Conservative speaker and award-winning writer Andrew Klavan spoke Monday in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union about the role God plays in creating the world people live in today, the ways people think about God and how that affects the world they enter. 

Klavan said he felt compelled to talk about this from a political perspective because it is so rarely done.

“What I am trying to do is convey to you that the situation you have is fluid,” Klavan said. “The things that you have that you love may not last; things that you have that you hate might not last. Nothing is going to be the same 10 years from now, and a lot of it is going to have to do with what you believe and the ideas that you bring to the table.”

Klavan said the United States is a Christian country that grew out of a Christian civilization, but he said saying this causes confrontation that is usually political because people have the mindset of winning the debate as opposed to listening or learning.

Klavan said every single founding father was shaped by Christianity, and so is every single person in the Western world.

“Think of Christianity as a spiritual nuclear blast,” Klavan said. “It begins as white light; everything is destroyed. Old customs, every way of thinking, it is just whipped out, and then the radiation starts to spread out, it sinks into the skin, there are mutations that are born and even when you go forward and everyone forgets about the blast, those mutations become new kinds of creatures. They don’t even know they were formed by the blast, but they remained formed by the blast.” 

Klavan said this creates a problem when we deal with cultures formed by other religions such as Islam. 

He said the idea of separation of church and state stems from Christianity.

“The entire idea of a secular state is a Christian idea; it never existed in the minds of men until Jesus spoke the words, ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and render on to God what is God’s’; before that moment, religion and the state were one.”

Klavan also discussed the dangers of socialism and how it has failed in the past. One attendee asked if the reason that leftists believe socialism is possible and fail to understand the “evils” of it is the outcome of modern education. 

“That is exactly what it has to do with,” Klavan said. “It is tragic what has happened to universities. I don’t know this university, I don’t know if it happens at this university, but Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the U.S., is just a scream against America, against freedom by a full-fledged communist and it is the best selling history book in the country, and it is nonsense, it is absolute nonsense.”

Avery Abney, freshman in construction engineering, attended the lecture and said he was overall impressed with Klavan and liked that he acknowledged that if people are only going to argue to disagree there is no point in discussing a topic. 

“I don’t personally agree with everything he said, but I really appreciated the civil conversation that he brought,” Abney said. “The fact that he can bring his points to the table and project them in a civil way, which I think he did very well. Overall, even though I don’t agree on every single one of his points, [it] was an excellent presentation.”