Responding to the Charge of “Perceived Carelessness” and More on the Social Justice Revolution

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is Monday, and I promised over the weekend that I would address certain issues, and unfortunately, we don't have water at the office right now, so we're not going to go quite as long as we normally do.

In fact, I just realized I didn't get any anyways. So, oh well, we're not going to go as long as we normally do. We'll try to sneak everything into an hour today, and then hope that the water is fixed by tomorrow, and see what we can do at that particular point in time.

I wrote an article, it was only about, okay, it was two and a half parlay posts.

So that's about 2 ,500 words, I guess, or 2 ,500 characters, actually, not words. And I'm going to read it, because I was then sent a rebuke by a fellow by the name of Mike Pereira.

It says, Mike Pereira is with Cab Malone and 71 others. So I assume there were 72, 73 people.

Somehow, I'm not sure how you do that. And it was about this article.

So, not everybody read it. I think it's important to hear what I said, because I'm being rebuked for it.

So this is something that Christians believe is rebuke -worthy, and I think we need to understand why, and we need to be able to respond to it.

Because this is becoming a new dividing line. And it is a dividing line that allows you to identify, unfortunately, the influence of external sources of authority, and external ways of thinking that are not derived from Scripture, that are derived from secular sources.

So here's what I said. When I was a kid, my mom would take me to Gettysburg.

We would walk the battlefield and visit all the monuments I loved. We'd buy a genuine bullet from the battle, by the way.

I still have one of those. Or fake Confederate money. It felt so crinkly and looked so cool.

Because they tried to make it look older, so it got all crinkly and stuff. Anyway. I was born in Minneapolis, and I lived there in Pennsylvania, so the boys in blue were the good guys.

But when we saw the statues of Lee or Longstreet, it never crossed my mind that they should be torn down.

They were monuments to the men who fought here. Years later, I visited and walked

Pickett's Charge. If you know what Pickett's Charge is, shame on you. I could not imagine the bravery of the men who made it all the way to the

Union lines. Just amazing. And then I noted, you can go to Fredericksburg if you want to do the reverse journey.

That is, if you want to be on the Union lines and try to get to the Confederate—in that case, it was the wall there in Fredericksburg, which had happened before Gettysburg.

Which is why the Union soldiers in Gettysburg chanted, Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg, when Pickett's Charge failed.

I am thankful for those trips, for I now live in a culture of offended feelings, not historical memories.

Instead of honestly evaluating the past, seeing the good, the bad, even the ugly, people now live in an emotional haze of constant anger and frustration.

Offense is now the greatest civic virtue, and you don't even have to be offended by the living alone.

No, it is great to be offended by the dead. General Robert E. Lee was, in the opinion of almost any historian of the period, one of the greatest military leaders this nation ever produced.

But you don't have to believe modern scholars. Just read what was said about him by his contemporaries, including those against whom he fought.

He was not just respected, he was revered, or in the case of those on the other side, feared. Respect, admiration, honor, all accompanied his death only five short years after Appomattox.

Governor Ralph Northam has announced that Lee's monument in Richmond will be removed.

Already defaced, the monument shows Lee upon his trusty steed, Traveler, who died shortly after Lee in 1870.

I guess it is fitting that people who live by emotion rather than careful thought must be protected by the powers from even seeing anything that would offend.

For a wise people, a grounded people, unified in a consistent worldview, history is a rich source of wisdom.

You can look at Lee, recognize he was a man of his era, disagree mightily with his decisions and actions, all the while recognizing the utter childish foolishness of dragging him into your time and missing the great things we learned from him and from others.

Lee, Jackson, Grant, Sherman, then I put the parenthetical comment, see how

I'm more of an Easterner in my youth, and if you know the war, you know that they all fought in the Eastern Theater, not the

Western Theater, were all men of their days, well, Sherman did some, but primarily in the

East, were all men of their days upon whom we could easily pour opprobrium in our modern superiority, and that seems to be the fashion of the day, but the fact is no nation can survive self -hatred, and that is what this is.

It is shallow, childish self -hatred that shows not the slightest adult capacity to categorize, consider, think.

