T4G Panel on Critical Race Theory: Part 2

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Stephen Wolfe on the Case for Christian Nationalism- Part 3: Revolution and Liberty of Conscience

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am your host, John Harris, for part two of the

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T4G panel discussion on critical race theory. We heard the first half last podcast.

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You can go check that out. In fact, you probably need to for this one. And we're gonna talk about the second half of it. And we left off with Pastor Bobby basically saying that his dad suffered discrimination.

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He had disparities where he went to school. And critical race theory tries to make sense of all this stuff by showing the motivation behind it.

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And so there's a helpful analytical tool, if you will, that critical race theory offers. And this was in contrast to what

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Kevin DeYoung had shared, which was basically that racism's probably worse than white people think it is, but he disagrees with some of the fundamental core tenets of critical race theorists, like interest convergence, which says that race relations, when they get better as a result of legislation or something, that's just a mirage because white people are maintaining their white dominance.

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And so it's questions the motives of people unnecessarily. And then he went on to say that actually this challenges the gospel.

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This can lead to real mission drift. And so I really was hoping that Kevin DeYoung would focus a little more on that.

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Like, how does this challenge the gospel? Well, because it's a false gospel. It has its own ways of rectifying sinful situations by getting woke, participating in activism as a means for grace, really, if there is any grace, but there really isn't.

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But those are the sacraments, if you will. And then striving for this heaven on earth, this equity, inclusion, and diversity world.

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And of course, the bad news is that we have white privilege. It's not original sin.

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It's that we violated political correctness. And it's that we're gonna have to be canceled if we don't do the right thing.

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And so it's a whole different gospel. It's a whole different religion. And I really wish Kevin DeYoung would have knocked that out of the park.

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Talked about how woke ideology, critical race theory promotes these, quote -unquote, oppressed perspectives.

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And it's a direct challenge to revelation because when you do this and say that there's special knowledge that someone has because of an experience, a set of experiences that are only attached to certain social locations, then not everyone has the same access into truth.

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And that would mean the truth of the word of God can't even be accessed to the same degree. And this is a big problem.

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And we see these kinds of things happening in the quest to diverse membership and elder boards and theological libraries because this is all rooted in the idea that, well, we don't have the full truth or we just don't have, we're hampered if we just don't have these oppressed perspectives that we need to have in order to make our church better.

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And so he could have gone into that. He could have gone into the justice that critical race theory advocates, which is really lady justice taking her blindfold off.

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He could have gone into how, and it is a legal theory, so that actually is directly relevant.

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And he could have gone into the ideology of it a little more. He did some, but just how it flattens people and really makes them out to be, they're not even human anymore.

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They're either oppressed or oppressors. But it was a little limp,

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I thought. And there were some good things though. Kevin DeYoung shared some really good things, I have to say, and I'm grateful for him.

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He did go after interest convergence. He did say critical race theory was a threat to the gospel. That was really good. But I think there's a nervousness there.

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And we're gonna find out today whether or not that continues in Kevin DeYoung's response to this.

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And we'll see if he challenges Bobby directly by saying, essentially what I would say, I ended the last program this way, but that, look, critical race theory has done nothing to promote good race relations.

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If anything, it's done just the opposite of that. It's fomenting issues. And we saw in 2020 probably the worst kind of fomentation.

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And the destruction of property, two billion, I think, is the latest estimate. Two billion dollars of destruction of property, people murdered.

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It's taking down historical symbols, destroying historical relics or monuments.

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And it's just, it's done a whole lot of damage. Crime going up because of the

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Ferguson effect in some of these cities and more people dying as a result of that. And so I would really wanna get into that and be like, look, you think critical race theory helps make sense of all this stuff?

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This is what critical race theory is doing. Furthermore, critical race theory assumes that everything is done for the purpose of power and accruing power and maintaining power.

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And it's these straight white males who want power for their social group. And from the beginning, and it's the same now, and that's just not true.

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People are more complex than that. And of course, we would be fools to deny that people want power and sinful people in particular.

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But we would also be very foolish to say that that's what motivates everything. And it's a particular class of people that's trying to hold on to some kind of a domination.

