CPAC Update: Secularism and the Future of Conservatism

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I've got a lot to get to today. I want to talk to you about last week.

I was at CPAC, why I was there, and then give you some observations about things I noticed about the future of conservatism.

So that should be interesting. Also, no episode of mine in the last few weeks at least, last few months really, would be complete without mentioning something about the crazy world of Southern Baptist.

So we'll talk about that and a few other fun things. Secularization really is the theme I would say for this particular episode.

Before we get to any of that though, a few announcements. Number one, I will be at the Shepherds Conference this coming week.

If you're going to be there, please let me know. Facebook message me, Twitter message me, that's the best way to get to me. Number two,

I will be busy the next couple weeks, like really busy. I have a hard deadline on a thesis

I have to submit, a rough draft for it. And part of this is working on some social justice related issues that I'm hoping to use for a future project this summer that I won't say anything more about.

You can wait in anticipation on what that is. But I'm hoping to get some guest hosts for this.

I may be able to put out some short videos, but for those who wonder, hey, where'd John go? Is he slackening off?

No, if anything, I'm actually working harder. It's just that some of this work is going to be like an iceberg.

It's underneath the surface and it will emerge. It will emerge. It's just a matter of time. But just wanted to give you a heads up on that.

Thank you, by the way, for all those who support my work, who have enabled me to go to places like CPAC, who have enabled me to even do some of the research that I'm going to be doing.

And so I appreciate that so much. Now, before I get started with the main material,

I want to talk a little bit about this. Philip Haney is a, what was a

Department of Homeland Security whistleblower during the Obama era. And I got the privilege of meeting Phil.

I rode in the car with him, talked to him for about 25 minutes. Just a really sweet guy.

Really nice. He's a born again Bible believing Christian from what

I know. And he unfortunately passed away last week. And I know some people that were close to him and it's being ruled a suicide.

It is not a suicide from everything that I can tell from what

I've been hearing. Enemies within the church will probably, probably be putting out something on this.

They interviewed Phil. He will be speaking from the grave and enemies within the church movie when, when that comes out. That's actually why

I was at CPAC was to raise support for that. And I think they're about 70 % of the way there. They just need to get over the hump they have to finish the film.

And Phil Haney was part of that. Judd Saw, the director, tells me that he thinks that Phil Haney, he knows he told him personally and I believe

Kerry Gordon, the face of the film, but he thinks he might have him on film saying that if I'm ever found dead, it wasn't a suicide.

And so they're looking into that right now. But figured I mentioned that. Please pray for his family. It's good that he was a believer in the

Lord Jesus Christ, repentant of his sins, trusted in Christ and has that hope.

But his family, I'm sure, is grieving over this. And it's just a really just sad thing.

I'm not going to speculate right now or say anything more about the details of this other than it does not look like a suicide, which is what they're ruling this.

So to the main subject of today, secularization really is the word that I would use to talk about, sort of tie together everything we're going to be talking about.

On the left, there's Bernie Sanders there. And it's an article that says he doesn't think that Christians are fit to hold public office.

Now Snopes is disputing this. Essentially, here's the transcript. He said that those who claim that Muslims do not know

God or stand condemned, those are the kind of people, they shouldn't be in the public square. And so really, here's the deal.

If you're an Orthodox Christian, and you hold Orthodox beliefs about the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ, you're not fit.

And we're seeing this just from, it's not just Sanders, I'm using that as just one. I think it was a statement he made in 2017.

It's one example. But Christian beliefs on sexuality, especially, are not really viewed as appropriate for the public square.

And this is a problem. And the secular world doesn't necessarily want Christians to just go away.

They want Orthodox Christians to go away. A Christianity that doesn't challenge the status quo is fine.

It was the same way in the Roman Empire. As long as you did your sacrifice to Caesar, you were fine. If you refuse to do that and say

Caesar was Lord, you're in trouble. And so if you're a true Christian, you're not going to do that. And so we have to make these distinctions.

We have two Christianities. We're going to have the Christianity that is going to try to become ingratiated with the power structures of the country.

And then we have the Christianity that's true. And more likely, that kind of Christianity is not going to be in positions of authority, unless they're able to convince enough people to vote for them in public office or in other ventures.

They're going to have to find some grassroots support. But we are seeing secularization just come at us full speed.

It's been coming for years, hundreds of years really. But it's really starting to become,

I would say, totalitarian in its approach.

And then on the right, this is an example of Christianity ingratiating itself. This is a false kind of Christianity, I think, creeping up.

It's an article from Christianity Today that came out recently. Polyamory. Pastors next.

Sexual frontier. And I'm not going to read for you any quotes, or you can go look at it yourself. But the way in which polyamory is treated here, we would not treat any of the, let's say, less than desirable sins.

We would never treat racism the way they're treating polyamory, with a fine -tooth comb and kid gloves, essentially, trying to understand what polyamory is and develop some compassion for those who have these tendencies.

And there should be some compassion, but the prophetic voice is being completely lost. And we are, and when

I say we, those who identify as Christians are being more and more sucked into a secularized culture.

