Culture in Crisis with Andrew Walker

Part 1

Tim Moore: So, Andrew, thanks for setting aside time to join me today…

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: On Christ in Prophecy. I really look forward to our dialogue.

Andrew Walker: Yeah, Tim, thanks for the invitation. And I’ve got to say, I appreciate that you referred to me as a young man on camera. I’m slowly becoming less young.

Tim Moore: Well, you got a little gray in your beard, but you are younger than me by far, my friend. So you are a young man, for sure. That age range is growing every year as I get older.

Andrew Walker: That’s right.

Tim Moore: Well, I really did leave a lot out of your extensive biography. I didn’t want to run short of time for our dialogue, but there’s many things that you were involved in, and I did hint that our first engagement almost 20 years ago was in a political setting. So tell our viewers how we first crossed paths and how we came to know one another in that setting.

Andrew Walker: Yeah. Right out of seminary in 2010, I started working for the Family Foundation of Kentucky, which is kind of a state-based, faith-based public policy organization. And I was preparing to go learn how to lobby in the capital in Frankfort. And one of my colleagues said, “Seek out Tim Moore. Tim Moore is one of our great allies, as far as members in the state legislature.” And so, you know, my organization at the time, and still is, focused around issues of life, marriage, religious liberty.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Andrew Walker: And so as we were trying to move policy forward, I’m green between the ears. I was probably 25 at the time, so it’s been a day or two. And so yeah, you and I, I recall, working closely together on several occasions, trying to fight for legislation that we think is not just beneficial for Christians, but it’s beneficial for all of society.

Tim Moore: Exactly.

Andrew Walker: So that was a fun, a fun way to meet you. And it’s neat to see how the Lord brings those paths back together over time.

Tim Moore: It is fun how we have intertwined our lives in different ways. I don’t know if I would call being at the legislature, even as a lobbyist fun.

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: But there were moments of reward and even a few of joy.

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: And finding other brothers and sisters who are willing to be salt and light, even in that very dark place. That was encouraging.

Andrew Walker: Yeah. You know, one of the things that left me with a life-changing perspective after working for the Family Foundation was how much individuals can do on the state level. What we tend to do in our political day and age where politics is kind of a spectacle and a spectator sport, we tend to federalize issues. And we go to Washington, D.C., where you have these gargantuan budgets and organizations with, you know, $50 million budgets. But then you realize, man, a dedicated minority on a state level can really accomplish a lot with a budget not anywhere near $50 million.

Tim Moore: Exactly. Right.

Andrew Walker: So it’s a good reminder that we should be looking to where we can be salt and light where we are most approximately located, not just deferring everything to Washington.

Tim Moore: That’s absolutely true. Even down to the local level. And for individual Christians, that means that you can be impactful in your own hometown. Sometimes in your own neighborhood, indeed, in your own family. So I want to dig into a little bit about what you have been focused on with your academic career and really your life’s work.

When it comes to Christ in Prophecy, some people think that we are solely focused on the prophecies yet to be fulfilled. But as so many end times prophecies, I believe, that God has revealed are coming to pass before our eyes, we inevitably are seeing the rise of wickedness, violence, and even apostasy right before us, not just here in America, but around the world…even next door.

Andrew Walker: Yeah. That’s undeniable. One of the things that I think about is regardless of kind of your model that you take on eschatology, the witness doesn’t change, right? When Jesus says that we are to be salt and light, He doesn’t, He doesn’t put an asterisk around that where it’s conditioned based on where you are in society or your popularity in society. It’s a generic command, “be salt and light.”

And one of the biggest paradigms or motifs I go to in thinking about the place of the Christian in the culture is Jeremiah 29. Now we know that that’s the famous passage in there, where, you know, that the Lord says, “I have a plan to prosper you,” right?

Tim Moore: Yes.

Andrew Walker: Okay. Well, we actually need to zero-out and think about the context of Jeremiah 29.

Tim Moore: Yes, we do. That is not a situation Israel wanted to be in. Israel’s taken into exile. What are they commanded to do while they’re in exile? And by the way, I should add, an exile that they’re told is going to last a really long time. It’s not a short, short stint. What they’re told to do is not necessarily take Babylon back for Yahweh.

Tim Moore: Right.

