Atheist Cults Once Took Over France! (with Guest Troy Frasier)

Did you know that at one time France was actually run by an atheistic cult?

Well, we're going to have our friend Troy Frazier from Revive Thoughts tell us a little bit about that in just a little bit.

Sometimes I feel the

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a manly drink, Pepsi and shoe polish, and I hit the

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And I feel my

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Like most Calvinists, he's not.

Your Calvinist Podcast is filmed before a live studio audience.

And welcome back to Your Calvinist Podcast.

My name is Keith Foskey and I am Your Calvinist.

I'm glad to have you with me today and I'm going to be bringing my guest in in just a few moments.

And we're going to be talking about an interesting historical fact.

But before we do that, I have a few things I would like to share with you.

One, Your Calvinist Podcast is a ministry of Sovereign Grace Family Church.

And if you're in the Jacksville area, come visit us at sgfcjacks .org.

We're also a member of the Truth and Love Network.

And if you want to get ahold of us, you can get ahold of us through our website, which was put together by Fellowship Studios.

And our website is keithfoskey .com.

If you're interested in some of the shirts and things that we have available, like the one I'm wearing here that says, I hope it was a blast for them, because it was

certainly a blast for me.

You can get that at our spring store and you can find that at keithfoskey .com.

Always remember also, if you're enjoying the show, hit the thumbs up button.

And if you're not enjoying the show, hit the thumbs down button twice.

All right, guys.

Well, thanks again for being with us.

And I'm going to bring in my friend now, Troy, and he's going to introduce himself.

So come on in, Troy.

How you doing, my friend?

Hey, it is really good, Keith.

I feel like hearing and talking to you right now is just such a blast.

I was on your show a couple years back, but it's been a while.

I do want to apologize for the lighting.

We don't normally use this studio for camera.

We're still in production on the video side of things.

And so I hope that my words can be the light where the darkness is currently covering me up.

So if you're listening to this, you're probably having no problems.

But if you're on YouTube, I don't normally look this pale and weird.

So that's just I want to get that out there right now.

Now, that's cool.

And yes, you have been on here before.

You came on to talk about your missions work and also about your work with

Revive Thoughts.

And since then, I wanted to let you know, you have your wife does her podcast as well.

And my wife has listened to that.

Are you guys still doing that?

Is that still still going on?

Yeah, everything is still going strong.

We still have Revive Thoughts, which is a podcast dedicated to bringing back sermons of the past.

I don't know when this episode will come out, but I was listening to your interview, which was the last one you did with Honest Youth Pastor,

who's on Instagram.

He's always been very nice to us over there.

Great guy.

And you were mentioning how you like to look at old sermons of the past.

Sometimes after you've studied the Word, you've really been diving in deep.

And that's what we do is we just take those old sermons by Charles Spurgeon, R .C. Sproul, not R .C. Sproul.

His are on audio.

You can go listen to them.

But if they've been dead before the recording of microphones, we will take their old sermons and bring them back.

And at this point, we've been doing it for over five years.

So we have sermons from, I mean, almost every century and almost every walk.

We have it is it is a massive catalog at this point from the big names you would expect, like Charles Spurgeon, John

Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, people like that, I guarantee you, I guarantee you some people you've never heard of.

But when you go and listen and find out, you're going to go, wow, that is an amazing preacher who lived an amazing life.

And where have they been?

Where have they been missing all my life?

So I love what we get to do.

And honestly, at this point, I do it because I grow so much from doing this.

It's just it's just a pleasure to be able to do it.

And then you're right.

My wife runs a podcast as well, Martyrs and Missionaries, also telling church history stories of the stories of great

martyrs and or missionaries.

The called in the brave is the tagline.

And she has amazing episode series on people like Hudson Taylor, people like Adoniram Judson, Gladys

Aylward.

Just she does a really good job of getting like the original diaries and biographies and

comparing them with notes.

She'll I'll be talking to her sometimes or she'll be doing research on episode.

And I'm like, girl, nobody ever researches like the cartography of maps at that time and like the

sailing wind patterns and some of the stuff she gets into.

She loves it.

And then she brings that in and does an amazing job and teaches me.

I learned all kinds of stuff from her.

We were almost going to on our show, Revive Thoughts.

We almost had an episode that was going to come out by Count Zinzendorf that I think a friend of your program, Jake

Corn, was going to read for us.

And it was my wife's episode of Martyrs and Missionaries on the Moravians.

And she put it out there.

And when that went out and I listened to it, I said, oh, my goodness, I cannot have count Zinzendorf on my show after hearing

about what he got involved with.

So that's your hook.

That's your tease.

If you've heard of the Moravians, you're going, well, what's wrong with those guys?

Go check out her episode of Martyrs and Missionaries.

I promise you, you will never look at that group of people the same way again.

There's no other way to say it.

Wow. Yeah.

No, that's very interesting.

And like I said, my wife has listened, has really enjoyed it, has told me how much she enjoys it.

And that's great.

And I'm just thankful for you and your friendship.

And again, I know we don't get to talk to each other much, but seeing you online and seeing the things that God is doing through you guys, I'm very blessed

to call you my friend, even though we've never been in the same room.

We've had these conversations, and I can still call you my friend, even though it's a digital friendship at

this point.

We'll meet one day, if not here in eternity.

We will.

And I appreciate you, Keith.

I remember years ago when it was just the early days, getting to have you on my show.

You read a sermon for us, I think two different sermons for us, actually.

And we were making memes and having fun way back when.

In different Christian groups on Facebook.

And I was like, this guy's a really genuinely good guy.

And I'm really, it's been really awesome to see how you have grown so much to making denominational, your

parody on denominational, on the supernatural one that you did was absolutely hilarious.

The Hanukkah cosmos, but the scary Hanukkah.

Anyway, you're doing stuff like that.

You're reaching so many people.

But what I love about you, Keith, is that I don't feel like you've changed and let the, you know, the quote unquote

fame get to you.

Or you've become like a hot takes kind of guy.

You've kept a calm hand.

You're still just focused on loving the Lord and being fair to everybody that comes on.

I can happily promote and say, people listen to Keith.

He's a great guy.

And not have to worry and hedge my bets and be like, oh, but, you know, be careful on this subject.

I never feel that way.

Oh, well, that's super encouraging.

And thank you for saying that very much.

And I promise I'll have your check in the mail soon.

It takes a little longer to get here.

So the topic we're going to talk about today, I teased it at the very beginning, talking about the subject

of what happened in France.

And I want to say from the outset, I'm going to be the student today because I'm not going

to be able to contribute a lot.

This is something that you know a lot about.

And that's why I'm asking you to come on.

And I had asked you about different historical subjects, because I know you're a historian and a student of history and a teacher of

history.

And that gets me excited because I love history and I love to talk about it and learn about it.

And you gave me a few topics.

And when you said, you know, France had been taken over by an atheist occult, I was like, that's the one.

That's the one I want to hear.

That's the story.

Because everything going on right now, you know, we have in America, there's a huge conversation

going on about Christian nationalism and the question of what are the dangers of having,

you know, a secular state versus a state that recognizes Christ as Lord.

And that's something that really causes a lot of people to divide.

