Who's Conquering America?

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast where we are forging a bold Christian vision for America. I'm your host,

John Harris, and I have a question for you. Who conquered America? That's a question that I used for the title of a

Substack article in which I intend to start a conversation on the topic of whether our internal threats are greater than the external threats that we hear about so often.

I don't have a firm grasp on every element of this particular conversation, but I think it needs to be a conversation.

And this is somewhat of an original thought today. It's rooted in critiques primarily from more traditional

Bible Belt perspectives on the nature of particular regions of the United States and the threat that they pose to a

Christian order. But in our environment currently, it is very popular to look at the nature of things in our country, whether that is moral decay, financial problems, et cetera, corruption, and think the issue is something external that if we were to sever our connection with, we would be paradise once again.

It's in internal groups of particular immigrants. It is Israel now. Oftentimes, especially with older generations, it's

China. Or if you're going to Cold War era, it's Russia still. These external threats are what bring the maladies about that we have currently.

And I saw this from a very firsthand perspective in the Southern Baptist Convention with people who really thought if you just cut

George Soros money from flowing into the evangelical immigration table, and if you cut whatever foundation money is going into the seminaries and other entities potentially, then you will solve the problem of liberal drift in the

Southern Baptist Convention. And I knew at the time that was important to do, but it wasn't the root issue.

The root issue is ideological. And part of the reason I knew this was because I was sitting in the seminary. I was sitting at Southeastern.

I could see ideologues being formed before my very eyes. People who came in with conservative views that graduated as more progressive leaning pastors who are going to go show the folks back home in Mississippi or whatever what it really means to be a

Christian, because now they've learned. I've seen this firsthand. I have many stories of it. And it's not something that is solved when you just cut money ties.

It's something that is ideological. Now, this doesn't go for every person, right? There's opportunists out there who are just going to go with whatever pays the most people without principle.

And then there are people who are the true believers and the people who are the true believers in any movement, the revolutionaries.

I think it was at Stalin who called them the useful idiots. They're going along with something.

They don't know always where it's going to lead, but they're firmly committed to the ideology. Those are oftentimes the most dangerous people.

They're very rigid. They can't see the full picture. They're blinded by their own all encompassing narratives, and they end up becoming your shock troops.

And we saw that very clearly in 2020. And I think that this kind of thing can happen on very, very many different political sort of wavelengths when it's married to a revolutionary instinct or spirit, especially a novel revolutionary instinct or spirit.

So the question before us is, is ideology the bigger issue or is external funding coming from foreign countries or coming from NGOs or think tanks or you name it?

Is that the problem? And I will submit to you this, because this is the conclusion I came to. If you have people running your institutions of good character who are firmly committed to Christian orthodoxy and measuring things by that, you are not going to have the ideological problem, even if the motivation for it is money, because those people will say no to the money because they're firmly committed to something already.

In other words, men of valor, men of integrity, men of virtue and character, those kinds of true leadership would say no, because they're committed to God, they're committed to their people, they're committed to the truth.

Ideology disrupts all that. It's a wrench in the gear system and it makes people think in very diseased ways.

They have a mind that is not able to actually think clearly. They're hampered and they can't even see it oftentimes.

If you're able to correct that issue, then the other stuff kind of solves itself.

I decided to focus on that more so. I wrote Social Justice Goes to Church. I wrote Christianity and Social Justice with the hope of explaining and refuting social justice theory, showing you how it is in conflict with Christianity and biblical teaching and Christian history, showing you how it doesn't make sense, and then letting the chips fall where they may.

Now, I knew what would sell more books and produce more online engagement, and that is if I were to come and say, do you know what's really changing your church?

Do you know what's really changing your seminary and your denomination and your missions organization and your charity? It's these external funding cloak and dagger things.

That way, you can feel like you're more in the know. You can be comforted by the fact that it's not really you or your institution that's the problem.

It's all these things that are afflicting it. The disease is not internal. It's environmental.

Molds in the house just move out of the house rather than actually you have stage three cancer and you're going to die from it.

I knew it was stage three cancer. I knew that it was ideological malady that could not be solved by just cutting all those connections as much as those things need to be cut, which they do.

