Tim Wildmon: Hey, welcome back, everybody, to Today's Issues on the American Family Radio Network. Thanks for listening to AFR. I'm Tim, with Ed and Chris, and Ray. Ray's from Florida. We're in Mississippi, and we thank you for listening, whatever state you may be in.

Ed: Whichever blue state you may be in.

Chris: I see what you did there. It took me about three seconds, but I see you were just wanting to remind us how bad Tuesday was.

Tim Wildmon: We're all a little blue.

Ed: Blue with the blues. Sadder than sad.

Tim Wildmon: All right, but hey, today's a new day, and we've got to get to work, right?

Ed: That's right. That's right. So we took a couple of days off to mourn.

Chris: We did. We dressed in black, and we patted each other on the back of the shoulder.

Ed: Yeah, sorry to hear that news. Texas was lost.

Tim Wildmon: But remember the Alamo. There's a comeback on the horizon.

Chris: We do actually have a story about that.

Tim Wildmon: Listen, let me just say this. Yes, we're joking around here. What do you do, right? You've got to have a little sense of humor about this thing. But I would say this: As bad as Tuesday was, remember, two years ago, it was the other way.

Ed: Yeah, that's right.

Tim Wildmon: Okay, we're dealing with a lot of fickle citizens out there who don't have a lot of principles. They look at it and say, "You're telling me that our representatives or public officials hinge on $4.25 or $3.96 a gallon of gasoline? That's what you're voting on?" I know people say, "Well, you don't understand. That's my business, or that hurts my pocketbook." I understand that is a factor. Economics is a real factor and always has been. But I'm just saying, we have a worldview clash that's extremely serious about the future of our country between people who really don't believe in our Constitution and think it needs to be replaced. The freedoms and liberties of conservatives and Christians will be threatened if these people take over altogether. I'm just wondering a little bit here. It just seems like sometimes these issues are a little bit superficial in light of how serious this culture war is. Do you see what I'm saying? Does that make any sense at all to you?

Ray: Let me give you a counterfactual question back. Let's suppose everything is relatively the same, but with one difference. For whatever reason, Mr. Trump decided, "We're not going to attack Iran." I'm saying that he decided last February not to do it. Where are we today? If the Iran war and all that came out of it had not happened, where are we?

Tim Wildmon: That is a very good question. Before I do that, let me take one minute to defend President Trump on this. When you're the president of the United States, sometimes you know a lot more, especially about threats to our country, than the average person knows. You're having to make real-time decisions, as President Trump did in February, on something as serious as an enemy being about to have a nuclear weapon.

Tim Wildmon: Somebody walks into President Trump's office and tells him, "This is how it is." President Trump can't say, "Well, I'm going to go over there and check it out. I'm going to climb down that mountain." In other words, "I'm going to go over there and verify what you're telling me." No. President Trump has to go on the intelligence that he's given by our Defense Department, or Department of War, whatever it's called today, the CIA, and what the Israelis and others are telling him. So you've got to make a call. What do you do? If you don't do anything and Iran gets a nuclear weapon and fires it at New York and 10 million people die, people will say, "Well, Trump knew this and he didn't do squat." I'm giving the worst-case, end-of-the-world, movie-type scenario. But just the threat of a nuclear weapon by these crazy Islamic people who believe they're here to usher in the end of the world, and who threaten, maybe not New York, but maybe Tel Aviv, you see what I'm saying here?

Tim Wildmon: He's given this information, and every president that I can remember, Democrat and Republican, Obama, Clinton, Bush, however far you want to go back, has said, "We cannot allow these crazies to get a nuclear weapon." We can't allow it. Am I not right?

Ed: Oh, yeah. They all said that.

Tim Wildmon: So Trump's faced with, "Here it is. Are we going to do anything to stop it or not?" He decided, "Yes, we're going to war," and the Israelis did too. We're going to fire on some targets and get them. So I'm just saying, under those concerns, I'm getting to your question.

Ray: Sure.

Tim Wildmon: You can look back in hindsight and say, "Well, Trump shouldn't have done this." Well, faced with what I've just said, and he's the president, and it's his job to protect our country, our interests, and our people, what's he supposed to do? You see what I'm saying?

Ray: I think where he got in trouble was that it went on for weeks and months and months, and now we just seem to be floundering. He hasn't given us any clear direction on what the objectives are now. Does that make sense?

