Trail Talk: Engaging Woke Christians

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, Trail Talk edition. I am enjoying a beautiful day at a

Sony State Park in South Carolina. It's about 70 degrees out, and it's so much different than the weather

I had yesterday as I flew from New York with my jacket on to Charlotte, North Carolina.

I am gonna be flying out of Monroe, Louisiana on Saturday. And in this whole period of time,

I have six different interviews I'm doing for the 1607 project. And so it's a pretty grueling schedule, except for today.

Today's the one day I had a little bit of time, and so I decided to go on a hike, which I'm enjoying. And I also decided to stop off at a local university.

And I guess people can probably figure it out. I'm not gonna say what university, but you could probably figure it out based on what

I already said where I am. I ended up going there to just get some really quick B -roll because they have some good examples of some federal period architecture.

And I thought, well, that might go with the 1607 project. And while I was there,

I noticed a sign that two students had set up at a table, and it said,

Believers for Racial Unity. Now, I wanna ask you, have you ever been in a situation where you didn't know what to say?

You wanted to challenge something that was wrong, so in this case, social justice, but what do you say?

How do you challenge it? Where do you even start? And I'm not, even though I've written books on this,

I'm not immune from that. I still have those thoughts. I don't wanna go lecture someone. I don't wanna push them so far in the opposite direction because I'm aggressive.

I don't want to, and of course, no one's perfect, but I don't wanna stay silent either when

I have an opportunity. And I thought, this is an opportunity. So what did I do? So here's hopefully something that will be instructive.

I went up to them, and the young lady who was there, very nice, offered me a

Jolly Rancher. Maybe my one mistake is I shouldn't have had a

Jolly Rancher as I'm trying to talk to them because your mouth turns into a black hole. But other than that, especially the sour green one

I think I got, I started off just by asking her about their club. And I said,

I'm not a student, but I am a Christian. So she knows they can't recruit me, but they know

I'm interested in what they're doing. And I said, I'm a Christian. I'm just curious about what you guys are about. And she said, well, we're about racial unity on campus and helping people to have diverse experiences with other people.

And that's just a good thing, right? So it was very general. And I said, oh, okay, cool. And I looked them up after I first saw them, and they are woke.

They are more social justice -minded. They buy into the police brutality narrative.

They buy into standpoint theory to some extent. And they are

Christians, though. They claim to be Christians, at least. And so I suspected this, though, all along.

And what I did was I weaved in a biblical understanding of unity between people, between people even of different races.

And I said, that's interesting. I had an experience in Virginia while I lived there.

I went to a black church. So I thought that it would be good to try to build some common ground.

So I reached in my file in my mind, what common ground can I use to build some trust?

And that was the first one that came to my mind. I went to this black church, and it was beautiful. And the person

I was talking to was a young black lady, so she related to all of it, and was nodding along as I was telling her.

The songs were just, they weren't off -key, for one thing.

They were beautiful, very emotive. The sermon, I thought it was gonna end, and the pastor kept acting like it was gonna end, but it never really did.

And there's a lot of things that were just so different than the experience that I had had in other churches. And so I said, it was so beautiful, it was so wonderful.

And I said, I had a unity, though, with them while I was there. I felt like I had unity, even though we were different.

And she was nodding along, right? And so I said, I would hate it if they stopped doing that.

If a lot of people like myself came in and wanted to change the church, I feel like that would be a really bad thing, because I would wanna preserve that culture.

And she was nodding along, oh, absolutely. That's what we're about. We don't wanna see anything destroyed.

We wanna preserve culture. And I thought, good, good, she said that, so now

I can let the other shoe drop. And the other shoe was, I said, I'm a music guy at the church

I currently attend, and we do a lot of these old hymns. I've heard that some people don't like that, that they would prefer we do songs that aren't hymns, because hymns are too white.

I'm not kidding. I've really heard this before. And I said, I would hate if someone got rid of some really rich traditions and beautiful hymns that we have, because it doesn't fit their cultural preference.

And she, and that's kind of where I left it. But I made sure to let them know that I was in a church that was very diverse, racially speaking, and that we had unity.

And so I didn't have time to get into, in this conversation, what true

Christian unity is. I didn't have time to get into standpoint theory and Gnosticism and any of the other things that maybe would be good points to talk about.

But I asked a question that elicited a response from her that she wanted to preserve culture.

And it exposed an assumption of hers that unity meant, in a

Christian context, that you had to be, you had to be gleaning from others' experiences and somehow integration was part of this.

You had to worship in the same churches or your friend group had to be diverse.

That was what unity was. And I was presenting an alternative, a Christian unity.

Now, those things can play into it to some extent. It's not like they contradict. And I'm saying, best case scenario here,

I go to a diverse church, so I don't think that there's any contradiction there that's against biblical unity.

