December 26, 2023 Show with Jason Storms on “A Christian Guide for Cultural & Political Engagement”

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, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet

Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 26th day of December 2023, a date on the calendar that many

Christians worldwide for centuries have commemorated the martyrdom of St.

Stephen, the very first Christian martyr who was stoned to death, and we commemorate his faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ, which did not waver even in the midst of being murdered by the enemies of Christ.

And today, I also, after hoping, after stating to you all,

I should say, that I hope you had a wonderful, restful, refreshing, joyful, and Christ -honoring

Christmas, I have my own praise report for Christmas that I just learned of moments ago before going on the air, and I ask your prayer for this specific praise report, that it has lasting value.

A dear friend of mine called me just moments ago to let me know that her daughter, who

I love so much, I consider her as if she were my own daughter myself, she, sadly, perhaps two years ago, could have been longer, but I think it was about two years ago, she came out of the closet as a lesbian and moved in with a woman, much to the shock of everybody who knows her, and yesterday, you know those proverbial disagreements that Christians have over the dinner table with folks during holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas?

Well, even though Jade is not convinced she is saved yet, she, at the home of her girlfriend's parents, she was standing up for Christ, Christianity, and the scriptural condemnation of homosexuality.

And because of that, her quote -unquote girlfriend broke up with her. So I am receiving that as a

Christmas gift, a glorious Christmas gift, from our Savior, and of course her mom is as well, and I ask that you pray that this is a permanent breakup, but much more important than that, infinitely more important than that, that Jade truly comes to a genuine, repentant faith in Christ and gives nothing but crystal clear evidence that she is a true child of God, a true

Christian, and heaven -bound, and pray the same for this woman with whom the relationship has ended.

So I just wanted to share that praise report because it's something that has been on my lips when

I offer petitions up to the Lord's throne of grace very often, and it came as a wonderful surprise today, and as I said, please pray that this is a permanent thing that has occurred, and that any kind of sorrow or grief or sadness or depression that my friend's daughter may be experiencing during this breakup does not lure her back into that relationship.

But I will, God willing, keep you posted. But today we have on my program a first -time guest.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have him on the program. He's actually the son -in -law of a friend of mine who you've heard on this program,

Matt Trujillo, the pastor of Mercy Seat Christian Church of Brookfield, Wisconsin, who is also a political activist and evangelist for the gospel and publisher of much -needed works that have been brought back into print through Matt Trujillo.

My guest today is Jason Storms, the national director of Operation Save America, an evangelist at Mercy Seat Christian Church of Brookfield, Wisconsin.

Today we're going to be addressing a Christian guide for cultural and political engagement, and we're also going to be announcing the upcoming debate on the theme,

Abolition versus Incrementalism, How to End Infanticide in America, this

February on Iron Trump and Zion Radio between Jason Storms, the abolitionist in the debate, and my friend

Scott Klusendorf, who is representing incrementalism.

But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trump and Zion Radio, Jason Storms.

First, it's a pleasure to be with you. It's great to have you on the program. First of all, tell our listeners about the church where your father -in -law is pastor and where you serve as an evangelist,

Mercy Seat Christian Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Yeah, the church has been in existence for 35 years,

I want to say. It's been a faithful voice in the Milwaukee metro area, standing up for biblical truth for multiple decades.

I've been very active in discipling and working with a lot of the young people in the church, raising up the next generation of evangelists, of gospel preachers, of leaders.

I run a construction business in addition to the ministry that I do by vocational, so I've been able to train a lot of young men in the trades, in entrepreneurialism, in business and finance and economics, and in expanding the kingdom of God in those realms, and applying good biblical principle to our work, our work ethic, and our finances, and our productive labors.

And so that's been a joy to watch a generation of young people come up. We just had our 11th child, so that's exciting, and are blessed to homeschool all those kids.

We got a very dynamic church with a lot of young people, a lot of fruitful families, a lot of homeschool families, big families, and doing our best to shine as a beacon of light in this dark world, and increasingly so amongst the young people.

So, only 11 children, huh? When are you really going to get started? That's it.

That's it. I just was hoping to fill a football team, you know, and then that's it. I thought 10 and done, but then, you know, we ended up having one more.

I don't know. Maybe we'll have 12. We'll see. But, yeah, it's an adventure and a joy.

Well, you make my former pastor, Mark Romaldi, look like a rookie.

He's pastor of Sovereign Grace Church in Greenbrier, Tennessee, also known as White House, Tennessee, and he only has nine children, so.

Oh, boy. But can you tell us something more about the theological makeup of Mercy Seat Christian Church?

It's a bit of an eclectic mix, theologically. We, you know, my roots and Pastor Matt's roots both were in sort of the

Pentecostal charismatic movement, but as you probably know, that movement, it tends to be about a mile wide and an inch deep, and so Matt and I followed similar courses before we even met each other, theologically began to be, you know, we both had pretty dramatic conversions to Christ in our teen years from broken families, drugs, and all the while living.

And Matt actually got saved in Teen Challenge at 17, and I got saved at 19, moved to New Orleans with my dad.

And my dad was actually an Assemblies of God pastor in New Orleans, and so he came to the Lord at 19.

So, you know, we both followed similar journeys, though, in different decades and independently of each other, but both of us began to become dissatisfied with, you know, sort of the standard fare of evangelicalism in the 80s and 90s was, you know,

Jesus is coming back soon, get ready, buckle up. And that was it.

And so I remember reading Gary DeMar's book, Last Day's Madness, and I think

I was 20 years old, Dr. D. James Kennedy, who I supported his radio program, listened to him on the radio, sent me that book, and I was like mind blown kind of thing.

And so, you know, began to dive deeper into sort of historical

Christian theology in reading the Reformers and reading guys, great revival preachers like Wesley and Edwards, and just beginning to step back and look through the history and reading a lot of the writings of the early church.

And so our church is sort of nondenominational, I guess you'd say. We're not connected to a denomination.

Left the charismatic Pentecostal world, but never settled into a particular denomination. So broadly

Protestant, I would say we're probably best seen as a post -mill, covenantal, theonomic church, which tends to turn some folks away.

We had a lot of people join our church during the COVID era because we, of course, stood against the lockdowns and the mandates and all that stuff.

And so we had a lot of people join our church, but then to discover that we were not pre -millennial and that we didn't think that this was the last days that we were living in, they left our congregation.

But so it's a little bit of our church's theological bent.