And that's really the root of a lot of the issues that we're seeing out there. I want to talk about this.

This is a sign that I saw at the Smithsonian, the

Natural History Museum. It says, what does it mean to be human? How are humans today different from other apes, primates, and mammals?

And this exhibit shows how the characteristics that made us human evolved over six million years as our ancestors struggled to survive during times of dramatic climate change.

Now, there's a lot of leftist assumptions in that, but here's the point. This is a hard question for secularists.

Think about it. Why should we treat humans different than we should treat dogs or rats or,

I don't know, coronavirus? Why are humans different than that? We don't kill humans.

We like to kill diseases, right? They're both living. Well, here's what the exhibit said.

Well, we've gone through this long evolutionary process to where we've come. And where we've come is a state in which we can think in abstract terms.

We have abilities and characteristics the animal kingdom doesn't have. Well, it's true that we have these abilities, right? Well, so here's where the logic leads, though.

If you think about it, the exhibit didn't go this direction, but I'm asking you to think with me.

If we are different than dogs because we have higher mental faculties, what about someone who is mentally handicapped versus someone who is

Einstein genius? Is the person who's Einstein genius more worthy of living than the person who's mentally handicapped?

You can see where this logic goes and we know where this logic has gone. So this is a problem for secularists.

Now, what does it have to do with what I'm about to talk about, which is critical race theory, intersectionality, et cetera, et cetera.

We can just call it all critical social justice theory. Here's what it has to do with it. This came out,

I believe, today or yesterday. This is Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. Esau Macaulay on reading while black.

And this is a textbook article. You can go read it on standpoint epistemology.

And I talked about this with you last week with Bill Roach, standpoint epistemology. And Bill made the point that, and I'm going to just try to summarize this for you before I connect these two things.

Bill tried to make the point that in its current iteration, standpoint epistemology says that your level of oppression gives you an ability to see things that those who have privilege don't see.

So if you are a single black female who's left -handed and introverted, you're really oppressed.

And you can see things that those who are in majority culture perhaps can't see.

So they should just listen to you and you should give them the lens by which you look at everything through. You have a certain truth. You have ability of looking at things, right?

They have their truth. You have your truth, but your truth in the current hierarchy is actually more truth.

It's more truthy. There's a little more to it that we should listen to and let direct our public policy, so forth and so on.

That's where we're at. Now, the problem with this is that as you get going and as you develop more characteristics, everyone's experience is different.

So everyone has a different lens eventually. I mean, you can try to create these kind of Marxist, neo -Marxist social groups, but there's variations in those.

And so you could say there's the black community, but within that community, there's a huge wide array of different experiences.

And so you end up on these islands of thought where you have your view and you can't really communicate with anyone else completely.

It's very difficult because you see things differently than they see things. And well, you have your truth. They have their truth.

And obviously there is a sense in which there's an effort to try to let certain viewpoints run the show, so to speak.

But we're told that, especially myself as a white male who's heterosexual,

I am part of the hegemony. I'm unable to fully get it in the current hierarchy that we are seeing emerging.

So all that to say, I'm going to connect it now to evolutionary Darwinian thought, but how do we relate to one another in a world in which everyone has their own view based on their experience, based on what they do, based on what they've seen?

Well, we have a hard time doing it. There's really no unity in that. Compare that with a

Christian understanding of the Imago Dei. Now I know a lot of social justicians will throw out the Imago Dei and say, well, you know, the immigrant and the sojourner,

Imago Dei, we can't deport them or something like that, which is a complete misapplication of what the

Imago Dei is. They're just using it for political power. They're not really thinking about what the Imago Dei is. The Imago Dei, the image of God, is what gives us all intrinsic worth and relatability.

It means we're all of the same, in a sense, the same nature, same substance. We actually have emotions that are similar to one another because we're both made after the image of God.

There's actually a blueprint for both of us, and it's the same blueprint. We can relate.

We can have things like sympathy. I don't have to enter into every single experience that you have to have sympathy.

That's why empathy is so big right now. Sympathy isn't, right? Because it's all about you have to see things through this lens.

But really, biblically, sympathy is really what we should be aiming for because I can never enter into your experience, and you can't enter into mine.

Not completely, not 100 percent. Everyone's unique. But we have a common nature, and our experiences play out in the context of this common nature, which is given to us by God.

There's something beautiful in that. There's something that Western civilization has understood that not every civilization has.

Think about the caste systems of India, and you're more spiritual if you're in the top of the caste system.

Western culture hasn't even said that, even during times of slavery. Western culture, the more

Christian it has been, the more I think of what Robert E. Lee said about the ground being level at the foot of the cross.

There's this understanding that we both have access to God. We both can relate to one another.

Okay, that's a beautiful thing. We understand this. Which understanding is based upon evolution?

Critical social justice theory or Christianity? And the answer is critical social justice theory.

It came from a Darwinian evolution understanding. Or I should say, it doesn't make sense unless we start with that understanding.

The idea that we've evolved, and we're just products of nature, and we have these abilities, and these capabilities, and these understandings that the animal kingdom doesn't have.

But you know what? They've developed differently. We have now different social groups that see things differently.

Now there's different worths ascribed. We're putting different premiums on certain people's truth over other people's truth, and their story over someone else's story.

And in some ways, we're saying this group is more worthy of respect than this group.

Not because of something in them that says they're living up to some standard of decency, but because of their experiences and the social group into which they were born.

This is consistent with a Darwinian evolution understanding of human worth. And I could probably do a whole episode on this, but it really clicked with me more when

I was in that museum, and I'm looking around, and I'm thinking, this is the foundation of what we're fighting, guys.

It's not a Christian understanding of who human beings are, and what

God designed them to be. Because we're made in the image of God, we all have access to the tools of reason.

Because our maker is the author of those tools. It's not something that is particular to one social group or another, or one social group has it down more than another because of their level of oppression.

No. That is not a biblical understanding. That is very consistent with an evolutionary understanding of human beings.

And so I just wanted to point that out. Maybe this needs more development, but just an interesting thought today.

Now, I want to switch gears a little bit here. The Southern Baptists, I actually had about a million things

I could have put up here, and I decided that I would just put this up. The Southern Baptists are in campaign mode.

I think they have chat rooms where they just all, the bigwigs all get together and they say, what are we going to do? What's our next play?

So Albert Moeller, a couple of weeks ago, put out the convictional cooperation at the Southern Baptist Convention, and it's just a call for unity.

We can just all kind of come around this Baptist faith and message. And of course, the seminary heads all circling the wagons, and yes, we agree.

The thing is, it's peace, peace, and there is no peace. You can't just come around these documents. And I've pointed this out a million times, but these documents, like the

Baptist Faith and Message 2000, they're being interpreted in different ways, and you have to get at the underlying assumptions that people are approaching these documents with.

If you're approaching, I've said this before with inerrancy, if you're saying, I believe in inerrancy, I signed the document, but meanwhile, you're accepting the idea that, yeah, different cultures, they have their ways of looking at things, and we should rid ourselves of white privilege and read the

Bible through the lens of the oppressed, or something like that, well, you've given up objectivity. You've really given up inerrancy.

You can sign that thing all day. It doesn't matter. And my concern right now for the elites in the

Southern Baptist Convention is that they are trying to quell what they know is a forest fire.

They're trying to put it out, and they're going about it by saying everything's fine, instead of addressing the issues.

And I have actually, I have a ton of references I could have put up here in the last couple weeks of Al Mohler, where he's kind of pivoting.

He's trying to appeal to conservatives and liberals and not make mistakes. And instead of just taking a side, and I'll tell you what taking a side looks like.

Taking a side looks like talking about what's happening in his own backyard. Talk about Matt Hall. Deal directly with what

Matt Hall has said. And Jarvis Williams and Curtis Woods. Deal directly with what's happening at Southeastern.

If you're not going to do that, if you're going to talk about what's happening in the Methodist or what

Christianity Today said or something else, then that's not really taking a stand. It's a political maneuver.

And to give you one example of a political mover, Albert Mohler for a long time, I could have given you a lot of examples, but he's been saying that when the

Southern Baptist Convention was formed kind of out of slavery, and this is repeated often, that this is the reason the

SBC formed. Here's what he's saying now, and I'm just going to contrast those.

Seminary President Albert Mohler summarizes, the founding fathers of this school, all four of them, were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery,

Mohler writes. Many of their successors, he says, advocated segregation and the inferiority of African Americans.

We knew in generalities that the founders of the seminary owned slaves. We knew in generality that they'd been very much a part of Southern culture, the culture of reconstruction and even legal segregation, but it had never been documented.

The report, written by six current and former faculty members, draws heavily on the seminary's own archives.

It acknowledges the only reason a separate Southern Baptist denomination was formed back in 1845 was because Northern Baptists refused to appoint slaveholders as missionaries.

The SBC is first and foremost established for the purposes of missions and evangelism, congregationalizing, planting churches.

It's about reaching the nations for Christ, and so there are many things that people want a denomination to talk about, but the

SBC was established in the beginning only to foster and engender foreign missions, or what we now call international missions and home missions, we now call

North American missions, and that still has to be the very heart of what we're doing. So look out for that going forward.

I think things are coming at a mile a minute in the SBC, the developments happening. I mean, the ERLC right now is kind of getting ready for being put under the microscope, and they're sensitive about that.

I don't have all the answers for what's going on in every quarter. There's a lot happening, some good, some not so good, but we're moving towards the convention, and I think things are just going to keep heating up, and we just need to be careful that we don't get sucked into something that sounds good, but doesn't actually address the real problem.

The real problem needs to be addressed, and that is the fact that critical social justice theory is being used in the

Southern Baptist Convention as more than just an analytical tool, and I've pointed this out and given you plenty of evidence over the last year for where this is happening, why it's happening, and how it's happening.

I wanted to say a few things about Southeastern real quick. I have more for a future episode, but I just want to say these two things, because this is happening pretty soon.