I've landed in a very different place, I suppose, than some of the people around me who are willing to measure everything by it's an external problem.

I want to talk about this a little bit because this really came home to me at CPAC in 2020.

This is where I want to start the conversation. I'd be curious to see comments on this, by the way, because I think there's so much more to be said and added to this.

I'm at CPAC. Conservative Political Action Conference. In the center of the lobby is this display,

America versus socialism. I look at it and I think to myself, what about the

Oneida community in New York? There were a number of these communes starting in the late 1700s and then into the 19th century that were experiments in radical egalitarian belief.

Were they not American? They were of American stock, original settler stock, many of them.

What about the German 1848ers? Looking back, you could say they were a foreign influence who immigrated here, but that's at an early stage, fairly early,

I suppose. It's before our American Civil War. They come and they settle mostly in the

Midwest. They open newspapers and they're essentially socialists. This animates the ranks of the early

Republican Party. This supplies troops to the Northern Armies. They're a bunch of socialists.

If you want to explain why the media is so left -leaning, this is part of that story. What about labor movements at the turn of the 20th century in Rust Belt factory towns?

Are these people not Americans? It begs the question, what is an American?

Is it something that is part of your stock and your ancestry and your habits and culture?

Is it a rooted, tangible, organic identity that forms through natural relationships and shared experience?

Is that what an American is? Or is an American someone that has to have particular political beliefs?

If you fail in those particular political beliefs, you're just not an American. It's about more abstract ideas.

I happen to think that being an American, with it, there are beliefs that accompany this that have developed and have also, in some sense, been with us in our early stages, but it's in a natural, organic kind of thing.

It's like a family. When you have a child who decides to reject some of the things that the family believes in, it creates a crisis of identity for that child often, but they don't cease to be your child.

Just because there's people in our country who have gone in directions that are damaging to our country doesn't necessarily mean they're not

Americans anymore. If we start defining things based off of just the beliefs in your head, then really anyone's an

American if they just adopt whatever the CPAC thinks is an American. What, the free market?

Anti -socialism? If you're not a socialist, you're an American? That doesn't really make sense. More could be said, but I thought that this was a problem when

I saw it. I thought, if we think this way, if it's just like it's America versus socialism, and what do you do with socialism in America coming from native stock

Americans that didn't require foreign influence? Or do you just say that is foreign influence?

How do you categorize that? Then how do you categorize what America is? And so I chewed on this and I started thinking, during Obama's presidency, there was an awful lot of comparison between him and Soviet dictators.

In fact, the Glenn Beck program did this whole thing about the national anthem for the Soviet Union, putting new words to it, making it about Obama.

Just to give you one example. And I thought, I mean, there's some truth to this, right? There is truth to this.

There is truth to the CPAC sign. There's a kernel of truth. The leaders of BLM were trained Marxists.

The leftist college professors that I had seemed very soft on communism. I remember one class called social problems.

It was required in undergrad. My professor said homosexuality was safer than heterosexuality, and you should go experiment with it.

She said that it was safer to be in regions that had gun control because you're less likely to get shot than places where guns are unrestricted.

And she said Karl Marx was right. This was a required class. And you don't have to prove to me that college professors are obviously afflicted by Marxism.

And that is, and you could say English. You could say it's

Russian. And you could say this is something that derived from Europe.

It came to our shores. It's not really part of the American experience. But it was such an early stage that this stuff became part of our experience to some extent.

And it all ran together, I think, when I was in college, at least all the liberal slash progressive slash

Marxist slash radical left ideas. It all just kind of ran together. And it was a package deal.

And it just seemed opposed to the real authentic America, which dressed like you had mossy oak.

You're ready to go hunting. You're listening to Alan Jackson and you're guarding freedom while holding a beer can in one hand and shooting off your

Roman candle with the other. I mean, that was the stereotype when I was a teenager was in my 20s was

America. It was a blue collar comedy guys and get her done. And that's the real authentic America.

Again, it's just Southern stereotypes, rural stereotypes. That's where the real authentic America is.

As if the people who are in more urban areas and in northern areas, they're just not as authentically American from a

European perspective, by the way, they do tend to think of America as the authentic Americans are the cowboys.

