The Moment People Realized Acts 29 Was Going Woke

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. A few things that I wanted to show you before we get into the topic today really briefly is

I fail to mention this so often. So if you live in Indiana, I'm gonna be in Indiana, October 20th at Fellowship Bible Church in Kendalville.

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and you can RSVP if you wanna come. I'm gonna be talking about rebuilding from the ruins. What do we do now that we've seen all the carnage that's come from social justice and other things really, but how do we rebuild a robust institutions?

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We still got openings. Would love to see you at the Adirondack, I can say the word,

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So goldriverco .com, Gold River Tea Company. Now, let's talk about the subject for today.

This is gonna be a little open -ended. This is a montage or a compilation

I made of various clips from a panel discussion at an

Axe 29 event in 2017. So kind of a blast from the past here, going back five years.

And the reason I'm playing this is because I've been doing some research into Axe 29, and man, they really have bought into a lot of social justice stuff, unfortunately.

It is unfortunate, it really is. And with this particular panel,

I see this as kind of, it was a moment. It was a seminal moment.

And there's moments that I can think of that are important for this whole debate in social justice and Christianity.

In 2018, there was three of them. There was the Southern Baptist Convention had Resolution 9, which endorsed critical race theory as an analytical tool, that passed.

You had T4G and David Platt's preaching about disparities and how you're guilty if you're white because you don't care enough about the lack of diversity in the room.

And then you also had the MLK50, which showed that Southern Baptist seminaries and the gospel coalition were putting on really what amounted to a political event.

The gospel was compromised at the event in Russell Moore's speech, and it became a left -leaning political event.

And so people were waking up at that point, some people saying, what's going on? Well, I think that happened a year earlier in Axe 29 in the

Church Planning Network. And this was the event that some people who were there at the time thought, wow, something's going, something's wrong.

And if you wanna see the whole discussion, go to the link in the info section. There's also a link to this particular montage. So this is,

I think, like 20 minutes long, if I'm not mistaken, which the whole thing is over an hour. So I couldn't really, in one episode, do an hour.

Actually, this is only 14 minutes. So I've broken it down to 14 minutes. I'll fill in some gaps, but this is what was happening in Axe 29 in 2017.

And it's still, to some extent, happening. Some of the people on the stage here are still at, like Eric Mason and Thabiti Annabuile, I can't speak for the others, but they're still advocating the same ideology.

And Axe 29 hasn't deviated from this. My research is, and really another brother in Axe 29 has helped me locate these things.

A lot of that has gone through 2020, but I'm gonna be looking at stuff through 2022 and just seeing what they're still putting out.

But through 2020, they were still putting out stuff that would be congruent with this. So this was the moment.

This, I think, was the big moment for Axe 29 when people started realizing within the network something was wrong.

And it's clips from a panel discussion called Understanding Race and Reconciliation in the USA, which that was before 2020, the term everyone used in evangelicalism to promote ideas that would be adjacent to critical race theory or liberation theology, or just even just sort of leftist views on race and race relations.

It was framed in this racial reconciliation language. So without further ado, here is

Matt Chandler opening up what you're about to hear. And so what

I thought we could do with our time, what I wanted to do with my time is just ask some brothers to come up here, and I just want them to talk to us because how they feel matters, and how they see matters.

And we are not, I'll say it, we are not in a position to understand.

So we must try to seek it. I cannot, with the education

I have, the background I have, and life experience I have, be an expert in this space.

But I can say that I'm not, and I can try to learn. I want you, as we have the conversation today, to kind of look for these things in your heart.

If when our brothers are speaking, you begin to think in your mind how you could explain to them of why they shouldn't feel that way or why they shouldn't think that,

I would just flag that in your mind as an example of what I'm talking about. Because I think when you go, oh, let me try to explain to them why they shouldn't, that's just bad pastoral ministry at any level.

Privilege is a real thing. All right, so the way that Chandler frames this whole thing from the beginning is if you're in the audience, picture yourself as you're in the audience.

This is, I believe, at a pastor's conference. So you're a pastor. You're sitting there for Acts 29, and you're being told you're inadequate.

You can't critique what you're about to hear. Don't try to contradict what you're about to hear.

If you have a concern, you need to just listen. Shut up and listen because you don't have the education or the background or the understanding.

And these people are the experts. And apparently, it's bad pastoral care to think that you can critique them.

You need to just listen. And this is, you're gonna hear this sort of standpoint theory stuff come up later on where you can't critique someone who doesn't have your experience if they have a quote -unquote oppressed experience because of the nature of their, in this case, ethnicity, but it could be gender.

It could be other factors. All right, so that's how the whole thing is framed.

And then you hear, you see here, I think this is Lacone Crump talking first here.

And he is making the point, really, he's making a point about white privilege.

And so we will, let me back it up a little. It's called privilege.

When you can look back and say, well, we're Irish. Here's our seal. Here's our crest. Here's our family.

And you have 13 % of the population that, for the most part, cannot do that. That's privilege.

And that's what it's like to be a black man in America. So that's part of having white privilege is if you can trace your lineage, but because if you're black, you can't trace your lineage, then you have some kind of a privilege, some kind of an advantage.

And I only bring this up to give you highlights because there's a lot more that was said, but that's just one example of, in a sea of many examples that were given of this panel, saying that, essentially, they had it really rough.

And maybe some of them did, but they had it, it was really bad for them. Life was not great.

It wasn't as great as it could be if they were white. And that's the first part of this whole panel.

And it really does till the ground. If you think of the analogy of trying to plant a seed, right?

If you wanna plant a seed, you gotta water it, it needs sun, it needs to grow. But before you do any of that, you need to till the soil so that it's not hardened.

And I think what I've often seen this pattern where on the front end, there needs to be these emotional stories, there needs to be a playing on your emotions, specifically your emotion for empathy or sympathy, that this is horrible.

What can we do? That's the next question you generally have in your mind. What can we do to make sure that this right is wrong?

There are many wrongs you can't right. These things happen over the course of hundreds of years.

But in this particular case, he's picking something that I thought, and there's many other things they pick, some of them serious, some of them, though, are kind of innocuous or they're kind of, they're just like,

I mean, I know a lot of people who can't, or they're not, some of them maybe not interested in, but there are many people who can't trace back.

In fact, my own family, for a while, we couldn't trace back because General Sherman had burned down the churches where the family public records were kept during the

Civil War. And so, am I supposed to look back on that and be very upset that that happened and hold it against people who maybe their lineage traces back to General Sherman?

They were Union soldiers. Therefore, I should be very angry at them because they prevented me from tracing my lineage back.

You can see that this isn't, obviously, a unique thing to black people, but he universalizes it like this is all black people.

And there's other factors that go into this. It's not just slavery. In fact, now,

I can't speak for every individual case, but this is often the case that records were sometimes better kept here in the

United States, even for slaves and those who are descendant from slaves, than they were for the descendants, than their ancestors in Africa.

