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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.
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.
It was his term called the New World Order. And he wanted that to replace Christianity, to replace familial ties and national ties. And essentially, what it would do is become what he called a religion.
He thought of it as a religion, not just a political thing. Derek Bell, father of critical race theory, he was against fundamentalist Christianity, but nevertheless, he saw how a new interpretation of Christianity could lead to enlightenment.
So a new interpretation of Christianity, a new religion, something that's different than what was before. A social justice religion. We saw that in 2020. Michael Tracy, a secular reporter, says, I'm telling you, every protest I've been to perfectly mirrors an outdoor evangelical Christian worship service.
He's watching these protests, these BLM protests, and that's his observation. And we have many examples of protesters taking part in what look like civic religious rituals, bowing down to BLM protesters, engaging in public acts of repentance, and in some cases, doing penance for it.
And this all really, this is just one iteration of social justice, but this all gives us a window into what's actually truly going on here. You have a new religion. Instead of the bad news that Christianity preaches, that we have sin, we've broken God's law, and there's going to be judgment upon us after we die, we have the bad news of social justice, that there's whiteness, heterosexuality, there's maleness.
These are the original sin substitutes. And we have broken not a divine law, but a human law of political correctness. We've, instead of having judgment after death, we can implement our own judgments by getting people canceled, because there is no afterlife, right?
So we have to have judgment now. You wonder why the Me Too movement is so concerned with making sure that no abuser gets off the hook this side of heaven, and false accusations are okay because we want to make sure that no one gets away with it?
Because there is no heaven, there is no hell, there's no judgment except the judgment that they are able to implement. And if someone dies, and they haven't been judged in this life, then they got away with it.
As Christians, we know no one gets away with it. God will judge those who sin. And that's why as Christians, we can actually sleep at night knowing that there's evil in the world, because we know there's going to be a day when it will be taken care of.
And even the evil in our own hearts, we know, was taken care of at the cross. Justice was satisfied. It's not satisfied in the social justice religion, and so we have to satisfy it this side of heaven.
They have their own canon. They have their own woke books, these perspectives that you are not allowed to question, because they're infallible. They have their own saints, victims of police shootings, right?
Doesn't matter how much crime they participated in, or how much fentanyl was in their system when they died. To pick one example, they're a saint. You are not allowed to question their dignity or their character, rather.
You have their own seminaries, their own evangelism, implicit bias training, the secular university. I mean, at every point, there's a parallel between Christianity and social justice. It is a manufactured religion, but it's running on the same track that Christianity runs on.
We saw the same thing emerge with the COVID religion, right? The salvation is vaccination. Sacraments, masks, social distancing, lockdowns, booster shots, proselytizing would be public service announcements and social media virtue signals.
Your membership in the cult is your vaccine card. The heathens are the unvaccinated. The heretics are the anti-vax conspiracy theorists. The high priests are Anthony Fauci and government health officials.
God is government and Savior is science. It's a religion. It's not simply a political move that's going on. And people in my area, at least, still follow it religiously. Went to the library the other day, actually, and they wouldn't accept book donations because of COVID.
And they all had masks on. I had to wear one. I mean, this is still happening in some places. I don't think it's happening here as much, but people don't want to give up their religion. So let's go back to the definition of social justice.
Social justice 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.
Makes sense now, right? The goals are achieving an egalitarian ideal, dismantling social institutions that prevent its achievement, and implementing a force capable of executing the utopian dream. So this is what we're dealing with today.
This is the religion that is before us. Cautions 2 .8 says, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men and the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.
And yet this is what we've had over the past century. We've had different versions of Christianity or aspects of Christendom trying to syncretize, trying to merge with different versions of social justice.
And we had the social gospel, the Anarchy of Germany, there was the German Christian movement, liberation theology, progressive evangelicalism, and today the woke church. And all of these different groups try to blend, and what ends up happening is they destroy Christianity in the process.
They destroy their faith. And there's little left to show of the mainline denominations in this country that went, it wasn't woke at the time, they didn't call it that, but went in a progressive direction for the social gospel.
No one wants to go to those churches. Those churches are mostly dead. In the area I live in, they're converted into bars and restaurants. All these beautiful old churches that used to have hundreds of people.
Why would you want to go to a church that doesn't really believe in what the Bible teaches, that thinks that man is more wise than God? I mean, I wouldn't go to that. And that's exactly what we're doing now.
We're going to reap the consequences of this, and we already are, very soon. The woke church is the off-ramp from Christianity. Now, the easiest way to show the errors of social justice in comparison to Christianity, I think, is to break it down into three parts.
And there are certain questions that every religion must answer. Okay? Questions of metaphysics, which are concerned with what kinds of things exist in the world, what's the nature of reality. So, we know that we have material, we have immaterial, you have a soul that's immaterial.
In Christianity, we know the nature of reality because of the special revelation and the natural revelation that we're given. The other area is epistemology, which is concerned with what kinds of things are true.
How do we know truth? How can we verify things? And then we have the philosophical branch of ethics, which is concerned with value, and how do we know what right is and wrong is, right? And so, social justice teaches a concept to answer these questions in each category, and so does Christianity.
And so, social justice teaches ideology. We're going to talk about that in a minute. They teach standpoint epistemology, and they teach egalitarianism. And all of these concepts contradict Christian metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
So, let's start with the first one. Let's start with metaphysics. My professor at Liberty University, who I worked under, Terry Roberts, he defined ideology, which is the social justice metaphysic, as a rationalistic closed system of thought designed to explain all of human behavior through simple precepts.
So, what does he mean by that? He means that everything is reduced into one thing. All the full spectrum of reality, everything we see around us is pigeonholed into certain categories, binary categories.
There's a narrow channel of evaluation that we just squeeze everything through to find out whether or not it's a part of an oppressed framework or an oppression framework. If someone's an oppressor, we can label them.