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And it's straight white males, and that's what they're doing. I mean, it's also straight white males who have really helped in the process of, and been participants,

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I should say, in the process of building up trust with black people and getting us to the point.

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I think we were at that point under George W. Bush more of having good relationships.

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And I think it was straight white men who have allowed the level of immigration that has taken place of people coming into this country and sharing in the benefits of the

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United States. Everyone wants to come here. If it's such a horrible, oppressive place, that doesn't seem to be a reasonable outlook.

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But we'll see. We'll see if that's what Kevin DeYoung does. So let's keep going with this, and let's see if he goes for the jugular.

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So Bobby, can I come to any of those same conclusions, can I make any of those same observations without the help of critical race theory?

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I hope so. The Bible is our authority. And so if a secular theory helps, and I'm thankful for scholars.

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Paul knew platonic thought. I just tried to quote that to you. He knew secular ideology. And I don't want to, there are real

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Christian scholars that I know who study critical race theory and other things. I'm thankful. Okay, stop here.

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Just remember the difference between those two. If you're studying math and philosophy, these are rules baked into natural revelation, the relationships that exist in the world.

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And so studying logic, studying philosophy, studying Pythagorean theorem and stuff,

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I mean, this is different than, and philosophy, of course, you could have, I'm really more thinking of logic and math and stuff.

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Philosophy, I'd have to spend more time on, but there are certain things. My whole point is we live in a real world that operates by laws.

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And if your job is to discover those laws, and if you're a good observer and you have the faculties God's given to observe, then yeah, you can be a non -Christian and find out some cool things and relationships between things.

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And of course, but critical race theory is more about the assumptions that exist in the minds of sociologists and thinkers, academics, that are really fantasy world.

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They're not, they don't comport to the real world and they're just imposed on the real world. It's not trying to look at the real world and think, well, we see this relationship.

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What explains that? It's more an assumption on the front end that power motivates everything, and power dynamics, and that what are the results of that?

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You have to kind of start with this assumption. And the assumption is that white people have white privilege.

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These are assumptions that, I mean, they present it as this is to try to make sense of the world, but they start with that at the beginning.

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It's not like they're collecting data, and from the data they've collected, we can make this assumption.

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It's more, in fact, when the paradigm doesn't even fit all the time, this led to really weird stuff, right?

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With beards are racist, farmer markets are racist, classical music's racist, but like all, it just connects everything into this grid of everything is motivated based on power, oppression, and race being a primary part of that.

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And so I would make a huge distinction between Paul understanding platonic categories, and then the critical race theory, and sociologists who start out with assumptions that power just drives everything, and that you're either an oppressor or an oppressed, and ideology and the postmodernism that comes into it and all that, that's much different.

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And those things definitely do contradict the word of God, and we'll see if Kevin DeYoung picks up on it. Understand some of the philosophies of our world, but our

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Bible gives us the answer, and if I were to quickly read my Bible, I'll just give you one verse in Isaiah chapter 52.

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In Isaiah chapter 52, here the prophet is summarizing Israel's history, and as he summarizes

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Israel's history, he says this in verse four, "'For thus says the

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Lord God, "'my people went down at the first into Egypt "'to sojourn there, and the

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Assyrian oppressed them "'for nothing.'" The Bible talks about groups oppressing other groups, and we don't have to qualify that, whether they're virtuous victims or that.

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People really, groups do oppress groups, and the Bible just says that, and that was a phenomenon that happened in our

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American history. And so if groups can oppress other groups, and the Bible says that, we also can ask, are there, what remedies are there for that?

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And have the remedies we have. Let me stop here. Of course oppression exists. No one, before critical race theory, people knew oppression existed, right?

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And the pushback isn't that oppression never existed in the United States. I think everyone's, it wasn't news to me that there was slavery existed when this whole thing started.

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With, in 2020, I was like, of course. You know, are there people that don't know that? They just learned that? I mean, oppression exists all over the world, and really, honestly, any one of you, anyone listening who goes back and traces their family history, you're gonna find causes for oppression, no matter who you are.

