What Keeps Gen-Z Away From Christ? ft. Cliffe and Stuart Knechtle
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Hey everybody, Cliff and Stuart, they are great people. They visit college campuses like I do. Wonderful conversation and we take some questions from you, members, members.charliekirk.com. If you're a member, you get access to these conversations. You get access to in-depth coverage.

It is members.charliekirk.com, members.charliekirk.com. As always, you can email me, freedom at charliekirk.com, and get involved with Turning Point USA at tpusa.com. That is tpusa.com. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.

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Cliff and Stuart Connectal, welcome guys. Thank you for having us, Charlie. So for some audience members that might not be aware, introduce yourselves.

All right. So I'm Stuart Koneckley. I am associate pastor at Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Connecticut. I get the pleasure of working with this guy. He's nice enough to have me on his team. And then we also do apologetics, outreach evangelism together on university campuses across the country. And sometimes I notice we overlap, like UT, I think where you got the water bottle thrown at you, like the West Mall steps right there. He's been there for like 55 years.

So, and then we combine those together. So I've got a master in psychology and divinity. So I try and use those to really do outreach at our church and beyond. So that's kind of where I'm from. And you've been doing this for 42 years, yeah? Easy, Charlie. He's got the number down. Yeah, but you're right. I'm getting up there.

I'm Cliff Koneckley. I'm an obnoxious twit who the Holy Spirit is changing, and I try and combine the grace and love and truth of Christ and communicate it on university campuses and at the church where Stuart and I get to pastor, and I get to be this guy's dad, so I'm an awful proud dad. That's amazing. So you've been doing this on campuses for a while, kind of similar to what I do, somewhat from a political standpoint, but we're unafraid to talk about

the deeper things, more important things. Talk about that. I mean, that's... Yeah, sure I will. You know why I like him? Because he hasn't made the mistake of elevating politics over faith in Christ. Obviously, we can slip into a type of nationalism that is rah-rah-rah country and leave God out of the equation. That is lethal. And what Charlie does in a way that I've come to respect is because I've been

confronted by more and more of this type of issue is he puts Christ at the center. God is the basis of your worldview. And then because of that, you respect your country. You're very grateful for what our foremothers and forefathers have done in putting this country together.

And you want to return it to the Judeo-Christian ethic that was the foundation of this country, even though we're well aware of the fact that many of the founding mothers and fathers were deists. And no, we're not deists. We believe in a personal God who's involved in our lives today, not in a distant God who remains aloof. So we disagree with Thomas Jefferson, with the Jeffersonian Bible. But we're very grateful for the Judeo-Christian ethics that our forefathers and foremothers held to so tightly.

Well, thank you for that. And so have you seen – let's just talk in the last couple of years, both of you visiting campuses. It would be interesting to hear you say, what are you hearing? What are you seeing? Have things changed in recent years? Talk about trends. I think our audience would be interested in that. So –

30 years ago, I was a little young, but from what I hear, it was, is there truth? And then 20 years ago, it was, okay, there's truth, maybe lowercase, maybe uppercase, but what is this truth? Let's have a dialogue. Today, it's, all right, I'm in a lot of pain. I think you may have mentioned it in one of your talks. Divorce rates, deaths from despair.

Depression, anxiety, skyrocketing. And so that's the trend I've seen. Some of the very similar questions, is God a moral monster? Slavery-wise, is God allowed suffering? All of those are pretty much the same and similar. But I think the growth, again, in pain...

Whether that's psychological, relational, oftentimes that's connected to nihilism because somebody who doesn't believe in God, it's I have no objective meaning and purpose. I came, I was an accident, accidental birth, and I'm going nowhere. And my favorite is when I actually see happy nihilists because it's the biggest contradiction probably out there that we see on college campuses. But literally, we will have students come up to us and say, yeah, I'm a nihilist. I have no meaning and purpose in my life. But hey, I'm a nihilist.

I'm here, you know, YOLO. I'm here for a good time, not a long time. And so that's the new narrative I think we see. So you want to comment on that, Cliff, as far as trends, things you've seen? Yes, sure. And talk about the process of how you do this on campuses. I would just be personally interested to hear that. You bet. I am not here to butter him up, okay? In fact, I don't like talking about people, all right? But, guys, for 44 years I've been standing up on university campuses dialoguing with students.

Now, I am committed to pointing people to God's existence. Therefore, morality is not subjective. There are few moral absolutes. Therefore, the logical conclusion is not despair. There's hope because there's a God who has eternal life in heaven for all who trust in his son, Jesus. All right. Now, I don't feel comfortable going into the political arena. That's why I respect what he's doing.