If someone's oppressed, we can label them. We can categorize them, and we do that with everything. We just put them into these categories. I don't know if anyone's seen, in this room, I'm not recommending it, but there's a movie called The Matrix from years ago, right?
And in this movie, you have people who are in a delusion, but they don't know it. And everything they're seeing is actually the result of computer simulation. It's all ones and zeroes, but they think it's reality.
It's a little bit like how social justice warriors think. When they look at reality, they are looking at it, and they think it's all just ones and zeroes. Everything is a simple, it's one thing. It's just an oppression level that exists out there.
I mean, they can find oppression on the McDonald's menu because of this. They can go into the room, like the CSI crime scene investigator, take their light, that's supposed to find the blood from the murder that just happened, and what do you know?
Their light doesn't work, and it shows blood everywhere. Oppression's everywhere. Everything's oppression. That's why they're miserable, because everything in life ends up being something negative. It's something bad.
It's something oppressive. And they take people, and they reduce them down to their worst moments, or to things that aren't even true about them, to try to connect them to some kind of oppression. And we're more complicated than that.
You have your own hobbies, your own way of speaking. You have the region you came from, the habits that you've formed. There's so many things that make you you. In a social justice framework, there's only one thing that matters.
There's only one thing that really confers identity to you, and that's whether or not you're an oppressor or someone who's oppressed. So for feminists, patriarchal domination rules the world. Everything's patriarchal domination.
For critical race theorists, it's whiteness. Everything's whiteness. And you can see social justice activists just reduce everything down to these power dynamics. And this is a dangerous thing to do, because what it ends up doing is it destroys social trust.
When you start reducing people down, people are afraid. They don't speak up. They don't want to be pigeonholed into being an oppressor. If you presume guilt on any human activity, not advancing the revolution, then innocent things become bad.
Going fishing with your son can all of a sudden become a bad thing. I saw some mainstream articles that tried to argue that sheet music, beards, and farmer markets are racist somehow. You know who used to shave beards?
Black people. They used to work in barber shops and shave beards. So, man, if you have a beard, that must be racist somehow. I mean, this is ridiculous thinking. But this is the kind of thing that ideologues, they'll connect everything to oppression.
That's what they think. And it requires immediate, drastic, and often forceful solutions to rectify these evils, because it's an emergency. There's oppression everywhere. We've got to do something. It's an emergency.
Let's take drastic action right now and not think about the consequences of those actions. Ultimately, it reorients life, the purpose of life, towards political activism. Now, responding to ideology, there's a number of things that we could say here just from a common sense standpoint.
Everyone knows deep down inside that this is ridiculous. I really think that we suppress the truth in unrighteousness, as Romans 1 says. But ultimately, people know it's kind of ridiculous to start calling people all these names when that's not who they really are.
That's not the fullness of who they are. So it is impossible to impose egalitarian abstractions beyond the limits of reality. When you start saying cheeseburgers are racist or something, I mean, come on, right?
So this is sort of the common sense. Let me just appeal to your common sense here. It doesn't always work, but that's one of the ways that you can try to talk to someone who believes this. We can also try to force people into thinking through the consequences of their actions.
If you're going to start just ripping down all these hierarchies, what's going to stand in their place? Example, if you're going to defund the police because they're racist, what happens to your city?
Not pretty stuff, right? So you're only looking at how bad the police are, but you're forgetting about evils in everyone's human heart. It's not external and systemic and out there. It's in here. And guess what?
Thugs are also human, not just policemen. So you create a bigger problem by trying to supposedly solve a smaller one. Ideology often makes human worth second to political activism by making it contingent on one's ability and willingness to advance equality.
So you're actually, you're reducing people down. In the name of supporting human beings and loving them, you're actually reducing certain classes of people. You're dehumanizing them philosophically. And it fails to take into account the full spectrum of attributes woven into the created order.
All the things that we share beyond oppression, like we're all made in the image of God. We're all accountable to God. We're all subject to his law. We're all sinful. We all need salvation. And if we're redeemed, we're all part of the body of Christ.
These are all things that we have, no matter who we are. They transcend all the social things and cultural things. There's also ways in which we're different, according to Scripture, right? We have male and female.
So there's two genders. We have culture and geography. We have our different abilities. I can do things you can't do. You can do things I can't do. We have different spiritual gifts and we have different hierarchical positions.
Paul talks about this. And all of these things contribute to social order and they actually confer identity. They make you, you. And they actually give you a sense of knowing where you belong, a sense of belonging, which is what we're missing today.
People don't know where they belong or who they are. And Christianity offers that. So if you take into account the full spectrum of reality, everything that God's made and who he's made you to be, then you can have more of a rich and fulfilling life.
But if you don't, if you just reduce everything down to ideology, then you're going to be a miserable person. And I've seen that firsthand with the people who go down this path. No matter how many wins they get in elections, no matter how many things they're able to accomplish, they're still miserable because there's always oppression out there and there always will be this side of heaven.
So a few things, ways that we can respond. We can respond with scripture. You know, when you lie about someone, you know, that's bearing false witness. That's wrong. When you use differing weights and measures, when you judge one group one way and another group another way, that's actually against justice.
Here's a question, though, that I like to ask. Could the motives of social justice activists be connected to a desire to oppress? If you think about this, this is the Achilles heel that destroys the entire ideological theory.
Because the theory is that everything, everything in reality, this is their metaphysic, the nature of reality. Everything is somehow connected to an oppression level. Everything. But they give themselves an exemption.
What about the idea that everything is connected to an oppression level? Could that not be the results of oppression? They don't think about that. Now, it may seem a little philosophical. You have to take three Advil and kind of take a mental step back.
But that's exactly what they're they're they're doing. They're giving themselves an out. Surely they're not oppressors. Surely the ideas in their minds aren't oppression. Those are pure. I have the ability to look out across reality and identify oppression because the tool in my mind works to do that.
Well, why? How? Justify it. Why can't that tool in your mind also be a tool for oppression? Why not? So this really destroys their whole line of thinking. And then the other thing, this is more of an emotional thing.