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Somewhere along the line, someone, some other group did something to you. And in the case of American slavery, the 95 % that went to South America and Central America, and the 5 % that came to the

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United States, they were sold from those in Africa to European people or people from the

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Northeast who were sailors and owned vessels, slave merchants.

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And then they came and in turn sold them to planters in the

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United States, and of course all throughout the new world. And so this is not a unique thing.

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And that's the thing, critical race theory, the problem with it is it really just makes it about a power dynamic that is imposed by white people.

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The Africans who sold their fellow Africans really don't have anything to do with this. Again, the original sin is found among the white people.

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The white people are to blame for everything. And that's really the more of the root issue.

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It's not, the objection is, that's a straw man to think the objection is that some people are just denying oppression exists.

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No, that's not true at all. Everyone knows, everyone should know at least, that oppression does exist.

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But what are you using it for? What are you trying to, when you tell that story of oppression, what is the purpose of it?

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Is it to try to forward some kind of a political agenda for, I don't know, some kind of a redistribution scheme or what?

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What is the purpose of it? And is it even a fully true story?

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Or is it emphasizing and certain things, leaving out other things in order to give an oppression that's not accurate in order to vilify in the present, certain people for political purposes?

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Much different. Then that's the kind of thing that is the issue, not whether or not oppression exists.

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Of course, oppression exists. Of course, people have oppressed other people. Of course, black people had barriers and major ones to becoming the recipients of the benefits that come with being an

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American in times past. Yes. And of course, that is lamentable.

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And of course, that's something that we don't want. But that's the thing. It's like, try to get, in these discussions, rarely are the root issues actually brought up.

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So are white people fundamentally guilty for benefiting from a system that supposedly allocates privilege to them?

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Answer that question, right? That's kind of the root issue with all this. Do we get more correct views on what constitutes injustice and how to solve it from people who have experiences with injustice from certain social locations simply because they're in minority social locations?

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You know, should we adjust the way that we treat people here and now, today, because of their social location, their race, and give certain benefits to some people and certain benefits to other people and treat them differently?

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Like, these are the root things that need to be debated. And I sense that we're dancing here on the surface a little bit.

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With like, of course there's oppression, right? Like, this is such a, just a point that all it does is waste time, in my mind, for getting into the root issues that really need to be discussed here.

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Effectively work. And I think we can disagree over that, but we can have conversations with our

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Bibles open as Christians at that point. Kevin, thoughts? Well, I like,

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I agree with everything you said. I don't think that's critical race theory, so we'll set that aside.

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So the observations Bobby's making about the situation in American history in the last 60, 70 years, this is also what you see?

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I think the questions you're raising are good questions, and I think we have the residual effects.

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How could we not? I mean, just your own personal biography, how could we not have residual effects of legacy, of slavery, and Jim Crow, and all the rest?

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What I do want to press in, because we've had these conversations, and... Let me say this really quick. Okay. I think a lot of people say there is no residual effect.

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And you're saying that, and I think that's helpful for the conversation. I think some people say... I think you're right. We reached a colorblind society, don't bring up race.

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If you bring up race, then you're creating the problem, and you're the racist. There are people who literally say that. And I disagree with that.

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I disagree with that strongly, and I think we need to acknowledge that. I think any monocausal explanation for racial disparities is bound to be incorrect.

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Life is complicated. Humans make decisions for all sorts of reasons that are bound up in family, and history, and institutions, and cultures, and religion, and decisions.

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So it's not one thing, it's many things. What I would want to say, because I think what makes these panels helpful is if we push and pull on each other.

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We've had these conversations in private before, and I love Bobby, and I respect him, and I love his preaching of the gospel.

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Often, we end up talking about many different things. Are we talking about the past, the present, or the future?

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And the past certainly matters. And we can talk about what happened in American history.

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Why did it happen? I think we've traded a, if we've traded a hagiographical view of American history, we now have, in many places, a hamartiography, meaning it's not all saints, now it's all sinners.

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And I think that is part of critical race theory, to have a revisionist view of American history, where I don't think that's how

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King or how Frederick Douglass. I think they viewed the founding generation as inconsistent, sadly hypocritical, but putting in place the right sort of things that we need to have the full purchase of.

