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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:
by Rod D. Martin and Jeff Schreve
September 6, 2026
My discussion on American Family Radio’s "Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve". Sign up NOW for the AFR YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode!
Jeff and I discuss:
Why excusing Lindsay Clancy means denying women moral agency
How therapeutic culture turns wickedness into diagnosis and perpetrators into victims
Why Protestant seminaries’ silence on demonology has left Christians unarmed
How abortion’s “culture of death” brought us here.
It’s 14 minutes you won’t want to miss!
Nothing is more important than educating the next generation. My friends at the Herzog Foundation are expanding access to Christian education. Watch this short clip and visit HerzogFoundation.com
Our Full Discussion:
Announcer: This is Real Truth for Today. Podcasts of the program are available on the podcast page at AFR.net. Now, back to Pastor Jeff Schreve.
Jeff Schreve: Welcome back to the program. Pastor Jeff here, talking to my friend Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital, an anti-communist, and part of the team that started PayPal. His website is RodMartin.org.
Okay, Rod, at the break we were talking about Lindsay Clancy and just how horrific what she did was. It seemed like it was planned out. She got her husband out of the house and killed her kids in a gruesome way, strangling them to death. They were five and under, three kids. Then she threw herself out of the window to try to kill herself. But she slashed her wrists or slashed her throat or something like that.
I haven’t followed it closely, but what is her defense? That I was just nuts?
Rod D. Martin: Yes, pretty much. She pled that she did it, but she’s crazy. That’s probably the best defense available, because otherwise this is completely indefensible.
The evidence is absolutely clear that she did it. And the people online who say, “Oh, well, the husband really did it,” and so forth are shocking to watch.
No. Her defense lawyers actually had her plead not guilty by reason of insanity. That means she’s admitting in a sworn filing that she did it. The whole basis of her defense is that she did it, but she wasn’t mentally competent. So all this internet crazy is just really wild to watch.
It goes back to something we were fighting in the Southern Baptist Convention for several years. In the defense of women, and of course we want to defend women, critical theory takes you into this weird place where women should be given all power, and if only women existed, there would be no violence in the world. At the same time, women can kill their children randomly and can’t be held responsible for it because: hormones.
Well, wait. What?! That’s just insane.
It’s anti-biblical, because the Bible actually holds us all responsible for our actions. If she really is crazy, then of course you would modify that, but you wouldn’t let her go free. She’s a threat to society, and she murdered three children. That’s not how that works.
So what is the biblical view? The biblical view and the American legal view are that you are responsible for what you do. That’s a good thing, because that’s the basis of equality.
If women are just all ninnies buffeted about by their hormones to such a degree that you can’t leave your children with them safely, then the logical response to that would just be to lock all the women up. But that’s complete nonsense, and so is the infantilization of those same women by their so-called defenders.
Jeff Schreve: Right.
Rod D. Martin: So the defenses being made are absurd. They are a dodge of responsibility, which is endemic in this culture. Everything is made a therapeutic issue to avoid the reality of sinfulness and fallenness. Nobody is ever accountable for anything. If somebody steps beyond a certain norm, we just call it crazy so we don’t have to call it evil.
That’s unbiblical. That’s un-Christian.
Honestly, if this woman is crazy, she probably didn’t have the requisite intent to be held fully accountable for murder one in this case. But she’s still accountable. She still did what she did.
Jeff Schreve: Right.
Rod D. Martin: There’s just no avoiding that.
The other thing, in answer to your question, is this idea that somehow she was drug-addled and turned psychotic by pharmaceuticals. The evidence doesn’t seem to support it.
I saw one of the doctors give testimony on this. He was saying her real problem was that she was pill-resistant. Her defense lawyer cross-examined that, and he said, “No, we couldn’t get her to take her pills. That was the problem.” She had all these prescriptions because she wouldn’t use them.
And sure enough, the physical evidence matches that. They looked at her pill bottles very, very closely. She’d hardly taken any of them, ever.
So the defense that she was driven into psychosis by medical malpractice just doesn’t seem to hold water. I look at this evidence, and I think she meant to do it. I think she was competent, and she’s just wicked.