Records weren't kept. So, the very fact that there are some records is because sometimes due to the fact that within Western civilization, it's important.

There's more of a priority to keep records. The very fact that he gives you right here can be just as easily turned around.

The very issue he brings up, at least, can be turned around as a positive thing that look how white people, quote unquote, people from Europe have contributed to helping peoples who weren't keeping records to now start to keep better records.

That's ignored though. That's totally ignored. And it's just, you should feel bad, I guess, or you should just realize being white, you have such a privilege, such an advantage, and they don't have it.

And there's nothing to be proud of. If you're white in this particular circumstance, there's nothing that you are made to feel that you've contributed to the situation when in fact, you could make a case that actually the opposite to some extent is true.

And that doesn't, by the way, that doesn't justify slavery. That doesn't justify, often that's the retort that I'll often get is if I point out some of these things, it's like, well, you're just justifying slavery.

No, no, I'm just not justifying it. I'm just saying that it's a result of interaction between European peoples and other peoples, including

Africans, that have led to some of the advances such as record keeping.

That shouldn't be controversial to say that. But I need to just play it because if I get nitpicky here, this podcast is gonna be forever.

Shaping of white people, and this is, I'm not endorsing it as, I'm not endorsing it, but it's my shaping, is my mom telling me, white people crazy, right?

Just regularly, white people crazy. And would teach me that because I was 50 pounds ago, a pretty good athlete and enjoyed worldly popularity and all that good stuff, was teaching me

I couldn't trust white people. And she would tell me if I go out, if she knew I was going out to a party, say somebody's having a party at their lake house, which meant they were white because we don't own no lake houses.

And so she would say, she would always say, boy, be careful. And I was like, well, we're just gonna be at the lake house, you know, doing what we do.

And she would say, no, you can't do what they do. No. She said, cause if something go wrong, they gonna go home, you going uptown.

And I can't come get you out of jail. You can't do what they do. And -

Kind of wondering what they were doing. Just curious, but he didn't really say. And they can't be trusted.

Now, I know that's a stereotype. I know that's broad and all that good stuff, but that was shaping and it would be proved over and over again that I couldn't trust and I couldn't do what white folk did.

Okay, this is interesting because Thabiti Annabellili is making an admission that I think is very significant. I've said this about...

Okay, so back up a little here. I've said before on the podcast that there's a combination of two things going on often when you hear these stories.

You have sometimes legitimate racism that has been experienced sometimes in the present, but oftentimes it's in generations past.

And what I've said about that sometimes is that it's curious to me that those who hold the most resentment are those who experienced it sometimes the least.

And those who lived through, and I'm using the term racism,

I should probably say ethnic partiality or something just because the left has made that word almost a word that has no definition.

But what I mean by that is hatred of other people due to their ethnicity. So people who actually did live through hatred against them and opposition and barriers, often they're not as jaded and upset as those today who have experienced them less and are currently experiencing them much less.

And that's a curious thing, but I've said it's a combination of that, some legitimate opposition because of their ethnicity and mistrust and all of that, and conditioning, and conditioning.

Oftentimes I sense a conditioning because I'll meet people even in college ministry who it's like they don't...

Their examples of suffering racism are like, well, a woman clutched her purse once when I walked in and I noticed it.

And I'm like thinking, let's just assume that's all true. Really? That's the thing that's causing you to have so much opposition to Donald Trump and a fear that you're gonna be lynched or something.

Like really that? And it's because I think there's so many stories, there's so many, there's a whole industry that it seems like their end goal is to make black people and other racial minorities and women to some extent and LGBT folks, but in this case, black people feel insecure about themselves.

Like they are viewed by everyone else as less than, that they can't do the same things.

They can't, they're going to be treated differently. That, and for people who haven't experienced those things, they live vicariously through the experiences of others.

That's the conditioning. Or it's just suggested to them, the police are gonna do this. And so I've seen that just in my generation and the generation under me, where I'm like, well, you didn't go through, you're talking about, you're reaching back to slavery, which ended a long time ago to justify the hangups you have today with, and mistrust you have for white people.

That's an odd thing. Don't you think that's an odd thing? That's at least how I approach it.

I'm not going back in time to find out what, okay, my mom's from Ohio, you're right, am

I? There's a rivalry between Ohio and Michigan, and sometimes it gets pretty zesty. And maybe you're saying, well, that's a stupid example,

John. Well, maybe it is, maybe it is, but I got some diehard Ohio fans in my family. Like I'm not reaching back to find mistrust for Michiganders.

I'm not reaching back to the Civil War times to try to find mistrust, let's say for, I have soldiers on both sides of my family, but the

Harris line comes from the South. Am I gonna have mistrust then for people in the

North? Do I have a mistrust for Anglicans because of what my Puritan forefathers,

Presbyterian forefathers went through? You can, you see where I'm going with this, and you can do that.

Any group can really do that depending on how far you wanna go back. I mean, you could be Hebrew and say the

Egyptians, you don't trust Egyptians because of thousands of years ago what they did to Hebrews.

So it's not the way that everyone lives. And I'm not saying,

I'm not trying to say that in all situations or all scenarios, it's not understandable.

There are certain scenarios where it becomes understandable, but it's, in our day and age, often it's a lot of conditioning contributes to this.

And when Thabiti mentioned that, I just thought to myself, well, that's part of it. That's the, there's some conditioning going on there.

So he wasn't arrested at this, I don't know if it was a drinking party or what he was at, but he wasn't in trouble.

He didn't get in trouble, but his mother telling him that it's gonna be different for him was what conditioned him to, and that's what he says, it was formative for him.

It formed the way he viewed white people in general. And later on, you're gonna hear them talk about these cultural lenses we all have.

So what's interesting to me is Thabiti at the beginning says, I don't endorse this, but this is part of my shaping.

It's part of, and then later on they're saying, well, you have all these cultural lenses that you read even theology through.

So if this is part of Thabiti's shaping, is this is part of his lenses, part of the way he views the world, part of the way he thinks of white people was these impressions, this conditioning he got from his rearing, then how does he transcend that?

How does he transcend that? What you heard from Matt Chandler at the beginning was, if you're, and he's talking to a room of mostly white people, that you don't have, you can't understand what you're about to hear.

You can't criticize it, because guess what? You're trapped, you're conditioned in your white quote unquote culture, whatever that is.

You're gonna hear that even said again later on in this. And my question is,

Thabiti here admits that there's also a conditioning that he has. How does he transcend that?

Are we just all trapped in our cultural boxes? Is that, because that's the impression you get after listening to this.

You could very easily at least get that impression. And I would like to suggest there's objective truth.

There's ways of navigating these things. And even if you've been told things and you've experienced things, you can transcend those things.

And times have changed, if you haven't noticed as well, since Thabiti was a child.

And that doesn't have to color your whole perception. You can overcome those things.

So, especially in the church, you would think. So anyway, let's keep going with it.

I got my doctorate degree. To be honest, why I did a hard master's degree and a doctorate degree was so that people in Christianity would at least respect what

I have to say because of my degrees. Amen, amen. Which that's why

I got them. Not just to get a biblical education, but because I believe

I have dignity and I wanted my theological education to communicate that dignity even before people met me.

And sometimes I've been confronted with the fact that I am still a nigga with degrees. And so,

I'm working through a lot. Okay, so this was a video published by Axe 29.

If someone ever says that, John Harris had a racial slur on his show, this might be the only time

I've ever played something like that. And the only reason is just to show you, this is what Axe 29 has put out there, what

Eric Mason is saying. And in no shape, where, form, I endorsing that. But the point, the deeper point here that Eric Mason is making is sad to me.

That he got his degree because primarily, it sounds like, he wanted to impress white people. He wanted them to respect him.

He's trying to get respect. And to me, that is absolutely heartbreaking. And I run into this, I run into this all the time with all kinds of different people.

I have noticed though, sometimes, with people who are conditioned to think of themselves more as victims, that that insecurity can just be, it can hamstring someone.

It is so sad. It is so grievous to me that there's people out there that feel the need to, he has to, he had to prove himself.

He had to get these degrees or else people wouldn't listen to him. And I, and you might say, some people who are woke be listening, you know,

John, you never felt that way because you're white. People will always listen to you. And that's just not true at all. But I never,

I always thought of degrees as education. I wanted to gain a certain set of skills. I don't care what other people think.

And it's, you know, does it give you some accolades? I guess. For me, it was, it's embarrassing to be honest with you where I got my degree from, my

MDiv at least. I, my heart just goes out to someone who feels that way.

And I don't think it needs to be that way. You can just be secure in the truth and in your

God and in who he made you to be and where he puts you. And you don't, I don't think you should have to go get degrees or something to gain respect.

The, if you, if you think about the situation all these guys are in right now, various levels of education, and they're all on a panel in front of a bunch of white people who mostly are paying the bills for this denomination.

It's not a nomination, this church planning network. And, but yet who's platformed, who's on the stage, who's the one that's lecturing everyone else?

And everyone else is told that they can't really critique it. That, it's a little interesting to me.

It's not because of their degrees, it's because of the color of their skin. It's because of their, and it's not even just because of the color of their skin, by the way.

It's because of their, it's a combination of the color of their skin, their culture and their commitment to activism within the church.

That's, that would be the reason these people are up here. That's why they're lecturing everyone else. So he has a position of authority.

He has a position here of influence. Among a sea of white people. And yet he's complaining that he had to get a degree or else people wouldn't respect him.

There's people in there that I'm sure are more educated than Eric Mason. There's people on this panel that were less educated than Eric Mason.

It's a fantasy a little bit. What he's, he's getting a certain level of respect here.

What it might be though, part of it could also be just wanting to, and I'm not,

I don't want to impose this on Eric Mason, but this is just a thought I had about other people who have said similar things that they, or they feel feeling they need to prove themselves.

And you don't have to be black. You don't have to be any color. But when people sometimes try to prove themselves, it's because they're trying to reinvent themselves or separate the weakness that they have, a weak version of themselves, something that they see as inadequate, something that they see as doesn't measure up.

They're trying to either get rid of that or separate the self that they're trying to build, this person with credentials and achievements from how they've been viewed or how they view themselves.

So in other words, sometimes they're not trying to actually prove to other people that they're worth something. They're trying to prove it to themselves because there's an insecurity because for whatever reason, and in this case, maybe it's conditioning,

I don't know, that they're told so often that they can't achieve or they're a victim or something.

And so it creates this need to try to point to something that shows I'm in control, that I have achievement,

I have worth, I have value, all of that. Keep in mind, this is a pastor's panel as we go through this.

This is supposed to be giving advice to pastors to how to navigate racial reconciliation in their congregation.

It's gonna be done with white evangelicalism as a whole because for the few brothers like yourselves, there's been a thousand to tell me otherwise.

When you have - Okay, so in the context here, he's saying the panelist, and I believe that panelist is

Lacone Crump again. What he's saying is that there's, for every person like Matt Chandler who's kind of wants to be woke, there's a thousand who are essentially racist in the left's meaning of that term.

And he just wants to be done with white evangelicalism. And so it's very discouraging, right? I mean, he's literally sitting in a room where there's a sea of white people mostly, and he's on the stage being platformed and he's saying,

I just wanna be done because the deck is so stacked against me. I hope you're seeing the irony of the situation when

Eric Mason and this other panelist, when they're saying what they're saying, it's like, but do you notice the situation you're in right now?

It's odd, it's a little odd, but that's how he views white evangelicalism. It's just characterized by racism.

I mean, that's a pretty bad ratio, right? There's only two people to every 1 ,000 that aren't,

I guess, racist in some way. A Midwestern or mountain white man who communicates that relationships between blacks and whites were at their greatest during Jim Crow and slavery and nobody in evangelicalism rises up.

Yeah. He's talking about Doug Wilson here. And he's saying, his complaint is, man, he wrote something.

It's the, I think, 1996 book, if I'm not mistaken. I think it's called,

Slavery As It Was, something like that. But Doug Wilson coauthored it with someone else. And there's a quote that people often take from that when they're trying to oppose

Doug Wilson, where his coauthor, it wasn't him, but his coauthor, I guess says that there was a mutual affection between master and slave, such as the world has never known in slavery, that this took place within the

American context of slavery. And then they go through and they try to, they demonstrate it.

That's not the thesis of the book, as I recall, but that's the demonstration that they give is,

I mean, they quote from a book called Time on the Cross by Stanley and Engerman.

They quote from Eugene Genovese, I believe, if I'm not mistaken. They quote from slave narratives.

There's a lot of information that I think they draw upon to try to make that, the coauthor, to make that charge.

So Eric Mason botches the quote, first of all, and because he's extending it to Jim Crow, which that wasn't part of it, and saying that race relations were never better.

And that's not what was said. So he's already, this is a misrepresentation, but he's talking about Doug Wilson.

He's also calling him a Midwestern mountain man, which I think he's from Maryland and he lives in Idaho.

So he's, but that's not, that's inconsequential. But anyways, he's using that as a

Midwestern person or a mountain person. They don't live among black people, I guess.

That's the only reason I can think of for him bringing this up. So he must not know. But he grew up,

I believe, in Maryland and he was in the Navy. So I doubt that that would be the case, that he wasn't around black people. And to communicate that the historicity of well -known historians, the etymology, the ontological development of history is off, and to begin to say, nah, slavery wasn't bad as Negroes make it to be.