But the fact is I'm unified spiritually with someone who, because I'm in Christ, who may go to the

Chinese church down the road from me. I'm unified with them, spiritually speaking. There's no division there between us.

There's no conflict that needs to be adjudicated. And that's how, when

I was looking at their literature later, that's how it's presented, that racial strife in the

United States is partially the result of Christians who fail to be diverse enough.

And that diversity is gonna bring the unity, and it won't. That's the problem. So I didn't get to say all of that, but I was able to at least present a hint of, or at least let them know that there's a different way of looking at unity, spiritually speaking.

And I was able to, and when I was walking away, it was just obvious to me that that was kind of a new thought,

I think, or at least it intrigued them, what I had said about, I wouldn't want the hymns changed because they're white.

They weren't necessarily nodding along as much with that, even though she had been nodding along with my example of, if someone wanted to go change a historically black church around.

And I think because this whole movement is set up against Western civilization, against white people, against European culture, et cetera, we have a mindset often, a default setting, that we must preserve any non -European culture.

But if it's European, unless it's Ukraine right now, but if it's European, then no.

That's the problem. That's the culture that needs to be deplatformed. And we need to do something about that, right?

So to be able to at least let the thought enter someone's head that this can work both ways,

I thought was really important and good. And I felt good about the conversation.

Now, what will that do with them? I don't know. I don't know where that will lead, but the whole thing only took about four or five minutes.

Very short conversation, but I left them with something to think about.

And my encouragement to you is to go and do the same thing.

Don't be intimidated. Now, if it's violence, if it's Antifa, maybe be a little intimidated.

But if it's someone that's pushing for social justice and you think, ah, it's not worth the hassle, it's not worth the, it's gonna take too much time.

It doesn't have to take much time. Depends how you approach it. One of the things I've observed quite a bit, especially with parents and children in this is parents often wanna lecture their college students.

They say, they pay for this indoctrination camp they send their students to, their kids, and then their kids come home for Thanksgiving and the parent wants to lecture them about how what they're learning is all wrong.

I'm not saying that's all wrong because parents should instruct, but it's,

I think, very important to come up with some good thought -provoking questions to help people think through things. Jesus often did this.

He would often ask questions when he would have questions posed to him. And it's just good to get into that way of thinking, to using, trying to use the tools that Jesus used.

And he sometimes would not give the full answers. He wouldn't refute everything. He would just give a little bit of food for thought.

And so that's my food for thought for you today. I encourage you, say something if you see that.

Now, one of the things I was gonna also share, and it just says by way of observation, in New York, things are much different.

You wouldn't see a sign on a college campus, believers for racial unity, because as soon as it said believers, you would have, the real hardcore protesters would come and protest them for being believers and bigots, right?

So one of the things that, it grieves my heart, it breaks my heart, is that I've seen the other side of this.

I see what happens when social justice gains a foothold and what it does and how it destroys things, because I live in an area that has, is much farther down the hole on this topic.

And the social justice warriors or the activists are not claiming anything

Christian related. They are more associated with paganism.

In fact, that's really big in my area. You go to our local Barnes and Noble, you'll see books on, actually all the books on the display case when you walk in are on witchcraft, crystals,

Wicca, that's just how it is. And it goes along with social justice though, it really does.

And so I wish that I could just help people in the

South who don't have, who haven't seen where this leads and what it does to sow seeds of social mistrust and how it does not have a

Christian origin and it does not have a Christian, I should say foundation.

It doesn't have a Christian foundation and it doesn't lead to Christianity to try to syncretize with this movement.

But I get the impression that some very well -meaning people think that it's somehow incumbent on them as Christians to support these narratives, these social justice narratives and that it'll gain them maybe credibility.

It's the true consistent Christian thing to do. And the fact is, it's just not. And if you live in a place that is not influenced by Christianity, where these ideas have taken root in much deeper ways for much longer periods of time, you'll see exactly what

I mean. And so you see the beginnings of it in places like this.

And it's just, that's my warning, that's my Paul Revere warning here that I just wanna ride through town and be like, guys, the commies are coming or something and you're siding with them, stop.

But that's not what usually is the most effective. The most effective thing, I believe most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time is to just ask some really good questions, especially of people that you don't know in a genuine fashion, a good faith challenge and that would be my encouragement for you.

So I hope that is helpful for those out there who maybe have been on the fence or not sure what to say about this issue or you've had a rift with a friend over it.

Just learn to ask good questions. You don't have to be the one to correct everything in one conversation. You just don't need that pressure on you.

Well, once again, thank you for those who support me and what

I'm doing. I'm excited this week to share some more with you. I will be uploading portions of some of the interviews that I'm shooting so you can see what they look like.