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Retreat: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/9040d4ba8ab2ea0f58-mens Conference: https://crtconference.rockyspringschurch.org
Welcome to Conversations That Matter Podcast. I am your host, as always, John Harris, and we're gonna talk today about a number of things that some people, at least, have wanted me to talk about and some things that I just wanted to mention and talk about.
It's gonna be, we're gonna talk about Russell Moore, we're gonna talk about, I'm gonna show you a few clips, one from Matt Gaetz and another from a Christian, quote unquote, Christian podcast, but it's advocating an interesting idea about Jesus, that because he had scars in his hands, he was disabled.
A lot of really innovative readings of scripture that people didn't see for thousands of years, but all of a sudden now, we're now seeing all these things. I know there's a lot of people who are looking forward to me talking, I just wanna acknowledge this, about Carl Truman, because I mentioned it, I kind of teased it last week that I had read Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and I had some, I liked a lot of it, but I had some concerns about, just, I don't even know if concerns is the word, I just differed with him on a few things and I am gonna talk about that, it might be next week at this point, I just, I have to get my thoughts together and I don't think it's gonna be a long thing, but just some basic framing things, probably, but I will do that, but the other thing is, I'm probably next week, that's my guess, I'll be getting to this book by Carl Truman called Republocrat and I've thought about doing a series, I don't know yet, about books or figures in, quote-unquote, conservative evangelicalism who have pushed some kind of a third way, politically, and obviously, though, politics is based on moral frameworks which are based on theology, ultimately, and so there's, there tends to be a theological compromise that happens and we've seen that with Tim Keller, I've talked about this, but I've thought about some other figures because it's not just Carl Truman, I think, who has pushed kind of a third political way, there's, you have the book Jesus Made in America, which is another early book that I think kind of pushed a similar narrative and that's by Stephen Nichols, who's a theologian at Ligonier, so I mean, conservative circle, we would at least think, this is R .C. Sproul's circle, but then you look at some of the books that were published and it really is around that, like, 2008, nine, 10, 11, like that area, there seems to be this kind of pre-push, so before people knew what the social justice stuff was, there was, in these rudimentary forms, it was being introduced, and so I don't know whether I'll, I don't know exactly how I'll do all that, but I've been thinking about doing that, doing some reviews of some books that you're not reading today, you're not reading those books, but those books probably were necessary to some extent to then create the conditions for the current crop of books that are pushing the needle even more to the left, so there you go.
We're gonna do, there's a couple of more announcements. We're gonna, I'm gonna be releasing a documentary tomorrow on the Haldeman Mennonite Church, and this took travel, this took time, I filmed this, we had the editor from Last Dance Studios actually put it together, he agreed to do that, which I'm really grateful for, and it's gonna be helpful for a group of people who are in what, I'm just gonna call it a cult, they're in an organization that is not orthodox, has bad Christology, has bad soteriology, and you're shunned or you're excluded if you leave.
I mean, if you leave, there's really no coming back, and so a lot of people, not just in the Haldeman Mennonite Church, but probably other false churches with similar authority structures and doctrine are gonna be, I think, interested in this documentary.
It's gonna be eye-opening, helpful. I don't know of any other resource like this on the Haldeman Mennonite Church that really gets into the nitty-gritty of the theology and the problems with their theology, and it will be beneficial for Haldeman Mennonites, because they're not supposed to be, I guess, watching YouTube videos, so I'm told, but they do, and so it's a way to reach them when they are discouraged from publicly having a conversation with someone who's a Christian.
So that's gonna be coming out. I'm gonna have some other, I think at least two of the interviews, I'm just gonna put the interviews out there in more of a long-form conversation format, and you can check those out.
So links and all of that are gonna be available, but starting tomorrow is when I'll release it on this channel. Last Stand Studios is also gonna release it. You can go to either place and watch it on YouTube, and I'll probably end up releasing on Rumble as well, and on Facebook and other places, but YouTube is probably the easy way for you to see it, at least initially.
So wanted to let you know about that. Other announcements before we get into some of the various things that we're gonna talk about today. I wanted to remind everyone, there is a men's retreat coming up with Dr. Russell Fuller, and this retreat is, I'm very close to securing a venue, but it will be limited, and that's one of the things, I think I sometimes don't understand, or I underplay sometimes my own, I don't wanna say influence, but the interest, I should say, the interest level around something like this, something that I would be putting on or participating in, or I just tend to think, I thought 50 people maybe, tops, and this would include people from Grace Bible Church, and then people from other places.
Well, I quickly realized when I started seeing the signups that I'm like, this could be a lot bigger. This could be well over 100 people. I may be really not thinking in the right terms. I mean, I have people from half the country away saying they'll come for a weekend retreat, and so this has me thinking, and I'm just gonna let you know what I'm thinking.
I'm thinking that this will be the beginning, hopefully, of something that could end up being bigger, but I don't wanna jump in the deep end. I wanna dip my toe in and just kinda see how this goes, and so obviously, we're gonna do it.
We're gonna do the men's retreat, and it's a weekend. That's Halloween weekend. That's Reformation Day weekend. That's the 28th through 30th, but we're gonna do it, and I'm very close, like I said, to securing a venue.
It's kinda between right now a camp in the Adirondacks and then a camp in Pennsylvania just south of Binghamton, but there is gonna be a limitation, and the thing that appeals to me about this camp in the Adirondacks is I might be able to get more people.
I could probably cap it at like 100 people. The one in Pennsylvania, I have to cap it at like 70 people just because this is, people don't generally plan larger conferences or retreats this late, this close to October, and I wasn't thinking I would have a larger one, so all that to say, if you're interested in this and you know for sure this is something you will come to, you should go to the website.
I'll put the link in the info section and just put your name there because it's gonna be first come, first serve, and there will be a cap, and so that's how I know. That's how you can confirm. Now, I'll give more information to you about where and the price and all of that as we, probably next week, probably early next week, I'll be able to get that information all out there, and then we can, I'll figure out how to make that all work, but if you put your name on this, then I'll know you have preference, and anyway, it's gonna be good.
Dr. Russell Fuller's gonna talk about Jeremiah. It's gonna be Christian men. We're gonna be out in the woods and doing some man stuff, and that's gonna be good, and for years, looking for the future, looking in the future, maybe this could turn into conferences and things.
Maybe we can look at doing some bigger things. I just, I don't know. It never crossed my mind that I would really be the point man for something like that, though, I guess, and maybe I should have thought through that more, but we'll see what happens.
Anyway, that's going on. We have, oh, I wanted to let everyone know about this. There is a conference in Pennsylvania. It's actually near Grove City College. For those who don't know, there's been kind of a controversy at Grove City College on critical race theory, and I've talked about it a few times in some of my videos, but anyway, the conference is called Critical Race Theory Is It Critical or Corrupting?
