TLP 484: Linguistic Theft | Hillary Morgan Ferrer Interview

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So linguistic theft is when people have taken words that have traditional meanings and literally changed the meaning, and then they put it back on, say,

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Christians and say, well, your God says that he's love, and this is what love means. Parenting isn't about us.

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In fact, parenting isn't even about our kids. Parenting is just one way Christian dads and moms are to worship

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God. So welcome to the Truth Love Parent podcast, where we train dads and moms to give God the preeminence in their parenting.

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I'm your host, A .M. Brewster, and today we're talking about talking. More specifically, we're talking about whether or not your family's vocabulary has been hijacked by the world.

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Trust me, this is not mere semantics. This is not mere opinion. The words we use, what we mean when we use those words are eternally important.

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Our kids will either be set up for spiritual success or destruction based simply on what they believe words to mean.

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We talk a lot about family talk on the show. Communication is always a huge issue anytime two or more sinners are in the same room, so be sure to click on the link in today's description for a bunch of related resources that will help your family glorify

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God in your communication. And with that, I pray this discussion with Hilary Morgan Ferrer is profoundly beneficial for you and your family.

01:15

Hilary, thank you so much for being back. How are the hiccups? Are you okay? Are we good? Oh, same as they were since fifth grade, just random and just obtrusive.

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Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your ministry? So my name is

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Hilary Ferrer. My husband is John Ferrer, and he was doing formal apologetics ministry before I even was.

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And my kind of specialty, I was a science teacher, and so I wanted to go back and get an advanced degree in science, specifically biology, so that I could really speak into a lot of the questions that I saw coming out with students in the sciences, especially as in regards to faith.

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And so, but then the Lord really called me into more, I guess, a more roundabout apologetics ministry in general when he kind of started placing just the phrase mama bear apologetics on my heart and realized that, you know what, women will stand up and learn stuff that they wouldn't necessarily do for themselves, but when they see that it's going to take their children down, suddenly they become a whole different beast, and they will rise up, and they will teach themselves apologetics because they're saying, not my kids, not today, and I thought that that would be a really good instinct to harness.

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So that's kind of where mama bear apologetics came from. Yeah, this is nothing compared to getting an advanced degree in biology, but I actually read the

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Harry Potter series for, my motivation at the beginning was one reason and one reason only. People were saying,

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Christians in particular, were saying so many, you know, bad things about it. It's demonic, it's witchcraft, all that kind of stuff, and I couldn't speak intelligently into it, so I thought, well,

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I'll study it, I'll read it so that I can speak intelligently, and I think really that's what we talked about last time and what we're talking about this time, that's kind of the invitation.

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The invitation is to you parents, all of us, to take that extra step, to study, to know what the world is saying, know what's out there, know what our kids are hearing, and then be able to intelligently respond to it.

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Yeah. All right, so last time we talked about the book, Mama Bear Apologetics, Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies.

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Today, though, we're not going to talk about the book in general, we're going to look specifically at chapter four. Now, I mentioned last time that the book is broken up.

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I've got my book here in front of me. I always like the guys on the radio, you can hear them rustling their pages. I never do that, so this is my page rustling.

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The book is broken up into two parts. The first part is really laying a foundation for what it means to be a mama or a papa bear, and the second book is dealing specifically with all the isms, the lies that we've...

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Part two is lies you've probably heard but didn't know what they were called. So they tell us what the lies are, they tell us what they're called, and they help us to learn how to equip our kids to reject those lies, to challenge those beliefs, those world views.

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So the first four chapters of the book are these. First is Calling All Mama Bears, and I love their subtitles.

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You have to get the book for so many awesome reasons, but you'll smile every time you read the subtitles. The very first subtitle is,

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My Kid Has a Cheerio Shoved Up His Nose. Why Am I Reading This Book? And that is so beautiful.

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I really, I love that. The second chapter is... Taken from an actual mama bear conversation,

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I have to say, I think this was a Hillary Short's contribution. Oh my word.

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If you ever want to, like, find yourself saying ridiculous things, just have children. Oh my goodness.

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And then the second chapter is How to Be a Mama Bear, which their subtitle is,

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Is This Code for Being the Weirdest Mom on the Playground? Third chapter is The Discerning Mama Bear, and then the fourth chapter is called

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Linguistic Theft. I love that terminology. I've been trying to, I've been calling it different things, and when

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I found that, I'm like, that's the term I'm going to use from now on. Linguistic theft. That perfectly describes what is going on in our society today.