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So I think what becomes difficult is, are we talking about what happened in the past and why?

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Are we talking about where things are in the present? Or are we talking about how things can be, come better in the future?

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And obviously, they're all connected. But I'll just lean into that. What I think, one of the difficulties,

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I think for many people, Christianity starts to feel impossible.

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Meaning, I want to recognize the hurt, the history.

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I want to recognize and acknowledge it's worse than many people in majority culture learned.

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I think also then, what many people sense, and where the issue is, is what do

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I do about that? I can't change that Thomas Jefferson had slaves. I can't change that they did redlining.

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I can't change what happened up to the civil rights legislation and what's happened even since then.

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And I think then a secondary question is, can we acknowledge that it's not 1619 or 1776 or 1865 or 1964, and that actually a lot of things have gotten, maybe not as good as many white people think, but they actually have gotten a lot better.

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And we are in a better place. And when you see the New York Times since 2014, averaging what, 500 references to racism, and then it spikes, and white supremacy spikes when you combine

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WAPO and USA Today and New York Times. Why is it, when I think objectively, probably no time in American history has there been less racism?

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I'm not saying no racism, or that it's not insidious and pervasive, and maybe that's just cultural norms that force us to press it down.

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But even that signifies something good, that racism is so stigmatized. Why is it in a time where there's less institutional racism, less personal racism,

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I think than ever before, we see mainstream news outlets and all of our major entertainment outlets talking about it more than ever before.

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And maybe, and I don't speak for you, you may say, well, because you haven't seen it, or you haven't been willing to see it.

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I'm not saying me personally, but just whites haven't. And I think that's a very fair point and critique, and we need to own up to that history.

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And yet I think that also leads to a dead end in the conversation, a sense of helplessness, like, what do we do?

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I mean, someone just came to my church this Sunday, and it's just their own anecdote, maybe they're inaccurate. They said, first time visiting your church, our pastor, a white pastor, has been telling us to repent of our whiteness.

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I said, I don't know what to, God made me white. I don't know how to repent of it. I don't want to be a racist.

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I don't want to have this sin of partiality. But I'm a white supremacist now. That's an impossible burden.

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And I do think many people, it's not just cranks on the far right who are trying to gin up votes.

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I think good, ordinary, faithful church people are feeling that.

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I'm gonna stop right there. So I think it's obvious Kevin DeYoung is nervous.

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I think he did a decent job here, but he didn't go for the jugular, right? Racism, actually, if you're speaking in terms of ethnic partiality, does exist.

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He didn't say it didn't exist. I'm just saying it does exist, though, in a category that he's not even probably thinking of, which is, now it's been flipped to where you can't get a job, all things being equal, if you are white.

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If there's a minority who has the same qualifications, sometimes not even the same qualifications, in some industries, it is harder to get a job if you're a white person.

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There have been now barriers placed in the way of that. And so we're entering this time of, we have entered a time where your stories, if you're someone who's proud of your

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American heritage, how many stories are there out there that reflect that today? Shows on television, anything.

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And then compare that to all the different media things being produced to fight racism by telling stories of racism from the past and so forth.

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It's really not much of a comparison. We're seeing an in with the new and an out with the old.

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And the old is, white men in particular, straight white males, they are at a disadvantage in many fields, especially the higher you go in elite circles.

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So yeah, there totally is ethnic partiality that actually does exist and still exists.

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And I think it'd be fine if Kevin DeYoung pointed that out. I think that would be, in fighting racism, in the name of fighting racism, you're actually, you're doing the very thing that I thought you were trying not to do.

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And then you get into this, what is racism? That would be a really good discussion to have. Is it, you have to have power to be a racist?

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Because if that's true, then that doesn't accord with the scriptural definition of what sin is.

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So they're not really getting at the root issues. They're kind of dancing on the surface still, in my mind, in all this.

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And I think Kevin DeYoung is doing a decent job, but it's decent at best. It could really, you could tell he's struggling.

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And I gotta give him credit, in the room he's in, maybe I would be doing worse. A lot of pressure in that room. It's really difficult in that room to really take a big shot at critical race theory, name the names of the people in evangelicalism that are pushing it.