Tim Wildmon: I think you could answer Ray's question this way. What if he had never attacked Iran, or he had done what you said? I absolutely agree with President Trump. I think he had no choice, if that intelligence was spot-on, but to try to stop that nuclear weapons program.

Ed: I think, though, that what he should have done, and this is the second option to try to answer Ray's question, is hit it, pummel the mountain, as you've said on the show, and then leave. Say, "This is a one-week deal." Then say, "If you start it up again, we'll just send it back. You won't hear the B-2s coming, and we'll just keep hitting it. That's what we're going to do."

Ed: So either he never hits them, or he hits it and gets out, without regime change even being in the weeks and months ahead. Where would we be today? I think if he had pivoted from that and worked on the economy and passed legislation, he had both houses of Congress. I understand the Democrats could stonewall, but I don't think he ever passed a bill through reconciliation this year, did he?

Tim Wildmon: I don't know.

Ed: He could have done some things. If he had worked to bring down inflation, I think it would have been a normal midterm. Democrats would have picked up 20 to 30 seats, but Republicans probably would have held the Senate. If he had never gone to war, I think Texas would have still been red.

Chris: Right.

Ed: South Carolina, probably.

Tim Wildmon: What do you think, Ray?

Ray: I agree with what Ed just said, and it really ties in with what you said too. He had two choices. I also think that some of his advisors, and let's not say the military because we don't know exactly what the military folks said, told him, "Mr. President, this is quick. Mr. President, it's going to be that second option. You're going to get in. It might be two weeks, it might be three weeks." I think he genuinely thought this would be a very, very short engagement. We all discovered it wasn't nearly as short as anybody thought it was going to be.

Ray: Ed, if he had done what you suggested, hit them hard for a week or 10 days, send the message, "We're going to come back and do this again if we have to," and then bring the troops and ships home and work on the economy, I think exactly what you said would have happened. The Senate would still be in Republican hands this morning. It would have been a normal midterm, where the party in power loses some seats, but it is not a catastrophe.

Ray: But I do think the war, and then the fallout from the war, with oil prices and diesel going up, lasting for months and months, has hurt. It's been nine months now, right? And then, let's be honest, Trump is sort of disengaged from it.

Ed: Right.

Ray: He's talking about a ballroom, and there's nothing wrong with the ballroom. He's talking about the golf course he wants to build there, and he's got to have that golf course. He's saying, "Gas prices are up a little bit, but it's worth it," or something like that. I mean, comments that seem to be out of touch.

Tim Wildmon: It's kind of like, remember George H. W. Bush when he was running for reelection and America was going through an inflationary time?

Ed: It was 1992.

Tim Wildmon: He went to the grocery store and was trying to identify with the average person on the price of groceries. He was on camera asking what the scanning machine was for.

Chris: Yes, for the barcodes.

Tim Wildmon: Remember that?

Ed: Right, yeah.

Tim Wildmon: It was like a moment where you go, "This guy is so out of touch, he doesn't even get what the average person goes through."

Ed: It backfired on him.

Tim Wildmon: Just like Michael Dukakis getting in the tank when he was running against George Bush in 1988. So I think Trump has been viewed by the average person out there as someone who doesn't even know what we're suffering through because he lives in the White House and flies on Air Force One. He doesn't even identify with what we're going through right now in terms of affordability.

Chris: That's why all the Democrats stayed on message, to their credit in terms of political savvy. Whenever they were asked questions, El-Sayed, when he was asked questions in Michigan, said, "I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the people who can't pay for their gas, so they have to choose between this and that."

Tim Wildmon: Yeah, Chris.

Chris: That was a clever campaign strategy. Talarico did something very similar. They made it about the kitchen-table issues, which Republicans do too, because, as always, the economy is the number one issue. There are other issues that matter, but the economy is, and in this case the war, because the war and the economy have been intertwined for the last nine months.

Tim Wildmon: All right, you're listening to Today's Issues. Chris, next story.

Chris: Let's talk about the Bible for a moment. In addition to discussing politics and other things that are important in this country, we also spend a lot of time recommending that people know what the Bible says. Our brothers and sisters in Christ over at Lifeway Research put out a Bible quiz, and here is the headline: "Two-thirds of churchgoers fail basic Bible knowledge quiz."

Chris: I don't have all of the questions from the quiz. I have some of the findings, and I'm going to go around the panel here and ask you basic questions.

Tim Wildmon: No, you're not. You ain't asking me squat.

Chris: Okay.

Tim Wildmon: Because I'm taking the Fifth Amendment.

Chris: I've got a pastor and Bible college graduate here.

Tim Wildmon: And Ray Max, who lived in Ray Max. I am so terrified by this.

Chris: I can just read the findings. People can decide whether Tim knows the answer or not.

Tim Wildmon: I'll shake my head one way or another.

Chris: All right. I'll throw this question out and see if somebody knows.

Tim Wildmon: Hold on just a second. Just to be clear about what we're talking about, there was a survey done by Lifeway.

Chris: Correct.

Tim Wildmon: The survey was to determine what?

Chris: Basic Bible knowledge among churchgoers.

Tim Wildmon: Got you. They wanted to know how much of the Bible people who go to church know.

Chris: So what did they find? What were some of the questions they posed?

Tim Wildmon: I can ask the question, or I can read the findings.

Chris: Just ask the question.

Tim Wildmon: Which individual received the Ten Commandments?

Ed: Come on. Is that really one of the questions?

Chris: Yes.

Ed: That's a really dumbed-down question.

Tim Wildmon: So I didn't know that?

Ed: They're not that dumbed down. I'll bet even Tim knows this one.

Tim Wildmon: Yes. If somebody doesn't know that, they're not in my church.

Ed: We're throwing them out there.

Tim Wildmon: We're firing the pastor.

Chris: No one's giving me the answer.

Tim Wildmon: Okay, as JJ would say, here's the deal.

Chris: He was a basket case.

Tim Wildmon: All right.

Chris: Ninety-four percent knew Moses received the Ten Commandments.

Tim Wildmon: Ninety-four percent.

Chris: Here's where it gets a little dicey. Who was Israel's first king?

Tim Wildmon: Saul.

Chris: Go ahead.

Tim Wildmon: Yes.

Chris: Only 45 percent of churchgoers knew that.

Tim Wildmon: Wait, hold on. That's all I'm going to do right there. I'm scoring 100, and I'm quitting.

Chris: You know what happened right there, for people who can't see in the studio? Ed and I were watching Tim answer, and I thought for about two seconds I had just lost my job.

Tim Wildmon: No, I thought I was going to lose mine.

Ed: Tim, you're killing it, man.

Tim Wildmon: Your look was like, "I can't believe you don't know this."

Ed: No, because you were talking about not answering any of these, and then on the second question Tim is right on it.

Tim Wildmon: I'm going to count on my teammates here going forward. I'm going to be bringing the ball down, looking to throw it to Ed on the wing or right under the basket.

Chris: All right, one more question. True or false: Hezekiah is a book in the Bible.

Tim Wildmon: Wow.

Ed: No, false. A big false.

Chris: Two-thirds of churchgoers wrongly identified Hezekiah as a book in the Bible. Here's where it's really sad. I have shared the Christian Post article on this on our Today's Issues Facebook page. This is not the first report to note biblical illiteracy among churchgoers. In 2019, Pew Research Center released a report that analyzed what Americans knew about religion. Among its findings, they reported that 34 percent of self-identified evangelicals did not know that Jesus was from Nazareth. Thirty-one percent did not know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 25 percent thought that the Golden Rule was one of the Ten Commandments.

Tim Wildmon: Well, that's sad.

Chris: It is sad. Ray, what do you think about that?

Ray: Some of those questions, I will say, are surprising. The Hezekiah one, I remember being in Bible college and people in Bible college being fooled by that. They thought, "That's in Second Hezekiah." They go, "Okay, well, with that." I think because you get into all those prophets, especially the minor prophets, where Hezekiah was in the Catholic Bible.

Chris: So what do you think about this kind of survey?

Ray: I think there is a lot of biblical illiteracy.

Chris: What do you think about what we're discussing?

Ray: I think the concerning thing here, which we all understand, is the trend. The trend over the last 50 years, the graph is not going up in terms of knowledge. The graph is going rapidly, rapidly down. I know of one Bible college that has been giving a test like this to incoming students for 50 years. What they told me is that 50 years ago, their incoming students, who basically all came from conservative evangelical churches, scored way up here. In 2026, they're way down here. You can just trace that trend line.

