Part I

A Titan of Daytime Television and Moral Provocateur Dies at 88: The Life and Legacy of Phil Donahue

We’re going to turn to questions for today, but first I want to look at the passing of Phil Donahue. He died Sunday night, just days ago, at age 88. Now even as I’m speaking to you, I understand that there’s some people who are saying, “Oh, Phil Donahue died,” and others are saying, “Who’s Phil Donahue?” And that’s because of how time moves. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, it makes very clear that time moves forward, and before long, you have persons who don’t remember someone because they didn’t see them on television. The old hymn says, “Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away.” And that’s a humbling reality.

But if you were in the United States and a part of American culture in the last decades of the 20th century, you almost assuredly knew exactly who Phil Donahue was because he redefined daytime television during that period in such a way that he built a huge international reputation and a huge national audience for the program that was known as The Phil Donahue Show, and eventually just as Phil Donahue. And that’s how Americans came to know him, they knew him as Phil Donahue.

He was born in 1935 in Cleveland. He began his journalistic career like so many in radio because radio was the big phenomenon back during that time. But then he really was early into television. He did a lot of jobs in television for years before catching fire. But he really did catch fire when there was a decision to try to put on television a show in the middle of the day. Now remember, the big audience at that time in the middle of the day was largely women who were at home as they would be described as housewives, taking care of families and children. And it was an audience that wasn’t all watching soap operas, for that matter, of course, all watching television. But the fact is, those watching television were at least evidently open to something new, and Phil Donahue brought something new.

He eventually decided on a talk show format with a live audience, and then he went so far later as to include persons at home who could call into the program. He also decided that he would do issue programs. So he would have guests tied to specific issues, or he would just raise an issue and it would become the topic of conversation for a very intense program. And the more bizarre, the more strange, the more alien, the more controversial a topic was, the bigger the ratings.

Now here’s the thing. For a long time, it really didn’t catch on as a big phenomenon. But eventually Phil Donahue was discovered as a national phenomenon. So then he moved from a local market to Chicago. And it wasn’t so much that it was the Chicago local market, it was that Chicago gave him the platform for a national program, which is what he had for many years. And for years, Phil Donahue dominated the talk show scene.

The previous talk shows have been largely based upon celebrities who came on doing suave or ridiculous things. They were famous because they were celebrities, which reminds us of Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, who said that in this sense, a celebrity is someone who’s famous for being famous. But that was fading by the time Phil Donahue came about. And with all the tumultuous issues, all the controversies, all the vast cultural changes taking place in the United States in the last half of the 20th century, a lot of them related to marriage, morality, and sex. Well, all of a sudden this exploded, and Phil Donahue was at the center of the explosion.

So Phil Donahue started in radio, ended up in television in Cleveland, and then in 1967 started this live program with an audience, went national by syndication, moved to Chicago, and eventually moved to New York City. That’s the big time in media, and at that point Phil Donahue was the biggest name in daytime television, hands down. After moving to New York in 1985, the show came to an end in 1996. It had been on the air for about 29 years. So for three decades, Phil Donahue was a major figure.

So why did the show end in 1996? That was not Phil Donahue’s plan. Why did the show end? It ended because others took up the format and beat him at the game; most importantly, Oprah Winfrey. So Oprah Winfrey becomes a national celebrity. She has a syndicated television program, simply known by her name, Oprah. And before long she’s out-Phil Donahue-ing Phil Donahue. Phil Donahue at that point had married Marlo Thomas. They were a power couple and very famous in Hollywood throughout American culture.

Phil Donahue did some groundbreaking things. He did some scandalous things. He did some things other men certainly wouldn’t have done, as he dressed up in costumes and did all kinds of things. And frankly, he was a provocateur. He had a largely female audience. And a lot of the issues he provoked, a lot of the controversies he stoked had to do with the moral issues that were debated not only among women, but having to do with American women. He was pro-abortion. He was basically pro-sexual revolution.

