David French on Intergenerational Sin

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. It's going to be a bit of a short podcast.

I guess it could have been long. I saw this morning that David French had posted an article yesterday, some people were sending it to me, on the

Dispatch, called Structural Racism Isn't Wokeness, It's Reality. And I could have read the whole thing.

I was thinking about it. I'll just read through this whole article and we'll just kind of respond line by line. It's already got 782 comments as I'm recording this, 325 likes.

That's actually, that's interesting, a lot more comments than likes. I'm not sure if that's typical for the Dispatch, but anyway.

It's a terrible article. I don't know how else to say it. It's just an awful article. And some of you have been wondering whether or not

I'm going to talk about the situation at McLean Bible Church and David Platt, and the answer is yes. But, and I have been aware of the situation for actually well over a year now.

There's been problems there for a while. It's a bit complicated, that situation.

And so I, am I planning, yes, I am planning on talking about it. Still mulling over exactly how and when.

I have some people who have reached out to me personally, I've told them that I don't even know if this is really so much, you could do it in a podcast, but I'm not even sure this is something that should really be done in a podcast with all the moving parts.

If you really want to get the full picture, you don't have to, I mean, we could just kind of go over the high points, but there's a lot of stuff.

It's an iceberg. I'll put it that way. It is an iceberg. You are only hearing about the stuff above the surface.

Below the surface, there is so much more and so much that I don't even think I know about. But some of the things that I have heard, and I just, it amazes me what's going on.

It's very bad, in my opinion, what's going on at McLean. It is more sneaky than what happened at Naples.

Naples was so simple compared to what's going on at McLean. Anyway though, this was the launching pad used for David French's article.

Because David French is basically saying that the issues that are going on with David Platt right now, and the so -called conservatives, he makes fun of them, who are against David Platt, are against him because of a statement like this.

And I think this must be from when David Platt, I don't know when this is from, but I'm assuming this is from like 2018's

T4G conference. It may not be though. David Platt said this kind of thing a few times, I think. But here's the quote that David French quotes from David Platt.

David Platt says, a disparity exists. We can't deny this. There are not opinions, they're facts. These are not opinions, they're facts.

It matters in our country whether one is white or black. Now, we don't want it to matter, which is why

I think we try to convince ourselves it doesn't matter. We think to ourselves, I don't hold prejudices towards black or white people, so racism is not my problem.

But this is where we need to see that racialization is our problem. It's all of our problem.

We subtly, almost unknowingly contribute to it. So this is an accusation.

This is like the way that someone who's very nurturing in the way they have a good bedside manner knows how to accuse someone of something, because basically he's accusing you of being a racist.

He's accusing you in that quote of at least contributing to these systems of racism.

And you're telling yourselves a lie when you say that black and white doesn't matter. You're a liar too.

You're feeding yourself these lies. You're self -deceived. And he knows how to craft it in such a way. Russell Moore was also good at this, but not as good as Platt.

Crafted in such a way where it doesn't seem like he's really accusing you.

It seems like he's kind of in your corner, but make no mistake, this is an accusation. So David French is using this to say that this is the kind of thing that David Platt said that he's getting in trouble for now.

This is what's causing the problems at the church is these horrible people that think they're conservatives and they're not going after David Platt.

And so David French tries to create a defense, for lack of a better term,

I guess, for David Platt. He wants to defend, I'm assuming his friend here or someone he's close to, agrees with on some of these things.

And so I thought about going through all of this. There's a lot of innuendo, a lot of, or just kind of taking cheap shots all over the place.

A lot of just assumptions that you could take a long time to get behind. But what I thought was, the worst part of this to me, and this is my

Christian side coming out, is the way that he uses scripture.

That's the most offensive thing to me in this whole article. It's the most basic thing as well.

It's a simple mistake that he makes that he shouldn't. And I have not seen a response to my liking yet on this.

I've seen some good ones, by the way. I should say that. I've seen some good responses, but I haven't seen one that really got into one of the main passages he uses, which is 2

Samuel 21. We need a response to that.

And so this is one of the reasons that I decided I'm gonna do this podcast. And so I wrote something, I posted it on Facebook, and I'm gonna read it to you, and I'll comment as I read it to you.

But we're gonna work through 2 Samuel 21, or at least the working issues in that passage that David French wants to use, and what he left out.

We'll mention that as well. And then we'll talk about some of the other passages, which are very easy to deal with.