It's very hard to communicate Christ and then also to challenge people to think, okay, what are the ramifications of your belief in Christ, especially politically, especially culturally? That gets real hard. And one of the reasons it's hard is because we don't all agree, right? You go around in this room, and I don't think we're all going to agree on everything. That's where tolerance comes in. Tolerance is not an atheist and I agree. No, we don't agree.

Tolerance is, although you are an atheist, I respect you, and we're going to have an intelligent dialogue. Now that's what he does, and that's what we try and do. Intelligent dialogue. Guys, that's what a liberal arts education is all about, a free exchange of ideas where we don't necessarily agree, but we communicate respectfully, and we explain why we believe what we believe. What's the evidence of whatever it is you believe is true. So that's the kind of thing that we want. Now in terms of trends, Charlie, it's been frustrating for me.

44 years ago, I began to watch the LGBTQ movement begin, just begin. And then I watched the LGBTQ movement gather momentum, more momentum, more momentum, until it's become the most highly organized student group often on campus. It's embarrassing, guys. It's embarrassing. So that's why we have to get it into gear, think about it, and that's why I'm so grateful for the emphasis here. You've got to vote. You've got to put it on the mat.

Get out there. Wrestle with these issues. And the most important thing is always Jesus. The second most important thing is making sure that we can talk about Jesus and worship Jesus, which is increasingly more difficult. So talk about the process. You guys set up a table on campus.

People come up and talk to you. For the audience, that might not be aware. Yeah, so we've never set up a table. We get invited by different student organizations, and we go. Back in the day, he would have to start, which is, that's the bold part, right? You have to speak and somehow find a way to get people to stop and actually engage. But now, thankfully, God has used social media in a big way, so when we go, there's already a very big crowd, even at very secular schools like UConn, very hostile crowd.

So that's how we start. We get invited by different organizations. We show up. They oftentimes will start the crowd, but then it'll gather and grow very quickly. Then we go about debate, and then we go about connecting with as many students as possible. But the important part, I think you were kind of getting to there in your second part, is discipleship. We don't want to go – sadly, Billy Graham, we're huge Billy Graham fans, but if you look statistically, when he would do his crusades –

A very high percentage of people after three weeks would turn away from the faith who went to the altar calls. So what we try and do is we make sure these organizations on their outreach nights where we speak at, and that'll have a lot of students show up, but we don't want there just to be an event that we speak at, at the end of the week. We say, guys, we are here not just to evangelize. We need discipleship. So these students will stay in the faith and understand what real scripture is with

When you went to Genesis 22, for example, specific scripture, this is what we need. It can't just be this type of higher power. Oh, yeah, I'm a Christian now, but I just never read the Bible. So that's part of the process. So it's very important. You went on Logan Paul's podcast, which I'm sure you got a couple emails and things from that. Talk about that experience. What an amazing way that God used you to reach a population that has not heard the gospel.

All right, so here's some of the challenges. I really respect Logan Paul. He began our time together by saying, I am not a Christian, but maybe by the end of this podcast, I will be. No pressure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that kind of honesty and vulnerability. Goodness gracious, that's cool. I found him to be a very nice guy, and it was fascinating, his sticking point. His sticking point was, you've got to be kidding me.

Good Jews and good Muslims and good Hindus, they need to accept Christ. I mean, that just is too narrow. That's just too bigoted. It's too intolerant. And so what I was trying to help him see was if I say that every path leads to God, that's a truth claim. I'm saying majority Muslims, the majority of humanity, which is Muslims, Christians and Jews, they're wrong.

Every path leads to heaven. That's a truth claim. If I say to you half the religions and philosophies of the world lead to heaven, that's a truth claim. I'm saying half are right and half are wrong. That is a truth claim.

And when Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me, that's also a truth claim. He's saying, you've got to put your faith in me. I am the way to heaven. So let's be real honest. We all make truth claims. Let's not sit back and act like, oh, I'm a really open-minded, really tolerant person because I say all paths lead to heaven, all paths lead to God. No. No.

You're making a truth claim. And I can promise you, if I say that 1 plus 1 equals 2, I'm not necessarily being arrogant. Now, I might be arrogant, but just to make a truth claim does not mean you're being arrogant and intolerant. It means this is my take on reality. You better ask me what's the evidence that your take on reality is true. And I'm going to ask you the same question. And what is your take on reality? What's the evidence that your take on reality is true?