Number one, Neil Shenvey's going to be there tomorrow, or depending on when I upload this, it might be tonight. I'm going to be on a flight, so I don't know when

I'll get to this, but I wanted to just make a prediction here and make an observation. I haven't said much about Neil Shenvey, and I want to do that real quick.

I've appreciated some of Neil Shenvey's work. Him and Pat Sawyer have written for the Gospel Coalition, and Neil's gone back into some of these primary sources for critical theorists and analyzed them.

Good to do that. He said some good things. Here's the interesting part, though.

Here's the thing that makes me nervous a little bit, and I'm going to tell you why. Last summer,

I got into a friendly exchange with Neil Shenvey where we were disagreeing. He was saying that intersectionality can be used in a church ministry.

You can have a single mom's ministry. That's intersectionality. I was saying, that's not intersectionality.

There's a kernel of truth to that. They always start out with a kernel of truth, because we all know different identities have unique identities, have different forms of oppression or different privileges, and maybe there's different needs they have.

Kimberly Crenshaw Williams moved identity politics in this direction. She said that certain demographics, for instance black females, need unique political representation because they're uniquely oppressed.

This is intersectionality. Neil Shenvey's saying these observations are good observations.

I would say, yeah. This is kind of a duh observation. You don't need intersectionality for this. You just need to look around and say, everyone has unique needs.

Of course. That's why we have handicap parking. That's why we have a lot of things. Here's the thing.

We don't go the extra step and say, well, because this person is uniquely disadvantaged, they have a unique way of viewing truth.

We should just sit down and listen to them. This is the ERLC. This is Russell Moore and his Caring Well Conference. This is all the victims that stand up and they talk about their experience.

Instead of having biblical pastors saying, this is how we're addressing in our church abuse and how we don't have abuse in our church because we're applying the

Bible rightly. You have speakers instead that have been abused. Some of them probably emotionally unstable. They're getting up there and they're the experts now and they're telling pastors what to do.

Do you see how the roles are reversed in a sort of a way? Instead of those who understand the word of God and can apply it, you need this unique understanding that's outside of the scripture.

It's fine to listen to a story. No one's arguing against that, but it's the platforming of the story and the story must be bowed down to and everyone must submit to the story.

You cannot question the story. This person is the authority now because they've been abused and they're going to tell churches what to do about abuse.

That's where the standpoint of epistemology comes in. That's the same thing with, this is where intersectionality can lead.

Those with a unique forms of oppression are going to be running the show because they have a unique way of looking at truth and it's the victimology hierarchy.

That's where it's off. I haven't heard Neil really explain that.

Maybe he has, but I pointed this out to him and he seemed intent on maintaining that intersectionality.

We have a lot we can learn from this. He doesn't see, at least he hasn't, maybe he's changed now, but he hasn't seen critical race theory and intersectionality as worldviews.

He's not seeing the big picture, in my opinion. I haven't seen that from him. He seems to focus on the analytical tool.

Here's one example. He supports, unless he's changed his mind recently, he has supported up until recently,

Resolution 9. Or he has at least said that, well, it didn't endorse critical race theory as a worldview, so therefore the

Bible is supreme in Resolution 9. Not understanding that in order to take critical race theory or any of the critical theories as an analytical tool means you have to adopt it in some sense as a worldview.

It is literally a lens by which you will look at everything through. I could say a lot more, but here's why

I'm a little nervous about this. Part of me wants to say it's good, but something's off. Here's why

I think something's off. At Southeastern right now, students have been given extra credit to go to this speech by Neil Shenvey.

Neil Shenvey, he's a member at Summit Church where J .D. Greer is. I don't know what that means, but I'll just throw that out there.

That's where he goes. Why is Southeastern so big into pushing?

Why do they want to platform Neil and why do they want people to go listen to Neil? I've had it on good accounts from others that some of the biggest social justice warriors

I know are saying, you know, you should really listen to Neil Shenvey. It's like he's the approved guy that the more left -leaning evangelicals and Southern Baptists in particular, that they want to platform him as the expert.

Now, why is that? It's hard for me to go down this path right now because there's a lot of things

I know behind the scenes that aren't publicly available and I wish they would, but I know of, as much as I can say,

I know of two seminaries, Southeastern's one of them, that have decided not to platform or we'll say disinvited or decided not to platform certain big name evangelicals who are very critical of social justice.

And the reason for it is because of their positions, but they are making it a requirement for students to go listen to Neil Shenvey.

So if you're a student and you're listening, there's probably a lot of questions, clever questions you could ask of Neil, but my prediction is he's going to come out hard against critical race theory, but he's not going to put a name and a face with it in the

Southern Baptist convention. If anything, he's probably going to give people like Walter Strickland and Matt Hall passes because, well, they're not using it as a holistic worldview.

They're just using some observations from it. So question you can ask to Neil Shenvey, first of all, is critical race theory a analytical tool or is it more than that?

And see what he says. That would probably be a good question if there's a Q and A time or ask him what he thinks.

