#415 Getting Real With Dr. Jay Richards! Don't miss this high energy discussion where science and ideology are increasingly at loggerheads!

So buckle up and get ready for today's episode . I am so delighted and grateful to be back with Dr J Richards . He's the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life , religion and Family and the William E Simon Senior Research Fellow in Religious Liberty and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation .

He's a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and executive director of the stream . J is author or editor more than a dozen books , including the New York Times Best Sellers , infiltrated and Indivisible . He's also the producer of several documentaries .

His essays have appeared in the Harvard Business Review , wall Street Journal , bearer and the Washington Post , the New York Post and many , many others .

As an experienced public speaker , he's spoken at academic conferences , colleges , university campuses in the United States , europe and Asia , many think tanks in the US and Europe and , on several occasions , to members of the US Congress .

His 2008 debate I wish I was there at Sanford University with Christopher Hitchens was moderated by Ben Stein , was broadcast to several hundred churches in North America . Dr J Richards , thank you so much for being with us . It's great to be with you .

Well , you just hosted a show right before this , so I'm going to I know that's fresh on your mind talking about the faith of our fathers . You title it . Why is Christianity been in decline ? You want to talk about that a little bit Absolutely . And then I want to transition over to some crazy you know crazy things that I saw from astrophysicist Neil Tyson .

So I'm going to mix it up a little bit and see if you can see , if you feel like going like that .

And they just did a major research project , a study , in which it was based on polling and questionnaires that were actually passed out in select churches around the country , both Protestant and Catholic , and just asked people okay , these are people that are in church basically every Sunday and asked for the demographic details .

Did your father , did you grow up with your father in your home ? Was he interested in the faith ? And the outcome of this is absolutely amazing .

I mean , we all kind of intuitively know , look , if you were raised in a married , you know a home with a married mother and father and they're taking you to church regularly and cataclysm you properly , you're going to be more likely to be faithful . You know , as an adult , what was interesting about this is that it's actually the father specifically .

So if they're even more so than you know the kind of marriage of the mother and father , it's the presence of the father . And so if you were to ask a random man that is 25 years old , that's in church on Sunday , was your father faithful and did you grow up with them ? Overwhelmingly the answer is yes .

So in other words , like a key entity , the key cause of the transmission of the faith to children is the father , and that's I mean . Once you hear it , you know , okay , kind of makes sense , you know , and .

But it's also I think there's an interesting theological thing here , because the reality is , when you're a child and now if you're a Christian , we talk about God , we refer to God as father . That's not true in every religion , but we talk about God , the father .

And a child doesn't have a grasp of the Trinity we don't right and so their best access to what that would mean is going to be the father .

That's either in the home or not in the home , and so if you're a drunk , abusive father or you're an absent father , that is going to shape the views of the child to God , unless something very unusual happens , and so that's kind of an awesome responsibility .

But what that means is that both , if you're concerned about the transmission of the faith , you've got to be concerned about marriage . It's not just that marriage is good on its own and is sacramental , but if fathers aren't in homes , the culture is going to get less and less religious over time .

And now , if you're just a cynical politician , I would tell them okay , like if you're a Republican , you should care . And let me tell you why .

The most , the reddest group of people that donates is actually mothers who are at home , married , raising their kids and the demographic the bluest are public school teachers , and so if it's as culture gets more secularized and less religious , it's going to get more progressive and left-wing . So even the cynical Republican that's actually concerned about the elections .

Actually should have an interest in this data .

I , dr J , you may or may not know , but I spent a lot of time presenting what I call stolen innocence , which is really what they're doing to our children in the public school with here in Illinois .

We're in the belly of the beast here with the , with the national sex ed standards and the pornography fighting in schools , and so when I'm speaking to teachers , you know teachers that are Christian and more conservative , which are becoming less and less date the stories they tell me , Dr J Well you know they'll blow your mind if you haven't heard this before .

We're really trying to wake parents up to this .

We , I'm a Catholic , I want somebody to do evangelism , but that's not going to be heritage , we are public policy organizations . And what public policies can actually help these things ? The government's getting messing stuff up . It's not great at fixing stuff , so we can sort of blow up marriages . We don't know how to put them back together .

