James: Call me James; all right? I closed out the other day when you were with us, and you can go back and watch it, LIFE Today. It’s in the archives; watch the program Tuesday. I said, “Would you come back and we will talk later in the week?” People want to know, have you given any thought to running for President?

Mike: Well, I’ve done it before and it didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped. No, but I’m seriously looking at it again.

James: Really, nobody knew you. Those of us that knew you, we really were behind you and you know that.  We did our best to encourage you, pray with you, pray for you, and with no support financially you stayed in there until the very last.

Mike: We really had a dime to the dollar of the other people that were in the race and got further than anybody but John McCain in the republican primary. So I am looking at it again.  It is not just because I have some nutty ambition to say, wouldn’t I like to be president. But I really think, James, our country is in real trouble and a lot of it is because we’ve just divorced ourselves from common sense. We’ve divorced ourselves from an understanding that we cannot survive as a republic if we do not become once again a God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God. It is the natural law of God. Our founders really understood that and believed it. Now I’m not saying that a person should run and say, “let’s have a theocracy” because I don’t think we should. That’s not what even our founders wanted.

James: We have a theocracy right now, it is a secular theocracy.

Mike: That’s it! It is a humanistic, secular, atheistic, and even antagonistic toward Christian faith, and that’s what we need to understand. Our basic fundamental rights are being robbed from us, taken from us piece by piece. We simply need to come back to the place where we recognize that all of the Bill of Rights, every one of them was designed to tell the government what the government couldn’t do. It was to protect citizens, not to protect the government.

Today, people talk about the Bill of Rights as if the government is supposed to shut us up, tell us not to worship, don’t pray, don’t have certain beliefs. You’re going to be punished for your beliefs. You can believe up to a point but if your belief gets where the government doesn’t want it to go, the government wins. And the first amendment says no, the people win — the government loses. It is a people first country, not a government first country, and we’ve got to get back to that.

So if I were to do it, that’s what would be motivating me, and the fact that I’ve got four grandkids now that I really truly worry about in terms of their future.

Betty: But Mike, if we don’t take responsibility first as Christians, I feel like we have that responsibility to stand up finally.  And they’ll say, “My one vote won’t matter.” Yes, it does!

Mike: It does — 537 votes in the year 2000 in Florida, 537 votes in one state decided the presidency. Sometimes we tend to forget that one vote can make a difference.

But here’s the tragedy. There are 80 million self-identified Evangelicals in America; only half of those are registered to vote. Of those only half vote in a presidential election and of those, only half vote in an off year election. And we wonder why we’re seeing judicial supremacy arguments that put same sex marriage in states where the people voted against it.

We wonder why it is that the culture has made this massive shift. If our leaders become the cheerleaders and advocates for that which we say is not biblical, well, it is because they got voted in and we didn’t. It’s because their people went and voted, ours didn’t. Their people contributed to candidates, ours didn’t. This is, folks, a simple matter of math: 50 plus one wins. I tell people politics is not complicated. If you can get to 50% plus one you win, and if you don’t, you lose. It’s pretty simple.

James: Yeah, but the problem is we can’t get the people who really say we believe there are absolutes, there are sound principles, there is a reliable standard of measure and we have that standard to live by; if those people do not even participate in the process of selection then the people that do not believe we have a reliable standard or they don’t like say a biblical or founder standard or constitutional principle then they’re the ones that are going to elect the people to represent what they don’t believe as well as what they do believe.

I’m finding too many caring people who do care about their family, do care about what is right, they’ve just opted out of the political process. And they’ve said it is dirty business. And it’s gotten to be a real dirty business because the better people have opted out. Is this one of the reasons you wrote this book is to try to get average Americans who believe in work, personal responsibility, believe in the free market opportunities, still believe our founders had some sense and the constitution is the greatest document ever written outside the Bible, you believe those people are going to have to wake up and get involved or we’re never going to correct our course?

Mike: That’s exactly what happened. One of the stories — I open with the story of Chick-fil-A Day back in August the first of 2012. It was a simple thing. Go buy a chicken sandwich not to be a protest of anything. Not angry…

James: You were the one that started that. You activated America to do something for a fine businessman who loved God and love the people who work for him.

Mike: And he was getting hammered. Not just by a handful of activists, there were mayors in major cities, in Boston and Chicago who said, “We don’t want that company to open a store.”

Now think about this. A mayor of a city not wanting a free enterprise opportunity that creates jobs and brings a business to his town, not because the product they sold had something wrong with it, because the person who ran the company had a personal belief that he didn’t agree with.

