Rick Beggs Welcome to the Compass, navigating the public square together with faith, truth and conviction.

Rick Beggs Well, welcome to another edition of the Compass. We're so glad you're with us this afternoon. let me just say this. I don't know how you're listening to us. It may be on, the app. If you don't have it, you ought to get it. You may have gone to ivoterguide.com and you saw our little insignia down at the bottom. Compass. Wait, I haven't even introduced you and you're already coming in on this, so. And then you could go to afr.net this is going to be a good show.

Debbie Wuthnow It's going to be good.

Rick Beggs Well, she's already spoken, so why don't you welcome Debbie. Debbie, say hey to the crowd.

Debbie Wuthnow Hey guys. And hey Rick. It's great to be back with you and in person again. So, so fun.

Rick Beggs And we're with Willie B. Today, our producer.

Debbie Wuthnow Love Willie.

Rick Beggs So it's very good. It's always good to be with him. Anyway, we, were in the middle of, doing several shows. We thought it was going to be one or two. Now it's going to be three and four and who knows, it could be 12 with our interview with George Barna and, there was so much data in that, discovery he had for us. But I need you, Debbie, to get us back to where we need to start off today. So could you give us a little summary of episode one and two with George?

Debbie Wuthnow Well, sure. You know, to that point, George told me there were like tens of thousands of data points. So what we've tried to do is to, I'm going to go up to 30,000 foot and kind of view it from the top, see where we've gotten so far, and then Rick and I'll dive a little bit deeper. So we asked George to do some research into endowed ballot voting. Nobody, had really looked at most polls, looked at top of the race, you know, senate race, presidential, who's voting. They didn't really go down ballot.

Rick Beggs He was m really excited about this.

Debbie Wuthnow He really was. I mean, he's been doing this 30 years or more and nobody ever done it because nobody paid for it. Right. So it was exciting.

Rick Beggs So here we are.

Debbie Wuthnow So here we are. Well, and that's part of the whole, the whole reason is that people just don't focus, focus on down ballot. So but what he learned is that 85% of likely voters, and he did survey 2,000 likely voters in this poll. It was a really very quality George Barna poll that had a less than 2% margin, of error. Of those 2,000 likely voters, 85% of them will vote at the top of the ballot, which could be governor, could be Senator, but only 55% will complete their whole ballot. So, that's like a 30 point drop or 35% of those voters will not fill in their whole ballot, which is. We weren't surprised by that. But to see it put in numbers with Georgia's authenticity was very confirming to what we've been doing. So there's a lack of information out there. Oh, well, the next thing we found out is why don't they vote down ballot? And the number one reason was they don't have enough information about the candidates on the ballot. That was by far the number one answer. and that the race that was most confusing to them was the school board races. And we talked about last week how frequently school boards are nonpartisan. There's no party label attached to, to the candidate names to guide you, no Republican or Democrat. So people don't know who they are. You know, they've seen yard signs, maybe very rarely for school board. They don't know who to vote for. So they skip it and leave it blank.

Rick Beggs We're an interesting place because this is really a huge commercial for why we exist. I mean, what really George did was prove why a voter guide needed to be created. And of course, God spoke that into two men years ago. And here we find ourselves. What George has done is really stamped

Debbie Wuthnow approval of the business case in a way. and the need.

Rick Beggs Yeah, are you done with your summary?

Debbie Wuthnow I think I hit the top of. I mean, if I remember something, I'll pop it in later.

Rick Beggs I don't want to make sure I don't cut you off. You know how you get. anyway, we decided on, the third episode, sort of the big idea was really going to be, how do we get unbiased information that can move voters and the church and of course their families? and you know, years ago, like I said, iVoterGuide when it started, it was really just going to be for Texas. When it went nationwide, we started understanding that not only did we need to cover all the federal races and the high state races, we really needed to go down ballot. And that's where we find ourselves now is to make sure that we are, trying to drive information down to judges and city council and school board races.

Debbie Wuthnow Well, you know, I think what George confirmed is that that was the right direction, that the more we can do down ballot the more needed. That is, as you can imagine, the scope of that is daunting. but the need is.

Rick Beggs And the cost is daunting.

Debbie Wuthnow And the cost is great. Yeah.

Rick Beggs And that when you think about it, if you just think of just all the school board races that are within your county.

Rick Beggs You know, I just, it's unfathomable how much work has to be done in order for people to get this information. But we're starting.