Like, that's correct. Like, that's correct. That's, I mean, that's,

I mean, that is, I mean, that is,

I mean, I don't even know where to put it. I mean, you know what I'm saying? And then when you call yourself a Confederate, but then you see.

All right, let's stop here. So Eric Mason's critique is that Doug Wilson, that's who he's talking about here, went back, or no, he's innovative.

He's contradicting all the historians and the sources and even what black people say about slavery experience.

And it just makes me wonder whether he's red, black, and tan, whether he, I mean, he's quoting

Frederick Douglass. He's quoting slave narratives in his writings on the subject. In fact, if you go,

I don't, I recommend this all the time. I say, look, read primary sources. If you, I agree, actually, with something

Eric Mason's saying here, which is go read the people who experienced slavery. Read what they said about it.

We've read slave narratives on this podcast on multiple occasions. And I've read negative experiences.

I've read people who had experience that they didn't consider negative. But if you read the slave narratives, and I'm talking, and there's multiple slaves narratives, but the one specifically that the

Works Project Administration did, the study they did in the 1940s, where they found elderly slaves and interviewed tons of them, the vast majority of the accounts really don't have anything negative to say about slavery.

Does that justify slavery? No, I'm not saying it justifies slavery. I'm just saying that's, as a historian, you have to deal with that somehow.

You have to interpret that. These are actual slaves that lived that life.

And it's what they said about it. And some of them would talk about missing their masters, looking forward to seeing them in heaven.

I mean, this stuff really existed. You'd be, you'd think today, if you just absorbed what

Hollywood and the academia is telling you, that none of that ever happened. But it's a little more complicated than the ideological interpretation that we're given today.

It's not even worthy of the term interpretation. It's just, it's false. It's monolithic.

It doesn't take into account all the various facts that would lead to a complete paradigm. It's memory studies.

It's revisionism. But yet the accusation is that Doug Wilson's the revisionist and that, so because I'm familiar with the sources to some extent, and I've had to read extensively on slave conditions and all of that for my history studies, my bachelor's, my master's, this isn't something that, this is something that I'm not taken in by.

Because I know the sources that are being drawn on to make the argument, which

Eric Mason's kind of misrepresenting here. But I'd be curious what specifically, what historians, what arguments, or what, specifically what people are being contradicted here in innovative ways.

But this is, so this is an accusation Eric Mason is making against Doug Wilson. Acclamation document that fundamentally and doctrinally, when you call yourself a confederate, you're basically fundamentally saying you want subjugation.

And so nobody publicly in Christianity, except for Thabiti, which it came from him, but it should have come from the other side.

Like there needs to be, but like we used to say in the 80s, bum rush. Okay, here's what he's saying. I'm familiar with the situation to some extent at least.

Thabiti, Annabelle, and Doug Wilson had it out online. And I think, so I'm not sure if he's referring solely to that or to a private confrontation, but there is definitely some kind of a confrontation there.

And Doug and Thabiti met, I think Don Piper kind of facilitated whatever the meeting was.

And Doug Wilson has referred to himself as people accuse him of being a neo -confederate.

And Doug Wilson says, I'm more of a paleo -confederate. There's a video online of it. And my point in bringing all this up is not to defend

Doug Wilson on all this stuff. It's to clarify and correct and set the record straight because Eric Mason's attacks are at best sloppy.

And at worst, there's lies in them. It's so inaccurate. So Wilson specifically says that it's because he believed that the

Confederacy had a constitutional point. What would that be? Well, that's secession. That's why he called, that's why he he's used that term.

Well, Eric Mason is now saying that it's connected to really racially insensitive views that Doug Wilson has.

And that, and he's about to make the point that it's up to white people to keep

Doug Wilson in check, to confront Doug Wilson, as if that hasn't happened, right? There's tons of white people who have done this.

But Eric Mason makes out like white people wouldn't actually go after Doug Wilson, which to me is funny because that Wilson's had a lot of white people go after him.

And it was up to Thibédé and Abouylé to confront him. And that shouldn't be. So, and again, this is an audience of white people that basically you got to police yourself.

You got to police these bad boys, Doug Wilson being one of them. Like, that means rush to the, rush to the forefront.

Like we need whites who get it to like, say, like you gotta like, cause for me,

I'm battling apologetics in my neighborhood because they view Christianity as apathetic towards race.

That's it. Why do they view it? Why do they view it that way? That's the question I have. Is it because they've endured slavery?

Is it because they, why is it that they view that way? Is there conditioning involved?

Is there a narrative about Christians that isn't fully accurate? Doesn't mean that Christians can't do bad things and Christians have done bad things and people who have done bad things who call themselves

Christians who aren't. Doesn't mean that doesn't happen. But there's a reason that historically in this country, black people have tended to identify more as Christian.

Why is that? Have you thought about it? Have you wondered why did that present state of affairs come to be that black people, even people who their lives don't seem to look like they're

Christian, but they still are culturally Christian? If it's such a racist religion, if it's so oppressive to minorities, if it's white supremacist, if that's what

Christianity is, when did that idea start taking place? It couldn't have been a long time ago.

It couldn't have been when black people were converting to Christianity. When was it?

When did that happen? When did that take place? See, this paradigm, the narrative

Eric Mason's giving you doesn't make sense of present circumstances necessarily.

Now, I believe what he's saying as far as I think that is a challenge he probably has in an urban neighborhood. They think that Christianity is racist, okay, or racially insensitive somehow.

All right, got it. So how do you approach that? If Christians are actually being racist, and that's what

Christianity, people are doing in the name of Christ, then you need to correct, here's what the

Bible says, here's what they're doing. Right, if they're breaking God's law, let's say, you need to, they're breaking God's law, they don't represent him.

If it's conditioning though, if it's that half truths and lies are being spun, then that needs to be confronted.

And depending on how you analyze that situation is gonna determine how you approach it when you're in those conversations.

I would submit to you, I think there's a lot of conditioning going on. And the existence of the black church, of black

Christians in the United States is one of those things that proves that there's conditioning going on. Because if they all thought Christianity was racist, and that that was a barrier to prevent them from being

Christian, then how come that became the number one religion? And these are people who came from places in which they would have been practicing animism, mostly.

And they didn't all just, I mean, there's still, some of the Gullah peoples practice hoodoo, and there's still some of that stuff still exists.

But in large part, there was a heavy influence of Christianity and conversions that have gotten rid of a lot of that.

You know who's trying to bring it back into the black community? Black Lives Matter. They're trying to bring the witchcraft stuff back. They're trying to go back to Africa, to the pagan religions, and bring those back as if those are authentic.

And we've been oppressed as if black people are forced every Sunday to get up and go to church. I'm sorry, no one's forcing them to do that.