I thought this is not North Korea, this is not Iran, this is America! It is okay that you have different beliefs and attitudes. You don’t put people out of business. James, we’re going to lose the country morally but we’re going to lose it economically if we start putting people out of business because they’re Christians, if we say, “If you believe in God and believe in the Bible, well we don’t want your kind around here.”

Remember when Governor Cuomo in New York, the Governor of the state made the comment, he said, “These people who like guns, these people who are against abortion, who are against same sex marriage, these are not our kind of people. We don’t want them here.” A governor of a state made that statement on radio. I’m thinking…

James: To believe in marriage and family and personal responsibility and the right to protect the family you love… a junk yard dog protects its family. Why in the world would he say something like that? I mean it is like… It is insanity ruling!

Mike: That’s why we have to get back to calling people, “Take a stand.”

James: You did it!  And they stood!

Mike: They did stand!

James: It was amazing because millions of people were in lines all over the place to get a chicken sandwich. Maybe they had never had one before when they got a chicken sandwich.

Mike: You know what that did though for people? They looked around and a lot of times, people out here in the land of God, guns, grits and gravy say, “I’m all alone. Nobody believes like me. The world is against me. Nobody still believes in marriage anymore. Nobody still believes in life anymore.” On that day they looked around and they said, “I am not alone.” Americans who believe in old fashioned godly values, who still love this country for all that it was created to be, need to look around and say, “I’m not alone!”

The best way we can do that is to show up at the polls to stand up and speak up, not with anger, not with hostility — and one reason the Chick-fil-A day really worked is because we didn’t ask people to honk their horn and yell and scream and carry signs and be angry at anybody. We just said, “Just lovingly, go buy a sandwich and just eat the sandwich and say ‘I’m for free speech.'”

Betty: I saw some of those lines on the news and those people didn’t look angry. They were happy.

James: They were supporting something right. They were supportive of what’s best, and that’s really what makes America great. I just think it is time for people to wake up. I believe you’ve been doing your best to wake them up. You know this.I’ve started building bridges in relationships. Above those barriers and walls that we put up, we may have some serious differences, that’s okay. We’ve got some serious things we agree on like marriage and family.

I’ve started meeting with Catholics. You know I had a meeting with the Pope. Now that raised some people’s fur but he actually gave me a high five, I gave him a high five because both of us said people in the Catholic Church and the Protestant church don’t know Christ. They need to have a personal encounter with Christ. Would you agree that’s true?

Mike: Absolutely, it’s true. There is a chapter I call “Grenades in the Tent.” The worst thing you can do if you’re in the military is pull the pin on your grenade when you’re in your own tent.

[Laughter]

James: Sounds like church to me!

Mike: That’s my point. We have people not only in churches, we have them in political parties, we’re so busy fighting each other that we’re not that much different, that we’re failing to understand the real contrast is with people that are outside the tent. The battle is not inside our own tent.

But we’ve come to a place, look at this culturally. I can remember when Baptists and Methodists and Church of Christ and Catholics used to fight over things like, how do you baptize somebody? How long is your service going to be? Is it going to be three hymns and an offering? — Really insignificant stuff.

Guess what? Now that we’re all under persecution and now we’re all under the pressure of just trying to survive and maintain a godly faith, isn’t it amazing how the little things have become less important to us?

Now the church is, I believe, under persecution to bring us back to the main thing; to once again help us focus on Jesus, focus on godly values, focus on the fundamentals of scripture and not the worship styles and things that are not as important. I love to say it this way. Some people eat their soup louder than others. It doesn’t mean the soup tastes any better. That’s what we need to understand how we worship.

James: Here’s the thing. I listen to you on FOX and I listen to Father Jonathan Morris on FOX — and by the way, he came here and said I didn’t need to call him “Father,” just call him “Jonathan Morris.” So this priest… and basically you’re saying the same thing. You know what I found out when I talked to both of you? You believe there is Father God, you believe he is a creator, and he did well. You believe he gave his son Jesus to die and he’s the only way of salvation. And you believe everyone who is born from above is in his church and we’re family, no matter what the pedigree or what the label. And y’all are saying great things.

Do you believe that I’m right to reach out and say to others who believe marriage is important, who believe there are basic moral standards, the Ten Commandments still matter, who do believe that we should be salt and light; do you believe I’m right to reach out across the lines?

Mike: Absolutely, James, you are and I salute you for it. And you were one of the first Evangelical leaders that began to call us out to once again recognize that we come together around Jesus. We don’t need to come apart over the things that aren’t central. I’m so grateful for that.