So kind of tell us about the discussion you had with him and either one of you, the response that you received.

I thought he was really genuine. He gets pegged for trying just to poke holes and then walk away. But I thought he was genuine. I mean, he did ask questions like, will animals be in heaven? And, you know, the lion will lie down with the sheep. So I believe that animals will be in heaven. Literally, he would ask questions like why Jesus amongst other religions, he would he said he got burned a few times by Christians who were so judgmental about other faiths and

And so we dug into that a little bit, but you know, his mom was sitting there the whole time. And I guess his mom typically doesn't show up, but she showed up for us and she held her cross out the entire time, kind of pointing it to Logan, pointing it to us and,

And I think that shows her obvious desire to get her sons, him and Jake, really thinking about the faith and moving towards the faith. So that was a very, very interesting part of it because he would really come after me, mainly really went after you. I tried to more of the emotional connection. And yet at the same time, I think at the end of the time, he was genuinely wrestling with

And yet he would turn to his mom and try and, again, push back on her faith. So it's fascinating dynamics, but offset yet again, there was still an hour of time where he wanted to connect. So, but the, his, his objection was that Christianity is too true or something, or that. Too narrow. Too narrow. I'm being facetious. I mean, like too narrow. I don't understand the objection there. Like what, what, what would that, apparently he's just saying that,

God, no way that God would allow this to happen, that God would not send a son? Or what would his... I didn't watch the entire interview. All right. Who here has a problem with the idea of God being angry? All right, well, Logan has a problem with God being angry. And guess what? So do a lot of Americans. You know, God is love. God doesn't get angry. The wrath of God? I mean, how primitive. You really believe that? Yeah, I sure do believe that. You know why? Because I promise you,

that if one of you kidnaps one of my little granddaughters, I'm going to be real angry. And guess what? If I'm not angry, my granddaughter doesn't matter to me. If you matter to me, and someone pulls out a knife and sticks it in your chest, and I say, come on, Charlie, we're Starbucks. Let's be real honest. You don't matter to me. I don't give a rip about you.

If I love you and someone pulls out a knife and sticks it in your chest, I'm going to be royally angry. Not with a selfish anger, but with a righteous indignation. Is God angry? Yes, he is. Not with a selfish anger. Oh, you've offended me. Oh, you rained on my party. No, none of that. With a righteous indignation of how we dehumanize each other, that's sin. Racism is dehumanizing. Sexism is dehumanizing.

Sexually exploiting someone is dehumanizing. She's not a Barbie doll. She's a human being created in the image of God. Don't use her sexually. Greed, dehumanizing. Your money's more important than you are. I want your money. Coveting, dehumanizing. And so God is angry because we dehumanize each other, and God has created us not to dehumanize each other, but to respect each other, to love each other.

Hey, everybody. Charlie Kirk here.

We'll be right back.

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So when you visit campuses, is that the most common sticking point, that the path is too narrow? If you had to really bring it down, what is the limiting current belief of Gen Z when confronted with the truth that prevents them from accepting Jesus? What would that be? Yeah, moral relativism.

For sure. And this white Western adopted philosophy, which is all religions are true. And how dare you say that you have the right religion? So they will say, look at the elephant, look at all paths lead up to the mountaintop. So all religions are just grabbing one's grabbing the ear. One's grabbing the foot of the elephant. One's grabbing the trunk and see, you guys are all just grabbing part of God. And yet what they don't get is, well, those people are blind. So they don't realize they're grabbing parts of the elephant.

Okay, then someone has tremendous vigilance and spiritual superiority to say, I'm the one who's not blind.

And I see Charlie grabbing the trunk, so he's Buddhist. I see Cliff grabbing the foot, so he's Hindu. So you guys are all idiots. All gods are the same. What you don't realize is you are not only spiritually elitist, but you are also rejecting the exclusive truth claims of 95% of the world.

That's one of the biggest challenges. Would you agree with that? Is that the core objection you receive? Yeah. And let's be real honest. I think it really comes down to I want to sleep with whoever I want to sleep with. Well, that's a separate issue, though. Meaning that they won't believe it if it's true. That's Frank Turek's line. Would you believe Christianity if it was true? Right. And most people would not because it would change their life.

