Transcript of Andrew Isker on The Tucker Carlson Show

I don’t want to go down that road.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, nobody does. Nobody does.

The Decision to Leave

ANDREW ISKER: And so it’s like, we need to get out of here. We cannot trust the whole system with our child. They could steal him from us. This could happen. I don’t want to be the test case. I don’t want to go through the legal battles and do all those fights. I want my son. I don’t want to live in a place where that’s even conceivable that could happen to you. It’s insane.

And so it was at that moment, I’m like, we need to get out of this state. This is not a place where I can raise my children. And I’m thinking long term. We’ve been in this place for six generations, and it’s a wonderful town, an amazing place. I mean, it’s home. I love the people there, and many of them are going to be watching this.

My wife and children hated when I would go to the store because it would take an hour to get a thing of milk, because I’d just stop and talk to people I’ve known my whole life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I love that.

ANDREW ISKER: And it’s a wonderful place. It’s hard to leave that. You’re familiar with everything and all of the people and just the way of life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Gosh, that’s where your family’s buried. Six generations. I had no idea. That’s so much to give up. That must have been…

ANDREW ISKER: But I can’t stay in a place like that. There’s no future for my children, for my family in a place that’s that far gone. That has been destroyed. And you see so many of these other states, California, Washington adopted all the same things that Walz’s Minnesota did.

The Ridge Runner Project

TUCKER CARLSON: I want to get back to the Ridge Runner and the town that’s being built, which I assume is a fascist Christian theocracy.

ANDREW ISKER: That’s what the TV news in Nashville… Yes. Mr. Phil Williams, the journalist, “Little Iran.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Except Christian. But why do you think—I mean I have my own theories, but you’ve lived it much more personally than I have. So you tell me why do you think states like Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, California have gone to a place that I think by any objective global standard, there’s no country in the world that would nod and say that’s okay. Except maybe the UK.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: How did they get there?

How Progressive States Changed

ANDREW ISKER: I think for all of them the political power was captured by the left, political and cultural power. I mean I went to college in Minnesota in the early 2000s and you could see the seeds of all of these things beginning to form. And so all of the institutions were captured.

Especially culturally in Minnesota, people are very nice. Minnesota nice is very real. And the ethos is if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Which I just swim completely against that tide.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s true. I mean not to point to genetics, but it’s real. It’s Germans, it’s Scandinavians, Norwegians, Swedes, some Finns. It’s like these are gentle, non-confrontational people for the most part.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes. They’re very kind people that are, to a fault, unwilling to give offense.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ANDREW ISKER: And very tolerant of other people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, they are.

ANDREW ISKER: And that gets taken advantage of. So you can have…

TUCKER CARLSON: So they take our best qualities and subvert them against us.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes, yes. And you can see that in other places too, like on the west coast as well. Especially with Christians, this is done all of the time. We’re told, well, we need to love other people and be kind and be Christlike. And that ethos gets subverted and used to these ends. Where, “How dare you talk about these things? How dare you talk about these things from the pulpit? These things going on. It offends a lot of people.”

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it does. I mean I come from a family like that. Some of them have strong views, but they would never impose their views on you under any circumstances. They’re just, it’s just not in them. It’s a very specific northern European culture where they just don’t want to get in your face.

ANDREW ISKER: No, never.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it leaves them defenseless a little bit, I think.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. And maybe I’m unique, maybe my personality type is such that I just can’t do that. I can’t see evil stuff happening, taking place and not say something about it. Not say, this is insane.

Like, just think 100 years ago. That’s sort of what my book is about. If you go back 100 years and you think about your great-great grandfather and you told him, “Hey, they’re going to take little kids and little boys and remove their genitals and turn them into girls.” Are you okay with that? Do you think that’s all right? What would they do if that was even proposed?

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought eunuchs were out with the Ming dynasty.

ANDREW ISKER: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t believe we have that.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, we’re bringing that back. They would go insane. They would fight, they’d become violent if that were happening. And we’re like, “Well, you know, I really want to keep my job, so I’ll put the pronouns in my email signature and on my LinkedIn. I’ll just go along to get along.”

TUCKER CARLSON: I have contempt for them.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So my theory is that those are the most secular states.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Maine is another one of the most secular states, unfortunately. And those trends are rising there as well, famously. And there’s something about the, you know, lots of left-wing ideas that are liberal ideas or socialist ideas that, like, I don’t disagree with all of them, honestly, but some of them I—a lot of them I really disagree with.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

The Truth About Revelation, and Leftist States Driving Out Christians

TUCKER CARLSON: But the transgender thing, the abortion thing, human sacrifice and turning your children to eunuchs, those are so clearly expressions of cultish religion, of pagan religion that, I can’t turn away. I’m like, the Canaanites did this. I know what’s going on here.

ANDREW ISKER: This is not—

TUCKER CARLSON: You claim you’re secular, you’re not secular at all. These are religious rituals. That’s the way it feels to me.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes, absolutely, it is. And that’s part of it, too. I think the things that happened, like when I was in college in the early 2000s, you had the new atheism, and everyone was like, it was just cool to be an atheist.

TUCKER CARLSON: Atheist.

ANDREW ISKER: Like, “Oh, I’m agnostic. I don’t really believe.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Who is that? There’s like a really absurd person posing as like a genius who was one of the leaders. There are probably a bunch of them. Who was the most famous one?

ANDREW ISKER: Oh, like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens.

TUCKER CARLSON: I knew Hitchens well. He was a marvelous guy. Totally wrong on this. He was legit smart. No, there’s another one, whatever who’s always running around like today.

ANDREW ISKER: Like James Lindsay is one of those types.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’s James Lindsay?

ANDREW ISKER: He’s this atheist guy that opposed wokeness and things like that. But wants just a free liberal society. Like it’s 1995.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I’m all for a free liberal society. It’s just that there isn’t one either. You’re moving quickly toward… I will never give up my views. I will never stop being liberal on the most basic level, which is I actually don’t want to control you or your beliefs because I don’t think you’re a slave. I think you’re a human being because God made you.

ANDREW ISKER: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s my view. And so I don’t want to break down people’s doors to make sure they’re adhering to what I believe at all. I hate that. However, you’re either moving toward order or you’re moving toward chaos. You’re moving toward a society rooted in some sort of transcendent belief. Or you’re moving toward trannyism, which is another… like transcendent belief. It’s like you pick a religion.

The Vacuum Left by Atheism

ANDREW ISKER: It’s not whether but which—there will be one. And that’s part of it is like the new atheism, all those things that broke down Christian mores and Christian cultural Christianity that was imbued all throughout American public life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

ANDREW ISKER: Takes all of that down. But then there’s a vacuum and that vacuum gets filled up. And what’s it been filled up with? Insane stuff like this child sacrifice. All of it. It is a new religion. It isn’t a question of like, “Well, we’re just going to have pluralism. We’re not going to have any dominant religion.” It’s no, there will be one. There will be a God that you serve. And the one that we are serving now is some kind of demon.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I think that’s so much better put than I could have formulated that, but yes, exactly. Perfectly put. Exactly. You’re going to worship something, and now we’re worshiping something really, really dark as a society. But it’s particularly pronounced in the States that have abandoned Christianity the most aggressively and just come up with this new pagan religion. So, okay, so this is going on in your state. You’re six generations in one town. Boy, that’s got to be pretty rare right now. You’ve got six children. You have a child buried in the cemetery along with all your ancestors, and you leave all of that. What’s going on in your church? Were you a churchgoer at the time?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, I was. I was pastoring a church.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, gosh, yeah. Literally. Okay. Yes. So you’re involved in church?

ANDREW ISKER: Yes, I am. Yeah. And it’s a church with wonderful people. And they’re there because they more or less think like I do. They like hearing what I preach. They like all of these things. And so it’s extremely difficult to leave them as well.

But it was difficult because it was a very small church, and the things that I’m preaching… So I take the pastorate there in 2021. So after the lockdowns, after all of these things. And there’s an incredible amount of discontent among Christians because their church has been shut down, their leaders have failed them. And so we had many families join us after that.