Saturday, September 24th at 9 a .m., and it's hosted by Rocky Springs PCA Church. You can go to the info section. I'll put the link. This is actually a conference originally that I was supposed to speak at, and unfortunately, I can't because of family obligations.
I have a funeral. My uncle, this has been kind of a year of some tragedy for my family, but one of the things that has taken place is my uncle unexpectedly died, and so with, anyway, it's in California, so it's a distance, and the memorial service was postponed until October when the maximum amount of family could be there, and so it's on that day, and so I need to be there for that, but I still wanna just commend that people check this out and go to this conference on September 24th if you're in that area.
You have Scott David Allen and Jesse Gistan, or Gistan, I'm not sure exactly how you pronounce his name. He's a pastor in California. Scott David Allen, of course, has written a book on why biblical justice is different than social justice, and it's not that expensive.
It's only 35 bucks, and if you're a college student, it's 20 bucks, and that pays for the conference and lunch, and I told the organizer when I couldn't make it, I said, look, I'll definitely shout this out on the podcast, and hopefully people can check it out, and I don't know.
There may be another speaker coming on as well to this. I'm not positive about that, but there may be another speaker before this is over who also is gonna share, so check that out. Wish I could be there.
Can't, but that's coming up, and then I wanted to, let's see, talk about, there's a few other things. Oh, I wanna let everyone know about our sponsor for this podcast, which is Equipping the Persecuted, Helping Nigerian Christians.
Christians in Nigeria suffering from persecution. There's a civil war, essentially, going on there, and it's heartbreaking, some of the stories that are coming out. One of the ways you can help, though, is by giving to Equipping the Persecuted.
You can go to their website, equippingthepersecuted .org, and go to the Donate tab, you can click on that, and it's easy to do. There's a podcast, I mean, there's more information that you can get about the ministry, and one of the things that I like about Equipping the Persecuted is I personally know the person who runs it, Judd Saul, and I've been in the car when he gets calls from some of the people on the ground in Nigeria that he's helping supply with resources.
In fact, there's a picture of him with some Nigerian believers, and it's not just food and water, it's also technical support, walkie-talkies, body armor, that kind of stuff, trying to coordinate to try to minimize the death that's happening when people that are terrorists come into these villages and do horrible things.
It's ministering, of course, though, food and water and that kind of thing to refugee camps, and it's also bringing the gospel, and I know Judd goes there once or twice a year, and he preaches when he goes, and so that's, sometimes, I think last time he did a pastor's training conference, and so there's all kinds of things that they're doing, and I would just encourage you, that's a good organization that's not woke, and so that's really, those are the announcements that I wanted to bring to all of you.
Let's get into the nitty-gritty today. I wanna talk about this, and it's really just because I wanna talk about it. No one asked me to talk about this, but here's a story from BoundingIntoComics .com.
The Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power actors confirm show aims to erase Tolkien's work for the sake of modernity. I'm gonna read you part of this. The Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power actors completely stripped away any kind of facade that might have been built for the Prime video series that it would be faithful to Tolkien's literary work.
Instead, they made it abundantly clear that the show is dedicated to modernity in spite of Tolkien's work and his clear criticisms of it. Sofia Nome-Vette, who plays Princess Dysa in the show, spoke to PA Media where she claimed she is the face of a necessary redress of balance.
She went on to detail, we are redressing the balance within the film and television industry, and of course, this franchise, I hope, lots of franchises moving forward. These are best people for the roles, but what we've done is open the door for people of all backgrounds to come forward and have opportunities to rise.
Nome-Vette then made it abundantly clear this show has nothing to do with Tolkien's work other than the name of the series and character. She stated, to be part of a creating accessibility for generations to come, for new generations, this is their version of Tolkien.
This is what my daughter will see of Tolkien's works. She explained, it's their time and it's so important, and I hope many people will see this fantasy and be able to relate to it. This is a reflection of the world we live in.
There are many, and we are different, and we will embrace and discover and peel back and learn and educate and be educated, and we can only do what we embrace and love our differences. It's kind of a word salad, but I'll explain in a minute.
She asserted, to be the poster child and to fly the flag, being a mother, being a woman, being a person of color, being a curvaceous woman deemed as a thing of beauty is something we don't always see.
So that image of Dysa, that is all of those things personified in a face, and it happens to be my face. Another actor in the series, let's see, echoed the claim, said that the awareness of diversity with Tolkien's original source material has grown.
The cinematic world that Peter Jackson created has immense value, but we've shifted lenses since then. He continued, the conversation is different right now, but going back to the source material, the world is diverse not only in race, but also in thought.
It's a diverse mix, and now we're just adding people from diverse backgrounds. And they got so many more quotes. It just keeps going on and on about their commitment to diversity, these other actors. I believe it was the director I saw who made some kind of a statement about how we're gonna try to conform Tolkien's world to the world as it looks in reality.
And very different than Peter Jackson, who when he did Lord of the Rings, he essentially wanted to be faithful to the authorial intent to what Tolkien himself had set up. And in Tolkien's mind, this was very European.
It was European folklore that he was basing this off of. It really is kind of a Christianized fantasy, to be honest with you, the universe that he created or conceived of. And so that's something that had a lot of transcendence to it.
There was an overarching plan or a sense of providence in Lord of the Rings. One of the reasons I kind of like Lord of the Rings is that I always go back to the speech that Frodo receives from Gandalf in the Mines of Moria as kind of like, that's the big moment in Lord of the Rings for me, because I just think it shows that it gives hope.
It gives real hope where hope is actually to be found, which is in the transcendent and in the divine, it's in God. So this, you can watch the trailers for the Lord of the Rings from 20 years ago, and it's got a kind of a mystery to it, but it's got, you can just sense it.
And I can't put my finger on all the reasons you can, but you can sense that transcendent quality. And it's, like I said, faithful to Tolkien. This is not, this is not faithful to Tolkien. This is essentially a remix or a, it's a deconstruction move, actually.
It's taking Tolkien and it's trying to, quote unquote, modernize him, trying to just use him as an inspiration, use his name as, because it's popular, as a way to get people to be interested in the show.
But then it's inserting political and philosophical assumptions that Tolkien would not have made into the show. So it's a corruption of the show, or the story, I should say. And it's, and the big thing for me is it lacks that transcendent character.
It doesn't come through the trailer. It's the dialogue is poor. There's just nothing of heavier things, of mystery, of, there's nothing lofty or grandiose about it. It's got good cinematography, but it just, it's lacking the heaviness that Lord, the original Lord of the Rings had.
And then it seemed like you have, people who are of African-American, or sorry, African descent, who have Scottish accents and stuff in the story. If you wanna write a story that has that, that's okay.
There's nothing wrong with that, but that's not Tolkien. And it does come off, I think that's one of the things, it comes off as fake. It comes off as, and it's a fantasy, right? A lot, obviously this is, this didn't happen, right?
This is fake in the sense that it's, but the thing about good fantasy is it, there is a conformity to real life. There is a relationship between fantasy and the lessons that are taught there in real life.