But what tangible things are social justice activists personally doing to elevate the condition of suffering people? You know, the two most charitable states in the United States are Mississippi and Utah.
Those are places that the left really hates. Utah, Mormons, Mississippi, evangelical Christians. But more interestingly, Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. And they give more to charity than California and New York.
Why? How come? How come the people that all say they care about the downtrodden and the oppressed don't give of their own finances in the same way that someone from Mississippi does? See, this is something that I grew up with.
My dad didn't have a lot of money, but he helped people who were homeless. In fact, I remember one time we had to go searching for the van because he gave it to someone to borrow and they stole it. And that's who he was.
He was just, he'll give you the shirt off his back. So when someone tries to say, hey, your dad's an oppressor because he's a white male, I know that's not true. And that's the thing that's going to, I think, help our children and grandchildren see that this narrative doesn't make any sense.
Because when they see people who fit the descriptions that they're giving, Christian, white people, males, heterosexuals, actually helping the needs of more poor people, then they realize, well, this is just a lie.
What are you doing to help poor people? You're just complaining about it on the street with a sign? What are you doing? So this is another, I think, way to address the challenge of ideology. We've had a number of victims of this, historical monuments being one, people being another who have been smeared.
And the next section is really standpoint epistemology, which is, the question is concerned with what is truth. So we talked about what is the nature of reality. Now, what is the nature of truth? What is true?
How do we know something's true? And social justice warriors believe in something called standpoint theory, which really considers oppressed experiences to be superior understandings. So if you're oppressed, you have knowledge that other people who aren't oppressed don't have.
Let me give you my stick figures that my wife is probably very embarrassed about because I can't draw. But it really will get the point across. This is a two-dimensional world where you have Redman. And Redman has his red glasses.
And through these red glasses, the Redman has experiences. And guess what? Everything's a shade of red. It's a Redman because he has red glasses and he's in a red box and he's stuck in that box. He has his perspective.
Then you have Blue Man, right? And Blue Man has the same thing. Blue glasses, everything's a shade of blue. Now, how do we know who's telling the truth if Red's perspective and Blue's perspective conflict?
How do we know? What if Blue wants to back the Blue and Red wants to defund the police? How do we know which one we should listen to? Well, thankfully, God sent us the sociologists who are able to adjudicate and transcend the boxes and tell us that Red is actually superior.
Red's experience comes from a place of more oppression and therefore we must follow what Red says. And so a new hierarchy is formed. Red is superior. Blue is inferior. And that's just the way it is because the sociologists have told us so.
Now, what are they not telling us? Where do the sociologists live? What box do they reside in? Well, guess what? They don't have a box. They have a God view. They're able to step outside of the box and compare perspectives to be the prophets from on high to tell us which one we ought to listen to.
Now, the problem with this whole thing is that why can't I just arbitrarily say, I disagree, I'm able to transcend and step outside the box and I know what reality is now. There is no reason because the only, it's arbitrary, the only reason sociologists are able to say or you can put the media in there or critical theorists, the only reason they're able to say that the oppressed are the ones we should listen to, their version of oppressed, is because they've crowned themselves king.
That's really all there is. There's nothing else behind this. And so they tell us that everything's a shade of red. The blue person really needs to put on the red glasses. And then, if through listening, shutting up and listening, they can see the world.
But they're still stuck in their blue box. If you're a white male, you know what I'm talking about. You will never be able to convince some people, even if you try to use reason, because you are just spouting the ideas of white men, white heterosexual men.
That's the lowest form in this sociological perspective of hierarchy. Well, in Christianity, we don't have sociologists in the place of God. We don't. God has a view. And God has given us revelation, special revelation, natural revelation.
And our attempt, whether we come from a red social location or blue social location, should be to figure out what reality is, what is objectively true. If there was a police shooting outside, what we should be concerned with is what actually happened.
What are the facts of the situation, not what narrative benefits which group. And so this is why Christianity is so different than social justice. Social justice does not believe in objective truth. There is no objective truth in this.
These are just different people with different interpretations and a group of elites telling us one group should be favored and giving themselves an exemption because they don't get to be in a box. Christianity tells us actually everyone is capable of knowing the truth.
Social justice says only some people are. Believe women, just because they're women, not because of any facts that they have, just because they come from an oppressed social location. How about every time there's a police or a school shooting?
Who comes on the news to lecture us about gun policy? Well, it's people who are the survivors or the parents of survivors of that shooting. But what gives them the right to do that or the knowledge to do that?
It's simply an oppressed experience. That's all it is. So they privilege certain people just based on their social location or what experiences that they've supposedly gone through. This has gotten into the church.
We've seen this with a lot of churches who have, after the George Floyd incident, had Sundays in which they had minorities from the congregation or from outside come up and just lecture the congregation on what it's like to be a minority or how they view the police.
In the Southern Baptist Convention right now, which just ended or actually is ending today, I believe, they just pushed a Me Too policy in their convention, which does not value due process. People can make accusations in a list they want to form of supposed abusers in the convention.
Some might be, some might not be. But it's based on people just coming forth and making an accusation. There's really not a legal due process involved in it. So we see this all around us. Now the Bible assumes objective truth.
It's all over scripture, how important truth is. And we see in 2 Timothy 3, 15 through 16, that all scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that what?
The man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. So what's the standard we should be looking to? It should be looking to a social location for truth. You'll never see in scripture a barrier between Jews and Gentiles or Bereans or anyone because of how they grew up or the experiences they had.
Every human being is capable of knowing the truth, but they have to put some work in sometimes to understand it. That's why Paul commended the Bereans for checking out what he said and comparing it to the scripture, the Old Testament.
It wasn't because they were Berean. He said, well, you have a different lens than I as a Jewish man who's a Roman citizen. No. He looked at them and he said, you did the right thing because guess what?
You went back to the standard. And that's what we're supposed to do as Christians. We go back to the standard. What is objectively true? Not who said it. What's true? So the response to this, there's a biblical response that God's justice is universally accessible.