There's a lot of Matt Hall quotes out there. Find some Matt Hall quotes and say, do you agree with this?

And get him to start taking sides. Because that's one thing I haven't seen him really doing.

A very telling question to ask was, is there a value neutral way to interpret scripture?

This is a very clever, I think, question. Is there a value neutral way to interpret scripture?

So this will get down to the heart of, do we take our white privilege with us? And is it inevitable that we're going to read the scripture through our white privilege or through our

Asian privilege or through our level of oppression of some kind? Or is there a value free way to interpret scripture?

Is there a grammatical historical way we can use these tools to find out what scripture means? That'll be a very telling question for Neil Shenvey.

And maybe someone will show him this clip, so he'll be ready for it. I don't know. There's so many other questions that you could probably ask, but those are just a few off the top of my head that if I was there,

I'd probably be asking Neil some of these questions. But I just think that's very interesting.

And again, nothing personal against Neil whatsoever. He seems like a very nice guy. And I just think it's curious that a guy like Tom Askell is a pariah, but Neil Shenvey is loved by the same crowd that seems to hate

Tom Askell. Why is that? Why is that? So last but not least, this is kind of the main part of the show.

I want to talk about conservatism and we're talking about secularization. Of course, the critical theories come from a secularized understanding of humanity and truth.

And, you know, CPAC is going down a very interesting road right now. I'm going to give you my story sequentially.

I arrive in Washington, D .C., took a train from Lynchburg, I get off the train and I get into a

Lyft car. And the guy who's my Lyft driver does it on the side, but full time or part time, I don't know which, he is a social justice, definitely social justice driven pastor, youth pastor.

And he says to me before I even tell him who I am, that when I said I'm from Lynchburg, he said he would never go down there because it's racist.

Lynchburg is racist. And I'm like, I mean, no, maybe at one time there, but I wouldn't say it's characterized by that.

But he was insistent that it's in the South, it's racist. But then he started complaining about Washington, D .C.

being racist. And if you if you killed a man in Washington, D .C., if there was a murder, if you were white, they'd really investigate it with a fine tooth comb.

And if you're you're a minority, if you're black, he was a black man. He said if they killed me that they wouldn't care about my life.

So that's how we got the conversation started. So he asked me what I'm doing. So, well,

I'm here for CPAC. I'm here because I'm promoting a film called Enemies Within the Church.

And he said, what's that about? And so it's about the social justice neo -Marxist push in churches, particularly conservative ones.

Well, what's that? I had an option at this point. I kind of knew where he was at politically, or at least

I assumed he probably was more on the left. And because I wanted to get an opportunity to witness to him,

I decided to take a theological instead of a political kind of way route. And so I said, well,

I believe there's a corruption of the gospel going on. There's a kind of a new understanding of repentance, of what guilt constitutes guilt.

Even the atonement, the atonement now extends to beyond individual souls, eternal things to these present structures in society.

And that was never the intention of Christ. Of course, people, as they make decisions in life, will change the structures that they live in.

That's obvious, but the gospel itself does not save political systems and things of that nature.

And so the social justice movement has corrupted the gospel in a myriad of ways. And so he thought, he said to me, well, isn't that just what

Jesus taught? I said, well, no, it's not what Jesus taught. And we started getting into a theological discussion.

Turns out this guy, and I don't really have a better name for it. He's racist. Like, like the old fashioned definition of racism.

Like he, he really, he hates white people. And, and I, and it struck me afterward.

I thought this is kind of like the way it would be the discussion and how it went. If I was talking to perhaps a

Klansman, maybe just someone who believed that certain demographics were just evil.

They're just evil. There's nothing you can do. That's who they are. And until they stop being evil, then I have nothing to say to them, that kind of attitude.

Well, that's the attitude he had towards white people. And I said to him, I said, what about a white person who, you know, grew up never having a racist inclination or thought?

I said, I mean, I, I went to a multicultural church because he was saying evangelicals are just white.

That's just the white church. I said, I went to a, you know, I had leaders of my church who were black or Hispanic.

And, you know, I, I never, I don't have any hatred for anyone. What about someone like myself who, you know,

I, I don't feel or think that I am inferior in any way. And this is what he said to me. He said, because I have power,

I can speak out against the injustices of society, but he's off the hook. He said, because I don't have power, meaning him, he cannot do anything about the injustices of society.

So there's a moral imperative that I have to match that he does not. And I said, well, what do

I have to do? Tell me what I need to do. And this is where the DNA of repentance gets changed, right? I said, tell me what

I need to do to make it right, to, to become worthy. Right. And he says, well, you have to speak out against injustices.

And I said, well, I mean, depending on your definition of that, I have done that. I do do that. Um, I think racism is a horrible thing.

And he's, he said essentially, yeah, but, and it's kind of the trajectory of the conversation, but, uh, it's just so bad for us.

And that's kind of how it kept going is just so bad. There was nothing I could do no matter what I did, no matter how

I spoke. And so there's a number of things I could have said. I could have talked about forgiveness and asked him why he's not forgiving.

