Kirk Cameron Speaks Out on Hell, Demons & the Dark Side of Hollywood

19:05Dr. Josh Axe:Every batch is third-party tested. It's certified glyphosate-free and fully traceable. And you can even scan the jar and see exactly which beekeeper in New Zealand it came from. My kids eat it straight off the spoon. I stir it in a tea or take a spoon before I record a podcast episode. It's not just honey. It's a daily health habit. Go to manucor.com slash axe to get 31 % off plus$25 in free gifts with their starter kit. What's your advice for people in order to using their talents for the greatest good? And what I mean by this is that, you know, for a lot of people, I think they've kind of separated their Christian lives over here and their maybe business lives over here, even parenting.

19:54Dr. Josh Axe:I mean, kind of, you know, their faith is completely separate from their life versus for you, it's been like this. Why have you decided or what made you think, no, it needs to be like this. It needs to be intertwined together. And how do people use those talents for the greatest good and what God's called them to?

20:16Kirk Cameron:That question really makes me think. and to the degree that I am actually integrating my parenting and faith and work and chicken farming, I'm really, really thankful. I want to be a person of integrity. And I think that's what integrity actually means if you look it up in the dictionary, is that all the parts are touching. That's what integrity is, as opposed to if you don't have integrity, things are separate, broken apart, they're disconnected, and it's not integral to the whole. And I think sometimes we do that, myself included, in my weaker moments. I want to say, you know, I'm good at this over here, but I'm not so good at this over here.

21:00Kirk Cameron:um i'm for example i i'm really good at math and analyzing problems and solving them i'm a guy i like to solve problems but i'm not so good at being patient and listening to my wife when she just wants me to walk through something with her i'm just wanting to solve it uh or maybe i'm not so good at this element of parenting because it frustrates me or it calls my worth into question. But I'm really good at doing a podcast. And so I'll just camp out over here in the places that I get lots of attaboys and high fives and I feel good. And I'll kind of neglect these areas over here. It's easy to do that because we want to feel successful.

21:49Kirk Cameron:I want to be winning, not losing. If I feel like I'm failing at home, I'll just stay at work where everybody does what I say and says you're awesome. It's so easy to fall into that. But my wife and I talk about this all the time. I think that God sees us as a whole person. And that's why true faith doesn't just make me a better actor or podcaster. It doesn't just make me a better parent. it actually transforms my heart, which is then supposed to pump its life into all of these areas. So that now I have a Christian way of parenting and being a husband and being a podcaster and being an actor. So I think that little reminders, like I'm never a better person than I am a listener.

22:46Kirk Cameron:I'm never a better person than I am a smiler. I'm never a better person than I am a servant. I'm never a better person than I am whatever it is that God's called me to do. I have to focus on all of those things because I think we've got to have integrity. And as for the other half of your question, which was about talents and how do you use those for the greatest good. I've had to ask other people what my talents are, what my gifts are. I'm not sure if talents and gifts are the same thing. Maybe they are, maybe they're different, but sort of like special abilities that you have. It doesn't really matter what I want to do.

23:31Kirk Cameron:If that's not what God has equipped me and called me to do, I could say, Josh, I really want to be in the NBA, but look at me, it ain't going to happen. I just, I don't have the equipment for it. But there are things that I can do uniquely that I think God's equipped and called me to do. And so I think having other people in your life who are honest with you to say that, like, Josh, you're really good at articulating things and relating to people. You can take the intellectual horsepower that you have on all these subjects, health and nutrition and all of these things. And then you could communicate it because that's part of your talents and your gifts.

24:12Kirk Cameron:And you can do a show and be on camera and all that kind of stuff. I think sometimes we need others to help us recognize some of those things.

24:22Dr. Josh Axe:I was just reading through Proverbs. And one of my favorite phrases from Proverbs is this idea around, you know, wisdom is seeking wise counsel. And I thought it was one time in Proverbs, and this last time I read it, it was in there four times. I mean, he just is, you know, there are certain things he's just really repetitive on, Solomon. And it was in there four times. Like, hey, if you want to be successful, he was like, you know, these are the things to do to be successful. Seek wise counsel, you know, send the counsel of the wise constantly. And that's, you know, that's what you're saying there.

24:57Dr. Josh Axe:I mean, we have to have those people around us who, and, you know, I think we're living in a society today where, and I don't think COVID helped us either, but it's just, it's so isolated. I even know, when you read old hymns, most of the hymns were a congregation, a whole group of people praising and speaking to God together holistically. And today all of the Christian music is, it's all separate. So I think there's maybe something there too.

25:25Kirk Cameron:Yeah, man, I love the old hymns. Be thou my vision. Come now, fount of every blessing to my heart to sing thy praise. I mean, like, this is melodic theology. That's what these hymns are. They formed their theology from the word of God, and then they turned it into a song. That's right, yeah. And then everybody would sing it, and they'd been singing them for thousands of years. Yeah. Right? Like, I mean, we all love some Hillsong here and there, but I'm not sure we're going to be singing a Hillsong song in a thousand years. Maybe we will. But these hymns have stood the test of time when we didn't even have recording abilities, right?

