Behind America’s Mental Health Disaster: Carrie Sheffield

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW]“When someone asks me where are you from, I say I’m from America, because I’m from so many different places, growing up in a motorhome, but also in houses, in sheds,” says Carrie Sheffield. “There were parts of my experience as a child that I really treasure that taught me to love America. But there unfortunately was a lot of abuse as well.”

Now a columnist, broadcaster, and senior policy analyst for Independent Women’s Voice with a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, Ms. Sheffield grew up with seven siblings and an abusive, mentally ill father who thought he was a modern-day Mormon prophet. Always on the move, Ms. Sheffield rotated between 17 public schools—as well as homeschooling—over the course of her childhood. The glue in the family was her mother.

She is the author of the new memoir, “Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.”

In this episode, drawing from her own life circumstances, she offers some profound insights into the cultural malaise she sees afflicting America—from the rise in suicide and depression to the epidemic of addiction and isolation—and a path forward.

“We put human intellect in the place of God. And so even though we are materially better off, and even though we have economic wealth, it has come at a price, and that price is the humility and the recognition of the giver of our gifts. We’ve substituted worship for the giver of our gifts, with worship of the gifts. And any society that is ordered in this way is disordered,” Ms. Sheffield says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

*Big thanks to our sponsor for this episode Patriot Gold Group. Check them out here: https://ept.ms/3sr5LhH

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Carrie Sheffield, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Carrie Sheffield:
Thanks for having me, Jan. Good to be back.

Mr. Jekielek:
Congratulations on your new book,”Motorhome Prophecies.” You had a remarkable childhood attending 17 schools all the way from the inner city to the grade school at Harvard. Let’s talk about your life experience and how you got here today.

Ms. Sheffield:
When someone asks me where I am from, I say, “I’m from America.” Because growing up in a motorhome, I’m from so many different places. I also lived in houses, in sheds, and in tents, and had one of my siblings born while the family was living in a tent. I lived in a lot of different parts of the country and there were some beautiful aspects of that.

I learned to love this great country by being exposed to some of the most beautiful places; seeing Mount Rushmore, going down to visit New Orleans, tasting jambalaya, and visiting Robert Frost’s home in Vermont. There were parts of my childhood experience that I really treasure because they taught me to love America, and that’s why I’m here today. But unfortunately, there was a lot of abuse as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely. You ended up in Kansas City, which was memorable, as you write in your book. This was a serious way to go to school, going through metal detectors. You were one of the very few white girls in the school system, so you stood out quite a bit.

Ms. Sheffield:
It was around 1994 through 1996 and I was in middle school. Walking in with my mom on that first day, I felt like we were walking into a juvenile detention center, but this was just a regular middle school. The experience of nearly two years in this school forever emblazoned in my mind the importance of school choice, because these were very difficult academic environments.

The Kansas City Public School District was the first school district in the entire country to ever lose its accreditation, which is an incredible dishonor. This was an overwhelmingly black school with only a handful of white students. I was bullied for being white. My black friends were bullied for being friends with a white girl.

But the worst part about this whole experience was the dangerous learning environment. You had to wait to go through the metal detectors. Sometimes you had to be out in the cold for maybe an hour or so. We all had to go into a holding pen in the morning in order to go through there.

Everyone had to sit there, and sometimes fights would break out. Once everybody got through the metal detectors, then we were allowed to go to classrooms. But if you’re pent up and everyone’s fighting, you bring that chaos to the classroom, which is just what happened. You have students throwing chairs at each other. It was just utter chaos.

Meanwhile, the adults in the room are afraid. The teachers are having to call the security office. With the academics, I was in sixth grade and eighth grade, and I’m doing things that I had seen maybe in first or second grade. It shocks the conscience that anybody like Randy Weingarten or anybody else would want any student, let alone a vulnerable black student, to be trapped in that environment.

Mr. Jekielek:
Since the late 90s, it’s only gotten worse across the country in these beleaguered school systems.

Ms. Sheffield:
Yes. Chicago is a case in point. New York City schools are a case in point. The only silver lining in the country right now is that there are more states that are starting to embrace school choice—the ability to use taxpayer money for a voucher to go to a private school, a parochial school, a charter school, or some other public school that is going to be thriving, and give those kids a chance. Because culture matters. Unfortunately, our culture in a lot of these very urban areas is so corrosive. A lot of these kids are coming from broken families where there is no father, so they follow terrible role models. Then this intergenerational trauma just perpetuates.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re a very compassionate person and it really comes through with your experiences in the 17 grade schools you attended.

