Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro and Christian Pastor John MacArthur called for a return to biblical morality amid plummeting church attendance across the United States in the latest episode of the Sunday Special.
The two discussed the decline of religiosity in America and how many churches have twisted the Bible to be more in line with woke culture. They also discussed how modern secularists have embraced moral relativity and rejected any claim of a higher power.
During the conversation, Shapiro asked MacArthur, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, how people looking for a biblical truth “determine what is a Bible believing church that’s worth their time versus a church that maybe has a Pride progress flag hanging off the door and claims to be speaking in the name of the Gospels.”
“A church that is faithful to scripture, a synagogue that is faithful to scripture, bears moral authority,” MacArthur said. “I mean, it exists to say, ‘this is what the Lord has said. This is what God requires.’ This is divine mandate. This is the morality that leads to blessing and disobedience. And disregard for this morality leads to cursing.”
MacArthur added that many in America wanted to live by their own standards of morality and not have any authority over them.
“The bottom line is, if you’re living in the culture that we’re living in, where you want absolute freedom to do anything you choose to do, to establish your own set of rules, your own truth, your own standards of morality, the last thing you want is to step into some place that’s going to call into question everything you’re choosing to do in your life and is going to exercise authority over you,” he said.
The two also discussed the person of Jesus Christ, who many Americans have twisted into a generic hippy-type figure, Shapiro noted. He said that modern secularists tried to turn Jesus into a “bizarre pacifist with nothing of morality to say.”
WATCH THE FULL ‘SUNDAY SPECIAL’ EPISODE WITH JOHN MACARTHUR
The Daily Wire host noted that “the perversion of Jesus into a sort of namby-pamby, bizarrely androgynous creation from Haight-Ashbury is one of the stranger things that’s happened over the course of the last 50 or 60 years in American life.”
MacArthur agreed that the moral character of Jesus was transcendent and pointed out how much of Jesus’s ministry was about judgment.
“You either come to God for forgiveness and salvation, or you’re going to come under divine judgment. That’s the real Jesus,” he said.
Shapiro also asked MacArthur how he might convince a skeptic of Christianity to start attending church. MacArthur replied by saying he would recommend that people read the Bible.
“Read the Bible. Just read the Bible. It has the ring of truth. It defends itself,” he said. “It’s like a lion. You don’t defend it. You don’t defend the lion. You open the cage and let it out. It’ll be okay. And the scripture is like that. But it’s like that even morally, there’s something in the heart of people that resonates with biblical morality.”
The two also discussed the distinction between faith and acts.
Shapiro said that in Judaism you can bring people to faith “through acting in the way that the Bible suggests, that you set up a track record of success by acting in moral ways and because you’re now living in the realm of godly morality, you’re living what God wants you to live.”
WATCH THE FULL ‘SUNDAY SPECIAL’ EPISODE WITH JOHN MACARTHUR
MacArthur agreed, noting that often people need to be able to see the change in another’s life to come to faith.
“I think, how can I convince somebody to be a Christian if they can’t see the transformation? I mean, what am I trying to do if I can’t say to somebody, you need to be obedient to the law of God, you need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. You need to be obedient to God’s will and God will bless you,” the pastor said.
The two also discussed the spread of wokeness, building church community, and religion’s role in politics. Watch the full interview here: