Next Week: SJW's, Victims, & Sheologians

Victimhood, Social Justice, and the Perfect Victim in Christ

Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back to Next Week with Jeff Durbin. I'm Jeff Durbin, and let's get right into it. So we have a special guest on the show today. He's one of my favorites. He is a pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, not Russia, Moscow, Idaho, where they've received now a record snowfall.

Hey, tell me about how the global warming is working, Toby Sumter.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for having me on the show, and yeah, February has loaded us with a hundred year record of snowfall, like way over 60 inches or something.

That's amazing. That's amazing.

Well, I can't So you all should join us.

Yeah, I can't relate. No, everything's just Arizona desert here, and actually, we're heating up. I think we're in the 80s next week possibly, so yeah, and that's why we all live here. So hey, guys, if you haven't got a chance to check out Toby Sumter yet, make sure you do so.

I would check him out on YouTube. Check out wherever you can get his stuff. Let me just do that now, just get out of the way, Toby. Where can people go to get your stuff?

You can find me at my blog, tobyjsumter .com. I am also involved with CrossPolitik, the podcast and show, crosspolitik .com, and ChristKirk, ChristKirk .com is the homepage for Christ Church here in Moscow.

Awesome. So hey, Toby, I wanted to have you on because I think it's important for us as ministers of the gospel to engage with cultural issues, the things that are happening around us, and not just pithy things, and I want to talk about, there's a popular movement, social justice warriors, people who are talking about quote-unquote justice in a really peculiar.

Way.

There's a popular view of being a victim. That seems very popular today, and you gave a talk recently on that whole concept of being a victim, and you talked about how we have a perfect victim, Jesus.

So bring us into that discussion, Toby. I think that you're the best guy to do it.

Wow.

Well, I don't know about that, but I will give it my best shot. I would, you know, we can look at something as recent as the Jussie Smollett incident.

Okay.

Many people have been following that as this crazy situation where a guy apparently staged his own assault.

Right.

The facts are still coming in, and it's a little bit, a little hard to read, but at least the initial read is that this guy staged his own assault, and I think that's a great example, though, of actually pointing out what's going on in our culture.

Somebody thought that they would be, they would get some kind of benefit from being a victim.

Right.

And so they staged their own victimization, perhaps, is what it looks like.

Right.

And so I think even that setup is a great example of, so somebody thought this would actually help them.

Right.

Somebody thought this would be useful. Use the word social justice warrior, social justice movement. One of the key terms that's being thrown around in some of the literature, and I think it's getting a little more popular, is the word intersectionality.

That's right. What's that mean?

Intersectionality is this idea that depending on how much you've been victimized, you sort of score extra points. And so if you think of it in terms of intersections, you might have different layers of victimhood.

So if you're female and not male, you're not part of, I don't know, the dominant sex, even though there's more women in the world than men, but don't let that bother you, then you're victimized because you're female.

But also if you're a black female, you're not part of the dominant white culture, so you're even more of a victim. And if you're a black female lesbian, then you've been triply victimized and so on. And so there's various ways of basically trying to count up victim points.

And the more victim points you have, this ultimately kind of goes back to a very materialistic view of the world, but such that every time you hear the word empower, you ought to spit. And the reason is because the whole idea of empowering is the idea of trying to, in some way, it's Marxist, it's materialist, and the idea is that you've been gypped, you've been ripped off by the culture, and we need to give you that power back, which basically results in a high priest culture.

And the high priest is those who have the most victim points. This goes all the way back, ultimately, though, to the Garden of Eden.

Really?

God, you know, there's sin enters the world, God shows up and says, what happened? And Adam says, it's the woman you gave me.

Yeah.

He immediately plays the victim.

Yep.

It's not my fault. It's not my responsibility. This woman, and he blames God, right? This woman you gave me. He plays the victim card, trying to somehow manipulate God. I mean, this is crazy, but in some way trying to avoid his sin.

We see the same thing with Cain and Abel. Right after Cain kills his brother, God shows up and says, where's your brother? And Cain says, I don't know. Why should I know where my brother is?

That's right.

Am I my brother's keeper? And immediately, again, evades responsibility and is playing the victim. I'm just ignorant. I don't know what's going on. Why are you blaming me? And so I think running through the story of the Bible and then running through, I think, the rest of history, there's this sinful instinct that we have to evade responsibility, claim victim status.

