Young Republicans Cave On Pride Month & SBC Profs on Social Justice

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. This is gonna be a short episode in about 24 minutes.

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I have a commitment, so I gotta keep it short. But I wanted to bring to you two things, two points

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I wanna make, and then I wanna elicit your help for something. So the two points, number one, is that in case you haven't noticed, many of you have,

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I even had someone message me about this, Republicans are reacting in ways to Pride Month this year that we haven't really seen, at least on this level.

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Young Republicans in my state have posted something on their social media, and I wanna talk about it, because as Christians, we're gonna have to figure out what does this mean?

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Do we find another party? Is this a call to get more involved, that there haven't been enough

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Christians involved? And so these young Republicans who are just out at sea without any guiding principles, do they need some help?

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What does this mean? And it seems like what's happening is, as Robert Louis Dabney said at the end of the 19th century, that conservatism,

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American conservatism, is just that shadow that follows radicalism. It's just not rooted to anything.

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It's Obama, when he ran the first time, is more conservative on the family, it seems like, in some ways, than a lot of Republicans are today.

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So we wanna talk about that. We also wanna talk about Southern Baptist professors, two of them

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I just wanna show you and highlight, who have talked about social justice, and I'll show you their writings, but they're not any of the professors that have been highlighted before, because they haven't been overt about critical theory or any of that.

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My point is, though, that this kind of language is just kind of, it's in the water. This is just kind of part of the, it's the landscape.

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And it's just firing a few professors, it doesn't automatically, well, we got rid of social justice teaching or something like that.

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I saw this when I was at Southeastern. It's in the chapel messages. It's in the administration. They're the only ones that can intimidate the professors as to whether or not they should speak up.

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It's in NAM, right, the Send Institute. It's in, to some extent, the

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IMB, with the suggestion of doing diversity training and implicit bias training,

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I think was the term used a couple months ago. There's a lot of examples out there. And so,

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I just wanna pick these two just to show you, hey, look, there's professors that this isn't their main thing. They don't talk about it all the time.

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But it's just kind of, it's kind of there. And this is what messengers, I think, need to realize as they go into the convention, that this is kind of a stage four cancer thing.

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And it's not to go personally after these professors at all. It's not far from it. It's just to show that this is, it's not just SBC.

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This is just kind of everywhere, right? This is, I'm almost wanting to use a term they like to use a lot.

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It's systemic. Well, it's not like every single person does this all the time and is talking about social justice.

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But it's present. It seems to be, even for those who aren't as controversial, who don't make the headlines, they'll still use the term.

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And they'll use it in ways that, at the very least, maybe some of us should be a little uncomfortable with. And so,

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I just wanna highlight that a little bit for you. And then I wanna elicit your help. Actually, I'll elicit your help first a little bit.

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So let me show you what I need help on. I'm trying to figure out book cover concepts.

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And I think I'll name the book that we're doing, Christianity and Social Justice. That's a working title, at least for now.

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And here are just some concepts here. The first one, someone sent me.

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But I was the one, the middle one, I created. That was my first concept and purely, you know, creation in my mind of what

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I thought a book cover could look like. Now, I think there'd be color in it. I don't think it'd be black and white.

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But kind of that contrast between the raised fist and then Christ's kind of outstretched hand, and then

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Christianity and social justice. So on the right was just a little sketch someone made that might just be a little bit better of a,

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I don't know, format, scale. But I wanna hear what you guys think.

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I'd like to really see if there's someone else who has a better idea. Because I'm kind of hitting my writer's block.

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I'm not sure exactly what would be, the publisher wants three ideas.

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And I just really honestly have this one. I think it's a good one. But what other ideas are out there?

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Or could this be improved upon? You can email me. Probably the best thing, let's see, the best email.

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Ooh, let's see. Send it to, I think, jonathanharris1989 at gmail .com

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is probably the best one. And just send it there if you have an idea.

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I would really appreciate it. Moving on here. Republicans, ooh, here we go.

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Republicans during Pride Month. This is someone from the Glenn Youngkin campaign, which

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Glenn Youngkin did win. The primary, barely, but he did win.

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And I pointed out how Glenn Youngkin is basically into social justice. And when he says he's not gonna teach critical, he's gonna make sure

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Virginians don't teach critical race theory. No reason to believe him based on his track record. He needs to come out and then retract statements he's signed in the past, both with his company and with his church.