Ms. Sheffield:
There were 17 K-12 schools plus home school, so it was 18 in total.

Mr. Jekielek:
That in itself is quite a feat. How did that all happen?

Ms. Sheffield:
My mom was the organized one in the family. I grew up with seven biological siblings. Along with my mom and dad, that made 10 of us. We were traveling the country because of my dad’s claims of having a special mission. In order to fulfill what he said was the Holy Ghost guiding him to do certain things, we had to go along with him.

My mom had been an elementary school teacher’s aide and had an elementary school degree. She enabled us to do all this because she had a filing system and a folder for each school year that she kept in the motor home. For each school, she would have the vaccine papers and the registrations, so she could put us in the school and then take us out.

Sometimes I was in three different schools in one school year. Some years, I maybe had the same school. Two consecutive years were the most I had in the same school. That was for kindergarten. Then I went away to three different schools for first grade. Then I came back to the same school that I had been in for kindergarten for second and third grade.

But it was utter chaos in terms of just moving so much. The ability to eventually make it to Harvard was a testament to my mom’s ability to keep the glue on, but also to my determination to have something different for my life. Unfortunately, in some ways, I encapsulated the worst of both my parents in terms of how much pressure I put on myself.

Mr. Jekielek:
You cover the things that you see as your failures. It’s a wild tale that I encourage people to check out. Your experiences got you to care and want to make a real, meaningful difference, and not just performatively. There’s a lot of performativity in our society today where we’re not actually helping in a meaningful way, like in school systems. You decided that you wanted to make a difference.

Ms. Sheffield:
People on the conservative side of things get accused of not having compassion or empathy. In my view, our policies are correct. But sometimes we don’t talk about them in a compassionate way to help people understand that you can be the agent of your own uplifting, as opposed to just condemning people. The conservative worldview is the most empowering for the individual because it allows you to flourish as an individual.

But the thing is, there is also a need for a safety net. How do we balance that need for people who are disabled, who are mentally ill, and who cannot work? There are segments of the population who have those traits, and we should provide for them. As conservatives, we don’t talk about that enough.

With public health issues, poverty issues, and the churches involved with food banks, it’s actually the conservatives who give the most, but we don’t speak in a compassionate way. There’s a really good book by the late pastor Tim Keller called, “The Prodigal God.” It’s the story of the prodigal son in the Bible.

The prodigal son is a story about a younger brother who takes half his inheritance and goes and lives a drunken, frivolous lifestyle. He wastes all of his inheritance, which was half of his father’s estate. Then he gets a job feeding pigs. He wakes up one day and realizes, “Even a servant is treated better than I am in this pigsty. I’m going to go back to my father’s house to be a servant for my father.”

Instead, the father runs out to meet him and says, “You were lost and now you’re found.” What does the big brother do, the one who stayed? He’s angry, because he doesn’t want the father to throw a celebration for the younger brother coming back. To me, the older brother represents the conservative.

It’s not about excusing the sin or saying that the behavior is acceptable. It’s about having compassion and welcoming the prodigals back. That’s the lesson in that story. It’s something that I’ve seen over and over in my life, and as conservatives, we should be doing better at this.

Mr. Jekielek:
I chose a few quotes from your book. You say, “The truth is, any politician or party or policy process is a false idol. False idols, like politics, can never fulfill the human pull in our soul towards the divine. Politics is a shoddy substitute, just like abusive man-made religion is a shoddy substitute for divine relationship.”

One of the biggest costs of the Enlightenment, with all its amazing benefits, has been the severing of the human relationship with the divine. The world came to be viewed in this strange, mechanistic way, where God no longer played a role. Whereas, traditionally, you were always aware of God and the divine. This comes through in this quote, but it also comes through in so many places in, “Motorhome Prophecies.”

Ms. Sheffield:
My book is a very typical story in that way. It is the arc of what’s happening to our country currently, but also more. If you look at the long slog of human history, where there is endless poverty, and then there is this hockey stick of growth, economic flourishing, and scientific discovery—all these amazing discoveries came because of the Enlightenment. But what ended up happening is that we put human intellect in the place of God.