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We're going to kind of dig into the chapter a little bit and discuss this, because I want to have a couple more episodes after this where we, the

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TLP family, are talking about the importance of our family vocabularies, the importance of what we say, how we speak, not just the tone of voices and things like that, not just being kind and loving and gracious, but literally what we mean when we say the words that we mean.

05:37

So this is an awesome way to segue into that conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to do this with us, but to you, succinctly, what is linguistic theft?

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So linguistic theft is when people have taken words that have traditional meanings and literally changed the meaning, and specifically for the terms we're talking about in this book, they change the meaning, and then they put it back on, say,

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Christians and say, well, your God says that he's love, and this is what love means. Or your God says to be in unity, and we're going to decide what unity is.

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So it's taking these Christian ideas and words, changing the definition, and then placing them on us as if we're required to obey the new definition instead of the definition as it was understood when the

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Bible was originally written. But I mean, this can go not just with Christian stuff. This is going in all sorts of different directions right now that words are just losing their meaning left and right, and that is how propaganda is being used, that if you can just define assault however you want, well then yes, everybody got assaulted.

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Or if you can define gender however you want, then yes, you're much for women, can include anyone who wants to be a woman.

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All of these things are words that have meaning, but if you take the meaning away, then all of a sudden you can actually change the identity of the cause that you're supporting, and that's concerning.

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Yeah, I love the way that you summarize that. We're going to talk more about some of the words that are commonly stolen from our language, but I want to pinpoint one of them.

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Just as an example here at the very beginning, you used the word gender. For the longest time, the word gender didn't have anything to do with a person's sex.

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They were completely different terms. In fact, the word gender was never used to apply to a human. It was a word that was used of linguistics.

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For example, if you're studying a language, you would talk about the gender of a word, right? That's the only time gender was used, but here's the interesting thing.

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Now, this is a personal opinion. I don't know that it's 100 % true, but I think that the word gender came to be used as a substitute originally for the word sex because Christians, and even the world at large at the time, didn't like using the word sex.

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So the word gender seemed like a really decent substitute, and so they started using the word gender. Gender started to become a substitute for the word sex, which it never was, and nowadays it's gone beyond that.

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It is now seen as separated out as a substitute. It's not a substitute for the word sex. It's something completely different, but it's been filled with all this brand new meaning within the past few years that it never, ever, ever had.

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And if we don't understand all this, then we don't know what gender means. We don't know what it's supposed to mean. We don't know what people mean when they say it.

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So that's an example of a way that the world takes a word and redefines it.

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Yeah. I'd like to see more history on that, actually, because I just kind of assumed that it was, for the most part, synonymous because there were going to be sixth grade teachers you know.

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There have always been sixth grade teachers, shall we say, and trying to talk about the concept of sex and gender to a bunch of sixth graders is like you get the hee -hee -hee, you know, giggles or something.

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So I always figured it was just a way to just get rid of the word sex because the word sex obviously had two very different meanings.

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Yep. The biological sex and the active sex. Exactly. So I thought that's what ruined it, but I'd be interested to see your research on that that that was when it was just used for, say, when he's talking about language, he's talking about, you know, how in Spanish you have el and la and it's going to be a masculine or feminine word.

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We don't have that in the English for the most part, but basically every other of the romance languages do.

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Yep. So let's look at different categories in the book. I want to look at three in particular as we talk about linguistic theft today.

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First of it, first one is the nature of linguistic theft, then the consequences of linguistic theft.

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And then we kind of want to finalize this discussion really asking how can we fight back?

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And I like the way it's put in the book, the book, how can I fight back without being a jerk? We're talking about a fight here, a war, challenging things.

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You know, apologists are oftentimes, unfortunately, negatively seen as being people who are just super argumentative. So we need to understand what it is.

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We need to understand what it's doing to us and our families, and we need to understand how we can address it.

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So let's start with the nature of linguistic theft. Where do we go when it comes to understanding this concept, really wrapping our brains around it?

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Well, I think we need to know that it's happened in the first place. I think a lot of times, um, uh, who was,

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I believe it's Voltaire was credited with saying, if you, if you wish to converse with me first, define your terms.

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That even when I was early in our marriage with John, we would have these, like,

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I won't call them knockdown drag outs, you know, for, for us, they were, you know, basically it's us debating back and forth, very different than other people's, but, um, it would usually come around to, we were actually talking about the same thing, but we were using different words for it.

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And so when we finally figured out that we were referring to the same thing, oh, okay, the argument's over, we actually agree.

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We thought we disagreed, but we didn't. Um, so I think just, oh yeah, I think just knowing that this, this, um, substitution for words has happened in the first place.

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If you don't, if, if you think that words just have always meant the same thing, or there's just a natural evolution of, of language,

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I mean, there is a natural evolution of language, but not to the extent that we're seeing it. We're seeing people purposely changing words and changing the definitions.

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And I like how Holly Ordway says that once language becomes routinely distorted, it becomes increasingly easy to justify and promote evil while at the same time hiding behind positive words.

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Uh, if you were to even look at, uh, the book, have you ever heard of Rules for Radicals? It's this book on basically how to be a community organizer.

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And when I say community organizer, I mean, um, kind of the Obama, Chicago, Saul Alinsky type community organizer.

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And one of their, their tactics is saying whatever political thing you want to do, you have to phrase it in moral terms.

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So you have to turn this into a moral imperative. And so they'll take some kind of moral word and then cram it into the situation and then say, we're fighting for justice.

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We're fighting for equality, which, you know, justice and equality are two of the words that we talk about in linguistic theft.

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Yeah. It sounds great. Who's going to be like, boo, justice, boo, equality. You know, I hate that stuff.

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No one's going to say that. So it's like, you have to hide things behind their words. And, uh, one of the things that I just,

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I just gave a talk at the women in apologetics conference. And, uh, leading up to my talk, I was going to be kind of doing an intro to the mama bear book, but I became really convinced about this concept of identity that I would say identity is probably one of the biggest, uh, battlefield battlegrounds in our society right now.

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And what happens is you have to have two things in order to have a correct identity. You have to have the concept of truth, something that's actually true.

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You can't have a true identity without the concept of truth, but in order to convey an identity, you need words.

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So we've got truth and words, all both pointing to this identity here. And if we topple either of those, then we're going to be completely confused about identity.

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And so I think that society has attacked the concept of truth over and over and over again.

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There is no, the truth there's my truth and his truth, but now they're also taking on the concept of words that you can't even talk about a true identity because they're changing the words.

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And, um, and I also thought back, you know, if we want to just take this, you know, where does this, uh, you know, pull the thread, where all does it go?

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And, uh, that Jesus Christ is called the logos. He is the word.

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So if society really wants to attack Christ himself, they are going to attack words.

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That is his, in some ways, his identity from John 1, 1 in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was

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God. So no surprise that we're seeing an attack on words. So how do we start? We have to recognize this attack first and foremost.

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And Satan's been doing this since the beginning too. He started by trying to reinterpret

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God's words, questioning God's words. And that's what led to where we are today.

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One thing that you mentioned in the book too, is that words in general are being commandeered, commandeered to promote lies.

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Um, but Christian words, our Christian virtues, our Christian concepts are also being kidnapped. It's not just justice and equality.

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It's specifically biblical stuff. And one thing that I read recently, I can't cite it right now. I wish I could, but is the fact that a broader and broader group of individuals are starting to use the phrase born again.

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Like that's, gosh, that's totally heard that a Bible thing. I mean, Jesus said to Nicodemus, you need to be born again, but people are going,

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Hey, we really like the way that sounds. And they're using it to describe themselves when they would never call themselves a biblical

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Christian. So it's happening, happening all over the place. Yeah. I've seen the same thing happen with the, the concept of gospel that basically anything that produces kind of warm, happy feelings is the gospel.

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And we're here to, to bring unity and, and, uh, service to it. It's like, they're basically redefining gospel to just be unity and service.

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And that's, I mean, those are good things. Those are part of acting out the gospel and showing the power of the gospel, but that's not the gospel.

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Yep. I'm, um, I'm part of Natasha Crane's launch team for her upcoming book, talking with your kids about Jesus.

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And, uh, I just read a chapter that was talking about the confusion that people have when it comes to the word, uh, judgment, like passing judgment on something to judge someone.

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Right. Because it's like, you know, you Christian, you're not supposed to judge, or we're not supposed to judge. And the Bible does say that, but it comes down to an understanding of what the

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Bible means when it says that. And one thing, I think that's super missing in this discussion. And I, we don't really have time to dig, go down this rabbit hole too far is the fact that oftentimes the same

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English word is used to, to, um, translate to different Greek words or whatever the source, uh, language was.

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And because our language maybe isn't as broad or doesn't have the same depth as the other language. And so we read it and we see one passage says, uh, don't judge, but another passage basically, um, tells us that we should be judging.

