You're listening to Family Talk, the radio broadcasting division of the James Dobson Family Institute.

I am that James Dobson, and I'm so pleased that you've joined us today.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.

I'm Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy here at JDFI, and I'm pleased to be sitting in the co-host seat today, because we have a topic to discuss that is extremely important.

It's important for the Christian church in America,

but it's also important for all sorts of reasons,

public policy, parenting, marriage, and many other things.

You know, we've talked here at Family Talk quite a few times, and Dr. Dobson has had as a major theme

to remind people that we are blessed to live in a country, the United States, that was really founded on a very exceptional idea.

And that idea is right in our founding documents in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence,

where we say as a nation that our liberty comes from God, the God of the Bible, not from a president that happens to be the party we like, or not from five magical votes on the Supreme

Court, that our liberty comes from God. Now, the challenge from that is that we're living

at a time when a growing number of Americans and quite frankly, a growing number of Christians

don't really look to the Bible for guidance

about life and about the direction our country should be moving in.

And not doing that, we have a real risk here as a nation, not only for the American church

to go off the rails, but for America

itself to go off the rails.

Sadly, if you accept that premise, that means the number of true Christians in America, and this is

really depressing, is even lower than the number of professing Christians

in America. So the question we want to talk about today is, how can we tell whether what we're

hearing, even in our churches, is real Christianity? How can we tell whether the people that we've accepted as fellow believers

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