Correct. And so therefore, the reason I reject Christ is for a moral reason, and then I hide behind the intellectual reason. But if you push comes to shove, I mean, my younger brother went to Princeton University, and at Princeton, he used to share Christ with his roommates late into the night. Around about midnight, he turned to his Princeton classmates and said, guys,

If you're just going to ask these questions, we'll pull an all-nighter if this is honest. But if the real issue is I want to sleep around and I want to cheat on my next exam because the pressure to get into med school is intense, then let's be honest. And every single time his Princeton classmates would say, Stuart, you're correct. This is not an intellectual problem. It's a moral issue. And he would say, guys, wait. We don't have to pull an all-nighter. Good night. Have a good night's sleep. So then how then do you overcome that, if at all? I think it's – for me, it's getting rather simple.

The older I get. You know, morality is relative, which means the guy who took a whack at President Trump and killed another guy, it's all relative. That's his definition of truth. And the sex trade traffic, well, you know, it's all relative. So if you're upset about it, fine, but I kind of enjoy it. And truth is relative. You know something? You can't live that out. Because even when you were a little kid, if your sibling got more ice cream in their ice cream bowl than you did in your ice cream bowl, what would you say? Oh, that's cool.

No, you'd say that's not fair. And if you're married and your spouse takes a whack at you, you don't say, oh, that felt good, honey. Why don't you do that again? No, you say you should not do that. You ought not to do that. It is impossible to live out moral relativism. Doesn't work. Do you find that to be persuasive to the students you talk to?

I take a different route. That's probably the better route. I take the route, though, of, look, statistically, two guys from Yale wrote this book, Premarital Sex in America. And promiscuity is directly correlated with serious mental health problems, especially for women. Men, for some reason, are able to cut off their emotions sexually from the physical side and just live out their physical well-being of shagging any woman they possibly can.

But there's clear breakdown as well these Yale authors are writing, showing that there's a drastic increase in divorce if you're sleeping around as well. But again, you can go there. The best answer is making Christ more attractive than just, I'm going to shag the next...

thing or person with a pulse that I possibly can. And if Jesus is more attractive in the way where he says, I love you unconditionally, no matter your failings, I offer you grace. You know, it's the whole idea of your job can't die for you. Your job, if you find your identity in it, you're going to be ultimately crushed. If you find your identity in your wife, you're going to be ultimately crushed. It's St. Augustine's ordered loves. If you put God at the top, you will live a life of incredible flourishing.

So that's kind of where I go. Yeah, and I want to get to some questions here in a second. I visit college campuses, as you guys do, and I get the spicier encounters at times. I'm sure you guys get them as well. But what's so fascinating is that I'll come and talk primarily about politics, but as you well know, I always share the gospel whenever it comes up. But inevitably, almost always, if I go and I have a table and what I want to talk about for the day never remains –

And it could be about immigration. It could be about that there are no genders and two sexes and unlimited personalities, you know, whatever it is. Within minutes, they are asking me, well, are you religious? Because they have been so trained and conditioned because they want to get down into where is this coming from? Because if you're saying something that's true and they think about it, they say, well, do you think there's a God that's telling you this?

because they want a moral license to live as they want to live. But what I've found is that almost all of these conversations

yield back to some moral standard at some point and they'll many college students and even college professors will deny the fact that there is a moral standard but they're living up to some standard at some point so someone tells them that murder is wrong or murder is evil or theft is wrong they say oh that's just common sense i we just know that i i i know i know that murder is wrong i understand that so why we have so many murderers then if everyone knows that it's wrong

So do you guys encounter that as well, that it gets down to the deeper issues rather quickly? Yes, it definitely gets down to the deeper issues rather quickly when you have the privilege of talking with thinking people. And people have to think. I mean, I am very grateful that over 290 times in the Gospels, Jesus asks questions. And this whole idea that faith is anti-intellectual, faith is anti-rational, faith is anti-logical,

That's a naive blind faith. And Christ does not call us to a naive blind faith. Does he call us to something you can prove? No. To prove means to show it cannot be another way. I can't prove, Charlie, that I'm not just a bad dream you're having right now. Maybe your eyesight is flipping out on you and you're having this weird dream of Cliff. So I can't prove it. But the overwhelming evidence is you and I are having this conversation now. That's why we behave the way we do. So...

We've got to use our minds and ask ourselves, what does the evidence point to as being true? I do not think the universe is religiously ambiguous. I think God has left more than enough evidence for any thinking person to believe in him. That's why anthropology shows us that around the world, every culture has some type of religion.

Yeah, atheism is the vast minority of a New Age belief. Oh, yeah. So, Daisy, let's start doing some questions here. First, just plug how people can support you.

