that's kind of important.

He didn't write it. It was based off a book. I can't think of the author's name right off the top of my head. But the author of the book was pretty committed to the movie being as based on the book as possible.

In fact, I actually heard that they wanted to cut out all of the father-grandson scenes altogether and just make it a fantasy, and the author refused, which is crazy to think about, because that's such an integral part of the story, is the grandfather and his grandchild reading this book and discovering the joy of a good story together, and the grandson growing up as a reader.

So there's this narrative, and then there's the meta-narrative of the book that they're in the studio. I just wanted to get that out, which is crazy. Oh, it's why you never trust studio executives' editorial decisions.

But yeah, so yeah, not made by a Christian, but the Princess Bride is made by an image bearer, and that is the key to that.

Well, this can be a complicated issue, because Christians do constantly disagree over things like this. Most Christians that I know, as I was saying earlier, enjoy the art, which would include movies, TV programs, and music, of unbelievers.

The question is, when do we stop enjoying these things as Christians when they include things that are clearly offensive to God? I'll give you an example. I remember when I was a new Christian, and I went to the movies with my very first Christian girlfriend, and we were watching that classic movie with Steve Martin and John Candy, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, a movie that I still, to this day, love.

I think it has one of the most moving endings of any movie I've ever seen, and I still get choked up watching the end of that movie. But I can still remember there is a scene—the profanity is almost entirely absent from the movie except for this one scene where Steve Martin is furious about a rental car not being available, and he just starts a litany, a machine gun of profanity, and I remember—.

Yeah, 17 F-words, I think, within 30 seconds or something like that.

Yeah, and I remember my girlfriend looking at me, and she said, you think that's funny? And she was furious. I still wonder if that had something to do with her eventually breaking up with me. But now, I'm not saying I was right for laughing at that scene.

But how are we as Christians to react to things like that? Do we reject the entire piece of art, in this case a film, and just never watch it again because of a scene being in there like that? Or how do we compartmentalize things like that when we are trying to enjoy something?

And that would be, in this day and age especially, almost everything that we enjoy from the hand of unbelievers.

The difference, though—I mean, we have vulgarity in pretty much everything. You're absolutely right. I would say there's a difference, though, in Plain Shirts and Automobiles in that the author's intent was to show the absolute frustration and anger of the main character there.

So if he was cussing like that the whole time, there wouldn't have been a really dramatic point to it. Doug Wilson wrote the book The Serrated Edge, where he talks about the proper use of language and when a Christian should use harsh language or strong language or all those sort of things from Scripture.

That's a really great book. I'd recommend The Serrated Edge on that. But even so, even if you say, well, I completely disagree with it, you can watch something and gain value from something, even if it's done sinfully, or even if sin is referenced.

It would be weird if I looked at the Scriptures and said, man, I'm really entertained by all the violence and rape and bad stuff in the Bible. That would be weird. But the overarching narrative of the Bible is Christ and being rescued and all these sort of things.

But there is all these demonstrations of evil and wickedness in Scripture that are absolutely vital towards explaining to you, one, the depth of human depravity and also how great of a rescue, a salvation that Christ breaks.

So even the Bible uses sin as a narrative framework in its storytelling over and over and over again. You know, the writers of the Bible are murderers and drunkards and all sorts of sin, which they openly talk about.

There is this way in which God's world works, in which Christians aren't to be sort of these isolationists who aren't aware, or they escape from tough conversations or difficult situations, or they cringe and rebel.

We've become such critics of this. And I would also add, too, like in classical Christian education, a lot of the stories from whether it's Plato or Aristotle or, you know, I mean, the list goes on. They also have a bunch of stuff in it that is immoral.

And sometimes, you know, the story that they write doesn't even lead to a great conclusion or whatever. But we still study it because what we see in these works, these classic works, are how are these great civilizations, like what are their stories?

What do they care about? What motivated them to build these great civilizations? And it's that accidental exposing of being an image-bearer that is what we point out and we bring up in classical education.

And let me pick up when we return from our first commercial break on what you just said. And if anybody would like to join us, our email address is chrisarnson 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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Justice, Death, and the Limits of Christian Mourning

Welcome back. If you are just tuning us in, my guest today is Marcus Pittman, who is a founder of lore .tv, l-o-o-r dot tv. And we are discussing in the wake of a horrific bit of news that we all received five days ago that Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, were gruesomely murdered by their own son.

Their throats were slit, and there has been some controversy over how one should even respond to the death of a notorious anti-Christian. Not that that means Rob Reiner was against every single Christian that he may have known.

