GLENN: So I spent a lot of vacation reading, and I was trying to look for perspective and insight, and one of the things that I read, one of the articles that I read was by Rabbi Daniel Lapin, and he's with us now.
Hello, Rabbi. How are you?
DANIEL: Hi, Glenn, how are you?
GLENN: I'm good. It's always good to have you. I read a great article that I wanted to talk to you about, by you. Where you start out, "I am no Winston Churchill. I have a hard time even being Daniel Lapin, but I have a warning. Can you a take us through this?
DANIEL: Yeah, sure. My point was that there are times in history when there are certain warnings, where there's writing on the wall. And one of those times was when Winston Churchill, in the ten years that led up to World War II, a time during which England was ignoring the threat of Germany, completely oblivious to the war-like goals of Adolf Hitler in his quest for more space for the third like. Everybody ignored it, and England unilaterally disarmed. They scrapped a number of the royal navy ships. They ignored the possibility of needing an air force. They didn't build planes.
During all this time, Churchill was saying, look. Just read Hitler's book, Mein Kampf. Just listen to his speeches in German. And you'll know where this is going. We are going to have to fight a war, and the longer we put it off, the more serious it's going to become, and the more devastating the consequences to us. Very often -- and this is true in life. Confronting problems on time is better than letting them go. If I had to say, what is the secret of successful living, you know, every one of us right now, do not what you want to do. Do what your head tells you you should do, and do it when you should do it.
And Churchill said the same thing. If you don't fight the war when it should be fought, you're going to fight a much tougher one later on.
And meanwhile, everyone else says, oh, Hitler wants peace, everything's going to be fine, and Prime Minister Chamberlain and said peace in our time -- meanwhile, sold Czechoslovakia down the road.
Anyway, my point is, it's not hard to see how things are going. And you have to put a stop to it on time. Otherwise, it becomes much more difficult. And I felt --
GLENN: You draw this comparison to history, and then you say, look, I want to issue a warning right now to Christians.
DANIEL: Yeah! Absolutely. I know it sounds funny for a rabbi to be singing Onward Christian Soldiers, but the fact is, you know, we just don't have the numbers in terms of people to dramatically impact the culture on the street.
Yes, we have disproportionate influences, no question about that.
Unfortunately, however, 70 or 80% of Jewish influence goes in the wrong direction. It is sadly not a convince that George Soros happens to be a Jew who is utterly divorced from anything Jewish, and he is loathing, I'm quite sure, of the Hebrew testament just as much as he's loathing of anything Christian.
Yes, there is a war against Christianity right now, and I would go as far as to say that Christianity is a lost, unprotected minority.
Yeah.
You know, you spoke earlier in the show about the enormous, mind-numbing, bravery shown by Hollywood. Right?
GLENN: [Laughs.] Yes. It was -- I was weeping.
DANIEL: Sorry?
GLENN: I was weepy and teary-eyed when I saw it the data.
DANIEL: They put the show on Broadway, the Book of Mormon. Really brave, right?
GLENN: Yes.
DANIEL: -- poke fun at one of the most successful groups of people, Latter Day Saints church, most successful group of people on the planet. Strong family life, business, everything works well in the LDS, and so we'll do a show mocking them.
What about the brave -- why don't you do a show called the Book of Islam? Do a show on the Koran on Broadway. Let's see some bravery here. You want to mock something, mock that. But no, never mock Christianity.
Excuse me. They will never mock Islam but they'll mock Judaism, and more than that, Christianity is truly up for grabs.
GLENN: You wrote -- you said, consider the long list of antiChristian books that have been published in recent months. American Fascist, the Christian Right and the War on America. Baptizing of America, the religious right's plans for the rest you was.
The end of faith. Religion, terror, and future of reason. Purity and Politics, the right wing assault on religious freedom. Atheist Universe, the thinking person's answer to Christian fundamentalism. Kingdom Come, how religious right distorts the faith and threatens America. Religion Gone Bad. The hidden dangers of the Christian right.