Andrew Walker: Although that would be totally fine, right? What they’re commanded to do is to effectively be salt and light in their culture. How are they commanded to be salt and light? It’s not through a public policy agenda necessarily. They’re called to form families, build houses, plant gardens.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Andrew Walker: Which, to me, I think, one of the ways we need to think about Christian political witness is it’s never less than voting. It’s never less than political participation. But I think it’s more than that.

Tim Moore: Oh, certainly.

Andrew Walker: Because it’s really about living ordinary lives of extravagant grace, where we are learning what it means to be truly human in conjunction with the creation order that God placed in the beginning in Genesis 1 and 2.

Tim Moore: Absolutely.

Andrew Walker: And so I just think that the call to be salt and light, it can look revolutionary.

Tim Moore: Right.

Andrew Walker: It can look like a William Wilberforce-type witness. But the Christian witness is also going to look extraordinarily ordinary.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Andrew Walker: Right? Forming marriages, being faithful to your spouse, having children, caring for your children, being faithful to a local church. If we do that and multiply that times 1,000, you’re going to have political communities that are much more sound…

Tim Moore: Absolutely.

Andrew Walker: And much more able to reach the whole point of their existence, which is the ability to flourish as a human being.

Tim Moore: Well, we’ve talked on our program before about living for Christ in the End Times. So I entitled this dialogue we’re having, “Serving Christ Behind Enemy Lines.” Because this realm, Satan is still reigning on the earth. God of this age, prince of the power of the earth. And so we’re behind enemy lines, where we’re serving Christ. And you mentioned ordinary lives. I would only submit that sometimes what used to be ordinary is now extraordinary. My daughter-in-law said that my family, which we are very intentional about being ordinary…

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: She said, “You have the most abnormally normal family,” because most of the people she grew up around don’t have intact families who all love the Lord and are serving Him to most of their ability.

Andrew Walker: Oh, Tim, I couldn’t affirm that more. That is what makes our society so subversively dangerous, is, yes, we have those major crisis points, like abortion and pornography crises, but there are also, beneath the surface, crises that are, that are not necessarily downstream problems. They’re foundational problems.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Tim Moore: One of them, just to tell a quick anecdote on this, a friend of mine sent us a group of…a group chat that I’m in, a screenshot of an interaction between his daughter and him and Christian family, and the daughter said, “Dad, in my peer group in college, I’m the only young woman that wants to get married and have a family.” That is incredibly destabilizing to society.

Tim Moore: Oh, it is.

Andrew Walker: Because, and don’t think about this just from a public policy perspective, think about it from a creational perspective of Genesis 1. What are we commanded to do? We’re commanded to be fruitful and multiply, so that we can exercise dominion. What our society is doing right now is almost inverting the creational mandate, to where we’re not even repopulating the species to have the bare essentials to have a civil society. So I think you’re exactly right.

And what you just also hinted at goes back that paradigm in Jeremiah is, it looks extraordinary in our particular current time that we’re in, where you’re going to be married for 60 years, you might have five or six children. Again, that may look extraordinary in our culture. I think it’s actually profoundly ordinary for what God has called us to.

Tim Moore: It certainly is. And really, that’s what I want to, I want to get to is some of these ordinaries, as described in Scripture. And in order to do so, let’s just step through some of the books, well, the books that you’ve written over the past 11 years that reflect the importance of speaking truth into the confusion that our society seems to have embraced in the modern era.

And we’ll do this in kind of a lightning round, touching on some of the headlines from today’s news. Your first book, indeed, as we’ve been talking, focused on marriage, and I would submit that our grandparents could not have imagined the assault that this first human institution ordained by God would be under in our own day and age.

And yes, I mean a marriage between a man and a woman, and yet that’s considered passe by the cultural elite. So how do we get here, Andrew? How do we move from that just a few generations ago to the confusion and the rebellion that we witness today?

Andrew Walker: Well, the historical genealogy, genealogy of that is quite long. I mean, I could point back to movements as long back as 700 years ago that all kind of brought us to this moment that has converged on our present crises.

But I would say, in the short term horizon, things like, honestly, the rise of hormonal contraception, I think, will be looked at in the fullness of time as one of the biggest paradigm shifts in America, governing how we think about family and sexuality. Now, I’m not here to litigate all of the debates around contraception, as much as I am for us to understand that if you can conceive of yourself as not a reproductive being, you can effectively nullify the reproductive end of the species, what then are you going to do?