26:13Kirk Cameron:I mean, we're still singing the same songs because we've been passing them on verbally, generation after generation. and you've just got deep, rich, thick, dense theology of confession, of sin, of praise, of judgment, of victory and glory in these four verse hymns. And many of them, we only know one verse of the whole hymn, you know, like joy to the world. Joy to the world, the Lord has come. And we only sing that at Christmas time, but there's four verses that get into such great theology. I love the hymns.

26:47Dr. Josh Axe:It's so good. I listened to, Eric Metaxas has this great biography on Martin Luther, and I was blown away at how many hymns Martin Luther wrote. Like I had no idea, no idea a lot of these ancient saints and they were a lot of the people that actually wrote the hymns.

27:00Kirk Cameron:Yeah.

27:01Dr. Josh Axe:So.

27:01Kirk Cameron:Yeah. You know, the old dead guys are ones to pay attention to. There's a reason we keep going back to them. You know, some church traditions recite the Apostles' Creed. recite the Nicene Creed or the Athanasian Creed. And the reason that we have these old, old, old, I mean, these are over a thousand years old. These are very, very old is so that we don't forget who we are and whose we are. And we don't forget who runs the universe and what reality is framed by. Because right now, reality is being reframed by chat gpt siri alexa the drag queens and people making up belief systems that completely twist and distort reality for a young generation of kids it's like going to the fun house and you go into the mirror room and everything's all wonky and twisted and you're too too you're not proportional anymore and the hymns and the creeds and the scriptures reframe everything for us so that we can get back to reality.

28:17Dr. Josh Axe:I remember listening to a sermon by Tim Keller, and he said something like, you know, we are being programmed constantly. He said the biggest things that are programming us today are stories, songs, and slogans. Those are three things, these things that are kind of repetitively training us. And, you know, and of course, one of those things is songs. My wife, Chelsea, and I were having this conversation recently. We're saying, you know, when do we feel like we're the most spiritually fit and healthy and growing? And we said that there are certain things going on in our lives when those are happening.

28:52Dr. Josh Axe:One, we're part of growth groups. We're like really iron sharpens iron with other Christian couples and that type of thing and engaging in church. Another big one was what's the music we're listening to and just feeding ourselves day after day after day. And so I think, you know, these habits, You know, these habits are big. I agree. What are some of your spiritual habits? The things you're like, this is non-negotiable or just whether it's non-negotiable. Here's some things that you're really trying to apply. You've tried to apply over maybe in the past, you know, 20 years for, you know, forming your faith.

29:25Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah.

29:26Kirk Cameron:I want to be a man of routine and habit and have schedules and strategies that are going to accomplish my goals. And I love when people can stick to those things and really accomplish them. I struggle though throughout the days because things come up that I want to do or things come up that people that need my help and I want to be available to be spontaneous and do those things. So I'm trying to find what is the balance there so that I'm not just distracted and dominated by the urgency of the moment and yet not so rigid that I can't have some margin to say, hey, son, let's go have a burger, sit down and talk about what's going on with your girlfriend.

30:10Kirk Cameron:I want to be able to do that. So for me, I have recognized that if I don't have some spiritual disciplines set in place at the beginning of the day, I'm just already, my rifle is pointed in the wrong direction, right? And I'm going to, even if I've got a good attitude, I'm focused on the wrong target. And so I want the first voice inside of my head to be the voice of the Lord. And so that means I need to go to scripture. So what I like to do is wake up, kind of have a built-in biological alarm clock that gets me up at about six o 'clock every morning. And I turn on the pot of coffee and I sit down with my Bible and a devotional that I've come to love.

30:57Kirk Cameron:I've got to get you a copy of it. It's called Be Thou My Vision by Jonathan Gibson. He's a professor at Oxford. Okay, I'd love it. He's also a professor of the Old Testament at the Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. And it's this liturgy of daily worship. And so it's a daily devotional that takes you through essentially an ancient Christian church service structure every morning. Love it. So it's the call to worship. Hear God's will for your life as heard through his law. Then it's a confession of faith. And he takes you through the creeds and the catechisms along with scripture. And so by the time you're finished with this 45-minute structure of liturgy, you've read through the ancient church fathers of Ignatius and Justin Martyr, and you've gone through Arrhenius and then the reformers, and Knox and Luther and Calvin and the others, and then even some more modern scholars.

32:01Kirk Cameron:And you just see the depth and the breadth of historic Christianity, and it's just put in your lap every morning. I've come to love it because it's so different than Jesus Calling, for example, or something that you'd be familiar with that sounds a lot like today's modern worship music. It is the devotional equivalent of the ancient hymns in their writings. I love it. You'd love it. but I got to get you a copy.

32:25Dr. Josh Axe:Cool. That's powerful.

32:26Kirk Cameron:And that roots me deeply. And it gets me just to be thoughtful about the day and recalibrate my priorities and remind me that God doesn't need me. I'm so very grateful to be alive and that he has chosen to use me for good things. And I want more than anything to learn how to be a better listener and to learn how to serve and care for people.

32:57Dr. Josh Axe:That's so good. You know, I noticed the same pattern. I'm sure everybody who has done this notices the same pattern. There's something about doing it first thing in the morning. I mean, right when you wake up, it's the first thing you do, spending time with the Lord. Because if not, it's that parable of the sower. It's like, you know, the weeds, things start to choke out, you know, the busyness of just, you know. So I noticed the same thing. Like my demeanor and my character is much, much greater and improved if I'm spending time with God in the morning versus if I don't.