Tim Wildmon: Let me add some context. It is sad because that's an excellent point. The trend is in the wrong direction. That's probably true, though, about every branch of knowledge. It's true about knowledge of the Constitution, knowledge of our history, and knowledge of science. The distractions out there today for people are innumerable. They didn't have them a hundred years ago. So it is sad for the church, and the church can certainly do a better job, but there is something underneath all this that may be causing some of it.

Tim Wildmon: So what should we be doing, Ray, as followers of Christ?

Ray: I'm thinking of that man. I think Robert Raikes was the man who saw poor kids and organized something to teach them the truth of God several hundred years ago, maybe 300 years ago, and he famously called it Sunday school.

Tim Wildmon: Sunday school.

Ray: We've kind of gotten away from that idea for a lot of people.

Ed: Was that just teaching the Bible, or did they teach other things in Sunday school?

Ray: All of it, right? These kids needed instruction.

Ed: On life.

Ray: On life, right?

Tim Wildmon: I think we need to get back to the idea of the church as a teaching institution. We talk a lot today about prayer, and we should. We talk a lot about fellowship, and we should. We talk a lot about helping hurting people, and this world is filled with hurting people. But as we reach not just the children, Ed, but the teenagers and young adults, there ought to be a systematic approach in every local church to teach our people, from the youngest to the oldest, the basic truths of the Bible.

Ed: Absolutely, that's at the center of it. But you know something we're talking about here? What if the church was open during the week and we taught kids how to do a checkbook? Teenagers and adults, how do you change the oil? How do you change a tire? There are a lot of distractions. Some of that they can just look up on YouTube, but there is probably something more to it.

Ed: I don't know if we continue to do this here at AFA, Tim, but we had something we did for young men. What was it?

Tim Wildmon: Men of Honor.

Ed: Men of Honor, where we taught them how to treat a woman and how to change a tire, all those kinds of life skills, because a lot of young men are growing up without fathers. Just as a kind of vision for church people who may be listening, what if the church said, "Hey, you know what? We're going to show you how to bandage a wound," and taught first-aid skills? You could draw people to church who want some of these basic life skills. While they're there, you introduce them to Jesus. Even more importantly, you teach your own people more about the Bible.

Ray: I would add that Scripture tells us in 2 Timothy 2:15 to study, to show thyself approved. The Lord himself, a very long time ago, laid it on the heart of the Apostle Paul to tell us, "Hey, you need to read this book," over and over again.

Tim Wildmon: I do think sometimes people need more than just reading the Bible straight through for themselves. I do that, and I encourage people to do that, but sometimes you're reading and you think, "I need some commentary because I don't have a clue what's going on right here." Especially in the Old Testament, we're talking about thousands of years ago, and things can get culturally confusing. You don't know what's going on. Is there a commentary that you favor, Ray?

Ray: I am a big believer in the study Bible concept. John MacArthur and his people came out with the MacArthur Study Bible. You're reading First Kings or Second Kings, or you're reading Obadiah, and you have the notes right there in the margin.

Tim Wildmon: Oh, you do?

Ray: Yes. There's the NIV Study Bible, the ESV Study Bible, and the Life Transformation Study Bible. There are a plethora of resources so that you can read the Bible and read the notes to help you understand the text while you're reading it.

Tim Wildmon: Is there one that you favor more than any other?

Ray: Probably the MacArthur Study Bible and maybe the Life Transformation Bible that Warren Wiersbe put together.

Tim Wildmon: Warren Wiersbe. I still have some of his commentaries.

Ray: Yes.

Tim Wildmon: All right, well, that's good to know. It's very helpful. Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for listening to the Today's Issues program. Ed, thank you.

Ed: Yes, sir.

Tim Wildmon: Chris?

Chris: Thank you.

Tim Wildmon: Ray?

Ray: Appreciate it.

Tim Wildmon: Thank you. Thanks to Jenna Ellis. I'm sure you're still listening. We appreciate Jenna being on with us, and Jonathan, who is running the board today, and Adam Suddeth, Cole, and Adam and Eve. We want to thank everybody on the show today.

Chris: Who are they? Adam and Eve? Who's that?

Tim Wildmon: I've heard of those.

Chris: I see what you did there.

Tim Wildmon: Yeah. All right, take care, everybody. Have a great day.