But I can tell you one we have got a lot of data on the exposure of children to pornographic material , and this is all bad . There's no trade off here . This is a disaster that everyone should be able to agree on , and the reality is is that exposure of small kids to pornography is not a free speech issue .

It is a protection of children and , frankly , mental health issue , and we think that is something that needs to happen in states . Just simply requiring age Just right , they don't have to do anything about trying to make it all illegal . Just requiring age verification for online porn .

It plummets , not just kids , it plummets in terms of adult use , and so we think , look , that's actually something that we can do something about that at the moment we're not doing anything about .

you're talking them about that . God has created you , male and female , and you start to work through this . We have a program called Love Ed , dr J , and love Ed is . It helps parents give the talk , you know , the talk that we were always supposed to give to our kids , which none of us knew very well , right ?

Right , we did a , I did a terrible job on this . Well , we go into churches and we help parents give that talk , and that you know God's plan . And and we asked the fathers to be with the boys . I mean , you know , that's the way it should be .

All the young men , except for one , that have worked for us at the John Paul Toorik Newell Center , beautiful young men , late 20s , say early 30s , that have given talks and do work with us .

Each one of them had a problem with pornography for a while and it was all by accident , all they would hear about human sexuality , they'd hear something about sex ed in school and they had questions and they would basically Google it Right , run into porn and to your point , which I , you know , we probably don't want to dwell on it too much , but but affects

your physiology , sure , or your , your , your , you know , in your mental health state , of course , absolutely , oh absolutely .

I'm optimistic that there can actually be a really solid bipartisan agreement on this Cause . Honestly , I don't think even a secular liberal generally thinks it's a good idea for young kids to be exposed to porn . I hope not , but we're going to find out .

And he just gave this talk a week or so ago in in in at the Senate , yeah , and he was quoting from these , these book , absolutely yeah , there was a here , in fact yeah , he was interviewing two of my friends , nikki Neely and Max Eden , who were about this .

And yet , you know , if you tried to read from those books at a school board meeting , they will drag you away because it's it's indecent .

the funding will stop . I mean so you said you know you think most liberals could at least agree with this . I don't know .

Look , that's , when I say porn , I'm talking about that kind of stuff . And so what the problem is is that when they speak , they always try to avoid talking about the actual books under discussion , right ? They want to imagine that we're talking about to kill Mockingbird or something . That's never what it's about .

It's always about , at this point , explicit pornographic material and , of course , the gender ideologues on the other side . This is intentional for them . They want to sexualize children , and the quicker that we can realize that , I think , the quicker we can defeat it .

But , as they grow up and they start to be interested in dating and things , they start to see these young girls and this is where I really see the pain , dr J , we give a lot of high school retreats . We were talking about this to a group of 16 year olds and then we separated them , boys and girls .

So I was telling the boys how they would treat a young girl if they really loved , love her . And they got it . And we talked about porn . We said you know the problem with porn for you guys , one of the biggest problems you see this girl that you're , you know you're romantically or your heart goes out .

Oh my gosh , you're attracted to her and you start to look at her as body parts Instead of seeing the beauty of that heart within that woman , right , and it's very difficult for them to see past just her body parts and using her as an object and see it , and they know they want something more . So I'm talking to .

I'm talking to the girls then , because the girls heard what I was telling the guys about how they should treat a young girl if they really love their , and they wanted me to tell them that . Right , yeah , as I was doing that and I won't go much further than here . A young girl started to cry and we asked her why she was crying .

Later on , the counselor went and asked her why she's crying . She said that was the first man that ever stood up in front of me and told me what love was and how a young man should treat me if he really loved me . And it was so beautiful . I started to cry . I mean this is what they're missing when we steal the innocence from them .

Oh yeah , absolutely , absolutely . Well , I . What I want to do now is I want to , I want to put you on a roller coaster ride here , because , because , when ?

And it's connected to me and you know in many , many ways , because if the base of our civil society is marriage and the family and , of course , morality , our founders , our founding fathers , understood that . That John Adams would say this has to be a moral and religious people , otherwise the Republic won't stand .