Everyone can access God's justice, that God's justice is known by the righteous. So if you're going to try to find someone to get an opinion on an ethical matter, then really we ought to be going to the people who are godly.
They're going to know more. And it's not because of a social location. It's just because they know the word of God more. They put work into it. They understand it. God gave an objective standard for adjudicating justice, and that's his word.
So the question is to ask. This is my favorite one, and I think you'll see the humor in it. But why would we assume someone is qualified to write instruction manuals for surgeons simply because they underwent an operation?
Would you want to go have brain surgery by someone who never did a brain surgery, but they had one once? They had an experience. Well, no, that makes no sense. Well, it really hurt. OK, who cares? That doesn't give you the right to lecture on brain surgery or to perform brain surgery.
What gives you the right to do that? You put the hard work in. It's not about your social location. And here's one of the big ways I see this coming out in Christian circles. And I've heard this. I've heard this many times.
We get a better interpretation of the Bible, the more socioeconomic and culturally diverse perspectives represented in the interpretation process. Have you ever been in those Bible studies where everyone goes around the room and no one knows what the passage says, but they all tell you how they feel about it.
What does Bob think about this? And I think this relates to my cat the other day. And, you know, it's like, what? We're in like Philippians. But I've been in those studies. OK, the way that social justice warriors think about it when it comes to the Bible is it's not about each individual perspective.
It's about each social location perspective. So, well, how do the black people feel about this passage? What do they think? Well, that's a valid perspective. Well, how do the people from another country feel about this?
How do the people who are women feel about this? And then we'll get the right perspective. No, you won't. That's not how you interpret the Bible. That's just a way to bring in perspectives that could potentially be false and then and then promote them to your whole congregation.
And this is really happening. So that's standpoint epistemology and what the Bible has to say about it. Now, the third section here is egalitarianism. And this is my favorite definition of socialism from Treasury Secretary Leslie Shaw, who said that socialism is the idea that men must succeed equally regardless of aptitude.
Men must succeed equally regardless of aptitude. In other words, equal outcome regardless of your ability. So what you see in social justice and socialism and every iteration of it is this idea that we need to have some redistributive scheme.
We need to somehow adjust to the way that we treat people based upon a level of oppression or difficulty that they've experienced in life. And pretty much every single policy from the left is based on this idea.
Every single one of them. I can't think of one that's not based on this. Now, the problem with it is that justice is not egalitarian. Justice is the opposite. In fact, you see the statues around the world of Lady Justice being blindfolded, right?
Because the idea is that justice is blind. If someone walks into the courtroom, it doesn't matter who they are. The law must apply to them without partiality. Equality before the law. Social justice says no.
When someone walks in, you better start thinking about what color their skin is and what region they came from and what gender they are and what sexual preference they might have. And then you can make an adjustment and you can give them either the punishment or the reward that's due them.
Well, that's the opposite of justice. In fact, Exodus 23 is the go-to passage on this. If you ever want to talk to someone about this line of thinking, go to Exodus chapter 23. And there's a whole list of groups given here.
Wicked people, the multitude, poor people, enemies, brothers, strangers, all these different groups. And guess what God says? Treat them without partiality. Don't adjust the way you treat them because it's your brother.
When an ox comes or a donkey comes into your land, you return it. It doesn't matter who they are. It doesn't matter if they're your enemy. Don't be partial to a poor man. Why would that be? A poor man will tug on your heartstrings.
Man, he's got a sad story. Maybe I'll withhold justice. It says no, do not pervert justice. Do not pervert justice. So some of the questions to ask, especially for Christians, is one of them, is God's law just?
His law is not egalitarian. Is it just? What do you think of God's law? On what basis are humans entitled to social privileges? Have you ever thought of this? What gives someone the right to the benefits that come with being an American citizen?
Is it because they landed here once on a plane trip and now I'm in America so I can get social security and everything else that Americans can't? No. Is it because of a certain racial makeup someone might have?
Is it because of what is it that makes someone an American and able to participate in the privileges that come with that? Well, in our country, traditionally, we've had a long process. You have to become a citizen.
You have to know what the principles of this country and value this country to come here and to take part in this. Well, today that's being eroded. People should be able to just come here and it doesn't matter who they are, where they're from.
They should be able to take part in the benefits of being an American. What they're ignoring is centuries and centuries of people sacrificing your fathers, your grandfathers, your great grandfathers, building, bringing us to the point of all the blessings that we have today.
And then if you let everyone in, then you just sink it all for everyone. It's like a boat that's sinking. You can't sustain it. But these are the kinds of questions that don't get really asked. This is a deeply philosophical question.
On what basis are humans entitled to social privileges? What makes that the case? Are there certain hierarchies that we should not deconstruct, like the family, for instance? So that's a slippery slope.
How far do we take this? If we're going to eliminate all disparities between people, do we get rid of moms and dads? Because guess what? Children with moms and dads do a lot better. So maybe we should get rid of that, right?
So these are the kinds of questions, I think, that get people to think about this and realize that, you know, this really isn't fair. This doesn't conform to reality. And in the end, it will lead to disaster.
This is the last, I'm landing the plane now, but the last section, and this is really, this is the key thing that got me into this. I saw a perverted gospel. And what we see with social justice is a false humanist gospel.
Secular social justice activists want to bring about this egalitarian, equity, diversity and inclusion world with unicorns and sunshine. And that's their good news, that you can be part of that. And Christians, we, as Christians, we have our own good news, don't we?
The gospel of Jesus Christ. The good news that though you're evil, that though you've done evil, wicked things, Jesus Christ can forgive you of those things if you repent and put your trust in him. And it's not about your work.
It's about Christ's work. That's the gospel. It's all about Christ's work. You didn't contribute anything. To it, except your sin. Now, what happens with secular social justice warriors and Christian social justice warriors now merging these beliefs together is we get a false gospel that merges works with grace.