There's a reason that many of them are doing that. And it's, and history answers that reason. I don't think

Eric Mason's narrative makes sense of it though. So when we still put on our textbooks white church fathers who were

African, when we hear foolish - I've never heard that before.

And white, we don't even categorize theologians that way generally. He's probably talking about Augustine or something,

Augustine of Hippo, because he's in Northern Africa. They try to, oftentimes woke people try to make it out. He's an African theologian.

He would have been, yes, he would have resided in Africa, but he wasn't in Sub -Saharan Africa. He wasn't black.

He would have been ethnically, we would have thought of him more as,

I guess, European, Roman. But that's,

I mean, that's what he's using to say there's this racist barrier exists that Augustine's not, he's categorized as white.

I mean, so I have a friend who's having a baby in Africa right now and they're missionaries. They're European in their ethnicity of some kind.

So they're having a baby. They live near Victoria Falls. Is that baby white?

What do you say? That's the question I have then for Eric Mason. If the baby becomes a great theologian in Christianity, is it wrong to categorize the baby as they, descendant of Europeans living in Africa?

How do you draw those lines? It's online. You need to dig into the feed and yakowism.

You understand what I'm saying? You gotta get up in there and begin to say, yo man, let's begin to talk about this. Let's dive. I'm not talking about a troller.

We're not talking about some wandering troll like when you're on Periscope and somebody's putting obscenities on it.

We're talking about notable characters in the Christian faith that need checking by our white brothers and sisters.

Because we're always, no matter what we say, to be honest, we always gonna look like the angry dudes. You understand what

I'm saying? We always gonna look like we got a chip on our shoulder. So when it comes from you guys, men and women, not just men, but men and women, utilizing your platforms, utilizing your blogs, and beginning to push out proper history, information, and relationships, and even empathy,

I think it just transforms sort of the culture of letting someone get away with saying that writing a black and tan is just crazy.

That's how you know he's about Doug Wilson because he mentions Doug Wilson's book, Black and Tan. So Doug Wilson never should have gotten away with writing that book.

All the white people should have checked him and they didn't and they failed. That's his point. There's a lot of white people, though, that have opposed

Doug Wilson in that. So it's not accurate, but that's his point. And so it's motivating the room full of pastors, who mostly would be white, to go out and be activists.

That's what this is doing. So this is pastoral training. It's a pastoral retreat or conference.

And these pastors now ought to go out and they gotta police people who say things that Eric Mason thinks are racially insensitive.

I get a lot of requests for help me know what to read. How do

I grow? And I think it comes from a well -meaning place. So I don't wanna pour water on it, except to say, take control and responsibility for your own remedial education.

Yes. We can't be sort of always developing a bibliography for you, especially when you have research skills.

Can I pause you real quick here? Because there's a principle tied to it.

Can I speak freely? That was a joke. I was gonna say, thank you for, yeah.

Yeah. It is the numinous Negro principle.

You see it in back of vans. You see it in the green mouth. This is language you've probably never even considered.

But there is a history of the elevated magical Negro that comes along to fill out the worldview of the well -meaning seeking white man.

I don't know what to say. I'm getting my words together. The legend of Bagger Vance, the voluminous,

I guess that's the word he uses, black person who, magical, who comes along. And well, this, it sounds like Al Sharpton called

Barack Obama the magic. And then he said that, it's not a wrong word to say necessarily.

I'm just, I just know that the charges people bring against me.

So I'm extra careful sometimes. But he used that word as well to describe

Barack Obama. And it was supposed to be a good thing. So I guess

Al Sharpton would be part of the person in that trajectory who is creating this myth, this horrible myth of a magic black person who comes and fills out a worldview.

But Bagger Vance didn't do that. He wasn't filling out a worldview. I've never seen the Green Mile. So I can't really comment on that.

But I thought, I didn't see anything racially insensitive about the legend of Bagger Vance.

Did anyone else see that in the legend of Bagger Vance? Yes, there's a picture of Robert E. Lee in the movie.

Yes, okay. It's not racially insensitive to have a picture of Robert E. Lee. I would say

Will Smith's character is a good character. He comes to help.

I don't understand where he's going with this. He's trying to connect something that I don't think connects.

That's I guess what's up. That's why this is weird and confusing. So at the beginning, I believe Lee is saying, hey, look, don't come to me and ask me questions.

So now, picture everyone in the audience, all these white people, right?

These white pastors who are told by Matt Chandler, you can't talk about this subject, really.

You're just not, you don't have the tools. You're inadequate. You can't challenge this. You need to just shut up and listen.

So, okay, you're in that posture already, and now you're told you can't even go and ask a question about what books to read, because if you do, you are expecting too much of black people.

And to put icing on the cake, you're told that you're part and parcel, you're complicit in creating the myth of a magic black person, like a genie almost,

I guess, who comes and helps you with all your problems. And this is, it's not fair to do this to black people.

I don't know what to say. I mean, I'm very offended by the Lucky Charms, was it an elf?

I don't even know who, a leprechaun? You know, very white. I have Irish in me. Man, you know, you eat your

Lucky Charms, and I'm very offended by that. And Gandalf the Wizard, I'm very offended now that you think of white people specifically as, come on, really?

Really? You know, the whole narrative that you've, the idea,

I've heard this before, about the white savior, right? There's a lot of people influenced by critical race theory talk about the white savior complex and stuff.

The white person who comes and saves the black person. That's not right. White people shouldn't be going and saving black people,

I guess. And apparently, black people shouldn't go and save and help white people because that is being imagined.

So can white people ever help black people? And can black people ever help white people? I'm really curious to know.

Is there any way of transcending these boxes? Because this panel is a joke. They're just putting more barriers in front and sowing more mistrust between people groups by doing this.

Now you can't even ask them a question without feeling like you're somehow patronizing them.

Man, I mean, goodness gracious. If you wanna ask me a question about what I think or what would be helpful, feel free to ask.

I don't have time to answer everyone's questions sometimes, but goodness gracious, I don't think that you're, that it's offensive for you to ask me a question.

Jesus received questions. The apostles received questions at times. There's nothing wrong with answering a question.

If you're a good teacher, you're gonna answer questions. Okay, I'm getting worked up. These are pastors though.

These are supposed to be the people that you go to with questions. Forget about skin color.

Can we forget about it for a moment? And just, I need to help growing in my faith. Can I ask you a question? Is that okay?

Man. Talk about being unapproachable here. Whether it be sport, history, whatever.

Is this remotely Christian? Okay, I'm done. And as the good doctor just said,

I don't wanna pour water on your request. I really don't. But let's not uphold that.

I went through the same education system you did. School didn't teach me who

Benjamin Banneker was. I've got a doctor on my elder team.

He's 60. He has a PhD. He's white. He didn't know who Benjamin Banneker is.

Benjamin Banneker designed Washington, D .C. He's an African American man. The stoplight, the filament inside of a light bulb for electricity, revolutionizing train travel.