Debbie Wuthnow We are. Yeah. I've actually started to look at how many school districts are in each of the counties across the nation as part of just a. What would it take? That was the question. What would it take to cover all of them? It varies and it's shocking.

Rick Beggs And if you're one of our listeners and you have a great love for us, doing this, we'd love for you to write to us and let us know. We, we would love to maybe even use you as a panelist or something in some respects that we could get this information out to people. So where are we going to go today, David? Did I just call you David? Where are we going to go today?

Debbie Wuthnow How did you know?

Rick Beggs I don't know. I don't know. I just, I really. What I want to ask you. Here's the question I wanted to ask you, David. was, how do we nudge people? How are we going to get them to move to be good voters?

Debbie Wuthnow Well, we had George ask that question.

Rick Beggs Oh, okay.

Debbie Wuthnow Which you know, you want to ask. If there's a problem, the next question is going to be what's the solution going to be? Right. So we learned that people didn't vote down ballot, they didn't vote for lack of information. But then we specifically asked what would cause you to change your behavior? you would think, or I would assume if the lack of information is the problem, that the solution might be information.

Rick Beggs More information, More information.

Debbie Wuthnow And not surprisingly, that was the number one response that what they were looking for was a trusted, accurate, non biased source of candidate information. 33% of voters said that that would make them much more likely. But if we included likely and much More likely, it's 2/3 of voters that said information would cause them to complete their entire ballot, not just turn up to vote, but to fill in all the races.

Rick Beggs And when we're talking about information, we're not Talking about the 33 million flyers you get in the mail. We're talking about somebody has done some work.

Debbie Wuthnow Yeah. If you've never seen I voter guide you have no idea. Honestly, I've been in presentations where I show it and literally gasps happen in the audience because it is not, you know, these six issues. And this candidate supports, reposes. It is so in depth and all just gathered for you, the voter, to make it easy for you to make that decision. Take a look at it. And you know, I think we're having. This is gonna be on the air, the Saturday after Share-a-thon If you didn't support AFR during shareathon and you check out ivoterguide and see value, it's never too late to support American Family Association, American Family Radio and I. Voter guide.

Rick Beggs Why don't we listen to George?

Debbie Wuthnow Let's do it.

Rick Beggs Let's play clip nine.

George Barna Interestingly, voter guides came out as being absolutely crucial to them. Now what we've seen is that voter guides typically don't give the kind of down ballot information that people are looking for. So I think that's one of the interesting, combinations here.

Debbie Wuthnow Voter guides, huh?

Rick Beggs well, Debbie, as president of ivoterguide, what would you have to say about that?

Debbie Wuthnow Well, not all voter guides are created equal. As I was saying earlier, an ivoterguide is unique, and it's personalized and it's free and it's that unbiased, trustworthy information. But it's also so much more in depth than you would, assume. Right. Most voter guides you might get would be just one race at the top of the ticket. So we cover, further down the ballot, and we also go more in depth in the research. So I'll talk about the coverage first. So we obviously covered, when we went nationwide, all the federal races. We added a number of states where we covered statewide races like governor, attorney general, and we've added to that state supreme court races, which is. We've had another episode. We talked about what goes into that judicial research, which is really unique. And they are considered down ballot even though they're statewide because it's not at the top. We cover state legislature. And then what we've really seen the increasing need, even before the George Bonner research, George really confirmed that we were moving in the right direction, which was adding, the local races, more, ballot measures, more school board races, and we're even researching some county commissioners and city council members because that's where the information is lacking. This year we're covering or at least researched every school board candidate in Virginia, the state of Virginia, quite a few in the state of Florida. So trying to give that depth of research which Includes not just their position on issues, but, you know, who they give money to, who they gave money to them if they, haven't been legislators or if they're at their school board level. But we have a team that's listening to school board meeting minutes or reading through transcripts and finding the votes of those incumbents takes a lot of people. It is a lot. Well, we talked about last time. It's finding hen's teeth, finding the needle in the haystack. Takes a lot of people. Takes time, take, takes bandwidth, to expand that coverage. But George's research confirmed that that's really what will help move people.

Rick Beggs And if you don't remember how to use ivoterguide or have never been to it, it'd be real important maybe to go back to some of our earlier episodes where we really walk through ivoterguide and how to use it. But really it's go to ivoterguide.com and you put in your address and boom, your ballot will come up. And all the research has been done for you. You just, click on little tabs and you find out social media, you find out, how they voted, if they've been in office, you found out who gave them money, who they give money to. It is unbelievable, the information you can get on our website.