And just what you're talking about, hot takes.

A lot of hot takes come as a result of people saying, you know, even the phrase, Jesus is

Lord, just a few weeks ago, that was trending because it was being used even by unbelievers to sort of use it

in a negative way.

And so I'm very interested to talk about how governments have dealt with the subject of

atheism versus theism, you know, exalting Christ versus rejecting Christ and what we have seen.

And so that was the one that really stuck out to me, even though the list you gave me could have made eight different

podcasts that went on eugenics.

I'm very interested in, and there's all kinds of other stuff.

So maybe if you would, we'll do another one soon and maybe talk about some other subjects.

Yeah, but before we go into everything, yeah, I would love you to, I have a little thing I want

to post right here, right in the middle.

This is just something to remind people about something very important.

And that is the most important message is all over here.

We're going to hear this and then come back and we're going to let you start the story.

How about that?

Hey guys, I just want to quickly say thank you for watching this episode.

And if you're enjoying it, please hit the thumbs up button.

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Most importantly, we want to make sure that everybody who hears this podcast, hears the gospel.

The word gospel means good news.

And that good news has to be preceded by some bad news.

And the bad news is this, that we are all sinners.

Sin is breaking God's law.

So we stand guilty before the Lord of the universe.

But the good news is God sent his son into the world to pay the penalty for everyone who would believe in him.

Jesus came into the world, lived a perfect life, and he died a substitutionary death for everyone who will believe.

And he calls us all to repent of our sin, to turn from our unbelief and trust in him as Lord and savior.

And if you've never done that, I encourage you to do so today.

Now back to the show.

All right, my friend.

And now I'm going to turn it over to you.

Tell us what happened in France, when it happened and what it's all about.

All right.

So just a couple of clarifiers.

Yeah, I teach history in Indonesia.

And when I say the word history, there's going to be a part of you that are some of you are listening right now.

And you're going to go, oh, awesome.

I'm going to learn some interesting things from the past.

I can't wait.

And then there's a group of you that are going to hear the word history.

And you're already looking for that close button.

And let me tell you, hold yourself, hold yourself.

Don't do it.

Because there is so much we can learn from those who have come before us.

It's amazing.

And the lives that they have lived, we like to think that we are special.

And what we are going through right now is very unique.

And of course it is.

But there are amazing brothers and sisters in Christ who have gone through things very similar to what we are going through currently.

And we can learn from them.

And they're also, quite frankly, the opposite.

There are devils, not to say devils per se.

But you know, there are bad people who've done bad things.

And we can learn from them as well.

In the case of the atheist cult taking over France, this is a situation where the bad guys are doing stuff.

But we can see so many similarities.

A couple weeks ago, I put this episode out.

It was about an hour, maybe a little less, on this subject.

And I cannot tell you, the number one response I've gotten from people is from our Patreons to just random listeners who

clicked in for the first time in a while or found us for the first time.

And they all sent me the same message.

I see parallels to where we are at today.

And this sounds like a very similar thing that could happen in the world today.

And that's funny because I did not paint those.

I really try, when we do history, we try not to paint an image so you can see it.

We just tell the story as it is.

And we'll let you do the thinking.

But the thing is, it just happens to be this story really does sound like ours.

Now, it takes place during a time called the French Revolution.

And whenever you hear the words French Revolution, as an American, my brain just starts to turn off because I don't care what they

did in France a couple hundred years ago.

I barely understand what's happening in France right now, right?

America and France are not always best buddies on this thing.

And if you remember French Revolution from history class, it's this almost boring subject until

Napoleon gets there because neither side is good.

The king seems bad, but the other, the communists basically also seem bad.

They're not communists.

I know the communists don't come till later, but they're kind of like the early communists, aren't they?

And they don't seem like good guys either.

And so this is one of those situations where there's no good guys.

But let me explain.

I think one of the big reasons we don't appreciate and don't understand this issue is because we do not have

the context of God involved.

Once we understand the religious nature of what's happening in the French Revolution, it suddenly becomes much more

clear.

For about 100 years in France at that point, the Catholic Church is the official state religion.

It had been the state religion for a lot longer than 100 years.

But in this past century, the French religious clergymen had been persecuting the Protestant

Christians, the Huguenots, and they had been taking money through tithes and through power.

And they were one of the most powerful forces in France at that time.

And this built up in a massive amount of resentment, especially among the elites, the

wealthy, the educated people during that time.

Oftentimes you'll hear people say that, well, the American Revolution was caused by the Enlightenment.

And yes, the Enlightenment did have some influence, but not nearly as much influence as the Great Awakening

did.

And there's a reason why George Washington, when he was talking with Thomas Paine, Thomas Paine said, hey, we need to support the French

Revolution.

He was sitting in a room with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Both of them were his friends, and they had done the American Revolution together.

And he said, I would like, we need to send people to France to interfere with the French Revolution to help the

cause of freedom.

And George Washington said, no, America will not send soldiers to France.

And Thomas, if you go there, you are on your own.

Thomas Paine and George Washington were never in a room again together.

And in fact, on George Washington's birthday, a few years later, Thomas Paine basically wrote him a letter saying, you're a sellout.

You're a traitor.

You're a coward.

Why didn't you come help the French?

But the thing that George Washington knew was that the French Revolution was not of the same character as

the American Revolution.

The American Revolution was built much more off of the Great Awakening, whereas the French Revolution was built

off the Enlightenment, off of atheism.

Twelve years before the French Revolution got started, a man named Voltaire, one of the most famous atheists of all human

history, showed up in Paris for the first time in decades.

He had been a person from Paris living in France, but he'd been living abroad.

And he finally got to return to that city, and they threw a parade for him.

They loved him.

People were selling shirts with his quotes on it.

They had Voltaire merchandise.

Even the Catholic Church came up to him and said, hey, if you just promise to kind of say, I didn't mean that

stuff about the church.

I said, we'll let you in on some high honorifics and stuff.

And he said, the problem is I mean every word of it.

You see, Voltaire had made himself famous for years calling out the church, and you couldn't directly call out the church.

You would get censored.

And so what he would do is he was very clever.

He would say, I've heard some rumors that some people say, and then he'd put all these negatives about the church and God, and then

he would end it and say, thank goodness the church protects us from ideas like that.

And he would be able to publish all these things using that technique because he couldn't censor him, right?

He wasn't saying those were his views.

He was a very clever man.

If you've ever heard people say the idea that Jesus wasn't really God, it was something that centuries over

time, that the church created this idea at the Council of Nicaea.

Voltaire, I'm not sure if he's the first guy to create that idea, but he was definitely one of the major propagators.

The reason we're using, you hear atheists using that argument today, you can thank Voltaire for that.

Tons of other things like that too.

Voltaire was wildly anti -Christianity.

However, I don't know if he was an atheist or not.

He would say man needs God.

However, was that him just saying that to keep himself secure?

Oh, I like God.

I just don't like your God.

Was that what he was doing?

Or was he actually doing that because he genuinely believed that there was a God out there, just wasn't the Christian God?

We don't know.

Regardless though, he was a major anti -Christian proponent.