33:29Kirk Cameron:Yeah, I think so too. And you mentioned the importance of songs. What did you say that Keller said it was? It was songs, slogans, and stories.

33:36Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah, that's right.

33:37Kirk Cameron:I was reading this morning that Jesus didn't speak to the crowds without using parables and illustrations. Jesus used stories, perhaps because he was behaving based off the same truth that Timothy Keller understood, and that is stories shape people. And he told stories. And in Matthew chapter 13, there's like four or five different parables in there. and it was the parables about farming, about food, parables about retail merchant sales, and a couple of other ones. And these stories got me thinking about when's the last time I spoke to someone who had no knowledge of the kingdom of God in the form of a story or a riddle that would require some questions in order for them to understand it.

34:35Kirk Cameron:I thought this could be a good evangelism method.

34:37Dr. Josh Axe:That is good. Do you like riddles?

34:42Kirk Cameron:Do you like mind benders and mind twisters? Do you like?

34:44Dr. Josh Axe:I guess I haven't done a lot of riddles for, well, I haven't done a whole lot of riddles, so maybe.

34:50Kirk Cameron:Yeah. So I like to ask people a little, you know, the riddle of the Sphinx and all kinds of other fun, interesting ones. And I thought, you know, I should follow up a good riddle with somebody who's into puzzles and mind teasers. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a farmer who had a field and he sowed some good seed into this field. But then in the middle of the night, someone came in and put a bunch of weed seeds in that field. And when they grew up, the servants came and said, master, master, there's weeds all infested in your field. And he says, the enemy has done this. He said, he wants to take the weeds out.

35:24Kirk Cameron:He's like, no, don't take them out. Because if you do, you might pull out some of the wheat. Wait till it grows up. And in time of harvest, I'll send the harvesters and I'll tell them, gather up all the wheat, tie them in a bundle, throw them in the furnace, and then take my wheat and put it in the barn. Do you know what this means? What a great setup for sharing of the gospel. It's so good. You know?

35:43Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah.

35:43Kirk Cameron:And Jesus told stories because everybody loves a good story.

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37:01Dr. Josh Axe:Unfortunately, Hollywood's not as good as telling stories anymore. Yeah, I was actually, I brought this up on my podcast. This is probably, I don't know, a few months or maybe even a year ago. One of the things that I loved about, I grew up in the 90s, is I loved when I was watching, again, Growing Pains, Full House, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Saved by the Battle. Come on, come on. That's it. That was real TV. It was so good. You know, Family Matters, all of these shows had a moral of the story. Right. They weren't even Christian shows. No. But they had a moral of the story. Today, it's the anti-moral story for the most part.

37:38Dr. Josh Axe:And so I tried to figure out, it was literally right when the 90s ended, something happened. It's because growing pains went off the air.

37:46Kirk Cameron:Once growing pains went off the air, the whole thing just went off the cliff.

37:49Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, I think you're right. Actually, I tried to think about this and type back to, you had in the 60s when God was taken out of school and maybe there was a certain age group or whatever. But something happened.

38:07Kirk Cameron:No more Ten Commandments, no more prayer.

38:09Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah. You know, I also watched this thing where Jordan Peterson said this. He said when he started his career teaching at Harvard and the University of Toronto, probably 80 % of people, whether they were Christian or not, knew the biblical stories. Yeah. He said by the time he left, this is 30 years later, only 10 to 20 % of kids going to public college knew stories of the Bible. He said they didn't even know what Jonah was. They had never even heard the story before. Yeah. Yeah.

38:39Kirk Cameron:Yeah. I heard some people, I think it was even, some people were even saying that on a multiple choice question, when high school students were asked recently, who was Noah's wife? Some of them actually selected Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc. Right? They had no clue. They had no idea. I mean, that's funny and scary. Yeah. And like you said, the moral compass pointed toward the scriptures as true north. The fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. These are the kinds of values that you saw on Growing Pains. These are the kind of values that Mr.

39:27Kirk Cameron:Rogers was teaching the kids. Davy and Goliath, Gumby and Pokey. All of these shows from way back up and through the 80s, a little bit still, we're pointing toward the scriptures because America, which is where these shows are coming from, Hollywood, California, Disney and all that, they're rooted in ideas that have come from the Bible, from the form of our government to the moral and ethical fabric of our society. the Bible built America. And as we've pushed the Bible away, we then start to ask questions. Well, what is it to be good? What is it to be evil? Does evil even exist? And now it's not that we don't have a morality in TV.

40:16Kirk Cameron:It's that, like you said, an anti-morality. It's the new morality, which is calling good evil and it calls evil good and we're paying the consequence for it. Just look around our society. Children have a huge identity problem. Children are filled with anxiety and depression. They're being isolated. Parents are acting like children. Men are acting like women. Women are acting like men. Adults are acting like children and nobody knows what in the world's going on. And they're desperately looking for answers.

40:51Dr. Josh Axe:You know, the number one thing that I, the number one reason why I think people have chronic illness today, the number one reason is not their diet. I think for a lot of people, they have emotional trauma from their past. They're dealing with, they don't know how to deal with their emotions healthily and they don't have a purpose. And so I think all of these things sort of pile up and create anxiety, depression, and worry, illness, fear. And this is the number one thing more than diet making people sick today, especially with autoimmune disease, with cancer, with a lot of these conditions.