I'll just give you one of these quotes here. This is from let's go to Ron Cider, who claimed that evangelicals denied the full biblical doctrine of the atonement because of a heretical failure to embrace Christ's pacifism.
Ron Cider inspired people like David Platt and Russell Moore. He's one of the founding fathers of the social justice movement and evangelicalism. Well, what he's saying is you don't really have the gospel.
You're denying the atonement if you don't do what? Something political? Something you do? Some action you take? Something that political stance that you have to believe? Richard Mao, who inspired Tim Keller, by the way, stated that the payment that Jesus made through his shed blood was larger than many fundamentalists seem to think because he died to remove the stains of political corruption in all forms of human manipulation and exploitation.
Now, if you read his book, it's called Political Evangelism, 1971, I believe, or 72. He makes the statement in that book. He makes the argument in that book that actually, when we get involved politically, that's evangelism.
That's we're sharing the gospel when we reform a prison system. Well, that's silly, because what you can end up have happening is a prison system that is now redeemed. The atonement is applied to it, and no one in the prison system is a Christian.
You can end up with secular people now doing, quote unquote, gospel work, which is exactly what Eric Mason, the author of Woke Church, argues that Christians, in order to apply the gospel rightly, need to look to secular organizations that are doing it already.
Sorry, people that are unredeemed aren't doing gospel work. Gospel's Jesus's work, not the work of unredeemed man. And that's where social justice is bringing us. So what is the gospel? The gospel, according to 1 Corinthians 15, or sorry, according to Romans 1, 16, is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.
According to 1 Corinthians 15, Paul said, I deliver to you as of first importance what I also receive, that Christ died for us according to the scriptures. He was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures.
He says that's the gospel. Galatians 2, by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified. Gospel is Christ's work, it's not our work. And yet, we find in the book of Galatians, a different gospel was entering the church.
You had Judaizers coming in, they were telling the Christians, you're not really a Christian, you don't really have the gospel unless you're circumcised. And Paul said, damn that. That's what he said.
Curse that. That is evil thinking. We didn't contribute anything to our salvation. And in fact, he confronted Peter because Peter was standing with or confusing the gospel by giving, basically he was sitting with the Judaizers.
He was giving cover for them and showing that they're just brothers just like us. And Paul confronted him to his face and said, you can't do that. These are not brothers. These are evil people. And we might think that, I mean, that's pretty minor.
I mean, the Judaizers, they just wanted you to be circumcised. Who's against that? Why would that be bad? Just like today. Well, who's against social justice? Why would that be bad? I just gave you a lot of reasons, but let's say you didn't know those reasons.
Well, it's bad because when Christians bring it in, ultimately and inevitably, they start merging it with the gospel. They start saying this is part of the gospel. And if you don't have it, you just have a half gospel or a partial gospel.
And it seems to happen every time. Paul said in Philippians, from any walk of whom I often told you and now tell you, even weeping, that they are enemies of the cross of Christ. There's a documentary called Enemies Within the Church that I happen to be part of.
And I remember someone was giving me a real hard time for this. You know, you shouldn't be in any documentary that would call Christians enemies. And it's why do you assume they're Christians? Paul talked about enemies back then.
Why would we think it's different today? There's always enemies of the cross of Christ. So ultimately, at the end of the day, this is what Christianity offers us. Christianity offers forgiveness of sins, real sins, real oppression.
Christianity can forgive that. You don't have to do some social justice work. You don't have to be on the hamster wheel of trying to prove that you're not racist or not sexist every five seconds and renewing it when it expires.
Christ took that. Social justice doesn't give us unity. It gives us more division. Christianity gives us unity across gender, class, age, tribe, tongue, nation. We have unity in Christ. Christianity gives us a fulfilling identity that you're more than a power relationship.
You're a person made in the image of God. We have different roles and different responsibilities. It gives us a purpose. We know who we are and what we're supposed to do. Christianity gives us a basis for rights based upon responsibilities God's given.
And then Christianity also gives us a sense of belonging because we know exactly who we are and what we're supposed to do. And ultimately, what culture even is, what we were born into, what kind of family we were born into was not a mistake.
It was God's grace upon us and his gift to us, even if there were hardships there. And so all of these things actually make sense in a providential understanding that God has given us in his word. In social justice thinking, there is no providence.
It's just oppression. And it leads to despair. And I've seen this, unfortunately, with a lot of close friends of mine. Let me close with this. I don't know what the future holds with this whole movement.
I know many of you probably coming from more politically conservative backgrounds are wondering, man, what's going to happen next? It just seems like the world's going crazy. I do know this, though. The Lord Jesus Christ is in control and he's put you right here for such a time as this, to be a light in this world, to go out and not to participate in this ridiculous social justice stuff, but to actually feed the poor yourself, to actually raise your children, to actually serve at your churches, to do all the things that God's commanded that have been there since the beginning.
He's given you a responsibility. And the only question is whether you'll step out in faith and do it, however small. There are no small people or small places in God's framework. There's significance in all of it.
And so that's really what I wanted to share with you. That is a crash course in social justice. So hopefully you understand it more now. And if you're curious about more information, a lot of this, not all of it, but a lot of this is in the Red Book in the back.
And I'd be happy to talk to you about it more if you want more resources. Do you want to close with prayer or what do you want to do now?
Thank you, Jeff. So this time we are going to have a Q &A. So if you have a question you'd like to ask, I'd be happy to bring the mic to you. We're going to send the plates around at this time as well for offering.
I have a lot of liberal Christian friends. What is the best book that you give them of the three that you showed us?
Probably the red one. I mean, it depends kind of where they're at. I honestly think Edie Robles' book is really good, too. If they're more academic minded, I'd go with this. If they're not academic, I'd go with this.
So yeah, I just make it out to me. Yeah, John Jonathan, my full name or John Harris.
It's J-O-N.
J-O-N. Yeah, not Jahan, John.
John, could you give us some examples of seminaries that are not woke and also Christian colleges?