In fact, who was it? Owen Strand. Owen Strand wrote an article that I think, within a few sentences, he dealt with those passages.

I'm gonna deal with them here too, but he did so in just a great way. It was a very good article on David French.

I'm coming at it a little bit differently. So let's start at the beginning here.

Here's a screenshot of, on Twitter, David French posting this, and of course, there's a picture of David Platt.

So you know that this is about the situation at McLean, to some extent at least. I wanted to read for you some old quotes.

Not that old, really, though. 2019. This is David French in 2019 in an article in National Review.

He doesn't work there anymore. He works for the Dispatch, but in National Review, he said this.

Is there a boot on the neck of the American working class? Yes, or working class American. Yes, there is.

Sadly, it is typically a man's own boot. His own choices weigh him down. His own decisions destroy his future.

Elites can help and elites can hurt, but in the United States, a man can still make his own way. If he can't, the first person he should blame is the person who stares back at him in the mirror.

The primacy of personal responsibility over public policy is an outdated conservative dogma.

It's cold, hard, pragmatic fact. David French, February 25th, 2019.

Here's David French on February 4th, 2016, in an article called

Mandatory Diversity Training and the Racist Injustice of Serena Williams Multi -Million Dollar Endorsements. Here's what he said.

Let's check in on the University of Missouri. Last semester, campus radicals pushed out the president largely because of a few alleged racial incidents that no sentient person believed he caused or could control.

Now comes the brave new world of mandatory diversity training, where young students learn all about the oppression inherent in the system.

There's one slight problem with the narrative, however. This isn't 1950, so the racial injustice is a bit harder to find.

David French, February 4th, 2016. So these are things that I think, those who are listening, most of you at least, you're resonating with this.

You're saying this sounds like it's coming from someone who's actually conservative. And David French has been going through,

I have never followed him closely, but from what I've read, and people who I've read him more closely have said the same thing.

He's been shifting left now over the last few years, and in the last two years, last year especially, there's been just a huge shift.

And what do we attribute it to? I don't know. I don't know what to attribute it to exactly.

There's probably a lot of things. I could gander at an idea, but I don't want to speculate.

I'm just noting that this is the kinds of things David French used to say. Now he's saying that we have generational sin, and we need to make atonement for what has happened in past generations, and it's worked its way into systemic racism, of which we're all complicit.

He sounds like a critical race theorist. So there are two reactions. I was just looking through some of the comments earlier today, and I really wanted to highlight because I thought these are good.

One is Jacob Brunton. He said, how would you distinguish between what you say here and wokeness?

And this is a really good question, and it's not asked enough. When someone who says they're conservative, like David French, says something that sounds like critical race theory, or wokeness, or social justice, and they say, well,

I don't believe that. I don't agree with that. Then I think it's a fair question to say, okay, well, if you don't agree with that, tell me how your position or your views are different than those views.

And if all it is is, well, I'm not an atheist, or I'm not a materialist, or I'm not a Marxist, or I'm, well, then you know that they're not actually dealing with the ethical issues, the rubber meets the road, critical race theory issues, what the effect it actually has in the real world.

They don't actually have a substantial disagreement. It's a grounding issue for them. And so it's a good question.

I don't expect David French to ever engage with Jacob Brunton, but it's a good question. Jennifer says,

Reuben, I guess, pro -voting Reuben, okay. I guess that's a statement, is an MSNBC anchor, apparently, and loves

David French's article. It says, every conservative needs to read this. Everyone needs to read this.

So I just thought that's funny. It gives you an idea. Well, when you got someone who's an anchor for MSNBC saying how much they appreciate your article,

I don't know that a conservative, maybe there's some issues in which you could do that on.

Maybe I'm against child trafficking, they're against child trafficking or something, but you're talking about literally the main issue right now, one of them, that progressives are pushing.

And that is this idea that America is fundamentally racist, systemically racist, and guilty, and we need to admit this guilt, we need to humble ourselves, supposedly, and just listen.

This is the tool that they're using to manipulate all these institutions, and that's what

David French is writing on, and you have an MSNBC anchor, Jennifer Reuben, agreeing. So here's my response.

I'm going to read through it, and we'll just, maybe I'll make some comments here and there. Here's what I said. David French, a senior editor for the

Dispatch, recently appealed to biblical texts in 2 Samuel, 2 Kings, Daniel, Nehemiah, and Leviticus in order to defend the view that modern

American Christians are complicit in structural racism and possess an intergenerational obligation to remedy historic injustice.

In 2 Samuel 21, God caused a famine in Israel in reaction to King Saul's previous attempt to break

Israel's treaty with the Gibeonites and exterminate them instead of simply treating them as slaves.

Now, if you know the story, the Gibeonites fooled Israel. They came, and they made their clothes look old, and they made out like they were not from the surrounding nations.

They weren't neighbors. They weren't the ones God had told Israel to destroy. And they fooled

Israel, and that led to Israel making a treaty with them. And as a result, and the word slave is used in Scripture, so that is the word.

They were going to be woodworkers and slaves of Israel. So they gained their lives.

They didn't lose their lives, which was a win for them. They didn't get eliminated by Israel, but instead they had to become slaves of Israel.

And I wonder what David French thinks of that. He wants to use this story as normative somehow for what

America should do today. So I wonder how he feels about that. But that's in the story.

So to give you some background. So, as a result, Saul's predecessor, King David, handed over seven of Saul's sons and grandsons to be punished for the sin of Saul and his bloody house.

That's the term used in 2 Samuel, Saul and his bloody house. So King David is responsible, well, he's the one that has to deal with this issue.

Years after the fact, when there's a famine for three years in Israel that God caused, and the famine is caused because this is an unresolved issue of some kind.

Saul tried to exterminate the Gibeonites. He never should have done it. He broke the treaty, and justice still hasn't been served, essentially.

So this is a unique situation. And French asserts that Saul was king before David, and God was punishing

Israel years after Saul's regime because of Saul's sin. It was the next king, David's responsibility to make things right.

He concludes that Israel remained responsible for its former leader's sins, and they were required to make amends.

This responsibility extends to the United States of America, which he believes fails to ameliorate the effects of slavery and Jim Crow embedded in our system.

Now, I want to just say, this is an argument we have to contend with from 2 Samuel 21.

Most of the things that I saw dealing with this did not actually even, they didn't contend with this.

They didn't go after 2 Samuel 21. There were potshots taken here and there on Twitter, but I haven't seen a serious grappling with it.

So this is, I do think, and look, I know that David French is outside of bounds.

He's involved in all kinds of hypocrisy when he points to that, and he's not pointing to clear passages like Ezekiel 18, which

I'll get to in a minute. But we do need to answer this. So here's my answer.

It is significant that civil justice was limited only to living members of Saul's bloody house and did not extend to David's sons or any other

Israelite. See, that's a big difference between what David French is promoting today and what happened back then.

This was only Saul's bloody house, and it's described in the passage as a bloody house. We perhaps don't know all the ins and outs of what that exactly meant, why the whole house was bloody.

Was it only the result of Saul's sin? Was that a characteristic of the house itself, that the people there in Saul's house were like this?

But that's what the passage describes. And David was not paying for it by,

I mean, they all had the famine upon them, Israel did, but he's not sacrificing his sons or himself or saying,

I'm guilty for this. No one is saying they're guilty for it. The only people that are punished for some kind of guilt or atonement, which is the word used in the passage, are

Saul's sons who are members of his bloody house. So you can't extend this to, well, all of America is systemically this way and we're all guilty or all

Christians are guilty or all white people are guilty. It doesn't work. This isn't along ethnic lines. This is very, very specific situation.

It's specific to one King and his family. It is also obvious the situation was unique and not normative.

And this is very important to me. David was unaware of how to rectify the circumstance from God's law.

In other words, he's looking at this and he's thinking, I don't know what to do about it. So he goes and he asks the Gibeonites, all right, what's going to appease you?

What do you want to have happen? Because there's nothing in God's law that says exactly how to rectify this.

And I thought it was interesting, you know, there's a famine for three years and finally David goes to the Lord and says, what's going on? And the

Lord tells him, but he doesn't go to the Lord about what to do about it. Or at least it's not recorded in the passage.

So I thought that was fascinating. So we don't know what the Lord thought of this solution.

So the Gibeonites were not interested at first. David goes to them. What do we do? Gibeonites say, we're not interested in reparations.

We don't want their money. We are not, we don't also, we don't want to kill anyone either. We're not going to violate

Israel's due process by putting anyone to death. The passage does not clarify whether God approved of David's actions.

It doesn't say. It is descriptive. It's not prescriptive. David French wants to make it all prescriptive.

This is what America should be doing today somehow, which I don't know how you apply this. Are we going to take seven descendants of slave owners and kill them?

Or what does he want? But anyways, interestingly, God was moved by prayer for the land.

In other words, the drought ended not after the executions, but rather after the bones of Saul, Jonathan, and the seven executed sons were buried in their family grave.

And this took some time. I don't know how long, but it was David, David was kind of shamed, it seems like when you're reading the passage into burying them in the family grave.

And so that's when God ends the drought. Most biblical interpretation textbooks advise studying concepts in difficult passages like this one by first understanding passages that are easy to understand on the same subject.

So Ezekiel 18, most of us are familiar. It talks about those who practice justice and righteousness, living and those who sin, who are characterized by sin, dying.

And to quote it in verse 20 of Ezekiel 18, it says, the son will not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son's iniquity.

Each person is answerable for their own actions. This does not mean that children cannot learn though, and repeat the sinful habits of their parents.

But it does mean that when they are punished for participating in the sins of their ancestors, it is because they are actually participating, not because they inherit someone else's guilt.

So French uses the way Josiah, Daniel, and the Israelites during Moses and Nehemiah times confessed their father's sins as evidence that modern

Americans must repent and atone for systemic racism. Yet in all these examples, the current generation was actually confessing sins in which they themselves were participating as they continue to perpetuate the sinful patterns of their parents.

So perhaps this behavior makes even more sense in the context of a national covenant. So essentially, what

I'm trying to say here is that most of the examples that French brings up, and they're not the ones he comments on, he spends more time in the 2

Samuel passage, but the other ones are all, you know, our father sinned, our father sinned, our father sinned, we confess these sins, but it's always included in, and that's what we're doing.

We are guilty of these same sins as well. So there's an inheritance of sin because they're inheriting the habit of their fathers, not because they're inheriting the guilt of their father's sin.

And there's a big difference there. And David French wants to make out like you're inheriting the guilt,

I guess. It seems that way, or at least those problems that were, it's up to you to rectify them.

And one of the problems with this that I'm not getting into is he does attribute slavery and segregation to the current disparities that exist.

And that's just not accurate. You can go back, I think, three or four episodes. I did a whole video on Phil Vischer and Jamar Tisby's woke ideology.

And I went through piece by piece showing that the current situation is not so much because of segregation and slavery.

It's because of other factors, and the main one being unstable homes.

And there's, like history, like anything in history, there's a lot of converging elements coming together.

But it's just a curious thing. The closer you get to slavery, the more you have a solid family in the black community.

The more there are black -owned businesses and things of that nature. Even the crime rate.

Now, the crime rate's been elevated for some time, but it didn't get up to over 30%, 30 % until like 1941.

And so, you know, you go back farther than that when the country was more racially insensitive, et cetera.

And why is the crime rate lower? So, anyways, I cite a lot more examples in that video.

You can go check it out. And so David French is wrong about that. But focusing just on the scripture here, even if that was all true, that dog doesn't hunt.

That it's not the children's responsibility to be guilty because, or to make right necessarily, the sins that their parents did.

Now, there are specific situations I could probably get into where, you know, dad ended up taking something from someone who's still alive, and the son has it, and you know, that kind of thing.

But that's not what we're talking about here. We are talking about hundreds of years, if we're going back to slavery, we're talking about if we're going back to segregation, you know, 60, 70 years.

And we are, you know, that generation is, they're nearing the end of their lives now, the ones who experienced that.

And they seem to be the ones that are less bitter about it. Isn't that interesting? It's the ones that never experienced it who seem to be the most bitter about it.

But those who had no participation in that, in other words, they were not, even if they were living under it, they weren't, you know, promoting this.

They weren't trying, they weren't committing actual sins. The Bible says they're sins.

You know, they are not guilty. You have to be guilty of a sin to be guilty, in Christianity at least.

And if your parents were involved in something, even if it was sinful for them, you know, let's say, you know, your dad, your great grandpa, whatever, they were part of the worst kinds of racists imaginable.

They actually murdered people out of racial hate, et cetera, then you would not be guilty for that sin.

And that's what Ezekiel 18 is teaching. And when Josiah, Daniel, and the Israelites during Moses and Nehemiah's times are lamenting or confessing the sins of their fathers, they're saying, we're doing the same thing.

So if their father was involved in racism, right, they were involved in racism, which it wasn't, and racism isn't even a term

I like to use, but taking that term and applying the worst element of it, you know, actually breaking

God's law by murdering someone, let's say, or saying hateful things against someone because of their race, evil, right?