Mental Illness and the Reality of the Demonic
Jeff Schreve: It’s just horrific.
I’ve had this conversation with a number of people in ministry. In the Bible, you don’t read much about mental illness. They had crazy people. They said of Jesus that he’s out of his mind. But you hear and read a lot about demonic possession.
I think that in America today, we don’t ever want to say somebody is demon-possessed or anything. But if you do the things that a lot of these people are doing, you stab Iryna Zarutska on the train for no reason at all, stab her to death as that guy did in Charlotte, North Carolina, I mean, the demons are involved in that kind of behavior, just like with her behavior. I think she even said she was hearing voices.
We don’t like to talk about the demonic side of this, but I put more emphasis on the demonic side than on, “She’s got a mental illness.”
Rod D. Martin: Well, that certainly seems to be the case here. I don’t think you’re going to be able to prove that to a jury, of course. But as Christians, we know that demons are real. We know how they act. We actually are given a very clear picture of that in Scripture. Jesus certainly took it seriously, so why wouldn’t we?
The answer to that is part and parcel of what I was saying earlier. The entire culture wants to deny the idea of fallenness, and certainly of the supernatural, all of which is a bit ironic these days. We have gone way past the rationalist materialism of our youth into a culture where Wicca is prevalent and all kinds of pagan “spirituality” is everywhere. They may not all know it, but of course they’re playing with demons.
I’ve met more than a few of these people. We’ve got one young lady in our church who was a Wiccan and spent years in the occult before she was miraculously saved. She tells stories: “Of course we knew we were dealing with demons. We would make contracts with demons. Yes, we knew what we were doing.”
Crucially, she said, “We took the Bible more seriously than any Christians I know, because the demons know perfectly well who God is and that He’s real.”
So the whole aim is to twist and pervert whatever God wants into something that will give Him offense.
Well, if that’s going on even with people in my own church, I don’t think that this is hidden in a corner somewhere anymore.
It is a real shame that our Southern Baptist seminaries, and no other Protestant seminaries of which I’m aware, even have a single class on demonology. They just don’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. That’s a mistake.
It is a real mistake to leave mental health issues to a professional field that is rooted in Freud’s dictum that having religious belief is itself a sign of insanity. And it’s equally stupid for us to leave demonology entirely to the Catholic Church. That’s an enormous mistake. Protestants have to start taking this more seriously.
In any case, if it is true, and I don’t know that it’s true, but I think based on the evidence I’ve seen that it is true, that Lindsay Clancy really wasn’t taking her pills, really actually seemed to be able to form the intent, and certainly premeditated it to the degree of even getting her husband out of the house and arranging everything so that she could carry this out, she actually strangled her own three children in front of each other.
Imagine the horror in the two children who are watching the first one get strangled to death and just can’t believe that their mommy is doing this.
Jeff Schreve: Yes.
Rod D. Martin: And she did all this just completely heartlessly.
So, okay, that actually does sound a lot like demon possession in Scripture, and Christians need to take that seriously. We don’t know that for sure, but we know that it’s possible.
And it would be helpful to speak to a culture that thinks of itself as highly spiritual without being Christian: Here is the consequence of what you’re believing and doing.
When Abortion Is Called Mercy
Jeff Schreve: Rod, I’m going to play you a clip. That was from Anne Hathaway on The View. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but it just shows you Isaiah 5:20 comes into view every single day: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
Here is Anne Hathaway talking about the mercy of abortion.
Anne Hathaway, recorded clip: When you are a young woman starting out your career, your reproductive destiny matters a great deal. My own personal experience with abortion, and I don’t think we talk about this enough, abortion can be another word for mercy.
We don’t know. We don’t know. It’s not a world in which we know that no two pregnancies are alike, and it follows that no two lives are alike. That follows that no two conceptions are alike.
So how can we have a law? How can we have a point of view on this that says we must treat everything the same?
And where I come at it from is, when you allow for choice, you allow for flexibility, which is what we need in order to be human.