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Yeah. Judge rightly is what it says that we're supposed to do. You are to judge right, uh, rightly. Exactly. And it comes and we get these ideas just totally get kidnapped because people think that they know what it means and they've packed their own meeting into it.

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Man, there's so many, so many things that come just from the, you think about what happened at Babel that the

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Lord said, I'm going to confuse them. And I had the same problem going through my old Testament class of, we were asking which part of the old law is, um, applicable for new

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Testament Christians. And I was like, how in the world are we, how in the world are we supposed to know? Cause there, there was like,

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I think up to 12 different words used for the different types of law in the old Testament. And there was two, as far as I could tell in the

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Greek. Um, and so there was no way to distinguish between these different things. You just had one word.

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And I think when it goes from even Greek into English, it's like it pairs down even more kind of like the concept of love.

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I think there's a total of six different definitions in the Greek for love. Most people are just not familiar with the four and we've got one word that describes how

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I feel about pudding and how I feel about my husband. That's a problem. I always told the teenage boys

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I worked with at victory Academy, not to be too impressed when a girl said they were cute because a girl will call a puppy cute.

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They will call an old man cute. This is what I'm saying.

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So it doesn't mean anything. Or even those dogs that are so ugly that they're cute. So yeah, it doesn't always mean what you hope it means.

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No, it doesn't. And a friend of mine, Mark Massey, the director there, he would say, you know, when speaking of love, he would say, you know,

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I love my wife, but I also love pizza and it doesn't end too well for the pizza. So, you know, what in the world?

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So what we're talking about here, you know, these confusing things, you know, destroying pizza or destroying people the way

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I destroy pizza and being called cute like an old man, maybe some of the silly consequences of linguistic theft, but what are some of the serious ones?

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Like when the world has sneaked in and stolen our family's vocabulary, basically in a way, when we give our family vocabulary to the world to allow them to define the words, and then we start using it the way the world says, what are some of the consequences that happen in our homes?

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Yes. I think that probably one of the largest concepts in Christianity is God's identity as love.

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And we are told God is love and we are to love others and that our two greatest commandments are loving the

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Lord our God and loving others as ourselves. And this is a, I mean, this is a foundation of Christianity.

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So when the world takes the word love and they say that it means feelings of comfort or accepting everything about somebody or sexual attraction, sexual attraction, calling something true, all these different things.

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And it's like, we can't just look at what is, how do we define love? But what do we define as unloving? And if you make someone uncomfortable, that's unloving.

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If you make someone feel judged, whether or not you're judging them or not, if they even feel judged, you have objectively done something unloving.

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And so they can look to our kids and said, your God says to love people, why are you disobeying your God? And the child's going to go, oh,

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I didn't know. And they're going to try to rectify the situation because we don't want to be jerks.

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We don't want to make people uncomfortable. We don't want to hurt people's feelings. So if society keeps telling us that what we're doing is hurting them, then we're going to try to change that.

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But it's all based on this bogus definition of love. They can convince us that we are actually following scripture by affirming maybe a certain sin or by affirming,

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I don't know, just different things. And that's the definition of love. You have to affirm all these things, call them equally true in order to love.

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And that's a problem for our kids who have only been shown a felt board that says God is love.

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That's right. All right. So Hillary, in the book, one of the consequences of linguistic theft, you say, is that it stops a discussion in its tracks.

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What do you mean by that? Well, I'll say it stops a normal discussion in his tracks. You try to pull this on my husband and he will, it does not work.

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But he has had guys actually ask him, why do you hate women? And because they're, it's like, wait, huh?

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Because he's probably, because he's talking about, he's very passionate about pro -life apologetics. And so if he's arguing for the cause for the unborn, they're turning that into, you hate women because you don't want them to be able to make choices.

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So they've taken that word hate and instead of it meaning that you have ill feelings and you're wanting to,

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I don't know, the worst for somebody. It's like, that's a really loaded question to say, why do you hate women?

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Right there. Most people would not know how to answer that. And it's usually, yeah. You stumble all of yourself and you could conveniently try to be, oh,

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I don't, I don't hate women. But then you can't really say anything because if you say what you were saying before, they're just going to come back and say, well, why do you hate women?

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Yeah. But you'll also see it with them saying, you know, why are you content with injustice? Why are you content with oppression?

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Why are you okay with oppression taking place right before your nose? Because they have defined what oppression is or they've defined what justice is, or they've defined what equality is and they've accused you of being the opposite.