And there's something about, there's just a lot of parallelism. And in this, I think when you do that, when you have, when you, obviously, in Tolkien's work, dwarves had beards, they look like men and stuff.
It was, I'm surprised they didn't go like the LGBT route with that. But instead, they're gonna put, it's all gonna be interracial relationships. It's all gonna be these, it just, it doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense biologically. You have these races of people now in Lord of the Rings that all, they all look so different, drastically different and stuff, but it's, they don't, it's something where it would have had to been recent immigration or something, right?
It would have, it's not something that feels ancient. It doesn't feel like this race of people has shared experiences for generations because then they'd all look alike. So it's, it kind of drops that.
And that's, I think that's one of the, that's a little thing that I think takes away from it, like that the ancient feeling of it and stuff is that, yeah, of course, in our modern world and multicultural urban places, you're gonna have a lot of recent immigrants.
You're gonna have a lot of diversity as far as that goes. But it's, but that's not like, that's not a people who have been together for generations that have all these shared experiences and shared identity and shared folklore.
And they're actually quite different. And so Lord of the Rings is gonna give you that urbanite kind of to modern urban modernity, this urban globalist kind of scenario, but in packaging it in this ancient land where you didn't have mass transit and you didn't have all the things that could have made for that.
So it just lacks, it raises questions that really can't be answered and it lacks authenticity. And I know for some, that sounds weird because it's a fantasy. How could it lack authenticity? But in these parallel universes that are created, there also has to be a certain amount of authenticity that's brought to those that explains how they got to be the way they are.
And then there's a parallel with the real world. And, but, you know, there's many issues here, but I think the big one is the whole push behind this is the push we see that's happening everywhere. It's to deconstruct and then remake in a different image.
And it's taking Tolkien and it's using his name, but not actually sticking to any kind of authorial intent of what Tolkien would have approved of. It's not trying to be true to what the author, if he were to make a series, would have wanted based on his writings and pushing an agenda.
And we're seeing it everywhere. It's in everything. And, you know, as if there's some kind of this moral quality or it's evil. I think one of the assumptions is like, it's evil if it's not quote unquote diverse.
It's discriminatory if it's not quote unquote diverse. And of course it only goes in one direction. We wouldn't, you know, should we put like all kinds of white people, right? Or Europeans or Asian people in Wakanda?
No, they don't do that. You know, they don't, they wouldn't make a film about, you know, a Chinese karate movie or something. And then make like the people who live in China who are ethnically Chinese, cast white people in those roles or something.
They don't do things. They'll have stories in China where there's Europeans and stuff, but they wouldn't actually cast in those roles because they're trying to be authentic. That's the reason they do that.
But in, I mean, there's one of the complaints of Dunkirk, you know, it's too white. Well, it's just reflecting reality. The time in Great Britain's history when World War II happened, it was. And so you can't change history.
I mean, you can try to change the way people remember things and put lies into it. You can inject lies into the way people are gonna remember certain things, but you can't change the actual historical record.
All right. So that's, I'm not gonna be watching it. All that to say, that's what I'm leading up to. I'm not, I'm just not gonna be watching it. It doesn't interest me. I just, it's, and plus I don't have Amazon Prime anyway.
I got rid of that when I started to see what Amazon was doing and how terrible of an organization they are. And so even if I had it though, I wouldn't be watching this particular series. So that's something that, I'm not a huge Lord of the Rings fan.
Like I have, I've read the Hobbit. I haven't actually even read the Lord of the Rings. It's on my list. I need to read it. I know some of you are surprised. How can you be homeschooled? I know, but I really do like the movies and I have wanted to read the book.
I am interested in it, but this to me is, it's just not Lord of the Rings. It's, might have some beautiful cinematography, but it just kind of ruins it. And in revealing Sauron, I have to say, the arch villain, revealing kind of just, these trailers don't leave anything to mystery, if you've noticed.
It's like, I already understand the whole series by seeing two of the trailers. It's like, I don't even have to watch it. All right, I wanted to play this for you. This is a, let's see if I can go back here.
This is, so this is on a super left-wing, like super left-wing show called the Young Turks. And they played this clip from Matt Gaetz, who's a congressman, I believe from Florida. And this was, this is interesting to me.
And to me, this is kind of how, I guess a way to treat leftists, leftists in the media. Just, and I just thought it's interesting, it's worth playing. And I wish more Christians would be a little bit like this.
I was thinking of for myself, I think I tend to be, I tend to think of graciousness and civility and I don't tend to react this way, but Jesus actually, though, if you look at the way he dealt with the Pharisees so often, he played hardball with them.
And it's been something stirring in my mind more and more and more. Like, but let me play this clip and then I'll flesh that out, that comment. So here we go.
I'm very pro-life and I make no apology for it. And I'm grateful that Roe has been overturned and that Dobbs is now the jurisprudence on abortion. And I find these people who go out in these pro-abortion, pro-murder rallies odious and just like ugly on the inside and out.
And I make no apology for it. The ones that are out there protesting and marching outside Justice Kavanaugh's home, trying to threaten the court, that's just, it's just pure ugliness.
And I see that ugliness on the inside, I see it on the outside. Is it safe to say that based off of your comments, you're suggesting that these women at these abortion rallies are ugly and overweight?
Yes. What do you say to people who think.
That those comments are offensive? Be offended. Okay, so on this show, The Young Turks, the host, hostess, she loses her mind on this. And she just, it's actually so, it's pathetic to watch the reaction to it from the left doesn't know really how to react to this kind of thing.
All they can do is double down with like, well, you're a bad person. That's all they can really do. You're such a horrible person. You've broken the code that we have. You're mean. That's all they can do.
I would never find you attractive. You don't find those women attractive. I don't find you attractive. And it's like, but he doesn't care. And that's the point. And that's, I think what Trump should have kind of showed us to some extent.
But it's one thing, it's hard because I think naturally, we want the approval of men. That's a natural thing for humans to want. They want the approval of especially people in power. That's how you get power yourself.
That's how you climb the ladder. And I know, as anyone who is in the public eye, anyone who talks about, especially what's happening with the social justice movement and stands opposed to it, and I've been a rude awakening, but in Christian circles, apparently it's not much different.
If you stand opposed to it, you get called a lot of names. You get a lot of lies passed around about you. I even saw earlier this week, there was a guy passing all these lies about me that I've refuted long ago, that I've talked about, I've explained, I've refuted, but it's just part of the territory.
And I think one of the things that Matt Gaetz showed here, I think, is that you don't have to be bullied by them. I think most people, especially in the upper levels of quote-unquote conservative evangelicalism would be like tripping over themselves to see like, no, no, I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that.
And then the reporter can be aggressive and it's like, well, what are you saying? And it's probably just better to be honest and outright with it and be like, yeah, that is what I believe, what of it?
