captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008 good morning. isn't this a fantastic event? it is just such a pleasure to see all of you. isn't it? great? it is my pleasure to introduce you to james robison. he is working with jay richards. they're a combined presentation so jay will be speaking first. james robison's a good friend of mine and i want to tell you why you should listen to james robison today. don't listen to james because he's spoken in over 600 venues around the country. full to the brim breaking attendance records at the rolling stones didn't and appear with billy graham throughout the '70s and '80s. although he did that.

don't listen to james because he has an international missions outreach that has literally saved the lives of thousands of young children, saved countless young women from child prostitution and dug water wells although he's done that, too. don't listen to james because millions, 20 million plus, have come to an understanding of jesus christ through james primary vocation, that of an evangelist. but here's why you should listen to james. james has stood up twice at critical times in our country as a citizen patriot and the first one is quite interesting. he is a southern baptist evangelist and in the late '70s he saw a southern baptist president and realized perhaps not all people of faith had the

same views politically as he saw president carter. and he convened a large group using his influence as a well-known and highly effective evangelist an he convened a huge number of pastors cutting across all lines. and ronald reagan spoke to that group, and james told ronald reagan, he coached him on what to say and what reagan said that day was groundbreaking. he said, i know you can't endorse me but i want you to know i endorse you. that was a watershed moment as people of faith realized they could come together and impact their country as patriots themselves. with their faith postures at work in the political marketplace. well, james and his wife betty is here, as well, today. have become alarmed as many of us in a special way in the last few years and james is stepping

up once more as a citizen patriot raising the alarm there's something amiss in the book and written a book with jay richards" indivisible" which you'll hear about shortly. listen to james carefully today as a deep be before you today to introduce the next speaker. jay richards is a senior fellow at the discovery institute directing the center of wealth, poverty and morality. dr. richards written many academic articles, books and

essays on a wide variety of subjects and produced several documentarie documentaries. a previous book he wrote "money, greed and god" won in 2010. this book also had a significant impact on my education in economics by giving an understandable approach for the moral argument for free markets and showed that all you really need to know about free markets an economics you learned in kindergarten. i won't reveal the secret. you can ask him about that afterwards. when dr. richards isn't appearing on "larry king live," lecturing members of the u.s. congress or producing documentaries he is a contributing editor of "the american" which is a publication of the american enterprise unit, a visiting fellow at the american heritage, a research fellow at the acting institute. he's here with james robison with "indivisible: restoring faith and freedom before it's too late." today our society is riddled

with fatherless homes and abortions, a national debt on the verge of $16 trillion and the government that's growing increasingly out of control. to quote dr. richards, today we are fighting a culture war, not a civil war. a culture war is unlike ordinary political debates. it is a fight over the fundamental principles of which cultures are based. end quote. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming dr. jay richards. [ applause ] >> well, it's wonderful to be here. i'm actually now at the discovery institute in seattle but have been at a number of think tanks throughout my year and i'm a little intimidated. try to put yourself in my shoes. so we have heard from governors, we have heard from glenn beck and amazing speakers and now hearing from a philosopher to use slides. right? so, you know, that's where the basic story. but i honestly felt like

something important was supposed to happen here in weekend. a couple of weeks ago i had given a speech and lost my voice right after and didn't have a voice several days and then last tuesday, i threw out my back could barely stand so i had to get medicines and spent two days at summit industries in colorado spring where is the fires were and i thought there's so much opposition. i feel like i have to get down to colorado. and i got to tell you. the energy in this room is spectacular. i spend most of my time in seattle in the city and so you can imagine if you're sort of conservative christian in seattle if you don't get out to things like this frequently you start to think maybe i'm the one that's crazy. but this book "indivisible" what we want to do in it is in the title. james robison and i are convinced that conservatives if we learn to work together and learn to think together and commit ourselves to a

foundational set of principles can still turn the culture around. the problem is, of course, is that there are a lot of things that want to separate us. all of us part of the conservative movement know for instance conservatism is described as a three-legged stool. this is sort of a common way of describing conservatism. the idea of a three-legged stool is three coalition that is come together in the american conservative movement. there's fiscal conservatives, those are the people interested in limited government, free markets, you know, government doing a few things and then otherwise staying out of our lives. social conservatives who are concerned about cultural issues and concerned these days especially about questions of life, abortion, euthanasia, religious freedom and called soesh conservatives and then the third leg is foreign policy conservatives and just people believe we must have a muscular foreign policy a that's a core competence of the