They're the frontier. It's a lot of our art is derived from the South or cuisine.

So they're they're looking at culture and it's got a strong Southern bent to it. There is some truth to this. But what

I thought was that feminism, socialism, centralization, these things were all there from very early stages in our history.

And there is a legitimate critique of those things that says the seeds of our destruction first took root in the northeastern region of the country, where Unitarians sprung out of congregationalist circles.

Reverend Lyman Beecher noted in 1823 that all the literary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian out of this heretical movement or rationality, perfectibility, anti -hierarchy sentiment.

And reform movements emerged from these ideas. Temperance Society in 1826, the

Women's Rights Convention of 1848, various socialist communes. This is all happening at early stages.

This is before the progressive movement. I don't oversimplify this, but the so -called

New England theology was more than just Unitarianism. Unitarianism marked this decisive shift. But beneath all of this was a rejection of God's authority and a denial of man's depravity.

That's really it at a baseline. That's the American radical tradition at a base level, rejecting

God's order and thinking man's perfectible. There's this spark of good in him. It's a humanistic mindset.

We've had it with us for a very long time and we still have it with us. The regions where this emerged are still the greatest blue regions of the country.

I don't think we should just ignore that. It doesn't get talked about a lot, though. I don't think the

Northeast was forced by foreign influence to adopt

LGBTQ. When you drive through Montpelier and you see trans flags and it's as white as can be, and most of the people there have descended from the original settlers,

I don't think it's because of some foreign influence that they became that way.

Now, maybe you think it did. Maybe there's some way of it, but you got to figure out why was it them and not other regions? Why didn't other regions go that direction?

No shots were fired. No deep state manipulation was required. No foreign powers needed to intervene.

And as destructive as those forces may be, they are not at the root of the problem. So you talk about Catholic immigration,

Jewish immigration to the Northeast. This did little to resist the emerging liberal voting patterns, and if anything, reinforced them.

This was not the case with the Puritans' Protestant cousins, though, in the South, who retained a more traditional outlook for far longer.

And I have not yet turned to the 20th century, which serves as the starting point for most contemporary political analyses.

So we're not even to the 20th century. We're not even to the point of large quantities of Roman Catholics and Jewish people showing up at Ellis Island.

We are still in the 19th century, and you're already seeing this huge division form. And you just got to ask yourself, that division still is mapped on an electoral map.

You can see it every election. Yes, foreign influence makes a difference.

But what about this elephant in the room? Are we going to talk about that or not? This is a question that I've had for quite a while.

1607 Project focused on some of this. I'm not saying that the Cold Warriors or their children have no point, but the

Soviets were latecomers to this story, right? And the revolutionary ideas were already present long before modern lists of foreign enemies that now dominate the imagination, including

Ashkenazi immigration waves, Russian spies, and domestic Islamic terrorism came. Yet these are often the very preferred explanations for why

America is the way it is. And these framings have, I think, been abused rhetorically. And as a result, it's become difficult for the right to reach consensus, even on taking

Islamists seriously, let alone Nazis or Soviets. So there's an emerging group of people who just sort of dismiss

Cold War era explanations or now even dismiss the threat of Islam because it's been used and appealed to so often.

And there's just growing awareness that these paradigms don't fully explain the compromises of 2020. Now, why is that?

Let me put some meat on the bones. When your enemy is a rake and file bureaucrat with a

Netflix account, and your sister shows up at your house and says that she's a dude now, it's a little bit hard to think that Hitler or Osama bin

Laden are behind these problems. Maybe if it was their sister, they would.

But they're not these radical LGBT trans flag -waving people that the one thing led to another, and here it is.

The Soviet Union and the leaders of that Soviet Union are the ones that are promoting all of this stuff here today.

I think the narrative has been spent so many times, it's hard to get people to think in terms of that now.

It's part of the reason that I think Israel and Jews and all of that has also become somewhat of an explanation. That narrative is now quickly running its course because it's being appealed to so often for so many things.

But at the very least, if your enemy is someone who is more secular and insidious and liberal, and you can see that enemy with influence in institutions, in your country in a very visible way, it's an easier sell to say they're the ones that are motivating the bureaucrat.