In fact, I don't know what the theology of actor James Woods may be, but he professes to be a political conservative, and in spite of that, had apparently a very close friendship with Rob Reiner, who even rescued his career at one of its lowest points, having him starring in a movie, I believe it was Mississippi Burning.

And apparently, Rob Reiner was very aware of the conservative political leanings of James Woods, but at the same time, he was notorious for being in favor of everything that Christians are supposed to biblically oppose, opposed to everything, or many things that Christians are biblically commanded to support.

And that, in and of itself, raises the question of, should we enjoy the art of someone, even someone who is as notorious in his views in favor of the murder of unborn children, for instance? But at the same time, as I was saying at the beginning of the program, I'm sure you would agree, Marcus, that we are not to be using occasions like this as Christians to publicly rejoice when we hear about someone like Rob Reiner being murdered, or even being somewhat callous about it.

I totally disagree with the way our president reacted to it.

Yeah, I thought that was just weird.

Yes. And the only way that you could make President Trump's words make sense is if he was claiming that Rob Reiner's son was pro-Trump, because Trump's words insinuated that Rob Reiner brought his murder upon himself through his Trump derangement syndrome.

So, I don't know why he would even bring that up. He shouldn't have remarked at all if he was not going to say it. I mean, apparently he did conclude his words by saying, rest in peace. He hopes they rest in peace.

And some have said that Rob Reiner was very glib about the attempted assassination of President Trump. Now, I could not find anything like that. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I know he openly despised President Trump, but I don't remember, or I could not find anything that he said where he was delighting in an attempted assassination of Trump and dismayed over the failure in that attempt.

But nonetheless, we as Christians are called to a higher standard, even if people seek or wish ill upon us. And that's one area where, as much as any of our listeners may love and support President Trump, we should not be imitating that behavior at all.

Am I correct there?

Yeah, I think, you know, the Bible says not to rejoice in the death of the wicked. I think that's true. I think also, like, even if they're wicked, if they're insanely talented, I think the world loses something there as well.

We lose the gifts that they provide. You could have this evil, anti-Trump, leftist, pro-abortion, vile human being, and he's a really great chef. And you're like, man, I really love that food. And then he dies, and suddenly that restaurant goes out of business.

There's things that are lost in the world when anybody dies, whether they're a believer or an unbeliever. I was shocked by his death. I think he was still working on stuff that we will probably never see the completion of it.

In the same way, I still think about the death of Jim Henson. And what if he was still here today? Would the Muppets have ever sold? Would they have sold Disney? Would they just be, you know, IP in Disney's vault that very rarely ever gets used?

All those things. And I felt the same way, too. I'm sure a lot of people did. With the death of Steve Jobs, I was legitimately upset. I was in the cell phone industry at the time, too. I was a lot closer to it, not too far after the release of the iPhone.

But I remember when he died, and I was like, man, the world lost something. And God, in his kindness, used people like that to be able to gift us with incredible technology and innovation. Sometimes I think, a lot of times when God hardens the heart of an unbeliever, he removes—they just become really stupid in some areas.

But other areas, God sort of preserves for them. I think an example of this is—who was the guy? Penn Jillette is one of those examples. He's an adamant atheist. He's a brilliant performer and magician.

His show Fool Us, I think it's been on like 10 years now. It's just a really good, clean show. Have you ever seen the video that he did,.

Penn Jillette, where he describes in vivid detail the fan of his who approached him after one of his Vegas acts and gave him a Bible? Did you ever see that? Yeah, I did. I saw that.

I know Ray Comfort got to speak with him briefly, and I also saw that Sy Tim Verdenkate got to speak with him as well. I don't know. I think they might have been at the same moment.

Just to let our listeners know, if they're wondering why he brought that up, and you could look it up yourself, just look up Penn Jillette Receives the Gift of a Bible on YouTube, and he talks about how much he admired a man who gave him a Bible because that man believed that the only way one could receive eternal life in heaven was by being a Christian, and you become a Christian by understanding and believing in the Word of God.

And Penn Jillette said, even though he's an atheist, that how on earth could you not tell people this if you believe it? What kind of—how cruel can you be to keep that to yourself? So he was saying something quite remarkable that you would not generally or regularly or hardly ever hear from the lips of a leftist and an atheist.

Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I remember that video pretty thoroughly. That was like right during the time where I was pretty heavily involved in Way of the Master, so that was like a big deal for us street preachers, man.

That was a really big deal. And I think there's this guy on—this is kind of off the subject—there's this guy on TikTok. I think he's called Celebrity Evangelist or something like that, and he gets custom Bibles with the celebrity's name embroidered on it.