You’re going to redirect, and, I think, misdirect how you use your sexuality, so that if you no longer need to get married in order to have intercourse, what’s going to happen? You can have intercourse with wide availability, which decreases the need for marriage, which leads us to today where marriage rates are as low as they’ve ever been. We’re having fewer children than arguably ever before. Marrying later on in life.

And all of that, I think, flows downstream, not necessarily from a group of intellectuals in the 1940s and ’50s who said, “You know what? Let’s re-engineer society to where families aren’t forming.” It’s one of these contingencies of history where you have technology, you have ideas, you have intellectuals all converging on a particular time in history that produces this perfect storm that eliminates the plausibility structure around marriage.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Andrew Walker: So that we really no longer have to conceive of ourselves as a marriage-oriented species.

Tim Moore: Well, and the other thing that plays into it is our American concept of rugged individualism with the emphasis on individualism and now personal autonomy…

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: To where the idea of entering into a covenant relationship selflessly to be joined with another person, that’s an affront to autonomy. And so people are caught up in that. To move from that, your next book was religious liberty.

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: And so, in spite of an emphasis today on all the freedoms and liberties, people don’t want responsibility, but there’s one freedom that the elites have rejected. And that is…

Andrew Walker: The irony of that, right?

Tim Moore: The irony, yeah. The foundational freedom enshrined in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights as the very first amendment. And so that recognized that liberty has facilitated a healthy balance between church and state. But now, again, this freedom from religion has become a mantra. And yet, the left and the elites want to embrace pagan faith as they expressly reject Christian faith.

Andrew Walker: Yeah. I mean, we are living in a moment where, I think, the confluence of social attitudes, previous legal opinions have really worked to try to make religion a weird thing and a sectarian thing and a thing to banish to the margins. And why? Because religion forms individuals at their most foundational level. And one thing we see with kind of progressivism and elitism in general, if you want to call it that, is those types of systems don’t like authority structures outside the authority they can dictate what it is.

So if you now have an authority system outside of elite opinion or progressive opinion, where individuals are saying, “You know what? No, it’s not court opinions or cultural consensus that defines what marriage is or defines when a human being has a right to life.” What are then the cultural trendsetters going to do? They’re going to work to isolate and marginalize and banish viewpoints that contradict the overarching system.

Tim Moore: Well, and even beyond that, as you have a desire to banish, really, there’s an effort to transgress. And so I go write the Psalm 2.

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: Where people want to cast off the fetters that God has imposed, or set themselves free…

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: Of any of the parameters that He said, “Here’s how you will flourish. Stay between the lines, folks. If you’re driving down the road, stay on the road.” But they want to say, “We don’t want any lines, we don’t want any warnings.”

And so this gets to the ultimate transgression lately, which is transgenderism. It’s a complete rejection of creation order from Genesis 1 and 2. Marriage, liberty that is restrained liberty. They used to call it ordered liberty in our founder’s days. But now, even to the point of denying the difference between man and woman as two equal, but separate sexes created by God. And so transgenderism just wipes all that out.

Andrew Walker: Yeah. Well, let me actually connect my answer to your previous question as well. Is, you know, the progressives, the elites thought that if we can just get religion on the margins of society, those benighted simpletons, those bigots, the unreasonable individuals, if we can just get them on the margins of society, we will make space for pure reason. Right okay?

Well, it’s not reasonable to hold the idea that a man who thinks of himself internally as a woman is actually a woman. That’s actually deeply, deeply unreasonable. Which is another way of saying, you think that you can drive irrational religion to the margins, and what man really does is just to replace that with their own irrational claims.

Tim Moore: That’s Romans 1 all over.

Andrew Walker: That’s Romans 1. They become futile in their thinking.

Tim Moore: Absolutely. Exactly. Depraved.

Andrew Walker: So, you know, but what’s really fascinating to your question, and I want to anchor this back in kind of a creation order, Genesis 1 conversation, is, you’re right, our society has gone full bore into the transgender movement. Even, in fact, I believe, it was in 2021, then President Biden called it the civil rights issue of our time.

But what’s fascinating, as of this recording, the conversation that we’re having today, I actually sense at even elite levels, there is a growing skepticism and concern around transgender ideology. And we’re seeing that with medical guilds revising their treatment protocols. We’re seeing the Olympic committee…

Tim Moore: Exactly. The Olympics saying, “You’ve got to be a woman to compete as a woman.”