Sure. Oh, thank you. Southern Evangelical Seminary in North Carolina is not woke. They're actually anti-woke and very much vocal about it. Other than that, I know there are some smaller seminaries out there.
People have told me there's smaller seminaries that aren't woke. Here's the thing that I look for. So when people tell me this, I'll often go to the website and I'm like, OK, where's the statement that they've made against it?
And I can't ever find one. And it's like, well, don't just trust us. They're not woke. I'm like, well, they may not be, but I can't. It's hard for me to tell. And because I've endorsed things in the past that have wound up being, let's just say, less solid than I would have hoped, I tend to be a little apprehensive about giving endorsements.
But Southern Evangelical Seminary is one seminary. Appalachian Bible College is a college, and I think it's a liberal arts school, that is decidedly anti-woke from what I know of the faculty there. I know Hillsdale College tends to be anti-woke or conservative politically, at least.
They're not a Christian college. I think they claim to be, but they're Christendom. They're Catholic and Protestant. They're more broad. There's other ones I can give honorable mentions to, but honestly, I hate to say this, but there's really no other institutions that I feel comfortable giving endorsements of, just because I keep getting bit when I do that.
So, yeah, I can give you some other names of possibilities if you're curious afterward.
Say, I wrote down a bunch of different things, but I'm going to limit it to two. And that is, what's the best way to get a hold of you and how can we best pray for you?
Yeah, the best way to get a hold of me, and it's pretty easy, I think, because if you're on Facebook, you can message me through Conversations That Matter. I do have some cards with me if someone asks me, and I have an email address on there.
You can email me. So, yeah, if you're a patron, you can message me whenever. I'm trying to think what other, pretty much, I think all my social media, like Gab has a messaging thing. I respond to that usually.
So, yeah, I'm not that hard to get a hold of, I don't think. Have you tried to get a hold of me and it didn't, you couldn't? Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, if you're praying for me, yeah, just for right now, my wife and I are kind of, she's not here tonight, but we're in kind of a crossroads in a way of, not like in a bad way, but we're just trying to figure out in our lives what the next step is.
So we live in New York, and I don't think that's going to work out long term just because it's New York, and so we're kind of looking at what the future may hold. We want to have children. We want to raise them in a good area.
So that would be a good prayer. Yeah, thank you for asking that.
I told him Polk County is a good place.
Yeah.
That's what I was going to say. We moved to Polk County. We're great here. My name's Rhonda. I'm from Tactical. We talked on the phone. Oh, yeah. Hi. Nice to see you. I'm just going to do a plug that if you have a pastor other than Seth here or these guys up in front, and would like them to have a good discussion with Jonathan Harris tomorrow at 1130 to 130, we're having a free pastor's luncheon.
Please invite them to come have these discussions. With John Harris. Also, tomorrow night, he will be speaking at the Upper River Community Church over in Emory at 630. So the question that I have for you, is this going to be the same talk, or are you going to change it up a little bit?
Seth and I were talking about that before I started, and I don't know. If it's the same audience, then definitely not. I'll talk about something else.
All right. So you'll show up, and we'll do something different.
But if it's a different audience, then it might be. Yeah.
Clearly, the gospel is the answer, and you're not a visionary, but what are your thoughts pertaining to, where does academia go outside of eating itself? What is the culmination in the next 10 years?
Academia specifically?
Well, either secular or Christian or both.
Academia was already being devalued before this, because like a normal high school diploma now, it seems to be equivalent to, or what a high school diploma was 20 years ago is kind of like what a bachelor's degree is now.
And so there seems to be, I think, a bubble in academia. It's way overpriced. But I don't know. People keep going. I have an expectation, and I know this has been predicted for years, that eventually there's going to be a big collapse, and a lot of colleges are going to close.
And it just hasn't seemed to happen. I don't know why exactly. I still expect that it will at some point. I just think that a lot of, so there's certain fields you have to kind of get into, like nursing.
There's no way around it. You have to go to a university for that. But if you're going to do business or something, a lot of employers now, they're not looking at degrees. They're looking at experience, because they know degrees aren't really the determining factors anymore.
So I think education is becoming devalued. I think people are starting to realize it's silly, a lot of, like when someone goes and gets a degree in some social justice field and they can't really do anything, but they know a lot about women's studies, it just doesn't really apply.
So yeah, it's going to be more silly, though. Like the things that they're learning and the things that are, I mean, it's totally Marxist, totally anti-God. It's a truth suppression factory. That's how you have to look at most of the universities out there.
It's not about learning anymore. So you have to choose carefully where you go, and then if you, wherever you go, try to gravitate to professors who actually want to learn or want you to learn. And I think a lot of studies are going to be independent, because the internet is also changing things really quick.
And so there's a lot more online programs that people are doing. So I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah, I don't know the answer, really, what's going to happen.
So back in the day, it seems like this all started with tolerance, and the tolerance only went one way. Now we've got the CRT, and it only goes, you're an oppressor or you're oppressed. Do you see where it's going to go from here, or are they finally going to collapse on themselves, and people are going to say, you know what, I'm not going to go with this anymore, because you're busy directing us with your elitism?
Right. Yeah, I hear a lot of conservative talk shows say that kind of thing, like it's going to collapse, like this is so ridiculous. Obviously, men aren't women, women aren't men. And the whole thing is going to come down, but it never seems to happen, actually.
Like, I never underestimate the potential of people to be idiots. Like, that's just kind of a cardinal rule of history. Like, you can go back, and like what I just traced out over the last 150 years, you see kind of a development that occurs.
No one ever seemed to wake up and like, oh, you know, there are individuals who do. But as a movement, things keep going this direction. So I think what's happening now, tolerance was a temporary phase just to neutralize conservative Christians.
That's all it was. Because if you were bigoted, if you said anything against, let's say, LGBT, it was like, well, you need to be tolerant. Now you don't even hear leftists say tolerant. They don't want to be tolerant.