But he mostly functioned as a provocateur. I had the opportunity to be on the one hand on his program in 2002, the program from New York. I appeared on his program to debate, to discuss, to represent the definitional issues of the Gospel of Jesus Christ when the great controversy was whether or not it was tolerable, it was intellectually respectable in the United States, for Christians to say that all persons were lost and without hope for salvation until they came to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And in particular, the question of whether or not Jewish persons had to come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ to be saved. It was a huge issue, and I was the representative of evangelical Christianity, I would say gospel Christianity, on that program. And I’ll tell you, Phil Donahue came at me guns a-blazing.

But when I say he came at me guns a-blazing, let me refer to a specific part of the transcript from this program in 2002. He turned to me in front of a national television audience and said, “You also have God kind of being an egomaniac. ‘You better pray to me or I’ll show you what trouble really is.’ I don’t see God,” he said, “as a Santa Claus who rewards good and punishes evil. It seems to me your position, Dr. Mohler, is very unfair to God.”

Now at the time, that was really a demonstration of how, say, the cultural progressives had just invented a feel-good religion. And when I argued from the Scripture, he basically told me, “That’s very bad public relations for God.” Now, of course, I see God as revealing himself in the holy Scriptures and understand the holy Scriptures to be the very Word of God, God’s self-revelation. And so the sin to me would be misrepresenting God in a way that’s not consistent with how he has revealed himself in Scripture. But let me tell you, that was way out of bounds when it came to Mr. Donahue. He came at me repeatedly with just this kind of logic.

My response to him was this. “Well, all I know is that God’s Word, the Scripture, tells us the authoritative message about who God is and what he would intend. And this issue of one, true, and living God and one way of salvation doesn’t even wait for Jesus in the New Testament.” I went on to say, “God declared this to Moses in the covenant at Sinai. He spoke very much about the fact that there was an order to have no other gods before Him. Jesus Christ,” I then argued, “is the fulfillment of that law.”

In other words, God didn’t wait until the New Testament to insist upon monotheism. He insisted upon it in the Old Testament. It’s in the 10 Commandments, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” That’s not the feel-good of American, late 20th century new age religion. I understood why I was there, and I understood, I fully expected that Mr. Donahue would come at me hard, and he did.

A year earlier, I had debated Mr. Donahue, not on his program, but on the Larry King program on CNN. We faced off over the issue of the death penalty. And that exchange was just a foretaste of what would come when I went on Mr. Donahue’s show most memorably in that program in 2002.

I want to share something else with you. I want you to understand I’m saying this with respect for Mr. Donahue having invited me on his program. He gave me the opportunity not only to say what I believed I needed to say on behalf of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but he also gave me the last word in the program, something Larry King often did on CNN. I greatly appreciated that. So even as he came at me hard, he gave me the last word.

I also want to just tell you this. The program was recorded live and before a live audience in New York City. After the program, I was in the back in the changing area with other guests on the program, and Mr. Donahue came up to me just beaming ear to ear, “That was great.” He could not have been friendlier. He could not have been more respectful. He was talking to other guests. He came back to me and asked some very kind questions about my family, my life, my work. And then he more or less said, “Well, until next time.” And he walked to his dressing room where I’m sure he had an entire staff ready to help him get unready for the program and go on for the next one.

But as for me, I was standing there dumbfounded thinking, “He came at me with guns a-blazing on issues of severe disagreement about the most ultimate issues that human beings will face talking about God and eternity. And at the end of the day, he thanked me for helping to be part of a good show.”

So here we are in the year 2024. And at age 88, Phil Donahue has died. He hasn’t been a major factor in our society for a long time. But it’s good to remember that as time passes, those who are at the center of entertainment culture, they tend to change over time. You could have Phil Donahue replacing someone, and then Phil Donahue is replaced by Oprah, who by the way doesn’t have her program on live television anymore either. It’s a humbling realization, but I’m also thankful for the opportunities that Phil Donahue gave me, oddly enough, to speak on behalf of the gospel, even when that happened under fire.