Oh, yeah. Okay. So Instagram, it's just Stuart Connectly. So Stuart underscore Connectly is T-U-A-R-T and then K-N-E-C-H-T-L-E. And then TikTok is Stuart Connectly. And then YouTube, our main channel, is Give Me an Answer with Stuart and Cliff Connectly. So those are our main three. So thank you for the support. We haven't started a podcast yet. All right. We got to do that. All right. Yes, ma'am. Hi, my name is Jordan. Huge fan.

So my question is that first, I am not a cessationist, and I do think that it is important to study to show yourself approved. And I'm curious to know how do we test the spirit and allow God to minister through the apostolic and the prophetic while also studying and ensuring that we do not become super like religious and legalistic. So in order to test the spirit, you always have to remain tied to scripture as well as prayer. And it has to be done humbly.

Because to your point, you were kind of going there. We immediately, so I lead our small groups at our church. And one time this person stepped into our small group. She came from another church. And she said, oh, you guys don't speak in tongues here? You guys are barely believers. You're baby believers. I speak in tongues, and I got a clear pathway and direct call to God the Father. So obviously, the testing of the Spirit has to start with the greatest Christian virtue, which I believe is humility.

And you are asking of Scripture, you're asking of God, but then you have to be in a healthy Christian community, and I believe a small group as well, to hold you accountable to say, yes, you're walking in line with the Spirit, or you're walking in line with the flesh. And I love that you went here in terms of the pride issue, too, because...

I personally believe that when Niebuhr, for example, the great theologian, said that you will grow quickest in going against the spirit and quickest in pride if you become religious, more so than any atheist.

Because there's something about religion that if it's in a petri dish, it will make you a person who is fundamentalist and always looking down on others. And we see this with the Pharisees, right? As opposed to the God of the universe sending his one and only son, becoming a slave, dying on a cross for us. Then we respond in such a way we're walking in line with the spirit. Next question. Yes. It's awesome to have so many goats in the same room. So thank you for being here. So I was...

I articulated yesterday by a couple of my friends that our country was not founded on Christian principles. So I want to see how, like an argument that you guys can give me to combat that. So essentially they articulated to me that our country was found on common law because the declaration only refers to God four times and the constitution doesn't refer to God at all. And it only articulates the structure of government. And, and,

Is common law Christian in nature or is it not? I can take it first. So this guy, whoever said that doesn't really know what they're talking about. So first of all, remember that we were a collection of states and colonies, and you need to read the state constitutions before anything else. Nine out of 13 of the original states required you to be a Bible-believing Christian to serve in government at the time of the founding.

You could even in actually 13 or 13 required a declaration of faith. Nine out of 13 required you to be a Protestant, except Maryland, which was Catholic, which still required a declaration of faith. And almost every single one of the original state constitutions, Pennsylvania included, they had I profess Lord and Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior in the original state constitutions. So you remember a collection of states before that.

Secondly, 55-56 of the original signers of the Declaration were Bible-believing, church-attending Christians. You ask about common law. So common law is inherited from Blackstone, who was Christian. Common law is an outgrowth of the scriptures. So let's go to three principles of common law. Presumption of innocence.

due process, and jury of your peers. All three are biblical principles. So, and all wrapped into the ultimate biblical principle that you shall not favor justice if you are rich or poor, which is in Leviticus 19, right before the most famous part of Leviticus 19, which is that you should love your neighbors yourself. But before that is that in the administration of justice, you shall not favor the rich or the poor, which is the idea of blind justice. We get that in the West.

which is incorporated also in the New Testament ideal, neither slave nor Greek nor Jew, you're all one in Jesus Christ, which is the idea of human equality. These are all biblical ideas. They're not Enlightenment ideas, which is they kind of get conflated at the time. But more importantly than that, they say that God was only mentioned four times in the Declaration of Independence. Well, that's a big deal. Okay. Laws of nature and nature's God. The last paragraph of the Declaration reads as a prayer.

It says we appeal to the supreme judge of the universe. Who's the judge of the universe? Jesus Christ, as it says in Revelation, that Jesus will judge us.

The earth on his throne. So in the declaration, they were praying to Christ our Lord as a prayer very specifically. Thirdly, as I said on stage yesterday, Deuteronomy was by far the most quoted book, religious or non-religious, in the time of the founding when they were putting together constitution. More than John Locke, more than Montesquieu, more than Blackstone. So the book of Deuteronomy, which talked about laws, customs, traditions. It was Moses' farewell address.

as he's about to say goodbye, say, hey, good luck in Canaan, guys. Here's how you should set up your form of government. But finally, and most importantly, let's look at actually what the founders said

John Adams seamlessly said the Constitution was only written for a moral and religious people. It was wholly inadequate for the people of any other. The body politic of America was so Christian and was so Protestant that our form and structure of government was built for the people that believed in Christ our Lord. One of the reasons we're living through a constitutional crisis is that we no longer have a Christian nation, but we have a Christian form of government, and they're incompatible. So you cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population. So...