African Americans. School didn't teach me any of these things. I went out and I got that information.

60 % of American history is not taught in American history. Okay, let's stop right there.

I just pulled up a page for Benjamin Banneker, and I have heard of Benjamin Banneker before, but I have not researched him extensively.

So I will say I am fairly ignorant on Benjamin Banneker. But this is, all right, so Wikipedia.

So we don't, points are taken off if you submit a paper in Wikipedia, you cite

Wikipedia. But in general, on certain politically correct things, they tend to lean left. Let's say if they're gonna lean anywhere, they're gonna lean left.

They're gonna lean towards giving Benjamin Banneker probably more credit. So I'm just,

I'm shooting from the hip a little bit here, but if you go to the page, it says this about him. He became known as assisting, okay, assisting

Major Andrew Ellicott in a survey in establishing the original borders of the District of Columbia, the federal capital of the

United States. That's a lot different than designing Washington, D .C. It's a lot different than designing

Washington, D .C. He helped, you could say, he surveyed, but you don't generally put assistant surveyors in a history book where you have limited time.

And that's part of the, I have seen this so much with just the BLM narrative, unfortunately, that oftentimes what they do, they'll take people, they do this, let me give you another example real quick.

Chris Bissetux would be another example. It'd be like, you need to know about him. And in passing, okay, like he was,

I think that he was the first one killed at the Boston Massacre. Okay, sure, he's a black guy. So is there something significant about that?

I mean, I guess, but he's specifically, I, he's mentioned, he's highlighted specifically because he's a black guy.

That's part of it. And so if you say 60 % of American history isn't taught, then how would you form a curriculum?

I had to go through this in grad school. I had to actually form curriculums on a class on World War II or a class on the

Holocaust or whatever the subject field was. I had to form a study, a curriculum for teaching undergraduates.

And you have to make a lot of choices about what you cut because guess what, there's a lot. You could do a whole semester on one battle in the

Revolutionary War if you wanted to, with all the details. When you have to get through half of American history in one semester, you're gonna highlight significant things.

And sometimes people who, white, black, Asian, doesn't matter what their ethnicity is, but people who made contributions that were significant aren't going to be included because those contributions weren't as significant as someone, let's say, like a

Thomas Jefferson. Because guess what? In my American history curriculum, when I was in high school going through that,

I was not only not told about Benjamin Banneker, I admit,

I don't remember being, the only reason I know about him, I think, is from, it was like two or three years ago,

I remember reading something somewhere. It was, so it wasn't even,

I don't even know if it was related to coursework. It's very fuzzy in my mind. So I may never have, it's possible

I never read about him in grad school either, even though I, but I wasn't studying architecture. I wasn't studying, I wasn't studying things that he would probably be directly involved in.

So let's just assume that for a minute. It's possible I read about him somewhere. I can't remember where, but in undergrad,

I definitely, I didn't. And in, well, I should say in high school, I definitely didn't.

So you know who else I didn't read about though? Major Andrew Ellicott. So the guy that Benjamin Banneker was assisting,

I didn't read about him either. He's a white guy. Ooh, maybe it's, maybe they're just against surveyors.

Maybe that's the problem. You know, this is, so he's reading it through this lens of like they're covering it up because it's black.

Well, they're also covering up Andrew Ellicott then. They're not highlighting him and he's white. And he would, we would seem to have more prominence in that particular situation, surveying

DC than Banneker would. So this is unnecessarily attributing a racial barrier to something that wasn't probably even driven by race.

Because I guarantee you the same textbooks he's critiquing, they probably talk about George Washington Carver. Guess what?

His contribution was really significant. He basically saved the South through encouraging the planting of peanuts.

They probably talk about Booker T. Washington in those same textbooks. Malcolm X is probably mentioned somewhere. MLK is probably mentioned.

There's probably some significant figures that are mentioned in that textbook that are black. But he's making out like, it's another evidence of racism out there.

And if you want to get the information, you can go and get it too. And that's what the

BD's saying. I just wanted to add that there's that one little piece there. Don't make your black brothers and sisters into numinous

Negroes that are gonna fill out your enlightenment. If you really care, go and get it.

Just go and get it. So feel really bad if you don't know about Benjamin Banneker and don't dare ask someone who's black about him.

That's what I'm getting. That's exactly right. You've got Google just as I do. And you know how to chase footnotes and you know how to look up.

Do that. Marry, marry your interests with initiative. I'm sorry, not everyone is going to become an expert in the minutiae of black history in the

United States. I think it's great if people did know all that, but that's not gonna be everyone.

Even historians have their fields. And in a general survey, Benjamin Banneker is probably not going to gain a mention.

So you're made to feel like you are somehow complicit in racism or were subdued in, or your mind was being controlled by racists in some way because you don't know these little details about black history.

You know, you probably don't know them about white people or American, Native Americans, because they're minute details.

That's why a lot of this stuff. And by the way, I should be clear again, what

I'm not saying that it's never happened. Like that, I think it's possible that in some textbooks, especially from the past, it's possible that there may have been things that were significant, that were overlooked.

It's possible, but not this example. And it never should be that you feel so much intrepidation for asking someone a question, a basic question.

This is not approachable. This is not the heart of a pastor for his sheep either. This is, there's an entitlement of some kind, an attitude of entitlement it seems like here.

Like you're, people should rearrange the way they act and their whole understanding around who

I am without my assistance, by the way, rather than me kind of arranging the way that I act and behave because of them.

And there's not a graciousness in that or a hospitality in that, or a love for learning.

It's just, it's odd to me. Maybe put a comment in the comment section if you have a better understanding.

I'm genuinely a little confused by this. If you're really interested in furthering your own thinking and furthering the conversation with people across various lines, marry that interest with genuine initiative.

It's going to speak volumes about your sincerity. And actually, honestly, it's gonna help you catch up in the, white

America is 200 years behind in this conversation. We've been studying you since we've been here.

We've been in your homes, raising your children. We've been thinking about your politics and how it affects us.

We've been listening and watching and studying you for over two centuries. Y 'all have to catch up.

And we can't do the catch up work for you. It sounds like a father scolding his son or something.

Like you should have known better. And why did you go and steal the cookies? You should have known better.

There is, I think, something the media is tapping into here, which is kind of a version of Marx class consciousness.

Now we call it standpoint theory to some extent, but there's a double consciousness. Sometimes they call it being bilingual, even though you're not speaking another language technically.

But there's an idea that if you're oppressed, you have to navigate the world of oppressed peoples and the world of the oppressors.

So you have to be, you have more knowledge, you have more information, more understanding.

And the oppressors don't have to stoop to the level of the oppressed, so they don't really know that world, right? And that's how you get this idea that, well, if you're oppressed, then you know more and you can lecture about social justice and everyone else who's oppressor, white, has to shut up.