And so he wasn't making a universal statement that every single protester is ugly. I didn't take him to mean that, but he's saying that in general, that's what he sees. And I don't even know that that's the ground you want to necessarily fight on.
I'm not saying his statement is like, that's what Christians should be saying, go call people ugly. I'm saying though, that when the left gets offended by things and they say things like, so you're saying that men should be the leaders or something, or women should be, I'm just saying biblical stuff here, women should be help mates to men and that men are the ones that lead the home.
It's like, yes, that's what I'm saying. If they say, well, you're saying that men can beat women. No, I'm not saying that, but they try to get to those points. They try to, they'll lie, they'll slander, but you can, I think you can be aggressive.
If they lie about you, you can just say, well, you're a liar. You just come back at them. But if they say something that's true, then don't shy away from it. Even if it sounds like it's, it sounds bad or something, don't shy away from it.
Just let it stand and then let the world kind of lose their mind. And I think that's, there's just a lot of scenarios like this that I've been in where, I can't believe John would say, John, you can't believe Al Mohler's like this, or you can't, it's like, yes, I can.
Yes, he is. Or I remember once, there was this one time, I'll just share this real quick. There's this one time I remember on Twitter, this was probably, I don't know, maybe 2019, back when I had a Twitter.
Someone had said that, oh, no, they took, I don't remember exactly how it came about. I probably could if I thought about it long enough, but it was something along the lines of like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, Robert E. Lee, some of the guys that had slaves.
And they're like, John, you can't be saying that slavery is not a sin. Of course it's a sin. And I just like kind of went out on Twitter. And I remember I basically said, well, here's what the Bible says.
I said, if we start condemning, or we start saying men like George Washington, George Whitfield, Robert E. Lee, are somehow now in sin, because simply for the fact that they held slaves, not for the fact that they may have not followed biblical rules on that, because the Bible has teachings on this, but just because they happen to hold slaves, I said, I think that's a dangerous path to go down, because then we can just make the Bible say anything.
That's just the biblical, we just throw out biblical ethics. We throw out what the Bible says about these things. And now we're just completely going on man's wisdom. And really what modernity teaches about labor relationships and all that kind of thing.
Well, anyway, that became a huge thing. That became on Twitter, it was all the leftists were like, it was like chumming, because it was like, we found someone who said what, we knew all the conservatives really believe this, and they found someone who they thought articulated it, and they thought they had a gotcha moment.
The thing is though, I stood on truth at that moment. I just said, this is what the Bible says. I'm standing on this teaching. Yeah, of course, and of course, anyone who's listened to this podcast for any length, anyone with half a brain knows, don't advocate for slavery.
I can put all the qualifications there, personal responsibility is much better. I would have been a gradual emancipationist had I lived in 1840. All that stuff, people know that, but I don't even think it's necessary in those moments always to have these qualifications.
I think that's where we sometimes trip over ourselves with, and Matt Gaetz could have done that. He could have been like, I'm not saying they're all ugly. I'm not saying, he just kinda like let the, he just said the truth, and he just let it kinda stand out there.
And in this situation, I remember, I kinda did something similar. I just said, this is the truth, and I let it stand out there. And what it did was it just increased the podcast numbers and everything.
It's just more people were interested in, whoa, there's a guy who's not gonna back down and like make a million apologies for something that the Bible teaches. Like, okay, let's go check him out. And that's the thing.
I actually had some discussions earlier this week with some guys who are conservative, and some of them are still on Twitter, and they're dealing with some of the ridiculous, Twitter's ridiculous in my opinion.
Some of the people that are on there, the voice, people who become popular on Twitter, that doesn't reflect in necessarily like real world stuff, but they, anyway, it rewards people who can be the most vitriolic and the people with the most diseased minds at times.
And so you have to deal with that. And so we were talking about it, and I was like, look, I was like, I think it was a tweet where it was, someone was being compared to Hitler for something. And it was something though that wasn't, it wasn't necessarily bad.
It wasn't like, you know, they're like, hey, love your country. It's like, well, Hitler loved his country. It's like, and I was like, why don't you, you know, you could say, there's a lot of responses you could give, but I think most conservatives are like, oh no, I'm not saying that.
I'm not, you know, I'm not a Nazi. Well, of course we're not. Like that's, it's stupid to think, like the whole thing was inane from the beginning. So, you know, there's a couple of ways you can handle it, but one of them could be, you could be like, yeah, well, I don't know.
Hitler wasn't wrong to say that we should love our country. You know, let it stand. And then watch the internet explode. Watch all the, and like, what do they have? What do they have? They could just call you names all day, but just prove to them, yeah, it doesn't work.
Yeah, nah, I'm not accepting what you're saying. Yeah, you guys are discredited. Nah, you guys are, you know, I'm not, you're not the gatekeepers. And that's the whole point. You're not the gatekeepers.
I don't bend to your authority. And so, yeah, obviously Hitler's, I've read, I've actually, because of my history background and stuff, I've had to read a lot of stuff. I've taken courses in the Holocaust and World War II.
I've read Mein Kampf. Yeah, I completely disagree with Hitler. I can't, I think there's, he's an, it was an evil man. I think what he did with, you know, the Holocaust obviously was evil, but even more than that is his economics, I think were evil.
There's so many things, but I don't think that, like when someone's trying to like make that argument, I don't know that that's the time always to do that. It's just to, it's to be on the offense. The other side, what they're attempting to do in those moments, and what they're attempting to do with Matt Gaetz right now, is they want to be the gatekeepers.
They want to be the arbiters of what's acceptable and what's not. And so if they can smear him enough, then they can get him kind of, you know, let's make him, let's marginalize him. Let's make him kind of a stain on the, so the other conservatives throw him overboard.
Let's try to, and that way we're the gatekeepers. We're in charge of who's acceptable and who's not. And that's the crux of this whole issue. They don't get to define what's acceptable and what's not.
We have a standard and it's not the mainstream media. It's not leftists. It's not, it's, we actually have one right here. We have an ethical standard right here. And this is the standard that we should be going back to.
We have the Bible. We have logic and reason. We have the tools necessary to figure out, and if anyone's going to be making the, applying this, if there's a group of people, it should be people on our side of things.
People who see these problems, not people, and I'll put it this way to make it simple. Not people who read magazines, or I should say newspapers, that have headlines like this. New York Times, a taste for cannibalism.
A spate of recent stomach-churning books, TV shows, and films suggests we've never looked so delicious to one another. Why let these people, and this is the same outlet that did the hit piece on Tucker Carlson.
He's such a white nationalist or whatever they said. Why let these people be the arbiters? They're moral train wrecks. I mean, the groomer thing, there's truth to this. These are the people that are soft-peddling all kinds of evil, trying to get it, and I mean, I don't even know if I want to read this.
Normalizing cannibalism. Normalizing cannibalism. I mean, can you stomach it? A fascination with cannibalism, perhaps not surprisingly, can tow a fine line. Like, this is the beginning of accepting something.