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And in the past, I mean last year. It's not like ancient history. But I digress. Here's one of his campaign, guys who worked for his campaign.

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And he put, happy Pride Month, everyone. If you don't know why we celebrate it, ask yourself if you or anyone you know has ever been scared to be openly straight.

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Now ask, and it goes on. And just how terrible it is, I guess, for people that are

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LGBTQ, et cetera. Now, okay, that's one guy, right? I mean, he's posting a don't tread on me rainbow flag.

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I mean, this is just, it's, yeah, I'm sure the founders would have loved that. Their symbol there, the snake, and don't tread on me, having a rainbow flag backdrop for Pride Month.

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But here's the thing, it's not just one guy. Young Republicans Federation of Virginia. This is the

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Young Republicans of Virginia, guys. In 2018, they said, under Chairman Kishore Thotha, I think

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I'm pronouncing it right, YRFV passed a resolution recognizing the political diversity of the

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LGBT community and the principles enshrined in Virginia's Republican creed that all individuals are entitled to equal rights, justice, and opportunities, and should assume their responsibilities as citizen in a free society.

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This Pride Month, we recognize the contributions of all hardworking LGBT Republicans and young Republicans around our

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Commonwealth serving as party leaders, activists, elected officials, and candidates. We are so proud of you and proud to welcome conservatives of all backgrounds to aid in our efforts for Republican victory this year.

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This is where we're going. And you can see the logic that's being employed here.

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This is just about equality, it's about equal rights, it's about justice, opportunities. This is why when your political party starts down this road of we're about something like equality or democracy or some, it's this sort of vague notion, this vague principle that can be applied to all kinds of different things, you actually don't have a principle in effect.

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You think you do, but there really isn't a principle here. There's no boundary that keeps equality from applying to anything you want to apply it to, if that's the case.

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I mean, if it can override the difference between men and women, then why not equality for,

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I mean, this is offensive to some people at this point, but I'm just saying the logic itself could be used by someone who wants to promote pedophilia or I don't know, really any kind of deviancy you can think of.

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There just isn't, just say you don't believe in the family anymore, just say you don't believe in hierarchy anymore, just equality of everything.

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There is no hierarchy, everyone should just be equal. And I mean, this is dumb, but this is where we're headed because there is no brake pedal, there's no boundary, there's no, thus saith the

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Lord, there's nothing transcendent and there's no designer with a transcendent meaning that in this conception that puts boundaries on things.

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And so this is no different than like atheists for liberty or something. There's just, and I don't know how you can consider any of this conservative, it's not.

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I mean, the most basic unit of society that conservatives are supposed to protect is the family and out of the family comes culture at large and traditions and the principles and the care and stewarding of land and resources and all these things that conservatives have traditionally cared about.

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And this just blows it all up. So there's no point to being a

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Republican if that's all that being a Republican is. I mean, why, if Republicans are just as much for the socially,

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I mean, we already know that they spend almost, they're not quite as bad as Democrats, they're just getting us to the same point financially a little bit slower.

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But it's pretty fast. We already know fiscally Republicans have pretty much caved on a national level at least.

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I'm not saying all the state governments are like that. You might be in a state where the Republicans are great. But now there's evidence that on the social issues they're also caving.

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And this is just, I think, a prime example of that. In fact, I probably should have, I'll show you, I'll work it into another episode.

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Maybe I can do it. Maybe I can find it. Let's see here. I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do this or not.

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I'm gonna try. There was a video of Ben Shapiro that I also think exemplifies this case.

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I'm gonna see if I can find it here. Ah, yeah,

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I found it. All right, let me show you this. This is Ben Shapiro recently. And I'll just comment after you see what he says.

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We are indeed done here today. I have an appointment I gotta get to. Thank you guys, it's great to see you. And I'll see you here next time.

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One thing on that episode, how did I say pansexualism is weird? Can we just cut that?

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That'd be great. Before it's reposted? Yeah. Yeah, we could. It's like a 10 second panel.

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It's about halfway through. It's just I'm pansexual. I'm like, that's kind of weird. Like, you don't feel like everything? Like, you have no, like. You wanna get rid of that?

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Yeah, it's just like, it's nothing, but don't make it something. It is weird that you are attracted to every single thing.

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You have no taste at all. I thought that was a funny bit. It is a funny bit, but that's why I'll get boycotted. All right, so here's the deal.

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Ben Shapiro did this recently. And it's, I guess

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I'd never even heard of that term. And maybe if you have kids in the car, I probably should have said this earlier.