They're the ones that are influencing your sister to the education system or something like that. So what we get now is a new paradigm.

This is an explanation that now is appealed to for virtually every problem, but the

Jews, Israel are both in some unusual combination, manipulate outcomes to their own advantage. The Jews in the media are somehow opposed to the

Jewish state that's in Israel, but that doesn't matter. It all works out somehow that it's this enemy specifically.

And this does a better job than appealing to communism or to Islamists or China at explaining why your sister and a soy sipping government employee are problems.

I think to a lot of people today, but it's still an external threat, right? It's not internal. And so you point any of this out and then you're censored.

And the censorship confirms the existence of the Jew behind the curtain that's getting control of every level of society.

Now, there are several advantages to viewing Jews or Israel as America's enemies. One is that there is a visible connection that can be pointed to as evidence of influence, unlike crimes syndicates or Chinese front groups or Islamic terror cells, which are far more difficult for ordinary people to see.

In other words, no one's hiding the fact that there's at least not yet in large.

It's not popular, at least quite yet, to just hide the fact that Israel or Jewish people have influence.

Maybe it'll become that way. But roughly half of that cohort that stands out from the broader public, that two and a half percent of Jewish people in the

United States are also people who stand out for religious reasons because they're religious

Jews. So the Jews are easily noticed by the majority as outsiders. And an undercurrent has existed for some time on the right to explain our problems in terms of America versus you fill in the blank, some kind of foreign actor.

And this is where I think it's important to think through whether our problems are external force, jackboots, or whether it's some kind of Soma like in Brave New World, where people are choosing to go in bad directions.

I already talked about this a little bit, but I write more extensively in my piece on this idea that the

Southern Baptists and Christian denominations are the way they are simply because of outside actors.

It's all those trips to Israel or it's Chinese or European Union front groups, communist front groups, they're funding things.

And that's the explanation. Now, if America and her churches are under any captivity, foreign ideas and influence imposed by an elite class for money manipulation, then the solution would be simple, right?

You turn off the money faucet, unmask the bad actors and things return to normal. It's a Scooby -Doo episode for boomers and Gen X, the arch villains behind the curtain were

Russia and China for millennials and zoomers in a reverse Cold War narrative. The villains have become Israel and Jews. There's actually a lot of similarity between the ways that both generations act on this particular thing, which

I've never really bought fully the boomer explanation for why things are always bad.

And I don't buy this explanation fully for why things are bad either. At the end of the day, the premise is that it is someone else's fault.

And this can easily become the overriding explanation, right? Now, I think there's a question that needs to be asked in order to figure out whether that's the root of the problem though.

And the question is why, why is it that there is an attraction to the ideology that these foreign groups allegedly sell us?

Where's the hook? Were the 30 pieces of silver so appealing in the first place that they made

Judas do the wrong thing or was there a corruption in Judas's heart? And obviously both were happening, right? There was external and internal, but the internal,

I think needs to be recognized. Obviously both matter, but at the end of the day, the compromise begins where Jesus said it does.

It's in the heart. And if much of the Middle East is immune to Israeli domination, what makes Americans so weak, right?

So I've been thinking about this, Israel can't even control the West Bank, but somehow they are dominating every institution in America.

They're the reason everything's bad, but they can't even do simple things that would be in their advantage that would require much less effort, presumably.

And I think this is the difference between the 1984 problem and the rave new world problem.

In the 1984 world, 2020 was the manifestation of the jackboot.

The government is telling you lies, they're oppressing you, it's all top down. And it's bleak because even those who attempt to resist ultimately end up loving big brother in the end, as the story goes.

Is there a merit to this view? Of course there is, but there are limits to the explanation. In brave new world, circumstances are calibrated to a population that surrendered itself to vice and rejected

God's design long before the mechanisms of state control and dependency were fully formed. So things like motherhood are socially embarrassing in brave new world long before there's an oppressive government.

And I think this is closer to what's been happening in the United States. And one of the avenues for analyzing this that has been cultivated over time, it's not as popular now, but I think it has merit and should be revisited is the

Southern explanation for the country's demise. Now, if you're a

Northern partisan, just bear with me. The United States won its independence from Great Britain, right? And we rightly think of ourselves as free.