The problem is, is that none of us are actually innocent. We all are guilty of some sin. Even when we are actual victims in some sense, we've all sinned and the wages of sin is death. And the thing that I've wanted to point out to Christians in particular is that I think there's a, we need to be aware that we are tempted to play the victim card too.

And we need to refuse it because every offer to play the victim card is ultimately as an offer to lure us away from Jesus. But Jesus is the only perfect victim in the history of the world. He was sinless and he freely offered his own life in place of all of us sinners.

And I think in many ways, that's actually why we like to play the victim, why people are tempted to play the victim, because we want to be like Jesus. And ultimately we want to be our own Jesus. And so we want to, we try to earn victim points as an attempt to justify our existence and attempt to justify why we act the way we do.

Well, I was victim. I had to yell at my daughter because I was so tired and I got fired that day. Or I had to lie because, you know, and we justify. But we can't save ourselves. We can't justify ourselves because ultimately we deserve death.

We deserve the death penalty because we're sinners. The wages of sin is death. God in his grace offers Jesus. Jesus willingly offers himself. And so, and he's a perfect, innocent victim. He's the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

What this does is completely turns the whole victim culture on its head. And so you get Paul saying crazy things like this in Romans 8, where he says, for as it is written, for your sake, we are killed all the day long.

We are like sheep for the slaughter. That's pretty victimized. And he says, but in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. Then he goes on to say, I'm persuaded that neither death nor life or angels or principalities or things present or things to come may, are able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

And so I think this is just a wonderful word to Christians. Don't take the bait. Don't take the victimhood. And even in the sense that you are like sheep gone to slaughter, God says, steward that. If you're in Christ, then you have nothing but gratitude, joy, because your sins have been taken away.

And now in Christ, you now have actually been given a status of conqueror rather than victim.

Biblical Justice, the Cross, and Vocation

That's powerful, man. So Toby, what do we do in the situation before us where we have people faking victimization, people learning whole college courses on how to be the perfect victim and how to find out how and where you are a victim and sort of putting up on a pedestal all the victims and celebrating the victimhood and all the rest, the Me Too movement and all the rest.

How do we address that in a way that's healthy, that's biblical, that's just, in a way that doesn't go the way of the evangelicals that act like God's justice and his law doesn't really matter today. God's not concerned with justice today.

Because you see the problem is you have on the one side people with social justice warrior mindsets that really have a perverse view of justice and victimhood. But then you have, of course, God's law, which is the perfect law, God's standard of his own character.

It's the disclosure of his own character. It's his own standard of justice. And God's law does have a focus upon victims' rights in God's law. It's a big concern for God, and it is, of course, today. It's a concern for God.

He's not changing, and so God does have actually a perfect concern for justice today and for victims. So how do we actually address this in a way that's actually whole, meaningful, coherent, and biblical in light of the fact that you have Christians today, people that love God and love his word, that'll say God's not concerned today with standards of justice.

He's not concerned with justice in society. But then you have the polar opposite view of people who go the social justice warrior, the neo-Marxist way, and they start doing things like Me Too and all the rest.

How do we actually have a balanced view?

Yeah, well, I think so we want to lead. We want to start with the gospel, and we want to lead with the gospel. But I think what we need to do is we need to read the whole Bible, and we need to read what the Bible actually says about the gospel.

And what the Bible says about the gospel is that God was establishing justice in the cross.

Yes.

And so we have to start there, and it's really important that we start there because otherwise when we move on to talk about applying justice in the world, we'll get it upside down and backwards, even if we are all about the Old Testament.

But if we start at the cross, we need to recognize that in the cross, God was dealing justice, and he was establishing justice in the world. He did justice by paying the penalty that our sin deserved, and it was not one ounce more, and it was not one ounce less than what needed to be paid.

It was perfect and complete justice for the perfect and complete remission of the sins of God's people. But when God does that, and he sets us back up on our feet, and he washes us clean, and he clothes us in the righteousness of Jesus, or what we could call the justice of Jesus, we're not just saved to stand out here in the cold in Idaho or out there in the heat in Arizona.

We're clothed in the righteousness of Jesus in order to become ambassadors of his righteousness. Second Corinthians 5, Paul says that he who knew no sin became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.

And he's talking in that episode, in that section particularly, about the ministry of the gospel, which proclaims the wonderful justice in the cross, but then also proclaims the righteousness of God in us.

And so Ephesians 2 is another place where he says that we are saved by faith through grace, that faith is not of yourself, it is a gift of God so that no one can boast. And then he says, for we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.