But, you know, overall, the people in Minnesota, they’re not used to the kind of preaching that I do, the kind of Christianity that I have where it’s like, I believe the Bible. Like, God is real and he has revealed himself to us in the Bible. And therefore, I believe all of it, and I’m not embarrassed by any of it. I’m not going to tiptoe around the things that might be controversial. If anything, I’m going to lean into those things, and I’m going to preach all of it.

And that runs totally against the evangelical Christian ethos in America today. Really. It’s all about, you need to be nice. You need to make Jesus very inoffensive to people, and that’s how you bring people into your church.

The Changing Face of Evangelicalism

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ll say. I’m not an evangelical. I’ve always liked the evangelicals. I’ve always defended them. I’m very sympathetic as a non… I’m not even exactly sure what an evangelical is. It seems more like a cultural descriptor. But I’m completely opposed to abortion. So that has been for me the reason that I’ve always defended them. But I always thought that the evangelicals were really forthright about their faith. Another thing that I liked and were way more on the kind of fire and brimstone side, which I’m for, by the way. But you’re saying that they’re not.

ANDREW ISKER: That was certainly… you look at like, you know, the 80s and even in the early 90s, like you have the Moral Majority where they very much were that kind of fire and brimstone, and they’ve been vindicated by everything that has happened.

ANDREW ISKER: But throughout the 90s and early 2000s, they really changed course right as the cultural trajectory is changing. They adopted very seeker sensitive movement where it’s like, well, people—

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry, what did you call it?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, seeker sensitive movement is—

TUCKER CARLSON: What does that mean?

ANDREW ISKER: It was the big movement in evangelicalism in the 90s and early 2000s where we’re going to make it as easy as possible for people to come into the church and believe in Jesus. And so we’re not going to focus on things that might offend them. We’re not going to focus on sin and repentance and things like that. We’re just “come on in and have a good time and know that you’re welcome here. Come as you are, we’ll meet you halfway.” That was more or less the—

TUCKER CARLSON: Why do you think they did that?

ANDREW ISKER: I think, you know, a friend of mine, I think I could call him a friend, Aaron Renn. He’s written about this like neutral world or negative world? Neutral world, Positive world. Where, you know, in the 70s and 80s, Christianity is generally understood culturally as a positive thing. Like if you said, “Oh, I go to church, I’m a Christian, I go to that church,” people think, “Oh, that’s a good guy. He’s an upstanding, decent person.”

But by the mid-90s, it was sort of neutral, right? It was sort of, “Well, that’s just a cool thing that you do,” right? Just like collecting stamps or building model trains or being part of the Lions Club. But by the Obama years, by like 2015, you’re in negative world where if you’re an evangelical Christian, you are suspect. You’re probably a Nazi, you’re probably a bigot, you’re probably a white supremacist. Right. That’s the attitude that people have.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I just ask you to pause just to state for the one millionth time, the Nazis were not Christians. They were not Christians.

ANDREW ISKER: Christians. No.

TUCKER CARLSON: More Christians were killed by the Nazis than any other group. Just a fact. So anyway. No, the Nazis were not Christian. So I just—

ANDREW ISKER: I’m sorry. Yeah, I had to say that. Because they’ll clip this and they’ll say, “Oh, Andrew Isker is saying that the Christians are Nazis.”

But so that period of time, there’s these widespread cultural shifts in the country. And so I think a lot of it is just in response to that, where you’re in that neutral world. And so you had figures like Rick Warren or Tim Keller who sort of adapted these things.

So Tim Keller is in New York City and he tries to adapt Christianity to your upper middle class strifer. People in New York City were to make it easy for them to come to church. So he wouldn’t ever talk about homosexuality or if he did, it would be, “Well, that’s not so good for human flourishing. But we’re not really going to talk about that too much.”

There’s the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, famously said in a sermon, “Well, the Bible just whispers about sexual sin, but it shouts about financial sin or greed.” Right. So they want to downplay—

TUCKER CARLSON: It shouts about both of them.

ANDREW ISKER: It does. And the two are connected. Right? If you’re greedy for money, you’re also going to be lusting after the flesh. Like the two go hand in hand. But it’s to downplay things that the culture does not want to hear. Right. Because you’ll be branded as a bigot, as intolerant, as a bad person if you’re just like, “Well, this is what the Bible says. Fornicators, adulterers, sodomites, they will not inherit the kingdom of God.” If you say, “Yes, I agree with that,” you’re a bad person. You are outside of polite society if you say those things.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you can reject it, you can reject Christianity itself and you’re certainly welcome to in this country and in all countries actually. But it doesn’t just say this parenthetically. No, it’s like included in a sidebar. It says it again and again and again.

In the church I grew up in, they’re like, “Well, there are only four times where in the scriptures where homosexuality is attacked.” And it’s like since no one ever read it in my church, no one knew, but I finally read it, what the hell, why not read it? And I did. And I’ve never been anti-gay or anything like that. But by the end I was like, oh, there’s a really clear message.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: From like the Hebrew scriptures all the way through the Christian to the New Testament and like again and again and again. So you know, again you don’t have to believe it, but if you’re a believing Christian, it’s not whispered at all.

The Rise of Young Men Finding Faith

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, you do have to believe it if you’re a Christian. If you claim that this is the Bible that God spoke. And so they’re very fearful of those kinds of things. But the interesting thing now that we’re in what Ren calls “negative world” is that young men who were raised, most of them raised secular, they went through the whole new atheism thing. They never went to church, they never grew up in faith.

I talk to so many guys, so many young men who connect with me on X and places like that where they’re like, “Hey, I was not part of the church at all. I was not a Christian. And I see all of the evil everywhere.” They see things like you were talking about, like they are sacrificing babies. Like, they care about this more than anything else—the ability to murder a baby. They see things like the Ukraine war, where it’s like our rulers just decided to have a war and kill millions of people for absolutely no reason.

TUCKER CARLSON: And our proxies have banned the majority Christian faith. Banned the majority Christian faith. The majority faith, which is Christian in Ukraine. And I just wonder, just to go back to the atheists for a second, what do they make of this? I certainly understand being agnostic. Like, “I don’t know,” you know, I get it.

ANDREW ISKER: I can see why someone would have that viewpoint, for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s a pretty normal place to be. I think it’s wrong, but I don’t think it’s crazy. But to be an atheist, to have determined that there is no God, like, what do you make of the things you see around you? Have you never held someone’s hand while he dies? Like, what do you think that is? You’ve never felt anything that is clearly outside of what science describes. Like, how determined are you to ignore your life that you become an atheist? Like, what is that?

The Contradiction of Atheist Morality

ANDREW ISKER: It’s funny because most of the people that you talk to, when they espouse kind of atheist ideas, they’ll retreat. It’s kind of a Motte and Bailey thing where they’ll retreat to, “Well, really, I’m agnostic. I don’t really know for sure.” So there’s very few people, especially now, that are like, “No, I’m an atheist. There definitely is no God.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, well then how… Why is murder wrong?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Well, because it is. Because it is.” Well, okay. I think it’s right. So how can you tell me it’s wrong? By what authority?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because you feel that way. That’s your authority, your emotions.

ANDREW ISKER: And you would see this. I remember—

TUCKER CARLSON: So, like, the people you were saying who are atheists, like, are they ever… Some of them are smart, I assume.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do they say to that?

ANDREW ISKER: I remember watching, you know, previous guest of yours, actually, the man who trained me in ministry, Doug Wilson, debate Christopher Hitchens. And they had that discussion. And it was shocking to watch Hitchens say, “Well, it’s common human experience, you know, solidarity with mankind. That’s why I think murder is wrong.”

And of course, Doug says to him, “Well, if you saw someone being murdered on the street, you think that’s bad. Right. Well, why?” And he goes into his whole spiel and Doug says, “Well, what if it’s a pregnant woman and her baby’s being murdered? You would just say, ‘Well, no, no, you need to have a medical license for that, to kill that person.'”

TUCKER CARLSON: What did Christopher say?

ANDREW ISKER: He’s like, “Oh, you’re being flippant. You wouldn’t go down that road.”