Part II

Is An Investigative Role as a Child Sex Crime Detective Incongruent with Christian Faith? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Now we’re going to turn to questions, and sometimes you get what you ask for. I invite listeners to write in questions, and they range across an incredible range of issues, and some frankly are easier to address than others. But sometimes there’s a question that’s hard to address, and you realize this is really important. In this case, it’s coming from a brother in Christ who works as an undercover police investigator and police officer, and with the assignment of helping to fight child sex trafficking in the United States, something like 15 years of experience. Here’s what he’s asking. He identifies as a Baptist, as an evangelical Christian who goes to a biblical church. He’s struggling with an issue of conscience, and he’s asking about some of the investigative techniques that police have to use in order to discover and detect and then confront and arrest those who are involved in the sexual exploitation of children.

I’m not going to use the language over and over again, but I do want us to know what we’re talking about. And in particular, this undercover police detective writes to say that even as he works in this area, one of the questions of conscience is the fact that he has to sometimes pose as someone he is not in order to discover who it is that is behind this business. He wants to know if that’s something a Christian should do or not. He writes this: “I know that Christ wants me always to act honorably and not to deceive, but to speak truth. I know that I’ll be called into account for all that I say and do.” But he says this: “I also know that every day there are thousands of children getting exploited and trafficked. I also know that Christ wants us to be a light.”

Now, I want to say to this police officer that as unique as your question is, it’s not unique in the history of Christian moral theology to the modern police and detective fight against international child trafficking and child pornography. There is more to it than that. There’s a longer moral traditional, a longer moral argument than that. And it goes back, for example, to the context of war, and to the question as to whether or not subterfuge can be used as a legitimate tool of warfare.

You have someone like Winston Churchill during World War II who spoke honestly of this by saying that the truth is so important that it must be surrounded by what he called a bodyguard of lies. Which is to say that if he told Hitler where he was going to invade, where the Allies were going to invade on D-Day, Hitler would’ve been able to defeat the Allied forces and Nazi Germany would still be in power. And by the way, this gets to the point that there are more ways to lie than with the mouth. Then you’ll recall that the Allies came up with brilliant subterfuge, such as at one point dropping a dead body with information which were actually wrongful, that is to say deceitful, war plans in order that the Nazis retrieved the body and thought that they had received this great cache of information and espionage, when it turned out it was a plant, a dead body. And that man, by the way, must be thanked posthumously for the fact that even in death, he served the cause of liberty.

It also comes down to the fact that George S. Patton at the time who was out of sorts with the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, had been assigned to put together a phony army complete with inflatable tanks so that Nazi spies would see what amounts to a lying inflatable army and think that it was amassed across the channel where the invasion would take place. It was a lie, but it was a lie that helped to save Western Civilization.

Now, you could look at the moral theory of pragmatism or utilitarianism and say, “Well, that’s all you need to know. If it worked out well, then guess what? It was morally justified.” Christians can’t give ourselves to that. We can’t say just because it worked, that it served a good purpose, it was legitimate. But it has to be put in a larger frame.

Let’s move from, say, espionage, and think about the detection of a criminal network. That’s what we’re talking about here with the work of this police officer, this detective, and others who work with him. At times, you are working with the level of truth that you can demonstrate to people who deserve the level of truth. Which is to say it is not a part of our Christian calling to use the necessity of telling the truth in such a way that we bring about grave damage to others simply by making them vulnerable.

I’ll be blunt. I do not believe that the people who were hiding Jews during World War II from the Nazis were obligated by Biblical command to tell the people coming in as Nazi officers where to find the Jews so that they could kill them. I think that’s absolute moral nonsense. There, on the other hand, are circumstances in which as we think about our obedience to Scriptural commands, including to be the people of the truth, we have to ask, “Okay, what does that demand of us?” And I will argue that the lengthy discussion of the Christian church on this question, on this issue, a great struggle, a lot of Biblical struggle, a lot of theological and ethical struggle. I think the consensus is actually a wise consensus, and I think it is rooted in the Scripture itself. Let me just mention Rahab and the spies. It is rooted in the fact that you must be a person of truth such that the truth must out. The truth must be told.

