Hi you guys, this is Heidi St. John. Welcome to the Off the Bench podcast today. I'm going to tackle a topic that is being talked about all over the news, but not addressed properly in the church. And that is the topic of Christian nationalism.

I want you to stick around because this is going to be a conversation that we're going to need to have in the weeks and months with our kids.

Well, I'm glad you guys are here today. So this is the first week of the mom strong international Bible study. We're studying identity. And as you guys can see, I'm trying to get to it right here.

You can see this is been this is what it looks like. So a mago day created known and loved. We're going to spend the month of October talking about why we need to stop talking about how the world sees us as individuals and you to start talking again about how God sees us because really that's the only thing that matters. Right. What are we here for the Bible teaches us that we are here to bring honor and glory to God.

We are here to glorify God. And in a world that is literally obsessed with sexual identity. This has become the the march of the left right now that we see ourselves clearly through the lens of sexuality. But more than that, it's a departure from what God says even about human sexuality and about marriage.

And we're going to spend the month of October diving into the word of God and parsing it out and then taking a look at ourselves through the lens of scripture. And so I hope you guys will join me. I'm really excited to be teaching again at mom strong international and again, you can join me there at mom strong international.

I'm also as I've said to you before my speaking season is starting to fill up and I'm very excited about that. If you guys would like to have me come and speak for your event, you can do that by contacting me at Heidi St. John.com and just clicking on the speaker tab for those of you who are watching this on YouTube.

I'm very glad that you are here. We are slowly but steadily moving our way up. All right, I got a question from a listener a couple of weeks ago and she was asking me about Christian nationalism and in fact accusing me and it's a sort of accusatory language of the left of being a Christian nationalist. And at first, I was like, you know, I'm offended. I'm like, I'm not a Christian nationalist.

But you guys actually think I am one. And here's here's why I think this is not a bad thing. The more I got to thinking about, I was like, wait a minute.

So if the language, remember, I've said this, you know, a million times here at the show. Change the language to change the culture. So we're watching the left just destroy or try to destroy Western civilization. Absolutely for sure by just changing the language. Right. So we changed the language of male and female.

And so we decided that pronouns are something that is now affluent. So we can refer to somebody in the, you know, with a plural pronoun just because they identify as non binary or some other such nonsense. This is patently false, by the way.

So if you, if you, for example, believe that Donald Trump was a good president, which I do by and large. I thought he was a very good president. I loved his policy by and large. Certainly I didn't agree with everything he did. And I don't agree with everything he says.

There are lots of issues with Donald Trump that I would, that I would take issue with. But when you're talking about his policy positions as a president by and large, I agreed with them and supported them. And I've talked about this on the show before.

And that immediately to many people on the left made me a fascist. If I say that I that I don't believe that transgenderism is actual science. I think it's a political ideology that's coming out in what I call cultural Marxism.

And we're injuring our children body soul mind and spirit. Then you would have certain members of the left. Call me a big it. Well, I, I think we need to start looking at the definition of war.

Because just because the modern left in our woke universities and our woke churches like to throw the words around like big it and fascist and Christian nationalists. It doesn't mean I kind of want to sit some of these guys down and say, me thinks it does not mean what you think it means.

Or maybe they're just changed the definition because they're trying to cause culture to be the culture to be in chaos. And really that's where we're headed. We're headed toward a cultural chaos. And so I want to talk about Christian nationalism.

Because I know that a lot of you, you know, you kind of shrink back from from the idea that you could be termed a nationalist. So let's think about this for a moment and see, is it really a bad thing?

By the way, God has a heart for nations. God's a fan of walls.

So the church has this inherently misguided understanding largely because we've stopped reading scripture and we're just listening to, you know, woke preachers and woke reporters and woke cultural commentators on tiktok.

We're not studying to understand what these words actually mean. What's the root of the word word is the word come from. And so I actually looked it up on Wikipedia. So no one could say, well, you found that at Christian.com or whatever. Right.

So here's what Wikipedia says. Nationalism is an idea and a movement that holds that a nation should be congruent with the state.

...