Andrew Walker: Right.

Tim Moore: We’re not going to have any of this type of nonsense.

Andrew Walker: And what is that? That is creation order reasserting itself. You know, Paul says in Romans 1, “Sinful man suppresses the truth and unrighteousness.” It’s not that they don’t know God’s moral law, it’s that they suppress it in unrighteousness. Then it says, “They become futile in their thinking,” and that leads to then social destruction. But then what happens is you can try to suppress the truths of nature for so long until nature strikes back. And I actually think that, you know, we are, as a society, trying to press against the very outer boundaries of creation order. And we’re finding out that that’s actually futile and it doesn’t work.

If I could just share one quick anecdote around this. A couple years ago, Atlantic Monthly, very elite publication, had a headline that said something like this, “Scholars have figured out how to solve economic inequality.”

Tim Moore: Scholars.

Andrew Walker: And the solution was, kids need moms and dads, and societies need more marriages. And you’re like, “Okay, well, great. I’m going to applaud you for that.”

But all that these scholars did was to reverse engineer themselves to what Genesis is already saying, right? God’s creation order is set; there is a boundary around it. We will either live in conformity with that creation order and prosper, or we will try to live outside of it and we will be unable to do so. And then there will also be great collateral damage and consequence…

Tim Moore: Absolutely.

Andrew Walker: In trying to.

Tim Moore: It reminds me of the old bumper sticker. You’ve tried the rest, now come back to the best.

Andrew Walker: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Moore: And that’s kind of where we are.

Andrew Walker: I love that.

Tim Moore: I mean to love it, balance it down. Well, finally, your most recent book is sort of an all-encompassing retort to the post Christianity that has been pushed, especially in recent years. And you assert that Christianity actually reflects the truth of faithful reason.

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: So how does our advocacy for natural law and ethics represent the pursuit of God’s glory and our good?

Andrew Walker: Yeah. I mean, so a lot of this kind of springs back to what I just said a second ago, natural law is just this idea that God has affixed a moral order in creation. And that moral order directs us to the goods that cause us to prosper and flourish as human beings. Once we figure out what those goods are, that helps us determine norms and standards of actions that allow us to get those goods.

But what the natural law tradition of Christianity is really saying is that there is not a morality for non-Christians and a morality for Christians. There’s one moral order. God’s moral order is known through three distinct mechanisms of revelation. It’s known through creation order. It’s known in God’s revealed law covenant. We call this the special revelation. And then God also communicates His moral law in our conscience.

The simplest way to put this is God is not a schizophrenic God. There’s one moral order. And what Christians are trying to do in the natural law conversation is to say, you know, there’s a fixed moral boundary, and this fixed moral boundary is not punitive. It’s not trying to restrict your field of action. It’s not arbitrary. No, this moral law is actually fit to the type of person you are. And if you actually want to experience wholeness and flourishing, you need to conform yourself to that moral law.

And from the Christian perspective, when we order our actions in line with how God has ordered creation, we are glorifying God. “Whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God,” the Apostle Paul says. But then as we order our lives for God’s glory, that reflects back on us in what looks like well-ordered lives, happy lives, flourishing lives.

Tim Moore: Exactly. Flourishing lives. I’ve witnessed some of the chaos in big cities. Recently, there was a, in Chicago, a group of youth who just went wild and started tearing things up, as basically a riot.

Andrew Walker: Sure.

Tim Moore: Because they are transgressing and rejecting moral law, and it creates destruction, havoc, and fear amongst the populace, and that is counterproductive to human flourishing, clearly. Well, Andrew, Paul encouraged my namesake, Timothy, to guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called knowledge.

Boy, that sounds like he could be speaking today. Even as he warned that in the Last Days, we would see that difficult times would come, and his prophetic warning was that professing to be wise, back to Romans 1, many would’ve gone astray from the faith, even who claimed to follow Christ. How is that playing out before our eyes?

Andrew Walker: Well, it’s hard to say that there is, you know, one determined line that this is going down, that Christianity in America is in decline and it’s secularizing. I would rather describe this as situational and episodic. And what I mean by that is just very recently, I heard three very prominent, kind of progressive Christian podcasters say, in reference to James Talarico in Texas, this new state senator.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Andrew Walker: Who is very progressive in his Christianity.