Even though we are materially better off, with economic wealth, health, freedoms, and flourishing at an individual level not seen before, it has come at a price, which is that we no longer recognize the giver of our gifts. We’ve substituted worship of the gifts for the worship of the giver of our gifts. Any society that is ordered in this way is disordered.

In the book I talk about divine order, and divine order is to put God first, then people, and then things. I was agnostic and angry at God. I was uncertain about God and a shoulder shrugger. When I was in this place of disbelief in God, I was living life in a disordered way. The first order of my life was people. I wanted to take care of people and honor people and things. I was ambivalent about God.

In many respects, that’s how kind of your average spiritual but not religious person lives. They may or may not believe in God. Maybe they think, “If I’m just a good person, then that’s enough.” This is opposed to taking a step back and asking, “Where do I come from? What’s my purpose?”

As a society, we’ve lost that faith in God, and that’s part of why we have skyrocketing depression and skyrocketing suicide. Just looking at the statistics now with Gen Z women, their suicide rate is almost double Gen X women when they were the same age. It’s very troubling. The suicide rate in 2022 was the highest since just after the Great Depression in 1941. We were seeing that coming out of the Great Depression.

Something is happening to America’s mental health. Part of why I wrote the book is because I’ve had so many struggles with the mental health of my family, but also with my own mental health. What has worked for me is returning to this understanding of God as a source of healing. There’s so much science behind faith and belief in God and religious community. It has been scientifically proven to heal our minds.

Mr. Jekielek:
You started out as a Mormon, and then you were led to question things. In “Motorhome Prophecies,” your whole worldview was shattered. You’re trying to figure out how to deal with everything. Eventually, you become agnostic for a while. You ask, “What are the probabilities of all this working out?” It’s almost like looking at water. It has all these incredible properties that are essential to facilitating life. What is the likelihood that it could actually work? But it does work in this unbelievably unique way.

Ms. Sheffield:
Exactly. It actually takes more faith to believe in random chance, statistically speaking. When you’re talking about the probabilities of the earth being at this velocity, at this axis, at this temperature, and that our heads aren’t exploding, and that we have the existence of life is so utterly improbable. Intellectually, it actually makes a lot more sense to believe in a creator, mathematically speaking. As a Christian, I’ve heard a really good encapsulation of it, which is that it takes a lot more faith to believe in a virgin universe than a virgin birth.

Mr. Jekielek:
During the Covid time we were very susceptible to all the narratives broadcast to us. There was a significant portion of our society that believed these narratives were correct and they are still very adamant about it. In many cases, these people are also anti-religious. It’s a strange combination. Have you thought about this?

Ms. Sheffield:
Yes. In particular, I’m very concerned about mental health. I was researching atheism, and atheism is strongly associated with emotional repression, which is very telling, especially because the psychologists and psychiatrists who run our mental health treatment are overwhelmingly atheist.

Harvard found among all the professions that the two most atheist professions within the teaching university system were biologists and psychologists. They almost have a hostility toward God, which is associated with emotional repression. They’re the ones assigned to treat our mental health, even though there is overwhelming scientific evidence that God heals your mind. It almost seems like this hostility is part of why we have such a disaster in our mental health system.

I talk in the book about some of the scientific evidence of how faith can heal. The Harvard School of Public Health found that women who attend religious service once a week are 68 percent less likely to die from suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol overdose, and men are 33 percent less likely. That is statistically significant.

There was also another study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which is one of the big feeders into the White House Council of Economic Advisors. They found something similar. In states that had a drop in religious participation, there was an uptick in opioid deaths and suicides—deaths of despair, as they call them. There was another study in the Psychiatric Times that was a literature review of 93 different studies. They found 66 percent of them showed a strong correlation between religious participation and lower depression rates.

You have this overwhelming scientific evidence for the power of faith in God. Then you also have this regime of psychologists and psychiatrists who have a hostility or aversion to God. It’s a recipe for disaster, and that’s why we are here today.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mention that biologists are in this group that is the most atheist. I studied evolutionary biology and it became clear that evolution by natural selection doesn’t explain the diversity of life or the origin of human beings. Natural selection has become a quasi-religious belief, which prompted me to study alternate models of evolution. There are many people that would say religion and faith is very important, but divine revelation is a whole different question for them.

Ms. Sheffield:
One of the big themes in the book is explaining the difference between religion and relationship. Religion is a human-run institution, and so inherently, it will be broken. When I was first in my father’s cult, and then when I was looking in other religious explorations for the divine, I kept getting frustrated. That’s a feature of religion being broken. I was expecting divinity in religion.