Jeff Schreve: It’s just unbelievable. Abortion is another word for mercy. Brutally murdering your unborn baby is another word for mercy. That’s where we’ve come. And then all the ladies on The View are a bunch of seals: “Oh, that’s right.”
Rod D. Martin: Yes, you can hear them.
Jeff Schreve: “Mm-hmm. How insightful.”
Well, that fits in with the women who are now supporting Lindsay Clancy, saying, “Oh, she’s not guilty because she was in psychosis.”
I look at that, Rod, and you just think: Obviously, there’s hope for humanity in Jesus, but there’s not hope for humanity outside of Jesus. We’re taking a bullet train in the opposite direction that we need to go.
The Culture of Death
Rod D. Martin: Well, we had a number of Southern Baptist leaders for a while — fortunately, many of them have left our denomination — but a number of them preached for many recent years that the worst thing about America was its Christian culture, this horrible “cultural Christianity” that deceives people into thinking they’re believers when they aren’t.
Okay. First of all, I question that anybody’s really deceived about that. Romans certainly suggests they are not. They either know Jesus or they don’t.
But the point is that what “cultural Christianity” did for us for centuries was give all of us a common moral reference point such that we just didn’t do or even think of certain things. And if somebody did, even the unbelievers understood that they were horribly wrong.
So there was a consensus that meant you didn’t get a lot of Lindsay Clancys, or Iryna Zarutskas, or the woman who in Times Square yesterday just randomly pulled a knife on a bunch of people and started stabbing them. Again, that sounds like demon possession. Apart from that it’s just weird.
And we have this increasingly prevalent view that no one is ever responsible for anything. Of course, unless you’re a Christian white male, and then you’re responsible for literally everything, of course.
Again, it is an attack on Scripture. And yes, it started with Roe v. Wade. It started with the idea that you could murder your own child in the safest place it should ever experience in its life, your womb, and somehow that’s not only morally acceptable, but in many cases morally virtuous.
No, that’s horribly, horribly wrong.
And not only because the excuse is frequently, “But the woman might not be able to raise the child well.” Well, guess what? Lots of people have bad mothers. That doesn’t mean they want to die.
For that matter, there are about three times as many people in the United States who would like to adopt a child as are able to. There’s no lack of demand for happy homes where these children can be raised, if somebody can just manage not to murder them before they have a chance to be placed for adoption.
So all of this is just horrible. And of course it was always going to lead here. What is the difference between killing a preborn child and a post-born child? Increasingly, the answer of many Democrats in particular is: There isn’t any difference at all.
We saw that under the previous governor in Virginia, when he was actually enacting legislation to allow the mother and the doctor to decide, after the child was born, whether they would kill it in the hospital.
This is where this goes: it can go nowhere else. And you see it with the euthanasia campaign in Canada and other countries. It is a culture of death. And if anything in the world is satanic, that’s it.
Democratic Socialism’s Openly Communist Goal
Jeff Schreve: Well said, for sure.
Okay, you are an anti-communist. It’s in your bio. They don’t call it communism. It’s democratic socialism, which I think the Nazis were the democratic socialists of their day.
Rod D. Martin: Yes.
Jeff Schreve: It’s on the rise. Young people think it’s all the rage. Are we on a collision course with disaster here?
Rod D. Martin: Well, they used to deny the communist thing. But we just had the Democratic Socialists of America convention a few weeks ago, and one of the principal leaders of the DSA stood up at the podium and said, “Our goal is communism.” And the crowd cheered.
So no, they don’t think it’s bad. They want to use the power of the state to punish their enemies. And we know where that goes. We know where it’s gone in every country that’s tried it. It involves mass censorship, mass theft, mass deaths, and just unbelievable totalitarian oppression.
So yes, we’re in a horrifying place in this country, and the Democrats are lapping it up like water at a trough. So we have our work cut out for us.
Jeff Schreve: We’re talking to Rod Martin. When we come back from the break, we’ll be taking your calls: 888-589-8840. That’s 888-589-8840.
If you have a question or comment, you’re listening to Real Truth for Today with Pastor Jeff Schreve here on American Family Radio. We’ll be right back after the break.