It happened with homosexuality the same way. It's like, well, let's ask some questions, and it's the serpent. Has God really said? Let's nuance it. Let's explore this a little bit, and then the unthinkable quotes, the unthinkable.
Develop, how about, no, it's wrong, it's evil. I mean, it's kind of a sick picture they even use here. These are the people that are gonna lecture us on morality. I don't think so, and I think we need to get to the point.
We really do, where we, as political conservatives and as Orthodox Christians and Orthodox believers, we gotta get to this point where, if these morally bankrupt leftist outlets that can't seem to read the Bible for themselves, that can't seem to understand morality if it hit them in the face, that we don't take them seriously ever.
We just disregard it. Honestly, we should. We just, right away, disregard. As far, like, their moral reasoning, it's bankrupt. Why would you go to them for advice on anything? Just, you know, hey, did you hear that so-and-so hates women?
Yeah, who said that? Oh, you know, this leftist guy on Twitter said it. You know, I heard it on Phil Vischer's podcast. It's like, eh, I don't know, disregard. Just, who cares? You know, that's kind of the reason.
That's what we should be doing, is if these people have demonstrated such a lack of honesty and such a lack of just a commitment to biblical fidelity, then there's no reason. There's no reason to take them seriously on those things.
So anyway, that's, I wanted to just talk about that. And speaking of Phil Vischer, there's a, let me see if I can find it here. There's a clip I wanted to show you. This is from The Holy Post, which is Phil Vischer's, he's not on this episode, but this is a podcast that he has.
So they had someone on recently. Let me just, let's just listen in for a moment. Let me just play this for you. And then you can be the judge. Let me ask you whether this is a faithful reading of scripture.
Back on this, cause it makes me very uncomfortable. And as you say, and to me that reveals that discomfort with disability more than anything else. Jesus's resurrected body is disabled. He says to Thomas, put your hand in my side, touch my scars, see them.
Blessed are you who have seen, but blessed are those who have not seen and believed. And as disabled people, we know that all too well. People touching us without our consent, people poking and prodding us, people wanting to examine our bodies for proof and not believing in gaslighting when a story is told as it is here with the women sharing that they have seen the resurrected Christ and Thomas saying, nope.
And this, I think it's also really important because we say that we believe that Jesus has defeated the dominions of darkness and defeated death itself and that death has no sting, but it was a whoopsie that he came back disabled.
I mean, that doesn't make sense. So I think that what we are uncomfortable with is the idea that the risen Christ would choose a disabled form. And what that reveals to me is that it gives me the freedom and hopefully it liberates us all because it makes me realize yet again that my redemption and the marks of my healing are not things to be hidden or erased or eradicated.
My disability isn't something to be ashamed of because it emulates the risen Christ. And that disabled body is the mark of all of our healing. Okay.
Anything that maybe gave you a red flag, a yellow flag, as you listen to that, well, it's innovative. This isn't a reading that, tell me the church father who put this spin on Jesus's resurrected body, right?
You're not gonna find it. Show me where they're in the Reformation, let's say, Puritan, whatever group of people you wanna talk about, Presbyterian divines, who said this about Jesus's body? Who made this interpretation?
This is obviously an innovative reading of scripture and it's coming at a time when intersectionality is so popular. And the statement that those who are disabled are emulating Jesus somehow, as if they have more of a shared experience with Jesus because of the disability they have.
Now, if they, here's the thing I'll say, if you go through trials and you react in the way Jesus reacted and you learn and you grow and you rely on the Holy Spirit, and yeah, you have something in common with Jesus, but guess what?
Everyone has trials, everyone can have that. And that's the way you react to your, if you have a disability, you react to your disability. But just having a disability, I mean, Jesus could use his hands, right?
What about someone who can't use their hands? Are they now not as much like Jesus? Or do you, I mean, do you have to have the actual holes? If I go put some holes in my hands, am I more like Jesus? Like it, and the whole thing, I mean, you can sense the victimology kind of, or the idea that, well, people poke and prod us.
They treat us ways we wouldn't wanna be treated. And somehow that's the same with Jesus. But Jesus was the one who actually asked Thomas, come and touch my hands. You see, and it wasn't to see if I'm disabled.
It was to see that I'm actually here, that I'm actually alive. Like it's just a whole twisted reading of scripture to try to, and I don't know, there's so many, you could even see the me too stuff in here to some extent, not directly me too, but just, people don't believe that we're disabled.
So they need proof. Like, oh my goodness, that's, it's just like Thomas coming to Jesus and needing proof that no, if you're someone who doesn't look disabled, but you say you're disabled, people may ask you, well, how are you disabled?
I mean, what is it that's, what condition do you have? I don't think that's an unreasonable question necessarily for people who are close to you at least. I mean, why? I don't know. You can't question that though, apparently.
And that's the same as Jesus and doubting Thomas. What? Like, it makes no sense whatsoever. But that's, welcome to 2022. And someone from on the other line here is Caitlin, I think it's Shice, I'm not sure, but a doctoral student at Duke Divinity.
I mean, you know, you'd think, you'd think there'd be able to, there would be more biblical literacy here, but yeah, yeah, here we go. So that's what's happening out there. Let's see what else we're gonna talk about.
Oh, I'm gonna talk about this. Speaking of social justice, at 100, hymn society considers how worship evolves, Christianity today, really how worship evolves. I love the picture here. Everyone's got a mask on still, but the piano guy, it's just over his mouth, not his nose.
Anyway, let's not read the whole thing. Let's read, let's see. COVID -19 hit, many academics and music practitioners in attendance have not been able to sing out in their home churches. Oh no. Well, just take off the mask.
Though masking was enforced, the pandemic had lifted just enough this year for organizers to go ahead with the 2022 in-person meeting, celebrating the society's 100th year of existence. For the past three years, it's been so nice to see all of your faces on screen.
All right, let's skip ahead. Okay, it gets, this is similar to the diversity. This is similar to actually the Lord of the Rings things, the Rings of Power series we were just talking about in a way. The international panel of speakers grappled with the origins of the hymnody in parts of the world where songs brought by Western missionaries are still revered more than other church music, including the songs of local cultures.
We're still in the process of decolonizing what we are singing, said Gerardo Oberman, a leader of reform churches in Argentina. And one of the panelists speaking through a translator, we are still trying to find our own voice or trying to find our own rhythms because there's a little bit of disconnect between what we sing in our homes, what we sing on the streets, and what we sing in our churches.
See Michael Hahn, an Iowa native who had long advocated for including global music in American congregations, said that despite concerns about Western music's dominance, some people across the globe made traditionally Western hymns genuinely their own.
I've developed a little bit more awareness and sympathy for what a friend we have in Jesus sung in Yoruba, or not just in that language, but in a style that reflects they've Africanized it. So I love this.