Tolerance is bad, because we don't want to tolerate bigots. So they're not about tolerance anymore. That was just a holding mechanism to kind of bring themselves to the next stage, which is going to be to crack down on us more and more and more.
Trump's out of the way now. So now we're seeing more and more cracking down on other lower level leaders. And that's going to continue to happen. And I mean, ultimately, their goal is to destroy Christianity and to replace it with another religion.
So I mean, this sounds terrible, but we're living in a country of people that hate us in certain areas of the country. They will not be satisfied, I think, until people like us are neutralized, whether that's in jail or dead.
I mean, that's how communism's always worked. That's always where it goes, a bunch of dead people. And so that's why we have to be vigilant about it. So yeah, and that's not probably the answer you wanted, but the Lord can do something.
That's what I'm hoping for.
What's the difference between equity and equality? It seems like they don't use the word equality anymore. Equity has replaced it.
Yeah, well, today, when they say equity, what they mean by it is equality of outcome. So when you, I think I have a good example of this. So education, we'll take as an example. There's a barrier to get into education.
Let's say you have to pay 30 grand for a year of college or something. And let's say that someone's applying, but the historical forces, whether that's racism or sexism or something, have supposedly caused them to not be able to pay that kind of money.
Equity is, we take that money from someone who does have it through taxes or whatever, some mechanism, and then we give it to them so that they can be equal. They have the same, so that both people now have 30 ,000.
So one person has 60 ,000, one person has 30 ,000, or has nothing. We redistribute the 30 ,000 from the 60 ,000, so now they both have an equal amount. That's equity. Equality, see, equality can be the same thing.
They may use that term in the same way. But I think for the last 50 years, equality has really meant the former definition, equality before the law, that we all have equal rights, that our worth is equal.
I'm the same worth as you are, as your wife is, as the person down the street is. And so, yeah, equity is really, it's the distinction that I pointed out in the beginning, of equality before the law versus egalitarian equality.
That's all it is. So, if you read your Old Testament, though, you're going to see the word equity a lot. And it doesn't mean what, you know, they're infusing their own meanings into these words. They love to hijack words.
So, yeah, justice is one.
Hi, John, thank you very much for being here tonight. You said the goal of social justice is to destroy Christianity. That seems to be so obvious to me. So, how is it that the leaders of our churches and seminaries and people like Russell Moore and many others, I mean, how do they not realize that?
It just seems so obvious.
Yeah, I don't know. That's kind of what I've been working on for three years. And I've come to the conclusion that most of the people possibly in the higher levels of evangelicalism aren't even saved.
I don't know how to make sense of it. That's part of it. I think there are people who are, who are just super ignorant and super, they just haven't studied it. But that's not an excuse. Someone like that shouldn't be a leader.
I think a lot of these people are operatives, they're left-wing operatives in Christianity. They're enemies within the church, right?
So, I mean, what would they say if they heard your presentation tonight? How would they respond?
Well, I think a lot of, so like Russell Moore probably knows a lot of this stuff. I would think, I would hope he does. And I think, so if you studied, let's say, this is a good example of a parallel situation.
If you look at what happened in Nazi Germany, when Hitler, the Nazi party was on the rise and you had the confessing evangelicals, the confessing church, and then you had the German Christian movement.
It wasn't like an information thing as much, or an ignorance thing, as much as it was seeing what was going to happen down the road. So, hey, the Nazis are popular, they're going to take over. How am I going to survive this?
So it's self-preservation. You start being motivated by, how do I make my religion or my status in this religion now compatible with the new agenda so that I can survive it? And so that's what the German Christians were trying to do.
They were convincing the Nazis that Christianity wasn't a threat to them because we're on the same page. And look, there's Bible verses that support what you're doing. And I think that's the same thing that's happening now, in a way, because these people seem to be, they want to ingratiate themselves to power.
So when they see the powerful going in a certain direction, they want to somehow attach themselves to it. So then they have the power and they have the influence. And the only way they can do that now, in the eyes of the media and academia and the government, is to kind of get woke.
So it's selfish, I think, at the end of the day.
I mean, if I could add one thing to that, too, please, that, you know, the one thing I've noticed among pastors is, you know, they don't have a problem saying that Joel Osteen is a false teacher. I mean, that's obvious.
But there's people who sell books, speak at conferences, even speak at conferences with good people who are false teachers. And, you know, Satan's better than that. He's crafty, right? He gets these people into these places.
And I'm just I'm amazed at the naivety of a lot of pastors to think that, you know, there's just because the guy speaks at this conference doesn't mean he's saved, right? Just because he's selling these books doesn't mean he's the real deal.
So we need to grow in discernment and say, OK, what does the Bible say a false teacher is? And does this person fit that description? And don't be afraid to call the person out.
Good. I'm not very good at this, but thank you. My pleasure. Wonderful. There seems to be a lot of misconception when it comes to Islam. And the Red-Green Alliance, the Red-Green Alliance.
Yeah, I'm not familiar with that.
Well, it's the Marxist-Communist teaming with Islam.
Oh, OK.
Brannan House, I'm sure you've heard of Brannan House, speaks of this. And I think there's a lot of people that are confused about what Islam is. And maybe you can touch on that, too, because I think it goes hand in hand with what we're seeing with Communism, Marxism.
And you've brought up Nazi Germany and Islam was involved in the movement in Nazi Germany. And a lot of people don't understand that.
Yeah, unfortunately, that's not really my primary area, so it's hard for me. You probably know more than I do. I know when the Taliban just recently went back into Afghanistan, they were backed by China.
So I know there's a connection between Communists and Islamists. And Trevor Loudon's talked to me about a little bit of this. And he said, look, ISIS is just as much Maoist as it is Islamist. And so I know there's a connection.
And philosophically, it would seem that that connection has something to do with their conception of God, where they believe they don't have a trinity. And so God is everything is sort of breaks down into almost a pantheism.