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You know, this, I'm not trying to, I'm going past what you already heard from Ben, but pansexualism,

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I guess, means you're kind of like sexually attracted to everything. Something like, it's weird, okay?

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And that's what Ben Shapiro said, it's weird. And then he's telling them, he doesn't know he's still being recorded, his producers that, hey, can you cut that out?

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Because I'll get boycotted over it. This is the state of conservatism. These aren't progressives.

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These are supposedly the political conservatives. If all they have is, well, we kind of believe in a free market, and we like to defend our border,

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I don't know that you have much worth preserving anymore. If you're just gonna give up on family, which is essentially, like,

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I know Ben has a family, but if you're not even willing to say that a deviancy like that is even weird, let alone evil, let alone sinful, but you can't even say it's weird, then what can you say?

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And where won't you compromise? And that's the issue right now. There seems to be a free fall.

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There's just absolutely no foundation. There's no bedrock, there's no principles. This is what conservatism looks like when it's secularized.

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It's actually not conservatism anymore. It loses, there really is no conservatism. You can try to preserve some of particular elements of it, but you've just knocked down the whole foundation of it, which is the, which, at least at the core of that, should be something related to preserving the family, because you know that that's good for society, at the very least.

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That's what's gonna be the hedge against big government, and it's the most basic hierarchy that meets the needs of people and prevents them from calling out to the government and going to the government for those needs.

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It's the welfare system that works, because God created it. This is just, it's mind boggling.

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I don't even know what to say. I haven't re -informed all my thoughts on it, and I probably should do that later, but I'll leave it at this.

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If conservatives are going to say that girls should play in girls' sports and boys should play in boys' sports, but they won't fight on any of these other issues, their positions are that pornography is free speech.

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If they think that no -fault divorce is totally fine, and that was a good idea, if they think that marriage itself really isn't necessary because living together is just as good, or that's necessary before marriage, or something like that, if they think that homosexuality, same -sex unions, all that stuff, totally fine, then why can't boys play girls'?

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I mean, it's the same principles we're working off of, that there's a designer, and he made males one way with certain responsibilities, and females another way with certain strengths and responsibilities.

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If you don't recognize that in all these other areas, how can you then mount an opposition to boys playing in girls' sports?

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It'd be just knock down the foundation you say that you believe in. Is it just based on popular opinion at this point? Because if that's true, then we're slaves to the mob at this point.

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Whatever they say, we have to go along with somehow in order to quote -unquote win. And I think there's more important things than winning.

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And the progressives and the Democrats, yeah, they want to win, but even in the early years when everyone thought they were crazy, and when they were politically isolated and all that kind of stuff, they still held on to their principles.

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And their principles were terrible, but they still had some kind of thing they believed in, whether it was knocking down capitalism and the hegemony and all of that, and then instituting this great utopia, pipe dream.

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If it was that, then it was maybe crazy. Maybe it was something that we can all look at and we can all oppose.

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But they actually believed in something, and many of them didn't compromise. And they've won the culture war over time, or been winning it.

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I shouldn't say anyone's won it. We still fight. We're not gone. But it's really a culture siege too.

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It's not a culture war, but I digress. They've done this through the march to the institutions over time, slowly hanging on to these principles.

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And conservatives can't seem to, Republicans, at least, can't seem to do that as well. So I would just encourage you, if this kind of stuff bothers you, get involved.

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Outvote your local young Republican club. Get the person out of there who's pushing this stuff. Put someone in there who's going to champion the family.

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That would be my encouragement. So I wanted to show that to you. And it's not to depress you. It's just, this is the world we're living in now.

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And it's changing really fast. Let's talk about this. So this

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Southern Baptist stuff. In the Southern Baptist Convention, these professors actually are both from the

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Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I believe. Yeah. Brian Vickers is one of them.

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He's a professor of New Testament interpretation, assistant editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

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And here's what Brian Vickers had to say. In class, and I'll just play it for you.

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The other thing in the prophets is you get an equal, you get an equal emphasis on the importance, the biblical importance of social justice.

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Right? Which is, it tends to just launch into immediate controversy among evangelicals, because everybody's afraid they're going to fall into social gospel, though I've yet to meet any evangelical who actually fell into social gospel.

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Let me stop it right there. The term social justice itself, I mean, I've gone through the history of it before, but just to give you a little review, it comes from the social gospel.