I love the contrast here. A guy from Argentina, hey, we've got these Western hymns and man, that's such a problem. We got to find our own stuff. And then a guy from Iowa, we have our own stuff, but we got to introduce these stuff that's not our own to diversify our hymnals.
Do you see the contradiction here? Different standards. If you're in the West, if you're in America, the United States, then you need diversification. If you're in Argentina, you need your own local expression.
So you can't have your own local expression here. So anyway, this is in Christianity Today, talking about the complexities of the hymn society and how they're considering how worship evolves. Well, worship is worship.
The expression may evolve. The carrier, the way that worship is, the term is escaping me right now. There's a perfect term for this. Anyway, they're talking about, though, the diversity of hymns, the styles, and how they're communicated, how these truths are communicated, how we participate in corporate worship with one another.
And I just wanted you to see that double standard. It just amazes me. I think the question is, and I was a music, I was a minister of music for years, and I think the main thing is always in my mind, is it worshiping?
Is a congregation able to worship? So you need something that's singable. I think that's one of the geniuses, honestly, of Western hymnody is that in these hymnals, there's a place for everyone. There's a four-part harmony.
Everyone can jump in if you know how to read music. If you don't, then it makes it difficult. Some people can listen by ear and they can pick up the bass line or whatever line they need, treble, soprano.
But the thing is, it was something that was designed to be inclusive to everyone. And the hymns themselves were, they were simple enough that people could follow along. And they followed a basic cadence, a basic rhythm.
Today with performance-driven songs, like from Christian Contemporary, you don't have that as much. They're too high. And you don't have the four-part harmony, so not everyone can join in. And sometimes the ranges and the switches and the way that words and syllables are crammed into notes that don't fit them, because it's for performance, it's not for singability.
Unless you listen to the song 50 times, you can't sing it. And that's one of the problems I think today that's facing. I think we're gonna have to go back to more of a hymnody that we've, there was a genius behind it.
It doesn't mean it's perfect. It doesn't mean there aren't other expressions. It doesn't mean there aren't other styles, none of that. I mean, it's one of the reasons, and I'm not legalistic on this. I think drums are fine.
I think it's fine to have guitar. I think it's fine to have different instruments. As long as they're not drowning out the music, as long as, if they're taking away though from the four-part or the melody or whatever you're supposed to be following in your singing, then it takes away, it detracts.
And you don't wanna detract or distract from worship music. That's the whole point. So there are gonna be styles that just, they're not gonna be useful for congregational worship. You just can't. R &B is not a useful form for congregational worship.
It may be fine in other venues for other purposes, but it's just, it's not gonna be something the whole body can come around on a Sunday morning and worship together in. And it's just, it's not gonna happen.
Certain forms of really hard rock are just not helpful in that regard. People can't scream their lungs out. Not everyone can do it every Sunday. So you're trying to get a broad range of people. And this is real, real diversity comes in, right?
There are a range of voices, different people, men and women, women hate to break it, but women do have higher voices than men, generally. You're trying to get all these people to come together to make one beautiful noise to the Lord.
And that's the point of beauty. It's not about the people and what their tastes are. It's about giving voice to, it's about giving worship to the Lord. So I think that was one of the positives of Western music.
And it doesn't, I'm not saying other forms don't, can't have elements of that, but that should be the main concern in my mind. But the concern is shifting and it's shifting to just diversifying. And when you start doing that and if congregational singing and worship are not your primary things, priorities, then you'll lose it.
You'll lose all of that. The last thing I wanted to talk about, I think it's the last thing. Is it the last thing? Where is it? I had it pulled up, I thought. Now I'm not seeing it. I thought I had, let's see if I can find it now.
All right, Russell Moore, Christianity Today. Oh, let's, I think this must be it. Okay, no, I did have it pulled up. Okay, let's go over here. Fantasy role-playing is hurting America. This is Russell Moore's latest column.
And I haven't read this, so this is a cold reading. Let's just, is it short? It is short. Let's read or skim or something here. A number of people have been sharing this. Someone texted me the other day with this and I figured I would make this a cold read.
As a kid in the 1980s, I heard dire warnings from my evangelical leaders about the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons Dragons. It was, we were told, a foothold of the occult. Although I never played, I didn't take these admonitions all that seriously because I reasoned that the same logic could be applied to Lord of the Rings or Narnia.
Now in the 2020s, I'm wondering if my evangelical elders weren't partly right about the way fantasy role-playing can paganize a culture, just not in the way they expected. Here we go. In this month Atlantic, Jennifer Sr. explores a similar thought in relation to nationalist political strategist, right-wing media personality, Steve Bannon, who is currently indicted on charges of contempt of Congress regarding his alleged role in the January 6th insurrection.
Putting aside that I think about Bannon himself, I was struck by one section of the article that explains much of what's happening in America right now. Sr. points to a 2018 documentary in which Bannon explains to a filmmaker how when working on the internet gaming industry, he was surprised to learn just how many people are devoted to playing multiplayer online games.
Bannon interprets this intensity through the grid of a hypothetical man, David from Accounts Payable in the days after his death. Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who's never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers, and that's Dave.
Bannon says, he contrasts this boring real-life Dave from Accounts Payable with Dave's online gaming persona, Ajax. Ajax is tough and warlike. When he dies in the fantasy, there's a funeral pyre and thousands of people come to mourn Ajax the warrior.
Now, who's more real, Bannon asks? Dave in accounting or Ajax? Sr. writes, Bannon realizes that some people, particularly disaffected men, actually prefer and better identify with the online versions of themselves.
Bannon tapped into this, Sr. reports, when he acquired Breitbart News and realized that the comments section could become more of a community for certain angry, lonely individuals than the town they live in, the old bowling league.
He noted that the comments section could be weaponized at some point in time. The angry voice is probably directed at latent political power. Sr. asks whether Bannon considers what he has done in propagating political media and in energizing populist nationalist movements to be the gamification of politics.
He replied that this is exactly what he's doing. I want Dave in accounting to be Ajax in his life. Sr. argues that January 6th is the distillation of this role-playing fantasy. The angry howling hordes arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the role of rebels in a...
In face paint and fur, they stormed the Capitol while an enemy army tried to beat them away. This is hardly new, and the funny thing to me about this is that, well, what about, maybe he'll bring it up, but what about the leftist protests and stuff?
Was that just all cosplay? Was that just all fantasy, just trying to be something that they aren't? Because that's the whole thing. What Dave in accounting is not the mighty warrior. So he's pretending to be the mighty warrior.
And it looks like, and I haven't heard what Bannon said, but it looks like what Bannon's trying to say is that I want Dave in accounting to be Ajax in his life. In other words, Dave knows that he has a masculine impulse and it's being channeled in wrong directions that are not bearing any fruit.
There's nothing going on, but he's in a fantasy. He's fooled into thinking he's doing something productive when he's not. And so Bannon is saying, let's do something productive. Let's actually be, let's channel that actually good masculine energy into something that's productive.
