Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. President. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this awesome privilege, Father, to be in your presence. God, thank you that you’ve allowed us to see this day. The Bible says that your immerses are new every morning, and Father God will give you the glory and the honor. Thank you, God, for President Trump, Father, for appointing us. Father God, spiritual awakening happening in our nation, and it’s driving the secular left insane. That’s how the first official presidential cabinet meeting began, in prayer, led by Scott Turner, our new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and marked by what appears to be a significant trend happening all across our nation.

According to the latest Pew Research, the decline in church attendance and Christian identification has begun to reverse, and that reversal is being led particularly by young men. The New York Times is reporting that for the first time, young men are officially more religious than young women. In a recent survey of over 5,000 Gen Zers conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, 40% of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated. However, when it comes to young men, that number drops to just 34%. Now, why that’s so fascinating is because researchers found that in every other age group, men are the ones more likely to be unaffiliated with any religious identity.

In fact, that tracks with what researchers have found for decades now. Women are consistently more religious than men, a finding so frankly reliable that some scholars have characterized it as something akin to a universal human truth. Well, when it comes to Gen Z, that’s simply no longer the case. Religious affiliation, particularly Christian affiliation, is on the rise. A number of Hollywood celebrities have come to faith. Russell Brand, Shia LaBeouf, Hulk Hogan, Mark Wahlberg, Gwen Stefani, and even prominent politicians like none other than Nicole Shanahan. Nicole posted a beautiful testimony on her recent Christian conversion and baptism.

What she said in terms of her testimony was so key here. Nicole in her personal life said that she came face to face with evil, what she considered to be real, unblemished, dark evil. She doesn’t tell us necessarily what that experience was, only that she was convinced, as a number of psychologists have been as well in their encounters with some very tortured, dark souls in their practice, she was convinced that there is indeed a very real evil presence in the world and she concluded by reading the New Testament that Jesus Christ alone ultimately is the only one who can definitively defeat that evil.

Now, like I said, she’s not alone in that assessment. Some of you may know the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. He’s author of the book, The Road Less Traveled, which was basically just a very popular book on human spirituality and improvement and the like, but he also wrote books and chapters on his personal experience with the demonic possession and with witnessing exorcisms. He writes about this in his book, Glimpses of the Devil and People of the Lie. What made Peck’s study so interesting was that as a trained and licensed modern psychologist for whom the idea of human evil was considered archaic and ignorant and superstitious, which had been replaced by modern science and medical diagnoses and like or personality disorders or something that can be managed with a pill, he went into his practice as a total secularist.

He admits that, but then he writes about two patients that he encountered over many years of his practice, and he said that in encountering these patients, he realized he was not dealing with a psychological or neurological disorder. He wasn’t dealing with emotional repressions or anything like that. In both these patients, he realized, to his secularized shock, as it were, he realized that he was staring in the face of evil, real, actual evil, and he further realized that the secularized techniques that comprise modern psychology, as valuable as they are for most people, were nevertheless absolutely impervious to this evil, and the only possible solution, the only possible healing, was from a comparably spiritual source and force, and so that’s where he discovered the power of exorcisms.

And again, this was a scientist, so what appears to be happening here is that with Peck and with Shanahan, what they discovered, that realization is being discovered en masse all across the nation. More and more people, including our very own president who believes he was saved by God on that fateful July day in Butler, Pennsylvania, more and more of our nation is discovering that only Christ the King can ultimately defeat evil. The Secret Service can’t, right, and psychology can’t, and many of us believe that what we experienced over the last four years was indeed pure evil, especially with regard to our kids.

Now, obviously, not everyone is happy about this, and I have a very interesting article here that is lamenting this Christian turn our nation is taking, but first, obviously, our nation and our world are going through an intense period of change. How we see and understand this change is largely shaped by the news we consume with countless agendas competing for our attention. It’s more important than ever to have the right tools to uncover bias, break free from big tech algorithms, and escape echo chambers. This is precisely why I use Ground News.

It’s a website and app that gathers stories from over 50,000 news sources worldwide, letting you compare coverage across the political spectrum and highlighting stories one side might be ignoring. See for yourself at ground.news slash Steve. My favorite feature, Ground News, is the blind spot feed. It shows you stories that are disproportionately reported by either the left or the right. I find it really helpful for gaining a balanced perspective in our hyper-polarized world. So, for example, here’s a story that’s mostly ignored by left-leaning outlets. Borders are Tom Homan suggests AOC could face investigation over migrant tips.

Now, here’s a recent story that has no coverage on the right. Trump administration fires thousands of US forests and national parks service workers. So, for both of these and for every story, Ground News gives you a breakdown of the sources covering it, the bias of the media outlets reporting across the left, center, and right, how reliable these sources have been in the past, and who owns them. I mean, it’s the kind of news analysis you won’t find anywhere else. Right now, my viewers could get 40% off the Unlimited Access Vantage plan, which is the same plan I have.

Make sure you subscribe using my link at ground.news slash steve. Click the link in the description or scan the QR code when signing up. That’s ground.news slash steve. I came across a very interesting article written by someone who has clearly inhaled very deeply of secular liberalism, who daily feasts on an informational diet of left-wing loons. But it was an interesting article entitled spiritual warfare and political demonology. And it plays off of the latest concern that so many among our secular elite have with the rise of a Christian movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation.