We have material prosperity. And if there's any foreign influence, it must be covert. Because if we knew about it, we would, as the land of the free, have the resources to resist it.

But there is a region of this country that did not have the resources, the South. And you could also extend this to some extent to Native American tribes that have reservations.

Southerners are in many respects a conquered people. And for generations, they held on to their own version of events and their own cultural particularities only to be gradually reshaped from within through immigration.

And I'm not just talking about foreign immigration, I'm talking about Northern -oriented education, the holy dollar and the credit card, as Whiskey Myers put it.

The South held out for a long time under domination, as did the Irish, the Afghans, and countless other conquered peoples.

But this pattern appears repeatedly in the history of Israel. It's not a full parallel, but a large enough remnant resisted full assimilation and lived to tell about it.

Eventually, though, the South has changed, and it is continuing to change. And over time, Southerners of all stripes accepted broader media narratives about the way they were.

They retired their symbols and their songs, and they learned to think of themselves as generic Americans with a bit of gravy, which some people don't even want.

So I've watched this transformation in my own lifetime. And collectively, Southerners have lost the will,

I think, to reassert themselves. And with it, the Southern identity itself. One only needs to visit, and I've done this.

You just go out on a Sunday morning, look around. Where are people? Are they at the grocery stores?

Are they at the hip, new, cool church? Are they at a traditional Southern church? What about heritage groups?

Is everyone in there just about a gray -headed person? That's something that particular identities are not being retained.

And it's a sad thing, right? It's gone with the wind. It's like the sequel.

It's just a way of life and a way of identifying oneself that it's fracturing to some extent.

The South is still different, but they're thinking of themselves in different ways.

Now, it did not have to be this way, right? Daniel and his compatriots could have just threw their arms up and said, you know what?

We'll just eat the meat. We'll just bow. They didn't. They resisted, and they retained their unique identities as a result of that, right?

You can think of countless examples like this in history. Augustine quotes Cicero's account of Rome and moral decay, giving rise to a leadership crisis in the collapse of the old

Republic, and then compares it to the conditions of Rome in his day. And those in the leadership class of a people, whether formally holding power or not, bear responsibility for setting an example and shaping the choices of those in their care.

When they become the enemy, the situation seems hopeless. So in other words, the elites, those who run the society, when they become the enemy of that society, their own homegrown people,

I'm not talking about puppets. I'm talking about people who have actually bought the Kool -Aid. There's not much hope left for the society.

Edmund Burke feared the weakening of the Anglo will to resist Jacobinism, which is socialism, essentially.

I mean, it's the French revolutionary stuff. It's egalitarian. Richard Weaver feared the weakening of the Southern will, and of American, more broadly, to resist modernity.

And I fear our collective inability to stop ourselves from coveting what is displayed on the screens of our phones.

And the attraction in all these cases is an impulse that stems from a sense of entitlement over providence.

And so I want to zero in on the root weakness here, right? Richard Weaver's analysis is very similar to my own on this point, and how

I see the problems that are afflicting America more broadly. And this has embedded itself in the Southern tradition, because the

Southerners, Richard Weaver being one of them, were able to look at a region of the country that had rejected the social order and the moral order laid down by God.

And they were able to prophesy that this was going to be bad long term. And they were able to see the effects in their own lifetimes of this creeping into their own societies.

So they put the blame on ideology, essentially. They were able to identify the group from within the country, from whence it was coming, and identify the weakness that would compel people to reject their own religion and identity to adopt it.

It's self -serving, it's materialistic. There's a place for normalizing the sins that you enjoy when there's not a divine order.

There's a sense in which hierarchy is abandoned for an egalitarian hope in the spirit of man more broadly to make a utopian society here on Earth.

And this is the kind of spirit that Southerners have been critical of. Traditional Bible, mostly sort of Bible -believing, or at least

Christian cultural people who have inhabited that particular region and have seen the contrast. And so being exposed to that has,

I think, given me a different perspective than your standard run -of -the -mill boilerplate stuff that you just see in most of today's conservative, quote -unquote, or right -leaning political institutions, where everything is, it's them.

It's them, it's this foreign thing. And again, I have to say this a million times because I feel people will misunderstand me.