Debbie Wuthnow Take a look. Take a look.

Rick Beggs Yeah. Now I'm, I'm going to step into something right now that I'm not sure. maybe I'm not.

Debbie Wuthnow Are you going to get on your soapbox?

Rick Beggs Well, you know, this is me. there's only a couple things especially have to do with voting that really push my button. And one of them is the church. And we asked George a little bit about this, actually, we asked a lot, a bit about it, but, and he gave us a lot of information.

Debbie Wuthnow It's a favorite topic of his too.

Rick Beggs It is. And, and what I, what I really want to do is I want to give a positive Atta boy to our pastors out there who really take serious not telling their congregations how to vote. I think that is not what we should be doing. We should be encouraging our people to be good citizens and to vote to stewardship. Yeah. And so I think a lot of times pastors, they don't want to get their hands dirty or their minds dirty, supposedly by mixing politics with the church. But voting is not about politics. There's a political outcome from it. But voting is about being a good citizen.

Debbie Wuthnow It really is a stewardship responsibility.

Rick Beggs And so I really want to make sure that I'M promoting those pastors who are least willing to stand in the pulpit and say, vote, it's coming. They may not want to, you know, push out a voter guide, especially us. We, would appreciate if they did. It'd be free. It's a lot of work that we've done. But we would really like pastors to encourage their people to go to the ballot box and to get informed. That's what we're here for, is to inform. And so I want to say thanks, pastors, for those of you who are doing it. If you don't have a pastor that does that, at least does that minimal part to encourage the congregates to vote and you have a relationship, maybe you don't need a relationship. I would really encourage you as our listeners to go to them.

Rick Beggs And talk to them.

Debbie Wuthnow Maybe nobody's talked to them about. Encourage them to. They're afraid. Some of them are afraid that they'll lose people, they'll lose support. Let them know that that's what you'd like him to do. Give him courage, give him backbone, have their back.

Rick Beggs Yeah. and you know, they're being stewards of their time in the pulpit as well. So we understand that, there's a time to do this, but every church should be promoting people to vote because what are the stats, Debbie? A lot of people that sit in pews are not voting. They're not even registered to vote.

George Barna Right, right.

Debbie Wuthnow It should be. Every Christian, I mean, God calls us to be, this is our soapbox, to be salt and light. We need to engage with culture. And we did talk with George about this quite a bit too.

Rick Beggs Well, I also want to say too, that, in the, you'll remember the statistic, but even in the research George did, pastors didn't have that much influence over congregates. But I think I read into the, the percentage of it was because they're not talking about it. So that's why they don't have influence over their congregation.

Debbie Wuthnow yeah, we can, I don't know do we have that clip to play? But, but George talked about that, you know, there's been a changing role of pastors and I know George has been studying, you know, worldviews of pastors and you know, so many of them have stepped away from speaking into those things. I don't know if that's why they lose influence. I don't know if it's a part of, you know, how much of your week, how much time do you spend in front of a Pastor in your week, an hour.

Rick Beggs Yeah.

Debbie Wuthnow I mean, compared to everything, culture and TV and entertainment, the influence is less just because of that.

Rick Beggs Well, if we have, Brent, if we have C11, would you play that?

George Barna And so you've got evangelical oriented churches that often don't lift a finger to get their people to vote. And it's because their view is, you know what, we're pure, we just talk about faith, spiritual, biblical faith here. And we don't want to dirty ourselves with politics, which is very fascinating to me when I find those churches, because it tells me what the worldview is that people in those congregations are going to be exposed to, which is you can limit your faith, you can decide where you're going to participate in society. And yet when you look at the life of Christ, he went everywhere, he dealt with everybody, he took on every issue. There was nothing that was out of bounds for him. And yet the modern, allegedly biblical church is giving people a very different set of marching orders. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. What you're called to do is to come to church, give us money, enroll in our programs, do these things. But don't worry about politics because you're not going to be saved by politics. Well, we don't get involved in politics because we believe it's going to save people. Of course it's not going to save people. We're getting involved in politics because we don't want people to be kept from being saved, you know, not having the opportunity to hear gospel, not having the opportunity to live the gospel. And so that's why we participate in these things.