Well, I do also want our listeners to look up when they visit the website of Mercy Seat Christian Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, to look up these books that have been brought back into print by my guest's father -in -law,

Matt Trujillo. One of them is the Magdeburg Confession, and I hope

I'm not mispronouncing that, a really valuable book that basically was used of God after the

Reformation to squelch the attempts of the

Church of Rome to dominate the theological landscape of Germany, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah. And also other excellent literature that is available there at mercyseat .net,

mercyseat .net, and God willing, I will remember to repeat that information at the end of the program.

And we have a tradition here, Jason. Whenever we have a first -time guest on Iron Sharp and Zion Radio, we ask that guest to give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which you were raised and the kinds of providential circumstances our

Sovereign Lord raised up in your life that drew you to Himself and saved you. Amen.

Yeah, my parents were teenagers when they had me and my brother.

My brother's a year and a half older than me, and they both had, you could say, some religious experiences as teenagers.

They came out of the drug culture of the 70s and upstate New York. We're all from upstate

New York. My grandmother was a Sicilian immigrant and moved upstate and married.

And so my dad's side was very Italian, very Catholic. My mom's side, they were

German, Irish immigrants and so forth in the ancestry. And so my grandmother was a

Methodist on my mom's side. So my mom had a little bit of that upbringing, but for the most part, my mom was not religious and raised me.

My mom and dad were together and divorced when I was a baby. And so my earliest memories were of them separated.

My mom raised me in, I'd say, a very irreligious home. You know, we didn't go to church.

My dad was referred to, he became a Christian when I was three. He came, you know, like I said, they had experiences with the

Lord and then didn't stick. You know, they both kind of fell back, kind of went to church a little bit and started going to church, got married and divorced quickly and walked away from their, you know, whatever experiences they had.

My dad came back to that when I was three years old. So my earliest memories of my dad was he was a Christian and he was a part of a little church in Elmira, New York.

And so I'd visit him and he would take me to church and pray with me, read the Bible with me. But with my mom, it was not that way.

We ended up moving to California. I went to middle school out in San Jose, California. My dad moved to New Orleans when

I was little. And I'd spend summers in New Orleans with him. He pastored in the inner city of New Orleans.

And so I saw this big contrast between mom and dad. And I consider myself a

Christian up until age 14. At 14 years old, I had a lot of questions about the faith, had a lot of doubts, of course, influenced by my culture, raised by the entertainment industry, a major void in my life, of course, not having a

Christian home. And so at 14 years old, I renounced

Christianity and did not have a good relationship with my mom or my dad. And I just said, you know,

I don't believe this stuff. And oddly enough, I still believed in God. And I knew there's got to be a purpose to life.

I don't know what it is or why I'm here. And so I can see, it's interesting, I remember praying my freshman year of high school when

I was still considering myself a Christian. I remember praying to God, because I went through this cycle in high school, you know, starting high school where, you know,

I'd go to church on Sunday, live with my dad for the start of ninth grade in New Orleans. And I remember we went through, go through this cycle where Sunday I'd go to church with him, pray these, you know, pray and say,

God, help me to be a good Christian throughout the week. And then Monday I go to school and I'd be like, you know,

I'm going to do really well. I'm not going to lust after girls. I'm not going to cuss. I'm not going to be smoking anything.

I'm going to stay on the straight and narrow. And then by Tuesday, start to wear that down a little bit. By Wednesday, I was pretty much fitting in with the crowd.

And by the end of the week, you know, just living sort of like a heathen. And then weekend rolls back around. I come to church with my dad and repent, you know, kind of live that cycle that, you know, that was the six months of, that I lived with my dad in my freshman year.

And so I ended up moving away from him, renouncing Christianity. But I remember praying a prayer at that time.

I said, Lord, when I get out of high school, I'll serve you. It's just too hard to serve you being in high school right now.

And so I don't know that God held me to that. But I do know that it was a spiral downhill through high school. The sort of, you know,

I've been through a wild childhood, moved around a lot, a lot of broken family situations with different family members.

And God's no doubt preserved me through that. My dad, many prayers for me.

But my teenage years began to just be a spiral downhill, drugs and partying and wild living and ended up graduating high school in San Jose, California.

Ended up homeless, did a lot of crystal meth, smoked weed every day. A lot of bad stuff and a lot of criminal stuff, a lot of getting arrested, getting in trouble with the law and was at a bad place, basically homeless.

And, you know, a lot of nights sleeping alone, sleeping out on the streets, finding places to sleep and not eating, you know, going hungry.

I lost a lot of weight. It went from being a good athlete and high school football player to being a little tweaker, you know, and kind of came to the end of myself.

Prodigal son. My dad called me. I hadn't talked to him in quite a few years after I moved away from high school, moved away from him in ninth grade.

It had been about five years since I'd talked to him, four years. And he ended up getting ahold of me.

This was before the internet. This was 1997. So he tracked me down, found me a friend's house.

I was staying at, sleeping on his couch. And he said, hey, Jason, I know I've not been there for you, not been a good father for you in many ways.

But I know you talked to your mom, know you're in a bad place. If you want to get a fresh start, get a roof over your head, buy a bus ticket.

You can leave California, come back down here to New Orleans and stay with me and get a fresh start.

And so that was a wow moment for me. I was sort of at a place where God, I believe, had been really convicting me, drawing me to himself.

I had this sort of growing spiritual hunger to figure out why I existed, what the purpose of life was.

Everything around me I saw was fake. You know, all the institutions around me were failing me. I knew that the public school system was a joke.

I knew that everything I saw in the media and the television was corrupt. I knew my government was corrupt. I looked at the religious institutions around me.

I thought that they were all corrupt. So, you know, I just was at that place as a young man of word, as a young man go to find truth.

And so my dad ended up buying me the bus ticket. I called him the next day, said, let me think about it.

Called him back, said, okay, buy me the bus ticket. I'm coming down and spent four days on a Greyhound bus, sober and reflecting and just under tremendous conviction of the

Holy Spirit, God drawing me to himself. And I got off the bus that first night. My dad was having a

Bible study in his little apartment in New Orleans. And I remember just the words of Scripture jumping off the pages at me, the genuineness of the people, the

Christians that were there, just such genuine people. And I was just blown away.

I was like this starving soul that just was broken before God. And he just was revealing

Christ to me in a profound and powerful way. And so it really was incredible.

And I ended up probably spent about two to three weeks sort of wrestling with God and him breaking me down and drawing me and revealing himself to me.

And I would just stay up my dad and I until two, three in the morning, some nights just talking. And I'm just drilling with questions.

Well, why would God make the world of this and this? And how do you know the Bible is true? And how do you know that the Bible can be, you know, all these questions.