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s so sad is I knew Christopher very well and always liked him enormously for his erudition, his ability to recite long passages of poetry, Philip Larkin and Orwell. And, you know, he was a reader. Like, a real dedicated, lifelong reader and a wonderful dinner and lunch companion. I had many, many highly drunken dinners with him before I quit drinking. But he was such… And so I love Christopher, but he was a moralizer. Whoa.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I was much younger, 25 years younger than I am now. And I never sort of put it together in my mind, like, how can an atheist be a moralizer? It doesn’t even make any sense, actually. And I agreed with him on some things and disagreed on others, but he was always, like, in the pulpit, actually.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And a lot of the atheists are.

Atheism as Christian Heresy

ANDREW ISKER: What is that? Well, I think atheism really is… an atheist moralizer—

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s hilarious.

ANDREW ISKER: Well, it’s a Christian heresy. Like, they want to have all the things of Christianity just without God there. So they want to be able to pursue all of these things. They want to be able to say this is right and this is wrong, but have no authority to ground it on. Just by their say so. It is a conundrum.

TUCKER CARLSON: What? It’s wrong. Well…

ANDREW ISKER: And you can see why—

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. Why?

ANDREW ISKER: You can see why it’s breaking down, though, today under the weight of its own silliness. It creates this vacuum and it’s being replaced by something. So all of the moralistic energy is still there, and now it’s gone to things like transgenderism, abortion, Gaza, whatever. It goes to all of those routes. It goes to BLM and rioting.

TUCKER CARLSON: Because it’s highly religious. It’s in us. We can’t get away from the conviction, the true conviction that some things are right and some things are wrong.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. It’s fundamentally human. Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: But an atheist would have to, by definition, be utterly nonjudgmental about everything.

ANDREW ISKER: You would think they should be, but they’re the most judgmental people.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s unbelievable. I mean, Christopher at dinner was always lecturing about the Kurds. And I’m nothing against the Kurds. I don’t know much about the Kurds. I ran into them in Iraq. They were the most bloodthirsty people in Iraq. I did notice that.

ANDREW ISKER: But he was so—

TUCKER CARLSON: Again, I’m not against the Kurds. You know, I’m not an expert in Kurdishness. But he, man, he would, like, lay down his life for the Kurds.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I remember thinking, what is this? And it was the need to sort of find a good guy and a bad guy and put yourself in the good guy’s side.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. And that’s human.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like, human.

ANDREW ISKER: We want that.

Leaving Minnesota for Tennessee

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s totally true. So what did you say to your church when you left?

ANDREW ISKER: That was one of the hardest days of my life.

TUCKER CARLSON: I believe it.

ANDREW ISKER: Tell them I’m leaving. I’m going to Tennessee. And it was difficult. I still have a connection with them, relationship with them still. I’m still trying to find them a pastor to replace me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ANDREW ISKER: It’s hard to—

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s—

ANDREW ISKER: It’s hard for me to do that because, like, “Well, you left Andrew. Why you want me to go there now?” But they need one. And they’re wonderful people who have blessed me immensely.

I just told them that I have to leave Minnesota. There’s a place for me there in Tennessee, and it’s ultimately what is best for my family’s future. There’s a place where my children can grow up. Because part of it, too, it isn’t just the things that we’re leaving, the political, cultural things that we’re leaving in Minnesota, but it’s also the things that have been done to the Midwest, to everywhere where my children grow up.

If they want to have a career and a life and a family and success of their own, there just isn’t much for them in small town Midwest. And so they’ll all just fly the coop. This is what happened. When I graduated from high school, most of the people that I grew up with, they all left. They went to the Twin Cities, they went to other cities for work and for careers.

And that same thing was likely going to happen with my children. And I look at it and I think, well, my family’s been here for six generations and whether it’s going to end here? And I want to be in a place where we can continue that, where we can be rooted, where my children have the ability to stay in a place.

And so many friends are coming to Tennessee where we are. They’re bringing businesses. And once you build things at scale, the more stuff you’re able to do, the more businesses you’re able to have, the more opportunity is for young people. And so if my children want to stay where we are and continue that on generation after generation, we actually will be able to do that. It wasn’t so much just, “Okay, we need to leave Minnesota,” but it’s also, we’re being drawn to a place for a particular reason.

TUCKER CARLSON: The Tennessee dream.

ANDREW ISKER: There’s a future there. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: The hope of refugees from time immemorial.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

The Silence of Churches in Minnesota

TUCKER CARLSON: What did the other churches in the state say as the state itself became a place that faithful Christians couldn’t live?

ANDREW ISKER: I mean, there are a handful of churches there that are very strong. There are Christians there that oppose these things, but they’re so vastly outnumbered. Like when I went to the state capitol to oppose the abortion bill, there were lots of activists on both sides, pro-life activists and pro-ritual sacrifice activists, but there were no other pastors there. I think one of the Catholic bishops did a Zoom call. But beyond that, there were no other pastors.

And I’m thinking like, my church is like 30, 40 people. I do this. I tent-make, I do a full-time job and then do this. We’re tiny. I’m small. I’m insignificant. And there are churches with 15, 20,000 people, prominent men in the Twin Cities. And all I had to do was just send an email to the clerk of the committee, like, “Hey, can I have two minutes to speak?” No one showed up. No one was there.

And it’s like, they’re going to murder babies up to birth. Enshrine this in our law, try to make a constitutional amendment for it, all of these things. And no one is opposing it. I’m the only one that came. I quoted the Bible and opposed it as a Christian. There’s just so little fight there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Christians built your state.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: And all of it and every bit of it. And it’s so telling. When you go to the Twin Cities, I think of them as Protestant and Catholic. I think of them as Scandinavian in Minneapolis and Irish and others in St. Paul. But both of them, especially St. Paul, just littered with churches and schools. And it’s just like the infrastructure of those cities was built by Christians. And so it’s a little bit crazy that first of all, it’s been taken over by people who have made a point to stick a finger in the eye of Christians to make it impossible for them to live there. It’s like you’re being driven out of your own homeland. Six generations.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. I mean, this is what happened with my wife’s family. My wife is from St. Paul. Her father’s side of the family is Polish Catholic. I went to St. Casmer’s Church.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. That’s exactly in my mind what I think of.

ANDREW ISKER: In the neighborhood that they were in, it was all Polish people, but now it’s all Hmong. Everywhere it’s all Hmong and Somali and everyone there just left over the last two or three—

TUCKER CARLSON: Are there churches and parochial schools?

ANDREW ISKER: Well, St. Casimir’s Church is there, but it’s largely empty. We went there for a funeral a couple years ago, but there’s people still attending, but it’s not like it was. Most of the parishes there have shut down. The church schools have shut down and they’ve moved out to the suburbs. And so, I mean, that was a Polish neighborhood. It was this ethnic enclave.

TUCKER CARLSON: If I could just say, showing myself to be an ethnic nationalist. They’re just like some of the greatest people.

The Decline of St. Paul

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve ever met. I don’t think I’ve ever met, I.

ANDREW ISKER: Have to say that married one. So.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I just think they’re great people. I don’t know. I’ve met many I don’t like, but just false. The earth, smart, hard working, serious about faith and family. Yeah. Great people.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I doubt it was an improvement that changed to St. Paul. In fact, it wasn’t. I’ve been there.

ANDREW ISKER: No, it’s like when her parents finally moved, the whole area is run down, lots of crime. And it’s sad because it was beautiful. You could see the remnants of what was like. You drive through St. Paul, you see some of the old buildings and how beautiful they were, how much care people put into these places. And now they’re just falling apart. Bars on windows everywhere.

TUCKER CARLSON: Factory workers basically tithing to build the infrastructure of churches and schools and their own homes. People with no money giving the maximum amount to build all this stuff for their families. And then it’s just some politician decides, oh, this is too white, so we need to destroy it all and destroy all the people. It’s a crime on a level that only historians will be able to assess clearly. But yeah, okay, sorry. So can we just. Before you get into what’s happening in Tennessee so discursive. It’s my fault. But why aren’t the fearsome evangelicals, who I will still defend.

ANDREW ISKER: Absolutely. I’m just saying that the laity absolutely defend them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the laity.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Know a million of them.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I love them. In fact, there’s some working here right now in this office. But the preachers, like, where were they during all of this?