And of course , madison agreed with him and as did many others . When this breakdown comes for Dr J , marriage and the family , the church that you were speaking about earlier , when that breakdown comes , then then who goes out into the culture ? The culture has ? What has no , no meaning , no morality . We're not teaching our kids virtues .

And then that culture , the artists , the , the musicians , everything starts to break down and this is the Maloo the kids are in . And then we go into politics and economics and finance and everything starts to break down .

These tickets go for a high price . Oh , it's good , I know . And they say this they describe his , him , as a sensational astrophysicist and he uses his charisma and scientific knowledge to make the study of space fun and exciting for audiences . So come witness a live talk from this legendary scientist .

Right , prepare for a highly informative , fun journey into the natural world . And when I think he's going to speak , then he's going to talk about nature's laws , the nature , natural laws yeah or natural law or something .

the member of the species that produces the small mobile gametes called sperm . That is in that we need to find sex that way . That is not just for humans . That's basically everything in the plant and animal kingdom . They , those variations , differ from organ , like . There are unsumorganisms , believe it or not .

Offspring is determined by the temperature in the water , not by chromosomes , and there are exceptions on the chromosomes that comes to humans . But that basic structure of these two gametes , right , one's large , one's small . There's not a third one . There's no transition gamete , there's sperm and eggs . There's no spergs or orms or anything like that , right ?

So that's why sex is binary . This is very well understood . It's very hard to do any biology if you don't get this . And yet Tyson , under no doubt the social pressure of conforming to this fashionable gender ideology that claims sex as a spectrum rather than binary , is now tying himself in knots trying to accommodate this , which he would never do .

There's no pressure about , you know , saying that the laws of physics are a spectrum or something , right or so . There's no , so you don't have to do that .

But when it comes to biology , there's pressure now because of gender ideology to deny all this , and so he's just saying completely crazy things , and even his , his fellow atheist scientists now are saying , okay , something's happened to Neil Tyson , but it's . It's really quite staggering to watch it happen .

It kind of unfold online because he keeps trying to dig himself out of this thing and it just gets worse and worse .

I mean just people that they fall in line for this . Do you think there's yes , you know you know money , or I think that ?

A few years ago did a new cosmos Under National Geographic and it ran on PBS , and so he's the kind of official spokesman for , you know , the physical sciences on PBS , so kind of the mid-brow popularizer , right . And so he's gonna be highly sensitive to social dynamics and , in kind of elite opinion right , more sensitive than a lab scientist .

That's kind of quirky and a little maybe on the spectrum , but totally focused right those are not the scientists that are gonna be the first ones to fall for this , but he's no , he's out there .

But he also knows that if he said it was nonsense , you know he would get in trouble , he would get attacked by all the official people and he doesn't want to do that . And so clearly social pressure matters more to him than integrity and telling the truth . I mean , I just don't think there's any other way to put it .

It's a little sharp , but I think that's what's happening .

Again , you know , speak out against this , because somebody like Neil Tyson has a forceful personality , right , and so when he's speaking I mean he's , he's , he's , he's trying to command the , the discussion .

And so , as these two who are not amateur interviewers on this podcast , he goes like this , speaking of the XX XY chromosomes , he I just took a couple notes , so this might not be perfect , but he said the XX XY chromosomes are insufficient because when we wake up in the morning , we exaggerate the gender we feel like expressing that day .

Today , I feel 80% female , 20% male , so I'm gonna put on makeup and address . Tomorrow I may feel 8% male and I'll remove the makeup , put on a muscle shirt . What does anybody care ? My point is , if it's all about style , what you wear and trends and what the , this was interesting . This is me back to what the beauty industrial complex wants you to see .

Yeah , we have a .

Well , okay , gender used to be a synonym for sex , but these days it's a stand-in for gender identity or gender expression . And so he said I felt , maybe one day I feel 80% female and 20% male . What he means the idea is that all it really is is an expression , and so he's trying to have it both ways .

He's sort of avoiding coming down on the biological question , which is the question , and saying , well , these are all just kind of expressions and so they're really just social constructs anyway . And of course , yeah , exactly how you're supposed to dress and how much makeup , those are Conventional , right ?