Rick Beggs Amen and amen. I just can't, you know that line, we don't do politics because we, people are going to get saved by doing politics. We get involved so that we can keep being able to be the group that can tell, get, bring the message of the gospel. And it really becomes a stewardship issue with the people in the congregations. But he also talked about, parents and maybe you, you and I, Debbie can talk just for a moment about not just the role of the pastor having more of an influence because they have lost influence in this realm, but I think mostly because they don't want to talk about it. But also parents, they have an influence into their kids. So as these kids are growing up to become voters, become citizens, I don't think these things are talked about even at home, let alone the church.

Debbie Wuthnow Well, you know, as a parent,

George Barna we

Debbie Wuthnow take them to church, we take them to Youth group. We take them to kids and awanas and all that. And not all of us, but some delegated the responsibility of that training of their children in the way they should go to the church and to the Sunday school teacher and, to a DARE election. It was not a good thing. So, you know, some of us are being convicted, myself included, that we could have done more. If we could go back, we'd do it differently. But, you know, we're supposed to talk about it as we walk along the road, as we're, you know, baking dinner, as we're folding the laundry. We need to talk about, God and our relationship with him and our roles and responsibilities. Not just to attend church every week, but to live out that life.

Rick Beggs Well, and I will say, when I was growing up, I think it was not necessarily right, but it happened. And that's where spiritual development and formation did happen, at church. Sometimes I wonder if, you know, our churches are slipping away from a biblical worldview. They aren't necessarily doing that anymore. So that makes it fall on the parents. Well, it should fall on the parents, but they relegated that to the church. Likewise, being a good citizen or civics, we allowed the schools to teach that.

Debbie Wuthnow Right.

Rick Beggs They're not teaching that anymore.

Debbie Wuthnow No, we assume they're teaching what we were taught, but they're not. And that was really the big wake up call, you know, Loudoun County, Covid, all of that. Parents attending school board meetings because schools went virtual and parents could finally see what was going on. And they woke up to realize what, you know, we need to get involved in all of this. So that's part. That's when we started covering school boards. That's when we started, I think there's a big move in parental rights as parents are understanding that it is their responsibility to raise their children. But, you know, many on the left believe it's the government's responsibility. They like it that the kids get. In fact, they want, you know, earlier schools, you know, K through 2, preschool, get them all in there so we can indoctrinate them. That's, you know, a quote from Lenin or Marx of, you know, give me the children and I'll control the world. Basically.

Rick Beggs That's right.

Debbie Wuthnow You know, it's, give me the.

Rick Beggs And you can do it in a generation. Yeah, we've proven that. So we tried to give the responsibility as parents. You said you were guilty as charged. I'm guilty as charged. Probably everybody listening is guilty as charged. We allowed the church to do spiritual training when we should have been doing it. We allowed the school to teach them to be good citizens when we should have been doing it. And now we find ourselves in a place where people don't want to get involved and they don't think, especially as Christians. That's not something that I wanted as a part of my life. It couldn't be farther from the truth.

Debbie Wuthnow You want to hear it in George's words?

Rick Beggs Yeah.

Debbie Wuthnow Let's hear clip 12, please.

George Barna I think we assume the pastors have a lot more influence than they do these days. You know, 40 years ago, yes, that, that would have been the case. Today it's different. Pastors aren't trusted as much as they used to be. Pastors aren't turned to as often as they used to be. And the advice that pastors give isn't followed as often as it used to be. So are they leaders? Yes. Do they have influence? Yes. But we can't put all of it on their shoulders. I'd say it's vitally important that parents recognize that biblically, I mean, you know, start in M. Deuteronomy 6 and work your way through the scriptures. You know, this is. Your job is to be doing this because you're teaching your children by what you say, what you think, what you do. They're going to pick that up more by observation than by direct teaching. The direct teaching is going to support and explain the observations that they have. So, yeah, I think parents have to be doing a lot more of that heavy lifting.

Debbie Wuthnow Convicting.

Rick Beggs Yeah. I want to go backwards a little bit before we come to the close of the show. I know that he did, some surveying about mainline church attenders versus evangelical, if you will, in regards to who's likely to look at a candidate's worldview. Of course, if you don't have a good biblical worldview, you don't even know what you're looking for in a candidate. But mainline attenders are least likely to vote based on the value of a candidate's worldview. That's really scary when you think about it.