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Yeah, I know some people try to say, no, there were Catholics using it before that. They meant something different though. They were talking about trying to preserve social bonds that existed between landowners and tenants, and applying that to an industrial setting.

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The social justice that we think about today is really redistributive justice that goes back to Rousseau.

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And the term social justice was used by Rauschenbusch and others in that social gospel period in America to promote

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Fabian socialism, because Fabian socialism was mostly secular, and Americans didn't want to buy into socialism because it had this secular connotation.

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So instead of calling it socialism, they call it social justice. So fundamentally, what he's talking about here, oh, you know, no one's ever bought into that because of social justice, you know.

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No, that's actually how it was formed. That's literally why the term social justice is around. It was selling socialism to Christians in America.

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Usually so far on the other extreme, like we could probably use a dose of it, but immediately people are like, oh, social gospel.

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Don't worry, I'm not gonna turn into a social worker. So he's saying we could use a dose of social justice.

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Doesn't mean that we're social gospel. We could just use a little social justice. But we're so afraid, we're so afraid of this demon called the social gospel that we'll often use that as just basically an excuse to talk about issues of social justice, but not actually engage in any of it, right?

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But that's a little bit of a hobby horse of mine. I'm gonna leave that one be. But you can go to the prophets and read, right?

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Because the way we treat those apart from us is the material example, is the material evidence of what our relationship with God really is, right?

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That's another thing that you see in the prophets. It's another place where you can make. So his definition's coming out now.

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Social justice is just how you treat people. It's treating people nice, not social gospel. It's just treating people nice.

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Forget the history of the etymology, or not the etymology, but the history, I should say, of the term and how it's been used. What it means today in the minds of most people, it really hasn't changed.

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I mean, you have John Rawls using it a little differently. You have little anomalies, but basically the way social justice has been used and the way it's certainly used today is not just treating, it's not charity.

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It's not just treating people right. It's much more than that. And this is, yeah, and Professor, who's saying this is a hobby horse of his.

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Hobby horse. Doesn't seem to understand the history of the term, but it's a hobby horse of his.

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Constant application in the times we're living in because their outward actions are all evidence, or lack of, of their internal sort of relationship with God.

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Because we tend to internalize our relationship with God when in fact our relationship with God is meant to be shown. And the only material evidence for it anyway that's ever seen is the way we treat one another, the way we treat people outside of us.

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All right. So that is one professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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And he's not one of the ones who you are probably familiar with. And it's not to just oppose him or get down on him.

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I mean, there's, look, I'm ignorant about some things. It's not like, I get it.

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But to say that this is a hobby horse of his and to say, to act like you're knowledgeable enough to lecture on this in class, you'd think you'd know something about it.

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And then not to make the distinctions that should be made. How about the fact that today's social justice is bent on creating an egalitarian society of some variety, some version of that, through taking down certain hierarchies that stand in the way of that, certain social institutions, using some kind of centralized authority, some kind of power to break those things up.

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It's a lot different than charity. It's a lot different than treating people in a just way, according to scripture, to how the term mishpat is generally used.

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And that's the problem. And it hasn't really changed. Those fundamental things I just mentioned haven't really changed throughout time.

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There's been different veneers put on social justice, but those things have always pretty much been there.

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So there you go. That's one person promoting a version of social justice in class.

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Let me show you something else here. This is Peter Gentry. You probably haven't heard of him either.

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He is a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, How to Read and Understand the Biblical Prophets, book that he's put out there.

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So he uses the term social justice a bit as well. And I'm just gonna give you some examples of that.

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So the term is used quite a bit. Here's page 18 and 19.

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I'm gonna just go through a few pages with you. Talks about how the prophets, they had a perspective on social justice.

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Talks about, let's see, God's going after them for accusing them of the loss of social justice, or the prophets are,

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I should say. Anyway, I'm gonna go through this quick. Israel losing social justice. The final, let's see, four woes are all ways of elaborating the original charge of perverting social justice.

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He goes through this all over the place. It has something to do with wealth. Let's see, social injustice, gaining wealth associated with social injustice.

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And this isn't, he uses the term retributive justice, and that's not, so that, the assumption is here that that's not social justice.

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There's social justice, and then there's retributive justice. Perverting social justice was a problem.

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Let's see, again, gaining wealth by social injustice and living a life of pleasure to spend that, so there's something, and this is usually the way that social justice advocates use the prophets, that their critique is against some kind of systemic wealth disparity of some kind.