Not every culture says women have to wear a lot of makeup or something like that , and so no , what he's trying to do is avoid actually Saying the crazy thing , which is that biology isn't true , and shift it to this idea of kind of gender expressions and stereotypes and then saying how people can kind of vary , and that's certainly true , but that's not what

anybody's talking about . Everybody knows perfectly well that these kinds of ways we express ourselves there . There are men that you might say are more gender atypical . There are women that are gender atypical . We call them Tom boys .

Right , there's no girls , or still females , and so he's just shifted the terms and then it's just Buried in this kind of word salad that doesn't go anywhere . But if you're watching you realize he immediately never even actually Addresses the question are you telling me that the sexual binary in biology does not apply to humans , yes or no ?

That's the question he was , you know . Now , of course the question didn't get asked that precisely , but if it would , he just starts talking about this vague thing gender , not real .

you try to draw this back ? Absolutely , I would just say would you wait before ?

So in gender ideology , gender ideology Replaces the stable category of sex in biology in reality , with two other categories a gender identity , this idea that we have this internal sense of gender , so it's just sort of a psychological state that you have everybody supposedly has it and then something called sex assigned at birth , which is so .

It's just a social construct . That's what gender ideology says , and so it replaces reality with subjective psychological state and a social construct . Sex assigned at birth .

That's , that's how things work , and so , but the way they because that sounds crazy , to put it that boldly what people do is they'll just use the word gender , and they're actually talking about gender identity rather than sex . And so I would just say , oh , let's stop , let's define gender .

And if they're talking about gender identity and is it internal sense of gender ? I would say now , what is that , though ? What internal sense of what ? To make clear that actually it's , they're using a circular term , and then , but I would actually , it's okay though , let's just get straight .

So are you telling me that there are more than two gametes , yes or no ? Hmm , are there more than two gametes , yes or no ? Or they're more than two ? Sort of Organizations , body plan organizations around these sort of modes of production ? Because what ? What sex is ? We all know this intuitively , right ?

Even a person that can be illiterate , that know any biology . They have a concept of sex and they know it has something to do with reproduction and they know they're males and females , right , and so that's how you want to sort of frame this .

But people have this , if they were talking about , you know , characteristics , and some men are more feminine and some women are more masculine , right , that we're a drift there .

Everybody knows those kinds of things vary , but the reality is that the ideology denies basic biology and so always force the other side either to face that squarely or to make it Obvious to the audience that that's what they're doing .

Tyson doesn't want to do that directly , so that's hence the word salad , right , where you're just like what , what's happening here ? Because he immediately actually shifts the terms and then it's just nonsense .

You know we got to keep it kind of simple , keep bringing it back to like you said . You know , are there more than two gametes , right ? Yeah , and I think that's you know . Right , and and , absolutely , we have the over and and and the sperm and and that's what we're talking about .

The that's rare , but of course that happens , just as there's women that have their ovaries removed . But that doesn't change the basic biological facts of what happens under normal development , or that we understand this , which we do .

You know , it's rare enough that you know , but in those cases it's these aren't third sexes , these aren't non-humans , they're just . It's the same reason as if humans are bipeds by nature . Some people can have a disruption or a genetic disorder , an anomaly , where they're born without two legs right ? That's , in other words , about .

What we're saying is of course they're , they're human and so , but for this disorder they would have had two legs . That that's the way to think of it .

Yeah , I'm just contemplating this and I'm throwing it out to you and certainly don't agree because it's not my , my Scientific study yet , you know . But diversity means to me , now what I come down to as a basis , a diversity of morality . Oh , there was just no morality , nor a diversity of views of reality too .

So how many conservative Southern Baptist you have on your back ?

But you know , what you said a minute ago about the gender ideology is absolutely it's don't think of it as this kind of self-contained , fully developed Philosophical worldview . It is a cultural wrecking ball . The point of so-called queer theory queer in queer theory means to disrupt . It's a verb .

So to queer something is to disrupt categories , and what they want to do is disrupt stable categories of reality , especially in children , because that's how you Ultimately kind of dissolve the present order and replace it with your topian vision . So that's why they focus on kids and that's why they by design . It's designed to confuse your ideas of reality .

It's not an accident , that's . That's the whole point of the thing .