Even though God is not religion, at its best, religion can point you to God and help connect you with God. At its worst, it becomes a stumbling block and causes pain and suffering and separation from God. That happens quite a bit with everything from the pedophilia scandal within the Catholic Church to some pastors stealing and embezzling money or swindling people. There is sexual abuse against women in some churches or other denominations. There’s a lot of using the name of God for abuse.

I like to say, “If you go to the symphony and you hear a really bad rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, are you going to blame Beethoven or are you going to blame those musicians?” That’s how I feel about the difference between God and religion.

Mr. Jekielek:
Reading through your book, in the context of Covid, it’s very curious that the church was declared to be inessential. In this Covid situation where everybody was suddenly isolated, why was the church banned? That’s where people would find community. For many people, this was disastrous. It contributed to this massive spike in suicides.

Ms. Sheffield:
Yes. In fact, it has actually gotten worse. I paid careful attention to the State of the Union that we just had with President Biden. He talked about the mental health crisis and blamed Trump, somehow implying that mental health is now so much better under President Biden. But it’s actually gotten worse. What’s really sad is that coming out of Covid, mental health is actually getting worse.

There are many reasons. It started with that isolation from the Covid lockdowns. But then in some respects, people have continued those patterns. Once your subconscious has been programmed you go on autopilot. If you’ve programmed yourself to be isolated, you continue down that pathway, and technology is also exacerbating it.

The strong ties between social media addiction and depression is very well documented, especially among young people. The Wall Street Journal reported on the effect of Instagram on young girls. The Instagram staff knew its addictive properties and how dangerous it was for the self-esteem of young women, and how it encouraged eating disorders and low self-esteem and depression. But they didn’t do anything about it.

That’s a big problem and parents should be aware. But there’s no substitute for faith and community and in-person connection. There really isn’t. Churches and houses of worship being declared inessential was one of the catalysts for this mental health crisis that we have today.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the monikers now being trotted out as a big threat to America is Christian nationalism. How do you react to that?

Ms. Sheffield:
If you are Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Hindu, and you put government as your God, then you are a fill-in-the-blank nationalist, whatever identity you have. To me, Christian nationalism means the worship of government by someone who happens to be a Christian, and so I would disavow that. I would disagree with someone who worships the government, but I would do that with an atheist as well. I disavow anybody worshiping the government instead of God. It’s wrong, and again, that’s a disordered life.

There is a profound lack of understanding about what Christians actually believe. An example was this Politico reporter who just seemed
so shocked that Christians believed that the rights of people flowed from God and not from a central bureaucracy. This was just nefarious to this Politico reporter. The only silver lining about that is that she was routinely and profoundly corrected by Christians who said, “Yes, actually, that’s the point. In our founding documents, our rights do flow from God.” That is not nefarious at all.

As a proud Christian who loves America, this Christian Nationalist label doesn’t apply to me. But at the same time, I’m also aware that I am a flawed human being. My impulse is to be broken, just like all of us. I’m very mindful of a phrase from Ronald Reagan. He said, “I’m wary of people claiming that God is on our side. We should be asking ourselves, “Am I on God’s side?’” That mentality reframes how you think about government, and how you think about your actions.

Because the government in the U.S. is we the people. If you’re worshiping the government, you’re actually worshiping the people, which is very dangerous. We should not be worshiping the people. We should be worshiping God. That’s a very important thing. How do we make sure that we’re not imposing our will in place of God’s will? There are lots of controls that we can and should put in place to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Mr. Jekielek:
The government is supposed to be for the people. But a number of people believe it has been shifting away from that for a while.

Ms. Sheffield:
Yes, it has. Unfortunately, it has become the small coterie of bureaucrats who know better than the people and want to impose their worldview on everybody else, as opposed to having it come from a well-educated, civic, participating populace that voices their opinions freely in accord with the First Amendment. The idea of we the people is under attack.

I hear the phrase, Democracy Dies in Darkness, which is the current Washington Post motto. I’ve written a couple of freelance pieces for the Washington Post and I have some friends who work there. I’m not anti-Washington Post. The establishment elite’s idea of democracy is willfully blind to almost half the country and their worldview. The root of the word democracy is demos. Demos means people.