41:29Kirk Cameron:And like we talked about before, I think they're all connected, don't you? Yeah, absolutely. If I'm filled with anxiety, I don't care what you say, Dr. Josh, I'm getting a Krispy Kreme. Because it makes me feel better.

41:42Dr. Josh Axe:Eventually, those emotions will overwhelm you to the point where you will break.

41:46Kirk Cameron:100%.

41:47Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah.

41:47Kirk Cameron:If I can't sleep at night because of my panic attacks and trauma that I've experienced and things that are happening to me because of choices I'm making, well, I'm just going to load up on sleeping pills and other types of things that are going to help me to sleep.

42:06Dr. Josh Axe:I mean, the amount of girls in high school, in college, on antidepressants and anxiety drugs, of course, birth control. It's common, normal. It's crazy, yeah.

42:17Kirk Cameron:Yeah, somebody asked me once, this was a young man. He said, well, what kind of medications do you take? I eat in a kind of unique way. I try to eat things that are not inflammatory and a very low-carb diet and all this. And he's like, well, yeah, I can tell you, you're not heavy and overweight. You don't look like you're the kind of guy who's going to be obese and all that. And he said, well, what kind of medications are you on? And I was like, I don't take any medications. He's like, well, what do you mean? Nothing? And this is a young man in his 20s who's on medications. And they're the kinds of medications that I, I'm not a doctor, so I don't know if he needs to be taking these medications.

42:59Kirk Cameron:But sometimes I just wonder how much of this is spiritually, emotionally, and just stinking thinking rooted, resulting in anxiety and fear and sleeplessness and restlessness. And that if you address some of these spiritual, emotional, mental issues, these things would go away naturally and you wouldn't be a guy addicted to drugs.

43:21Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the questions I just have to ask you is, you know, I was on YouTube. You came up because you were having a conversation with your son sharing some of your views on hell. And I was blown away at the amount of people that just had to say something and the amount of criticism that you got on this view of hell. And it seemed to me like it wasn't even, you can clarify and I'm wrong. It didn't seem like you were saying, this is my 100 % belief, but hey, I might lean this way after reading some of these saints and theologians who have shared their view on hell.

44:06Dr. Josh Axe:Would you mind clarifying that a little bit and sharing a little bit your thoughts on what happened there? Sure.

44:13Kirk Cameron:So first of all, I didn't go on my show to talk about my views of hell. My son had some views of hell that he was questioning and asking me about. And I always told him, we can talk about whatever you want. I promise I'll be honest with you. Just remember that millions of people are watching. So, you know, let's just use wisdom in our discussions. And he said, you know, I've learned that there's some differing views of the nature of God's punishment in hell. And really stemmed from questions that he had in discussing with his friends, what kind of God preserves unbelievers for all of eternity in torment and suffering?

45:00Kirk Cameron:Is that consistent with a God of love and mercy? and I think this is at the bottom of the deep end of the theological swimming pool and to try to lift that rock off the bottom of the pool and you know examine it is like wow Jesus had really strong words to say about this and so did Paul in the book of Revelation and others and the wrath of God is so severe and yet his mercy and his love has swallowed up wrath and judgment in the gospel for those who believe. And so where do we go with this? And he said there's a view called conditional immortality, which most people have never heard of. What is that?

45:44Kirk Cameron:What do you mean conditional immortality? And then there's the traditional view that is also known as eternal conscious torment, which is just, you know, it's on the face of it. It's just a very, very, you know, impactful title of the view. And so we discussed both of these views and the fact that this has been a debate that has been going on for 2000 years. Church fathers believed in annihilationism or conditionalism. And then others like Augustine really popularized and made the mainstream view be the traditional view today. And I told him that once I heard about this other view, I began to look into it and I found the arguments very compelling, very persuasive.

46:34Kirk Cameron:In fact, the more I've looked at it in terms of like scriptures that weigh in the favor of one or the other, I thought it was gonna be a no-brainer for the traditional view. And I found it slowly going like this to where I think this conditionalism view is just a better position scripturally, not just an emotional thing. However, I could be totally wrong. Who am I to talk to Jonathan Edwards about the nature of hell or Martin Luther? Luther actually leaned toward conditionalism, interestingly, as did many of the church fathers. but I wanted to just be honest with my son and say, let's look into it.

47:16Kirk Cameron:You have an open conversation on your show. And do you know what I love about that conversation, Joss, is just this. It's not about who's right or wrong. The truth is not in jeopardy. God knows he'll tell me when I'm wrong. He'll tell you when you're wrong. There's no threat here to the truth. But the beauty of this was a father and a son were engaging over scriptural truth. Don't you want that with your kids? Of course. Whether he's right or I'm right, I don't care. I care for the honor of God and the sake of the lost because I want to speak truthfully. But if I get it wrong or I'm on my way to getting it right and I need other people to help me, that's wonderful.

47:55Kirk Cameron:I think there's something beautiful in the wrestling. There's something beautiful in the not knowing and the hiddenness of certain elements of the truth that we've got to dig to discover. And we do that when we engage with one another. That's what I see so many people missed about this.