And I saw a video recently where he gave one to James Corden with his name on it, and James Corden thanked him for that. I also heard that somebody gave a Bible to Ozzy Osbourne before he died. Yes, I saw that.

Everywhere. Yeah, yeah.

And he was actually frantically looking for it, and apparently his son was helping him.

Find this Bible because he wanted it desperately. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's like a musician who hates God, God still preserves their musical abilities. A visionary like Steve Jobs, God still preserves their vision and skills in that sense.

And that's kindness to the world, I think. Steve Jobs, unbeknownst to himself and probably never intending to be, is probably one of the most influential people of this last century that has been able to give the Bible and Christian resources and stuff to more people than any Christian has been able to do ever, and that's all through the iPhone, right?

How does that happen? I think, you know, we tend to lean, especially if you're a Calvinist, you tend to lean not so much into total depravity, but I think it's utter depravity, where it's like, you can't do anything.

And that's not a presuppositional approach to the way God made the world. But also, I mean, we could talk about this, I don't know where you want to go. We could go anywhere you want to go. Well, I like to point out the Christian scientists and innovators that got us to where we are today technologically, because they were Christians, and in some instances, nobody was able to do that.

So, Sam Morris is a great example. I have a talk where I give to students on Sam Morris, but he held the Westminster Confession. He was an artist, a painter, actually, and he was away on a trip where he was painting a portrait of—you know, I actually believe it's—what's the French guy in Hamilton, the Broadway—oh, they know him from The Blank.

I didn't see the role. Yeah, yeah, the real historical figure, but I didn't—. Major Andre, who was he? No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to try to go back and recite the lyrics to get the name of it.

But he was actually painting his portrait, and it was unfinished because he got a letter in the mail through the Pony Express, so it could only travel at the speed of a horse. It said, your wife is sick.

She'll be dead and buried in the services wall if happened by the time you get back, so continue your work there. And he did, and he came back, and his wife was dead. I think she died of a hemorrhage or something like that, a complication of childbirth or something.

Anyway, he was so bothered and weighted down by this fact that the speed of communication took several days to get to him, and he couldn't figure out how to do that. So his mom, Sam Morse's mom, writes him a letter, and you can just Google letters to Sam Morse.

You can read all these letters that were written to him and his faith and Christian worldview and everything he did. And then you have—he's sitting in a pub, and there's all these guys that are talking about the experiments that are being done with electricity and how electricity can travel as fast as the speed of light down a copper wire, no matter how fast, no matter how long the copper wire is.

And he asks them, do you think this could be used to actually communicate with people? And they laugh at him. And so then he goes and he creates the telegraph, which is demonstrated before the Supreme Court.

And the first telegraph message is, what hath God wrought, that Bible verse speaking on God's blessings to a nation in Israel, and it's what hath God wrought is the first message. And the United States government didn't spend money like they do now, so the United States government rejected it and said they didn't want it.

So that privatized it, thankfully. And within, you know, 10 to 20 years, you have telegraphs all over the place. And so that posed the challenge is that, well, how do you send a message overseas? Because now, I think it was Gary North.

I think Gary North was the one that said the day before the telegraph and the day after, the speed of communication went from about the speed of a horse, which is probably, I think, on average, maybe 20 miles an hour, if that, 10 miles an hour.

And then it went to the speed of light. So there's never been such a drastic technological shift in the history of the world since Sam Morris's telegraph. And that telegraph is the same basic technology we use for ones and zeros, dots and dashes, that's how computers communicate with each other.

And then, so then they had to do it overseas. And they do it overseas, and nobody can figure out how to lay a cable across the Atlantic Ocean. And everybody fails. All these humans trying to do it, these fails.

This Christian guy, oh man, I should know his name. You need a live chat on your podcast because live chat usually helps. So the Christian guy who first laid the first transatlantic cable, what they did was they met in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and they laid the cable on each side from Britain and from America, and they laid the cable on each side.

And then when they got to the middle to put the two pieces together, they prayed a prayer and they did a Bible devotion. And that secured, that the cable worked, their technology worked. And the first telegraph from the president to the queen of England at the time said, may this technology be forever neutral among the nations to further the gospel among the earth.

It was incredible how far we've come. Now we look at AI and we're like, oh, you know, 666, the mark of the beast or anti-grind or whatever. We always abstain from that. We're not investing capital in tech.

We're not doing any of that. And it was the Christians that kind of built this infrastructure. And the way in which they laid the first transatlantic cable is the exact same way they lay fiber optic cable in the Atlantic Ocean.