Jon Harris: Christianity and Social Justice

Calling Out False Teachers in Scripture

To name a name or call out an organization which is biblical. Paul calls out people, Hymenaeus, Alexander, Philetus, so on and so forth. Paul calls out Peter in Galatians chapter 2. So you see this model in scripture and yet within the American church they call it the 11th commandment.

Thou shalt not say anything bad about a fellow Christian leader and that's so true. And what has happened is that as the gospel has been proclaimed, what Satan has done is creeped in in so many different places.

And when you hear someone preach the gospel and you say well there's nothing wrong here, the problem is if you build and then you have a poison right next to it, it's going to choke up the truth that has been spoken.

And I have a quote that I want to share with you right now and this is from a theologian from a hundred years ago named Richard Lenski. The worst form of wickedness consists of perversions of the truth, but many look upon these perversions with indifference and regard them as harmless.

That's so true. That describes the American church in a nutshell. No big deal, right? This guy's okay. This Christian leader is okay. Now this teaching is okay. It's not dangerous and yet look at the fruit of it.

It's been so much damage all over the place. And so John has really been a voice of clarity, a voice of reason, a biblical voice during this time. So I'm going to invite John up right now and I'm going to begin by asking him just a few questions to get to know him.

So I'm going to trade places with him here. So John, what is your hometown?

Where I'm from.

Hometown. Where'd you grow up?

I live in Highland, New York. That's where I came from.

And you kind of live all over the place.

Hi everyone. Good evening.

Yeah, this is John. Where did you graduate from college?

Well, Dutchess Community College, Thomas Edison State College, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Liberty University.

Okay, wonderful. Over the last year, what is your favorite place you've visited?

Uh, Wisconsin.

Good answer. No, no, honestly.

Over the last year? Oh man, probably Alaska. My wife and I did a trip to Alaska last fall because it was dirt cheap actually, believe it or not. It was the cheapest place of all the places we were looking at.

Yeah, because of COVID, the cruise lines had shut down. Anyway, go to Alaska. It's great.

And here's a serious question. What three people have influenced you most?

Well, my dad probably and my mom. So there's two, but I'm assuming those other than them. So that's a good question. Three people, man. So growing up, and especially in my teenage years as I was leading college career ministry, I listened to a lot of John MacArthur.

Probably more so than any other pastor, I would say. At least, yeah, so John MacArthur would probably be one. Trying to think. A lot of the reformers, like John Calvin, Martin Luther, a lot of historical figures.

George Washington was definitely one of my heroes. Now I'm over three, I think,.

At this point. Yeah. And here's the biggest question. Vikings or Packers?

I don't really have a dog in that fight. Dallas Cowboys.

Before they went. Woke, of course, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Well, this time I'm going to turn it over to you and take it from here.

Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming out tonight. And did you have a prize thing you were going to do? Or is that at the end? You mentioned that to me. Okay.

That was good. Okay. Who came here the furthest? Anybody drive two hours to get here? Anybody two hours? Hour and a half? Okay. Okay. Whoever drove the furthest gets this 140th anniversary church cookbook.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, John, you drove... My parents already have one, so that doesn't count. Okay. I'll give one to you, and I'll get one to you later, okay?

Okay. Well, thanks for everyone for coming out tonight. It's a blessing to be here, and I've had a good time in Wisconsin. I hadn't really traveled around Wisconsin much, and the only thing I associated Wisconsin with was cheese.

I just wanted to find some cheese, which I thankfully found today. Along with Grant's cousin's house, we went... I don't know what's significant about it, but we saw it. Anyway, but I shipped some of that home.

But one of the things that I noticed yesterday, because I was coming from DeForest here, is how much the landscape changes. It's like a different state up here, and it's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful.

So, thank you for sharing your state with me and allowing me to come and speak with you. I won't let the Californians and New Yorkers know about the beauty here, so that they don't come and ruin it for you.

The Rise of Social Justice in Evangelicalism

Well, we're going to talk about social justice today. Seth had asked me to share a little bit about my story. For those who listen to the podcast, you probably know some of this, but I went to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and graduated in, I think, end of 2018.

While I was there, I noticed a huge change that happened after President Trump's election. It was like someone switched on a light, or switched off a light, really. All at once, everything seemed to change about the mission of the school, and the emphasis, and the kind of people that were being hired, and the kind of students that were showing up.