I was just telling you about the deceitful army there in the south of Britain. I’ve told you about the deceit of the dead body. I have told you about the fact that sometimes deceit and subterfuge and espionage are used in the context of war. And the big question we ask morally is, “Was it justified? And was the truth eventually honored?” Did this lead to greater righteousness and greater truth, or did it lead to less righteousness and less truth?

Now, I want to be careful to say this doesn’t justify what we would call lying. It does understandably concede the fact that there are persons who have criminal intent, murderous intent, genocidal intent, who do not deserve the truth. And, it doesn’t mean that the person is unaccountable to the truth. It means that the truth must be told in the right way to the right people and the rightful authorities at the right time. That’s the ultimate test.

Here’s where I want to remind this police detective, and I want to thank you for your work. I want to say that where it is most important that you get the story straight, and you know what I’m going to say, is in the courtroom when you give testimony, because that’s where you are speaking in a context in which the truth can be told and must be told, and for the sake of moral judgment throughout eternity, must be told rightly. That’s where the issue, I think, comes to the clearest test: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I don’t believe that you owe that to a Nazi killer; I do believe you owe that to a righteous judge.

I also want to finish by saying to this police detective, again, I want to say this from the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking on. I will tell you that I’ve been in situations in which I’ve traveled around the world, traveled around the United States, and after I’ve spoken somewhere, I’ve had someone come up. This happened to me not too many years ago in a context in which I had persons who were involved in targeting responsibilities for the American military who just very clearly were asking me questions about moral responsibility. And I was so thankful that I didn’t just start out at ground zero. But I could turn to Scripture and I could turn to the moral consideration of the Christian church over a period of centuries, going all the way back to soldiers serving in Caesar’s army, where there really has been a very strong Christian consensus that I think is clearly grounded in Christian theology. And I think it’s just unfair to say to someone who is in one of these excruciatingly difficult situations as a brother or sister in Christ.Even though I’m not in that situation, I’m not in that profession, I’m going to tell you exactly how I think you have to act in such a way, given the complexity of some of these questions.

That’s one of the reasons why I have two other words I want to say. And by the way, the man who wrote this question very kindly also indicated that he’s a part of a gospel church and is a part of the accountability in that gospel church. I would say for Christians, one of the most important things is we must speak to our brothers and sisters in Christ appropriately, but certainly the elders in the leadership of the church in such a way that we go to them with this kind of question and say, “I just want to make sure I’m doing the right thing. I want to make sure that I’m being a faithful Christian.”

The other thing is that sometimes we have to know that Christians are called to act in which we know that there is no way to handle this situation, as horrible as it is, with absolutely clean hands. I think that is the predicament that even you find in the New Testament, but you clearly find it in early Church Fathers like Augustine dealing with soldiers working on behalf of Rome. Sometimes a soldier finds himself in an excruciatingly difficult situation, and sometimes there is no way for him not to act in a way that he hopes is right rather than wrong or righter, to abuse the language, rather than wronger.

Eventually, we as believers know we will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and there, all things will be revealed. All of us on that day are going to discover that sometimes we got these things wrong, but by God’s grace, let’s do our very best to get them right.

But finally, I want to say, and I think this might be helpful to parents and others who might be talking about this with their children and teenagers, college students and others, I think you might want to consider a conversation that I was privileged to have with James Olson from my program Thinking in Public about these very issues. And let me just tell you, James Olson was director of counterintelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency. He ran lead on these kinds of issues for the CIA and was deeply embedded as a spy when his cover was blown. Let me just tell you, having a conversation with him on these issues is very different than having a conversation in a seminar room. We’ll make certain the link to that program is put up with the posting for today’s program.

Part III

This State is Deep Blue in Political Elections, But I’m a Conservative. Should I Still Vote? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, got another good question. This question’s coming in from a man from a distant state, and a state that I’ll just say is as blue as states get in one sense, that is to say it’s Democratic, it’s liberal. And so this question comes in from this listener saying basically he lives in a state, it’s going to vote blue. So he’s asking, is it still important for him to vote? And is it still important for him to vote his conscience when quite frankly he’s going to get massively outvoted? And probably does, I’ll say, fairly regularly?