That that's just that's just a surface level belief. So then they'll go to the First Amendment, which is has two two parts of the First Amendment which get conflated. First of all, separation church and state is not in the U.S. Constitution. That is a single letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1807 to the Danbury Baptist Convention in Massachusetts, assuring them that the government would not come after the church.

OK, which is the opposite of what they would say. However, that was then resurrected by the Warren court and the Burger court in the 60s where they said, hey, you know, all of a sudden we're now going to make this as if it's the Constitution. It does say in the Constitution two things, which is the establishment clause and the free expression clause. The establishment clause is that Congress shall make no law.

prohibiting the free exercise thereof. What they were most worried about was a Presbyterian or an Anglican or a Quaker-type religion taking over the federal government. Instead, it was that there is not going to be a state-run religion or a state-run government. Did you know that one of the first acts of Congress was taxpayer-funded Bible printing and distribution?

Did you know that there are church services held in the Supreme Court building as late as the Jackson presidency in the 1820s? But going back to this idea of separation of church and state, and again, I could riff on this ad nauseum because it's just so ridiculous, right? Is that it's not constitutional because you go a layer deeper. People that even say that, do you believe in separation of morality and state? Nobody does.

So all laws are a reflection of morality, and all morality comes from somewhere. There is no such thing as neutral morality. And we believe what the founders believed because they put it in the halls of Congress, they put it in the Supreme Court, and they put it all throughout the country, which is that the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, is the core morality of how a society and a civilization should exist, right? The Ten Commandments of every person. And finally, and this is the kicker, if the founding fathers were not Bible-believing church-telling Christians, why did they put Leviticus on the Liberty Bell?

Not John, not Psalms, not Proverbs, not Genesis, Leviticus. Most Americans can't spell Leviticus. Leviticus 25, 19, proclaim liberty throughout the land of which you are in. It is one of the most sinister, most unsubstantiated lies that does not come up against any sort of academic scrutiny. This idea that founding fathers were a bunch of enlightenment common law deists. The reason they hate it is because if they, the reason they must say this is that if we actually go back to our Christian roots and

And we go back to where we once were. It's America's best hope for revival and for a great future. You want to add to that? Sorry, I covered it. I can't touch that. Beautifully put. Are you worried about the future of the U.S. economy? With so much uncertainty in the air, it's natural to fret about the security of your retirement savings. But there's one asset that stands the test of time, and that is gold. For centuries, gold has been a hedge against market volatility and economic instability.

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Hey guys, big fan. I know I ran into, my name's Ridge. I'm here with my wife and my younger brother and some of our best friends. I know I ran into you two last night, but just want to elaborate on that a little bit about that tragedy and ask a question. And Charlie, I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you yet, but we lost our 18-year-old brother back in October to an accident in our front yard.

And we're constantly told like, oh, you guys might have to move on. You guys might need to kind of like put it in the past. It happened. Get over it. And we do have really good days where we get to share his story and share the gospel. But with those good days, there's also some really, really bad days where anger comes out. And I mean, I might get mad at my wife. I may get mad at the family, at the kids. What's your advice and what do you have to say about that?

How to cope with those really bad days that we have, all of us collectively being really close to him after his loss. All right. I'm really sorry for your loss, brother. It stinks. And that's one of the reasons I'm so glad that in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes, death is the last enemy. I am sick and tired of hearing people say, oh, death is just part of nature.

So just accept it. No, I don't accept death. That's why we fund hospitals. That's why we do medicine, because we are against death and we're for life. And that's what Jesus said. I've come that you might have life and have it to the full. Second point. All right, wife and brother and family, you've heard the man say, I'm hurting. At a time I'm okay, but at other times I get really angry. Okay, he's been honest, right? He's been honest with all of us. He's been vulnerable.

So now we've got to be patient with each other, right? We've got to love each other through the hard times, and it's a hard time you're passing through. The most difficult day of my life was when my 7-year-old niece was knocked into an early grave in a horrible car accident, and I had to go out to Madison, Wisconsin, where my brother, who's a transplant surgeon at UW-Madison, was transplanting kidneys and livers. And I had to walk with him around a field behind his home in Madison, Wisconsin. And he's pouring out his heart to me about the death of his 7-year-old daughter.