I remember, to give you just one example, in 2017, in the fall semester, there were three statements either originating in the school or being heavily supported by the faculty against Donald Trump or the alt-right.

Three in one semester. In eight years of Obama, there was not one statement against him. I thought, this is strange. I'm at a supposedly conservative evangelical seminary. That's the reason I'm there.

They're known for their missions emphasis. Now, all I'm hearing about, it seems like, are how we need to be nicer to illegal migrants, and Donald Trump's a racist, and we should support the kneelers at football games.

They had events, and articles, and podcasts, and things they were producing that were saying these things. How we need to rip down all the monuments that could be misconstrued as racist. There's so many things.

I remember there was an article once my wife and I, as I was logging into my student account, saw, because they would always have their little articles, and it was, the eight ways you are racist and don't know it.

I'm like, okay, well, how am I a racist and don't know it? If you live in a neighborhood that's mostly white, you are a racist. A lot of the stuff that they mentioned in the article applied to Southeastern.

I was very confused. I'm like, they're white. This is what happened in literally the space of a year's time. I don't know if Trump broke everyone, or if this was all a plan to begin with, but you had to draw the proverbial Ixvis fish.

As the early Christians used to draw the fish, because they didn't want anyone to know that they were Christians, but you'd see, oh, you're a Christian, you drew the fish. You had to drop those hints at Southeastern if you were a conservative politically.

I had a professor who was dropping some hints, and I thought, I bet he's a conservative. I bet I could talk to him about this. I went to his office, and I write about this in Christianity and Social Justice.

Actually, oh, I have it up here. I always forget to mention stuff. I'm sometimes the world's worst marketer, but in this book here, this is back there, and I tell this story. I went to a professor of mine, and he basically said, close the door.

Don't let anyone, whispering to me, don't let anyone know that you're against social justice. He goes, if I were to say anything, I would be fired. This is someone who had been there over a decade. I was stunned.

He said that this is the way their administration's going, but there's really nothing I can do about it. A year of that, and I realized that no one was really going to say anything. The faculty, the administration, no one was going to push back on this stuff.

It was just going to be allowed to continue. They weren't telling the parents this. They weren't telling you on the front end that that's what you were getting into when you entered this school. I finally came to the conviction, I'm going to say something about it.

I did try to challenge it from within the school, and I did not get far. The administration was on me like a duck on a June bug. After I graduated, I decided to make a video about my experience. For an hour and a half, sat in a chair in my wife's laundry room with my cell phone, and I said, this is what happened at Southeastern.

I thought anyone who might want to go to that school would want to know what they were getting into. Little did I know, that was the video that ended up going viral. All kinds of people in the Southern Baptist Convention in particular were sharing that around.

I was having people reach out to me from all these other entities and seminaries saying, hey, it's happening here too. I was shocked. I thought it was happening at my school. I didn't realize it was happening all over the place.

Then I had people from Campus Crusade, now they call it CRU, reaching out. From other organizations and World Vision, it was like the same thing was happening all over the place. This was before 2020.

If I were to think that this was a conspiracy or something, I would have been a crazy person. I was starting to think that maybe there was a conspiracy because I couldn't figure this out. Why in the world are all of these Christian organizations so attracted to what really amounted to, in my mind, Marxism?

What I was hearing in class sometimes was very similar to what I heard from Marxist professors when I was getting my secular degree in history. This set me in motion to keep putting podcasts out there.

I thought maybe I'd spend a few weeks talking about social justice. Here we are three years later. I wrote a few books on it. The last one is Christianity and Social Justice. I'm going to be presenting some of the material in there tonight for you.

It's really just a response to the movement in general, a description of what it is, and then what does Christianity, what does the Bible teach about this? Then I also did some research on evangelicalism and social justice in particular.

That's this book, Social Justice Goes to Church. This is the story of how this Marxist thinking got into conservative evangelical circles. The story starts in the 1960s and 70s. Some of the people from that era who were part of organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, other left-wing groups, have had an influence on today's current crop of pastors.

Then another book I have back there is written by a friend of mine, A .D. Robles, called Social Justice Pharisees. My books are a little bit, people say they're a little academic. His book is definitely not.

It is very understandable and accessible. He takes a little bit of a different angle than I do. Those are all available in the back if you want one of those afterward. If you don't have the money, just please take one or take two.

I usually recommend a $15 donation if you can't afford it. I just wanted to get that out of the way before we go into the presentation. What we're going to do, and I think this has been helpful for a lot of people, is we're going to go through the history of social justice so we can know what it is, so we can define it, so we can know what it is we're looking at.