He just patiently walked me through answers to these questions, patiently walked me through the scriptures, through the gospel.

And I knew I was a sinner and that was it. Probably the third week I was down there, repented, came to church with him and experienced a radical transformation.

And I just turned 19 years old. So that was profound.

And so I didn't have any useful functional skills. You know, I knew how to play sports. I knew how to break into cars and houses, but I had no useful functional skills at a high school diploma, but didn't know anything about life.

And so I had to figure out how to be a man. God led me through a journey of getting mentored and discipled by men and just learning how to be a responsible, hardworking man.

And brought me on a journey to where, by God's grace, 26 years later, 11 children,

I've run a business for 20 years and been able to serve in ministry, been on staff at our church for 18 years and just been blessed to be used of the

Lord for his kingdom and his purposes. And so it's been a blessing now to be the father for my kids that I didn't have through a lot of my childhood.

And to see my kids now, my teenage kids and grown kids, walking with the

Lord and doing ministry and serving together, worshiping together is just a tremendous blessing. Amen.

Well, I'm going to give our listeners our email address right away. It is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

If you have a question that you'd like to ask of your own, to my guest Jason Storms, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, such as you are in stark disagreement with your own pastor or your elders or your denomination over what we are discussing today.

Perhaps you're even a pastor yourself, and you disagree with your fellow elders or your denomination over something we're discussing today.

Well, whatever it is that would compel you to remain anonymous, we will grant that request. But if it's a general question, please give us your first name, at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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We're now back with our guest, Jason Storms, and by the way, Jason, I think that you should make use of your name by starting a private detective agency.

You have the name of a private detective as far as I'm concerned. But I think it would be good to set the stage for any further conversations we have regarding your engagement with culture and politics.

Please explain the book by your father -in -law, which is available from Mercy Seek Christian Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, The Doctrine of the

Lesser Magistrates, A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government.

Please let listeners know about that. Yeah, groundbreaking, fantastic book that I think is a self -published book.

I think it's over, I want to say, 140 ,000 copies sold now, which is pretty incredible, and that's been read by governors, senators, congressmen on down, all over the nation.

And so I think it's the definitive book for our day on that topic of resistance.

How do we resist corrupt government, and how do we think rightly and biblically about politics, government, law, policy?

And sadly, the evangelical world has a major void here in terms of a well -rounded political theology.

And so, you know, a lot of that was, a lot of factors, converging factors over the last century contributing to that.

But the classical reformed thinking with regards to politics and law and culture has largely been lost in the last 100 -plus years.

And so as we see across the spectrum, massive corruption in our public institutions and the gross secularization of our culture and all the things that follow from that, the dehumanization of life, the rampant sexual immorality, the breakdown of the family, onto just the gross corruption and system of bribery that exists within our state and federal government.

So what the book really addresses is it lays out a biblical foundation for how do we push back.

And the idea of the lesser magistrate doctrine follows from the recognition that all authority is derived from God.

He is the source of all authority. Jesus, of course, in the Great Commission, he says, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me.

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey all the things I've commanded.

And so the gospel is more than just personal salvation and the personal securing of one's soul into eternity, but there are real effects that redemption has on the individual's life in the here and now.

And that affects men socially in our social institutions, in our family, our business, our economics, our politics, et cetera.

And all of that is under the authority of Christ, who is King of kings and Lord of lords.

And so what we see biblically is the three spheres of government that God has instituted, all of which derive their power and their authority from him, are the realm of family government, right?

Children are to obey their mother and father. Wives submit to your husbands. Husbands lead your homes well as Christ.

Love your homes as Christ loved the church. Love your wives, love your children. Train them up in the nurture and instruction.

Lord, there is an order to the home, a government in the home. And there is limitations to that.

An abusive father should be resisted, not submitted to, right? The same is true of the next realm of government is ecclesiastical or church government.

We see within the church, Paul says, obey those who rule over you in the Lord. Peter reiterates the same thing, that there is elders to be appointed who care for your soul, shepherd your soul, and are to be submitted to or to execute church discipline and hold to sound doctrine within the church.

And, of course, that is not without limit. No pastor or elder is infallible.

Though their authority is derived by God, they can abdicate that authority through disobedience and through the abdication of their duties.

And so a pastor who's embezzling money, teaching heresy, so forth, is to be resisted, not submitted to.

And the same is true in the realm of civil government. We have the third realm of civil government where God has instituted,

Romans 13, the civil magistrate who is a minister of God for the purpose of punishing evil and promoting good.

The civil magistrate just doesn't exist as a law unto themselves. They don't get to just make up their own system of morality to impose on the people.

And Christians shouldn't just accept a morally relativistic landscape as though, well, we're just sojourners and pilgrims, therefore, whatever the civil magistrate decides, whatever he wants to impose, so be it, we just suffer and endure.

Sometimes that may be the case, but we should seek justice in the political realm.

God's word speaks to the civil arena, and his law speaks to the civil arena.

And certainly here in Western civilization, our laws were grounded in Scripture and in a biblical worldview, and that is well worth preserving.

And so the civil magistrate has a duty before God to punish evil and promote good, and when they fail to do so, they abdicate their authority, they become an enemy of God, and they ought to be resisted.

And it's the duty, first and foremost, of lesser magistrates, lower -ranking civil authorities.

Say, for example, in our system of government where we have governors, we have city and council leaders, state representatives, sheriffs, they have a duty to push back against federally corrupt laws that are coming down from the federal government, any branch of the federal government, be it court opinion or legislative act or executive decree, and they also have a duty to push back against bad state law that's coming down from the state house or governor or an attorney general.

And so, you know, this is an important check and balance that's rooted in Protestant political history that these magistrates are accountable to the law of God and that we have a system of checks and balances put in place here, a true federalism, where we have different layers and levels of government, and no governor, no president, no sheriff is a law unto themselves.

They are under the law. And so, for example, a police officer who's ordered to arrest

Christians and to take them, you know, in the back alley and rough them up by his captain must look at that captain and say no.

Or even just to arrest them, even just to arrest them and not rough them up if they're arresting them because these

Christians are living out their faith. Obviously, Christians need to be arrested when they are committing crimes that are real crimes.

Correct. And unfortunately, we see that in the news more frequently than we care to admit when pastors fall into all kinds of gross sin.

But we're talking about those things that the government has no business enforcing upon its citizens, especially in a country like the

United States of America that is supposed to be a constitutional republic, and yet the government is constantly, with greater intensity, trying to impose its unconstitutional mandates upon its citizens.

So even without the roughing up, the police, if they are going to put truth above their jobs, shouldn't they be resisting putting under arrest people that they know are being arrested for false reasons?