The Problem with Modern Evangelicalism

ANDREW ISKER: I mean, I think it’s largely the contemporary evangelical mode of being. I mean, so much of it, I look back to it being going all the way back to something like the second Great Awakening where the purpose of the major change that took place there is. It’s all about conversionism and it becomes a big show and marketing and all of that.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s where you got the tent revival.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. Yes. Charles Finney, those kinds of things. Well, that’s kind of in the DNA, at least somewhat within evangelicalism.

TUCKER CARLSON: So to put a finer point on what you’re saying, the point became the more souls we convert, the more people who profess faith. That’s like the scorecard that we use.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. That’s the metric that everyone follows. And so you look at it and you think, well, if we just water it down a little bit more, make it more palatable to people, people just get more butts in the seats. Then that’s the metric of success, not the internal development, discipleship of people. Not actual repentance and conversion, not fundamental life change and so forth that traditional Christianity always was.

It’s, oh, if we just get them here. And of course, if they put some money in the plate and they’re attending, that’s what matters. So you see churches where it’s like, okay, we have amazing production values, we have a great band and all of these things. And it’s all of these entertainments to get people in. Or the sermon is sort of like a self-help talk. There isn’t really Bible in it at all. Or if it is, it’s like tangentially related to something that the pastor wants to say.

It’s not “All right, we’re going to go through a chapter of Leviticus today and explain what the sacrifices are about.” There’s none of those things. And you see, many evangelical people have not been taught really any Bible or theology at all. And you see this in surveys, like the Barna group does surveys, and what people believe about different things and they haven’t been taught any Bible. They don’t know it.

And so then when the liberal says, well, the Bible condemns eating shellfish and pork, and in the same way it condemns homosexuality. So what do you have to say that. And they have no idea how to explain that, what that is about. And their faith is shaken.

TUCKER CARLSON: Or, God didn’t destroy two cities with sulfur and fire because people were eating pork. That’s. Sorry. He destroyed them because they tried to commit gay rape on an angel. Yeah, that’s just.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. And they’ll say that with. Well, the sin of Sodom was inhospitality.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it wasn’t.

ANDREW ISKER: Well, I mean, I guess it was gay rape. Yeah. I mean, the least hospitable thing. You can read it if you want.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like, yeah, it’s pretty out there. Yeah.

ANDREW ISKER: It’s like, well, yeah, the least hospitable thing you could do to a guest is to anally rape them. Yes. So all the men of the town.

TUCKER CARLSON: Came out, they demanded, yeah, we need.

ANDREW ISKER: To know these angels to have sex with these angels.

TUCKER CARLSON: And then Lot’s like, I’ve got some daughters in here. Take them.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Which kind of takes Lot off my Christmas card list for saying something like that. But whatever. He does that, it’s in Genesis. And they’re like, no, we want to rape the dudes. Like, it’s like. Like, these are not euphemisms. It’s pretty straightforward.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I actually. I just read Genesis 19 to my children, and there were some questions from the kids.

Biblical Literacy

TUCKER CARLSON: It was funny. I read that a couple of years ago for the first time, I’ll admit it. And my wife, who’s a very serious and wonderful person, but a serious Christian, we’re on a walk. And I told her, like, what I had read the night before, and she’s like, what? What? You know, she’s.

ANDREW ISKER: I mean, she’s just like.

TUCKER CARLSON: She’s the model for me as a faithful person. But she was like, that’s no way. You know, I was like, it’s in there.

ANDREW ISKER: That’s what happened. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And so I think about that. It’s like. I mean, it’s funny. Like, even at my little church, I just preach through the Bible, right? So I’ll just take a chapter and I’ll talk about it. I’ll explain what’s going on, all of these things. And, I mean, I have some wonderful people there, older people that have been Christians their entire adult lives, and they’re in their 70s. And one of them said to me, “Andrew, that’s the first time someone has ever preached from the Book of Judges in a church service.”

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a good one.

ANDREW ISKER: I went through the entire book and then, well, let’s do Ruth. And then First Samuel and Two Samuel. And it’s like, whoa, there’s so much. There’s so much there. I mean, I had friends come down that were sort of new and becoming Christians out of being secular their whole lives, and they’re like, “Whoa, the Bible is extremely metal. This is wild. There’s so much political intrigue happening in First and Second Samuel.”

Yeah. And I’m explaining it sort of in, like, this Machiavellian realpolitik way. And they’re just, like, at the edge of their seats, like, “Whoa, that’s crazy that that happened.” And so I love it.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I can see why. I don’t claim to understand a lot of it, particularly the Old Testament. Starting to figure out the New Testament more. But just having read it cold a couple of times, there’s like a book like, you would read Anna Karenina or Moby Dick. Like, it’s like the wildest, coolest, most interesting, most profound. Like, those are not overstatements at all.

And I think everybody. It’s the basis of Western civilization. I don’t know why people don’t read it. There’s obviously a reason. But even if you’re an atheist, how could you not read the Bible? Like, everything we have is founded on the ideas in this. And, like, you’re basically illiterate if you haven’t read it.

ANDREW ISKER: Oh, I know. I mean, you even see this. It’s so funny. Like, when journalists write about the Bible and they’re like, oh, there’s this weird illusion here that, that. And it’s like he’s talking about a whale swallowing a man. I don’t really know what’s going on. And it’s like, that’s the Book of Jonah. How do you not. How do you not know what that’s about? But they have no idea.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s just so compelling.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Even Leviticus, which I read on a flight to Europe one night I made myself because, you know, I had eight hours on a plane and I texted my wife from the plane. I was like, this is excellent, actually. It’s just excellent. I thought it was gonna be all like sacrificing doves. Cause you have your period, that’s in there quickly. Like 95% of it made sense to me.

The Beauty of Leviticus

ANDREW ISKER: Well, and it’s real. Like, it’s tangible, right? It’s the real tangible world that people interact with. That’s there. And people always ask me like, “Well, Andrew, what’s your favorite book of the Bible?” And I sometimes love to get a rise out of people, but I tell them, “Well, Leviticus is it.” And they’re like, “What? Really?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, like, I mean, I’m a pastor. My calling is to preach the gospel and to lead worship. And that book right there, all of it is about how do sinful people draw near and approach the presence of a holy, just, righteous God that cannot bear sin at all.” And there it’s laid out for us, all of it.

And even like you look at Leviticus chapter 9, like you read that, maybe you remember reading it. I’m actually going through this with my church right now in Tennessee. But Leviticus chapter 9 is the entire liturgy of the church right there. Each of the sacrifices and all of the Western liturgy for 2,000 years basically follows it, right? You’re called into the presence of God, you confess your sins. I mean, probably like your Episcopalian upbringing, Book of Common Prayer, like, you probably track with this. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: They never admitted that in our church.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, maybe they didn’t have a confession to sin in yours. But there’s a confession of sin, right. Then there’s an ascension, the ascension offering in chapter one of Leviticus. The worshiper puts his hand on the animal saying, this animal’s me. And then the entire thing is consumed, is burned up.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ANDREW ISKER: Olah. Right. Where the word holocaust comes from. Consumed, burned up, goes up to God in smoke. And that’s you. Right? And then the New Testament where it says the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. What’s the sword of the priest that cuts the animal and puts it on the altar and burns it up?

Well, that’s what’s happening when the church hears the Bible read and hears it preached. Right. You’re being cut up by the word of God and ascending up to God in smoke. And then the next part of the service is the peace offering. Well, that’s communion. Right. You sit down and have a meal with God and then you’re sent out.

Right. The entire liturgy is right there. Like our actual worship that we do now, right after the death of Jesus and resurrection of Jesus, sacrifice is done away with because he is that sacrifice. And we’re going through all of that each time we worship and renew the covenant with God.

And you see that in Leviticus and it’s like, whoa. Actually there’s so much to learn here in this book about what we are doing every Sunday when we worship God. So I’m like, yeah, of course it’s my favorite book. Not just because I’m autistic and like lots of rules and regulations. It’s like reading the instructions on the Monopoly game, you know, like, no, it’s there. Like so much is happening. It’s beautiful.

The Truth About Revelation and Biblical Interpretation

TUCKER CARLSON: And the prescriptions, or the prohibitions more precisely, are surprisingly sensible.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And one of the challenges to atheism is to explain why the atheist would agree with the overwhelming majority of what’s prohibited. Because it’s in him. He knows that’s wrong. Don’t have sex with your sister. Okay. And most people, most atheists would be like, yeah, well, obviously. But of course he has no grounds upon which to say that. There’s literally no law he can appeal to to say that.

ANDREW ISKER: He says that obviously because he grew up and was reared and absorbed by osmosis Christian culture, where that’s prohibited.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s right. But I also think in primitive cultures that have never had exposure to Christianity. I mean, I don’t know that there are many cultures where most of the prohibitions in Leviticus would be considered crazy.

ANDREW ISKER: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Or esoteric or, like, why would you ban that? It’s like every one of them, like, of course.

ANDREW ISKER: Well, you think about this. There was a pastor, theologian, brilliant guy, Peter Leithart, who wrote a book “Delivered from the Elements of the World.” And in that he shows—I mean, there’s tons of just amazing stuff in this book—but one of the things that he shows is that God makes these restrictions for Israel in the Old covenant that sets them apart as this holy people, as the priestly people.

But elsewhere in the world, they all have something like that. All throughout the ancient world, their gods had something like a funhouse mirror version of Leviticus where it’s like, “Okay, here’s all these rules about sex and what makes you clean and unclean and food you can’t eat and can eat.” The Egyptians had this. The Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, all of them have these kinds of rules. The Mayans, the Norse, like my ancestors, the Germanics—they all had these rules.

And it’s because in the ancient world, they’re all under their own particular gods. And what Jesus does is he comes and he takes the world back from Satan and from all the demons that ruled over the ancient world. And now he’s reigning over heaven. That’s actually like the book of Revelation. That’s actually what’s going on in that book.

Understanding Revelation and Dispensationalism

TUCKER CARLSON: That book, the much maligned book of Revelation.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. I know you had John Rich on last year, and he’s talking about dispensationalism and things like that. And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to be in Tennessee. I need to meet him and talk to him about this.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you?

ANDREW ISKER: I haven’t. No. I have no way of getting in touch with him. Maybe after this, if you watch it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, he’s a good man.

ANDREW ISKER: Oh, I love him. I mean, he was like the soundtrack of my youth of country music. Like, he wrote all those songs. So on that basis alone. But he’s talking about dispensationalism and what has happened in American Christianity for the last 130 years, how it’s actually a novel new thing. And for me, it was like, yeah, I looked at that. I mean, I remember growing up and that’s just everything, like Left Behind and the rapture is coming and all of that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I missed all of that.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: What you’re talking about.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. It’s a thing, especially—and of course, I’m very critical of it. But these are the best people in America that believe it. Like, the people that have six Trump flags on the back of their truck.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.

ANDREW ISKER: They also believe that the Rapture is coming tomorrow. We need to be ready for it. And so anytime I’m critical of it, I’m like, “Okay, I’m not critical of the people.” There’s not a moral defect that they believe these things.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree. First of all, thank you for saying that. Second, I feel what you’re saying, especially with evangelicals. I look at these grease ball preachers who, honestly, I find disgusting, and then I see the people who go to their churches, and I’m like, “Oh, I love you. You’re exactly my kind of people. You’re the most decent people in this country. You’re trying your very hardest against headwinds that are so unfair, and you’re doing a great job anyway.” And I just love that. I really mean it. I love them. So I never want to criticize, ever.

The Heart of Rural America

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, and so whenever I’m critical of that theology, I have to make sure people know I’m not criticizing you because you’re great, awesome people. When I first went to the town in Gainesboro, before we decided to make our move, it was right after the hurricane, which wasn’t far from there. And this is a town that doesn’t have a whole lot. The median income is not very high in this town. But I’m driving around and every gas station…

TUCKER CARLSON: Where is it?

ANDREW ISKER: Gainesboro, Tennessee, is in Jackson County. It’s like north central Tennessee.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

ANDREW ISKER: And every gas station has signs up like, “Hey, we’re going to western North Carolina to go help out.” And it’s like, people that don’t have a whole lot—they’re taking their time and what little money they have to go help people. And meanwhile, the Biden administration is sending billions more to Ukraine and to Israel and everything, and they’re taking their time. These are wonderful people.

TUCKER CARLSON: They are. And I will say, for Trump, whatever people think of Trump, I know Trump well enough to have talked to him about this kind of stuff away from cameras. And his affection, love, gratitude toward those specific people is totally real.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you can argue about which policies serve those people best or whatever, but leadership begins with love. If you don’t love the people you lead, you’ll mistreat them and you see it reciprocated.

ANDREW ISKER: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s totally real and completely real. And it’s emotional. And he’s like, “I love those people.”

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. And he eats McDonald’s in private.

TUCKER CARLSON: So that is, I just want to say that because I know that for a fact. A lot of politics is obviously fake, but that specific part of Trump, like loving people like that—oh, man.

ANDREW ISKER: Well, and it’s the people that are the most maligned in our country. Like, the only people you can make fun of are rural southern Appalachian people. That’s fair game. You can criticize them all you want and mock them. Jimmy Kimmel can make fun of them all day long on his show. No other group of people can you do that for. And they’re the people that have been dispossessed of their country the most. This is a big reason why we moved to this place—these are the people that are hated. I want to go live with them. I want to be around these people.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re great people with discipline and cheerful too.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. Wonderful people.

TUCKER CARLSON: I live in a place with a lot of people like that and you know, every third person has a child or grandson who’s died of a drug overdose and there’s no year-round work and there’s just a lot of problems. And these are like, you can pull into their driveway on a Sunday and they will just, they’ll have a six pack and they’ll give you two of them. I mean, they really are just the most generous, kind, hilarious, wise, just good people. The best, the best that this country’s ever produced, in my opinion.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not from those people at all. So I’m coming at this like, “Wow, these people are incredible.”

Theology and American Optimism

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, absolutely. And so I think about that, and I think about the theology that has shaped their outlook. And it’s understandable because, especially in the midst of serious decline, it’s sort of attractive to have this eschatology where everything is coming to an end. You can understand why people would eat that up.

But the people that actually built America, the Puritans and all of the settlers of this country, you think of even the founding generation, that theology did not exist yet. That wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that it came into being. They were actually optimistic. They viewed this continent as a place for Christians to build, to grow, to have a future.

TUCKER CARLSON: What an interesting point. I’ve never thought of that before. So dispensationalism, for those who haven’t followed it, is normally criticized and defended because of its interpretation of what biblical Israel is now.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s a super electric topic, both theologically and politically.

ANDREW ISKER: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: And people get utterly hysterical about it and start calling you names or whatever.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So there’s that. But you’re saying that the deeper or a deeper problem with it is that it makes people pessimistic.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you flesh it out a little bit?

Time Preference and Building for the Future

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. So I think if you go your entire life believing that any minute the world is going to come to an end, that I’m going to float up into heaven and my clothes will be here and we’re gone, it’s done, it’s over—well, that takes people that ordinarily are very low time preference, that build things for the future, that delay gratification, all of those kinds of things. And it flips it around and makes them very high time preference where it’s like, “Well, if the world’s not going to be around tomorrow, why invest in anything for today?”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

ANDREW ISKER: And you can even see this in terms of architecture. You think of the buildings that churches have. Well, they’re in strip malls or they’re just kind of garbage.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like a former pet store.

ANDREW ISKER: And you look at the buildings that Christians had before this was the dominant theology. And they’re gorgeous, they’re beautiful, and there were very poor people that made them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Like you said earlier.

ANDREW ISKER: And it’s like that right there. You see it tangibly and you think about that in terms of all of life.

TUCKER CARLSON: That is so smart. And what was the phrase used? Low time preference.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, low time preference. It’s like an economic phrase. So your preference…

TUCKER CARLSON: Please respect my ignorance.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes. It just means that you’re going to wait longer for things. It’s sort of like the marshmallow test with little kids. Where in five minutes you’ll get two marshmallows or you can eat this one right now. Well, the child that says, “Oh, I’ll wait, I want two”—he’s going to go on and have more success, versus the one that immediately grabs the one and eats it. Well, that’s low time preference. It’s people that will delay gratification, who will save and invest and build things for the long term, for the future.

TUCKER CARLSON: And for future generations.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes, yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: That plant oak trees.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who plants oak trees?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, well, in Tennessee we want to bring back the American chestnut. We want to bring that back.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you putting in evergreens, please?

ANDREW ISKER: Oh, I think everything. Yeah. I mean, there’s pines, there’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: Please don’t neglect the pine. I know it’s a fast growing tree, relatively speaking, but it’s…

ANDREW ISKER: It’s beautiful.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the answer. And cedars. If you can. If you have water.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll be able to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, okay.

ANDREW ISKER: Now we’re going to get into…

TUCKER CARLSON: Since you’re a preacher, Old Testament scholar, what was the inside of the temple clad with?

ANDREW ISKER: Cedar from Lebanon. Exactly. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: God himself said cedar.

ANDREW ISKER: That’s right. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: An accident. He was pretty specific about it.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. Yeah. It smells great.

TUCKER CARLSON: Maybe there’s a reason my sauna has cedar in the inside.

ANDREW ISKER: That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: I tell my kids that.

ANDREW ISKER: Like the temple.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s my senior church.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, that’s right.

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I’m sorry I’ve gone so far, I feel, but. So your point is that dispensationalism not only has specious theological elements, which I think very obviously it does.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: By the way, the whole theology was like laid out in the endnotes. It’s not actually in the Bible. It’s like interpretation in the version of the Bible.

The Origins of Dispensationalism

ANDREW ISKER: John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield. And they’ll claim that they’re antecedents from the early church. Well, this guy believed in something like the Rapture. And it’s like, it’s always very, like you said, specious.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, that’s my read as a non-theologian, but it does seem incredibly silly, but sincere. So. Okay.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, exactly. People sincerely believe it. So I mock them.

TUCKER CARLSON: 100%. A lot of people I really like and respect.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I just want to say that. But you’re saying that the cost is even deeper because it changes your worldview and makes it very difficult for you to engage in the labor of like, for example, loving people around you and building something beautiful, which are also Christian imperatives. Is that what you’re saying?

The Problem with Rapture Theology

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, I think so. And it also forces you into an immediacy. Right. We got to do everything right now because there isn’t going to be a future. There’s not going to be. I mean, and I heard this all the time growing up. Well, you know, we’re not going to be around. We’re going to be raptured. So why plan for the future? Why build things for the future?

TUCKER CARLSON: Heard that growing up.

ANDREW ISKER: Oh, yeah. This was just everywhere in evangelicalism.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you grow up in that?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, yeah, I did. And I remember in college when I was first getting into more historical theology or thinking, like, what did people believe before the 19th century about things.

TUCKER CARLSON: For the first 1800 years?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. What did they. Well, there are various different eschatological schools. Like, there’s all sorts of different views of how the end works. But when I first get into that, I’m thinking, like, oh, I don’t know if I actually believe in the Rapture. And I remember being in college and in campus ministry and telling people this. Like, I don’t know if I actually believe in that.

It was like I just uttered the greatest heresy of all time. I probably could have said I denied the Trinity or something, right, and they would have been like, oh, cool, that’s interesting. But saying, I don’t think there’s a Rapture? What? Are you serious? Like, that is central doctrine to many Christians, and it has this deep emotional connection because if you’ve grown up your entire life hearing this, and it’s just assumed by everybody, it’s hard to break out of that. Even though the historic church of millions or billions of Christians…

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ANDREW ISKER: It’s actually a tiny minority in the history of the church that has believed that. But presently it’s a majority of evangelicals.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it seems like that theology is dying. That’s just my sense, but I’d be the last to really know.

ANDREW ISKER: No, I think your instincts are correct. I think some of it is especially in the latter half of the 20th century, right after Israel is formalized as a State in 1948. Well, that gives big confirmation that, okay, things are happening. There’s an Israel in Revelation and a temple in Revelation. So it’s happening, guys. So we’ve got 40 years, right? 1988, that’s the end. Well, then that doesn’t happen. And then people make all sorts of other guesses.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I wasn’t even aware of that. So the idea was 1988 saying the world.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. 40 years after 1948. That’s when the Rapture is coming. That was a book like, “88 Reasons Why Jesus is Coming Back in 1988.” Right. And I’m sure it sold a lot of copies. And then, of course, didn’t happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. But Mike Dukakis lost. No, I mean, that’s not obviously the Rapture, but, you know, whatever.

ANDREW ISKER: We’ll take it for people in Massachusetts, maybe it was, but. But yeah, you know, it’s just so interesting because I look at it like you look at Matthew 24. Right? That’s the big text that people point to. And what does it say? Jesus says, well, there’s going to be wars and rumors of wars and earthquakes in various places and plagues and things like that. But right before it, Jesus is in the temple and he’s fighting with the chief priests and he’s telling them, he’s fighting with them at Passover. So thousands of people surrounding them. He’s embarrassing them in the temple.

Jesus’s Boldness in the Gospels

TUCKER CARLSON: And his boldness is really shocking to people who haven’t read it before.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: The rage that he displays at the leadership.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: The religious leadership is just like.

ANDREW ISKER: Like it’s nothing else.

TUCKER CARLSON: It comes right off the page.

ANDREW ISKER: Which is so ironic because you see evangelicals who are like, you need to be more Christ-like, right. Which means like, wimpy and weak and.

TUCKER CARLSON: Inoffensive, sweeping into the temple and knocking over tables and driving people out with a whip.

ANDREW ISKER: And then going into the temple and giving this parable. Right where? Of the vineyard. He’s like, first I sent this servant. You beat him and stoned him, and then you killed another one. Well, I’ll send my son. They’ll respect him. And then it’s the heir.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ANDREW ISKER: If we kill him, we could take the vineyard for ourselves. Right. And ask him, what’s he going to do to these people? Well, he’s going to come and he’s going to destroy all of them. And the hilarious thing, I think, reading the Gospels is Jesus is giving parables, and the point of the parables is actually to conceal what he’s saying. And people are like, whoa, what’s that? Even his own disciples are like, what’s that about? I don’t really know. It doesn’t make any sense. But he’s telling parables to the chief priests and the Pharisees and all the leaders of Israel. And they’re like, oh, that’s about us.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think it says they understood, it was about them.

ANDREW ISKER: They knew and they decided to kill him. Yeah. So the parables are obscured to everybody else. But when it’s about them, like, oh, he’s talking about us.

TUCKER CARLSON: But talk about speaking truth to power. I mean, I don’t know how that Jesus was kept from me, as a lifelong churchgoer, I have no idea. But you just read it. I would recommend everyone read it, non-Christians alike.

ANDREW ISKER: He’s there. He’s right there. Especially the Gospel of Matthew. I love it because it is.

TUCKER CARLSON: But Mark too.

Jesus as the True Israel

ANDREW ISKER: All four. I mean, obviously all four of them. But Matthew in particular is so cool to me, because you read it and the way it’s organized is Jesus is recapitulating the entire history of Israel, right?

So right in the very beginning, he goes out into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, just like Israel’s in the wilderness for 40 years. Right. Is tempted by Satan. He comes right after he crosses or is baptized in the Jordan, is like crossing the Red Sea, goes into the wilderness. Then after that, he is preaching a sermon on a mountain, expounding the law, which is Moses on Sinai. Right. And after this, he’s telling parables of the kingdom like he’s David or like he’s Solomon writing proverbs, writing psalms. And then he begins all of these excoriations of the high priesthood and the Pharisees and all the leaders of Israel. Well, what’s that like? It’s like the prophets, right?

So he’s reliving the whole history of Israel in his life. What’s Matthew doing there? What’s the Holy Spirit doing there? It’s showing that Jesus is Israel. Right. He’s the true Israel. Right. He is the, as the Apostle Paul says, he’s the chosen seed of Abraham. Right. He’s the one that carries out Israel’s mission, which is. You just dumbfound. I’m kind of doing the weave, too.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s Trumpian.

ANDREW ISKER: It is, Yeah. I mean, when I’m preaching, people are like, “Andrew, you’re doing the weave like President Trump.” And I try not to do the hand motions and things like him, too. But we all have our own rhetorical style.

But it’s interesting because the whole dispensational thing where it’s like, okay, the Old Covenant still somehow sort of exists, and there’s still this distinction between Jew and Gentile out there. Well, the whole New Testament talks about this. That separation that existed in the Old Covenant, they’re brought together as one in Jesus, who is the true Israel, the true, the successful Israel, the Israel that’s obedient and goes to the death and is vindicated by being resurrected. Right. And that Old Covenant, it’s done, it’s over. Those distinctions between Jew and Gentile, they’re gone.

TUCKER CARLSON: It says that only about a thousand times in every book of the New Testament. So to come to the opposite conclusion does make it sort of wonder. Like, have you read it?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Whether you believe it or not, that’s just not what it says at all.

The Unity of Jews and Gentiles in Christ

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. And so you think about that. And it’s like, okay, these two are brought together. I mean, the whole Book of Acts is about this, right? That the Holy Spirit not only goes to the apostles and the Jews in Jerusalem, but the Gentiles get it too. Like Peter goes to Cornelius and he believes. And now here is this Roman, right, this Gentile.

And the interesting thing about that, too, is there’s this misconception that the only people in the Old Testament that believed in God were Jews. But it’s like everywhere they go, there are these Gentile God fearers that believe in God. And Cornelius is one of them in the New Testament.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s all through the New Testament. And in fact, Jesus calls out repeatedly Gentiles as the most faithful. Repeatedly. The Roman officer.

The Truth About Revelation and Biblical Prophecy

ANDREW ISKER: Yes, yes, again. I mean, he says this in the Gospels. He’s talking about the faithless and adulterous generation. He’s talking about Israel, and he’s saying in the Resurrection, Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre and Sidon, they’ll rise. Sodom destroyed for trying to rape angels. They will rise up in judgment on this generation. Because if the things that I’m doing, if the Son of God appeared to them and preached to them, they would have repented.

And Nineveh, this Gentile city in the Old Testament of Assyrians, brutal, bloodthirsty people. Jonah shows up and he preaches, and his only message is, “40 days, Nineveh is going to be destroyed.” He’s gleeful about this. And the king hears about it, he repents. He makes all the people in the city wear sackcloth and ashes. And it’s like, well, I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but this looks serious. We better repent.

And I mean, we’re going to go in the deep weeds here, if you let me. You look at the Book of Jonah in particular. He flees not because he’s afraid of the Assyrians. That’s what people think is like, he’s scared to go there. No, you read the end of the Book of Jonah and he’s arguing with God at the end, and he’s saying, “I knew that you would show mercy on these people. I knew you would show them mercy. That’s why I didn’t want to go.”

He was trying to outwit God, like trick God into not being gracious to these Gentiles because he knows in the Law in Deuteronomy, one of the signs that Israel is about to be cursed is that he is going to call nations, the Gentiles, nations that do not know him to himself. He’s going to go to the Gentiles and away from Israel. And that means judgment is going to come upon Israel.

So Jonah knows this. He’s like, I am going the opposite direction. I’m going to Tarshish, to Spain, because I am not going to let God judge my people. That’s why he’s angry about this.

And it gets even more interesting because Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah to Israel and people think, oh, well, Jonah, he’s talking about the resurrection being in the ground for three days and three nights. And it’s like, I mean, that’s symbolic. That’s typological. He’s drawing on that typology. But it’s not about that. It’s that what’s going to happen. Gentiles are going to hear the Gospel and not you, and that judgment is going to come on Israel.

Judgment is going to come on this generation. And that’s what Jesus says at the beginning of Matthew 24, is these things are going to happen in this generation. He’s walking with the disciples in the temple and they’re marveling at the building. We would marvel too, at the beautiful temple. Like the whole thing is clad in gold on the outside is gorgeous. Beautiful, giant, massive stones that boggle your mind how megaliths, human beings, could move these things and build this stuff without modern power tools.

They’re marveling at the temple and Jesus is like, “What are you looking at? Do you not know that not one stone is going to be left upon another very soon?” And they’re like, “Oh, boy, when’s this going to happen?”

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, 37 years later, actually.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, well, I think it’s… We can debate, but 40 years later. But I mean, I’ll be autistic on that point.

TUCKER CARLSON: The second revolt, it’s normally said to be 70.

ANDREW ISKER: I think the resurrection is in 30. I mean, we’re coming up on 2,000 years of…

TUCKER CARLSON: The point is the Romans. It’s actually crazy, the effort that they… I mean, I’m sure you’ve been there to the site.

ANDREW ISKER: I haven’t. Maybe one day.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, you should go. Jerusalem is the most amazing city. And they… Anyway, but they just went to such a great effort to separate every stone, destroy everything. They didn’t just burn it and sack it. But they actually dismantled it.

ANDREW ISKER: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: Piece by piece. How many slaves did that take? How much money did that take? How much effort? Human effort. Why would you do that? Why would you bother to do that?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, okay, I just want… And I’m so sorry for the discursions, but I want to get to your destination, which is Tennessee.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, yeah.

Building Christian Communities in Tennessee

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you be a lot more specific about what you’re doing there? I know there have been attempts to paint this as some sort of white supremacist enclave or theocracy or whatever. What actually is it? Can you describe it?

ANDREW ISKER: No. So really it’s a real estate venture to build communities. And I’m even hesitant to call it like subdivision because it’s not subdivisions. It’s large properties. 2, 3, 10 acre lots where people…

TUCKER CARLSON: Has someone already bought the land?

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. So ridge runners bought the parcels. It’s being divided up and sold as we speak. And one of them, my church, is going to build a church right at the center.

And so imagine. There’s kind of two kinds of development that happen, or really just one kind. It’s just build massive cul de sac subdivisions, houses for BlackRock, that kind of thing. And that’s not how America was built. My town is founded in the middle of the 19th century and the first thing that gets built, like everywhere else were churches and schools, and that’s not featured anywhere in any city, subdivisions or real estate developments at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s no place for people to congregate and have an actual community.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, yeah. Like you see all these ones. I mean, I’ve seen some of the plans in places around, like the Dallas Fort Worth area where it’s like they have a lazy river and they have all these nice amenities like that. There’s never like a church. There’s never anything that the old America once had.

And so, yeah, my church is going to build its building there. Families from all over the country, some of them know me, I’ve known them. And they’ve been dying to get out of their blue state city, horrible existence out of the traditional subdivision into a place where they can have land where they can have some chickens, maybe a cow. Live like Americans used to.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

ANDREW ISKER: And be out in nature and enjoy beautiful things. To build something like that. Because that’s happening like everywhere is development. All especially in Tennessee. It’s like here in Florida just exploding. So many people moving there because they’re trying to get out of these places. And so what gets built, BlackRock style subdivisions and just hideous buildings. And very anti-human.

And so this is development that is human scaled. It’s built for people to enjoy actual life. For people to congregate in the same area where they hold similar values. You don’t want to live in a place where everybody hates you and hates what you think and hates that you love Donald Trump, you love your country, you love your God.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve done that.

ANDREW ISKER: You don’t want that. And tons of people, it was like, oh, wouldn’t it be great if I had neighbors that we pretty much agreed on everything. We agree on everything politically, culturally, all of that where you, and then you don’t even have to talk about it. It’s just have normal life together. Your kids can play with their kids and grow up together. That’s the kind of thing that’s being built there in Tennessee. And so I’m so excited to be a part of it.

TUCKER CARLSON: The fact that there’s a church at the center of it is a red flag for the authorities in most places and certainly for the cultural commentators and the media and it was any other religious institution, of course it would be great. That would be your community.

ANDREW ISKER: Well, they’re praising the Muslim communities in Texas, for instance.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Or the illegal alien communities in Texas or whatever. But a Christian church is… And I don’t think any Christian should be surprised. I mean, the Bible says you’re going to be persecuted for believing this, so. And they are. All right, prediction come true. But tell us the response to this, this dangerous venture of yours.

Local Support Despite Media Criticism

ANDREW ISKER: Well, you know, like locally the people in town are, and in the surrounding area, even despite the news attacking us and things like that, the people that I’ve spoken to, the people I’ve met in the town are very enthusiastic actually. That, especially when they see the things that I do, see the podcast I do or various things like, “Oh, like you’re not at all like the TV man said you are.”

And of course these are people that we’ve been describing. Like they don’t trust the media, they don’t trust journalists, so they’re already distrusting of that. I’m like, “Oh, it just seems like you really like Donald Trump and the United States and Americans and the Constitution and our freedoms and you seem like a just normal conservative kind of guy.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I am, I’m an open book. Like there’s no… What you see is what you get. What I believe, I earnestly believe.” And so people have been very, very kind.

TUCKER CARLSON: But the state legislature hasn’t tried to…

ANDREW ISKER: No, no.

TUCKER CARLSON: Mess with your zoning permits or anything like that. No.

ANDREW ISKER: And the thing is it’s like, well, the company itself is not saying, “Well this is a community” like that would violate the Fair Housing Act. To say this is a Christian only community. It’s just that my church is allowed to build a church there. There’s no law against that at all. And I can call up friends and say, “Hey, you want to move here and be part of our thing.”

What are the costs? The cost of living is extremely low. There’s no income tax in Tennessee, just like Florida. And so it’s especially compared to large cities, much, much cheaper place to live. So a lot of people are like, “Oh wow, it’s only going to cost me this much for a home. It would cost me two or three times that if I were to build something like this and I get land.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Are houses being built there?

ANDREW ISKER: They’re starting to be. Yeah. My friend CJ actually is right in the beginning stages of building his dream house. He’s going to be one of the first ones.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s quite a concept. Do you think that… And you’ve written a book about this called the Boniface Option, which was controversial but also loved like all good things.

ANDREW ISKER: That’s right. Maybe you’re speaking self-referentially but…

TUCKER CARLSON: I was just saying like, you know, it’s pistachio ice cream. You know, like not everyone loves it but the people who do really do. But I think you suggest that it’s time for…

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: For sincere Christians to be in fellowship with each other, like physically.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, yeah. Especially because you see sort of like online communities where people are like, “Oh I like this pastor, I like the sermons that he preaches or I agree with this theology and I’m being formed and shaped.” You band into groups online where you sort of self-sort and there are these massive communities on the Internet.

It’s like, well what if we took that this digital community that exists and what if we made it in real life? What would that be like? And that’s sort of what, at least for me, what I’m trying to do is what if we bring people together in real life? What kind of stuff can we do? Like, I’m trying to just make it on my own.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

ANDREW ISKER: Just eke out an existence. But what if we all did that together and multiplied our respective bandwidths? What kind of stuff would we be able to…

TUCKER CARLSON: And you talked to businesses there too.

Economic Impact of Christian Communities

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. People are already moving their businesses there. And the exciting thing is, it wouldn’t be just like the people moving in being the only ones working at these businesses. It will help the people that are from there, the local community. Throughout the years, because of macroeconomic forces and geopolitical things that were done to our country, all the manufacturing and real good jobs that used to exist in a place like this are mostly gone.

What would it look like if we brought those things back? How would it bless the people in that area? That’s a major part of it. And that’s the exciting thing—we can come to a place like this, we bring our friends that have remote jobs and good incomes. People will spend money locally and businesses will spring up because of that. People will bring businesses and need employees, and the people in the area will flourish in a way that they haven’t for quite a while.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the pioneer spirit. For people who are interested, what’s the name of this again?

ANDREW ISKER: Ridgerunner. So the Highland Rim Project.

TUCKER CARLSON: Highland Rim Project.

ANDREW ISKER: Highland Rim Project, yeah. So the website is ridgerunnerusa.com.

The Future of Christian Persecution

TUCKER CARLSON: So I have one last question for you. Do you expect—I mean, what you described in your home state, in your hometown is basically the persecution of Christians, the people who built the United States. And that is a trend. Where do you expect that trend to go to the extent you can predict it?

ANDREW ISKER: That’s the most difficult thing, of course. Always making predictions. But I think it will go in two directions. So you have the left. I mean, you see this right now, just how violent they are. They’re just itching to destroy things, destroy people. They shot President Trump. They’re very, very violent people. And of course, the political apparatus on their side loves that. They never condemn it.

TUCKER CARLSON: And we saw the youth brigades.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah. The militia in 2020. The same exact thing. And I think there have been instances of churches being shot at and burned down and bombed. I think those kind of things will continue to happen and continue to get worse, especially in blue states and blue cities where it’s basically allowed. George Soros just handpicks all the prosecutors, and they’re not going to enforce these laws.

But on the flip side, there are still tens of millions of Christians, very conservative evangelicals and the like. They just got President Trump elected. And political power is being wielded. For so many years, we were told that our enemies have all this political power, but we’re going to restrain ourselves. We’re going to follow the Constitution, and we’re just going to expect them to disarm themselves for reasons.

That sort of way of thinking among conservatives is quickly being discarded, that the only thing you could do is confront power with power. President Trump and Vice President Vance, they’re wielding power. And that wielding of power is going to defend Christians in this country.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, it will.

The Growing Divide

ANDREW ISKER: And so I think that conflict will continue to become more stark. The two visions for the country will become more black and white. It will become more obvious that Christians need to band together to leave places where they have no protection whatsoever, where people like Tim Walz or the next governor of Minnesota, probably Keith Ellison, who is an Antifa Muslim.

They want to have a foil—the whole thing on Christian nationalism. This is why I wrote a book on that in 2022. The media is just attacking normal, decent evangelical people that happen to like Donald Trump and have skepticism about the election, the vaccine, everything, and make them the boogeyman. And they would always say white Christian nationalism. They always put those things together because they happen to be white. Even though they espouse no white nationalist tendencies at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: Race theology whatsoever, whatsoever at all.

ANDREW ISKER: Like, they’re totally colorblind.

TUCKER CARLSON: They have a universalist theology.

ANDREW ISKER: Absolutely, absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: Unlike the fascists who run the US Media, who are like Nazi race mongers.

ANDREW ISKER: Totally race-focused.

TUCKER CARLSON: How many people of color—we’re going to count you by race, which they literally do in this country. Who’s the Nazi?

ANDREW ISKER: I know. That’s their approach.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t see that in church. People come to your church. Like, how many blacks do we have today? How many Hispanics? How many Pacific Islanders? You’re like, we have Christians.

ANDREW ISKER: Well, the evangelical leadership definitely does count that way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’ve fallen for this stuff.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: But never forget how poisonous it is.

Hope for the Future

ANDREW ISKER: Absolutely. Yeah, it is. It’s like—well, no, we just have Christians. And so I think those trends will continue. But I’m hopeful. I’m optimistic. Like, I’m espousing this optimistic eschatology. So of course I’m optimistic. I’m always hoping for the very best.

And I think that especially if the kind of evangelical Christianity, historic Christianity, the Christianity that built Christendom, that built the West, that built America, if that comes back—the kind of Christianity that sees Jesus in the Gospels like we were talking about earlier, and sees a man that is on a mission and is totally courageous and attacking God’s enemies to their face, knowing it’s going to get him killed. That kind of Christianity that preaches like that, that speaks like that, that sees a God that is real and is your God, and he loves you and he loves what’s true and good and right. And there’s justice, and he is going to bring justice to all of his enemies, to all of the people that hate him, all the people that do monstrous evil. That kind of Christianity that makes a comeback in America—well, that’s an America that has a future.

TUCKER CARLSON: I have to say, I think that the hallmarks of courage among them are cheerfulness and optimism. I do think that.

ANDREW ISKER: Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: And you have that. For a dangerous theocratic fascist, you seem very optimistic and cheerful. So thank you for spending all this time. I really appreciate it.

ANDREW ISKER: Thank you so much for having me.

TUCKER CARLSON: It was great to meet you.

ANDREW ISKER: Nice meeting you as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you. So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show. On one level, that’s not surprising. That’s what they do. But on another level, it’s shocking. With everything that’s going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more. And that is totally wrong. It’s immoral. What can you do about it? We could whine about it. That’s a waste of time. We’re not in charge of Google. Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that is true, not intentionally deceptive. The way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel. Subscribe. Hit the little bell icon to be notified when we upload and share this video. That way you’ll have a much higher chance of hearing actual news and information, so we hope that you’ll do that.

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