It's rarely defined. It's used in a very vague way often because social justice must mean just we're nice and we love puppies and we want people to prosper or something. We want equality. Who can be against that?

I want to introduce you to the real social justice, what this really has been from the beginning historically. Then we'll unpack the philosophy behind it, the assumptions behind it, and we'll put those in the light of scripture.

We'll examine them through the lens of scripture and really common sense and demonstrate that this is not a good philosophy. This is actually a damaging philosophy. It's led to the deaths of actually millions of people in the 20th century.

I want to start with a definition of social justice. Here's my definition. It'll make sense once we go through the history. The fog will become clearer. The modern social justice movement is a repackaged configuration of egalitarian ideas, heavily influenced over the past century by postmodern and Marxist derivatives.

Its purpose is to rectify disparities and advantages between social groups through reallocation. Thanks, John. I understand it now. We're going to come back to this definition. Social justice, the term and its popularity started at the turn of the late 1800s, early 1900s.

A bunch of Christian pastors and Christian seminary professors made this term popular as an alternative to socialism. One of the most famous people to make this popular is a guy by the name of Walter Rauschenbusch.

You might have heard of him. The phrase social gospel comes from Walter Rauschenbusch. He was a seminary professor or a Baptist history professor in upstate New York. He really became enamored with Fabian socialism, which took place in Great Britain when he visited Great Britain.

Fabian socialism, we have a word for it in our country called progressivism. It's the idea that we can have a socialist revolution, but it won't be all at once. It will be in incremental steps. We'll get there.

There will be a long march through the institutions. Eventually, we're going to get there. It might take a while. It might take 100 years, but we're eventually going to get to the state of socialism, of utopia, of equality.

Walter Rauschenbusch thought this is great. The only thing that's wrong with this picture is I can't market this to American Christians because once they hear that word socialism, they start thinking that I might be an atheist or some kind of a degenerate because that's how the socialists in Great Britain were.

I'll use a different term. One of the terms he used was social justice because who could be against that? It sounds so great. We're all for justice, right? Karl Marx actually thought justice was just a tool the elites used against the underclass.

It wasn't really a term that socialists used, so it was a perfect term. It was seen as a religious term, a moral term, and it was used as a veneer by which to justify and make socialism look good. Now, we could call social justice another term, which would be probably more accurate, redistributive justice.

The concept of social justice, redistributive justice, goes back before the term was popular. I usually start with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was the founding father, if you will, of the French Revolution or the philosopher of the French Revolution.

He believed in three basic things. These three elements, if you understand this, you'll be able to identify social justice or socialism wherever you see it because these three elements carry through every iteration of social justice.

I don't care if it's the Me Too movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, whatever other movement they come up with, environmentalism. These three elements always present themselves. The first element is the achievement of an egalitarian ideal.

Now, egalitarian is just the word equal in French, but egalitarian equality has come to mean that everyone has an equal outcome of some kind. It's different than equality before the law. It's different than the kind of equality Americans have cherished in which we have equal rights to one another that the government can't infringe upon.

This is actually the inverse of that. This is, we actually have to make adjustments in privileges and rights for certain people based upon their social location and the degree of oppression that they might have faced or historically faced.

And so, Rousseau said we should be able to achieve this through our own human action. Today, the egalitarian ideal is referred to by this name most popularly, and there's actually three names. Does anyone know what they, equality or equity is the first one, diversity, and inclusion.

And every business, just about, major corporation, every college, just about, has an office now for equity, diversity, and inclusion. That's the egalitarian ideal. That's the utopia on this side of heaven.

So, before death, in this temporal world, we're supposed to be working towards. And in order to do that, we have to dismantle the social institutions that prevent its achievement. So, the question is, why don't we have a perfect world?

Why don't we have this equal world where everyone can live in harmony and no one has more than anyone else? Well, the reason is because there's these institutions. You have families and they're passing down their inheritance through generations.

That's just not fair. Some people don't have that. You have borders that keep people out of certain areas where they might have better opportunities. You have certain regions with less access to health care.

You have labor relationships. You have the church and religious hierarchy that exists. And all these different things contribute to form a matrix of really barriers to people who would otherwise be equal.

So, we need to somehow get rid of these institutions or change these institutions fundamentally. Remember, Obama wanted to fundamentally change America. We need to fundamentally change things so that we can fix them or destroy them so equality will emerge.