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It would just take a lot of courage to do that kind of a thing. And so anyway, that's kind of how

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I am seeing it. I'm trying to think what else Kevin DeYoung said that I, there was something and I'm forgetting it.

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I let him speak too long. I should have paused it when I thought about it. Anyway, let's keep going here.

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I don't think we have too much longer. You're quoting the visitor at your church, describing themselves, that the pastor at their previous church was describing them in such a way now that they are supposed to understand themselves as a white supremacist.

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But they do not understand themselves to be a white supremacist at all. Bobby? Kevin, you're not a white supremacist.

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I think it's important to say, and I'm really frustrated at the

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Christian voice in this conversation when we weaponize words. When we don't speak like brothers, and we don't speak the truth in love, then we're not being instruments of reconciliation.

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I think we need to strive for having one mind in these conversations. And I think it has to start with the church.

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I'm going to let the world do what the world does. They don't have the Holy Spirit. They haven't been reconciled to God and to each other.

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The wall hasn't been torn down between them, opposing groups, but it has between Christians. And so I think we have to use the grace that God has given to us to model this unity that Christ died for us to have.

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And I think we have to do that. And I think we're doing it now. And I think one of the reasons why we're hearing a lot about racism now, and it is because of the legacy of a past, that when we were, we were really segregated.

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So black and white people didn't go to the same schools, didn't go to the same Bible conferences. And because we did that for so many years, our platforms are still fairly segregated.

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There are really black denominations that as many people are here will be there, and there'll be no white people there. Let me stop here.

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There's different things that, one of the history professors I had said this well, that there are numerous forces at work that essentially converge to produce the state of affairs that exist today.

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It's never one thing. You can certainly have fun tracing things, one things through history, but it's numerous things converge, and they're converging all the time.

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History is complicated, but here's the thing. With this situation, the assumption is just that it's just one thing.

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Segregation caused the situation that we're in today. And there's some problems with making it that simple.

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It doesn't mean that that didn't contribute, but what it does mean is that it doesn't actually describe why, why is there like a

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Chinese church down the street from my church? And it's a Chinese Christian church, why? Is that also because of racism, or is it because people that have traditions, culture, sometimes it's based on language, they want to come to a church that has people like them, and they worship sometimes in different ways.

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I've talked about it before when I went to a black church and had a great time, and I could have gone there and submitted to the pastor,

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I think. I mean, they seem to have decent theology and the rest from what I understood. But the thing is, they worshiped in a very different way.

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Their sermons were very different from what I'm used to. There would be a lot of things for me to get used to, and I wouldn't go in there with the attempt to change any of it.

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I think actually I want them to keep it the way that it is. I think it's a unique and a beautiful thing.

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So I think people tend to also make decisions based upon what kind of sermons are going to help them learn and grow, and what kind of music helps them worship better and facilitates that.

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And it is gonna be a little different. There is a little bit of a subjective element sometimes to some of these things. And people are gonna generally tend to be attracted to those who are similar to them.

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And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. That's not like an evil thing. Are people in black churches now,

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I mean, they're supposed to all go to white churches. And this is like, or they're a racist. I mean, look, here's the thing too.

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I just read this the other day, it was like 1968 or 69. It was basically the same almost.

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The vast majority of black people were against interracial marriage, just like the vast majority of white people were.

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It was like two percentage points difference. And it's like, this wasn't all just, well, white people just forced black people into this.

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They all wanted to be in a white institution. That's clearly not the case, because now that that is permissible in denominations and organizations in which it wasn't, you don't see streams of black people showing up or other ethnicities showing up too.

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People tend to be comfortable with the people that are like them. People in the areas in which they live, people who have similar interests, similar cultural backgrounds and traditions, and you just understand each other.

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There's mutual trust. It's the trust thing. I've talked about this. Talked about it in the last episode. So to just make it like, that's the reason.

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No, it's not. It might be a contributing factor to some extent, but less and less so as time goes by.

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In fact, a lot of evangelical organizations are doing their utmost to like go the opposite direction, give scholarships.