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And so basically you can't, you can't answer the question really without it, without like having to first back up.

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But when it backs up, then it's like, oh, you know, if you try to actually define the word, I think you mentioned before, oh, she's all fancy.

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She's using the dictionary now as if that's a bad thing and good grief. It's like, well, okay, well let's define these words.

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But a lot of times people will get so caught off guard by being called something that they'll try to defend their character and say, oh no,

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I'm not like that. Well, why are you arguing as if you were? And this is an important thing to remember with our kids.

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You have the opportunity, especially in the home to, before the conversation becomes totally derailed to say, well, that's interesting.

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What do you mean by that? You know, so your child comes, they're spouting off something Natasha mentioned in her new book.

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She mentioned an example of her daughter yelling out that she doesn't want to be judged anymore.

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And one of the things that she needed to do was. We all love that. I'd love never to be judged again. That would be awesome.

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Well, what exactly do you mean by judge? You never want to be criticized again? You never want somebody to pass it?

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I mean, what do you, what do you want? You don't want to ever be, have your head put on the, you know, the guillotine. Okay. I respect that. Yeah.

22:18

So we need to think about this when we're starting with our kids and you mentioned something earlier, I wanted to jump in and say it. This is just super empowering when you just start a conversation with these words.

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What do you mean by that? I have to do this all the time in my counseling. Somebody uses a word. It might be like a really a

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Bible word, but I have to ask, okay, so what do you mean by that? Otherwise we can't have a conversation. Yeah.

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Another thing you say is that linguistic theft compels people to act without thinking through the issues.

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What does that look like? And specifically when the context of like a home, what is it? Well, there's certain things that elicit a knee -jerk reaction because they should elicit a knee -jerk reaction.

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So if someone is being abused, that should be stopped right away. However, if you redefine abuse to be this whole umbrella term that includes all sorts of stuff.

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Spiritual abuse is a good one. You know, people are saying that because my parents took me to church and prayed with me that I was spiritually abused.

23:16

Oh, yeah. And I think there was somebody, I can't remember what school it was from, where he preached on,

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I think it was 1 Corinthians 13. Oh, I know. It was the guy from Piper, not

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John Piper, Everett Piper. Back when he was, I think, a provost or dean at Oklahoma Wesleyan University that someone came and basically said that they felt, maybe that they felt judged or something from a chapel on 1

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Corinthians 13. They had no concept of, he's like, do you mean you felt convicted? Are you saying that you don't love people well enough?

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And they were like, don't put your hate on me kind of thing as if the bad feeling that they had inside when they realized that they weren't loving people since it was an uncomfortable feeling.

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Well, obviously, it's because he's judging and he's speaking something wrong. And so therefore, I need to tell him that he's offended me for talking about love.

24:08

And he let that fly for about two seconds and then wrote the book, Not a Daycare, to describe this is how our school is going to be run.

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So I appreciate him for that. I think we recommend that actually at the end of the book. Another thing you say is that, and I think we've touched on this, but linguistic theft blurs the details.

24:28

It just makes it hard to have an intelligent erudite conversation with somebody because you really don't know what anyone's talking about.

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This happens, I mean, this happens enough with our kids as it is. Children, as they're learning to speak, I love my kids are constantly making up words and I'm constantly having to do the mental gymnastics of figuring out what they really meant.

24:46

But this linguistic theft blurs the details even further because who knows what the person's really saying.

24:52

Yeah. You're just packaging a whole... You're packaging assumptions into a word to describe what happened. Who was it?

25:01

I think it was Jay Richards with Discovery Institute wrote an article for the Atlantic 10 years ago and it was something along the lines of how you can tell when an agenda is being put into something.

25:12

And one of his things was it is an umbrella for multiple things. So he was using some of the environmental stuff, but I would say a good example, if you go onto the

25:21

Mama Bear website and you look at the look, there's a blog titled, so you marched for women this weekend.

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Here's eight things you probably didn't know you were marching for. And it was this umbrella term of marching for women.

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And if you went out, ask people what they were marching for. They were all like, well, for women, well, what does that mean?

25:40

What exactly for women? And if you looked at the organizer's own document, it was everything from the

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Dakota pipeline to more rights for sex workers, not to help get people out of sex work, but to protect their rights in some way.

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I mean, as if being in sex work, isn't just giving away your rights that we're trying to protect you from and gun control and like all these different things.

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But if you could smuggle it under one phrase of march for women, then you blur all these details of what people are saying you're marching for.