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And it almost sounds like that's how he's using it, but I'm gonna keep going because he makes an important statement. Let's see, we have in Isaiah 11, where a future king uses gifts of the spirit to rid of evil and establish social justice.

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I mean, that's pretty important. I mean, this is like fundamental stuff. At the heart, let's see, of the violation of social justice, and so here's the thing.

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He says that social justice is a word pair of justice and righteousness.

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So he refers to it two ways, justice -righteousness or social justice.

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And he explains it, I'll just read his explanation. According to the Hebrew poetry, which is based upon placing lines in parallel pairs, justice is matched in the first line by righteousness in the second, normally in prose, when the words justice and righteousness are joined together, they form a single concept or idea.

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Best expressed in English by the term social justice. Okay, best expressed in English by the term social justice.

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Really, that's the best way you can express this term. This is what Tim Keller did in his book, Generous Justice. He takes these two words, smashes them together, and says, well, now it's social justice.

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Now, if this is the best way to communicate in English, you'd think this would be the way that it should be translated, right?

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There should be no confusion, right? Trying to minimize confusion is important. Now, let me keep going.

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He says this is a figure of speech. The word pair becomes an idiom expressing a single thought that is both different from and greater than the words considered independently, just as one cannot analyze the expression by and large.

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In English, by studying by and large separately, someone cannot determine the meaning of this expression by analyzing justice and righteous separately.

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So he's saying that they form something different. They come together, they form something different, this justice righteousness. Isaiah 16, five is employing the concept of social justice.

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Deuteronomy calls for a king who implements the Torah in his regime, and Isaiah predicts a king who will deliver social justice in his rule.

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They are saying the same thing. So the Torah, so here's what we know so far.

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If you're reading this book, the Torah, the law is social justice. Implementing the law is social justice.

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We know that it has something to do with becoming wealthy in an inappropriate way. That has something to do with social justice.

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We know it's the best way to translate justice and righteousness together in English. He says the meaning of the word pair, let's see, there's pretty redundant stuff.

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There's a lot of things here. Here's what I wanna get to. This is the last, this is page 49.

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So after you read all this, you get to this section where he says, this social justice, however, is not what is meant by the term in America today.

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Rather, it is a way of summing up all the commands in the Mosaic Covenant for the right way to relate to God and to treat other people and the earth's resources.

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So, it's not the best term to use maybe in English to translate those two words, justice and righteousness?

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I don't understand, then why use the term? If this is not the term that's used in America today, but it's somehow the best term to translate it from Hebrew into English.

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And the way that it has been used somehow is associated with wealth and money. And do you see how confusing this is?

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And that's all I really wanna point out is this is really confusing. And at this time,

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I think we need men who understand the culture around them. If you lived in Mormon country, you wouldn't want professors teaching at your

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Bible college or your seminary who are promoting terms that are from Mormonism.

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You're talking about the priesthood of Melchizedek, let's say, in very confusing ways that are just kind of confusing enough and vague enough that it could make room for a

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Mormon concept. That would be an utter failure. You'd say the same thing probably in an Islamic context or any other religion, taking terms and concepts and then merging them with Christianity, but then redefining them or sort of redefining them.

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I'm not even quite sure with these two professors to what extent they do believe in the social justice that's advocated today or don't believe in it.

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They're not full throttle in that direction, it seems like, but there's something there and it doesn't quite make sense.

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And so that's what I wanted to just point out to people that this is a big issue. It's just way bigger than the few professors we've talked about on this podcast.

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So I hope that was helpful for you going into the Southern Baptist Convention just to realize we need clarity and this is a big deal.

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If you don't think it's a big deal, it's coloring so many different things. It is a big deal and we need men, we need to train pastors who are extremely sharp on this because it is the religion of the day.

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It is like being a Mormon country and not knowing Mormonism and being confused about it when you exit seminary.

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We don't want that. So it is important and I appreciate everyone's support.

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I don't say it often enough. I just wanted to thank everyone who does pray for me, does contribute. I also wanted to say, because I mentioned it on the program yesterday, we do have a family friend who is in not the greatest physical shape right now, kind of like a grandmotherly figure and I mentioned that.

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And obviously I'm here doing a podcast so I didn't leave to kind of an emergency to go and try to see them during their final days or anything like that.

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But it is kind of an up in the air kind of thing right now. So I appreciate your prayers for that. Thank you.

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And anyone who has any design ideas for the book cover, let me know. I appreciate it. God bless.