I could have put him under the microscope a little. I could have, um, taken the political route. I could have said, what do you mean?

You know, uh, there, you know, that the disparities are a result of hatred. Let me tell you why there's disparities, you know, fatherlessness has something to do with this.

And I don't think those things would have worked in this. If, if my goal is to try to share the gospel with him in a 20 minute car ride.

So I went a more theological route and right or wrong, you can determine how I did, but I, I didn't think about it till about three to two thirds of the way through the conversation.

I recorded a portion of it. So here's seven minutes of a conversation that I had with my, um,

Lyft driver. And, uh, and you can listen to it and you can, um, you maybe you'll glean something from it.

I don't know. Tobacco and cotton was not going to make us the most powerful, powerful nation. So they had to move the workforce to the

North to start creating factories and all that stuff. So until those people who are afraid to confront their own until they confront their own and say, we have to change, we have to change like drastically.

So what I'm asking is put some bones or some meat on the bones. Tell me, what is it that they would have to do specifically though for them to satisfy?

Right. You don't, I keep saying it, there's a silence. So don't, you can't be silent is what

I'm saying. I'm not saying you need to go and stand in front of the white house and, but, but speak out like acknowledge, acknowledge what

America is, acknowledge what America has been and let's stop with the, with the fairy tale.

Like, you know, speak out and say what, what is going on. So even Donald Trump though would, would fit within those parameters perhaps depending on how you define what you mean by speak out.

He calls himself a Christian too. So yeah, I don't think he is. Well, I can't judge that because I like you and you can judge him by his works and he hasn't, he's never even made a profession of faith or given an understanding.

His profession is that he grew up that way, but he hasn't actually, he hasn't actually given like an explanation of how he repented and turned and how he was born again.

Like you've never heard them say that. Um, but, but anyway, so I just, it's, it's not some grand act that needs to happen, but there needs to be a voice that comes out of, and I use this term loosely, the evangelical church.

But when I say evangelical, I'm saying the white church in general. Um, there needs, there needs to be more of an outcry about what's going on, you know what

I mean? And, and what has happened historically and that this is not right and that, that you don't hear that.

And like I said, Sunday morning is still the most segregated thing in America. So like there's a reason for that, isn't it?

I mean, that, that's not, well, some of it, I mean, there's probably mixed reasons, but some of it, I think it's geography and choice as well.

There's not the same community like my mom lives in West Virginia. Her church is a little diverse, but there are churches there that me and her would not be welcoming.

People would look at us like... And that's wrong. What are you doing? Yeah, yeah. Because you're part of the... But those are the people.

Those are the people that I'm talking about.

So I would agree with you. If there's someone that's actually saying, man, we don't want certain ethnicities in our church, then they don't understand the communion that, um, the body of Christ has because we're all one in Him.

But, but here's the thing. How do you actually compel them then to change their ways, right?

I can. You can. Only God can, right? So getting them to, to become part of some political move to,

I mean, to be honest with you, that's a lazy man's way out of my opinion to, well, just vote this way and support these causes.

How about instead, you just stop doing what you're doing. Practice the love of Christ. Realize that you're part of the same body with this person and accept them in your church, invite them into your home.

Um, so that's what I would say. That's what the gospel would, I think, that's the communion table. But if you start saying that like part of the gospel is you have to be for this political move or whatever,

I know you're not, but I'm saying that's what the documentary is about. We actually have people, we have people that are saying this is a gospel issue and then, um, ramrodding this, especially like white, straight male, ramrodding them with you have guilt, you need to sort of alleviate this guilt by getting involved with this political move.

And we're saying that Christ is the one that brings the unity and that we have to look to him.

And it's a, um, it's a vertical thing, not a horizontal thing. It's vertical first, but that's where, okay, that's where I get more into the political side because this is a

Christian nation and God we trust. Um, or it was, it was formed under the idea that this, this was a

Christian nation, right? Christian assumptions. Yeah. And, uh, going back to Germany, going back to South Africa, they addressed their issues.

So, so the, the Christian church lived through all the atrocities in America.

Now what you're saying is, well, we just have to let God change it. Like God has given us, Christ has given us the power, but there's a, there's a fear.

There was a cowardice, um, spirit that, Oh, we'll just sit back and let God fix it.

Like, no, like acknowledge, acknowledge your, your, your power and use your power.

Use your voice to change things. Like that's, that's what I'm saying. Like, cause that's the problem with America to this day.

You look at, you look at, uh, South Africa, there are people who made millions of dollars during apartheid who now drive cabs for a living because that, that money was given to people who are, you know, so you look at, you look at Germany, we'll never ever go to a point to where Jewish people are killed in death, killed in, um, gas change.

Hopefully. But yeah, we still live in a world and I met in a country where African American life is not worth as much if I were to go to Lynchburg, which is a place that I would never go.

But if I were to go there, uh, my life is more in danger. So like, just like have you been to Lynchburg?

Yes. Okay. I mean I have nobody's the South. I'm not, I'm when I say Lynchburg, I say small

Southern, small Southern town. So like the idea that my parents left the South because they were safer up North, it's safer for me in DC than it is in any

Charlottesville, any, any South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, like you're free to move about the country wherever you want to go.