And so we're not saved by good works, but we are saved to good works. And good works are just works, righteous works. And so when God saves us, deals with our sin, he establishes us in this world, and he gives us particular callings, and those callings are things like father, husband, mother, wife, child, student, teacher, business owner, pastor, elder, governor, judge, police officer.

He gives us these assignments in this world to do good, to do right. And so I would say, back to the original question, absolutely, there's ditches. There's a certain kind of mainline evangelical ditch that says, I'm all about Jesus and the cross and getting saved, and I can't be bothered with worrying about culture and politics and justice.

And justice, yeah.

And then there's the other side that says, but there's wrong, and so me too, and victim, and the social justice warrior stuff. And so the answer to it is the gospel. And in the gospel, we find that God saves us to good works.

He gives us particular assignments. And so what we need to do is go back to the Bible and say, I'm a dad. So how do I work out justice in my home as a dad?

I'm a mom.

I need to read the Bible and find out how do I deal out justice as a Christian mom in my household. I'm a pastor. I'm an elder. I'm a deacon. I'm a civil magistrate. I'm a police officer. I'm a captain.

I'm a whatever you are. And so there are standards of justice that God gives us, but all of that is built on the cross where God made us right with him.

Why Social Justice Warriors and Neo-Marxism Fail

Awesome. Man, that's awesome, Toby. Dude, thank you. Hey, just give you this. Let's address this. Why do social justice warriors suck? Why does neo-Marxism suck?

Because they don't actually care about justice.

Well, that's weird.

It's in the name, dude. It says social justice warrior.

Yeah, they're liars.

Yeah.

Here's how you know they don't care about justice, because what they're actually interested in is mobs. And mobs don't establish justice. And so what the Bible requires is two or three witnesses. The witnesses must be cross-examined.

There needs to be due process. False witnesses need to be punished with the very same punishment that would have happened to those they were falsely accused in.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

And so when we fail to do those things, what we find out is people who don't care about that don't really care about the truth. And if they don't really care about the truth, they don't really care about justice, which means they don't really care about protecting and helping real victims.

And so that's my problem with them is they suck because they don't care about people who have actually been wronged and harmed. And God who made us and God who made this world understands our proclivities, understands sin and gave the law to us so that we would know how to do justice and how to do righteousness in this world, how to protect the innocent, how to defend the voiceless and how to execute justice on those that have done evil.

And so they don't really care about justice because they don't care about actually establishing truth carefully. They're just mobs with pitchforks and no real victim should trust them.

Yeah, that's right. And I assure everybody watching right now, this is, I'm sure, the very first time you've ever heard two pastors talking about how much social justice warriors suck.

So, yeah.

All right, guys. Toby Sumter, Christ Church, Moscow, Idaho. Make sure you guys get to know him, download his stuff, listen to him. Toby, we'll catch you again on another episode, I'm sure, brother. Thank you for joining us today.

Thanks so much, Jeff.

Absolutely. All right, guys. Thank you so much.

Stay with us.

Be right back after these commercials.

Intersectionality, Victimhood, and the Culture War

Hi, guys.

Welcome back. Welcome back to Next Week with Jeff Durbin. I'm Jeff Durbin. That's Luke the Bear. That's Joy the Girl. And that is Summer Jaeger.

Yes.

So these two over here do a show called Sheologians. You guys can get that at sheologians .com. And we're here today talking about some important stuff. So what should we talk about? Should we talk about how Summer doesn't actually fit in her seat?

Well, you should probably clarify that.

I fit in the seat.

It's because her legs are short, not that she's too big for the seat.

I mean, hello.

Yeah, sorry.

All right.

Let me try that again. Let's restart the show. We had to put a pillow behind Summer so that her feet would touch the floor.

Okay.

No, don't leave, Zach.

Don't leave.

We had to put a pillow there so her feet fit.

I almost said fit the floor.

It's been a long day.

Yes.

It's been a long day. We're glad you guys all joined us live here on Facebook. Make sure you guys hit all the buttons and share everything. So we were just on talking to Toby Sumter, and it was a great interview.

He's a beast.

He is a beast. He is.

He's not like in a bad way.

Not like in a Dovahkiin kind of way.

Healthy way.

He's a healthy beast.

Kind of beastly way.

I love his blog.

Yeah, his blog.

I've actually never read it.

You have to.

I just listen to his sermons.

Oh.