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Southern is doing that. Southeastern has done that. I just heard of another college recently doing this, where they're giving out all these scholarships and full rides and all the rest to people who are black or Hispanic or Asian, just to try to diversify their campus, because they think it's wrong if it's not that way.

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And it's not creating hordes of people, just like hordes of white people aren't going to institutions in which, well, actually, let me put it this way.

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Hordes of Appalachians aren't showing up at a Lutheran seminary either in the Midwest. It's just, there's another reason for that other than they'd be discriminated against.

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All right. Hmm, let's just finish this. So the fact that we are trying now to sit at a table together and having these conversations, we're having conversations about race openly and publicly, and prayerfully, we can make progress.

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We can de -weaponize the language. We can have a lot of intentionality in what we do, like Jesus did in John chapter four, when he intentionally tore down the wall in Samaria, like Ronald Reagan said, tear down this wall.

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But to tear down the wall, I think it takes a sitting at the table. I think it's recognizing we have different communities, because redlining still,

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I live in a black community, and so my churches are gonna be black. But because Christ made his one body, very eclectic,

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I think we have to intentionally, as uncomfortable as these conversations may be, and these spaces may be, we have to love each other.

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Let me just say this. You know, one of my kids was really struggling. I have six kids, well, they all, at different times, struggle,

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I struggle. But my wife and I were really thinking we were gonna lose one of our kids. And I just said, honey,

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I'm going to, by all the power and grace God gives me, I'm going to keep this relationship.

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That I said that I'm going to keep this relationship. And I think we have to do that. I think we have to,

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I can be misunderstood, I can be defrauded, but I think we don't help keep the relationships when we turn around and hurt and injure each other.

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So I think the circle of voices, left and right, aren't helpful. I think one of the books that we just gave out this weekend has a man endorsing it who rejects

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Jesus Christ, who rejects the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and Ben Shapiro.

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So if we're listening to the circle of voices, then James says there's a source of the wisdom we use.

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It could be a demonic source. Left or right. So if we're leaning too hard with the CRT scholars when they talk about there's no way out of, or they classify our whole group as being guilty of something, if we listen to that voice, or if we listen to the voice on the right that demonizes anybody who says that there's still a legacy that we have to resolve, then if we listen to either one of those voices, we're not listening to the spirit that's bringing about reconciliation.

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I think it's happening on both sides. So wait, who are the voices? So there's not a legacy that we have to resolve.

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What would be the resolution then? What does that look like? That's the thing. Nothing practical has been suggested here.

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Do we resolve it by what? None of these institutions are forcibly segregated.

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See, this is the issue. Critical race theorists often say this kind of thing where it's like, well, we have so far to go.

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We gotta do this and that. And oftentimes they don't get very specific with what their plans are and how they intend to accomplish it.

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When they do, people are horrified and run away from it. So we have to run away from the voices who think there's a legacy that we need to rectify today.

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But how? To rectify what? Right? There's no specifics given here.

32:31

And unfortunately, Kevin Young's not giving any specifics. He says that critical race theory threatens the gospel. He said that at the beginning of this panel discussion.

32:38

And no specifics are given to where, who, how. This is why this discussion is very frustrating.

32:45

The moment we're in, we passed this. This discussion was for 2015, 16. It would have been great.

32:50

Maybe even 17, 18. But now, in 2022, we're just so far down the path of this that it's time to have some real hard discussions and what is worth disassociating over.

33:06

Because it's not enough to say, love, love, love. Let's sing kumbaya. We just gotta love each other even though we disagree on this.

33:13

When you have one guy saying, oh, actually, this threatens the gospel. And the other guy saying,

33:19

Pastor Bobby, saying that actually the thing that you said threatens the gospel is a useful tool for understanding the race relationships in the

33:28

United States even to the present. So we only have like four minutes left.

33:34

So I don't know if they're gonna get there. We'll see. Unfortunately. Thank you, Bobby. Thank you for,

33:41

Kevin, thank you for your comments. Brothers and sisters, it's 12 .05. If we're gonna get to lunch, the situation here at lunch is tight.