48:14Dr. Josh Axe:I absolutely agree. I think this is how you grow. This is this quote that Solomon talks about, iron sharpens iron. You have difficult conversations. And this is why the Bible uses the word like wrestling, wrestling with God. I mean, you wrestle with some of these difficult things. Don't you want your kids to ask those questions? Of course. I would love having these deep conversations. But you know what happened to me?

48:35Kirk Cameron:I had some people that came out and it was just the full fury of their wrath. They just went full scorched earth. Take out the napalm and just blast Kirk Cameron in the face with it. You are a heretic. This is cult rhetoric. You have left the faith. You're done. And I even -

48:52Dr. Josh Axe:Linacy, yeah.

48:53Kirk Cameron:Well, yeah. Or heresy, according to them, because I wasn't just lining up with the traditional position. But remember, I'm a Protestant. Yeah. We schism. We protest. We question church tradition. Yeah. We go back to a guy named Martin Luther and others. And so it's not to tear apart tradition because there's a very important role that tradition has. That's why we have the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed and catechisms. But we should, I think, always be looking to scripture and saying, do we understand it correctly? Or do we need to simply bow to tradition just because we've always believed this?

49:37Kirk Cameron:We've always thought this. And I even had a church, an institutional church leader who I looked up to, and I still look up to him. He's a hero of heroes today in the church world who had a public video and article written about this. And he characterized my discussion with my son, questioning the traditional view as sad, as dangerous, and a fatal error. And that this is characteristic of those going down the road of liberal theology. And so my son's response was always gracious, but it was also indignant. And it goes like this.

50:29Kirk Cameron:you don't want me to ask questions, but I really am wrestling with this. And if someone's struggling with understanding the character of God based on your view of scripture, and you want to tell me to just shut up, be quiet, this is what the church believes, you're going to lose my generation. We want people who will engage with us and give us the respect of a conversation. And if you can't do that, we're not interested in hearing from you anymore. You're the old guard and you're leaving. If you want this to perpetuate, you've got to invest in the young generation and answer their questions because a lot of their questions are going to be nuanced to their generation and their struggles based on the stories and the songs and the slogans they're hearing.

51:17Kirk Cameron:And what you're saying doesn't feel like it fits. So help me.

51:22Dr. Josh Axe:One of the things I appreciated, I appreciated Wes Huff, you know, weighing in and sharing some things there too. And I want to read this too, because I, because you know what? I appreciate it. It made me go and start reading and looking. And so here are some of the people that hold the view of, uh, of annihilationism, Justin Martyr, Arrhenius, William Tyndale, John Stott, Edward Fudge. I mean, there's a lot of others possibly, you know, Lutheran in that way. I mean, a lot of people, a lot of Christian scholars.

51:55Kirk Cameron:So these are Christian positions, traditionalism, conditionalism. This is not heresy outside orthodoxy. This is all a Christian position. And there's even a third position that some will talk about.

52:06Dr. Josh Axe:I will tell you, I went to a church that was Presbyterian. They were very, very, very Calvinistic for a period of time. And I really liked John Calvin. In fact, I own the institutes. I read a lot of them back in my 20s and thought those were great and listened to a lot of Reformed pastors. But one of the pastors there was like, oh, if you're Arminianism or a Methodist, you're going to have... I mean, there are some people out there that really aren't... Are more Calvinistic than Calvin. That's right.

52:38Kirk Cameron:Yeah, that happens. Yeah. I found that with a lot of brilliant thinkers, whether they're in politics or in religion or even in the health space. Maybe you could even cite some of these people who they themselves had strong but balanced ideas, but some of their followers take their ideas to an exaggerated extreme and become wackadoodle.

53:04Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah.

53:05Kirk Cameron:To where if their heroes were alive today, they'd go back and go, bro, bro, bro, rein it in. I never said that. You're taking this so far. I'm not with you. So imagine if Calvin were to go to all the Reformed churches today. What would he say about the Calvinism that they're preaching?

53:24Dr. Josh Axe:Well, one, I don't even think he'd like the term. I mean, if you have any form of humility. No, it's a derogatory term. Because it reminds me of when Paul is going to, I'm trying to remember which church it is, but he's going and he's saying, listen, don't follow Paul or Apollos or this person, follow Jesus. But just so you know, I'm excited to hear, I know you're having a conversation with this whole group of theologians and pastors. And so, yeah.

53:53Kirk Cameron:So my response to the outrage, I mean, I really caught hell talking about the afterlife with my son. I'm like, Hey, Hey, Hey, this is a private conversation. I'm just giving you a window into father and son stuff here. And, and so I wanted to answer those who said, can you go deeper into this topic for us? Because I had a lot of people who actually agreed with what I was saying and say, Kirk, you're on the right track. Keep going. I know pastors who have held a different position on the subject of hell for decades, but said they've never had the courage to speak about it publicly. Now, this isn't about denying the existence of hell.

54:33Kirk Cameron:I believe hell is real. I believe sin is serious. The wrath of God should be avoided at all costs. Jesus said it'd be better for your hand to be cut off and have, you know, one hand and get to heaven than have both your hands and be cast into hell where the flame is never quenched and the worm never dies. Hell, I believe, is real. and it is an eternal punishment.