And of course that's counter -biblical. That's, I mean, the Bible, you're not gonna find that, of course. The Bible, it's the man of God.

It's the wise person. It's the Berean who searches the scripture. Truth is accessible and there's not a barrier because of your ethnicity or something.

Yet people who call themselves Christians, like Thabiti, will parrot this idea. And it's just wrong.

As if white people haven't learned or benefited from, they haven't observed black people or other racial minorities.

In fact, in America, a lot of that black culture,

Southern culture, all kinds of different cultures have been integrated into American popular culture.

Even our musical styles, rock and roll is a mix of rhythm and blues and country.

So you have these integrations. You have the cuisine even that we eat, the food we eat.

This has all been integrated in large part. Even before there was like legal integration in some places in the

South, there was still a borrowing from one another when it came to certain cultural things.

So art and film and there's all kinds of ways in which there's been exposure of white people to black people.

And yet Thabiti's making out like, it only goes in one direction, just black people observing white people.

And so blacks, I guess are experts on whites, but whites aren't experts of blacks. And they're 200 years, 200 years behind, 200.

So you have literally two centuries. We have not really made any progress in understanding black people since the time that Thomas Jefferson just about,

John C. Calhoun was walking the earth. Daniel Webster was around. Really, really?

No greater understanding since in the postbellum period.

What an exaggerated claim to make. Here they are telling pastors this though. So talk about making people feel inadequate without really much in the way of a reason to back it up.

Evidence. Traps of privilege. And I know you're probably gonna talk about it. One of the traps of privileges is that you get into a stream of thought whereby you think that black people don't matter.

And I pray that this conversation enlightens you to see that there's a rich history.

There's also another side of the story. And there's also reason to believe that black people do matter

This is shadowboxing. It's shadowboxing. So there's people who is out there saying black people don't matter.

They don't matter. He's acting like there's this big problem out there.

Where? Because they don't go along with the Black Lives Matter agenda? Like, what is it that makes you think that white people in general don't think black people matter or something?

Can you imagine? I just thought of this. Can you imagine in the New Testament the Christians who are

Gentiles, newly converted Christians, and the Jewish Christians, believers, come to them and say, listen, you are way behind.

You don't understand the Old Testament, the Tanakh, the Torah. You don't know the sacrificial system.

You don't know any of that stuff. And these Jewish apostles come and say, here's the thing.

You can't ask us. You're behind. You need to figure it out.

You've had Jewish people living in your midst for hundreds of years. You Romans, hundreds of years.

And yet you don't understand their sacrificial system, their culture. And guess what? If you want to be in the church, you need to understand this stuff.

And you can't ask me. Now, that's not exactly parallel in every way. But it's the same principle, though.

What they're saying is, hey, in America we've lived side by side but you haven't made the effort to get to know us.

And I don't want you coming and asking us for resources on how to know our culture, how to know about us. That's just not

Christian. Especially as pastors. Again, this is a spiritual panel here, supposed to be a

Christian panel. How about what the apostles did? We're going to write down for you the significance.

We're going to give you the book of Hebrews. We're going to write about the significance of the law. You know?

Yeah, you need to study. Man, there wasn't this attitude that you see here.

I think this is the most offensive thing to me of the whole panel. That's why I can't quite leave it.

But here you see the shadowboxing, this assumption that I guess white people just don't care.

They don't think Black people matter. And I don't think anybody's going to be motivated to move into researching

Black history if they don't really believe that Black people matter. So I think the gospel and the purest sense is the only thing that can help you see that all humanity matters.

And in particular, in this conversation, Black people. So here's how the gospel connects to it. Ready? The gospel convinces you people matter.

Now, I can go with that. People matter. The Imago Dei means that people matter.

We're made in the image of God. That's why we matter. Okay, that gives us significance. But all right, the gospel convinces people because Jesus came, died, as John 3 .16

says, for the world. And that propels you into being, into thinking that specific kind of people,

Black people in particular, matter. And that propels you into having a curiosity about their culture and their traditions and history.

And then that propels you to understanding those subjects.

But what it can't do is propel you into asking questions of Black people about themselves, I guess.

So you just have to kind of work it out on your own. And if you don't, though, here's the thing. If you fail, like the panel has said, that White people are failing, apparently, it must mean that, reverse engineer this, it must mean that you don't really think

Black people matter, which means, have you really understood the gospel? Can you see how woke people get to, you don't really have the gospel, you don't understand it, whatever, because you don't do some woke thing?

It's logic like this that leads to that. Because if it's the gospel that promotes your wanting, your desire to understand

Black culture, and you don't have that desire to the degree they think you should have it, then you must not have the full gospel, or you must not have had the encounter with God that you should have, or something along those lines.

The stakes are pretty high here, aren't they? They don't matter. And so from that, I think that pushes into this self -study, self -discovery, because once I realized that I mattered,

I start researching, and I started, and I'm way behind. Some of you maybe even know more than I do, but I am trying to catch up because there are things that I do not know.

I mean, I don't know my family of origin, but I can find out what happened. You know, this history that is just so...

I'm finding out stuff like... He doesn't believe Black lives matter enough. Of course, that's ridiculous, but he's admitting his own inadequacies.

So maybe he needs to understand how he... Like yesterday, about what happened after Abraham Lincoln signed the

Emancipation Project, there were Black people still sent to coal mines and treated like slaves.

And white people during that time. Sharecropping was bad across the board, and coal mining too.

By the way, Booker T. Washington's father actually moved from Virginia to now

West Virginia in order to work in the mines because it was a better life even there than it was in the impoverished region that they were in before.

If you haven't read that story, you should. Because it's a great story, not just because Booker T.

Washington was Black. I want you to pay careful attention here.

Take note of something. I'm not actually sure who this panelist is, but this particular panelist, he says,

Acts 29, Pastor, that he learned that people were treated after the Emancipation Proclamation.

They were... I don't want to get into the whole history of that right now. It didn't free the slaves.

But in mythology now, American mythology, it did. It was the 13th

Amendment that freed people from chattel slavery. So, all right. Emancipation Proclamation, slaves freed supposedly, but they're still working in these mines in these terrible conditions.

So what did it really do? That's the woke narrative. What did it really do to free these slaves? That's the whole idea behind the documentary 13th.

He's giving you a taste of that. What did it really do? Take note of that, that point, because it's going to be contradicted, sort of, in a minute, in a weird way.

Or Juneteenth, which we celebrate. Many African Americans celebrate

Juneteenth. You know what Juneteenth is? It's the day that slaves in Texas and Louisiana were actually freed, two years after the

Emancipation Proclamation. Prior, yeah. So these are things. So when I'm... So the way we think about this for a minute, what happened after the

Emancipation Proclamation, they're still living like slaves. And in fact, there's a point, there's a part I didn't include in this montage, where that same point is made by someone else on the panel.