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And then you can go out and say, we had, you know, this many million of people marching against gun stuff because that was in your stated document, which no one took time to read.

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So that would be an example of linguistic theft being used to blur the details. And that leads clearly into this next concept.

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Linguistic theft vilifies the opposing viewpoint because if you stand against 99, or if you stand against over 50 % of what's in that document, then they can say, well, you clearly don't love women.

26:46

You don't stand for women. You hate women because you can just take it. And it gives me the opportunity.

26:51

I mean, children do this all the time. You know, we will, uh, we'll have to give them a consequence or we'll talk to them and, you know, it's cliche for them to go, you hate me.

26:58

You don't understand me. Oh yeah. You become the villain, uh, simply because of a misunderstanding or a deliberate misunderstanding in our terminology.

27:07

Yeah. Well, I mean, just think about the, the, the pro -choice versus pro -life they're both kind of using, excuse me, that, that tactic of, um, you know, oh, we're pro -life.

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Are you saying that the other side is anti -life or the people that are saying pro -choice as if, as if we're anti -choice, uh, like, no,

27:23

I don't like people making decisions. They're not saying which choice this is. Pro -life is pretty clear because we are pro -life.

27:30

We're, we're fighting for the unborn pro -choice. There's a lot of choices that we are not allowed to make.

27:36

You know what? This should be, not be a shock. We are not allowed to do everything we want with our bodies. You will get a ticket if you don't have your seatbelt on, you don't, you are not allowed the choice whether or not to wear your seatbelt.

27:46

You are told to wear your seatbelt. So choice isn't the actual issue, but they're going to make that the issue, um, just because of this one particular choice.

27:56

But if you're against it, you're anti -choice. That also ties into this next one. I, I, you know, well, that's, they've also stopped calling us pro -life.

28:03

They started calling us anti -abortion, right? When the, that's the next consequence of linguistic theft is that it turns a negative into a positive or vice versa and they can do whatever they want with that.

28:14

Yeah. So the, I think the example I gave in the book is, um, kind of what we talked about earlier about how the word gospel is being taken and, uh, the word sin, there was this one ministry that would not use the word sin.

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And when they were asked, why aren't you using the word sin? They said, we're going to, we're going to speak up for love.

28:33

And, uh, I can't remember what the other thing was. Basically we're going to, we're going to shout the love of Christ louder from all the rooftops and we, we won't back down shouting our cause of love.

28:42

Okay. So how, so what they're doing is they're answering as if we're saying, no, don't shout, don't shout love.

28:49

They're the person was just asking, why aren't you discussing sin? And the refusal to talk about sin was then equated with shouting love from the rooftops of Christ.

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And they weren't going to back down from shouting his radical love. And it's so easy to do it.

29:02

It's so easy to not engage with the actual topic at hand, but just to kind of throw up a straw man or to come in and to say why, and to change the subject is basically what they're doing.

29:13

Yes. It's changing the subject. And we're going to have lots of examples of this. If, if, uh, you just want to, uh, we're, we're coming into political season here.

29:20

Oh my. So we're, we're going to be dealing with people who are really good at this. So it's like, if you just kind of listen to how they evade questions and, uh, turn, whatever it is that they're against into being for something else.

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And, Oh, you know, if you're going to fault me for being pro this, you know, well then count me guilty, you know, kind of attitude.

29:42

You also find a lot of good examples in the book. If you haven't gotten the book yet, you definitely need to do that. Maybe you're trying to win it in our competition.

29:48

And I'll tell you a little bit more about how you can do that in a minute. But, uh, this book is fantastic. And I'll say this too.

29:53

If you go to truth, love parent .com under our suggested books, uh, you can find mama bear apologetics and, uh, with our

30:00

Amazon affiliate link. So if you actually purchased the book with that link, then a couple of things will happen.

30:05

One, you'll have the book and you'll be that much better off because of it. Well, if you read it and actually follow what it says, uh, two, you'll be a blessing to mama bear apologetics.

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And three, it actually helps truth, love parent because with, as an Amazon affiliate, Amazon will give us some money because you bought the book with our links.

30:21

So that's pretty cool. Um, but some examples of the book, uh, from the book of linguistic theft, we've talked about a lot of these is love truth, marriage, male versus female tolerance, justice and equality.

30:32

What it means to be a bigot. Uh, what it means to be authentic. Oh my word. That's like, no one knows what that means anymore.

30:38

Nope. Nope. That was one of the ones that that's actually something churches imposed on itself kind of, uh, that even people out in the world would, they, they probably wouldn't even understand that.