Absolutely. And so that's what the Lesser Magistrate Doctrine would affirm, and Christians have affirmed this for hundreds of years.

As St. Augustine said, unjust law is no law at all. And so we, of course, we fleshed this out in the

Nuremberg trials. We said to German military officers on down to lower -ranking soldiers, the idea that you're just following orders was no excuse and no justification for committing horrific injustices against other human beings.

And so the same is certainly true today as we look at, for example, abortion. We see children being murdered, one million a year in this nation, and for 50 years their blood has cried out.

For 50 years we watched every single governor, every single sheriff, every single police chief in the country bowing down to the

Supreme Court and saying, okay, the seven robed men in Washington, D .C.

said pre -born children are no longer legally protected human beings and opened up the floodgates of brutality to slaughter them.

And there was no resistance. Had this thinking been in place 50 years ago, perhaps we would have seen governors and sheriffs and police chiefs and state legislators stand up and say no when

Roe was issued. Sad that we sat under that bloodshed for 50 years. And by the way, it reminds me,

I've got to get on my calendar another interview with your father -in -law, Matt Trujillo, because the last time we spoke he enthusiastically agreed to an idea

I have for an interview. I want to get Matt on the show with several law enforcement officers who are on the same page with their biblical worldview as Matt's and have them discuss the very issue that you brought up, because Christian police officers really have got to be prepared when things get worse and worse, even post -millennialist, by the way, for our listeners who aren't aware of this.

Post -millennialists do not believe, and I am not one yet anyway, I'm open to it,

I'm an optimistic amillennialist, but post -millennialists do not believe that the future just keeps getting better and better and better in an unbroken progression of improvement as they are caricatured to believe.

Post -millennialists believe that we could be plunged into the world, that is, could be plunged into a state of darkness like the world has ever seen for centuries before things get better because of the fact that they have a longer life expectancy for the planet

Earth than most, or in fact, more than all pre -mill and most amill folks have.

This, just because they believe ultimately that the globe will be converted, and of course there are various interpretations even amongst post -millennialists.

Some believe it's just the majority of those alive when Christ returns who will be saved. Some believe that every single person alive will be saved.

Some believe that the majority of the Earth's governments, if not all of the Earth's governments, will be under godly rule.

So there are differences of opinion. But the longevity of the existence of this planet in the post -millennial worldview allows for even a period of darkness that lasts centuries in our future.

Wouldn't you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, that's something we're not extraordinarily dogmatic on.

As a post -mill guy, I welcome working with all my other brothers in different millennial camps. Unfortunately, some of my pre -mill brothers are pretty dogmatic.

They get a little ruffled by my position, but we're not dogmatic, and we don't push that aggressively on people.

I think that doing the work, I'm a much more practical kind of guy than sitting around debating theology with people endlessly.

I think doing the actual work is what matters, rolling up our sleeves, and regardless of where we may disagree on that, we can argue over that and have those discussions, and they are important.

But, you know, let's do the work, and let's get our hands dirty. And regardless of what the next 10 years or 20 years or 50 years may hold, we got lots of work to do in front of us right now.

Well, we got about five minutes before our midway break for you to outline the upcoming debate that we are arranging in the month of February, between you and my friend

Scott Klusendorf, who has been on the program. I think

Scott Klusendorf, in many respects, is doing a lot of great things and has done for many years a lot of great things for the cause of life and the mother's womb, although I am saying that having a disagreement with him over the issue of the debate we are hoping to have in February.

I would side much more strongly with the abolitionists, such as yourself, than the incrementalists, and that actually was something in my heart and mind when

I first became a believer, before I had ever heard of a movement called the abolitionist movement.

I don't even know if it existed in any significant or prominent way when

I became a Christian in the 80s. You mostly heard about things like Operation Rescue and pro -life movements and activities, but it always bothered me.

I always felt unsettled that even the most zealously active pro -life person or organization was never completely treating unborn humans in the same degree of humanity as post -natal children and humans of all ages.

It always seemed to me that there was a category of less importance when it came to unborn life.

So, in one way, I've always been an abolitionist because I always felt we should be treating the murder of an unborn child just as if we were treating a situation with an eight -year -old child, and we should be treating those guilty of these murders in the same way.

But if you could set out a summary of what you expect to occur when you defend the abolitionist position against the incrementalist position that is being represented by Scott Klusendorf on Iron Sherpa's Iron Radio in February.

Good. I look forward to that very much. I like Scott. He's also a friend of mine, and we spent quite a few hours discussing and debating these things.

And so, you know, I think that, one, the first step is going to be to define our terms, because that's obviously very important.

What do we even mean by incrementalist? What do we mean by abolitionist? What are we talking about here? And then the second thing that I think is important is to show how brothers who are sincere followers of Christ who are committed to the end of abortion but who disagree on some of these important aspects of how to go about fighting this battle can, with grace and with charity, can have passionate disagreement and discussion that hopefully,

Lord willing, we'll be edifying and encouraging and yet still have a love for each other and still be committed to lifting up the name of Christ and his lordship on the earth and to doing what we can, committing ourselves to putting an end to abortion.

So that being said, you know, I think, I'm not a big fan of either term, incrementalist or abolitionist, just to be quite frank.

We've been very involved since the abolitionist movement kind of came on the scene 10 years ago. I was sort of an early adopter, saw good things with that and came alongside a lot of the guys.

At that time, it was kind of an AHA, kind of online crowd, and they were doing some good stuff.

But there was a lot of problems in that movement. And so a lot of people have become very unsettled by that term, abolitionist, and have disassociated themselves from it.

And so, you know, I'm not married to the term abolitionist. There are principles that I think are important.

The abolitionist movement has helped bring to the fore, and we've been certainly a part of trumpeting that, that are very important and stand in contradiction to the mainstream current of most pro -life organizations, and particularly the big pro -life lobbying groups that really set the political strategy.

And I think that's where really we'll hash out and flesh out some of the disagreements here.

And, you know, my contention is going to be that the pro -life movement, by and large, is weak and compromised and ineffective politically, and largely due to,

A, a lack of good theological grounding, two, a lack of moral courage, and three, because they get co -opted by the

Republican leadership. And I think the real bad guys here, in conservative states particularly, is the

Republican leadership. That's where the real money is. That's the guys that really are responsible for keeping abortion legal in conservative pro -life states.

And a lot of pro -life rank -and -file people are shocked to find out that that's the case, but, you know, increasingly we've begun to see, and our eyes have become open, that there is such a thing as the political establishment.