Tim Moore: Yeah.

Andrew Walker: Basically saying, “Well, listen James Talarico, he can recite the Nicene Creed. He affirms the Nicene Creed. I don’t know why a lot of these Christians are getting hung up on his views about abortion and his views about LGBT issues.” Now, that’s a really clever and deceptive ploy because if you’re going to say, “Oh, well, he affirms the Nicene Creed, that’s the bare essentials.

Why are we getting hung up on these supposedly marginal secondary or tertiary issues?” That’s a misreading of Scripture. And it’s a misreading of the creeds, for one, because we understand that Christianity is not a cafeteria-style faith. You don’t get to pick what you like here and then not pick the thing over here. This all comes down to a question of the integrity of Christian revelation. Is all of Scripture inspired?

Is all of Scripture authoritative? Or is it just authoritative based on what I want it to be authoritative over? Because when you go that route, Scripture is no longer authoritative. It’s actually Tim or Andrew who’s authoritative because we are figuring out via, you know, kind of our own magisterial authority. Well, no, this is authoritative, but that’s not. So we’ll say that Jesus rose from the dead. So we affirm that.

But then we’re going to deny what the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 about homosexuality. And the reason that that doesn’t make sense is because the same body that is resurrected by Christ, or that is resurrected in Christ, is the same type of body that He’s promising to resurrect in all of us. And there’s all one big, seamless integrated storyline in this that prevents us from having to pick or choose what it is we want to believe or not believe.

Tim Moore: Well, obviously, if you start going down the road of saying, “Well, he affirms this,” that would be like saying, “Well, Satan was quoting Scripture when he tempted Christ, so he’s obviously using Scripture in a way.” No, he was twisting Scripture.

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: And he was quoting it clearly out of context and contrary to the will of God. And so you can’t, as you said, use cafeteria mentality to go and pick out verses and try to build or cobble together a faith. Well, we talk many times on Christ in Prophecy about being salt and light in this age. And with the short time we have left, obviously, Scripture says, “The gates of hell will not prevail against the church.” And I’ve often said, “Gates don’t move. The Church has to be on the offensive.”

Andrew Walker: Yeah.

Tim Moore: “Against this kingdom of darkness.” And the darker it gets, the lighter the light shines, or the brighter the light shines. What do you say to those who would reject Christians being involved in the political realm and in other spheres because they’re unseemly. How do we act out our faith, and be that conduit to seek the welfare even of this pagan land increasingly so that we live right now?

Andrew Walker: I would say to an individual who wants to kind of throw their hands up at politics is to say, “You may not think of yourself as political, but politics will find you.” One of my friends, Eric Erickson likes to say, “You will be made to care.” You may think that you can be indifferent about politics. Politics will not be indifferent about you.

Society is always moving in some particular direction. At the center of society, there is some, you know, nature abhors a vacuum. Something is going to be the core animating driving center of civil society. The question I would pose to the Christian who is apathetic about this is, you know, do you want progressivism at the core animating center of society? Because if you do, they’re not going to leave you alone. They’re going to actively draft you into their movement.

Or understanding that you don’t have to be politically obsessed, but are you politically mobilized in terms of being aware of the issues that are going on in society that are not just affecting Christians, but they’re affecting everyone in society? Politics is really, Tim, just one way to love our neighbor in the aggregate, in the aggregate.

Tim Moore: And if you want to have a close-to-home impact, it’s also relevant to our children and grandchildren.

Andrew Walker: Absolutely.

Tim Moore: Because what happens today carries weight down the road. Well, Andrew, I want to thank you for joining me today and encouraging our viewers to serve boldly in this present age, as I said, serving Christ behind enemy lines faithfully, even as we wait for and long for the age to come. So thank you brother, very, very much.

Andrew Walker: Yeah, thank you Tim.

Tim Moore: Yes.

Closing

Tim Moore: Well, there you have it. I hope that our dialogue today has been both an encouragement and a motivation to you.
You know, the lesson of Isaiah is that God seeks people who are willing to be sent to engage with others who listen but don’t perceive and look but do not understand. His call to Ezekiel is even more pointed. Whether they listen or not, our responsibility is to speak biblical truth, both a concept and a person, into a lost and dying world.
Are you willing to say, “Hineni, here am I,” and speak everlasting life to dry bones? I hope that you are because time is running out. Godspeed!

End of Program