The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 56 – Sam Brownback

Episode 56: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show, host Dr. Jeff interviews Ambassador Sam Brownback, who previously served as United States Representative, Senator, Kansas Governor, and Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom under the Trump administration. The conversation focuses on global religious freedom challenges and Brownback’s current work with the National Committee for Religious Freedom.

They discuss severe religious persecution worldwide, religious freedom issues underlying the Ukraine conflict, and growing threats to religious liberty in Western nations. Brownback emphasizes that religious freedom serves as a cornerstone right upon which other freedoms depend, and he promotes his National Committee for Religious Freedom (ncrf.org) which creates state organizations, candidate pledges, and voter guides to protect religious freedom domestically.

Episode Transcript

Ryan Dobson (00:00):
Hey everyone. Ryan Dobson here for the Dr. Jeff Show. I’ve got great news for you. Summit summer programs are back in person this summer. That’s right. You can send your kid to learn about Christian worldview in Colorado Springs and in Georgia. It’s amazing. It’s transformative. It totally changed my life when I was a teen and my parents sent me. I was so thrilled with that program, I’ve been back every year for 35 years.

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Dr. Jeff Myers (01:05):
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show, available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Edifi, Liftable, wherever you get your podcast. Could you do me a favor and take time right now to review the show that helps more people find out about it? This is the show where I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how our worldview changes everything.

My guest today served as a United States representative, United States Senator, Kansas Governor, and ambassador at large for international religious freedom under the Trump administration. He’s recently launched the National Committee for Religious Freedom to defend the right to religious free speech all over the world. Please welcome Ambassador Sam Brown back to the show. Ambassador Sam Brownback, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Sam Brownback (01:50):
Hey, thanks Jeff. Appreciate it. Good to be back with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:52):
I’m really looking forward to our conversation. I’ve enjoyed the conversations we’ve been able to have in the past back when you were a governor of Kansas, being able to just check in with you and realize we have a lot of things in common in wanting to take principles of a biblical worldview that reflect reality and bring that truth into the public sphere. So thank you for your service.

Sam Brownback (02:13):
Yeah, no, I’m happy to do it. And the things I’ve been working on now, a lot of it’s been on religious freedom, but it’s also been about telling the beauty of religious freedom because too much of the time we’re fighting about the rights and I got this right. You got to do that. Right.

But there’s a beauty to this that whenever you allow people to be able to live peacefully their own faith, there’s a blossoming and then it’s like a chorus of flowers in the society. It’s like a flower garden that you get to see Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim, and you get to see Christian and you get to see all these different things and the beauty that they bring forward as we share the space together and respect each other.

Dr. Jeff Myers (02:51):
Well, in the constitution of the United States, the First Amendment protects five rights, the first of which is religious freedom. But I remember reading a study from Dr. Timothy Shaw about religious liberty overseas. So sometimes I don’t think about that, but that’s where the real attacks are. What are you seeing in other countries when it comes to religious freedom? Why are you concerned right now?

Sam Brownback (03:14):
Oh my goodness. I mean just you see death and destruction. You see the Chinese Communist Party at war with faith. I mean, they’re tearing down churches. They’re putting pastors in jail and they’re being ruthless about it. You see it in Nigeria, really a war on a lot of Christians, and this is this sort of Muslim Christian divide that you get, the militant Islamic fundamentalists. And I’m not talking about most Muslims.

(03:42):
I’m talking about these militant Islamic fundamentalists that believe they have the right to kill somebody else if they don’t believe in your faith. And you’re seeing that happen there. You see problems in Vietnam. You see Ukraine, a lot of this is built upon the Ukrainian’s desire to have their own Orthodox church. This is Christian on Christian here.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:59):
Okay, yeah. So talk a little bit more about that. I think that’s really important. This is super timely. So Russia has, as we’re recording this, we’re at the National Religious Broadcasters event, which is why everything is so loud and crazy right now, but in the country of Ukraine, a lot of people are suffering right now and religious freedom is at the heart of it, and most people don’t know that. So tell us a little about what’s going on.