If you are completely detached from the people’s worldview, whether it’s their faith or their values and you have no understanding or respect for that, then you are the ones that are a threat to democracy. You are not understanding demos. You’re not understanding the people. You don’t have a fundamental respect for we the people

Mr. Jekielek:
There are two different ways of viewing the world. One is that people should have the right to think and believe what they want. The other one is that someone who is enlightened should have the right to make others believe or think something.

Ms. Sheffield:
Ultimately, we should be centering our society on truth. Unfortunately in our postmodern society we have untethered ourselves from the idea that truth exists. Then if truth doesn’t exist as an objective, outside phenomenon, then who becomes the arbiter of truth? It is whoever gets the most power or whoever gets the most credentialing.

Again, the danger in that is to worship the created world, instead of the creator. The creator is the source of truth. There is an arrogance to imposing as a human your interpretation of truth vs. the actual truth. Of course, the dispute is always about, “What is the truth?”

The overall conflict between coercion and persuasion is ultimately going to be the biggest question of our time. Because we were founded as one nation under God, not one nation under a small, elite cabal of people who have convinced themselves they embody the truth and their truth is to be imposed on other people.

I rejected a lot of our nation’s Judeo-Christian underpinnings for a long time because I had been abused in the name of God. I lived in this place of darkness and anger and antipathy, even though I called myself a secular conservative. It was almost like an oxymoron. I respected religion in the sense that I could see that it could be some glue. But I didn’t necessarily believe that there was an objective truth.

Mr. Jekielek:
You didn’t even fully realize there was coercion because it was routine. It was just how you lived. It took you a while to figure this all out. Again, this speaks to your compassion.

Ms. Sheffield:
The Bible says that wherever the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. This is also the tension, because the Bible also says to not abuse your freedom to make bad choices. That’s the paradox of America, because we are born and designed to be free. Unfortunately, because we are flawed, if we allow our freedom to basically run amok and have our most base impulses govern our society, then our society will collapse. I believe that’s what is happening today.

Irving Kristol, who was one of the godfathers of the conservative movement, had a collection of essays called, “Two Cheers for Capitalism.” He said, “I would hold that third cheer.” At the end of the day, a free market is basically just a very well-oiled machine for maximizing production and creating goods at a low cost. That third cheer is really the ethics and the morals and the programming of that capitalist machine.

There has been no successful long term society that has not programmed and elevated that capitalist machine in a way that is sustainable. Quite often it will actually elevate destructive, corrosive things, whether it’s bad food or an obesity crisis. The fact that so many young men are not eligible for the military because they’re obese is a huge red flag. It’s the same thing with elevating technology in a way that is so addictive. This happens through the capitalist machine.

As a society, we have to reprogram that machine, instead of allowing it to control us by perpetuating this pop sugar, pop culture that rots your brain. It is the CCP that controls the content on TikTok. You can bet they do, but that’s the paradox of living in a free society.

Cultural controls that are of a free private nature can be put in place through the traditions of faith and family, and they can create social controls on capitalism. This is opposed to the CCP, which is imposing a government mandate. America is an experiment in this freedom of private control over the culture, as opposed to the CCP, which is a government control.

Mr. Jekielek:
In our hubris, we believed that by investing in and building up China under the CCP, we would change them and we would impart our values. But they figured out that we were very corruptible to the mighty dollar. Ronald Reagan had this speech where he called out the evil empire which was the Soviet Union. Many people didn’t like that wording because who are we to judge what is evil?

Ms. Sheffield:
Yes. They didn’t like that language. They didn’t like someone cloaking himself in a mantle of morality and saying that there is good and evil, and right and wrong. But that has been the human experience. It has constantly been a struggle between good and evil, and light and darkness. We are deluding ourselves if we can’t use those terms.

Lenin said any method that can be used for the elevation of their proletariat aims was moral and good. He rejected any notion of a supernatural concept of morality or good. He was all about this forced atheism that was controlled by the human brain as the source of morality.

That was once how I lived my life which I describe in my book. When I was agnostic I called that my walk of darkness. It was an extreme religious cult control, and then swinging over to this Soviet form of control, which is atheism. The middle ground is healthy faith.

I really try to emphasize that a healthy relationship with God is great and right for the individual, and great and right for society. It means, “In God, we trust.” We do not trust in man-made cults. We do not trust in the state. We trust in God.