government. the three ideas and sort of strands supposedly come together to form the conservative movement. now, the media loves this description because it makes it sound like conservatism is essentially a marriage of convenience. right? it's three different disparate groups of people that don't agree amongst themselves with different world crvoous and a polygamist marriage of inconvenience. that's the idea that a lot of folks want to believe about the conservative movement and there are intellectual tensions, unfortunately. and the one tension i want to talk about this morning, really two, is this tension we have heard something about already. is there really a fundamental contradiction between the things that most libertarians believe and then things that social is there a conflict as many young christians now believe? i spent a lot of time on college campuses. a lot of the 18 to 21-year-old christians in the united states are convinced that capitalism

and free enterprise is fundamentally incompatible with bein christian, the economic system contradicts with the christian world view and the two most potent and dangerous conflicts i think we have to deal with if we're going to have in the conservative movement not merely a marriage of convenience or a marriage of inconvenience, but intellectual program that we can stand firm on and that we can come together on in the public square to transform the public square. in the book james and i argue that in terms of a diagnosis about what's happening insomein the population self identifies as christian and a sizable number beyond that actually subscribe to the idea there's a creator and endowed by the creator with certain inalienabl means a majority of the american public is theists. how is it that the commanding heights of culture have been almost entirely occupied by the

secular left? what's happened? in the first century a small band o christians were houned and tortured and killed by the roman empire and yet within three centuries they had transformed western civilization and the roman empire itself. now, if they can do that, why is it that som8 of us can't manage to turn the culture around? well, we think the reason that we can't do that is because we spent a lot of time fighting amongst ourselves. so what i want to talk about far anuple of minutes before tension between the social conservatives and fiscal conservatives and this tension between capitalism and the jude owe christian world view. you know, right after the 2008 election, there was a debate among conservatives about whose fault it was that we'd lost the election and a lot of people were sniping at each other so you got so-called fiscal conservatives or libertarians

attacking the social conservatives saying if we weren't saddled with the argument of gay marriage we could have won the election and went back and forth and i found this quote online in one of the debate that is's a perfect distillation of the complaint. i call it the libertarian complaint not because all libertarians think this way but a sizable people in the conservative party that see it this way. he said social conservatives need to understand that moderates, libertarians, small government conservatives, national security conservatives generally share their values on the issues of lower taxes, reducing government spending, strong defense, gun control, but that the social conservatives' positions on abortion, gay rights, et cetera are seen as government intrusion on personal liberty based on a particular religious belief system. okay. so do you see his point? what he is saying is that if you believe in limited government and individual rights and things like that, thing that is conservatives are supposed to believe in, you're actually being inconsistent if you think

the government ought to also take a pro-life position or that it ought to also recognize a traditional view of marriage. saying that's actually intellectual inconsistent. you can believe in limited government or you can believe in this kind of awe her to taryn idea where y the government forces the government but you can't do both. that's a much more important intellectual disagreement to resolve rath every than the things the left want to hoist on us. i've talked to people this weekend that expressed something like this idea. so let's just talk for a few minutes of what i would call the tough cases. for the person that sees himself as a fiscal conservative oral a libertarian, it's life, marriage and religious freedom. so let's just take life. i can't cover all of these but let's see if we can show that even given what libertarians believe they ought to be pro-life. in fact, i would go further.

i would say if libertarians believe what they claim to believe about individual states and rights, a recognize that, you can get to a defense of traditional marriage recommendseddy the states. let's just take life this morning. so here's the question. if you think of yourself as a libertarian and believe government caught to be limited, the question is, what limits the state? what is the thing that makes the government limited? what are we talking about when we say that? obviously, we are talking about the idea that the government, the state has some core competence, things to do and other things not supposed to do. it has a proper jurisdiction and then there's areas it has no jurisdiction over. well, there's sort of short answer of what limits the state is called philosophically -- what i'm talking aboutolitwial government is limited it recognizes that there are things out there already in the world

that a just and limited government recognizes. it doesn't define those things, it doesn't redefine them but recognizes the prepolitical realities out there already existing before a political experiment ever got off the ground. and of course, the most important prepolitical reality that most libertarians emphasize is the individual. right? now remember. every president -- i've been able to find quotes certainly from george washington and fdr to president obama and all of them say things like this. the government does not give us our rights. we get our rights from god. and a just and limited government simply recognizes those rights. that's a hugely important way of putting it and how thomas jefferson put it in the deck ra lags of independence. right? we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. in other words, those things, those individuals with natures

and rights, those exist prior to the state. a state doesn't define what those are. if a state is limited it simply recognizes that there are individuals that have a proper domain of autonomy and freedom that a just government must recognize. this is the exactly the opposite of the progressive sort of understanding of the individual and certainly the communist understanding of the individual. in the 20th century, certainly soviet communism argued there wasn't anything like an individual with inherent rights, rather, the individual only has existence and meaning and purpose insofar as it's a part of the sort of state collectivement right? it's a fundamentally different view of what the human person is and so you believe in limited government you already believe there's something outside the state that it simply must recognize. there's at least one prepolitical reality. right? the individual. so no one would say, well, i don't think the government should get in to the individual business.