I have to think about where I'm going. I also have to be very, very careful of my behavior, um, where I am because I can be taken out at the drop of a hat just like my granddad could.

The only difference is I might not hang from a tree. So, so what, what's the, I mean, I know I may have dropped off, but what real quick though, what, what, what's the solution then?

Because because I keep saying it's just just right, but that's so general. So the solution, this is not,

I know what the solution to change hearts, right? Right, right. Well, I know what the solution is not. The solution is not just let

God fix it. Well, I'm not saying that. I'm saying a plot. So, so it's, it's not letting God just fix it and being passive.

It's actually becoming a new man, having a new relationship with God to where you don't view people that way with hate and you're going to let him, uh, work through every decision you make in life.

That's, that's what I'm saying. That's what the gospel does, right? But, but, but, but, but when you have people who've been in church all their lives, when do they, when does their heart change?

Well, there's a lot of people in church who aren't Christians. Donald Trump being exhibit a.

So, Hey, God bless you. Thank you for this conversation. I appreciate it. So that was my conversation with the

Lyft driver. Now I got to CPAC and, uh, I met up with Judd Saul, the director for enemies within the church.

And I, I was looking for him and as I'm looking for him, I saw a number of folks with these free thinking shirts.

Uh, and, and they were, I think they were representing, um, atheists for Liberty. And it was one of the first things

I saw at CPAC. And I just thought, Oh, that's interesting. It was like, you know, conservative, uh, political action group.

And okay, well, all right. So I found Judd Saul, the director and, uh, and we went down radio row and we just tried to see who we could talk to, to get interviews, uh, to support our film.

And as we're going down radio row, I noticed there is a, a cross dresser because a transgender person dressed very flamboyant, uh, dress, uh, and a

Trump supporter and people are taking pictures with him. And I thought, well, that wasn't expecting that.

Uh, I also noticed a number of homosexuals like rainbow flags and homosexual paraphernalia, people with t -shirts and so forth.

I noticed things like that as well. And it was just interesting to me. It didn't, wasn't like didn't characterize the whole event, but it was, it was a presence there.

Judd and I were also able to connect with some Christians there who do see the issue with the social justice movement and are concerned about it.

And, um, one person in particular, I was able to do a little audio interview and this is just one example of the kind of stories that I hear on a daily basis going on across the country.

So I just want you to hear it. All right, so I'm here at CPAC and just talking to a young lady who goes to a

PCA, Presbyterian Church, so you would think conservative, uh, out in the middle of the country.

We're not, we're withholding the names and the church, uh, name as well, uh, for now, but that will be coming out hopefully soon.

Uh, but I just want to ask you, what have you experienced as far as the social justice movement is concerned in your church?

Well, it's changing, um, all over the city and it's really getting liberal in a lot of the churches from dinner parties that I've gone to discussions that I've had with pastors of Episcopal churches, but in my own church,

I never thought it would happen. Um, I thought we were a very conservative church, biblical church.

Um, and then all of a sudden my old founding pastor has started to give sermons and literally one day we left feeling like he called us racist and talking about Jim Crow and bringing, you know, having guest speakers up talking about oppression and how it's still that way.

This is in the pulpit and in fact, I went to the restroom and, and one lady was so upset.

She said, did our pastor just call the white people racist? And, um, three of us said,

I believe he did. And it was shocking to me in, in my church. So you felt like you were being called out for racism and there's a church have a problem with actual racism, you know, uh, certain ethnic groups, uh, discriminating and saying we don't want anything to do with another ethnic group or there's inferior.

No. In fact, just the opposite. I will tell you, um, our church is one of the most diverse racial churches, racially diverse churches in, um, our area for sure.

But I would say across the country, we're one of the top fastest growing churches in the country and one of the most diverse in the country.

So, um, I was very surprised that the, that that came from the pulpit and it's, and now we've always been involved in inner city work.

We give so much of our money to the inner city and we all love it. We're all involved.

We, we do all of that. That's why it was such a shock to us to hear that from the pulpit, from our founding pastor.

And it was a change. I'm telling you it was different. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Look forward to hearing more. I know you had an organization that you wanted to research more that you thought might be influencing, uh, the direction of the

PCA and the church you're at. And we'll talk more about that, but thank you for sharing that. Appreciate it. It's really sad that this kind of thing is happening.

What I did not see at the event were constitution, founding father stuff, hardly any of that.

Uh, I didn't see social conservative stuff really, um, at all. Uh, what

I saw, uh, were people, um, really, really I, more of an identity politics stuff, you know, black conservatives and homosexuals and, uh, and all these, these different groups.

And so I started thinking to myself, you know, what, what is it that makes conservatism conservatism anymore?

Because I always went back to it's, it's the founding principles, right? It's, it's, and it's our culture too. It's not just principles that are abstract.

It's, that's the culture that, that, and I think part of that's still around. Um, but, but something's changed.