And if you look at Communism, everything kind of goes in that same direction philosophically. So that might be the commonality that but I don't I just don't know enough about it really to give an educated answer on that.
I wish I did. So, yeah. But what you said is true about Nazi Germany. As far as the Nazi advisers, at least we're going to some Islamic lands to advise them on what to do with the Jews and that kind of thing.
So they share an anti-Semitism or I should say an anti-Jewish kind of hatred. But, yeah, sorry. I wish I just I know my limits and that's my limit. So, yeah, we can talk afterward about it. You can educate me.
So, John, a lot of this seemed to really launch into the evangelical world with the MLK 50. Right. With some of those people, you could have maybe excused them in the sense that they wouldn't have known what everybody else was going to speak on and kind of the direction that conference went.
Have you do you know of people who spoke not only at those who took some of these strong positions who've later actually repented, not just kind of let it die down, but actually repudiated that, you know, I was involved in this.
I should not have been involved in this. This was wrong because it seems to me as I listen, it's more like, well, let's just let this quiet down and maybe I won't push it as much. But there's never this sense of, you know, I shouldn't have supported this.
Not really. The best I've seen are people who give fake apologies, really, like some of the professors at Southern Seminary who all of a sudden I'm not I'm against critical race theory when they were for it.
But they made the way they did it was they acted like they had never been for it and they never gave the reasons they're against it. It was just trying to offset the pressure they were getting. So it wasn't a legitimate apology that was, you know, basically.
Yeah. So that's that's all I've really seen from the higher levels. I've never I can't think of someone off the top of my head, at least, who was involved in it at the high levels and then got out of it.
I can think of people at lower levels who weren't speakers, but were, you know, in foot soldiers, so to speak, and then realized what they were following. But, yeah, it's unfortunate. It really is. There really should be examples of that.
And there really aren't. There seems to be I don't know why this is. I haven't really studied it, but there seems to be an aversion to apologizing in the upper levels of evangelicalism. They're allergic to it.
They can never admit they did anything wrong, which is the weirdest thing to me because we all do wrong things. That's why we need Jesus. And that's why we're evangelical. But they can't seem to admit that.
So, yeah, back to the Islam thing. Maybe this is a better way to answer it. But why do the social justice warriors seem to love the Muslims?
I don't know.
You know, we have this lady over here in the Minneapolis area, Congressman Omar, and then in Michigan to leave where they're right in that war crowd right with them.
I know. I know.
They seem to love each other.
They're co-belligerents. They look at the enemy being a Christian. And for them, when they say white, you just got to understand this. When they say they're talking about white people, they're talking about Western civilization.
That's what they're talking about. Whiteness. It's not it's the thing, the attachment to skin color is just that the people who come from this region, which happens historically to be affected by Christianity.
Europe was affected by Christianity. So even with that, there's kind of an anti-Christian, you know, kind of bias there. But what they want to go after are really white Christians primarily and specifically white Christian males.
If you can neutralize them somehow, then then you can get all your agenda through. And so I think because Islam could be a co-belligerent and share the same enemy, they they join with with Islam. I wondered this whether or not, you know, let's say they get rid of their enemy.
What do they do now? They probably fight amongst each other, I guess, you know, but I think for now they're all focused on the main thing, which is to get rid of Western European culture.
Hi, my name's Lonnie. Actually, two comments. One is I work for a company that's corporate and I've noticed in the last couple of years, especially, and it's just an example, not really a question. The last few years, the company that I work for, they have pushed different agendas, such as sending emails out to the entire company asking for charity or.
Sorry, I'm a little nervous. I'm asking for people to give money to a library. It sounds nice in Southern California, Santa Clarita, to be exact. And we kept getting these emails. We have all different kinds of groups in our company.
They all represent different things. Pride Bridge is for black employees. We have all kinds that we have Asian groups. Anyway, back to where I was going with this, they were asking for donations from employees.
And I actually talked to HR because it really rubbed me the wrong way, being a Christian and thinking I'm probably going to get fired if I say something, but I'm going to say something. So I contacted HR and met with her.
And it was because they were asking for donations for a children's library in Santa Clarita for books that were labeled who am I, what am I, to change their opinion on whether they're male or female. And that just shook me to the core.
So I had to say something. And I still have my job, but they did ask me what I wanted them to do. And I said, well, I personally wish you wouldn't send this out. It's like an agenda to the employees that we all have to be on board.
If we're not, we're bad. We're not good people. And so I felt a little bit of what you were talking about earlier.
Yeah. Wow.
And then one other thing that I wanted to say, and this is on a personal note, I think you'll be quite pleased with the Wisconsin cheese.
Yeah, I'm glad you did that. That's very brave. And most people don't. So thank you for doing that.
We have refreshments downstairs. So, yes, there we go. So we can continue the conversation and John will be here if you have any more questions for him. And as he said, his books are at the back table if you want to learn more about this.
And as Rhonda said, tomorrow night, 630 at Apple River Community Church. That's not too far from here. So you can follow him down there tomorrow night. Be great to see you there. And I just want to say one more one more thing of encouragement before I close in prayer.
You know, we can't control what happens in Washington and we can pray. Right. But there's only so much we can do. We can't control what happens in the upper echelons of evangelicalism. But what we can do, by the grace of God, is make strong families, make strong churches and do what we can to influence our communities.
And so my prayer and my motivation in bringing John here was that, you know, that we would put the stake in the ground here in Polk County. And just say, we're not going to let this in and, you know, run for school board, get involved.
We're not a secret society, right? Christians are supposed to be out out in the community. It starts with the family, right? Raise your kids to follow Christ, have strong churches. So that's what we want to be.
And to draw that line in the sand, because the reason we're in this place in the first place is because people didn't do that, right? It fell apart somewhere along the way and you find the mess that we're in.
But there's also the future hope, right, that Christ is going to come back, that he will reign and this will be in the rearview mirror. And that's our ultimate hope. But in the meantime, let's let's do our part to to do God's work in this world.
Let's close in prayer.