you know? stay out of our lives. i think individuals have rights and some people don't think that. so, you know, live and let live. right? we wouldn't see that as a libertarian position. that's anarchy. in fact, the whole point of the american expert is a limited state recognizes those things outside it. now, so important because even ayn rand, sort of the hard core atheist and ar dant defender of capitalism in the 20th century said this. rand was an atist and yet she said this. man, every man, is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. now, i don't know where rand got that in the world view. all right? but i mean, i'm a christian in america saying, yes, exactly. we are made in the image of god. we are not simply tools for other people to use. and so rand herself believed in the inherent dignity and value of the individual. well, guess what.

that's precisely the same foundation of the pro-life argument. rand herself was rabidly pro-choice but pro-choice not by sag, well, the unborn are humans but it's okay to murder. what she did is she believed a pseudoscientific theory and thought that the unborn child went through different stages and one stage was a fish and reptile and this sort of crazy stuff that no one seriously beliefs and if you kill an unborn being you are not killing a human. she was inconsistent. but she still believed in the dignity of the individual. a lot of people say, yeah, but if you're pro life you are imposing a kind of religious idea on the question. that's not true. if you read the literature, the sort of debate over the pro life issue you never find anyone arguing over questions of the soul in the bod day enthiand th like that. all you need to get from the

value of the individual which is state must protect to the pro life case is a little clear thinking and basic biology. every one of you was at one point in time an embryo. every one of you at one time was a fetus. every one of you was at one point a preborn child. and a newborn. and then an infant and a toddler and a child and a teenager. what are those things? are we describing different realities? of course not. we're simply describing different stages in development of the same identical individual through time. and so, if each of us are humans, and we are identical with something that was once an embryo or a fetus, then whatever that is, by definition, it has to be human. and in fact, if you actually look at the biology there's no -- nonarbitrary way of excludeing a preborn human being from the sort of class of people

that are members of the human race. you get all sorts of ad hoc justifications. well, this being is dependent on another for its existence. it's small. it's not self aware. weird things like this but we have never useded the criteria to divine other people out of others. we don't think a small child that's just born is dependent upon its mother and doesn't mean it's not human. in other words, all you need is a commitment to the inherent dignity of the individual and then basic libertarian idea that the main job of the state is to protect human beings and human individuals from molestation and destruction at the hands of others. libertarian is not an anarchist. libertarian believes the state has a role and supposed to recognize these realities out there and protect them. so you can actually get from the libertarian sort of world view straight to i think a pro life cause fairly ease len ado it talking about marriage.

there's other prepolitical realities. the problem is i think sometimes people think the only thing for the government to recognize is individuals and nothing else out there. there's at least three other prepolitical realities. there's the church, there's the family and there's the institution of marriage. in fact, the institution of marriage is more universal historically than the american ideal of individual rights. in every time, place and religion that we know of, those places have all recognized this fundamental institution, a human institution, based in human nature. there's diversity, of course. polygamy is the most sort of radical diversity but you can still in the different cultures whether in england or paw paw new guinea, marriage is understood of something to do with a public commitment of a man and a woman who are complimentary beings come together in a public covenant for the bearing and the raising of children.

that's what the word marriage in english has meant and every other language has some word for referring to that institution. and so, if that's what marriage is, then we need a word for it. so whatever you think about homo sexuality or same-sex partnerships or whatever, there's still this reality out there in the world that's universal. and so what that means is that if a government is limited and just, just as it recognizes the reality of individuals, it will also recognize the prepolitical reality of a universal institution such as marriage. so you see the point? a tolerant government will do that. it's not a tolerant act for a state to decide that it's going to irrigate to itself the authority to redefine an institution that exists prior to it just as it's not tolerant for a government to redefine what the human individual is. that's a totalitarian act. if a government is just and

limited, it will recognize those realities outside itself and those include things and individuals, churches, voluntary institutions and above all the institution of the family. you see the point? that argument doesn't require we get in to a debate on theology. doesn't require we try to interpret genesis 1. we are going from the belief that limited government recognizes the things outside its juic and then think for a while what they are and get from limited government to a government that recognizes the rights of unborn human beings and the legitimacy and reality of the institution of marriage. that doesn't convince everyone but i think anyone that thinks of themselves as a libertarian thinks consistently and clearly is not sort of rabidly pro choice ought to see the wisdom in this. this is important because we have to learn how to think together. james and i wanted tonight to develop an argument for