And so there's nothing wrong with that, but Russell Moore is twisting this whole thing around to be that January 6th was just one big role-playing fantasy. It couldn't be that there were questions, and you see it's on YouTube, so I have to be careful how I phrase it, but it couldn't be that there were some questions people had, that some believed that the country that they once loved and lived in was no more if things were going to stand as they have stood now.
It couldn't be any of the concerns that actually brought people there, the real life, real world concerns people had. It has to be a fantasy role-playing thing for Russell Moore. And so what is the left doing when they, for a whole summer, dozens of people died, and it's more money than the greatest hurricane destruction we've ever had, a bigger insurance payout for all the damage that was done.
That's, what is that? No, that's systemic racism. That's real. They're reacting against something in real life. Well, let's continue. This is hardly new and isn't limited to any one point in the ideological spectrum.
Almost every Red Diaper Baby account about what drew their American parents or grandparents to the Communist Party during the Depression includes something along the lines of how David Horowitz described his parents' neighborhood Communist Party cell meetings in their basement.
And I've read David Horowitz on some of this stuff. And I think it's interesting that Russell Moore has to go back to, it's a safe time. It's a safe thing to criticize, the Red Diaper Babies. He's not gonna go back to 2020 and what happened there.
He's gotta go back to, you know, 1960. It was in this subterranean activity that the romanticism of their youth finally got to express itself. Here, they lived outside the norms of other mortals, breathing in the intoxicating air of a world revolution and plotted their impossible dreams.
In the cell, they were given secret names for the... Okay, here's the thing. You could say this about Christianity there. You could say this about Russell Moore to some extent, that most of the people in evangelicalism don't share Russell Moore's political persuasions.
The people that he has claimed for so many years to represent in the Southern Baptist Convention, or at least the people that were paying his salary, he didn't represent their political beliefs at all.
He was in a denomination that he was ill-suited for. And you could say about him, what's preventing me from saying Russell Moore is also involved in his own delusion? He's not really actually... He pretends to be, at the ULC and now at Christianity Today, this senior political thinker who is just so wise and is doing so much.
He's moving the needle and really, what he's doing isn't really that consequential. The people in his own denomination didn't really listen to him much. They voted for Trump anyway. Why couldn't I say the same thing that Russell Moore's in some grand delusion where he gets together at Christianity Today with the other people that are also pretending like they can be Christians and hold on to leftist politics?
You could do this with almost anything if you wanted to. According to senior, Bannon's strategy for turning a day from accounting culture into Ajax culture is to sow doubts about every institution. Let's see, the plan is to leave a smoldering crater where our institutions once were.
That's the plan. That's, yeah, right. So when Steve Bannon talks about he wants parents to get involved at school boards, that's his goal is to just leave a smoldering crater? Or how about maybe he wants a rebuilding?
He wants maybe people who aren't corrupt in the position of having institutional power. The institutions are indeed smoldering cratering. Polls show shockingly high numbers of Americans seriously contemplating secession or political violence.
Countless churches and denominations are either tearing apart or already torn. Thanks to people like Russell Moore, that's the thing. And in most of these institutions in crisis, the comments section comes alive to dwell among us.
Here's the thing. Russell Moore has also left a crater behind in the Southern Baptist Convention. I mean, he literally dropped these phone call recordings. He made statements that he's probably still in litigation for about Mike Stone.
And Russell Moore went scorched earth. And now he's here lecturing everyone on how angry they are and how much they're just not committed to a real vision. I mean, it's laughable. But let's forget for a moment, Russell Moore says, the institutions themselves, whether the Republic or the congregation or anything else, let's consider that individuals themselves.
Spend some time with the person raging on social media or at the microphone at the church business meeting, and you will often find the very same dynamic band and identify that Dave from Accounts Payable wants to be Ajax.
This is so ridiculous. You know, why can't, why doesn't Russell Moore apply it to himself? Russell Moore was, I mean, he was involved in Democrat politics. He goes to Southern, he gets involved there.
He wanted to, at one time, he says to be the governor of Mississippi. You know, why can't Russell Moore just be living out a fantasy? Why, he's the guy that, you know, wanted to do all these political things, but instead he's just leeching on Christian organizations.
He's destroying, he destroyed the last one he was at, or he left a crater when he left. He's a tool of destruction. He doesn't really accomplish any, like why can't that kind of thing be said about him?
And that he's angry, that he's got an issue, and that, it won't though. He won't see it. You have to be so blind not to see that the criticism you're leveling could be leveled against you. It turns out to be actual fantasy role-playing, whether it be Dungeons and Dragons and a Treehouse years ago, or multiple.
It's just to down, it's just to make fun of. It's just to say that these people are juvenile. They're pathetic. When in reality, Russell Moore's pathetic, guys. Russell Moore's kind of pathetic. I mean, think about it.
I mean, I'm not gonna try to be, you know, I try to be nice, but on the track that Russell Moore was on and seeing where he ended up and seeing the legacy that he has at his time at the Southern Baptist Convention and how the people in that convention actually think about him and feel about him, the people who paid his salary for so many years.
It's kind of pathetic. What are his accomplishments? Name them. What are Russell Moore's accomplishments? I, he's written a few books. I don't, I don't know. Like for a guy who is so interested in politics, what has he been able to do politically other than destroy the denomination he was at and develop a lot of, you know, a lot of people who thought he was one thing and deceiving them and that, well, really, you wanna talk about fantasy.
I mean, people thought Russell Moore was this conservative guy. He talked about patriarchy being a positive thing. I mean, he was, he portrayed himself to be one thing and then that's not what he was.
And then you go back to his early life and you're like, oh yeah. We talk about living a fantasy or not being forthright about who you are. I think we're gonna skip through some of this because it's just more of the same.
C .S. Lewis thought that paganism was a better place to start with proclaiming the meaning than arid secularism. He pointed out that the myths of paganism at least acknowledge a reality beyond the material.
But what happens when we discover a kind of syncretism that mixes a pagan sense of meaning with a secular loss of hope, all the while thinking itself to be Christian. So this is going against Christian nationalism, et cetera.
I don't think he's using the word Christian nationalism, but he's talking about January 6th. He's talking about Trump supporters. Maybe more people, he says, will see that there is indeed a cloud of witnesses all around us that we don't need them to cheer for us.
We just need to bear witness along them to the one who endured the cross, blah, blah, blah. He's putting the biblical veneer on his rant. Let's see. Remember me when you come into your kingdom. Our culture is fantasy role-playing.
Let me just read for you the last paragraph here. Our culture's fantasy role-playing is leading us to some perilous places. Sadly, we often replicate it. Even within the church, there are dragons indeed, both within and without.
Yet sometimes the dragon is not the one we're slaying in our fantasies, but the one offering us the illusion of belonging, glory, and meaning. Okay, Russell Moore, you have an illusion of belonging, glory, and meaning in leftist church politics.