Not saying foreign influence isn't a problem. It is a big problem. It reinforces, though, tendencies that I think have predated it.

And tendencies that we can deal with also at a root level. So because of the sins of the members of our own society,

Christianity has waned. And collectively, we have embraced, I think, modern liberal notions. And this is the case, whether you froze immigration and deported everyone tomorrow, we would still have these problems.

Maybe not to the same extent or in the same ways. There are a lot of problems that can be certainly curtailed.

We can preserve, it's kind of like this. You want to deal with the problems that are in your house, and you know you got problems.

But you don't want to take on everyone else's problems, which is the issue with immigration. It's like, okay, we already have enough problems.

My ship's already got leaks. I don't need to take on all the weight coming from your cargo on your ships.

So yeah, we can throw all that cargo overboard. We're still leaking, but we should still throw the cargo overboard. We should still, and that's figurative.

I'm not calling humans cargo, by the way. We should still, we can have a multi -pronged approach to this, but we must understand at a root level why there's a leak in the first place.

Why there's a weakness that in the first place rejects our identity, and our gender roles, and our religion, and that thinks that you can just import the third world, and there'll be

Americans. Where does that thinking come from? We got to ask that question. Because of the sins of the members of our own society, like I said,

Christianity is waned. So whatever foreign forces are at work, we have allowed them entry through our own distorted desires.

And we have believed lies about gender, family, and nationality because we wanted to believe them. So do not misunderstand foreign oppression's real.

The answer though is not to cast it off alone. Something more fundamental must occur, a replacement of the bad with the good.

And I quote Isaiah 44, 21 through 22, which says, Remember these things, O Jacob and Israel, for you are my servant and I have formed you.

You are my servant, O Israel. You will not be forgotten by me. I have wiped out your transgression like a thick cloud and your sins like a heavy mist.

Return to me for I have redeemed you. We see throughout scripture, Isaiah telling them to remember who they are and to trust in God as the path to overcoming foreign oppression.

So I'm saying, yeah, we have real foreign oppression. But however that looks, whatever manifestation and shape it takes, the answer has to fundamentally also include with it a remembrance of who we ought to be.

There is no restoration without identity and without virtue. Only then can these compromising external influences be fully resisted.

So I remember Great Commission resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention, right? I was researching this years ago.

Al Mohler writes in the book on the topic that the Southern Baptist Convention is going to become extinct.

It's going to recede because it's old white men. And we got to figure out a way to diversify and get young people in here.

And right after that, you have all these diversity initiatives show up, right? It makes sense why people thought that that would help the

Southern Baptists grow or at least not die. Al Mohler painted this picture of doom and gloom.

But I think that's an easy problem, right? You just eliminate all these initiatives, right?

And then the Southern Baptist goes back to normal. I think there's some truth to that. Like that would be a positive change in the right direction.

But there's also got to be a heart change. And what's that heart change? It's the attraction in the first place. Why was that a popular thing?

Well, there's fear, first of all. There's a lack of trust in God, I think. We can't just keep preaching the same message.

I mean, that's part of the reaction to this. We got to do something extra. We got to change our message so that we attract.

But there's nothing wrong with your message, right? So there's a lack of trust in the confidence in God's word and the message that he has given.

Number two, there's a fear of man. How many times did you hear if you're a Southern Baptist, the world is watching, the world out there.

They're all seeing us. The cameras are here at the convention. Don't talk about critical race theory like that. The world's watching. Sounds racist, sounds sexist.

How do you cure that problem? That's a heart condition. That's not as easily cured because that's corruption.

And that's what I'm trying to say is there's also corruption in the heart of man. There's also ideologies that reinforce that corruption that have sprung up from our own shores.

There's also whole regions of this country that have been given over to innovative revolutionary thinking.

What do you do about that? How do you address those things? I mean, we have to at least admit these things and address these things to some level.

I'm not saying you just hate certain regions of the country, but this should animate our motivation in evangelization, in the prophetic voice and in the political level, which is different than the prophetic voice.

We have to recognize who our enemies are. Some of the enemies are going to be descendants of those who are here at early stages in the country.