And the French philosophy at the time, now there was, I don't remember the lady's quote, I do apologize, but she said basically the most

famous celebrity in all of Europe is Voltaire at the end of his life.

And Voltaire's biggest place of fame was Paris.

This is only 12 years out from when the French Revolution starts.

We have other people at the time living at the French Revolution, Diderot, who says basically the last king of France should be

strangled with the intestines of the last priest.

And so these people have a deep -seated hatred of God that we skip

over when we hear about this part in history.

When you're sitting in history class and they're talking about all the stuff that happens in the French Revolution, they leave out this massive part of what

they're doing.

And what they're doing is they're overthrowing the church and they're overthrowing God.

So that when the French Revolution kicks off and officially starts to happen in 1789, by the year 1790, they started

to pass laws that say the church has to give their money up to the new French government.

The church priests now need to start swearing oaths to the French government.

And they begin to very quickly start rewriting what the French priests do.

First, they make all of the priests that will swear an oath to France.

Well, look, this is Catholicism.

I'm not a Catholic, but the Catholics are like, hey, we're supposed to swear our allegiance to the pope and all that stuff.

Again, that's what they do.

Well, the French government says, absolutely not.

If you don't swear to us now, if you don't work for the king now, you're out.

Many of them swear that oath, but even that's not enough.

Soon they say, no, you have to give up your salaries to us.

We'll pay you.

Actually, you don't get paid anymore.

You're not allowed to collect tithes anymore.

In fact, we want you to wear caps of liberty instead of French priestly robes.

And we want you to don yourselves in our new cloak.

And we want you to lead parades of liberty now, not leading processions to

Catholicism and to God anymore.

And within just a couple years, if you were a French priest that wasn't dedicated to what the French government was

doing, you were under suspicion and you could be beheaded almost overnight for just being caught.

And if you even hid a French priest, if you had one living in your house and they found out your whole family was up for

being beheaded, that was how quickly within the matter of just three or four years, the entire French Catholic

system was done away.

And by the end of the French revolution, 30 ,000 priests will have left France.

Another six to 9 ,000 will have gotten married and apostatized.

Several more thousand were killed.

When this is all said and done, France, Napoleon will reinstate the Catholic church, but there's almost nothing left to reinstate.

Like the system itself has been so hollowed out and destroyed, it's gone.

And there may be people listening right now and going, okay, but that's Catholics.

Look, I understand.

I'm a Protestant too.

I hear you.

And I know that it can be hard, but what we can take away from this is how quickly

when the church isn't doing its job, and I think we can all agree the Catholic church of France wasn't doing its job,

how quickly the mob can use that to turn everyone against it and absolutely

rip it out like a cancer.

And what they try to put back in its place is where this atheist cult comes in.

They very quickly go, hey, look, we need to do something with these churches.

We need to do something with the people.

They want to worship something, but we don't want to worship God anymore.

And I really think if there's any group of people that could have made the case that they hated Christianity and didn't

want it, and there's some, you know, I don't think there's justification for hating God and hating Christ, but they had some justification on a

human level that if any group could have pulled off doing this, if you're experimenting with people, and

there was one group of people that could have pulled off replacing Christianity with atheism like overnight, this group of people

might've been the one.

Like these could have been the people they really deeply resented Christ and his church because of

what has happened there.

This seemed like the perfect group to do it.

They do it and they absolutely fail.

First, they put in what is called the cult of reason.

And this is literally, they turn their churches.

They, in the middle of these churches, they built these dirt mounds and they pillared it with Greek pillars all

around it.

They had these women dress in all white and do these provocative dances on stage.

And when they were asked, like, is that idolatry?

They said, no, it's not idolatry because they're not statues.

These are women dancing.

But then they would basically bow down and do these weird worship religious

ceremonies to these women dancing and doing this stuff and say, that is

the goddess of liberty.

That is the goddess of reason.

We're gonna worship her and we're gonna acknowledge her.

They carried this one woman through the entire town of Paris, had people kind of bowing as she went.

They said, bow to the goddess of reason, bow to this woman.

And they took all of the churches, not all of them, but all the big churches, especially Notre Dame, and they turned them into these places, the cult

of reason.

And people were supposed to worship the idea of reason.

You were also allowed to worship the idea of victory, of liberty, and of brotherhood.

And if you're asking, how do you do that?

I personally don't know.

They basically be a good person.

There's no such thing as God.

If you're a good person, that's how you worship the goddess of reason.

And that will become the state religion for not quite a year, but almost a year in France during the middle of

the French Revolution.

And it's so funny to me because it's called an atheistic cult, yet they do have a goddess, but they're clearly mocking the

idea of God at the same time.

And yet they still have what seems to be a goddess.

And so it's such a bizarre thing because on the one hand, they're saying there is no God, but on the other hand, they're saying, please

bow to this woman that we're pretending is God.

And all these elite, intellectual, rich people were forcing this on the people like it was

a great idea.

Yeah, let me jump in just for a second because this is all so much information and it's great and

I'm riveted listening to it.

So, but the thing, the question that I have, and this is just sort of following up is

sort of a timeline.

So you said this lasted for a year, this worship of the

idols, the reason and liberty and those things, but how long did it take?

And you may not know the exact answer, but from, I guess, from the time of Voltaire leading up to this,

what is the timeline?

And because I'm thinking about like our world, I'm thinking about like, not that I want to make a one -to -one comparison,

but I mean, I think about my life and how things have changed in 44 years.

And I'm 44 years old.

I was born in 1980.

I was, I grew up during the huge youth group movement of the nineties, where everybody was in youth groups.

And that was like when it really exploded.

In fact, I'm going to be doing a show later this week, actually, with the guys from Watch Well

Media, who watch Christian movies or watch movies and talk about them from a Christian perspective.

We're watching a movie called Saved, which is with Macaulay Culkin and Mandy Moore.

And it really captures the youth group atmosphere of the nineties.

I don't know if you ever saw it.

You're a little younger than me.

I haven't seen it.

I did go to youth group, but it was in the mid 2000s.

So I'm a little bit, I've seen the left behind movies.

And honestly, I didn't see a lot of the Christian movies that came out.

My family was not exactly a Christian family.

So I feel like I got kind of, I missed some of those, those classic moments of the youth group

era.

But I am aware of VeggieTales and some of that.

Well, back in the nineties, there was this sort of explosion of the

youth ministry model and how, you know, in a lot of those youth ministries actually

became churches later.

They would go from, when those youth grew up, they wanted that same atmosphere in their adult church, right?

So now we have a lot of churches that are really just grown up youth ministries.

They still behave like youth ministries, but they're just for adults.

And what I'm saying is, as far as from a religious social standpoint,

Christianity for many people became almost like, it's like something, it's a game.

You know, you do this sometimes, you go and you enjoy this sort of, this uplifting talk from this guy, but it's not

serious.

It doesn't really affect your life, right?

It's just something you do, you know, it's something you have fun with.

And then comes 9 -11 and then there's this huge idea of, okay, now we got to get serious and start figuring

out what's going on in our lives.

And, you know, I'm talking about from my own life.

9 -11 was a huge moment.