And so, how are we going to do that? Well, number three, we have to implement a force capable of executing this utopian dream. Now, here's what that means. There's a bunch of little bullies on the street that are keeping everyone else from being equal.

So, let's get a bigger bully. We'll maybe get the government to come in and the government will punish all those little bullies and control them. And as long as the government's in charge, we'll have equality, right?

That's worked out well. So, that's the whole idea behind social justice. And you see this with every iteration of social justice. Now, think about this. If the problem is disparities, if the problem is that there's power dynamics in which some people don't have as much influence or money as others, you've just now, in social justice, implemented the biggest disparity in all of human history.

You have just created a all-powerful, godlike entity called the government, the national, all-seeing, totalitarian government. And the only thing, there's really nothing actually protecting the individual, the only thing between the government and the individual is space.

That's the biggest disparity ever. Individuals versus an all-powerful government. Get rid of all the other distinctions that exist between local areas, states, family, church, business. It's just the government and individuals.

And that, somehow, is going to prevent disparities from forming. But that is a disparity. And that's the Achilles heel and the contradiction of this entire movement. They say they're against slavery, they're against oppression, and yet they want to enslave everyone and oppress everyone under an all-powerful government that doesn't even see you as a person.

So, this is carried through in different ways, these three elements. You have Karl Marx, who wrote the Communist Manifesto, and analyzing the oppression that exists in society and saying it's all economic.

That's the reason some people are unequal to other people, because some people have stuff, other people don't have stuff. And so, we need to take from one group that has the stuff and give to the other people.

So, it's all about money. It's all about finances. And he wanted the government to control things like property, credit, transportation, production, and free public education. And if the government was able to control these things, he thought we would enter a state in which people would actually have the same amount of resources.

Well, what happened was, Antonio Gramsci came along about half a century later, well, really a century later, almost, and he saw that what Marx had promoted wasn't really working. He saw that Marx had said this revolution was going to be inevitable, and the revolution never came.

People were still oppressed, there were still rich people and poor people, and it didn't matter where there had been socialist revolutions before, people were apathetic to see a change. They weren't ready to rise up and throw off the shackles of the upper classes.

And so, he thought and theorized that actually the problem with what Marx said was he didn't go far enough. Oppression is not simply an economic reality, it's a cultural reality. In other words, there are all kinds of habits and traditions and just things we take for granted in our society that we don't really think about, but they're oppressing us.

Like street names. Street names that you go down the street and you see it's the name of a family that maybe has been in a region for a long time, made significant contributions, perhaps. Smith Street.

Well, why is it called Smith Street? Why can't there be another name there? Or the books that libraries stock their shelves with? How come those books seem to be written by educated white men? Why not other perspectives, other people, right?

You can see where this is going. It's the same cancer that's led to the destruction of our own history in this country. I was just in De Forest, and when I talked about this, someone in the audience told me that a local high school had gotten rid of their Christopher Columbus statue down there.

In fact, they had it. Apparently, I didn't know this, but there was a Confederate prisoner of war camp, and there was a cemetery near there, and there was a little bitty monument. It was very small, just telling you this is a cemetery to soldiers who died here.

And it's been destroyed. I haven't really been paying attention to this state in particular, but I know in my neck of the woods, a lot of things have been destroyed. I know in traveling to Portland and Seattle and some of these really left-leaning areas, I mean, they've taken down statues to presidents, statues to explorers, statues to soldiers.

I mean, they're ripping down everything. What they're replacing them with are BLM and rainbow flags, and it's a re-founding of the United States. But this is really, these are the ideas of Antonio Gramsci just playing out.

They're downstream from the way that he analyzed society and said, well, this is where oppression's located. So he thought that the way to deal with this was to essentially create a shadow government or a shadow hierarchy, create a brave new world.

And we see this happening in the university system and now in Christianity. Take over these institutions, start your own community organizations. That's what community organizers do. And when the time is right and the old regime is about to fall, tip it over.

Go. That's when the revolution's going to happen. Marx said it was inevitable. Antonio Gramsci says it's not inevitable. We got to wait for the right moments. But as we wait, we build. And that's what the progressives in our country have been doing for over 100 years.

They've been building first in education and in entertainment and in the arts and now finally in the church. Now, the critical theorists, I'm sure most of you have heard the term critical race theory.