It's not just foreign people who have come and convinced us to abandon ourselves or something.

No, there's even engineers behind a lot of this who made the decisions to bring in these people and abandon their own

American identities. And why did they do this? Why did they think or broaden American identity so that any of the whole world is part of it?

Why did they do it? What motivated them to go that direction? There was already a corruption of the heart.

There was already a rejection of God's natural order. There was already a confidence in the ability of man to perfect himself without confronting sin.

It all traces back to that stuff eventually. And we just have to be honest with ourselves about it.

Okay, we're going to have to rebuild our political thinking with the recognition that we have a competing system of thoughts that we arrange our institutions around because we predicated on the fact that man is actually corruptible, that God's ways are actually right and our responsibility is to struggle, to conform ourselves to his ways.

That's what right -leaning thinking, that's what conservative thinking should all be about. It's a recognition of the natural order that God has laid down, conforming ourselves to it as mediated through tradition and applied to particular settings.

We, you know, it's really not actually that complicated, but it's become so much more ideological and it's the free market combined with enthusiasm for national defense and a quote -unquote traditional values or religious values or whatever.

But I'm not talking about values. I'm talking about baseline assumptions about who man is and who God is and what the world on a metaphysical level that we live in is.

That's where things ultimately go wrong. There's always wrong thinking that enters somewhere. So anyway,

I talk about the need for both remembrance and repentance. It's what you see throughout scripture when the

Jewish people or the Israelites are oppressed, what do the prophets come and say?

You gotta remember who you are, your responsibility before God, and you need to repent. And I think that's what we have to do.

My explanation for the state of America begins with the heart. American radicals tradition with its egalitarian impulses and notions of perfectibility has eroded our

Christian foundation. It is served as an attractive vulnerability for foreign enemies to exploit and has drawn many immigrants into its ranks, but it is ultimately part of who we are too.

And what I mean by that, and I hold that loosely, who we are, in other words, we are capable of producing these things within our own ranks.

I don't mean like, I'm about to tell you that you need to remember your identity. We need to remember ourselves as the people who came to these shores, who believed in different things about who man was, that man was not perfectible in these ways, that we must conform ourselves to God's order.

It was deviating from that earlier stage of thought that has caused the problems, essentially, is what

I'm saying. So, yes, it's, you could say that at early stages, this thinking entered and it was a problem.

It has certainly served as, let's see, so not as a fundamental identity, but as the

Mr. Hyde we become when we forget our creator, his order and our traditions. We must remember, so yeah,

Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, I'm saying we can't be Mr. Hyde. We must remember ourselves as the extension of Christian civilization that we once were and can be again.

We must cry out to God. We must understand the true source of our problem. And it is not at the root, very important qualification for an influence.

It is our willful rebellion. So what should we do? Statesmen should wield power to destroy evil and promote good.

And pastors must preach the full counsel of God without the man -pleasing filter. And the rest of us must preserve the true and valuable things we have been given without letting anything stand in the way of our passing those things down to our children.

So I think God still has a plan for America, but I think conversations along these lines about where did it go wrong?

Is it simply a matter of sealing our border and things get better? I think we have to have these conversations.

Anyone who does abortion ministry, like anti -abortion ministry, they know this because they see the people coming and they see even heritage stock people.

Sometimes we'll come to the abortion clinic, depending on where you're located and say the most cruel, evil things about wanting to murder babies.

That's becoming more and more common. And you have to think, okay, I could deport every person and those people still are here.

They still have evil that they're trafficking in. So the opponents of America are those who want to traffic in evil also.

And we have to make our main message about, we're about Christ. We're about his word.

We're about his natural order. We're about securing and meeting the responsibilities he's given to us.

And we are against all forms of evil, whether domestic or foreign, and then get to work.

So that's my podcast. I hope that was helpful. Maybe it's a little outside the box. Maybe it'll get your wheels turning.

Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think, yeah, no, it's foreign influences where all the problems started. And it's, you know, most of the things can be explained that way.

And if so, I'd love to hear from you. This is very much a thought that I'm interested in thinking through and developing more, but I'm trying to get the conversation started.

So this has been the Conversations That Matter podcast. And until next time, fear God, stand strong and love others.