The message that you talked to him, like, that inspired that interview was really, really.

Good.

Straight fire.

Absolutely.

What's the name of the message again?

I don't remember.

I don't remember.

It actually had a weird. No, it was a weird title. What are we doing here today? Godly City or something.

Yeah, it was.

Yes.

I think that was it.

You wouldn't think it had anything to do with that talk.

Okay.

Yeah. Right on.

Hey, so what do you want to talk about today? I know what I want to talk to them about.

Well, yeah. Well, since we talked about victimhood.

Yeah.

With Toby, I actually have a little fun victimhood news story.

Is this a Your Mom joke?

It's not.

Okay.

Not a Your Mom joke. This is a real story. So you guys are all familiar with Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

I'm sorry.

Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

You know, tomato, tomato.

Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

He said Hezbollah.

I'm nervous.

Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

I am not familiar with what you're talking about.

This is not fair because your dad's like an expert on Islam.

That doesn't mean.

Okay.

Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

Whatever you want to call it.

Yes.

So we all know that they're a terrorist organization. Can we agree on that?

Sure.

Okay.

So Britain actually just recently, I just saw this today, Britain classified them finally as a terrorist organization. Good on you, Britain. It's already been like that in the U .S. for a while. But they plan to ban all wings of it in England.

So this, this is a real response from, from whatever you want to call them. They said it's an insult.

It sounds like a, like Buffalo Wild Wings new flavor.

They are really spicy. They will kill you. They're so hot. No, they said it's an insult. To the feelings and sympathies. And in the will of the Lebanese people, they consider Hezbollah. Hezbollah.

Hezbollah.

Hezbollah. Again, whatever you want to call it.

Anyways.

Their feelings were hurt.

That they were called a terrorist.

That they were called a terrorist organization.

Sure.

Feeling.

So now they're like terror flakes.

Did they actually say that though?

No, they really said that.

Terror flakes.

They're terror flakes.

Terror flakes.

Yeah.

So they have feelings.

Okay.

They matter too.

And they matter too.

Well, that's the number one sin.

It's just the victimhood conversation. That's perfect.

See.

Yeah, I know. It just can't say the name right. But you know.

Yeah.

The perfect connection point. If you could just work on the pronunciation.

But the connection point.

We're talking about victims.

Well, I mean, it did. The way you're pronouncing it does sound like Ebola, which also kills a lot of people.

That's what I was saying. I was thinking. Vaccines. Did I get my Hezbollah vaccine?

You don't want to hurt their feelings.

Come on.

Talk about vaccines.

I got the Hezbollah.

You can't come here and talk about vaccines.

It's the next plague. The Hezbollah virus.

Yeah. Yeah.

So anyways, that was my story. I just found it interesting.

That's right.

They have feelings too.

Yes.

That's good.

That's an interesting standard they live by.

That's right.

It must.

Yeah.

I mean, apparently the people, they're chopping their heads off.

People that they like to create victims don't also want to be that.

Yeah.

Well, they also feel like that's okay.

Yes.

So, interesting.

So, they need a victim too.

Speaking of Hezbollah and vaccines and everything else.

The terror it brings.

The two, yes, the two of you spend a lot of time doing a radio program called Sheologians, a podcast, Sheologians. And you guys talk a lot about intersectionality and the SJWs and all those things. But you guys do it, I think, in a much better way than you see often with the conservative talk shows and things like that, radio programs, and those clips you see online where people sort of just diss sort of the whininess of the SJWs.

The conservative channels will always diss the whininess of the SJWs. Sort of just general mockery. Some of it well-deserved, and it's fun to watch. But you guys are examining it from a more biblical perspective, and you're doing it as two Christian women, young women, who are engaged in this culture that is obsessed with being victims and intersectionality.

So, let's have that conversation.

Well, I think that, like you mentioned, sort of the conservative group that reports on whiny SJWs tends to be of a certain age. And so, to them, like millennials and social justice warriors are just kind of whiny.

They're like, you've never had to work a physical labor job. You've never had, like it's an experience that they just can't possibly understand. So, to them, they're just like, they're ungrateful. They're entitled.

Everything that every older generation has thought about every younger generation ever in the history of everything, you know. But it really is a lot more than that. Being a victim is, it's like a currency in our day and age.

Like you, if power has been taken from you or if something's been done to you, it sort of gives you this like card that it lets you do and substantiate anything that you want to do. Which, like terrorism, they've taken, they're like, oh, we do what we want.