54:56Kirk Cameron:But there have been different understandings of that. And so I promise to hold a round table discussion with four of the brightest and most trusted minds in the Christian world who have specific knowledge on this topic, including two guys who are writing a brand new book on the two Christian views of hell with a forward being written by Wes Huff. That book is gonna be coming out and they're both in my round table, along with two other guys. And we just recorded it. I believe by the time this is airing, it has come out and you can see the full three-hour discussion or you can see some of the highlights that my son and I talk about.

55:34Dr. Josh Axe:That's great. Yeah, and I want to be clear about something and I'll just let you answer this as well is that, again, I think my position is very much not on, you know, is hell, are people living in hell eternally, whether it's actually an actual fire, which some people believe, whether it's sort of this sort of mental spiritual state or whether it's, you know, they're there for a time and it ends. I think that having the conversation and digging in and having talks about this, it reminds me to a degree about, well, of course, a lot of theological topics. It's eschatology. Are you pre-mill or post-mill?

56:10Dr. Josh Axe:Well, you know. Or amill or preterist. There's a billion more. Yeah, there are so many. And so, but, you know, like when I read, I read through the Wayne Grimm's Systematic Theology book. And I remember when I was reading through that. It's not a light read. No, no, this is bad. You know, I try anyways. So, but I like that sort of thing. So I, but I remember reading through it and thinking, you know what? I don't know, but I'm glad I read it because there's a level of, I'm understanding now more consequences and understanding more about some other things about the heart of God and to be looking out for certain things more.

56:48Dr. Josh Axe:I feel like I'm growing in wisdom because I know some of these things. See, that's healthy.

56:56Kirk Cameron:That's so wise. And every year that God gives us to live, shouldn't we do that more and more? Shouldn't we gain wisdom and knowledge? And shouldn't we look to improve so that we can be better servants? I'm wanting to just change the way that I look at how many years I have left on this earth. I'm 55 years old now. And I'm thinking, man, I probably got most of my years behind me unless I live to be over 110, which I probably won't. But I think - I mean, you got your own chickens at home. So I mean - Yeah, so I know. I got a head start on most people because I got my own chickens. By the way, if you've never tried backyard chickens and their eggs, they're so delicious they're so good especially if you let them like forage around bugs worms and grass those yolks are orange they're not yellow yellow yolks i want orange yolks they're delicious exactly um i i start to think about i want to be i want to look forward to death i want to live a long time because i love life i don't love death i love life but i have eternal life in christ and And so I also got to keep framing my thinking with, it's not that the sand is running out of the hourglass.

58:16Kirk Cameron:It's that I'm one step closer to entering into full glory. And what's better than crossing the finish line at the end of a race and winning or being part of the winning team? And I want to be able to look forward to those kinds of things. So I want to be healthy. I want to live a long time or however long the Lord wants me to. But I don't want to be sad that this life is coming to a close. I want to be excited that I'm approaching life that is truly life in heaven.

58:48Dr. Josh Axe:That's so good. It's so good. Are you interested in functional nutrition tips to burn fat, reduce inflammation, improve your brain and energy levels, and heal naturally? Then I want to encourage you to listen to my friend, Dr. Dave Jocker's podcast, The Functional Nutrition Podcast. This podcast is designed to help you with easy actual steps to improve your nutrition and lifestyle, understand your lab work, and address the root cause factors that may be driving up inflammation in your body. Now, I've been friends with Dr. David Jockers for 20 years, and he's truly a world expert in functional nutrition, cellular healing, and so much more.

59:26Dr. Josh Axe:If you want to learn the best nutrition and natural healing tips, tune in to the Dr. Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast on Apple iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, and wherever you can listen to podcasts worldwide. And this is part of the question I had earlier. It's like, how do you, you know, how do we go about living our best life, taking those talents and using them for good? And that's something, again, I think about this impact you've had on Hollywood. And I'm encouraged because, you know, there's more now than when you were, I feel like, maybe in Hollywood. You know, people are coming to mind like, you know, Chris Pratt and his example and other people now being more outspoken about their faith.

1:00:06Dr. Josh Axe:And so I think, I mean, there's, you know, sometimes it just takes one person speaking out on their faith and it's like this domino effect of what starts to happen. You know, one thing, one other, just a couple more questions I had for you. you know, I've started to see more and more, I feel like, revival happening in colleges. And even I've been so encouraged about some of the celebrities, somebody who's kind of semi in the health space, Russell Brand, you know, his conversion has been so incredible seeing, you know, what happens there. And I was having this conversation with somebody else saying, you know, Russell Brand going from where he was to where he is now, nothing else could do that but Christ.

1:00:43Dr. Josh Axe:There's no other thing, stoicism, whatever. Nothing could do that except for faith in Jesus Christ.

1:00:51Kirk Cameron:I get excited just like you do when we see people evidently coming to faith in Christ. Now, sometimes it turns out to be a shallow ground hearer or a thorny ground hearer where they end up falling away not too long ago, right? Like, you know, sometimes you get excited about Kanye and they're like, oh, hey, what's going on? We got this big worship album and then like now we're not so sure. and what's happening? We've got people like Ravi Zacharias who were just like, oh my gosh, a pillar of the faith. I mean, an oak tree of the faith. And then we're like, what? And so I feel like I don't really know who's the real deal and who's not the real deal.