It will deprive our children of their own history to their detriment and ours. Finally, a people devoid of their own history will be a people easily controlled, easily redefined.

They will never be wise, they will never be mature, they will never be courageous. These are the things we are seeing being stolen from our children, but it may be inevitable.

Lee, Jackson, Grant, and Sherman would, to a man, stand in disgust at what we have become.

In our gay pride, flag -draped, planned parenthood, t -shirt -wearing smugness, we think ourselves so morally superior, when in reality, each one of those men would spit in disgust at the whole lot of us.

Well, the responses were very, very predictable.

The responses are basically based on the idea that there is a modern narrative that simply cannot be questioned.

You cannot talk about stuff like this. You can't address doing history.

You can't talk about anything that time. It's very, very similar to the situation in Germany.

I discovered about two years ago that my friends in Germany know nothing about World War II.

Nothing. In the public education system, and there is no private education system, you have to go to public schools in Germany.

There's no homeschooling. It's not allowed. They'll take your kids away from you if you try. In Germany, you are, basically, you do history up until Hitler.

Then you're told, Hitler was bad. We were bad. And then you pick up someplace in the 50s.

Maybe late 40s. But you just, you don't, the mid -30s to the mid -40s just disappear.

You don't know anything about it. There's no discussion of it. It's just terrible, bad, go on from there.

Well, what that does is, when you treat people that way, people are going to start looking for themselves.

And they may not find the best sources. And so it's just foolishness to approach it that way.

But that's how it's done in Germany. And that's what's now being done here. There is one narrative. All the guys in the

North were great. All the guys in the South were bad. It was all about one subject. That's it. Period.

End of discussion. No one who's done any serious study in the field would ever say that.

But that's what you now have to say. And so when you start tearing down monuments, and I don't know when they're going to get to Gettysburg.

I mean, there's a huge monument of Lee in Gettysburg facing, that's where you start the walk, that's where you start

Pickett's Charge, is at the Lee monument, across to the Cops of Trees there at the

Union lines. When's that one going to get torn down? Eventually, will you only have monuments on the one side of the battlefield, and all the monuments on the other side of the battlefield will have been torn down out of political correctness?

Because someone will be offended by that? As I pointed out, this is a stealing of history.

And to be mature in your thinking is to be able to categorize things. Let me give an example. In textual criticism, we used to have, and it's, you know, who knows what's going to happen in the future, but we used to have something called the

Alexandrian text. You have the Byzantine text, Alexandrian text, Caesarean Western. Caesarean Western definitely have gone the way of the

Dodo by now. But Alexandrian text, very, very common in textual critical materials, though, like I said,

CBGM may end up removing that as a valid category. We don't know yet. We'll know over the next probably five or six years.

Anyway, where does that name come from? Well, Alexandria, Egypt. Alexandria, Egypt, one of the most important cities in the ancient world.

One of the locations of one of the greatest libraries in all of world history.

I mean, you know, Cleopatra and all that stuff, Roman history and everything tied up in Alexandria, Egypt.

Where'd the name come from? Well, Alexander the Great. Alexander the

Great, King of Macedonia, unifies Greece in his early twenties, barely in his early twenties, and begins a campaign at the head of a

Macedonian army. He would never return to Greece.

He never returned to Greece. Once he left and invaded Persia, invaded Asia Minor, which was controlled by the

Persians. He never came back because he died at 33.

He was gone for that amount of time. But he created an empire that stretched from Greece to India, inclusive of Egypt, all the

Saudi Arabian Peninsula, all that land, pretty much everything that they knew in the world at that time.

That's why he was called Alexander the Great. And there are lots of Alexandrias.

That one in Egypt just happens to be the best known, but he tended to like his name. And so there are all sorts of Alexandrias that he founded all the way out to India.

That's why we have a Greek New Testament. That's why we have a Greek New Testament. Nobody was speaking Greek in Israel before Alexander came through, but he created the

Greek world that then Rome, in essence, inherited. And that's why your

New Testament is written in Greek, is thanks to Alexander the Great. Now, he's called the

Great, but I just finished a lengthy biography about Alexander.