I was 21 years old, you know, and then, you know, before 9 -11, nobody knew what a

Muslim, Suri, Sufi, all that stuff, you know, Sunni and Sufi and all, you know, nobody cared.

And then it became like the most important thing, like people had to study these things.

And I'm only saying, as you're telling this story, I'm looking back at my life, I'm looking back at how the

changes.

When I was a kid, it didn't, the religious argument wasn't a big part.

People just went into church and had fun and then they came home and they did their thing.

And, you know, but now it's like a battlefield and it almost feels like that's what you're saying.

It's like it became a battlefield.

And I guess I'm just saying, what was the timeline?

And I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I just, these are the thoughts that are going on in my mind.

I'm glad, I would really, I prefer an interrupt.

I can monologue all day, but I'd much rather that.

So 12 years from Voltaire's death to the French Revolution starting.

How quickly did, I mean, King Louis XIV was the sun god, was running everything.

The church was firmly in power in the early to mid 1700s.

I would say it happened a lot faster than you probably expect.

The French Revolution really starts in 1789.

By 1793 and 1794, the Cult of Reason is now running France.

Now it is important to note that this cult was running Paris very strongly.

When they got out to the countryside, some of these priests that had been sworn into the Cult of Reason would get up to give their

services now in the Cult of Reason.

And then a couple of the churches, the crowd was so angry, they forced him like, by like, we will kill you and rip you

apart if you do not give us actual communion.

Like we're not interested in this.

So it didn't mean that everywhere, everyone all at once jumped on board.

In fact, there was one part of France that put up a straight up a resistance.

They said they were more isolated, more rural, more countryside.

And the sad part is they said no to it all.

They pushed back on it all.

And Paris sent soldiers down to straighten them out.

And in fact, 180 ,000 of them between starvation and between being killed will be

just massacred.

Some people, some historians said it should be considered the first true genocide because it was the first time a group of people were sent

not to kill enemy combatants, but just to basically raise the area.

In fact, even their own friends when they were coming up to some of these soldiers, people who were on the Paris people's side were

like, hey, we're a part of this.

We love what you're doing.

They would kill them.

And they said they were really on our side.

They wouldn't have still been here.

And I'm like, that's, I mean, that's a massively wild betrayal kind of thing.

And that's the kind of situation that that was being dealt with.

So it's not everybody in France.

There were people resisting.

There was a really sad quote, actually, if I can find it real fast, I have it here in my notes, where one person said to the

effect of, where is it?

Hold on just a second.

Okay, I can't find it right off the top of my head here.

It's a really sad quote where he says basically something to the effect of, we've already given them everything.

We've already given them our food.

They've already killed our king.

They've already taken everything from us.

And now they will take our sons for a war we don't want.

They must not have our bodies too or something like that.

There is resistance.

There are people pushing back.

But the thing is, it's happening very quickly.

And if you want to make that comparison to today, look, it started with ideas.

It started with intellectuals.

It started with people like Voltaire, these French philosophers, blasphemously saying these things against

God.

And it started in those elite circles.

And what started in those elite circles eventually makes its way out to the people.

And we like to think that that doesn't happen, that the weird stuff at universities and the weird stuff among our elites

doesn't affect you and me at home, right?

I grew up with the idea kind of like, oh, the farmers, they'll be able to right the ship when the crazy elitists go off, right?

But as somebody who has lived in China and I've lived in Cambodia and I've lived overseas in a couple of different places, the

elites oftentimes will eventually get a hold of the people.

And the people will do some very dark, very scary things once their ideas spread out.

And don't think that those weird things that are happening at your university campus are gonna stay there.

I remember when I started going, you were talking about what age you were.

When I started going to college, I was 2009.

At that point, gender and sexuality, I remember in one of my classes, they were like, how can we get

homosexual marriage into the mainstay and what are ways to promote that and all that kind of, I went

to a public university.

And now look at where we're actually, the university there in Jacksonville, University of North Florida.

But now look at where we're at.

We look at where we've landed now.

That it seems like such a quaint thing to once stand up to the idea of same -sex marriage.

That is such in the rear view mirror of where the culture has gone.

But it started in those colleges and those campuses.

I have to jump in.

One, you graduated from UNF?

I did not graduate.

So I went there for two years and then I transferred to a small Bible college in the middle of nowhere, Kansas City.

But I was a University of North Florida Osprey for two years.

Oh, okay.

I just, that's cool.

Again, we grew up in the same place.

So it's fun sometimes just thinking about that.

Yeah.

But what you just said, and if you saw me writing, I pulled out a piece of paper because I want to remember this point in the

show.

When you said elites, when they get ahold of the people, that's what the people don't realize how much change can be

made.

And I mean, I'm not quoting you exactly, but you were talking about how powerful it is

that when ideas get out and the elites start promoting these ideas, just how it can trickle down.

And I have seen this so much, even in the children in my life, not just my own children, but seeing

this in the lives of other people's children, as they will repeat and parrot things, especially those who have

been exposed to public school or maybe even college and university, they will begin to parrot

things and not even realizing, because they'll say, well, the person who taught me, they were sensible and

reasonable.

And why would they lie or why would they promote something that's incorrect?

And they're not dogmatic.

Like you, you're the Christian, you're the one who's blinded by your commitment to dogma and commitment

to a 2000 year old book that's filled with errors.

I mean, these are things you're saying, you're committed to a book that was written by

Middle Eastern, ignorant people.

I mean, these are things that are said, not things that are true, but they're stated and they're often couched in the ugliest of terms.

You know, why would I believe anything about a Jewish carpenter 2000 years ago,

who was nailed to a cross?

You know, why does he matter?

That's the attitude.

And it really does come across as how ignorant are you?

How foolish are you?

And we know better.

We have this elite mindset.

So, yeah.

No, I agree completely.

I mean, I went to public school in Jacksonville, St. John's.

I went to Bartram Trail High School,.

Home of the Bears.

That's just for you, Keith, just so you know where I was.

And I also, well, I guess I went to public university.

I didn't.

I thought I knew a lot about the Bible when I went to Bible college.

God really humbled me to realize I did not know hardly anything about it.

I mean, I only had youth groups.

I did.

I thought I learned about this Bible stuff.

It's fine.

And I realized I didn't have a drop of the ocean of what I needed to know about the Bible.

And the same thing happened to me when I went to seminary.

And the same thing happened to me when I started studying church history.

I took church history class in Bible college.

I'll be fine.

No, I didn't know a drop of the ocean.

God has deeply humbled me in just how much I had to learn.

But the thing is, in these schools, we don't realize just how much the elite dogma,

the elite ideology.

You think that you're safe from Princeton because you're far away from Princeton, or you think you're safe from Yale because you're far away from Yale.

But that ideology, those ideas move lightning fast through the education system.

You wouldn't believe.

I am a teacher as well.

And as somebody who's even within the Christian schools, even within places that you think would be safe,

ideas like restorative justice, some of these DEI components and things like that have moved into places.

And you see it happen.

You watch it go down.

You go, wow.

And most of the time, the people who are doing it, they don't realize that that's what they're doing.

There are some people who do, but many of them don't do it out of malevolence thinking, I will, I will.

You know, they just, I don't want to be behind the times.

I don't want to be backwards.