Why can't I say that? And the very one that will just chain us up in one more dungeon. The world needs a different story, and Christians have one. Let's remember it. Let's sing it. Let's tell it. My God's grace, let's live it.
Okay, let me give you this one. Christians are against lying. Christians are against stealing. Christians are against all these, and I guess I wasn't showing anyone the article. I didn't realize that.
Oh, I was scrolling along here. This is the article. Fantasy role-playing is hurting America. You have a guy with a jousting an eagle. It's just, you know. Try not to be a hero. Being a hero, I guess, that's not good.
This is so, some of my friends would probably call it beta male. But, all right, so now you saw. That's what the article looks like. Now, so here's the thing. Self-refuting, in my opinion. Russell, you could just ply what he says to himself, and it would apply.
It shows something, though, in my mind. It shows, there's this, it's this opposition to masculine behavior that you're seeing here, too. And in the Bible, he's coming back to, the Bible gives us this vision of reality.
Well, how about this? The Bible also talks about David's mighty men and what they accomplished, commends them. It talks about David being a man after God's own heart, despite the fact that he was this warrior.
I mean, the Bible, Jesus himself, showed a lot of aggression at times, what would be considered aggression today. Certainly with the whip in the temple. You see the biblical lobbying against cheating and stealing and all the things that people showed up on January 6th because they were concerned about.
That's also, that's what the Bible is giving to us. And so, if that's not part of your reality, if you just downplay all those things, that it doesn't matter, it's not important, then what does that say about you?
So I just figured, that's my cold read of it. Figured I'd give that to you. Last but not least, I wasn't planning on talking about this. I noticed I had the tab open, though. I just wanted to acknowledge and let people know.
J .D. Hall, there's a statement that J .D. Hall's church, FBC Sydney, put out recently about him. And there's, I just wanna say this. I'm gonna keep it super vague. Not vague, that's not the word. I'm gonna keep it just kind of general.
And the reason I'm gonna keep it general is just because I don't think it's my place and I don't think I have all even the necessary information to come to you and tell you this is what happened. There's a police investigation, as far as I know, and there's a church discipline process going on.
The police investigation involves a call that was made, and I think in this statement, it says a church leader made the call about potential abuse in the home. And I just wanna let everyone know that I have talked to people who are closer to the situation.
And it doesn't, I don't have, I wasn't there. I don't know exactly what, the only thing I can seem to confirm is that there was a, J .D. Hall had a problem with Xanax, and that got into other areas of his life, and it was an issue.
But that's, beyond that, I really can't confirm anything. And so what, I do suspect, and I have been told by people closer to the situation, that there is, there are more details that are important to this situation that are not expressed on that, in the particular statement that the church released.
And that's really all I'm gonna say. My advice to people is, wait. If you're concerned about J .D., if you're, I mean, and hopefully that concern's a legitimate concern. It is a hope for, that he's repenting, that he's getting better.
I do have it on good authority that he is being counseled, that he's going to counseling, and that the counsel is to stay off social media, and that's the reason that he's not weighing in on these things.
So that's, I've been told this. I don't think it's my place to get into any more details, really, than that. But I think if you're really concerned, then you gotta wait for this police report to, or this police investigation to conclude, and you need to wait for the church discipline process to conclude.
And these hot takes that are happening right now, I just, so many of them that I've seen are just, I look at them and I'm like, that's just, it's ignorant. It's based on the information. You have to be just very careful.
You have to just be open to the idea that there may be other information, or missing information, that could make more sense of things, and that's all I'm gonna say. And so I'm totally open to, and I believe J .D., it was obviously wrong for him to have this Xanax issue.
And I think, obviously, if other things get confirmed that were wrong, I have no problem saying that, that that was sin, that that's evil. And the hope is that J .D. would repent of those things. And it's a lot different than other circumstances, where people, you know, they'll, John, how come you can't call out J .D. like you do someone who's a false teacher or something?
And it's like, well, people covering for false teachers or false teachers is on a different level, in my mind. That's a greater threat to the church directly. And this is the bigger issue for me. They're not stepping down.
They're not admitting that there's been an issue. They're still in the pulpit, or they're still in whatever area of influence they have. J .D.'s not that. J .D.'s not in any area of influence right now.
He's not online blogging. He's not in the pulpit of his church. He's getting counsel. He's, so what am I supposed to say, right? So I think that's where, someone was asking me yesterday for advice on how to handle this, and I said, I think that's the only advice really you need, is pray for J .D., pray for his family, pray for the church, and just be a little patient with these things that are ongoing and that we don't have all the full details on.
And that's it. There's really not much more to say. So I figured I would just let you know that, and hopefully that helps a few people who are, like this, there's sort of a knee-jerk reaction. I've just seen some people really want to condemn right away and just, some of them are showing, these are two things I noticed, for some people at least.
Some, okay, some people who are really just going to town with the J .D. Hall thing, did not show the level of excitement for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which is weird to me. I just, I noticed that, and I thought it was weird.
There's like a giddiness about like, oh, look, J .D. fell. The other thing is, the thing that I often had an issue with J .D. on, the thing I confronted him about, was the lack of grace that I would see with him sometimes, that there needs to be more grace here.
And I'm not saying sugarcoat anything. I'm not saying don't report on false teachers. I'm just saying, sometimes, making mountains out of molehills, making enemies out of friends, sometimes just phrasing things in the worst possible light, things like that, there were times that I would be like, J .D., like, why would you write that, right?
And I've told him this. Some of the people that are criticizing J .D. right now that are going to town on this are showing less grace, almost, than he showed. That's the thing I don't get. You like, don't like J .D. Hall so much, so you're acting like him, only worse in some ways.
Some people. So I've seen that, and I just wanted to let you know, like, hey, just stop and think for a moment. Like, we don't, you don't have to knee-jerk without all the information. You can acknowledge what's been revealed, and you can say, you know, we're waiting, you know, this is bad, and we're, you know, hopeful and waiting, and hopefully, even if he was your enemy, hope that he repents and this gets his attention.
Why not that? He's been humiliated. There's nothing to humiliate a moron. And then for the people, there are some people who want to just defend J .D., because they really liked some of the exposure he brought at Pulpit and Pen in Protestia, and they just feel like they don't have the information.
How do I defend him? And it's like, you gotta be patient, too. Like, yeah, you have to admit at least what has been confirmed, the Xanax thing has been confirmed, and I think just be open to their men's sin, and there might be more sin here, and don't think that you have to just go out and defend him right away.
I think at the very least, you can say what I've just said, though. It's like, look, we can't speak out of turn. We can't sound certain when we're not about some things, and we also should not fall into the same pit that J .D. Hall might've fallen into with a lack of grace here.
Let's hope for the best. Let's hope that there's repentance here. Let's hope that there's a healing process and that there's a restoration to some of the broken relationships that there may be. All right, I hope that's helpful for everyone.
God bless, and don't forget, the men's conference link in the info section.