DANIEL: Without trying, my researchers came up with 50 antiChristian books, books that if you would replace on the cover the word Christian with the word -- pardon me, homosexual or something like that, the world would absolutely go nuts. It would be totally unacceptable. But since it says Christian, it's fine. And you find the same thing also in movies. I'm not saying movies define the culture but they certainly do track the culture.
And the last time a nun was portrayed sensitively and respectfully was the Sound of Music from the '60s. And back in those -- remember Bing Crosby and movies like Boys Town and things like that.
This was a sympathetic priest who played a key role in society, shaped the lives of boys. And now, what do you get now? Now all you get are movies that assault and attack every priest, every nun, every pastor. These are people who are evil and doing horrible things. You know, one in 20,000, but look at the list of folks in show business, right?
One point to find good people overwhelmingly, look at the people who give their lives over to God and who really take care of other people. You find no detection of that at all. Furthermore, I want to say, Roland Emmerich, famous writer and director, he did Independence Day where half the planet was destroyed with computer-generated imagery, of course. But more interestingly, in 2009 I think he did the movie called 2012, which was a celebration of the Mayan myth. He hates Christianity. This is a guy who makes no secret of his loathing of Christianity. He makes the movie, 2012 in which he destroys Jerusalem and the Vatican and the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, and people said to him, look, it makes sense to also destroy the Kaaba, in Mecca.
This is an apocalypse. That's wiping out the whole world. If you're going to wipe out Jerusalem, never mind Washington, D.C. but Jerusalem and the Vatican and Christ the Redeemer statue. He said, do you think I'm crazy? Do you think we want a fatwa?
So he basically said, look, I'm a coward. I'm not an artist. I'm a coward.
GLENN: So you are -- you are saying, your warning, really, was -- because you brought up Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, and you said, look, you can choose to ignore this, but it's at your own peril.
DANIEL: Well, you know, I'm saying that things are not going to slow down. The history doesn't suggest that all on its own, America's popular culture, which is shaped very much today by a secularist agenda, even in the schools, you know, and when you've got the minds of the young, you pretty much can tell which way things are going in the future.
We used to send our children to schools. They would be safe physically and spiritually, and what they were taught were the famous three Rs. Children need to learn to read, to write, and to do arithmetic. Nowadays, we send children to school. They're not always safe physically. Heaven knows they're not safe spiritually. And we don't teach theology.
They do get inculcated and indoctrinated with what I call the three Ss. Socialism, secularism, and sexuality.
They get drenched with secularism, and this is what children come out of school with. This means that those are the future adults and leaders tomorrow. Their hatred to Christianity is going to be the same or more than today's. And so I guess what I'm saying is, let's link arms, shoulder to shoulder, and let us now be as sensitive to attacks on Christians as the blacks are about attacks on African-Americans, and homosexuals -- heaven knows, the best people in the whole world to jump on anyone in the culture who does anything anti-Semitic are my folks. Let's take a page out of the book of all of these folks and Christians, learn to link arms and defend yourself against insults in the call the. I will tell you, the phrase turn the other cheek, which is so well known in Christianity, actually comes from the Old Testament. It's the book of Lamentations. And when Jeremiah wrote that book and spoke about turning the other cheek, it wasn't a virtue. It was a curse. It was saying that your enemies are getting so strong that when they might you on one cheek, you barely can do anything to stop them hitting your other cheek as well.
And so I say, let's go for the Jewish interpretation here.
GLENN: [Laughs.]
And let's what? Go ahead.
DANIEL: Let's stop turning the other cheek. Let's stop ignoring the attacks on Christianity. We Jews know that these attacks on Christianity are bad for everybody, not just for Christians.
GLENN: Rabbi Daniel Lapin. Author of so many books. Let's see. The latest one, America's Real Buried Treasure, recently, Thou Shall Prosper. Rabbi Lapin. You can find him at RabbiDanielLapin.com. RabbiDanielLapin.com.
DANIEL: I appreciate everything you do, Glenn. I really dough.
GLENN: God bless you. Thank you so much. Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