Something's, uh, kind of in the water. And I wanted to make some observations here.

I think the direction conservatism is going in. If CPAC is any barometer of this, it's social media driven.

And I, and I heard actually, I was talking to someone this morning that Trump is the first social media president that, you know,

Donald Trump, um, is, uh, you know, you had, um, you know,

Abraham Lincoln being kind of like the telegraph president. You had Franklin Delano Roosevelt being the radio president and you had

Ronald Reagan being the TV president and Donald Trump is the internet president. And, and it's true.

He was big online and now, um, it was conservatism has gotten a little trolley.

It's kind of the Breitbart brand of conservatism. It's, it's kind of just let's own the libs. Uh, and so we're getting away from,

I think principles and things like that. Intellectual conservatism is, is not what's driving it.

Celebrity is what's driving it now. So, um, so you have, it's social media driven.

Uh, you seem to have identity politics, these various groups, uh, represented that have their own kind of angle on what conservatism is to them.

I actually, I talked to, um, a homosexual there, uh, for probably about 20 minutes.

I did not record this one. I probably should have, but, uh, you know, he was saying, I believe in freedom. I believe in all these things, uh, conservative things.

And I, I got back to family values and family being the, um, uh, kind of the institution that is the, uh, that shield that is the responsibilities of family are what keep the government from being the welfare state.

You know, people take care of themselves in a family and how the family is the building block of society. And he said, I, he even said he agreed with that, but he's just a gay person who's supporting

Trump. And so, so this identity has these different identities have now kind of bleeded into, uh, conservatism as if they are important.

It's important to wear on your sleeve that this is who you are, your ethnicity, your sexual orientation, et cetera.

Uh, I would say that there's a foundation foundationalistness going on, uh, because of this.

There's, uh, what, what holds us together now is kind of this love for America, maybe strong national security.

We like the free market. We don't like socialism. It's kind of, it, it, it, the issues that, um, that we can forward now as conservatives and have all the other various groups in conservatism agree on that, that list is getting smaller, a secure border would be on there perhaps.

But the social issues now are there. They're not as prevalent. And, and so that's another observation.

Now, some positive things. I think there is a place for culture. I think, um, you know, there, there is an understanding that America is good and that what makes

America is, is not just abstract principles. It's music, it's food, it's, it's, um, you know, it's the experiences that we've had over the course of the history of this country.

And it's all sorts of various different people that make up that. And, and I think that's, that's actually a positive thing because culture is part, uh, that that's what we're defending.

That, that's really what we should be about. Um, if you don't have culture, if it's just abstract, then you, first of all, working class people don't identify with that at all.

But secondly, what are you actually defending? Just principles, uh, but principles that don't seem to have application.

And also, um, you know, it's a deviant, it's different than what conservatism has been for a long time.

It's, it's not the hearth and the home and the community, the organic community you grew up in with responsibilities and attachments.

It's not what motivated people to go to war and to fight. So I think culture is still there and a love for America is there.

And that, that's a good thing. And I, and we may be even going more in that direction. Now, what America, what, you know, what is America in every sense that might be changing.

Um, there's also a step away from elitism. I think intellectual conservatism is, is on its way out and celebrity, uh, whether you like it or not is on its way in.

And so those who are the smartest, who are the, you know, they can evaluate things. They're not necessarily going to be the hotshots in the political realm anymore.

And, uh, and, and there's some pros and cons to that, but the, the pros to it are that, um, someone who, who truly is working class, perhaps like a

Joe, the plumber type can actually maybe get somewhere. Uh, it's going to be easier.

There's less barriers. So, um, just wanted to throw that out there. Just some observations, uh, for you about CPAC.

Um, I, uh, I, I made the mistake while I was there of walking around with Judd Saul.

I interviewed Judd, I interviewed myself and, uh, and, and our microphone wasn't working. And so, um, the audio quality wasn't that good, but Judd gave an update.

All right. Hey guys, this is Judd Saul, director of enemies within the church. I just wanted to, uh, kind of give an update on where we're at with the movie right now.

We're currently at CPAC, uh, in the, uh, conservative hub. I'm just going to kind of end it with this.

Judd, um, told me that enemies within the church is moving full steam ahead. Uh, they, they haven't put out updates recently, but he's, he's been busy with a number of things, but within the next few weeks, a mini documentary about first Baptist Naples should be coming out.

And, uh, Judd Saul is going to be, uh, and enemies within the church is going to be bringing that to you. Let me just kind of tell you where we're at.

Uh, we are 80 % complete. Uh, we have another round of filming we're going to be doing in two weeks.

And then we are looking to raise the rest of the capital for the film. We need about $50 ,000 to finish off.

And then we have a little more filming to do. And then we go into post -production. Our goal is to have the film out by mid

May before the Southern Baptist convention, but we can't get that done without your help.

We do need your support. And, uh, and we just had, we had a good time at CPAC and, uh, I appreciate those who support me, allowing me to do this.

Again, if you're going to the Shepherds Conference, please, please reach out to me. I would love to see you there. And, uh, until next time,