This is the forerunner of this. They wanted to drill down even deeper than Antonio Gramsci. So they're really analyzing things in a very similar fashion. They're seeing a problem with cultural issues and oppression being located there.

And they said, we're going to find that oppression. We're going to drill down deep into things like advertising. We're going to find out where the oppression is when you see a car ad for a car you don't need, but you just have to buy it or a cheeseburger from Hardee's or something.

And man, I just have to go eat it. They said that that kind of thing was oppression. You're being oppressed. You don't need that. But now you're almost like a robot. You have to go get it. And so they thought that capitalism was was oppressive, that it was just as oppressive, if not more so than socialism, because of the control that American capitalists have over their consumers.

One of the Frankfurt school members, Theodore Adorno, came up with this system called the F scale, which I'm sure you'll recognize once I describe it. He wrote a book called The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, and it had a profound impact on university research.

Now, this is 1950. OK, so we're talking over 70 years ago. And what he said, his thesis was basically there's a little Adolf Hitler in our hearts. If, if we have features like submission to parental authority in us, like a belief in traditional gender roles, like having pride in our family or a fear of homosexuality or a strong devotion to Christianity or the notion that foreign ideas pose a threat to American institutions, that kind of thinking means that you must be a fascist somehow.

Now, he made a scale for this to determine how much of a fascist you are. So it wasn't whether or not you're a fascist. It was just how much of a fascist. And of course, now everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is what?

A Nazi, right? They're a fascist. Or now, you know, you're a Christian nationalist or there's some pejorative that's used about you to smear you. Well, that's where this comes from. And what was in university research and psychology departments is now finally in our streets.

It's now in pop culture. It's now right in front of us. And people feel the freedom to call other people these names based on really tangential, unrelated attachments. If you love your country, well, you know, Adolf Hitler loved his country.

You must be a Nazi. And so this was, this is the kind of thing that the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School have given us. Now, before we get to critical race theory, there's one more school of thought I need to share with you.

And this can often be the most confusing one, but if you think about it in terms of Marxism, it actually becomes quite easy to understand. Postmodernism, radical subjectivity, these highly philosophical things that, you know, eggheads at universities describe, what they really are, are continuations of Marxist thought.

So, we've been going from economics to cultural forces and trying to locate where oppression is, right? And the postmodernists just said it's even deeper than that. It's deeper than these cultural forces.

It's embedded in meaning. It's embedded in language. That's where oppression is to be found. Has anyone in this room ever used the oppressive term female before? Have you ever called someone a female or a woman?

Yeah, a bunch of bigots, right? Well, so radical subjectivists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, they would say that, well, when you impose your meaning, woman, let's say, onto someone who hasn't given you that authority, because they don't know what they are, then you are actually, you're being a bully.

You're oppressing them in some way. You're imposing your version of reality. And so, now what we have are competing versions of reality. And so, which version should we go with? Some people say there's two genders.

Some people say there's 147 or maybe 1 ,000 now. I don't know. So, which one do we go with? Well, the radical subjectivists would say, go with the one that comes from or is produced by the most oppressed social group so that we can rectify disparities and have equality.

So, if oppressed people are LGBT people, if they have that feature attached to them of oppression, then we have to listen to them. Their story must be told. We must go along with what they say, because we've had our chance for hundreds of years.

And it's their turn now. They've been oppressed. They've been imposed upon. We've had our reality jammed down their throats. Now it's their turn to be able to express their own reality. And that makes sense of really where we are today.

But this has been in the making for almost a century. And so, Michel Foucault deconstructed knowledge by making it dependent on power, that every knowledge claim is just a power claim. There's no objective truth.

If we had a police shooting outside and there were two versions of it, we shouldn't figure out which one is true. We should figure out which one benefits the oppressors and which one benefits the oppressed.

Didn't we see that not too far from here two years ago? It wasn't about the truth. It wasn't about what actually happened in the situation, especially when we saw the extended body cam footage. We realized we were lied to about that incident.

It was about trying to tell a story that would benefit supposedly oppressed people and oppose supposedly oppressors. Jacques Derrida believed meaning was not found in what was said, but rather in what was meant in accordance with the hegemony of language.

In other words, there's no objective truth. Words don't actually correspond to reality. Words are just part of a narrative that we tell ourselves to benefit ourselves and our social group. This brings us to critical race theory, because critical race theory blends all of this together.