And then the very next thing you hear is, and we celebrate Juneteenth. So wait, hold on. You celebrate the point at which slavery ended, chattel slavery.

You're celebrating that, but then at the same time, what good did it really do?

So what are you celebrating? That's the question. What are you really celebrating then?

If it didn't really... If the woke narrative is true, if it didn't really change much, why celebrate it?

What good did it do? But he's celebrating it. When I post, I don't know how much time we have left, but when

I post why I don't celebrate the 4th of July the way many people do. And I say, because we don't celebrate emancipation.

We don't celebrate Juneteenth. And it seems a farce to me to celebrate the freedom of a nation that had my ancestors labeled as three -fifths of human being when they were being free.

Do you see the hypocrisy? We're getting free from Britain, and this is our birthday.

Okay, so Lacone Crump, if I'm pronouncing his name right, he... Now that Juneteenth is a federal holiday, he celebrates the 4th of July, I'm sure, right?

But this is before Juneteenth was a federal holiday. And he's saying he doesn't celebrate the 4th of July because...

But why? Why? I mean, does Christmas, a tux, life mean nothing? But what about the slaves that...

I mean, there were slaves who fought for the British people, you know, ex -slaves. There were some ex -slaves who fought for the

Patriot side as well. Do they're... This is the thing that I don't quite understand.

It's somewhat unrelated because it's a legal separation from Great Britain that we're celebrating on the 4th of July, that we're no longer under the

British. We have our own constitute... Our own, at that point, Articles of Confederation, but eventually the

Constitution, our own legal documents, our own system, our own government, we have formally separated from them.

And we won the war. I mean, that's what you're celebrating. It's not...

It wasn't meant to be an egalitarian... I mean, this is still at a time when women aren't voting at this point in history.

You know, should women just not celebrate the 4th of July? You know, Native Americans didn't...

You know, this is before the Trail of Tears. So there would be many crimes or tragedies and things against...

Fomented against Native Americans. Should they... Is there nothing in that for them? If you expand that whole event out, which unfortunately the left is the one that has done this, to mean just egalitarian freedom and equality or something, then yeah, you'll lose the meaning of the holiday.

The holiday is about a legal separation from Great Britain, winning a war, and being independent.

It's legal. It's national, if you want to call it that, independence. It's... It wasn't about that.

I mean, you don't go to other holidays and say, I don't know, Memorial Day. You know,

I'm not gonna... Oh, that's probably not a bad example to give. I don't know.

It used to be you could take George Washington's birthday. Now you have to say President's Day, all the presidents. So it's so generic now.

But I don't know. You don't go to other holidays, Christmas, Thanksgiving. That might be a good one to pick. You don't go to Thanksgiving and be like, well, at the point at which

Thanksgiving was settled, Thanksgiving was happening, typically we think of the pilgrims.

And at that point, this is after 1619. So there was already a ship of Africans, indentured servants, that had come to the coast of Virginia at that point.

So we can't celebrate Thanksgiving because what do we have to be thankful for? Like, that would be weird.

You're like, come on, man. Like, that's not what the holiday's about. And they're doing the same thing kind of with the 4th of July here.

We're not gonna celebrate it because... But that's not what the holiday's about. So anyway, we just learned in the matter of two minutes,

Emancipation Proclamation didn't really do all that much. People still enslaved. But yet it's good to celebrate

Juneteenth, which is the Emancipation Proclamation and the slaves in Texas who found out about it, even though it didn't free any slaves.

And celebrate that, but don't celebrate July 4th because there were slaves at that time.

I don't see how this doesn't destroy everything. This isn't acid. This just eats everything. It's hyper, hyper focused on one thing, equality, political mobility, and anything that doesn't have these elements for Black people in them is suspect somehow.

That's where this leads. And this is what's led to the defacing of monuments and the ripping down of history in general and just all of that that we've seen over the last few years, renaming of things.

This is the kind of logic that has kind of led to that. It's acceptable to celebrate Juneteenth. It's not acceptable to celebrate the 4th of July, apparently.

Or at least we should be suspicious of that. There's something racially insensitive about it somehow, even though that's a categorical error.

Except for you because you're not fully human. Here's my... You're not fully human.

That's another, you know, you're three -fifths of the person. You're not fully human. It's such a misunderstanding of what that three -fifths compromise was about.

It wasn't, they weren't saying you're three -fifths of a person, that your value before God is only three -fifths.

It was for the purposes of representation. How do we count slaves? This is at a time when women couldn't vote.

This is, it was strictly for apportionment and it was a compromise between the North and the South. So it's,

I did a whole show on the three -fifths compromise. You can go look at it if you're interested. With telling you to read books, you have a culture.

The thing I had to learn as an adult is that white people have a culture and they don't know it.

And they don't realize that that culture informs the lenses through which they read. It filters, it's the filter through which you do your reading.

So here's my appeal to you. Do not go into a closed room by yourself with your culturally informed lenses and read any book that they referred to you here because it may do more damage than good.

You may get to the back end of that book and say everything I thought was just informed here because you read it through lenses that were not informed by someone who have lenses other than yours.

You do theology according to your lenses. You have to actually interrogate whiteness.

And so there's a whole genre of literature called whiteness studies. Read in that genre of literature to be interrogating your own lens.

All right, so you shouldn't ask us for recommendations but here's all our recommendations. Go read whiteness studies.

So you're basically in critical race theory land at that point. Go to Amazon and let them tell you, let the world tell you what would be good for understanding race relations.

Read whiteness studies. Terrible advice from pastors, two pastors. And then you heard before that the whole standpoint epistemology narrative that was coming from a pastor on the panel.

That was Brandon Washington, I believe, Acts 29 pastor. So this was in 2017.

I had not watched this panel. I had heard about it and now you've all watched it. And I think this is probably, this has set the tone for some things in Acts 29.

This was accepted and there's a number of other things that I'll probably be bringing to you regarding Acts 29

Lord willing in the coming days and weeks. But I thought that would be helpful because this narrative hasn't gone away.

It's still out there. And it's a dangerous narrative, frankly. It's not a Christian, this doesn't come from, it's not motivated from a

Christian understanding of who people are and how to treat them. And of course, the most offensive thing in my mind being like, don't ask me questions.

You're supposed to know. You're the one that has the problem. You're behind. You need to know the gospel better or something to know to care about us.

And once you care about us, then you'll do the study. I mean, that is, I don't see that anywhere in scripture, that kind of an attitude.

There needs to be a humility, a patience, a working with people. Man, it's just, that's what you get though.

That's what you're getting. That's what Acts 29 put out there. It's still out there online. Hope that was helpful for some of you in navigating this in case you have people like that at your church who are saying some of these things.

Hopefully for those in Acts 29 who weren't aware of this, now you're aware and maybe that's something to think about. God bless.