33:48

We're gonna have to go. We knew when beginning this conversation, we wouldn't get very far. We thought these days, it's so rare to find

33:54

Christians who will disagree kindly and charitably and clearly in public. We thought if we could begin that, that would be helpful.

34:01

Thanks, Bobby. Sure, Bobby wants one last thing. Yeah, in these conversations,

34:08

I keep saying, can I say one more thing? That I wanna encourage my brothers and sisters, a lot of progress has been made. I think of what happened to Emmett Till.

34:16

If you don't know the Emmett Till story, look it up. And I think of, and that's my dad's lifetime. I think of what happened to Rodney King.

34:23

And then I just look at the responses of late, like a George Floyd. I think that black people have been frustrated that they can't get the jurisprudence, they can't get these cases in court and get a fair hearing.

34:33

And I think that's all changing. I do think that we don't live in a millennial kingdom.

34:39

I don't think that this is a theocracy. So I don't know that secular, unbelieving people are gonna reconcile over these things.

34:45

So I don't know that we're gonna get to the utopian ideal, idealized idea that America is gonna be without a sin of strife racially.

34:54

Thank you, Bobby. No one's ever accused me of being particularly helpful on CRT, but just as a pastor to pastor, simply three things on the larger topics of race that I would say that you could do that would be helpful.

35:07

Number one, make sure you try to go to at least one conference where you're racially in the minority.

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And now for those of you who here are Asian American, African American, that's super easy. Congratulations, you're doing that right now. But for those of you who are white, that can be a little harder and like, oh, where is that?

35:26

How do I find that? I would encourage you to do that work. If you want a good one to go to, go to HB's, Cutting It Straight.

35:34

I mean, there are good conferences out there where you can, you just learn things. I remember my first morning in Africa, kids wanting to come up and touch my skin.

35:44

We all want to do that, Mark. Well, thank you, Kevin. So go to a conference in which you're a minority.

35:51

Two, build personal relationships with pastors of different races.

35:57

Build those personal relationships so you can have conversations like this that are even easier in private. As hard as they are, they're easier in private.

36:04

And number three, try to read widely in American history. Try to learn what's going on.

36:10

Try to learn things that have happened that maybe you didn't have to be aware of that there's much for us to be aware of and know of.

36:18

Let me just close this time in prayer and then off to lunch and we will see you back here for priest singing at 1 -5 -0.

36:25

Okay, so that's the end of it. They never really did get to the root issues, unfortunately, which is sad to me because they had an opportunity.

36:33

They didn't give it a lot of time either. I'm sure it was probably one of the more well -attended panels of the conference, but I don't know if I have any other additional thoughts for how it ended there.

36:47

I think Pastor Bobby kinda, he talked about that progress was being made because they could get their cases, black people could get cases,

37:01

I guess attention on cases that were important to them. And what he sees as progress,

37:07

I think most people who are suspicious of CRT actually see as something very negative, that you have the assumption of guilt on the part of the police officer being the thing that produces the attention from the media.

37:23

And then that gets the super media -energized, focused court hearing, which doesn't produce justice as easily because everyone's nervous about what the media's thinking.

37:36

And it just makes the whole thing, not racially, but it just puts an unnecessary pressure.

37:46

And so what he's seeing as the very reason for that is because CRT is making people assume the

37:53

CRT -infused minds are thinking it's gotta be racism when there's no evidence for it. And that's what makes these things media spectacles.

38:01

So even that, there's just such a divide and it's not being rectified by conversations like this.

38:08

Nothing was really accomplished in that, significantly, at least. There were no sparks or fireworks and there's still this sort of sense of like we can have unity still.

38:18

It's like, guys, it's 2022. Your churches have been splitting for like three years at least, and there's been all kinds of...

38:27

The dust hasn't quite settled, but the dust is settling and it's just ripping denominations apart.

38:33

I mean, it's one of the reasons T4G is really ending. And this is the lackluster kind of response to all of that is we're gonna have this...

38:39

We can love each other and sing kumbaya kind of, and we have these disagreements, but we're never really gonna go deep and really discuss them fundamentally and name names.

38:47

So anyway, that's my opinion. That's just what I think. What do you think? You can write in the comments. That's it for today.