Well, my answer is yes, you need to vote. And yes, you need to vote according to your conscience and your Christian political judgment. And yes, you need to vote as a matter of record, and you need to vote as a matter of stewardship simply as a satisfaction to that stewardship and to your conscience. You need to vote in such a way that you can stand before God and say, “This is how I voted.” I also want to remind you that even as the Electoral College means for presidential elections, yes, it’s distributed according to Electoral College votes, not the popular vote, the popular vote still matters a great deal. When you hear people making political claims about elections, they often go to the popular vote, which means, here’s the good news, your vote will count in the national popular vote, even if it doesn’t make a difference in your state.

I live in a deep red state where there are people who are tempted to say with deep red convictions, “I don’t think I have to vote because you know the vote’s going to be overwhelming.” Again, I come back to the fact that it doesn’t change your stewardship, and it doesn’t change the fact that the national popular vote is going to be cited in ways that are believed by some people to be authoritative. So let’s make those numbers as accurate as possible and fulfill our conscience. Which, by the way, like in the question of someone serving as a spy or a police detective or other things, isn’t always an easy decision, but it is a stewardship that is given to us and a stewardship we’re called to fulfill.

Part IV

Is the Term Christian Worldview Too General? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Finally, for today, boy, I have to tell this listener I love this question. He writes in from Alabama to say, “I am concerned these days that the term Christian worldview is too general.” He makes some specific points, then he says, “I was wondering if you had any comments on this.” I want to say to this listener, what a great question. It’s a perceptive question. And by the way, you put your finger on a real problem, and that is that too many people use the phrase Christian worldview in a way that it is too general. It’s sometimes even evasive. It’s sometimes downright wrong by the way. But it’s a language that evangelicals have picked up over the course of the last several decades, and there are people who use it in a way that is too general and is too careless. I just want to say, I find no alternative.

Here’s where we are bound, in a fallen world, we’re absolutely bound to the limitations of language and to being understood. And there are numerous words that quite honestly have been nearly destroyed in modern rebellious confusions. There are other words that have been discounted by overuse. The word worldview can certainly be misused, and frankly it can be made a matter of conversation in such a way that is too general and is too superficial. The problem is that what it is referring to is indispensable to our intellectual consideration and to our Christian discipleship.

We have to think about how we think about the world. You can call that a worldview. There have been those who tried to call it a world picture, a view of the world, a vision of reality, but none of it holds together like the compound worldview, which by the way is based upon a German word, which takes a lot longer to say than worldview. But it points to the fact that it really emerged in conversation when you had rival worldviews, when all of a sudden you had to explain why do these people think so differently than their neighbors? Why on such a basic question like, say, the dignity of human life, the reality of abortion, you have people who seem to think that the importance of the life of the unborn is nothing, and those who believe that the life of the unborn is equal when we think of human dignity and the sacredness of human life?

Worldview really matters. The word matters. I have tried myself to come up with alternatives. I am bankrupt on an adequate alternative. And so far as I know, no one else has come up with a good substitute. And so there are times we are just stuck with certain words because they become a fixture of our vocabulary and of our thinking. I think that’s where worldview is. And the last thing I want to do is back worldview out of the consideration. So for now, I got to keep on using the word even if I think other people use it superficially or wrongly.

By the way, I love the fact that this listener from Alabama wrote in that he’s been praying for a great move of the Holy Spirit across our country. On that, dear listener, we emphatically agree. Thanks for writing.

Thanks to all who sent in the questions today. And I have to tell you, I feel the stewardship of trying to deal with these questions, even choosing which questions to discuss in ways that are most faithful. I hope today was found helpful. You can send in your questions simply by writing me at [email protected]. I also have to tell you that I hope sometimes dealing with these questions leads families around the table to have some good discussions, maybe in the car on the way to something, and to have Christians, brothers and sisters in Christ, maybe in the context of a local church and its fellowship having some of these conversations as well. Our goal should be to be Biblical and together to help us all think more faithfully.