Could you pick up right where you left off when we return from our midway break? Absolutely. We urge you to use this time wisely.

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And also send in your questions to our guest Jason Storms, to chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We're going to be right back. It's such a pleasure to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners from all over the world.

Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland, who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed,

Dr. Joe Moorcraft. I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in Atai, in County Kildare, Ireland, going back to 2005.

One of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio,

Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, are largely to thank, since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.

Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming is in Forsyth County, a part of the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Heritage is a thoroughly biblical church, unwaveringly committed to Westminster standards, and Dr.

Joe Moorcraft is the author of an eight -volume commentary on the larger catechism. Heritage is a member of the

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And before I go to any of our listener questions that have come in, I want you to continue where you left off. You were talking about rhinos, which are really known as Republicans in name only, and therefore almost indistinguishable from Democrats.

But if you could, are you there? Yeah, can you hear me?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we are well aware that there is, you know, a political establishment, and the

Republican Party, of course, used to be pro -abortion, political party. You know, I think what was it, seven of the nine

Supreme Court justices, or six of the nine at the time of Roe? Yeah. In fact, Richard Nixon was caught on tape wondering to do with all these little black babies who he wanted aborted because they were just they were just a burden upon society.

Yeah, yeah. Ronald Reagan was Republican governor of California, signed an abortion law into effect there pre -Roe, as did the

Republican Mitt Romney's dad, Republican governor of Michigan, pre -Roe.

So, you know, the Republican Party was a pro -abortion party. Barbara Bush? Yeah. Yeah, the whole

Bush family, right? So, you know, when you had in the late 70s, of course, the rise of the moral majority,

Jerry Falwell, and you had this whole awakening, guys like Francis Schaeffer, of course, a big part in awakening the church in that regard.

And, you know, they swept Ronald Reagan into power. And, you know, I don't know if Ronald was genuinely anti -abortion.

He wrote a book against abortion. But, you know, a lot of the Republican leaders who control the power and the money and the big donor base and Wall Street, they realized, okay, we need to ride this evangelical wave.

But we certainly don't share their values. And so how do we trick them into continuing to vote for us without actually doing the things they want us to do?

Because we don't, we don't like that. And so that's been the game that's been being played within the Republican Party for 40 plus years now, right?

And so what we find guys like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, I mean, you know, these are wicked, evil, evil men, if we knew the depths of the depravity of these men would be horrified.

And so they're leading the Republican Party. And so what you realize though, is because the way that the federal government, the two party system works in the federal government, as well as the way that it works within most state houses, is the leadership of the party really have the reins of power, and a handful of guys really control the power.

And so you take conservative pro -life states, where you've got super majorities of Republicans, and everybody says they're pro -life, right?

But really, it's a tiny majority that control the power and the purse strings and the campaign finances and all these things.

You know, in these states, you're talking billions of dollars run through that state house, right? And so the pro -life groups are relatively, relatively tiny compared to that, right?

And so these pro -life organizations have a decision to make, right? Their leadership has to decide, are we going to stand on principle and speak truth and stand and defend the lives of these babies?

Or are we going to succumb to political pragmatism, play the political games, hold to the political pressure, allow the money to silence us?

And that's the pressure. Republican leadership comes along to pro -life organizations and say, hey, look, we can't get this done right now.

But you know, we need you to tell your people to stand behind us. This is the best we can do right now.

And you know, that was the garbage that went on for 40 years. And of course, going back, you know, 20 plus years, we were saying, to stand up and end abortion, defy rope.

Conservative states had the authority to end abortion in their jurisdiction, right?

We saw this, you know, in Texas and in Florida during the mandates in 2020.

Governor Abbott, Governor DeSantis said, nope, not here. You're not gonna, you know, they basically told the federal government where to go with regards to locking down businesses and mandating vaccines and mandating other aspects of the

COVID, you know, nonsense. And so it's like, okay, so you can tell the federal government to go pound sand with regards to vaccine mandates.

But you're not willing to do that over the murder of little babies in your jurisdiction. Something's wrong with that picture.

So for decades, we knew and saw and realized that obviously not everybody that says they're pro -life is actually pro -life, right?

To us being pro -life meant you believe these are babies that are being murdered. And we stand uncompromisingly in their defense to be a voice for the voiceless, to call their murder what it is, the murder of an innocent human being made in the image of God.

And we need to stand up and speak against it. It needs to be fully criminalized and all those involved held accountable by law.

And so that's what we were beating that drum for years. Now, that was, you know, put us in a sort of a minority stance within the pro -life movement.

We were always sort of the oddballs. You know, our organization, Operation Save America, which used to be Operation Rescue, and a leader of that rescue movement, you know, those were guys that were taking direct action and were employing interposition, the classic doctrine of interposition.

They were saying, hey, these are babies being murdered. What is the appropriate response for a Christian? Well, it's to go and stand in between the victim and the victimizer.

And so, you know, rescue was a big thing in the late 80s and early 90s, and actually pushed the abortion industry against the ropes.

And the Christian leaders around the country, pro -life leaders around the country were getting behind that, joining in that, getting arrested, and laying their lives down, and calling on their elected officials to do the same.

But, you know, so there was this sort of, I think, crossroads in our nation in the late 90s, or the early 90s, rather, where the church was sifted and found wanting.

And many church leaders retreated when the cost got too high of arrest and persecution, and the

FBI knocking on your door, and, you know, crazy pro -aborts picketing your church and threatening your family.

And a lot of pastors got silent. A lot of pastors said, ah, you know, we think abortion is wrong, but we don't quite think it's that wrong.

And there was a lot of cowardice. And so things really shifted with the election of Bill Clinton in 1992.

Up to that point, we had 12 years of pro -life presidents and pro -life majorities with the rise of the moral majority, and this strong pro -life voice, strong evangelical voice thrusted into politics.

But as we look back, we see that the net result really was we got played, right? The religious right, Falwell, and those guys really just kind of got played by the

Republican Party. And Bill Clinton gets elected in 92, and Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court picks, two of them,

Kennedy and O 'Connor, flip. And rather than the, you know, the big Casey decision in 92, rather than what many thought was going to be the overturning of Roe, instead they ended up strengthening and expanding

Roe as Reagan's Supreme Court picks flopped.

And it turned out they weren't actually against abortion at all. And so then Clinton gets in office. He signs the FACE Act, Freedom of Access to Clinic and Church Entrances, and makes it a federal felony to engage in any peaceful civil disobedience in front of an abortion clinic, which we have a trial in just a couple of weeks with some friends of ours in Nashville, Tennessee, Cal's Astro and Chet Gallagher and Coleman Boyd and some other friends of ours,

Paul Vaughn and Eva Edel will be facing up to as many as 11 years in federal prison for peacefully sitting down in front of the doors of abortion clinic in Tennessee.