It's like we're a group of people. We have our own subjective view of what's right. We think we can kill people and that's all fine. And our feelings are hurt. It's similar. It doesn't really matter what you do.

You can kill your baby. You can assume and slander. You can assume people's thoughts and intentions and meaning in what they're saying. You can do whatever you want. And as long as you're a victim, that's okay.

Well, victimhood language is historically also a predictor of genocide. So if you look back at the genocide that happened in Ukraine around the 1920s, which this isn't really taught in schools because it's not popular, the way that the government was able to essentially starve 20 million of its people and shift power massively was to convince the younger generation that the farmers that were producing the food were making them victims.

So because the farmers had all the wealth, they were able to convince the younger generation that they were being victimized by the farmers. So in turn, the younger generation supported the government coming in and taking the farms.

And of course, when the government runs something, it runs as well as the DMV. And so the farmers died out and the land starved. Over 20 million people were starved out. You see the same thing in Nazi Germany.

The victimhood language of the Jews are, they're taking all your stuff. They're making you victims. Well, now we can kill the Jews. And you see the same thing with abortion. The unborn baby is going to ruin your chances at life, essentially making you a victim of this thing that happened to you.

And so therefore we can take the baby's life. So a lot of people, I think, have a very sanitized view of victimhood language. They think that they're speaking this way out of a care and a concern. But if you're not using God's standards to look at right and wrong, you can use victimhood language to really harm people.

So it's popular today to be a social justice warrior. It's popular today to take courses, whole college courses, to train you to become a professional victim and to complain. And you get extra points for how many different parts of victimhood you can claim for yourself.

And it's the popular thing to be a part of that whole movement. Tell us about intersectionality. What exactly is intersectionality? Because there's a word thrown around a lot of times. People, I think, see it and see it a lot in conservative posts talking about it but don't really understand what is it.

Okay. So Kimberly Crenshaw was a critical theorist. She's a feminist. And she did not believe that there were enough voices within feminism that were talking about feminism that wasn't white. And so she came up with this idea.

If you imagine that your different identity is that you can claim. So the only identity you can claim, well, is white and male.

So we get zero victim points, right?

You're getting ahead of me. You're getting ahead of me.

Okay. Sorry.

So typically your identities are going to be around your gender, your race, your sexual orientation. And if you imagine these as a road, you're going down the road with your whiteness. I'm sorry. Let's say blackness or person of colorness.

You're going down the road. But you're also going down the road with another identity, and that is your femaleness. So where this identity is going, but then your femaleness identity is going, where it crosses is an intersection.

And when you have this intersection, you have to look out for more cars coming to hit you than someone who doesn't have this intersection. And that was Crenshaw's, that was the actual analogy that she used.

And so essentially it demands that we view people through a social identity and that we understand them as people who we cannot understand their experience. If you don't have that same intersection, you don't have the pain or the knowledge or the experience that those people naturally have.

And so when we talk about if you buy into intersectionality, which I would argue is actually a religion, because if you have privilege, that's the original sin of privilege. It has priests. You're not allowed to question.

If you have a certain amount of intersections, you are imbued with knowledge that the rest of us don't have because we don't experience that intersection. So you're a priest. You cannot be questioned.

There's all kinds of other things that would make me argue that it's actually a religion. So let's say the transgender, you know, people that want to, if they're biologically male, but they feel as though they're a female.

So that's an intersection they experience that we don't. When they want to compete in sports, so let's say a biological male wants to compete in female sports. Intersectionality would essentially argue that because we don't understand that person's intersection.

We don't understand their lived experience, which is the height of all knowledge, the lived experience that cannot be questioned. We cannot understand that person's life or their perspective. And if you question their lived experience, you are denying them as a person.

That's why you'll see the transgender community arguing that when we do not see them for what they say they are, we are denying their very existence because we're denying their experience and your experience, your comprised experiences define who you are.

So that's why the religion of intersectionality is why you cannot question someone's lived experience. You cannot question if a man who feels like a female is a female or not because you haven't experienced it.

Does that make sense?

Absolutely. So when you guys are engaging with this world of thought from a Christian perspective, how do you actually engage it? Not merely from a conservative talk show like perspective, but how do you engage this world of thought from a Christian perspective?

What's wrong with it?

Well, I mean, for me, the pretty basic idea, she just said what makes you is your experiences and a collection of social identities, which obviously we reject. We believe that obviously people are like a complex combination of things.