I don't want to be out of date.

Let me keep up with Goetia.

Oh, I've heard this is a good way to do things.

And they adopt these principles to try and stay and keep up.

And before you know it, they've been adopting the ways of the world.

And we see that all over.

And we see that throughout.

And that is what happened in France.

I think two people just kept moving and moving and moving.

And before you know it, the elites had taken them right off a cliff.

And suddenly the famous Notre Dame is a giant cult of reason.

And we got these weird women in white, you know, dancing around.

And as crazy as that may sound, hopefully you hear that and you go, that's weird.

Hopefully you don't go that and go, that makes sense to me.

I expect to show up to a Catholic church and see that.

But I imagine if we went 200 years back in time and tried to show them some of the weird stuff going on, we tried to show them the

drag story hour and stuff like that, they would go, nah, nobody's actually doing that in the future, right?

That's crazy.

And so it really is a matter of, well, who's crazier in this situation?

Because both of these sides are going to sound pretty weird.

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

And I mean, none of us could imagine that, you know, like right now, if the local Catholic church

had mounds surrounded by, you know, these

gods and the women dancing, none of us, we can't imagine but like you said, it happened,

it's history and the people that were doing it, they were convinced

this is in accord with reason.

This is in accord with rationality and I like what you just said, the same type

of mindset is the kind of mindset that would say, yeah, we can have a man dressed as a

woman parade in front of little kids and dance and be provocative.

And that's fine because this is reason.

This is rationality.

This is normal.

You know, when you've really reached the level of crazy that we've reached is when somebody like

Bill Maher and Bill Maher is, you know, is a huge liberal thinker.

I don't know if you know who he is.

I do, I do know Bill Maher.

But to have him actually come out and say, we don't need drag queen story hour, that's wrong.

And be like, okay, when Bill Maher is speaking rational things, you know, you've reached a

precipice of crazy, right?

Like you, you are standing on the edge of the abyss when Bill Maher is saying, okay, guys, we've gone too far.

It's like, it's like Babylon had a thing.

Where the devil, yes, I saw that.

The devil said, okay, you're being a little too evil.

Guys, we tone it down, you know, I don't like being so open about it.

Well, and it's interesting too, because, you know, this cult of reason and what we see today, it always goes the same

path where these people who know so much more than the rest of us, then create something that's horrifying to natural instinct.

But for some reason, we always kind of assume, well, okay, everyone's going to stand up to this and say no.

And it really doesn't end up happening where the average person, the moral man does not tend to be in, at least in the French

revolution and the cultural revolution in China.

And then today, we don't actually see that happening where it's common sense that's putting it into these things.

Instead, it just continues to go and go.

And in France's case, that was just the first cult that took over France.

Afterwards, there's another cult that takes over.

This one is run by Robespierre.

And Robespierre looked at the other cult and said, look, we need people to believe in God.

Otherwise, they won't listen to us.

So he created a new cult.

He created a giant parade.

He had everyone come to the main, I've never been to Paris, but like the main area, the central park of Paris,

whatever that would be.

I'm sure some of your listeners have been there.

Champs is something that I think is what it's called.

And he built this gigantic mountain where like he stood on top of this hill.

And on top of the hill was a tree that they planted on it called Liberty Tree.

They had a pillar with a statue of a woman.

And he gets up in front of everybody.

And he has apparently half a million people come to this show.

This is Robespierre, the guy who ends up executing a bunch of people in the reign of terror.

And he gets in front of everybody.

He goes, look, what we've been doing is wrong.

He says, you know, we've been worshiping nothing and we can't keep doing this.

And he puts out this cardboard statue.

He says, see how ugly this cardboard statue is.

That's what you've been doing.

And he set it on fire in front of the crowd.

The cardboard statue melts.

And underneath is a beautiful statue.

And he goes, we need to worship wisdom, the goddess, and we need to worship an actual God.

He said, it's not a Christian God, of course, but we have a new God now.

And we're going to worship God.

You know what God wants you to do?

God wants you to be a good French citizen.

If you're a good French citizen, he'll think you're a good person.

He'll bless you.

And the whole crowd loved it.

And then they went and watched basically the French version of the Olympics at the time to celebrate their new religion.

And people said, Rose Pierre said it was the happiest day of his life.

And two days later, he starts the reign of terror where he begins executing everyone in his way.

And this becomes called the cult of the supreme being.

You're worshiping the idea of a deity that replaces the cult of reason.

And it lasts about six weeks until the nobles overthrow Rose Pierre.

And when they overthrow Rose Pierre, go ahead.

It lasted six weeks.

I don't know why they got me last.

It's like it lasted less time.

Than one of our academy classes.

It's like for real.

It's amazing how short it really was.

That's fast.

Yeah.

No, yeah.

I mean, I never started a cult, but I like to think if I did, I could make it past six weeks.

I don't want to brag, but I think I could beat Rose Pierre if I had to.

But six weeks later, he ends up getting beheaded.

And when he gets beheaded by the nobles, the nobles were so scared of Rose Pierre beheading everybody.

And by the way,.

They were beheading people during the event where he announces the new religion, the cult of the supreme being on the mountain

in the middle of Paris.

But he moved the guillotines outside of outside of Paris.

So the sound of the guillotine dropping and cutting people's head off wouldn't distract people from the greatness of the day.

I didn't stop beheading people.

That would be crazy, right?

But they just moved it outside of town.

So you'd have to hear the kathunk kathunk of the guillotine during the celebratory day, which I think that's just really nice of them.

I would like to know if I'm being beheaded, I'm not ruining someone else's day.

And six weeks later, he gets beheaded under the guillotine.

And once that happens, nobody wants to keep doing the cult of supreme being because the guy who started it's dead and you

don't really want to associate yourself with that.

So France is in kind of without a cult for a little while.

And so they start up a final, a fourth cult.

I skipping actually over one.

There was one.

Now, when they redid, when they redid France, you got to understand, Keith, they threw everything out.

Like you and I, we have a seven day week.

France solve seven day weeks as a sign of the church.

So they changed their weeks to 10 day weeks.

He worked nine days.

The 10th day you celebrate it.

They did.

They would call a week, then a decade every month at three decades.

And then on certain times of the year, you would have celebrations.

They renamed the months of the year.

I can't remember what they were,.

But they have,.

If you look it up, they have really weird names like Thuramides and stuff for the months of the year.

And then they also rechanged the calendar.

There's no more AD and BC.

It's now RE revolution era, like or something like that.

That's not my, maybe not what it was, but I think it was something like that, where the day of the revolution, 1789 is the new calendar

moving forward.

So they really rewrote everything.

This is also when they adopt the metric system for all of our overseas friends.

So you, you know, I'm not saying that the pound makes any sense or the mile, but, you know,

it's not, I wasn't created in a cult.

So, you know, they just keep it in mind guys.

And as they adopt everything by these 10.

Okay. Okay.

This may be the most controversial thing.

The whole episode, but I'm going to say it.

The Imperial system is better than the metric system.

I don't like the metric system,.

But that's just me.

I don't like the metric system either.

No, I live in a country.

And I haven't, I haven't the slightest clue when I buy a liter of something, what I've just bought.