30:48

That's it. That's where churches has, uh, done their own linguistic theft to themselves. Some, I think

30:53

I'd enter at, you know, thrown to this list and we don't have to discuss them in detail, but I, we need to be thinking about this.

30:59

Uh, we talked about gender. Okay. Um, but we haven't discussed the whole concept of using an incorrect pronoun to refer to somebody.

31:06

That's an idea of linguistic theft. Um, but I also think that a lot of the mental health jargon out there is a form of this linguistic theft.

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God refers to that part of our being as our spirit and the, and the mental health world doesn't believe in the spirit.

31:22

They believe that we're completely biological. And so they're going to look at the idea of our minds, uh, from a very different perspective and we've allowed them to do that.

31:31

And I think the church has hurt a lot because of that. So we see what it is. We see the huge consequences and no doubt as you've been listening, you're like, yeah, you know what?

31:39

There's been a lot of this going on in our home. Either we, as a family are using the wrong ideas, the wrong terminology, or, um,

31:46

I found myself on one side of an issue and my child on the other side of the issue, conversations have been derailed.

31:53

Uh, we've been vilified. So how do we fight back? And specifically because, you know, truth in love, how do we fight back without being a jerk?

32:02

Well, I think just, uh, again, like kind of teaching the biblical definitions of things. So looking at justice, if we know that things are attributes of God, then let's look at some of the examples of God acting in justice or God acting in love or God acting in mercy or compassion.

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And just kind of look at how God really, um, shows those qualities and what we can learn about what that actual definition is.

32:29

I'd also recommend going back to older, uh, older dictionaries to see how they have been defined in the past before, before agendas have crept in and kind of helping kids to identify buzzwords.

32:42

Cause I think, um, whenever someone says something that you're like, that's not quite right, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

32:49

I think a lot of times that's a clue that you have something that's been stolen there. There's some buzzword that's been used and it's kind of, you know, the princess bride.

32:57

I do not think that means what you think it means. Um, so that's kind of a clue. And I've heard a lot of women, um, or just people in general, when they read this book, they said there were so many things that I couldn't put my finger on, but now

33:09

I can, I can identify it. It's like they knew it was there, but they just didn't know what it was. Um, so I think in, in just deciding to be salt and light, it's one of those things where you kind of have to own what our role is as Christians that, um, as I was writing this chapter,

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I was thinking about salt and light. Um, we, we did a study on that in my church a couple of years back and how both of those have both a helpful and an irritating quality to them.

33:38

Uh, salt was helpful for, you know, seasoning meat and keeping it from decaying.

33:43

And we're called to be the salt of the world, but you put salt in someone's eye or like me, if you accidentally get salt or well, in my case, lemon juice on your fingers and you forget to wash your hands before you take out your contacts.

33:54

Uh, yeah. So that, that is not comfortable. So we have to kind of embrace the idea that, you know what, sometimes if we're pointing out something that is wrong, it's going to be an uncomfortable situation.

34:05

Same thing with light that nobody likes to have light in their face when they've been in the dark. It's kind of, um, but there's a way to do it to where you're not just barging in on someone in the dark and waving a flashlight in their face that would fall under the, um, fighting back and being a jerk category.

34:23

Uh, you kind of need to just lead people along and ask them questions to where they kind of figure out,

34:29

Oh yeah, you're right. Maybe I have changed that definition or maybe, maybe we're defining this thing in two different ways and it doesn't have to be this big battle.

34:37

It's more like a learning experience where you keep things conversational and just kind of ask honest questions and you can't ask them as if it's a leading question, like, well, what do you mean by that?

34:46

You know, there's a way to ask a question where it's not really a question. Um, personally, I think this is a little bit easier for women cause

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I think it's easier for us to play dumb and not really have it count against us. So I have this thing where sometimes

34:59

I'll like twirl my hair and be like, I'm not sure I understand that. Um, and, uh, and it can be really non -confrontational and I'm like, yay, it's good to be a woman.

35:10

Um, so, you know, just doing some of these things without being obnoxious, I think. Yeah. I can't do the whole hair twirl thing.

35:16

Yeah, you can't, but I can't. It's awesome. I can stroke their goatee though. There you go. Explain that a little bit more.

35:23

What do you mean by that? Yes, please. Let's recap. Let's recap these, uh, these ways, these four ways of fighting back without being a jerk.