And so arrested under the Biden administration under the FACE Act. So that FACE Act was enacted in 1992.

And that kind of crushed the rescue movement. And I would say from that time that the pro -life movement sort of wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, and afraid to stand up to the

Goliaths in the land, and afraid to challenge and defy Roe and afraid to call abortion murder.

And so the pro -life movement has just largely been co -opted by the Republican political establishment.

And it's political pragmatism. And even, of course, we see it now with the calls to abandon the issue of abortion altogether, even

Trump saying, you know, we're going to lose on abortion, we need to distance ourselves from a strong stance on abortion.

You have Nikki Haley standing up and others applauding her saying, you know, 15 week ban is reasonable.

No, that's not reasonable. You know, you can't get an abortion in France after 12 weeks.

So here we have our pro -life leaders standing up and saying a 15 week ban, something that would be considered extreme in France is reasonable for pro -life people here in the

United States, absolutely absurd. And so the pro -life movement, you know, is really, you know, there's two categories you fall into in the pro -life movement.

There are those who stand on principle and who stand up to the corrupt Republican leadership and those who won't, or who don't.

And, and that makes all the difference, of course, right? And so the abolitionist movement came on the scene, you know, 10 years ago or so, and, and really honed in on that, that message.

And we saw a lot of good, and we jumped on board, and I was involved in helping build the abolitionist movement, as was

Rusty Thomas, who was leading Operations of America at that time. And he wrote an excellent book, Biblical Strategies to Abolish Abortion, and has brought in a lot of, a lot of people into that fight.

And a lot of people are realizing, yeah, we've been fighting this battle wrongly for, for a long time here.

And that's why we continue to lose. We need to be wise here, we need to be principled, and we need to understand that the games that are being played by the big

Republican leadership, and the big pro -life lobbying groups, and that they're playing pro -life voters, and that they are selling us out, and they're selling out these babies, and that they're corrupt, and they need to be exposed.

So that's a lot of what we've been doing on the pro -life front for the last 10 years here.

So I am getting the concept here that a primary difference between a pro -life incrementalist and an abortion abolitionist is that those advocating incrementalism, especially when you're talking about major political figures, lawmakers, and movements, and organizations, people in the pro -life industry, are either naively, or unconsciously, or at its worst, intentionally compromising with laws such as a heartbeat bill, a 15 -week bill, that in reality, according to an abolitionist, is making the establishment of new laws completely abolishing abortion, and making the guilty parties of infanticide, whether they be physicians or mothers, paying to have their babies murdered, or getting them murdered in free clinics, or what have you, that they should be treated under the law equally with those who murder eight -year -old children, that the pro -life industry, even when well -intended, is actually thwarting the cause to permanently and completely banish abortion.

Is that basically, in summary, what you're saying? Yeah, that's fair to say.

You know, there's obviously a lot of nuance to all that. There's a lot of very good pro -life people there, and I don't ever want to make some blanket, broad -brush denunciation of the entirety of the pro -life movement, because, yeah,

I was a part of the pro -life movement, would have considered myself a part of the pro -life movement, though on its edges, as a strong gospel preacher for many years, but there's,

I know lots of very, very good people who have done great work, and are very committed to ending abortion, who are godly

Christian people, who've been fighting this fight for decades, and have borne the scars on their body, and much blood, sweat, and tears, and so there's a lot of very good people.

And, you know, of course, conversely, just becoming an abolitionist doesn't suddenly make you, you know, 100 % righteous in what you're doing either, right?

It's easy to armchair quarterback what's going on in the political arena, and just, you know, shoot from the hip on that stuff.

There is a lot of nuance to these discussions, but in a nutshell, yes, what we are finding is that, particularly after the

Dobbs case, you know, before Roe fell, you know, the real giant was the

Supreme Court, and what we were trying to do was get state governments, state government leaders to recognize they did not have to bow to Roe, and that was a real dividing line, and the overwhelming majority of the pro -life movement was absolutely against us on that, fought us on that, and of course, we saw then, but where is your courage?

Where is your commitment? And now that Dobbs has fallen, you know, this is a conversation I had with Scott Klusendorf, you know, two years ago, and I remember we had this conversation, and he said, you know,

Jason, I think that Dobbs is going to fall. It actually was doubtful. I didn't think Dobbs was going to fall. He's like, you know, and I'm afraid that some of the things you're saying are right, and have been saying, and that the pro -life movement we're going to find is a whole lot weaker than any of us thought, and they're not really going to do much to end abortion in all these states once Dobbs comes, and so we should talk about strategies, what we can do to try to actually move the ball forward if Dobbs, you know, if Roe falls, and so I said, well, yeah,

I can absolutely assure you, Scott, having worked in, you know, probably 20 state legislatures around the country in the last two decades, that the overwhelming majority of people who call themselves pro -life are either cowardly, you know, well -intentioned, decent folks, but just lack courage, or they're outright deceivers, and charlatans, and frauds, right?

And so, you know, the way you expose that is you test them, right?

You have to test a man's character. And so we've been working on bills of equal protection, bills of abolition, whatever term you want to use.

We like the term equal protection. We've worked on bills of equal protection.

I think this coming legislative session with the coalition of folks that we work with around the country will have somewhere around 18 states will have bills of equal protection, and what that does is separates the men from the boys.

You know, it draws the hard line in the sand. This is the principle that we stand on, full equal protection.

This is a law that protects a pre -born child and treats demands of the law, treats a pre -born child in the same way that you treat a born child.

That's it. You know, the law is not saying anything about anything other than that, right?

There's a lot of caricatures and misrepresentations, and we get a lot of kind of attacks and distortions about we want to force women who've had miscarriages to go to prison, and, you know, we just want to see women get the death penalty, and all these sorts of things that are thrown at us.

And the reality is all these bills of equal protection do is say, treat a pre -born child the same way you treat a born child.

And we establish equal protection. And as I was discussing with Brian Gunter not long ago, who is an abolitionist working arm and arm with my friend

Jeff Durbin at Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona. Yeah, we work with those guys, and good brothers, good friends.

And as Brian was saying that another key aspect of this whole divide between incrementalists and abolitionists is that most of the major figures in the pro -life industry who are incrementalists are vehemently, vociferously, adamantly opposed to any prosecution of a woman for murdering her child in the womb.

Yeah, that has certainly been the case with regards to the big lobbying groups.