And if anybody thinks they got an easy answer for that question, they're nuts. The answer, the honest answer first is I do not know why the babysitter didn't see the stop sign, why she went right through the stop sign and a pickup truck at 55 miles an hour came careening down the road, smashing into the car, sending my seven-year-old niece into an early grave. I don't know why God allowed that to happen.

And so therefore, we've got to be patient with each other. We've got to love each other. We've got to be committed to each other as we go through these painful, difficult times. The third point is, what's comfort? Comfort is presence. So you being together as a family with your presence is crucial. And even more important is God's presence with you, the presence of Jesus Christ. And that's where all of this talk and all of these answers to all these difficult questions gets real practical. It's not an issue of a good answer to a difficult question now.

It's an issue of presence. I need you to be with me because I'm hurting. My loved one died and it stinks. And now all of a sudden faith becomes real personal because now it's an issue of, do I know the presence of God? And brother, I'm 70 years old. So you're a lot younger than me. And I'm still working on that. I want to know the presence of God because it's hard.

And I was really ticked when Time magazine came out with Mother Teresa on the cover saying, oh, the woman struggled with doubt. See, she didn't really have real faith. Oh, baloney. Give me a break. There is such a thing as depression. There is such a thing as loneliness, as the snot gets kicked out of you by life. So now we've got to know Christ. And I find great comfort that in Philippians 3.10, Paul writes, I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering.

Remember, you worship a suffering God who got the snot kicked out of him and he was nailed to a wooden cross. So you can connect with this God. This God can connect with you. He's a suffering God. And then ultimately, brother, we have the solution to suffering. We're going to go through good times. We're going to go through hard times in this life. And you're going through them now, both of them. And yet we have the ultimate solution for suffering and death.

And that solution is eternal life in a heaven where there will be no more stillbirth, no more cancer, no more heart failure, no more little kids getting knocked into early graves by ridiculous car accidents, but eternal life in the presence of God. So come on, my atheist agnostic friend, let's go into the hospital. Come on, my atheist agnostic friend, let's go into the room where the baby lies, whose body's being shredded by terminal cancer.

What are you going to do? You're going to wave your fist in God's face and blame God? That's a cop-out. That's misplaced blame. I, as a follower of Christ, walk to the other side of the bed, and I too will hold that child's hand and seek to comfort that child. But in Jesus Christ, I've got a suffering God who gives a rip about death, about grieving people, who wants to comfort us and wrap his arms around us. That, my friend, is the solution to the very real problem of suffering and death, Jesus Christ.

We'll take one or two more. Thank you. My name is Darlene. So I have a beautiful explanation earlier about the foundation of our country. Under the Trump administration, the 1776 commission was really focused on instilling patriotism for students. And I wanted to know your thoughts on a new agenda. I think it's called project 2025 where many conservative organizations were focusing on the solution of, of,

helping Americans understand the true goal of how our country is supposed to serve us. What are your thoughts on that agenda or that project? Yeah, we're one of the listed organizations on Project 2025. I don't know all the details. The Democrats are losing their minds over this thing. I mean, it's...

Unbelievable. It's actually like her core message right now. It's not officially part of the campaign. That's important to note. It's a 900 page document. I haven't read it. I don't think anyone's going to read it. But yes, if the essence is to bring back patriotic education, I was on the 1776 commission and the first act Biden gets sworn into office.

He walks 100 feet into a side room in the halls of Congress, doesn't even wait to get to the White House, and signs an executive order nullifying the 1776 commission. It was within seconds of getting sworn in, which was a commission all about American patriotism, our American founding. It was literally the first thing he did as president was to make sure that our kids wouldn't learn to love America.

All right. One more question. Yes. Thank you, Charlie. So good to meet these others that are here. I had dinner with George Barna not too long ago, and I said some of the biggest concerns I pastor just outside of Detroit. And I realized that it's hard to keep college kids engaged.

It's a hard demographic to reach. And it seems like my pastor friends are all asking the same question. So I asked George Barna, I said, what is the solution? He said, you think you're losing them in the college years, but you're losing them much earlier. The worldview is developed by time they're 11. So knowing God designed three institutions, right?

but he gave the responsibility to parents to rear their children. How do these three institutions come alongside parents in God's design to help them establish a biblical worldview in their children before they're 11? Yes, 75% of Christian high schoolers turn away from the faith when they go to college. Fortunately, 40% come back after college.