Mr. Jekielek:
You forgave your father, and that’s impressive. But the curious thing about forgiveness is that you actually benefit more in the end than the person. You touch on this in the book. For many people, this is an odd, abstract idea. Let’s talk about this and gratitude as well.

Ms. Sheffield:
I talk about the science of forgiveness. I try to tie science into all the claims that I make. There is a lot of evidence that forgiveness is very good for your mind, your body and your spirit. I was living in a place of unforgiveness. It really culminated in 2019 when I ended up in the hospital because I had not forgiven.

As much as I pat myself on the back for forgiving, it was really because I got tired of living without forgiveness. I went through a big forgiveness process about my father in 2020, in part because I realized how much negativity I had trapped in my body. Yes, forgiveness is very much for the person who has been wronged. If you’re in the Christian faith, it’s actually a commandment to forgive. It’s not an option.

Mr. Jekielek:
You have to make that choice. I certainly know a number of Christians who have held grudges for quite some time.

Ms. Sheffield:
Then I would say they’re not following what Christ has taught. I am a very flawed person, as the book lays out. I am by no means in any place to judge anybody. I talk about Anthony Thompson, a pastor from Charleston, South Carolina, who became my forgiveness mentor. His wife was murdered in this brutal shooting in 2015, when a white supremacist came in and mercilessly slaughtered nine innocent black parishioners in this historically black church.

His goal was to spark a race riot. He had seen the cities of Baltimore and Ferguson burn. He drove all the way across the state from Columbia. He chose that church because it was very historic and had been a center of fighting against slavery. His goal was to create rioting and burning in these black neighborhoods. But instead, this miracle happened after this horrible shooting.

My friend was one of the people who was part of this. In the bond hearing, apparently it’s not normal for the judge to allow the family of the victims to speak to the accused. But in this case, they did. These family members who had just lost a loved one spoke to him and forgave him. They said, “Give your life to God. I forgive you. God forgives you. Change your life. Surrender. Ask for God’s forgiveness and you’ll be OK.”

That was the shot heard around the world. The city didn’t burn and there was no rioting. It was this miracle outpouring of love, compassion, and understanding. I met Pastor Thompson a few years later and I read his book named, “Called to Forgive,” where he talked about the journey of how he was able to do that. I knew that if he could forgive, then I could forgive.

I had kept so much anger trapped in my body, and I knew that wasn’t healthy. I knew that my father hurt other people. He had been wounded with a brutal childhood assault. He was sexually assaulted by a trusted adult in his life, and he passed that trauma on.

Quite often we’re talking about justice. There is a phrase thrown around, rehabilitative justice. I think it is important to hold people accountable. It’s not like Anthony Thompson says this guy should walk free. No, not at all. But I do think allowing that space for the person to repent should always be open.

Yes, we still hold them accountable. Should my dad have been thrown in jail? Probably. I still probably think that. But do I harbor anger toward my father? Do I allow that anger to control my life anymore? No.

Mr. Jekielek:
This example with your father, but also with Pastor Thompson is so powerful. This should be broadcast everywhere as a positive example of benevolence and sacrifice and transformation, as you describe it. But unfortunately, what we often see saturating our media is all the other stuff.

Ms. Sheffield:
It is actually so rare that it happens. As Roland Fryer from Harvard showed, there’s actually no disproportionate use of lethal force by the police against black people compared to white people. But then maybe hundreds of black people who are killed by other civilians get almost no coverage because we’ve normalized that. It is not news because it’s so normalized.

It is the same with forgiveness, because forgiveness is not a very splashy headline. In the news business, they say, “If it bleeds, it leads.” I appreciate that the Epoch Times has a positive news section with content that is restoring faith in humanity. It’s important to seek that out. The church and houses of worship are places where you can get those experiences.

It is absolutely what has gotten me through so much trauma. But when people leave church and leave their faith practice, they are cutting themselves off from these amazing stories. We as consumers have to demand them. I think technology can be used for good as well as for bad.

Mr. Jekielek:
Carrie, I’m grateful to know you and read about your life. I learned so much about what you bring to the world through reading this wonderful book. Thank you.

Ms. Sheffield:
Thank you, Jan, and I’m grateful to have met you. I’m grateful for the stories you tell and the truth that you present. You are an independent thinker that is striving for the truth, so you’re part of the truth party.

Mr. Jekielek:
Carrie Sheffield, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Sheffield:
Thank you, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Carrie Sheffield and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.