Debbie Wuthnow Yeah. You know, George's research a lot of times says the most prominent worldview is syncretism. People have made up their own, basically pieced and parted their faith from different religions, near east, you know, whatever. And, so then they're looking for candidates to share that synchronistic.

Rick Beggs It's sort of like when somebody makes a statement to me, well, that doesn't agree with my truth. Really?

Debbie Wuthnow My truth?

Rick Beggs Your truth. Okay.

Debbie Wuthnow Isn't there the truth?

Rick Beggs There's something the truth. Yeah. versus, that's 29%, value a candidate's worldview if you're a mainline church at Dender, versus almost a 50% worldview if you're an evangelical. Which is better. It's a lot better. But it's only half.

Debbie Wuthnow I know. Half's a good. Majority's good.

Rick Beggs Yeah, 52%.

Debbie Wuthnow We got a ways to go.

Rick Beggs Right.

Debbie Wuthnow This culture has slidden.

Rick Beggs Yeah. when I listened to the numbers and George talking to us, I didn't know whether to be excited because we think we have an answer to the question why aren't people voting? And why aren't they voting down ballot? But I was a little discouraged just how far we are off the mark.

Debbie Wuthnow Well, and a lot of us tend to work in a circle of we're in our own little bubble. Right. My sphere of my church, my neighborhood, my family. And we lose that whole cultural perspective. And George, that's what George looks at. So he's painting a better picture, a more accurate picture, I guess, of where American voters are and there's work to do. we each need to do our part, but it can be done. God sovereign.

Rick Beggs Well, if you haven't listened to the other two episodes of this, I want to encourage you to go back and do that because it'll give you the full picture. We're going to even spend next week talking a little bit more about who is movable, who can we move in the voting structure that allows people to choose good candidates? And what do you have to do to do that? We have found out that it's more information. If we can get more information, people will make better choices. So we'll talk about millennials next week. We'll talk about independent voters next week. And then some of the kind of effects that we feel that we need to participate in at iVoterGuide. So, I mean, this is, it's a wonderful time to be alive. For some reason, God put us on the earth at this point in time, and I trust that, we're going to have, some great influence into the future.

Debbie Wuthnow Well, now is the time. Right. We are in the season. You guys probably realize less than a month for the election, it's your phone's blowing up, your email's getting crazy with what's going on. And please don't just disengage. Stay involved. M. Seek the truth, use the truth.

Rick Beggs I'm not even concerned about our listeners. They're listening to us because they know this is important. It's really getting the message out and pushing it out to others. So we just want to make sure that you have all the resources you need to make good decisions and then pass that information on again. You're not telling people how to vote.

Debbie Wuthnow Right.

Rick Beggs You're giving them the hope and idea that they can do their research. That or look through the research we've already done so then they could go vote wisely.

Debbie Wuthnow Well, and even we'll be before election day, we'll be talking about the power of each person's vote. Right. Don't be discouraged when you think presidential and there's millions of people who vote. Races are won in the margins. They're won by dozens, hundreds, thousands of votes. And it's really especially down ballot. So really critical for you to feel empowered, for you to be equipped and for you to share with, your friends and your family.

Rick Beggs Well, you know what that sound is, Debbie?

Debbie Wuthnow I do.

Rick Beggs We're in voting season, not primary season. This is big time voting now.

Debbie Wuthnow Big time midterm elections. We're in the off season, off year elections and it's coming up on November 3rd. Early voting is going on right now in a whole bunch of states. Minnesota, South Dakota, Virginia, Vermont, Illinois, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Montana, Indiana, NewSong Mexico, Ohio, Wyoming, Arizona. You're already early voting in Georgia. Early voting will begin, rick, on the 13th.

George Barna Get ready.

Rick Beggs That's me.

Debbie Wuthnow Idaho in person. Absentee voting begins on the 13th as well in Iowa, Rhode island and Tennessee. Early voting begins on the 14th. North Carolina. Early voting begins on the 15th. You got to get out there and vote and use ivoterguide before you do it.

Rick Beggs Well, we've come to the end of this show, Debbie, and we'll talk more George next week. But I want to say to our listeners, thanks for joining us. Remember, you can pick us up on the AFR app. You can go to afr.net better yet, go to ivoterguide and go down to the bottom right hand corner and you can find our little emblem for the compass. We are grounded in God and rooted in research. Our producer is Brent Austin and I just want to remind everybody on the compass that Jesus will always be our true north. Thank you for joining us.

Rick Beggs Sam.