James: Do you think if those two faith groups would come together to stand for the moral and biblical principles we know are important, and the freedoms that are important, do you believe we could rapidly correct this nation’s course if they would just so to speak come out from under cover, come out from under the closet, get out of the church houses, get Jesus out of the house, get his witness out? Do you believe if they would come together we could correct our course?

Mike: Absolutely! Because culturally we still share those same basic biblical values. Again, the liturgies of our church are not as important as the big issues of do we believe in a culture that is God-centered, that believes that the Bible is our standard not our own man-made laws because we have to have a standard. As a musician I know that if you have five musicians playing on the stage and they’re all playing in a different key and none of their instruments are tuned, it’s going to be the worst most horrible noise.

James: Sounds like Congress. [Laughter]

Mike: It’s what it is like! So you have to tune to a standard, the music scale, and then you play according to a musical scale. If you don’t play to the standard you have noise. When you play to the standard you have beautiful, wonderful music. When we don’t play to the standard of God’s law we have noise in our culture. What do we have in our culture? We have got noise because we don’t have a standard. That’s exactly why we have to come together on those issues.

Betty: God created us all and we’re all different. We shouldn’t have to give up our differences, our different gifts to be able to come together as one and to unite together.

Mike: And equality, Betty, doesn’t mean sameness. That’s the beauty of it. Equality means we’re equal in worth and value but we’re certainly not the same. I learned as a kid I was never going to quarterback the Dallas Cowboys to a Super Bowl. I’m beginning to think nobody else is either!

[Laughter]

James: We don’t even remember what a Super Bowl is!

Mike: But the point is I had to realize God didn’t make me for that purpose, he made me for another purpose. That doesn’t mean that I’m less than to the quarterback of the Cowboys. It means that my purpose is unique to me and its equal in value to God in terms of his economy. So I don’t have to worry about I’m not as good as somebody. I’m not as equal. Yes, I am but I have a different function or a different role.

James: The one thing that I’ve seen and by the way, I can still go back and remember how our governor here complimented you to me when we were dealing with Katrina and all the Katrina victims were coming here.

And Governor Perry said to me privately, he said, “You want to know who is really helping more people?” He said, “That Governor up there in Arkansas, they’re putting these people in these schools. He’s finding places for them.” And that’s the way we’re supposed to work.

You know what I’ve discovered? When you recognize that you have a legitimate catastrophic situation people find the common ground. They say, “Do you care? Can you help? Will you help? What will you do?” And we began to work together. We do not discuss where we went to church. We don’t discuss our posture when we pray. We don’t even talk about the languages that we necessarily speak. We talk about do you care enough to be involved?

I think we have a tsunami, catastrophic economic collapse coming. I think we’ve got everything in motion for the most catastrophic events in American history and we set the stage for it by rotten policy, poor leadership, incompetent leadership, ungodly, non-god worldview leadership. And I think if we need something to show us common reason to get together, we’ve got the catastrophic situation. Would you agree?

Mike: Absolutely. And I think there is a great saying that I learned in church but it is applicable to politics. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking to know is there any authenticity out there? Does anybody really care about those people who when they squeeze the pump, the nozzle on the gas pump, and they can only get to five dollars because that’s all they can afford, do you know people like that? Do you care about people like that? Are you going to reach out to people like that? Is your economy going to be built so that you’re not punishing people for being successful but you’re not ignoring the people who are struggling?

That’s why America is a great country because we’ve understood that every person has worth and value and we want to lift people up but not artificially through some government give away but by empowering them to stand on their own feet and be independent. This is what made America great and what can make it great again.

James: And we’ve got to limit the excessive power and the excess of the federal government. Do you like this man? Do you agree that we’ve got to literally come together on common ground to address effectively our legitimate concerns? This book, God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, I would suggest you get it.

As a matter of fact, we’ll send it to you if you’d like to have it if you’ll just help us give fresh water to those who do not have it. Now you didn’t answer the question, are you running for president? But you are going to pray about it and you would like people to pray about it.  And you would like for whoever runs and whoever is our president to keep God in the center of their focal point. Do you agree with that?

Mike: Absolutely I do! And whether it is me or someone else and I do ask people to pray because for me, James, this is not just a political or financial decision, it is a spiritual decision. The only thing worse than not being elected president would be to be elected president without God’s blessing; I can’t think of a worse place in the world to be than in the Oval Office without God’s hand upon you. I’d rather not get near the place. But if that’s a purpose then so be it and that’s my prayer.

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