Is that a lot?

Is that a little, it doesn't look like a lot.

I mean, give me a gallon, man.

Help me out here.

Okay.

When I get on the scale and it says, you know, you're 90 something kilograms.

I don't know if that's good or bad.

It seems like it's, it's very hard to tell, you know, and if somebody tells me you've gained two kilograms, nobody has any

clue whether that's a lot or not.

All right.

Put it in pounds.

Like the British Imperial system told us to.

Okay.

That's, that's the way it was meant to be.

And I don't have any other further thoughts.

And I know that the Europeans right now that are listening are upset.

I know that my, we have some friends here that are in Indonesia.

They're from the Netherlands and they cannot for the life of them understand why we haven't moved over to kilometers and stuff.

And I, and I, and I go, well, let me explain the French revolution to you.

Whenever that happens,.

You know, that's,.

That's my starting point.

It was started by a cult.

Tell them it started by a cult.

There you go.

Now, by the way, if you are a big fan of mayonnaise, mayonnaise also comes from the French revolution.

People got so hungry that they needed to eat their horses and mayonnaise was a paste that made horses more edible.

So if you're a big fan of that, you can thank the French revolution for that personally, not a big fan of mayonnaise.

So that one didn't really make me want to eat it more, but maybe, maybe somebody out there really, really heard that and thought, how does it taste

on a horse?

Well, shout out to my favorite mayonnaise, which is Duke's.

I've actually had a fun back and forth with the Duke's Twitter guy because I said something about how great Duke's was and he came on

and we had a fun.

So I'm a, I, I actually, I'm not only just a mayonnaise lover, but I love like a specific type of mayonnaise.

So I guess I can be thankful for that, you know, so.

Yeah, I, I personally have never been able to get it.

In fact, one of the reasons I am very firmly in the Chick -fil -A camp is that I'm pretty sure the Popeye's chicken sandwich comes with

mayonnaise.

And I've, I've never wanted that.

I don't, I don't need that.

I need the Chick -fil -A sauce on it.

And you can keep a chicken sandwich there, guys.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Well, that, that, that answer is one of my top five.

I, I have these, these questions I ask at the end of the show.

And that one of them is, would you rather go to Popeye's or Chick -fil -A?

So I guess I know that.

So now that.

I will say Raising Cane's might beat Chick -fil -A, especially for price these days.

But, but if I had to choose between Chick -fil -A and Popeye's, I give me that Chick -fil -A chicken sandwich.

And okay.

I see, I live in Indonesia, so don't get that kind of food.

I better not talk about Chick -fil -A too much.

Otherwise I'm going to get hungry.

And I've got another year before I'm going to eat one.

So I'm going to have to focus.

Okay.

Let me tell you about the last cult that takes over France.

This is the group called the Theo Philanthropists.

This actually was started by Thomas Bain.

When he came to France, eventually he gets out of jail.

He actually goes to jail by the French Revolution.

And he has some friends in his jail cell while the guard walks by and puts a piece of chalk on his door and keeps walking.

He doesn't know what that means, but his door was open.

When he shuts the door, the chalk goes missing.

He doesn't know.

He can't see the outside.

Everyone who had a piece of chalk on that door, the next day got executed.

But when the guards walked by his door, because of the way it was open, because the chalk was on the inside that was covered, he

got to live, which tells you how close Thomas Bain was to getting executed.

While he's in that French jail, he writes on scraps of paper, a book that will eventually be called The Age of Reason, which is

absolutely one of the most anti -God books you can ever read.

I have read it.

When I was younger, I wanted to make sure like, do I actually love Jesus on my own?

Or was I just, was I just raised?

I wasn't raised Christian, but would I just read enough books to convince myself?

And one of those,.

I challenged myself to read all the great books of history.

I read The Communist Manifesto.

I read some books by Buddha, Confucius.

I tried to read everything.

And one of them I read was The Age of Reason.

My goodness gracious, is it an anti -God screed.

I mean, it is absolutely one of the most, I don't want to say it would have been better if he had died, but I

will say it is an awful book.

And he, when he gets out of jail, starts a new cult called the Theo Philanthropist.

And these guys kind of believe in God.

And their moral philosophy is, if it's good and helps other people, then do it.

And if it's bad and it harms people, don't do it.

Their cult actually is the most successful at reaching the average person.

They don't build a mountain.

They don't put themselves on a hill.

They don't do any weird dancing.

They say,.

Hey, come to our church services.

Again, all of them are doing this in the Catholic churches that they've taken over with state power.

And they basically say, hey, come to our service.

We'll give a moral speech about how you should be a good person.

And then every morning, we want you to give a vow to God.

God, I promise to be a good person.

And at the end of the day, before you go to bed, just ask yourself, God, was I a good person or not?

And they don't mean God as in Jesus.

They just mean God, the deity.

And then reflect on your day.

Was it good or not?

And then just as you go through, and then when you come to church, bring something to put on the altar.

It doesn't have to be big, but a piece of food, just something to sacrifice and say, I'm letting go of part of what I want to

something.

And the reason this I think did so very well is it is so small.

It's so gentle.

It's so easy compared to the flashy mountain things they were doing before.

But also it's so close to Christianity, isn't it?

It almost sounds like it's mimicking Christianity without Jesus Christ.

And I think this false religion, because of how close it was and how the people of France had only ever known Catholic,

you know, Catholic Christianity, it sounded like something good to, it's not obtrusive.

It's unoffensive.

It's small.

It's delicate.

And it was very successful.

However, when Napoleon came back into power, at this point, France had at one point taken over Rome and kidnapped the Pope.

They had just been doing nonsense all over Europe and Napoleon, oh yeah, they kidnapped the Pope.

They took him to France and then he died in exile, waiting to return to Rome, which did not make people happy.

And eventually Napoleon just kind of was like, to make friends, Catholicism is back on the table.

We're sorry about all these weird cults.

We're getting rid of our 10 day calendar.

We're going back to like normal years and our bad.

Let's get back on pace.

Also, I'm going to try to take over Europe.

But you know, they kind of get things back on.

It worked out for America.

We got, you know, the Louisiana Purchase out of all that, but everything else was kind of wild.

And those are your stories of the cults that took over France.

So none of them lasted all that long, but it's just, to me, what's really fascinating is just how these

really smart people thought they could get rid of God and make everything happy again.

And what they ended up creating was far worse, or at least stupider than what they had before.

What's also interesting to me about the whole story and situation too, is just how much this sounds like something we could see

happening today, doesn't it?

Like I, when I, when we, when I, again, I got so many emails from people when we put this episode out and they just said, I feel like we're five

minutes away from that happening in the United States of America or in the United Kingdom.

Like we're that close to seeing this kind of silly nonsense just going on all over again.

No, absolutely.

And, and that's what I'm thinking this whole time is this is, this seems like, you know,

like, like when I read 1984, I say, this isn't, this, this is a prophecy.

Like, like this is the, we're seeing it play out in real time.

And what you're, what you're talking about, you know, they say, if you want to predict the future, learn

the past because everything sort of comes in cycles.

And it seems like we're at that point where all it would take would be for somebody to offer people something else to believe

in, you know, offer them some, some other golden idol to, to look toward.