Sam Brownback (04:22):
President Putin and you read his speeches and I’ve read all of them leading up to the war. He does not believe the Ukrainians are a people. They’re Russians in his estimation, and they should be under the Russian sphere. Well, you look at it, the tribe of Rus starts in Kyiv in like 988, and that’s where St. Vladimir at the time has all the Russian people baptized, leaves paganism, and becomes part of Christianity in 988 in Kyiv.

Well, they later moved their capital to Moscow, but in Putin’s mind, there’s no Russia without Ukraine. And so Ukraine should be a part of it and you should be part of our Orthodox church. The Russian Orthodox Church, where the Ukrainians several years ago said, we want our own. And they split off. And I think these are major factors really going on in President Putin’s mind about, I’ve got to move now to pull these guys back into my sphere. They’re going to be gone forever.

And I’ve got news for him. They are gone. Really? They are gone. They are not going to be part of the Russian sphere. They are not Russians. They’re Ukrainians and they’re fighting for it, and they’re fighting to the death for it. And they will be successful. They may get suppressed for a while by the Russians, but they are going to be their own sovereign nation. And they fought and they’ve earned it. Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers (05:43):
Well, and I know in the cultural memory of Ukrainians is the slaughter of Ukrainians by Joseph Stalin back in the 1930s. So I know that’s in the background. What should Christians be thinking about and doing in this whole battle that we’re seeing?

Sam Brownback (06:03):
Well, certainly praying into it and secondly, supporting. I think groups that are helping Ukrainian refugees are helping. The Ukrainian military I think are both very valid things to do. Our government really should be supporting the Ukrainian people. We should be providing armament. There’s also, we should be providing help in financing. There’s this thing through the IMF called special drawing rights that can help the Ukrainian government be able to fund itself during this complete collapse of their economy. That’s taking place for the Ukrainians too. So we just need to stand up and fight.

And believe me too, there are a lot of other countries in Eastern Europe that are very nervous right now. The Romanians, the Poles, Moldovans, all that area that was under the Soviet sphere, they’re watching carefully and saying, we don’t know where Putin stops. If he takes Ukraine, is he going into Georgia? He’s already got part of it. Where else is he headed?

Dr. Jeff Myers (07:04):
Yeah, so there’s not a natural stopping place and the West needs to really recognize.

Sam Brownback (07:13):
And either fight him now or we’re going to fight him later. And you also, we have to confront China’s role in this. They’re the big enabler. If Xi Jinping tells President Putin ahead of the Olympics, don’t do it. This doesn’t happen. But he didn’t. He just said, not until after the Olympics and you’re just going. And then if we don’t confront Russia, what does China do with Taiwan?

And both of them are now allied with Iran and Afghanistan, so they’ve got terrorist states that are in their cabal. Are they going to start funding and unleashing terrorist groups, isis, Hezbollah, Taliban, Hamas, who are they going to give weaponry and money to and say, go do this to Israel, go do this to the United States.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:01):
Yeah. Well, thank you. I appreciate your thoughts on that ambassador as you President Trump. For those in our audience who aren’t familiar with the work that you’ve been doing for the last few years, he appointed you to be ambassador at large for religious freedom.

Sam Brownback (08:14):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:15):
On behalf of the United States. So you’ve traveled to all these other countries, you’ve been there on the ground watching what is happening when it comes to religious freedom. But tell us what you’re working on now because you’ve got a committee for religious liberty that I’d love for people to know about.

Sam Brownback (08:30):
Yeah, it’s the National Committee for Religious Freedom. It’s to stand up for the free exercise of religious freedom in the United States. It’s a 5-0-1-C-4, so it will do education and political activity. And it’s about fighting for religious freedom here. And we’ve got all faiths involved in it. We’ve got Catholics, Protestants, LDS, Jews, Muslim Hindus, and we’ll have ivory major faith standing for your fundamental constitutional, and I believe God-given right to practice your own faith freely and we’ve got a good unity going of everybody in this and we need it because this space is being crowded in a lot in the United States.

We’re different people in education in the classroom. They’re having values pushed on the children. A lot of times the family doesn’t agree with or in the healthcare system maybe saying, okay, you’ve got to prescribe an abortion drug as a pharmacist and you as a person of faith say, I can’t do that.