And and and of course you know somebody told me that came from a priest actually , and he just kind of threw this out and I started to dwell on this a little bit he said you know , satan doesn't have a sex .

But what's funny is if you look at satanic imagery so if you look at Freemasonry or Bafa Matt the Bafa Matt is this image of this Demonic , is a type of demon right , that has a goat's head . If you look at Bafa Matt , which we're seeing more and more .

At the end of the day , we're gonna break down marriage and the family . We're gonna throw God out . This puts us all into a certain chaos and a certain Goal . You know , naive way to think . After a while , and we just we were out right and it's turned to chaos and of course we need a savior . And who's gonna come in and save us ? Right , it's , it's .

It's some , some dictator , some Mm-hmm Tolerant system . Now , most of us can trace this back to a Marxist thought . Right , yeah , this is go all the way back to Genesis , dr J , you think well , in some sense absolutely .

It's like you know the gender ideologies , for the idea is that you're born in the wrong body Because there were , you were , just this gendered soul , that God stuck in the wrong body , and so your job is to change your body to fit .

That that's kind of Gnosticism , and of course , everything kind of goes back to Genesis ultimately , and that it's a rebellion , and often a rebel , a desire to be God ourselves , with its technology or whatever . But I do think that if you're , you're focusing on , okay , what are the more the proximate origins , the closer origins of this ? It's a cultural Marxism .

So Marxism , but not so much applied to economics as to cultural institutions family , sex , adults , children , male , female , that stuff , plus something called critical theory , which is another kind of form of cultural Marxism , plus French postmodernism , plus what follows postmodernism , because postmodernism is relativism and nobody's really a relativist , and so what always

follows it is a kind of radical totalitarian spirit . Combine that and then add the trajectory of the sexual revolution , starting with the pill and contraception and the breakdown of the family , and all of that converges in gender ideology . So all the most toxic ideas in the 19th and 20th century .

They come together in gender ideology , and they're coming for the minds and the bodies of our children . That is depressing . I'm optimistic , though , and the reason I'm optimistic is that I think God is giving us an opportunity To see down into the abyss that we're headed for . It's not just , you know , sometimes , people with contraception and some of these things .

We didn't . People didn't really see where that , where the train was going .

All of a sudden , we're seeing how awful train wreck is here yeah the train wreck is close to the bridge , is out and let's get off here , and a lot of people that aren't at all religious and are not necessarily Conservative or saying , okay , wait , you want to sterilize children , what are you crazy ?

And so I think that is it could be an opportunity for us culturally to say , okay , wait , we have been going in the wrong direction . What do we need to do to get going the other direction ?

I know this is a total guess , probably , and it's very hard to wonder . Or , ertigrasp , when we say people are waking up , what percentage of those are waking up ? Because I'm out speaking all the time and you're absolutely right , some people are waking up , but I don't see . This is a , this is kind of a person to person to person .

It is , and this is why this conversation we're having today is so important , because everybody here Needs to go out and grab this vocabulary . Yeah , just be able to start to push back a little bit of make sense of all this , don't we ?

Yeah , one way or the other , one way or the other and I can tell you that if the polls that we've seen on this when it comes to stuff like secretly socially transitioning kids in schools behind parents backs and giving kids Cross-sex hormones and gender transition surgery , that is about 70 or 80 percent of the public is against that , including a majority of

Democratic voters , and so it's really kind of going to be up to politicians to be able to just articulate that . But I mean , this is not only is it , people feel strongly about this and they're overwhelmingly against it . It's one of those issues that's that could be electorally decisive . I know people that it said like I've been voting Democrat my entire life .

I'm never voting for another Democrat until they quit with this gender stuff . People don't do that about . You know , slight tax changes to the tax code , right , those are like things you're irritated about . They don't change you like I'm never voting for that party again . This is one of those issues .

But I do think , unless the politicians that are supporting it Actually experience some suffering for their advocacy , they won't . They won't turn it around . So but you know that I wouldn't want to say people are Going to do that . I would say the conditions are actual , absolutely set up for for a turnaround and a route on this issue .

Heritage foundation is amazing place . I'll put your contact in the show notes . I'll make sure I have heritage Org and there anything else you want in the show notes that , jay ?