In an interview on American Family Radio, Turek listened to "Today's Issues" co-hosts Tim Wildmon and Ed Vitagliano describe several recent, headline-making crimes. In one example, a mob of youths stormed into a North Philadelphia convenience store, where they ransacked it and walked away with stolen merchandise. A second example, cited by Vitagliano, occurred in a New York City subway, where a homeless man stomped and beat a woman so badly she had broken ribs, a stab wound in the leg, and a punctured liver.
“This was all in the last 24 to 48 hours,” Wildmon pointed out. “The stories you just mentioned are only symptomatic for what’s going on all over the country, stories of lawlessness.”
Asked how he views “lawlessness” in the nation, Turek said the American culture has been devolving into more lawlessness going back to the 1960s. But, he told the radio program, churches have failed to be the “conscience of the nation” even though they witnessed the culture growing darker.
Turek, who speaks regularly at churches on Christian apologetics, went on to say too many churches have been more interested in “big numbers” and “big buildings” than reaching their neighbors and neighborhoods with the life-changing message of the gospel.
The program’s conversation about crime then moved to the issue of liberal big-city prosecutors. In cities across the country, those district attorneys are allowing even career criminals to plead not guilty to heinous crimes and to return to the street to await trial. The most infamous example to date might be Darrell Brooks, Jr., who rammed his car through a Christmas parade last year and killed six people. Five days before that attack, he had been released on $1,000 bail despite felony convictions and an active warrant.
Turek himself gave a less-violent example: District attorneys are refusing to prosecute shoplifters if the stolen merchandise falls below a certain value. So naturally the shoplifters are walking out with free merchandise, without being arrested, and those stores are shuttering their doors because the criminals are not being prosecuted.
“This is just a failure,” said Turek, “to understand human nature.”
Most of those DA’s wrongly believe human beings are good, Turek said, which is a humanistic worldview and contradicts what the Bible accurately says about mankind’s wickedness.
Pivoting back to the Church, however, Turek said the only way to tell the truth is for the Church to speak out.
“I lay this at the foot of the Church,” Turek warned, “because the Church hasn't been the Church.”