We’ve got to allow that accommodation for people who have sincerely held religious beliefs to be able to practice their faith and we’re going to have to stand up for it and fight. We’ll have 50 state organizations affiliated with this to push because a lot of this is going to be at the state and local level, but I hope people can affiliate with it and sign up. There’s a website that’s got our group going, thencrf.org.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:58):
TheNCRF.org.

Sam Brownback (10:01):
And it can go on and sign up and we got to start fighting for this faith. And the final piece on it, Jeff, is what I’ve seen is everybody watches the United States on human rights in particular and a lot of other things, but particularly human rights. If we lose ground here, it gets magnified overseas. Everybody thinks, okay, we can crowd that space.

When we did Roe versus Wade, the Supreme Court did it, opened up abortion around the world. That’s right. When that gets overturned and I pray and believe it will be this year that will send messages around the world, the lives that will be saved are enormous, and that’s what we’re trying to stand up for religious freedom.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:41):
You’re looking for a new respect for life, a new respect for freedom.

Sam Brownback (10:45):
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:46):
Tell us what somebody can do. Let’s say they’ve got a person running for their school board or city council or mayor as well as state legislator, state senator, members of Congress and so forth. How does the committee that you’re working on help them? I mean, what resources, do you have a way to help them understand whether the people they might be voting for are supportive of religious freedom?

Sam Brownback (11:09):
What we’re going to do, and we just announced it in January, we’re starting to reach out to various states to get organized, and so we’ll have Georgians for religious freedom and that group will then have a candidate pledge and say, do you pledge to support religious freedom or are you or not? And we’ll see who will sign this pledge, and if people won’t sign the pledge, we will put that out in a voter guide.

(11:33):
We’ll also track votes, whether it be at the state level, and I hope we can get it at the local level where this person voted for religious freedom. This person voted against religious freedom. So you can educate the public about, the person took the pledge or didn’t the person has voted for religious freedom or against, and then put that out as voter guides to individuals. That’s the intent that we’re getting stood up because we need to get more people elected that stand for this fundamental, and this is not controversial, right?

This is at our very founding. That’s why the pilgrims came here, was for religious freedom. It’s what’s allowed us to have the most diverse society on the face of the earth and live in basic freedom and comedy with each other without killing each other. So we’ve just, we’ve got to protect it and we’ve got to live it in beauty where we are doing this out of love, folks, we don’t want to get people crowded out of being able to practice their faith in the public square. They should be able to do that.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:42):
One of the things I suspect is true, and I’m just curious what you think about this. When religious freedom falls, political freedom and economic freedom also fall.

Sam Brownback (12:51):
They do. Religious freedom, and a lot of people, they’ll debate this point, but I think you just see it too many places. Religious freedom is a cornerstone human right. You get this one right, you can build off of it. You can build freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of press. You get this one wrong and you see those other rights deteriorate.

For instance, now this is kind of a specific example, but it’s the point in Vietnam, they’re saying, okay, we’re kind of opening up to religious freedom, but then the Catholics there are deciding that there’s an environmental spill in the ocean that’s killing a lot of their fish that they want to protest. The government wants to shut the Catholic church down.

Well, wait a minute. We’re just pointing out to you that you spilled a bunch of chemicals in here and killed a bunch of the wildlife, and we want to stand against that. And they used the church to help speak out against it. Martin Luther King Jr. Organized in the African-American church and praised God that he did. That’s why this is one of those that you either build off of or if it’s not there, the rest of the rights get denigrated typically in many places around the world.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:03):
Yeah. Well, you’ve been all over and you’ve seen how that happens. Before I ask, I want to ask you about Finland because there’s a story out of Finland that I wonder if it should really concern us, but if people want more training in protecting religious freedom, you’ve got an event, a particular event that comes up, and I assume you’ll be doing this every year or on a regular basis.

(14:26):
But tell us a little bit about that because I think some people in our audience, especially some who are in their twenties, they’re in their career, they’re looking for something to stand for, and this might be something they’d want to know about.

Sam Brownback (14:39):
I’d love to have them come. It’s the International Religious Freedom Summit. It’s an annual gathering of all the civil societies from around the world that stand for religious freedom. We had 80 groups last year. I hope we have 180 this year, being in Washington DC, June 28th to 30th, people can go on the website to look at it and register. It’s IRF Summit 2022, IRF Summit 2022.