But that 75% is astronomical in my mind. And the reason why we go after college students is because they weren't prepared, like you put beautifully, they weren't prepared by their parents in high school. And that's not just because they weren't given the intellectual tools to defend their faith. That is one of the biggest. But it's also often because their parents didn't mentor them, especially the father of the household.

They didn't mentor their child, and they didn't show their child what objective, right, and wrong is. The reason why 80% of pastor's kids turn away from the faith and never come back to the faith is because their fathers, who are the pastors usually, spend more time with the congregants than they do their kids, and they also don't practice what they preach.

I'm fortunately one of the 20% who has retained my faith because my dad has done a fantastic job practicing what he preaches and spending a ton of time with us. He actually was invited by endless amounts of organizations to speak all over the country and internationally, but he chose...

because of his love for me and my brothers to actually become a pastor and to spend time with us and not just leave us and travel all over the country and internationally. So I think it starts with the father, absolutely the mother, and it starts with that mentoring process, loving them and giving them a firm foundation of what is true, right, and wrong, like the founders of our country clearly did. With liberalism now, you clearly see that there's no objective right and wrong. So what do they do? They come out screaming, and they don't even know what they're screaming about.

They don't know what's right or wrong, and they're just screaming, and sometimes it'll be their own sexual identity. Other times it'll be, oh, yeah, drug use is healthy for you, and they just go on and on down the line, and it just becomes a total, excuse my language, poop show.

And so that's one way. I won't speak to the government side and some of these other institutions because this is our kind of lane, but really loving mentoring and then giving the intellectual tools to defend their faith, which is not that hard because in the philosophical realm, about 50% now, and it's growing, of philosophers at the top schools are saying there is a God. 20 years ago, it was 10%.

Now we have to go up to the religious departments because you would think the religious departments are pretty high in their belief of God and teaching it. No, they're not. They're the opposite. Even in the Bible Belt schools, like we were just at Mississippi State, some of the nicest professors I talked to, and yet they were secular liberals in the Bible Belt. And they were in the religious departments saying, oh, no, maybe there's a higher power, but let's be agnostic. So pushing back against them is important. I would just say this, that we need –

And it's very fixable. We need a renaissance of homeschooling and not just sending your kids to private school, but homeschooling itself. The excuses people give to not homeschool is the following, is that I don't know how to do it. That's a really bad answer. That's like, that's unbelievably bad. You taught your kid how to talk and you taught your kid the fundamental stuff.

There's so many organizations that can supplement. Or, and this is understandable, is that it's too expensive because I have to go back in the workforce. So, and here's the contradiction. If you're willing for you or your kid to go into debt to send them to college, why would you not be willing to go into debt to homeschool your kid? And no one has a good answer to that. Because they're willing to send their kid to go study North African lesbian poetry at Arizona State University.

But they're not willing to make financial sacrifices that they could educate their kid. And the third thing is that, and I know this doesn't fall into anyone at this conference, but the general population, parents are lazy today. They just are. They just aren't doing their job. They want someone else to do it for them. It's the, I'm more important than my kid. A parent is like a part-time job. I want my own career.

And we're seeing the ramifications of that. Can I just add, how would you respond to, because I'm a pretty strong believer in this, 1929, what happens when the obvious biblical homeschool movement occurred and we left the halls of power at the big universities because we were terrified all of a sudden, Christian parents especially, more the fundamentalists of Darwinism, evolutionism.

I mean, how do you balance? Cause I was homeschooled through the sixth grade, but how do you take this balance of let's congregate together, grow our faith, but then make sure we don't do what we did in 1929 and get terrified of the culture and lose power in the halls of power. Yeah. I, I'm a big believer that up to a certain age, the child should be protected and nurtured. And I don't know what that age is. Sixth grade might be the right time, but I wouldn't put an eight year old in a government school. And so I,

In the current configuration, I think that it's okay for us to domicile our children away from the current culture, but prepare them that they're going to be going to war. And then you send them out. And so I think both can be equally true. And once they get sent out, they must be –

Really deepen their faith and understand what's coming to them because it's not a matter of cloistering them for the rest of their life, but protecting the innocence of a child is biblical. It's necessary. And, you know, we have, we've seen the ramifications of, of,

throwing these kids to the lions. As you say, by 11, their worldview is formed. Sixth grade is 13 years old, 12, 13 years old, right? So that's probably a good cutoff there. We're out of time, everybody. Give it up for the Connect Police, right? Got it. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com. Thanks so much for listening and God bless. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust, go to charliekirk.com.