But, you know, that's changing. Here's the good thing is, you know, and partly due to the work of guys like Jeff in Abortion Now and Operation Save America and the work that, you know, we've been doing beating this drum for many years now is people are beginning to wake up and see that that's a problem.

And so, you know, I'm sure Jeff and Brian filled you in on the bill in Louisiana, the

Bill of Equal Protection there drafted by my friend Bradley Pierce. Excellent bill.

And, you know, it was opposed by 72 pro -life organizations signed their name to it.

And our Bill of Equal Protection, of course, you know, Students for Life of America just came out with a graphic, a meme that says, you know, it's got a map of the

United States and it shows 14 states. And these are states that passed trigger laws or abortion bans, quote unquote.

They had laws that were passed prior to the fall of Roe that would be a trigger law that would go into effect.

It would trigger, the law would trigger into effect if Roe were ever overturned. And so states like Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, right, a bunch of these states had these laws go into effect.

And so they're claiming that these states have all banned abortion. Students for Life is saying these are abortion -free states.

Well, that's just a lie. Based upon Planned Parenthood's own numbers and the numbers of the state of Texas, 19 ,000 babies were murdered this last year since the fall of Dobbs, since this trigger law went into effect.

You know, there was, you know, there was, I think, around 55 ,000 babies murdered in Texas average over the last several years before Roe fell.

And so now that number has gone down, they estimate probably between somewhere between five and 10 ,000.

They're saying this trigger law that went into effect has saved between five and 10 ,000 babies.

And that's great. I'm thankful for that. And I'm glad that it's illegal in the state of Texas now for a doctor to kill a baby.

That's a good thing. The problem with those laws, of course, is they, every single one of these 14 states that Students for Life of America is claiming are now abortion -free states.

And every single one of them, the mother can kill her own child via chemical abortion with impunity.

The mothers are explicitly exempted from punishment. And in Louisiana, in Louisiana, if I'm not mistaken,

Brian Gunter, where he pastors at First Baptist Church in the,

I can't remember the city right now in Louisiana, but Livingston, Livingston, Livingston.

He said that there are more babies being murdered by the abortifacient pills than through other means in that state.

Yeah, this has been a problem. And so some of this is just the older generation of pro -lifers. There's an ignorance here.

And then some of it is that they're getting money from pharmaceutical companies and from Republican leadership to get quiet.

You know, and some of it is the pro -life groups are just weak. And on Louisiana, Louisiana Right to Life absolutely betrayed the pre -born children on this issue.

Louisiana Right to Life and I forget the other organization was really, really pathetic. And so these, yeah, these groups signed this statement saying that they, that mothers should never be prosecuted.

They did not support the prosecution of mothers because mothers are victims. They've been lied to. Not only mothers, a lot of women have been lied to.

Our culture, we've all been lied to. I had a girlfriend that had an abortion when I was 18 years old. But you know, but even though I was lied to, you know,

I was a total pagan in my thinking, I knew I was consenting to the killing of my own child.

I knew that, as did my girlfriend at the time. And she, it devastated her.

You know, I actually never saw her again. It was so devastating to her. You know, we, we barely messed her up.

So had there been a law in place that said I would have been held accountable, as would her, that we both would have been held accountable and that we had a duty before the law to protect our, our child that we conceived.

We never would have got that abortion. That would have been a massive deterrent to getting that abortion. And I think that's what a lot of pro -lifers don't realize who

I think are well -intentioned. One is they don't realize that, that, that just because these mothers have been lied to, they're not victims.

When you go up to the abortion clinics and you minister and you talk to ladies, when you spend time on a college campus or a high school sharing the gospel and you engage with young people, what you find is they know full well what's growing inside of them is a little precious human life.

When a woman gets pregnant, they believe they have a right to kill that life. They believe that that life doesn't matter relative to their wants, desires, and needs, that their happiness trumps the life of that baby.

And so they're absolutely not victims. The other part of that, of course, is the law. So, you know, the law has three major functions.

It has a punitive function. People say, oh, you just want to, you just want to kill mothers. We passed this law. You're going to put, you just want to put all these mothers in prison.

It's like, no, actually our hope, you know, and this was our hope in Louisiana, you know, talking, of course, to Brian and Jeff and Bradley and the others, like our hope is that not a single mother would go to prison because our hope is that not a single mother would actually get an abortion if this law went into effect, right?

Because the law functions as a deterrent. The law deters bad behavior.

We, you know, we have, we have severe punishment for murder because we don't want people and that deters people from thinking about it and acting on impulse.

And, you know, what would happen if you exempt women from our homicide statutes? You know, you have a, you have a, you have a gang problem in Chicago and people getting, you know, hundreds of shootings every weekend in Chicago.

And imagine you just say, well, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to address this problem of gang violence.

We're going to make it really bad, really bad for a male gangbanger, but we're going to, but for female gangbangers, they're exempt from punishment.

If a female engages in a drive -by shooting, we're not going to prosecute her. We're only going to prosecute the men because women are, they're victims.

We don't want to put women in jail. They don't know what they're doing. These young gang members, they're being lied to, manipulated, and they're growing up in very hard circumstances and very rough neighborhoods and failing schools.

And they don't know what they're doing. So if they pull the trigger, they don't know what they're doing. I mean, that would be just another absurd thing.

Right. And so, you know, the question is why would pro -life leaders think this way?

And so there, there are a lot of good pro -life leaders, I think, good people, well -intentioned who really are just misguided on this.

And they, they, they overstate the case of how misled women are. Others, you know, have made arguments like this, that, well, you know, we want, we want the woman to testify against the doctor and against the medical facilities.

And so, you know, we exempt her from punishment that way. She's more willing to come forward and talk about, you know, who gave her the pills or, you know, who's pushing her to get an abortion.

And, but, you know, all that stuff is already a part of existing law.

Right. That's already a part of, of legal procedure. You know, that, that's, that is already the case, you know, such as like a drive -by shooting.

If a carload of four gang members drives through a neighborhood and shoot, they're going to investigate the degree of culpability of each person in that vehicle.

And there may be varying degrees of culpability amongst all the folks in that. And, and, and, uh.

Semi the bull Gravano. Semi the bull Gravano is a perfect example of it because he was used to expose the crimes of a higher figure in the, in the food chain of La Cosa Nostra.

Uh, he was, uh, you know, not incarcerated. Yep. Um, yeah.