And many people would just simply worship that thing, whether it's science.

And, and, and, and I see this in, in that realm, like, like science is the new reason, right?

Like that's, this is how, and, and, and, you know, back during the pandemic and all the, it was don't

question the science.

Don't question the elite.

Don't question those who are smarter than you because you don't know anything.

And, and, and that's the, the danger, right?

As we get to this point where we're, we're, we're told not only what to think, but we're told how to

think.

This is how you have to think about this.

And if you think any differently, then you're out of your mind.

And it's funny you say science because there is a quote, if I can

find it real fast.

Oh man, here you go.

Lord Bertrand Russell.

Have you ever heard of Lord Bertrand Russell?

I had not heard of this guy, but yeah, but he's a famous kind of name.

And he wrote a book called The Impact of Science and Society.

He made this prediction in the 1950s.

And by the way, he's a fan of what I'm about to describe to you.

So I hear this and it makes my blood go cold.

I go, oh my gosh, that's, that's scary.

I don't want this to happen.

He's making a prediction about the future of what science will do in the future.

And he's a fan of this.

He's saying this will be what science can do someday.

If I can read you these two quotes of his, he said the first one, or actually this one quote of his, the subject will make great

strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship.

The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of

producing an unshakable conviction.

The conviction that snow is black.

Various results will soon be arrived at.

First, that the influence of the home can stop it.

Second, not much can be done unless the indoctrination starts at before the age of 10.

Thirdly, that if you set verses to music and repeatedly play it, it's very effective.

And fourth, that the opinion snow is white must be held as very morbid and it's eccentric to believe that.

But I anticipate it is for future scientists to make these truths precise and discover exactly how much it

costs per head to make children believe that snow is black.

And even more, how much less it would cost to convince them that snow is gray.

And I mean, it's amazing, isn't it?

How in the 50s, they were writing this stuff down and saying scientists will be able to know how to basically get you to

not believe in truth and not only how to do it, but how much it costs to do it.

That's how effective they will be.

And I mean, if you could take that person 75 years in the future and show them, look at, you mentioned COVID, look at

this.

Healthy people are gonna sit in a room together wearing a mask because they're afraid that someone might be sick and not know it somehow.

I mean, you say these things and we all live through it.

We all accepted it, but it sounds completely illogical and unscientific if you could bring a person from 2015

to the future to show them that's what we did.

They would go, what were you guys doing?

But we were able to be convinced by science that snow is black, that a child in the womb kicking

against their mother's belly is not a child, but a fetus, right?

That all these things that we know are just not true, yet somehow they are, by science

tells us loud enough, we will believe that that soup of atoms somehow created life, that life

evolved until we got to a human, except some of the horses swam too much and they developed flippers

and became dolphins.

And we just have to accept that because that's what science tells us, even though on the face of it, it just doesn't make any sense.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani.

And we believe ridiculous things because that is the

result of not believing in God.

I don't remember who said it, but there was a great quote and it was this, when a man gives up his belief in God, he'll

believe in anything.

And I remember a movie years ago, it was with Tim Robbins.

It was about an expedition to Mars.

It might've been called expedition to Mars, but I don't think that was the name of it.

It was a blockbuster movie.

It was Tim Robbins played in it.

And the whole idea was they go to Mars, they're trekking Mars, walking through,

driving their little car and all.

And they come upon this mountain that looks like a face.

There's a thing on Mars that looks like a face.

Well, come to find out it is a face and come to find out there were Martians there at one time and come to find out those Martians seeded

earth.

And that's where earth came from.

That's where our human beings came from, that they were seeded from earth or seeded from Mars.

And we are actually Martians and we're from Mars.

And I remember watching that movie and I remember thinking, one, it was an interesting movie.

I mean, it was fun as just popcorn movie, it was fun to watch.

But I remember thinking, this is the type of mindset that's gonna influence people into thinking

that there is no God.

And then it was just a few years later that Richard Dawkins was being interviewed by Ben Stein on the movie, Expelled.

I don't know if you've ever seen that movie.

It's a documentary about teachers.

Yep, yep.

At the end of it, Richard Dawkins was asked by Ben Stein, well, do you think that we evolved?

And he said, yes.

He says, well, where did the original seed come from?

The thing that caused, where did the original atom or original cell come from that caused this evolution?

And he says, well, it could have came by aliens.

And I remember thinking back to the movie with Tim Robbins.

I was like, the movie that Tim Robbins had created is now being promoted

by, the same idea is being promoted by the leading

atheistic biologists in the world.

And so it's just this idea of, we're being, as it were, sort of

engineered to think a certain way by media, by culture, by art, everything.

We're being told, here's a beautiful painting.

And we look at it and we say, that's ugly.

No, it's beautiful.

You're supposed to say it's pretty.

Look at the painting of King Charles III.

It looks like a child did it with a magic marker.

It's so ugly.

That is not fair.

My daughter could color between the lines better than that.

What even is that supposed to be?

I mean, it is awful.

Yeah, somebody said it looks like it's in hell.

Yeah, it really does.

I feel like we're all closer to hell for having seen it.

It's just a horrible massacre -looking kind of a painting.

And let me say something, too.

I just think it's interesting.

This is something I've noticed just through history and through life, is that when Christianity came to the Greeks and to the Romans,

when it came to us, the Gentiles, we were these foolish people that were worshiping the stars, going, look,

there's Zeus and Poseidon.

The gods are up there.

And we don't know how we got here.

But somehow the gods up in the heavens, up in Olympus, brought life down to us.

And now we are here through the series of events.

And it's just so interesting to me that as Christianity leaves its foothold on the West, that we are now

looking back up into the stars and going, life came from up there somewhere.

I don't know where it came from, but it came from up there somewhere.

And that's how we got here.

And there's a smarter group of us out there somewhere that will someday save us.

I'm like, we just have returned back to the default settings.

As Christ leaves us, we go back into the same pit we were in before Christ was here.

And it's so fascinating to me that we may have put it in scientific language, but it's the exact same mythology beliefs, really, of

just something up there brought us to life.

We don't know where it is.

And now we're back to the same place where we're just something out there.

It's there and it's brought us life.

I don't know where it is, but it's there somewhere.

Yeah, it's worshiping the created thing rather than the creator.

We're Romans one cycling through again.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, brother, I've super enjoyed our talk.

And I hope that we do this again soon one day, because I mean, I could just pick your brain about a thousand things.

But this has been just one interesting, but also

terrifying.

I'm not gonna lie.

This is to hear what happened and to know that people were dying and having their heads cut

off during all this.

And this is one of the things I hear people say sometimes is, well, it's religion that causes

people to be monsters.

Atheism causes people to be wholesome and good.

This is a proof, if you will, that that's not always the case.

Atheism doesn't produce virtue.

There's no proof of that.

And in fact, the proof is in the opposite.

Would you?

Atheism has been tried.

Yeah, atheism has been tried in North Korea, in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, in

the French Revolution.

It's been tried and found wanting.

Now, technically, Cambodia is Buddhist now.

But we have done the Marxist atheism dance.