principles and arguments for all of us as conservative can actually think alike and see why we need to go together. now, there's a lot of interesting cross connections between social and fiscal issues. let me give you one. the number one predictor of childhood poverty in the united states is whether there's a father in the home of that child or not. in other words, an economic issue, probably the most important one, whether a child lives in poverty in this country is determined by a so-called social or moral issue, the health of the family. these things simply can't be separated. let's take kind of the other side of the argument, though. the moral dilemma that a lot of young christians see and we saw it in the occupy wall street movement. i don't think they accomplished a lot but they did accomplish this new way of speaking in which people are talking in terms of 99% and the 1%. this is a very prevalent idea and people think, look, if we're created equal how just is it that some people have a lot more

money than others? we have this in our language. right? some people get more than their fair i share. the richer get richer, the poorer get poorer. millions of college students otherwise christians and maybe conservative nevertheless think that an economic system that allows inequality is immoral. so what we are saying about that? what i would argue is when people see economic inequality and immediately think it's immoral, they think it's moral judgment but they're connecting an observation and an institution of human inequality with a bad understanding of the reality of economics. and because they do that, they misunderstand what's happening in the economy as a whole. well, jonathan mentioned that i learned everything that i needed to know in economics in kindergarten. i say that in this book and really more or less the sixth grade because what people are doing when they think that

inequality's unjust is they're assuming that our economy, that a free trade economy is a zero sum game. that's a word from game theory, many of you may have heard it before. all it means is that zero sum game is a win/lose game and logic of the rules is such if one person wins somebody else has to lose. football, baseball, basketball, chess, checkers, most of the games we play, right? just the logic of the game. if there's one person to win, another person has to lose. so it sums the zero, win/lose. so you can just imagine there's obviously at least two other kinds of games. there's win/lose. there's lose/lose. those are games when everyone that plays ends up worse than they started off. why are we doing this? that would be a lose/lose game. not a lot of examples. if there's win-slooz and lose lsh slooz there's in theory got to be win/win games. not everyone ends up equally

well off. it is a game of everyone that plays over time ends up better off than they would have been if they hadn't played. the comparison the between me and the guy across the street with aer er iferrari. the comparison is me in a free economy and me in an unfree economy and if we are better off as a result of a certain type of economic system and all of us are better off than we're in a win-win game. what's a free market economy? well, what's funny about this is the second you sort of ask it, you can answer it. it's a fairly simple illustration. this is what i learned in the sixth grade. and the sixth grade we were in from recess one day and our teacher -- i apparently anticipated the bad weather and came in to the class with toys m probably bought in a dollar bin at a department store and passed out the toys one by one. like silly putty egg. paddle ball.

barbie, trading cards and passed it out and everybody had a different toy. and she said, okay, compare your toy and write down between 1 and 10 if you really like your toy, give it a 10. if you hate it, trade it for anything else, give it a 1. we all wrote down our numbers on a piece of paper and then she had us call out the numbers and added up the total an put them on a board. right? say -- i don't remember the number. say it was 75. okay. now in the first round of the game, you can freely trade with anyone else that's in your row. all right? so think of this as sort of five rows of five seats to keep it simple. we had four potential trading partners. notice she said you can freely trade with anyone that's in your row. what does that mean? i'm free to clock the smaller kid over the head and sort of take his toy? of course not. if it's free, it's free on both sides and means that it's only going to happen if both people

want to trade and so you can imagine a few trades and people trading within their row but not a lot of activity and then she said, okay, now grade the toy you have in your hand. we called out the number again and she wrote it on the board. guess what happened? you heard me tell the story, you know what happened. the number went up. i would maintain this is one of the greatest mysteries in the universe right here. nothing new is added to the system. right? really got interesting in the second round. she said, now, you can freely trade with everyone else in the room. so suddenly you can and the pandemonium. everyone has 24 trading partners initially and then mass chaos and finally settles down. we call out the numbers again. adds up the total again and you know what happened, right? the number went way, way up. what's happening? think about it for a minute. there's an initial input of stuff, in this case, the toys.

and then all we had is a system of rules in which the rules determined what we could and could not do. and it mimicked free trade. notice this was not anarchy. there was a rule of law in place. the teacher enforced it. we're in the school. right? we knew we couldn't steal from each other or kill or threaten each other. if you're going to trade, that channels the activities and that rule of law channelled the activities in to engagements that by definition were win-win because a trade never takes place unless both people making the trade, if it's a free trade, see themselves better off as a result. it's just the very logic of the system of the free market is such if it's really free people that engage in it are going to benefit and the more people that engage in it the more everyone benefits as a result. now, find that sort of profound discovery. as i