And you need to understand, the Greek empire was built on the back of absolute chattel slavery.

He enslaved probably millions of people. He killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

And nobody, nobody in the history of the

United States can come close to Alexander the Great in guilt for slavery.

At all. Not even, not even... Trying to make a comparison is just silly.

I mean, just look at how, at the size of the United States in comparison to the landmass that he conquered and the number of people that he conquered is not even close.

So there are statues literally from Greece to India, north, south, down into Egypt of Alexander the

Great. Shall we begin the destruction now? No, because that was 2 ,300 years ago and nobody cares, right?

So I guess it depends on how far back you want to be looking, though that had far more impact across the world.

The Romans, you name someone, let's... You saw the videos yesterday in London?

Police running away because, of course, they've been disarmed. Not all police in London are disarmed, but the regular bobbies are.

They've got, they've got the guys with guns. I've seen them. I don't know where they were yesterday, but they were being driven away by Black Lives Matter's hooligans and thugs, and they were getting ready to deface and tear down the

Churchill Monument. The Churchill Monument. I've got pictures of it on my phone. I was watching those videos, ran those streets, those very same locations, took pictures of where everything was going on just last year.

Beautiful, beautiful place. I'm not sure if it will be for long, but beautiful, beautiful place. And Churchill said really demeaning things about Indians, not

American Indians, Indian Indians, the other side of the world. So tear it down because somebody would be offended.

Now, the fact that you're not speaking German is also due to Churchill, but hey, we just have to follow the narrative, right?

I mean, there were a bunch of people involved and you're not speaking German. But you'll never know that if you don't study history in the context in which history took place.

Once you allow a narrative and human emotion and offense to become the filter through which history is looked at, we're back to 1984 again, as in the

Orwellian view of 1984, where history becomes this pliable, editable, changeable thing that is always meant to fit the current narrative.

That's what 84 was about. Read it. What was Winston doing?

Winston was editing newspaper articles. They used to have, there'd be somebody that they had written a newspaper article about who is a hero to the fatherland, but now he's been executed.

So what do you do? You don't think people can learn from that. No, you go back and you put somebody else in, you put somebody else's face in, somebody else's name in, that person just disappears so that the narrative becomes the all in all.

Ministry of truth, it was called. Ironic term. That was the whole point.

Just like the Newspeak dictionary, it's meant to be ironic and yet we are now facing it.

Not only in culture, not only have we elected these people to office and they are now acting upon their convictions, but it's in the church.

It's in the church as well. And so now everything's about the narrative. Churches that have shut down and will not meet because of the panic of 2020 will send their people to BLM Antifa rallies and protests on the

Lord's day. Wow. Okay.

So that was the article. It is a serious, it's making a serious point about the importance of honesty in history.

But Christians then sent me this. Like I said, Mike Pereira, is it

Pereira? I don't know who Mike is, is with Cab Malone, vocab Malone and 71 others.

The following is being done with the spirit of Proverbs 27 .5 in mind. For a while now, you've made statements that can only be perceived as careless regarding social issues.

These statements have offended many black and Hispanic brothers and sisters in Christ.

While I don't believe that you've done this intentionally, you haven't exactly been receptive to correcting these missteps.

The piece below, which was the article I just read to you, is yet another example of this carelessness from your end.

This needs to stop as it is tarnishing your reputation before the eyes of fellow image bearers who have been purchased by Christ's precious blood.

Remember the words of Hebrews 12, 14, Romans 12, 10 through 18 and James 3. Please not brush these words on the proverbial rug of the easily offended.

Consider the perspective of those in the body who are calling for you to take a more measured approach in what you say.

And that's it. And my immediate response here,

I'll give you the response that I provided in the thread. Greetings.

I just encountered this, but I missed the part where one, you showed anything false in the historical data

I provided. Two, provide any biblical basis for the accusation of sin in the application

I made regarding the need to do history properly. Or three, provide a biblical basis for the confusion of offense with violation of biblical standards.

I am copying this when we respond fully on Monday's Dividing Line, but perhaps you could explain what specifically was wrong with the post.

You said it was not measured. It was quite measured, in fact. So where was the sinful statement?

Or is it possible that it is just impossible for anyone to conceive of how one might believe one should accept history as it was and not attempt to rewrite it?

Or is it not possible to learn from those of the past even if you find their personal beliefs erroneous?

I fully understand why social justice folks who have embraced the totalitarian thinking of intersectionality and critical race theory would militate for a closing down of historical thought and inquiry.

But you are approaching me as a Christian. I keep asking all those brothers and sisters who do so to open their

Bibles and provide a consistent foundation, one that comes from sharing the same hermeneutic whereby we define and defend the

Trinity, the Resurrection, etc., that would lead me to embrace these modern constructions that are not derived from a

Christian worldview but from a secular one. Is that what this is all about? I look forward to your response.

Now, I got overwhelmed with stuff that just went all over the place.

A lot of great emotionalism. If Mike responded,

I didn't see it. There was just a lot of stuff. Facebook, unfortunately, is just the way that it is.

But there was my response because it's hard to respond to something that, once again, is perceived as careless, offended, not been receptive, carelessness, and then consider the perspective of those in the body who are calling for you to take a more measured approach of what you say.

Now, maybe I'm just really dull, but I didn't find this helpful at all because it provided nothing biblically.

I mean, there were Bible passages, but they didn't have anything to do with what I was saying. There was no, okay, this is false, therefore.

This is a misrepresentation, therefore. This is a sinful statement, therefore.

Instead, it's all about feelings, emotions, perceptions, and I cannot control someone's perceptions.

I cannot control someone's emotions and feelings. Now, it'd be very easy for me to be offended by this if that was the kind of person that I am,

I'm not offended by this. I mean, if I were to take the same stance that I would be, and I suppose some people might think that that would be the direction to go, but I'm like, no,

I'm a Christian apologist. We deal with truth. We deal with truth.

We do not deal in emotion. We do not deal in simply perceptions.

You deal with the facts, and the fact is we are in a time period where the very essence of studying history itself is under attack by a worldview that is so far removed from anything that can be tortured into consistency with Christianity.

It is so far away from that, and we see the results.

We see it in our streets right now. We see it in our culture, and so what

I said was, yes, it is childish to destroy the history of your people rather than, as a mature adult, learn from history.

I stand by that. Evidently, what it's being told is, my reputation will be tarnished.

Well, okay. This is, I've said, what we're going to be seeing in light of this current situation and the rapid development and the fissures that are being opened by these pressures, not only upon our society, but upon the

Church as well. You're going to see Christian cancel culture, and this is how it starts.

Well, see, he wasn't willing to listen, so therefore, and what's the therefore? Well, starting in 2018, well, really starting in 2010 when

I had Votibalkamon and ever since then, but especially 2018 when everybody started talking about this stuff.

Someone just flipped a switch and it all started. The cacophony of slammed doors for opportunities for me to speak on completely different subjects have nothing to do with it.

The cacophony has been great. There have been lots of places that have been closed down to me.

Remember last year, right around this time, there was a professor at Cedarville that tweet on June 25th where I talked about the centrality of a culture of sexual license and rebellion and fatherlessness being far more relevant to the abortion plague amongst blacks than anything that happened 160 years ago.

Oh my goodness! Doesn't matter how many black Christian authors have said the same thing.

No, no, no, you're not. No, no, no. And that one professor, who never would respond to me, never had the intestinal fortitude or character to respond to my attempts to contact him, removed all of my books from his syllabi.

So he will actually leave his students with resources that may not actually be overly helpful to them, but he's virtue signaling.

He's doing his thing. This is Christian cancel culture and it will be all over us.

All over us. And this will be the subject. This will be the issue.

This is what it'll look like. Well, you're just not listening. And when you hear someone say, you're not listening, then stop and ask yourself a question.

If someone says, I don't listen, have I not accurately represented in the many hours where I have discussed critical theory, intersectionality, and those

Christians who are adopting these things, have I not demonstrated that I have listened? And have

I not said, here's where you're missing the point. You're making your experience the lens through which you are demanding

I look, rather than you and I both making the scripture, the objective lens through which we look.

And of course, within critical theory, there is no such thing as an objective lens anyways. But that's what has always provided the unity in the past for believers, is that let's go to the word together and let's consider these things together.

Now it's, no, these people have an experience and by definition, you do not.

So I don't have an experience. Well, where'd they get that from? Critical theory. You have privilege.

Where'd they get that from? Not from the Bible. Critical theory. So you need to listen.

Well, when I listen, I hear believers who have accepted unbiblical, inconsistent concepts from contradictory worldviews, and they're trying to hold them together, and then holding me accountable for accepting at a starting place the validity of that extra biblical material.

And I can't, and I won't. I don't do that when I'm debating an atheist. I'm certain

I could do that when talking with Christians, and they shouldn't be asking me to, if they're thinking clearly about it.

So when you hear this, well, you just won't hear. What's actually being said is, you won't start with our presuppositions.

You will not elevate our experience, our perceptions to the deciding level.

You demand logic, rationality, and from a

Christian, a biblical foundation from the start, and that's not where this stuff comes from.

It's not going to be able to hold together consistently, if that's what you ask from the and so think about, again, what

I said. What was careless about? Well, evidently, what was careless about it? Well, A, you're not allowed to talk about any complexities in history, especially in regards to the

Civil War. You're just not allowed. Oh, how about,

I did have one brief exchange, this one guy, and I tried to, again, tried to reason with him.

I mean, he just went off after Lee, and then I just simply asked, so in light of what you just said, we should tear down the

Washington Monument too, which would be a rather large endeavor, but it could be done.

I'm not sure where we'd store it, because it's fairly large. It's a landmark, but yeah, it's pretty big, right?

Because Washington was a slave owner. That's a historical fact.

The first president, founder of the country, founding father of the country. Well, yeah, but the point is, if you're going to be consistent, if it's a matter of you need to be constantly looking backwards at history, looking for reasons to be offended, rather than looking forward to the future, while learning from history and applying the wisdom of the past, learning from the mistakes of the past, but always with a forward attitude.

No, always looking back now. You never look forward. You have to nurture offense.

That's what BLM is about. That's what Antifa is about. That's what critical theory is about. Intersectionality is about.

That's what the whole thing is about, and the result is cities on fire.

The result is dead people in the streets. That's what we're seeing.

That's what's happening. Looting, rioting.

It's all around us, but that's the result of critical theory. That's what it does. It breaks down. The only thing it was designed to do is to break down social cohesion, the things that hold nations together, so you can destroy that, and that's what we're hearing.

We are hearing people in the capital of the United States saying, we need to tear it all down and start anew.

No more constitution. It's done. That's what we're hearing. Same thing in the

United Kingdom. Same thing all over the place. This is what critical theory does.

That's its design. It's its intention. It's battery acid. It can never build anything.

Once it accomplishes its purpose and you destroy it all, what will be built back up? The people who support critical theory will have to be banished from that by the powers that be, because you can't build anything.

There's no way of laying a foundation down there with critical theory still functioning. I assure you, someone may try to build a new society based upon stuff like intersectionality.

It's not possible. It is not possible.

The only way to make that work is through absolute techno -totalitarianism, and even then it won't work.

It just can't, by definition. This is what we have all around us. This is what we are now dealing with.

For many of us, at first, this was weird stuff that was causing people to say weird things in conferences.

Now, because it has been believed by the younger generation and is being put into practice, it's destroying everything and putting our children and our grandchildren at tremendous risk.

They will not have what we had. We've given it up. We've abandoned it.

If you were watching over the weekend, a picture of the

Shaw Monument was posted. The Shaw Monument is a monument to the 54th

Massachusetts. It was covered with BLM graffiti. Now, probably those people, sorry,

I have very little respect. No, I have no respect for any looters of any kind, at any point, anywhere.

I'm pretty certain they didn't have a clue what it was. It just looked like something civilly war -y and part of bad stuff, so let's trash it.

You probably know the story of the Shaw Monument and the 54th Massachusetts if you watched the movie

Glory. Awesome film. Well done. I think it got some

Oscars. I would assume that it did. One of the best civil war movies out there. But this is about Shaw, who was the volunteer leader, white leader, of the first all -volunteer black regiment in the

Union Army. I'm sorry? Five Oscars.