That's an evil thing to do. If you were doing that, and your father did it, and you learned it from your father, then that would be the connection.

But again, the behavior makes more sense, I think, in the context of a national covenant between God and Israel. There is a,

I mean, Abraham was going to be the father of many nations. And there is a promise that extends through generations.

And we don't have that same relationship in the United States with God. And this is one of the interesting things to me, because it's common for social justice activists to oppose the idea that America is like Israel, a chosen nation.

And they don't believe the civil laws specific to Israel apply to the modern liberal democracies like the United States. For example,

David French, he believes the drag queen story hours at public libraries are one of the blessings of liberty. And he opposes efforts to limit their access to the public square.

Yet this would be out of step with Deuteronomy 22 .5, which states, a woman shall not wear a man's clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman's clothing, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the

Lord your God. So David French is fine with running roughshod over that verse. That verse doesn't apply anymore, right, because we're a liberal democracy.

But yet French has no problem stretching and selectively citing unique examples from the Old Testament he can use to bolster his arguments for systemic racism.

So which is it? You can't have it one way. You can't say, well, those right -wing nationalists, they view us as some,

America is a special nation that has some kind of a blessing attached to it and a covenant with God. You can't oppose that and then at the same time try to smuggle in all these things that are unique to the relationship

Israel had with God. And so I think the story in 2 Samuel is unique to that relationship in some way.

There's a national covenant between two groups. And then the Lord is the one punishing the land for this abridgement of that contract.

And in the other cases, it's mostly idolatry.

It's Israel committing idolatry against the Lord and the children realizing our parents have done this, we're doing this, we as a whole collective have broken this national covenant.

So this is what David French is trying to use to apply to the United States. And I'm just saying, we don't have a national covenant, number one.

And number two, the scripture is very clear on that children do not pay for the sins of their fathers.

And so these examples he tries to use are at best sketchy.

I think, honestly, this is the strongest verse they have is the verse in 2

Samuel. I really do. I've seen all the verses that are used to my knowledge on this.

I think 2 Samuel 21 is the strongest one they have. And it doesn't work. It just doesn't work.

It doesn't give you enough information to see if God even approved the way David dealt with this. And it's not a parallel to today's situation.

So I wanted to give that to you. I hope that helps as you're thinking through some of these things.

Some of you might have seen the David French article. And I wouldn't suggest reading it. It would be a waste of your time, probably. But you're going to hear these arguments from other people.

They're going to bring up these verses. You need to know how to deal with them when they're brought up. And we can't avoid the ones that are hard, like 2

Samuel. We can't just say, well, we're going to deal with the other ones and not 2 Samuel. We have to come up with answers for these things.

And it's not hard. Once you just put on your thinking cap, you open the Word of God, it's not that difficult.

So I hope that is helpful for you. God bless. More to come later this week. And I want to say just two things briefly.

Number one, in closing here, I am switching over the audio podcast to a different podcast service.

So I'm hoping that everything goes smoothly with that. But if there is a problem, if you're watching the video because you didn't get the audio podcast, that's the reason.

It should rectify itself in a few days. And then the other thing is,

I did announce yesterday in the shortest podcast of all time, but I was going to just remind everyone that there is a tab now at worldviewconversation .com.

If you go there. And it's on the upper right -hand corner where all the tabs are.

And it says Host an Event. And so if you click on it, there's a tab for you can fill out a form.

If you want to host myself, and I have others that I have in mind for maybe a conference or speaking on this topic to a youth group or to your church or I don't know.

The sky's the limit, I guess. But I realize not everyone can go to a big conference. And so I'm trying to coordinate with some other individuals to bring good teaching on social justice and a biblical reaction to it to your church, your neck of the woods.

So check that out. Host an Event at worldviewconversation .com. I was told earlier by the web designer that there was a glitch.

So we're hoping that people yesterday did not sign up and then it didn't go through.

Because I haven't really seen much. So that's rectified now. That's good to go.

So if you did try to sign up yesterday or fill out that form, you're going to want to go back and maybe fill it out again.

And I hate to inconvenience anyone. But we're just not sure if there was an issue with it yesterday.

So it is running. We tested it. Seems like it's running well. And I want to leave you with that.

So God bless. Hope you're going to have a good rest of the week. And I will be back on Wednesday with some more.