1:01:28Kirk Cameron:Jesus said, you'll know them by their fruit. And I think that sometimes people just hang fruit on their own tree. You know, they're out there in the night, just hanging apples and peaches on the tree to try to look like a good Christian, but inside they're ravenous wolves. dressed in sheep's clothing. So I really don't know, but I don't think I have to with certainty because the Lord knows and he's working all things together for good. But I do get excited and I do believe that the kingdom is growing. It's not shrinking. I believe that the gospel is advancing and it's converting people's hearts.

1:02:02Kirk Cameron:And so I hope that Russell Brand and Kanye and other, I hope this is all the work of the Holy Spirit. And I think one of the reasons that people come to the Lord that is happening concurrently with the spirit, just straight up drawing them. Because I think at the end of the day, God finds us. We're lost, he's not. He finds us and he draws us to himself. Is that people recognize the lie of false gospels and the emptiness of false political systems that make all of these big swelling promises and never deliver. They're like clouds with no rain. Oh, follow us, follow this religion or follow this political party or just do this and you're going to be happy, healthy and wealthy and wise.

1:02:57Kirk Cameron:And they realize I've got no morals. I've lost my identity. I have no purpose. My kids are screwed up. I'm on my eighth marriage and I don't really believe in any absolute rights or wrongs. And so if we're just going to make this whole thing up, well, then who the hell cares? I just might as well go kill myself. I mean, you're having more and more people think like this. And then some people are waking up. It's like they just got red-pilled. They've snapped out of it and they realize this whole thing is a stupid made-up matrix. This isn't even reality. And they're saying, what is reality? and they're searching for the source of truth and of goodness and of beauty.

1:03:45And as they follow those things upstream,

1:03:47Kirk Cameron:they find this has to come from God. And so you see a lot of young people coming back to church now, coming back to faith now. Many of them back to the old traditions of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, because there's some historical integrity there, not just the religious circus show that we see in a lot of wackadoodle churches. And this is all indicative, I think, of young people going, we've been sold a load of horse manure. That's right, yeah. And we want something that's actually nutritious for our souls and has mental intellectual integrity. And so they're going back to C.S. Lewis.

1:04:34They're going back to Thomas Aquinas.

1:04:39Kirk Cameron:They're going back to the thinkers who rooted their thinking in the scriptures and in God.

1:04:48Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah, it's so powerful. Yeah, I think people want to know the truth. Well, some people want to know the truth, but I think if you're truly going to be happy, you need to know the truth because if not, it's like, you know, I think about this with health. It's like, if you think, okay, this is the diet. I've got cancer. Eating a diet of processed foods, that will be healthy. Or eating a lot of soy or canola oil. Well, that's not going to help you. You think it is versus if you know the truth, more fruits, more vegetables, more, you know, omega-3s, whatever it is, this is going to, and then, you know, it's that old saying, you know, the truth will set you free.

1:05:25Dr. Josh Axe:And so I think, and that's a big part of our conversation today is this is why the Bible is so powerful. Whether you need help with your marriage, you need to help with parenting, you need help with building wealth and success, you need help with your health. The Bible has answers to all of those. You know, that's one thing I love about the Bible too. You were talking about the parables and so many of them are food related, diet related. You know, I wrote a book on, on what the Bible has to say about health. What was that book I wrote? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The Biblio diet. And in the book, I mean, I had so much fun writing that with Jordan because it was like taking, you know, wow, the Bible, like, even though I'd read the Bible quite a few times going through and just saying, what does the Bible say about health?

1:06:05Dr. Josh Axe:The same thing would happen if you said, what does the Bible say about marriage? Wow. You know, it's just, it's just transformational and it's so counter-cultural. Yeah, that's right.

1:06:14Kirk Cameron:And discovering the truth about anything today is so much more difficult than it used to be. And the reason I say that is because I could pull up a video right now on my phone and show you an Instagram video and you'd say, oh my gosh, I need to run home and be with my family because Trump just started a war with Russia or with China. And then I can show you, nah, just kidding. It's an AI generated video. He didn't even say that. Even though you saw it with your own eyes, you heard it with your own. Discovering the truth today is like, it's like trying to, to me, walking into a candy store and trying to find nutrition.

1:06:57Kirk Cameron:It's like, you can't find it. I don't know what's true anymore. Where is it? Because people are making up their own truth. They're literally creating their own reality. Literally. I've seen brides having wedding ceremonies and marrying their AI chatbot groom. Literally, this isn't a joke. I hadn't heard of that yet. There is Tesla robots now that are walking around the house doing your chores for you and have full personalities programmed just the way you want them to. So if you want a wife that doesn't talk back to you and just cleans the floor and cooks your food, you can have one. If you want a husband who will honor you and respect you and listen to you and all of the things that you want, you can have one because reality is now what you want it to be.

1:07:51Kirk Cameron:And truth is very hard to find. So the Bible is more crucial and critical now than ever before.

1:07:59Dr. Josh Axe:And it's crucial and critical for kids to understand these principles earlier and earlier and earlier on too. Yeah. Yeah.

1:08:06Kirk Cameron:That's right. Where the Bible was always seen as the obvious place where you could find the truth. Now, you could reject the truth if you didn't like it, you didn't want it. But you knew what was true, and it was the good book.

1:08:20Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah.

1:08:21Kirk Cameron:There's a book that God wrote. This is the golden rule, we call it. It doesn't get better than the golden rule.