And, uh, well, we're going to go to our final break right now. I already know that we've got to have you back on a second time before the debate in February, by the way, folks, mark your calendars for February 21st, which is the date that we have scheduled for my guests debate on this program with pro -life incrementalist,

Scott Klusendorf. That's Wednesday, February 21st. Uh, but, uh, we definitely have to get you back on again because we're already running out of time and we haven't even stuck our toe in the water of the primary theme that we were going to have you discuss a

Christian guide for cultural and political engagement. Although this is obviously involved in it, but we're going to get to our final break.

And when we come back, we've got to have you respond to the challenges or the, the criticisms of me for having you be the representative for abolitionism in the

February debate with Scott Klusendorf. As soon as I made it public, uh, abolitionists began to complain that I was involving you as their champion in this debate because they said, you're not an abolitionist.

Uh, there were at least 10 of them who responded to my publicity for this debate.

And we'll have you respond to their criticisms after we return from this final break. And if anybody else, if anybody else has a final question, uh, that you'd like to add to the conversation, we haven't even gotten any of our listener questions yet, but if you'd like to get in line with the others who are still waiting, please send us your email to chrisarnsonatgmail .com.

chrisarnsonatgmail .com. Give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence. We'll be right back. Don't go away.

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We're now back with Jason Storms. And if, Jason, if you could respond to your critics who are angry with me for having you represent the abolitionist cause in this scheduled debate in February on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio with incrementalist

Scott Klusendorf, because they say you do not meet the criteria for being accurately identified as an abolitionist and that you don't believe in what have been called the pillars of abolitionism, if you could respond to that.

Oh boy, I'll try to be succinct here, but you know, there's a long history with the abolitionist movement, right?

There was the AHA crowd, AHA scene in, you know, going back five, six, seven, eight years ago.

And there was these abolitionist societies popping up all over the country. Many times they were led by teenagers, led by young men who were not even a part of a local church, and they were given a platform and they were propped up and put into a quote -unquote leadership role.

And so, you know, there was just a wild amount of division and strife and discord and immature, unruly, ungodly behavior that went on at that time that culminated in, for example,

Rusty Thomas breaking waves with AHA in 2017, said

OSA is no longer associating at all with AHA. Jeff Durbin in 2018 had a big public fallout and dispute.

We did mediation there. You know, myself and Matt Truella and others in 2018 as well distanced ourselves from AHA and from that whole movement as it underwent a massive split.

There was a big egalitarian wave that swept through that even split kind of the hub of it there in Norman, Oklahoma.

And so there's just a lot of drama, a lot of divisiveness, a lot of immaturity. It really was a youth movement.

It characterized all the problems of a youth movement. And also it was a very ideologically driven movement, you know, and the problem with being just wed purely to ideology without practical application is you live in the world of ideology, then you're sort of above everybody else, you know, and your feet are not planted in the ground where actual things get done.

And so it's sort of pie in the sky idealism. So what we saw was sort of a

Corinthian type spirit in the abolitionist movement that we disassociated ourselves from and distanced ourselves from.

And so, as I said in the outset of the broadcast, I'm not married to the term abolitionist. I don't even really like the terms incrementalism or immediatist.

But the so -called five tenets of abolitionism were articulated in the early days of AHA and are in Rusty Thomas's book as well.

And we absolutely agree with those principles. We believe in the total and complete abolition of abortion and have been calling for that, working for that.

We've got bills of abolition, bills of equal protection that Operations of America has personally found bill sponsors, supported bill sponsors, helped get bills written and done real work on the ground, campaigning in states to get abolition accomplished on the ground.

We've been doing that for many years in many states. And so to say that I'm not an abolitionist,

I think, you know, is probably something very personal. I think there's a group of abolitionists down in Oklahoma that have a personal ax to grind against me personally, you know, and they've lied about me.

They've, they just recently, they accused us of doing things in Ohio that we actually didn't do. And there was actually guys in Ohio who were like, hey, we were told you guys were doing this.

And we're here looking at what you're doing. You're doing the exact opposite of what they said you were doing. They actually lied about you guys. Why would they lie about you?

And I said, that's a good question. I don't know why they lie about me, but for whatever reason, there's a group of guys that seem to like to lie about people.

And that's not good character. And so, you know, the abolitionist movement needs to mature, to cultivate some humility, and to continue to grow with good leadership.

And I think guys like Jeff Durbin, guys like Rusty Thomas, uh, guys like, you know, Josh Weiss recently came out very publicly, said

I'm an abolitionist. And, uh, you know, the reason that he had that conversion was, was not, you know, because AHA people went and picketed his church and agitated him and attacked him and told him to repent publicly of being pro -life.

None of that. He had abolitionists in his church, Virgil Walker, Bobby McCreery, good godly men, solid guys who are identified as abolitionists, good, good dudes.

And they didn't berate Josh Weiss publicly. They didn't attack him and ridicule him and try to quote unquote agitate him publicly and call him to publicly repent.

They honored him and respected him as their pastor, as a good godly pastor leading the way. And they helped him to come to understand some of the games being played in the pro -life world.

And when he came to understand that some of these incremental bills were not accomplishing what he thought that they were accomplishing, he recognized that and changed his position.

And that, so that was the work of a lot of guys like Jeff Durbin was involved in it as well, talking to Josh and, uh, and being patient and long suffering and gracious and respectful.

That's how Josh Weiss came along. That's how we win. That's how we convert pro -life people. So we talked about that list of 72 people that signed onto that statement in opposition to the bill in Louisiana that Brian and Jeff had worked on.

And we were down there helping on that as well. What's interesting to note is some of the biggest pro -life organizations in the country did not sign onto that list.

There are a lot of pro -life leaders, live action, for example, Lila Rose, she recently came out and said she's now supports punishment from others.

Uh, the same is true of the lady down in Texas, Abby Johnson's patient work in labor of abolitionists there and others.

She has come out and said, yeah, I think that, uh, and she was originally vehemently opposed to it. Right. In, in a group students for life.

I think they're, I think we're going to see them tip, but they did not sign onto that document. So I think that our work is effective when, when we, when we, when we are

Christ -like in how we present our positions and how we state what we're doing and how we engage with people.

We don't just make blanket dismissive, you know, pompous attacks on anybody and anything that calls itself pro -life.

We don't get into bantering and fights over words and semantics and terms, but we, we, we, we keep

Christ at the center of what we're doing. And we are, we are, we are at a time brother, and we're going to have you back on the program,

God willing, very soon before your debate. And I just want to make sure once again, that the website of your church is given mercyseat .net,

mercyseat .net and Brawny in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Thomas in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

We will ask your questions and the questions of everybody else who's waiting in line to have their questions asked.

We will ask those questions during our next interview. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater