Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro and Christian Pastor John MacArthur called for a return to biblical morality amid plummeting church attendance across the United States in the latest episode of the Sunday Special. 

The two discussed the decline of religiosity in America and how many churches have twisted the Bible to be more in line with woke culture. They also discussed how modern secularists have embraced moral relativity and rejected any claim of a higher power. 

During the conversation, Shapiro asked MacArthur, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, how people looking for a biblical truth “determine what is a Bible believing church that’s worth their time versus a church that maybe has a Pride progress flag hanging off the door and claims to be speaking in the name of the Gospels.”

“A church that is faithful to scripture, a synagogue that is faithful to scripture, bears moral authority,” MacArthur said. “I mean, it exists to say, ‘this is what the Lord has said. This is what God requires.’ This is divine mandate. This is the morality that leads to blessing and disobedience. And disregard for this morality leads to cursing.”

MacArthur added that many in America wanted to live by their own standards of morality and not have any authority over them. 

“The bottom line is, if you’re living in the culture that we’re living in, where you want absolute freedom to do anything you choose to do, to establish your own set of rules, your own truth, your own standards of morality, the last thing you want is to step into some place that’s going to call into question everything you’re choosing to do in your life and is going to exercise authority over you,” he said. 

The two also discussed the person of Jesus Christ, who many Americans have twisted into a generic hippy-type figure, Shapiro noted. He said that modern secularists tried to turn Jesus into a “bizarre pacifist with nothing of morality to say.”

WATCH THE FULL ‘SUNDAY SPECIAL’ EPISODE WITH JOHN MACARTHUR

The Daily Wire host noted that “the perversion of Jesus into a sort of namby-pamby, bizarrely androgynous creation from Haight-Ashbury is one of the stranger things that’s happened over the course of the last 50 or 60 years in American life.”

MacArthur agreed that the moral character of Jesus was transcendent and pointed out how much of Jesus’s ministry was about judgment. 

“You either come to God for forgiveness and salvation, or you’re going to come under divine judgment. That’s the real Jesus,” he said. 

Shapiro also asked MacArthur how he might convince a skeptic of Christianity to start attending church. MacArthur replied by saying he would recommend that people read the Bible. 

“Read the Bible. Just read the Bible. It has the ring of truth. It defends itself,” he said. “It’s like a lion. You don’t defend it. You don’t defend the lion. You open the cage and let it out. It’ll be okay. And the scripture is like that. But it’s like that even morally, there’s something in the heart of people that resonates with biblical morality.”

The two also discussed the distinction between faith and acts. 

Shapiro said that in Judaism you can bring people to faith “through acting in the way that the Bible suggests, that you set up a track record of success by acting in moral ways and because you’re now living in the realm of godly morality, you’re living what God wants you to live.”

WATCH THE FULL ‘SUNDAY SPECIAL’ EPISODE WITH JOHN MACARTHUR

MacArthur agreed, noting that often people need to be able to see the change in another’s life to come to faith. 

“I think, how can I convince somebody to be a Christian if they can’t see the transformation? I mean, what am I trying to do if I can’t say to somebody, you need to be obedient to the law of God, you need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. You need to be obedient to God’s will and God will bless you,” the pastor said. 

The two also discussed the spread of wokeness, building church community, and religion’s role in politics. Watch the full interview here: 

Conservative media organization PragerU was kicked off of the Google Play store on Friday shortly after it released its documentary “Dear Infidels: A Warning to America,” but the Big Tech company said the suspension was a mistake.

Google notified PragerU that it had violated its “hate speech policy,” according to a screenshot shared by the conservative non-profit, and the app was booted from Android users’ mobile store, The Jerusalem Post reported. The Big Tech giant also told PragerU that its app went under a review, which found “content or speech asserting that a protected group is inhuman, inferior or worthy of being hated.”

Hours later, however, Google said that the app had been reinstated “after further re-review,” and a Google spokesman told The Washington Examiner that the suspension was made in error.

“In an email from Google, they said our recently removed app is now available ‘after further re-review,'” PragerU wrote on X. “Thank you to all of our amazing supporters who helped publicize this issue to force Google to reverse their earlier decision to remove our app from the store entirely.”

The new documentary that PragerU suspected was the reason for Google’s suspension of its app “features first-hand accounts from those who escaped Islamic rule and have come to warn America.”

“Radical Islam poses a significant threat to our freedom,” the documentary description states. “The rise of anti-American rhetoric and violence in cities and universities is a direct result of the indoctrination led by those perpetrating a religious war against the West.”

PragerU, which was started by conservative writer and radio show host Dennis Prager, has been targeted by Google and YouTube in the past. The organization has sued the Big Tech platforms “for restricting over 200 videos, including videos on the Ten Commandments, which continue to be restricted by YouTube today,” PragerU said.

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PragerU lost its 2017 First Amendment lawsuit against Google after the conservative organization argued that YouTube was favoring Left-wing channels over PragerU’s channel.