It imports the critical theory. It imports the radical subjectivity. It was started by a law professor named Derek Bell at Harvard. He said essentially that all that progress that we made in ending slavery and the civil rights movement is meaningless.

We are still under the dominion of white supremacy because of this thing called white privilege. It systemically embeds itself in the very fabric of American society. In fact, it's fundamental to the definition of what America is.

The only way to deal with this systemically embedded racism is to first interpret the world through the lens of minority experience. So if you're a white male, especially, you need to just shut up and listen.

You have nothing to say about oppression because you have not experienced it. You need to listen to someone who's experienced it, and they will be able to guide you into understanding how to deal with it and locating it.

I won't go over this for the sake of time, but there's seven major facets of critical race theory, and we're seeing all of them play out in our society right now, especially the attack on history and our American institutions.

Now, one of his students, Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, developed another term that you might have heard of called intersectionality. Now, if you think of critical race theory, it's really a tool of destroying things.

It's a way to rip down America and be critical about it, see all the things that are wrong with it, and just get people to view it negatively, attack it, and ultimately blow it up. Well, intersectionality is not a tool of destroying or destruction.

It's a tool of construction. It's the opposite. It's how are we, in the ashes of this America we've destroyed, going to build a new America? And this is how we do it. Crenshaw believed that identity politics failed to take into account the existence of groups with more than one socially oppressed identity factor.

So if you're a woman and a minority, and left-handed, and gluten-free, and I don't know. My brothers both have celiac, and I've noticed that sometimes white males will try to grasp for something that they can, like, I'm oppressed because, you know.

So you try to find something, somewhere where there's oppression. I mean, I'm unfortunately out of luck. There's just nothing I can take really with me. But if you have these multiple converging identities, you get kind of, you get a privilege, ironically.

You become more oppressed, and therefore, people should listen to you more, and more benefits should come to you, and you should get more political representation. And this is why we have a race to the bottom in our country right now.

This is why everyone seems to want to be oppressed somehow, even when they're really not. They might be a rich millionaire, or a Hollywood celebrity, and they gotta find something. It was just so hard, you know, being raised with all that money or something.

And so you hear these interviews, and everyone has hardships, that's true. Everyone can point to something in their life that was a challenge. And so that's what people are focusing on now. It's not excellence as much as it is oppression.

That's what makes someone admirable now. That's what makes someone a hero, right? Which is basically a poison pill for our country, because if we're not pursuing excellence in arts, and in manufacturing, and in all the different things that make this country run, then we're just gonna settle for mediocrity.

And that's what we're seeing. And so this is a new hierarchy in which the bottom is on top, and the top is on the bottom, supposedly. And that's supposed to be fair. Now the goal of all of this, why go through this, you know, century and a half, two centuries really, of social justice thought.

Well, the ultimate goal is really to destroy orthodox Christianity, I believe, and replace it with something else. You'll hear a lot of conservative commentators, mostly non-Christians, say it's just against white people, or it's just against Western civilization, or it's just against males, or this is just against heterosexuals or something.

Well, there's some truth to that. Ultimately, though, that's not what this is against. This is, I believe, a religion that has been, over a period of time, constructed by which to replace Christianity.

And it's against the God of the Bible. It's against the reality that the Lord Jesus Christ has set up. And it's a direct attack on him. And if we see it that way, I think it changes the way that we think about it and we address it.

Just a few quotes for you here from some social justice advocates throughout time in different iterations of social justice. You have Karl Marx saying that the social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and oppressed class.

They are cringing, but the proletariat is revolutionary. So that's a rejection of Christianity. You have Antonio Gramsci, who we talked about, wanted to kill Christianity. He wanted socialism to do it.

Michel Foucault, who we talked about, who was one of the radical postmodernists, he desired to liberate people from political rationality, which he believed stood on the idea of Christian pastoral power.

Now, it's not enough to just destroy Christianity, because nature abhors a vacuum. We're made to worship. Something's going to take its place. We have to replace Christianity. And so Rousseau believed that the Christian law was harmful, but he did imagine, though, a religion that would one day make a revolution among men.

Rather than biblical revelation, Rousseau based his new faith on the innate principles of justice and virtue. In other words, humanism. It's going to be a humanist religion. You have H .G. Wells. Anyone ever read The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds?

I love those books and those movies. Well, I found out later that the guy who wrote them was an atheistic communist, and I still like him, but I know kind of what he was getting at a little more now. And he came up with a term, not my term, not a conservative's term for conspiracy theories.