You may have heard about this. And as this author notes, this new Christian movement has around 3 million members formally, but its ideas have been taken up by a growing number of tens of millions of Americans, a growing number, note he added, of tens of millions of Americans who attend church every week. I’m glad to see that he recognizes that the number is growing. That at least puts him at odds with so much of the absurdities that passes cultural analysis among our secular elite who assume the world is moving in their direction when in point of fact the world is seeing what the late sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark at Baylor University, is called the single greatest religious renewal the world has ever seen.

That is the world we’re experiencing as we speak. But regardless, prominent figures like Pam Bondi, Mike Johnson are both very outspoken Christian activists who reportedly have ties to this New Apostolic Reformation movement. And there are two key factors to this movement, two key dynamics. First and foremost, it sees every aspect of life fundamentally as spiritual warfare. So we are in, as frankly Christianity has taught us from the very beginning, having come out of first century apocalyptic Judaism, we are in a cosmic war, a cosmic holy war. There is a battle over the cosmos being fought by forces that extend beyond the human, made up of the angelic and the demonic.

And human souls, cultures, nations, civilizations all comprise the battlefield. So obviously this secular liberal author takes tremendous umbrage with that cosmovision. We might even say he finds it evil. Welcome to the battlefield. But the second key dynamic to this is what the New Apostolic Reformation movement refers to as the seven mountains strategy for seven mountains strategy for the church, the seven mountains being derived from the book of revelation, which means that through prayer and faithful stewardship, Christians can take dominion over all the major cultural institutions. Those are the mountains like family and education and media and entertainment and politics and thus expel much of the satanic influences, demonic forces from our society.

Now, again, if you’re a liberal, if you’re a secular leftist, you’re going to interpret this as the author does as this is the single greatest assault on enlightenment, liberal democracy what we have ever seen. So according to the secular liberal, such a belief system has no place in the modern world and the church certainly has absolutely no place in the public square. The very insertion of the church into our politics and its whole seven mountains mandate into the public square is by definition anti-democratic and that’s basically what this guy argues. The problem with this view is not only is it radically ahistorical in that all of our founding fathers, every single one of them, even Thomas Jefferson, advocated what is called an accommodationist relationship between church and state, not a separationist one.

They believe that church and state should work together for the promotion and flourishing and prosperity and morality of culture. After all, all of those go hand in hand, but more than that this critique doesn’t realize what time it is now. So it fails in history and it also fails in the present and as we’ll see it will fail for the future. You see a number of scholars have recognized that all liberal secularism ultimately is, is just an excuse, an ideology that’s used to justify the expansion to the power and scope of an autonomous modern state.

It’s actually developed in a in a field of study known as state autonomy theory. Secularism, when all said and done, isn’t about protecting democracy. It’s about expelling any and all rivals to the modern autonomous state in its quest to be the sole territorial monopolist over the public square. Secularism’s got nothing to do with democracy. Actually, secularism has everything to do with the empowerment of bureaucrats, precisely like what we’re seeing today with the secular left, so ably defending unelected bureaucrats. Regardless, what’s really happening here when all said and done is that that vision of the liberal secular state having total and complete monopolized control over the public square, that vision has basically collapsed.

It’s collapsed in the hearts of minds, as we’ll find out, not just among most Americans, but among most people in the world. It’s not a matter of a bunch of anti-democratic authoritarian religious zealots secretly plotting in the darkness a government takeover. Far from it, as even the critics admit, it’s happening right in front of our very eyes. Everyone’s seeing it. It’s the single most transparent takeover we’ve ever seen. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s the secular liberal who’s even now defending unelected bureaucrats who rule the federal government in the shadows, these nameless, faceless unelected bureaucrats who think the government belongs to them and not the people.

It’s the secular liberal that’s defending that. Again, when all said and done, bottom line, the ideology of liberalism that these leftists cling to has collapsed. It had its day, certainly made a mess of things, but its days are over. It’s collapsed in the hearts and minds of the vast majority of the electorate. And the simple fact is, is that when the sole singular ideology that served as the justification for expelling the church from the public square, when that sole singular ideology collapses, then what happens? Well, obviously the church is going to return to the public square, just like the founding fathers, just where the founding fathers thought it should be.

And it’s not just evangelical, charismatic Christians that are doing this. Modernity, in its Marxist form, sought to expel the Russian Orthodox Church from the public square during the days of Soviet communism. Well, when that collapsed, what happened? That Russian Orthodox Church has now returned in full force, akin to the days of the Tsars. This same modern Marxism tried to expel Confucianism from the Chinese public square. Well, it’s now even making a more massive comeback through the President Xi-led Confucian revival that’s happening today. Liberal modernity sought to expel Hinduism from the Indian public square.

That has now returned in full force with the rise of the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party, a thoroughly Hindu nationalist party, and by the way, the single biggest democratically elected party on the planet with over a half a billion members. Secularism tried to expel Islam from the Turkish public square. That’s comeback in full force. Shiite Islam from the Iranian public square, everywhere we look in the world. The secular, modernist vision of the state, having a full territorial monopoly over the public square, has collapsed. And in its place, a more religious and civilizationalist vision of church and state and faith and politics has taken its place.

This is the wave of the future, an archaeo-future, where tradition and technology, church and state, religion and politics work together for the flourishing of humanity. That is the future that more and more Americans are embracing. That is the future that Nicole Shanahan has embraced. And that is the future that the Trump White House has embraced as well. That is the future that the Trump White House has embraced. [tr:trw].

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