And we get together activists, we get together, people that have been persecuted or family members from all faiths to tell their story is what happened. And also to encourage and to put together strategies. Particularly now we’re looking at, how are we going to stand up to high tech persecution of people of faith that the Chinese are really the leaders on, but there are a lot of places in the world they’re going to use these models to oppress people of faith around the world.

And they’ll probably give them the models so that they can have the authoritarian regimes just control. And it’s cameras everywhere. It’s facial recognition. It’s tracking your cell phone, it’s genetic sampling, it’s social credit scores. And then the big one that really concerns me, they’re going to, is digitizing the currency. So then the central bank will be able to track every single transaction. There isn’t physical currency, it’s all on your phone, but then the central government can decide, I don’t like Dr. Jeff.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:09):
Just turn it off.

Sam Brownback (16:10):
Just turn your money off. You may have a million dollars in the bank account and can’t get it now.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:17):
Wow. Wow. I sometimes get pushback when I talk about religious freedom from people who say, you’re making a really big deal out of something that is not a big deal. But there’s a case in Finland right now where a member of the government, parliament, parliament quoted from the Bible and is threatened with going to prison for doing that. Is that, I mean, I always thought Finland, at least, was a religious country. There was at least religious freedom. Is that telling us something about what could happen here if we don’t stand now?

Sam Brownback (16:54):
I think it is. We’ve asked her that parliamentarian’s been charged with criminal charges for quoting the Bible to come and speak at our summit because it is a western example of what’s taking place. And unfortunately, there’s growing numbers of examples like that. I was on a program earlier this week where a family in Pennsylvania was being, their parental rights were being severed because they wouldn’t affirm a minor child’s decision to do a sex change from female to male.

And it wasn’t that they were being abusive to the child, it was because they wouldn’t affirm what the child was doing, and they were going, well, we don’t think this child should do this. We’re not going to affirm that. Well, then we are going to sever your parental rights. And you’re going, oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Dr. Jeff Myers (17:44):
Yeah. Whose children are they? Are they the states or are they? The family is a sovereign sphere.

Sam Brownback (17:52):
Right. And we need to talk about, okay, and back up philosophically. Well, why is the family structure the way it is? Why should parents be engaged in a minor child’s decision making and upbringing? Well, I mean, this is the basic building blocks of character in our society, and you’re going to take the parent out of that.

And some people would say yes, and I am just going, I’m aghast at that idea. That’s not how you’ve built this free society here. You’ve built it off of the family unit being strong and building character into people and out of that then build some stronger neighborhoods and counties and states and country, and you’re going to back that. You’re not only going to back it, you’re going to force it out by the tools of government. I think this is a really bad move and that we need to push back against, from a philosophical, on a very practical basis. Both.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:47):
Yeah. There’s so much at stake here. Well, gang, this is one of those issues where we can’t be on the sidelines. We have to be prepared to stand and tell us the website again for the committee.

Sam Brownback (18:59):
It’s theNCRF.org.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:02):
TheNCRF.org, so check that out, and then if you’re interested in the Religious Liberty summit, you’d meet people from all over the world, people who are standing for freedom. It’ll be inspirational and exciting. Ambassador, thanks for coming on the show today.

Sam Brownback (19:19):
Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate it. Good to, thanks for having me, and thank you for what you guys do and the training and the teaching. It’s just really needed in a world that’s moved away from kind of fundamental set of values to really talk about the basics and understand the why of the basics.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:36):
Yeah. Well, we’re going to train a generation to stand for freedom, and I hope that it’s in time. By God’s grace, it will be.

Sam Brownback (19:43):
It will. Thank you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:45):
A special thanks to my guest, ambassador Sam Brownback, for joining us on the show today. The Bible says, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people. We are thankful for the opportunity to freely exercise our faith in this country, and we want to help people in other countries preserve their freedom as well. Thank you for watching. We’ll see you next week.

Ryan Dobson (20:06):
Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Dr. Jeff Show, and don’t forget about our discount. If you sign your child up for an in-person conference at summit.org before March 31st, you get $200 off the summer program, and if you use the code, Dr. Jeff 22, you get another hundred dollars off the summer program. Go to summit.org and sign up today. God bless.

Dr. Jeff Myers (20:31):
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