1:08:27Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah.

1:08:27Kirk Cameron:But if we don't teach these things to our kids when they're young, no doubt, ChatGPT and Grok and Google will teach them other things when they are young. And they are. And the Bible will be this mysterious thing that's been buried or hidden away somewhere. And only by the grace of God will they ever find it. We don't want that to happen.

1:08:52Dr. Josh Axe:Hey, I'm going to ask you this and you're going to laugh because I don't even know how to say this. So, well, you're doing kids' books, right? And then I think I saw something online. I think this was quick. With you with a, I mean, I thought it was a frog, but maybe it's not a frog. It's probably AI. I don't hang out with frogs. Oh, you're talking about Iggy. No, it's like a mump. It's like a -

1:09:10Kirk Cameron:You're talking about the iguana named Iggy.

1:09:12Dr. Josh Axe:Okay, it's an iguana.

1:09:13Kirk Cameron:Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Tell me about that. What are you doing there? So, I've been writing children's books of Christian virtue with a book publishing company called Brave Books. They're awesome. and I've been reading them in public libraries contra the drag queen story hours. And that's been going on for a couple of years. And we started out being banned from public libraries, from the American Library Association and others who didn't want us there in these very woke cities to now being invited by the Library of Congress to read these stories publicly in the nation's capital, which is a wonderful turn on that.

1:09:49Kirk Cameron:Amazing, so cool. Well, we realize that kids are spending more time on their screens than they are reading paper books. And so we decided to make a children's television show and we're calling it this generation's Mr. Rogers neighborhood. We had Mr. Rogers back in the day. That was so good. And he taught us all the good things because many people don't know this. He was a Presbyterian minister. And while he didn't talk about God on the show, he taught the values that really led to kids blessing and their protection and the building of families. so we have this little show called iggy and mr kirk and it's kind of like mr rogers meets sesame street so we don't have kermit the frog we have iggy the iguana and i'm raising him as a little five-year-old in my backyard tree house and he's got to learn all the lessons that today's five-year-olds have to learn and he's got a computer and he's got to deal with friends some tell the truth some don't.

1:10:44Kirk Cameron:Like there's one character who is a vulture named Culture, who's always lying to Iggy. And he's got to ask his mom and dad for biblical wisdom, learn how to trust God and pray. And he also has access to a non-woke supercomputer named Maple, who will also tell him the truth. So he's learning about the sanctity of life. He's learning about the priority of family, about overcoming your fears and telling the truth. And it's great. You can watch it on Angel, which is the network that gives us The Chosen. You can also watch it on Brave Plus, which is a new streaming platform that has old classics like Davian Goliath and has Bob the Builder and Strawberry Shortcake, biblical values, parents approved, and new originals like Iggy and Mr.

1:11:31Kirk Cameron:Kirk.

1:11:31Dr. Josh Axe:I'm so excited to watch it. Yeah. Kids love it. Little kids absolutely love it. That's great. Yeah, we had Dallas Jenkins on the show here, too. Those were great conversations. I love that Christian TV now, there's an excellence undertone to it. I think that there's, and I'm excited to watch the show with my girls. They're going to love it.

1:11:53Kirk Cameron:Yeah, I think you can watch the first three episodes for free. If you just go to Brave Plus, you can watch a few to see if you like it, and then you can sign up for the whole thing. The best deal, I think, is if you've got Angel, you can just watch it for free. If you don't, if you sign up for the Brave Book of the Month Club, you get a new Brave book delivered to your house every single month. Plus, you get full access to all three seasons of Iggy and Mr. Kirk, and you get all of this other stuff. And it comes with maps and stickers and games and family puzzles and challenges and conversation starters so that you can turn your book or your TV show episode into a core family memory and conversations with your kids about important stuff.

1:12:37Dr. Josh Axe:That's so incredible. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on, Kirk. This was great.

1:12:41Kirk Cameron:Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me.

1:12:42Dr. Josh Axe:Yeah. Again, I just appreciated, you know, ever since you were, you know, growing pains and just, you know, standing up for your faith post that, you know, left behind. I mean, you know, so is that where you met? Did you meet your wife on Left Behind? Or no, you met her with Growing Pains.

1:12:57Kirk Cameron:I met my wife on Growing Pains.

1:12:57Dr. Josh Axe:But you did Left Behind, right? She was in the movie. She played the Antichrist's girlfriend. That's right. What was I thinking?

1:13:04Kirk Cameron:Marrying her.

1:13:06Dr. Josh Axe:That's so great.

1:13:07Kirk Cameron:She turned out to be an angel. Yeah, she's just acting.

1:13:09Dr. Josh Axe:That's so great. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on today. And I just want to say, hey, everybody, thanks for watching here at the Dr. Josh Jack Show. Remember, each and every week, we are diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal physically, mentally, spiritually, and take your health and your life to the next level. If you're watching on YouTube, let me know, what is one of the biggest things that Kirk shared today that you're gonna walk away with? We would love to hear your thoughts. I also wanna encourage you to go over, watch his podcast, watch his show on YouTube, and the discussion on hell there as well.

1:13:40Dr. Josh Axe:I wanna say, hey, thanks so much for sharing. Thanks so much for subscribing, and we'll see you on the next episode.

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