We have seen even, okay, if we take out Marxism, because it's basically its own religion, what if we try a quiet, chill

atheism?

What we've seen in places like the United Kingdom, where they will let a child die or they will

encourage in Canada the elderly to die.

The atheism does not create a safe place for life to live.

And even places like Japan, where you could say, well, there's no one being killed there.

Look at how they're being worked to death.

Look at how the people of Japan do not want to have children because they feel no hope.

They feel despair.

I mean, that, if anywhere, should look like a society where atheism has flourished.

On the outside, no one's being killed, but the people themselves are screaming out.

You can tell they're struggling.

This is not where you want to be.

But I wanted to throw a caution to the group too.

It's easy to listen to a story like this and go, aha, see, the atheists are wrong.

And that's the story.

But it's also important to look at the other lesson.

How did they get to this place?

Part of it was because the church had failed to show Christ.

The church had become this state religion that was calcified into the people's lives, that had power over

the people's lives, but was not sharing the gospel and becoming an object of ire.

And we can't, that does not give an excuse to what happened.

And sure, the enemies of the church will always attack the church.

But I also have to say, had the Church of France behaved differently, and the Catholics, again, Huguenots are being kicked out.

It's not their fault.

The Protestant churches, we are not always guiltless too.

And I'm not saying that to make us feel bad.

I'm saying we need to make sure we are lights for the gospel, that we are showing the love of Christ to those around us, that we are

blessing those who persecute us and not cursing them.

We need to do our part because the thing is, as much as it may be unfair, they're going to persecute

us.

Christ didn't say bless them unless they persecute in this way.

It's bless those who persecute you.

We must bless them.

That is what Christ has commanded us to do.

We leave justice to him.

And so our role in this is not to scoff and laugh purely and go, you dumb idiots, that's what you do

when you reject God.

Our role in this is to also go, but let me make sure that 100 years from now, when they're talking about the American church,

that our church isn't looking like a problem to the world, and that we did not make some of those same mistakes

because I promise you, we all have blinders.

And that's one of the reasons I love church history.

I can learn so much.

And then I look at my day and I go, oh, here's some of my blinders.

I was able to look at some of these different cultures and perspectives and see, hey, this is an area we're all missing.

We only read that stuff that comes out today.

Everyone's saying the same thing because they're on the same page.

You need some of that.

You need some of that stuff in the past to help give you that extra perspective to see, wait a minute, this would be a blind spot of ours that maybe

we would miss if no one, you know, no one's calling it out today, but it's been seen in the past.

That's extremely helpful.

And it goes right along with kind of what we started talking about at the beginning, and maybe would be a

good place to draw to a close.

And that is, you know, a lot of the people who are crying, you know, talking about Christian nationalism on one side or the other, and

we're not necessarily trying to have that debate or argument, you know, which is better, which is worse.

But if we are not promoting Christ, if we are just promoting the power or

something like that, or if we're promoting something that's opposite of the gospel, then we

should take a step back and say, you know, we need to go a different direction with this.

We need to rethink this.

If this is not promoting what Christ would promote, then we're not promoting Christ.

And so, and again, I know people are going to read that.

People are going to hear me say that and think I'm on one side or the other.

Again, I'm not here today to argue my position

on Christian nationalism.

But we can see, as you said, when the church fails and it becomes the enemy,

and the rise up out of that is so easy because people say, look where the church failed, and here's where

we're going to save you.

And out of that comes these cults of reason that are dangerous and

deadly and unfortunately cyclical because they come back and they

continue to come back.

Yeah.

Well, Troy, I want to thank you again for being on the show.

If you have any final thoughts or as we close, I would like to ask you for your final thoughts, but also remind people

how they can get ahold of you, how they can listen to you, how they can support your ministry, particularly if

people are able to give and want to give, how they can do that.

And then we'll draw everything to a close.

Yeah, sure.

So if you want to learn more about church history, if you find these kinds of stories interesting, go to Revive Thoughts.

We do sermons of the past.

We tell you the backstories of all the pastors.

There are so many wonderful, amazing men of God who have done just incredible things that when

I learn their stories, I have so much courage and strength for the day.

I can't even explain how much these mentors of the past have really transformed and worked on my heart and helped me to grow

closer to Him.

And if you're a pastor or someone too, and you're wanting to grow, you've got to listen to sermons of the past.

You've got to read sermons of the past because they will make you better preachers.

I promise you, you will be able to speak more confidently and better about God if you're reading some of those great things from the past.

If you want to be good at a game, you've got to do practice and you've got to study stuff from the back.

You've got to study strategies.

Listen and read some of the greats.

It will help you grow.

So you can go to Revive Thoughts, my wife's podcast, Martyrs and Missionaries as well.

Great church history content.

And then if you'd like to follow our ministry, we are in Indonesia serving God over here.

I get to work at a Christian school and I get to have an impact on a lot of different students in different ways.

We have a Facebook group called Following the Fraziers.

If you don't follow Facebook and you'd like to contact us or something, you can also go to any of our emails,

revivethoughts at gmail .com or find us wherever you are on social media.

I'm on Twitter, too much.

So that's somewhere, sorry, too much.

And you can just find us over there.

But you can contact us.

We love church history.

We love chatting.

I like throwing questions out on X and finding out what will accidentally set people off and what will get

everybody a bunch of friends and we'll get a bunch of people happy.

And you never know what the day is going to be.

Sometimes you're like, oops, I really stepped in it.

And then sometimes you're like, hey, this was fun.

Everyone's happy.

But just find us.

We love serving God where we are here in Indonesia.

It's a real blessing that we get to do what we do and sharing the gospel with our students.

And yeah, we just feel very blessed where we are.

And we love getting to share church history.

I love being able to talk with people about it.

I find that, I don't know, for me, it has been just so many people are hungry to grow in God

and showing them what God has done in the past and the great people of God who have stood up through hard times, I have found has been

so incredibly rewarding for my faith.

And it has been very impactful on other people's as well.

It almost feels like a cheat code.

Like, if you want to grow closer to God, what do I do?

It's right there in the open.

If you do it, you will find that you will start, it just seems to me, you'll just start growing in your walk with God and

understanding the scriptures better and just having a lot more faith for the day.

Well, that's awesome, brother.

And I'm glad to be your friend and glad to be able to promote your ministry.

And I do hope people will come and not only listen to your podcast, but also reach out to you with support.

So may God continue to bless you and your wife and your family as you guys continue to spread the gospel abroad.

Thank you very much, Keith.

Thank you for having me on too.

Appreciate it.

Absolutely.

I want to thank you guys for being a part of the show today.

Again, remember, if you have questions, comments, or ideas for upcoming shows, and you'd like to reach out to me, you

can do so at KeithFoskey .com.

Again, my name is Keith Foskey, and I have been your Calvinist.

May God bless you.

And I hit the YouTube link and I feel my troubles all melt

away.

Oh, it's your Calvinist podcast with Keith Foskey.

Beards and bow ties.

Laughs till sunrise.

It's your Calvinist podcast with Keith Foskey.

He's not like most Calvinists.

He's nice.

Your Calvinist podcast with Keith Foskey, striving for superior theology and denominational unity, one joke at

a time.