35:30

Cause I think they're super important. Okay. Uh, first of all, and the big one is know the biblical definitions.

35:35

We here at truth, love, parent, and I know that mama bears that try to do it as well. We try to help you guys with this. We have a whole multi -part series on what biblical love is, where we look at the

35:45

Greek words, what Jesus meant when he said agape or what he meant when he said phileo.

35:51

Um, and all these words are translated love in our Bibles. You need to know the biblical definitions. Um, we did an episode called 10 things parents are supposed to hate.

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And, and biblically speaking, it is not wrong to hate something, uh, to draw a line in the sand and say, man, is that unpopular to say that?

36:08

Oh, I know it is unpopular. It's how much hate mail did you get from that? You know, I didn't get any, which means

36:13

I don't have that many listeners or all the right people were listening. I don't know. Oh my word.

36:19

But we have to know biblical definitions and we're going to talk more about that in the next, uh, the upcoming episodes.

36:24

Also teach your kids to identify the buzzwords. You really do have to know what the world is saying.

36:30

You've got to understand what they mean with all of their, uh, their various pronouns. I think it's interesting.

36:36

Uh, they're, you know, people are stopping the terms Latino and Latina and I'd actually don't even know what the pronunciation is cause

36:43

I'm only seen it written, but it's Latine with an X at the end. I don't, it's Latinx.

36:48

I don't know. I don't know what the pronunciation is, but I have not seen that. Yeah. You've got to be familiar with it. Um, because if you don't know that it exists and you can't be prepared to address it, your child's going to come in confrontation with it and they're not going to know what to do.

37:01

It's like our conversation with about, um, porn proofing your kids. Uh, you don't want to show them porn, but you've got to prepare them to know what to do when

37:10

God forbid they see it. This is the exact same idea. Identify the buzzwords. Also, I just want to say that this is a big one for science as well.

37:18

If you'd like to see a talk that I do called Darwinism and discernment, that kind of talks about the buzzwords that people use in science to kind of obfuscate the details of like,

37:27

Oh, and then this happened. Um, yeah, you'll see those buzzwords in science a lot.

37:33

By the way, you get two points for obfuscate. Uh, it's a three, it's a three point scale. So you're doing really well. So good job.

37:39

Uh, the third thing is identify when you are embarrassed to state your position. If you've come to a place where you are, you're kind of feeling like, man,

37:46

I've got to be on the wrong side of history. I've got to be on the wrong side of this debate because you're embarrassed. You've got to be able to identify that, uh, because that means that either you're on the wrong side or that linguistic theft has occurred and you need to be able to address it.

38:01

And then lastly, as Hillary so wonderfully put, we need to be decide to be salt and light. We have been called to be intentional premeditated disciple -making ambassador parents.

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And God says our ambassadorial role is a role of reconciliation. We are a city set on a Hill. We are salt to the, to the tongue.

38:19

And we are supposed to be drawing people to us. And if we're, if we're not going to do that, if we're not, if we're just kind of kind of go through our lives, hoping nobody knows, you know, that we're a

38:28

Christian so we can avoid all of these conversations, then linguistic theft is going to creep into our house.

38:33

It's going to steal away our family's vocabularies. And we're going to be left at the end, wondering what on earth anyone's talking about and not be able to figure out why our kids have gone off the rails or why they're being called haters at school.

38:48

Like, Oh yeah. Yeah. They'll come home asking us, mom and dad, everyone hates me. This is what they're saying. And we're like, Oh, I don't know why we'll just, my grandfather was really great.

38:57

You know, I come home complaining that people were making fun of me and he goes, well, at least they're talking to you, which not super valuable.

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And we do that. We're, we're, we're not valuable because we're not equipping our kids to be able to challenge these cultural lies.

39:13

And that's what the mama bear apologetics books is all about. I really encourage you to pick it up, Hillary.

39:18

Thank you so much. You guys are awesome. Thank you for what you're doing. I really hope one day we can have you back on the show.

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Whether you guys are writing a new book or putting out a new tool, I want to talk about it. I want to get it into the hands of our ears of our listeners.

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Cause what you guys are doing is really awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much. If that conversation was as impactful as I pray it was, will you please rate and review the show reviews are really a handy way to encourage others to subscribe to the show.

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And also please share this episode on your favorite social media outlets so that other Christian parents can be built up in their parenting.

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And hope you'll join us next time. As we once again, open God's word to discover how to parent our children for life and godliness.

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To that end, we'll be discussing how you can give your children a foundation on which they can stand. Truth.

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