Okay. We're just gonna start calling Rich Siri. Five Oscars.

And the story was incredible.

The acting was incredible. Denzel Washington. I bet you Washington won one of those Oscars, didn't he?

Because Morgan Freeman was in it, Denzel Washington. It was great.

It was great. So here is an all -black regiment and BLM is trashing their monument because these people don't know history.

They don't know history and they don't care. Barbarians don't care about such things.

Just trash it. Just destroy it. Tear it all down. Was that right?

What? Denzel Washington. No, no.

Did he? Was he one of the Oscars? See if Denzel Washington got an Oscar for Glory. I'd be interested in knowing.

Or Morgan Freeman, either one. So the point being, this is what happens when you trash history.

Their actions at Fort Wagner. The casualties they experienced in the attack on Fort Wagner.

In the unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner. This is the stuff of legend.

This is why you study history. And when you don't study history, you lose the reality of what built the character of your nation.

Best supporting actor. That's what I figured. And he deserved it. That was just one of my favorites.

It's just so well done. The music too. I bet you it won a music Oscar because wow, to this day, that Harlem Boys Choir that did the music, it's haunting.

Haunting. It's beautiful. If you have not watched Glory, like I said, shame on you. You need to watch it.

Rent it now. And sit down and watch it. And then realize what we're losing when you can't even honestly look back and consider these things and learn from them without being called careless and offensive and all the rest of this kind of stuff.

That's what you're losing. That's what you're losing. So about 10 hours ago, one of the fellas on Twitter that I follow is

RJ Garner. RJ Garner. I don't know who RJ is, but I've run into him on Twitter and I've started following him.

And this is what he posted. He said, for the first time, I'm feeling hopeless.

I know that God is sovereign and works all things for his glory, but there are very dark days coming soon and nothing we can do about it.

I mostly worry for my young son. I can handle whatever, but I worry about what future he will have.

And I saw that, and I've seen a lot of Christians expressing similar feelings.

And my response just an hour ago, well, it's probably about two hours ago now, was, I hear you, brother.

The Lord had to rebuke my unbelief through my brother Jeff Durbin's sermon yesterday. Should be on Apologies Facebook still.

And we had baptisms and were wall -to -wall with folks, which really encouraged as well. But I hear you,

I really do. And some of you saw that I mentioned this morning that I had the most violent experience

I've had as a cyclist. I was run off the road. It was very clearly an assault, a vehicular assault.

Went off the road by probably a drug addled guy on a 72 mile bike ride this morning.

I was only about four miles from home. And I called the cops when

I got home because I had video. I had the guy's license plate number, all this kind of stuff.

And basically they were told the DA won't do anything because he didn't actually touch you because I got out of his way.

So if you want to get the guy, go ahead and let him hit you with a car. If you actually are good enough on a bike to get out of the way, eh, so much for that.

Anyway, but I was talking with the police officers and man, they came quick.

I mean, I called the non -emergency number and they're at my house in five minutes. That's how fast it was.

I was surprised. But I was talking with them about other stuff, about what's going on.

And one of the two guys is an older guy and he was a grandfather. And we were like, yeah, once you're a grandfather, you start thinking about the future and you start thinking about your kids, your grandkids.

And because see, once your kids are old enough to have kids, then it's like, okay, they're taking care of themselves now.

But then you see their kids and you want to do everything you can to take care of them too.

And it changes everything. It changes your entire perspective on everything about the future, you, all that stuff.

I think older people who are involved with their grandkids are probably very, very different than older people who don't have grandkids or never see them.

I think sometimes older people can be rather self -centered. It's all about me.

It's time for me to get mine. I did my work. Now I want what's coming. Unless you got grandkids and then you're willing to do anything for them.

You're willing to stay up night. Good grief. You're willing to change diapers again. Believe me, after you get done with your kids, it's like,

I don't want to ever do that again. Oh, okay. Well, all right. We have to. It changes everything because you see what's coming in the foundation.

You want to help lay their foundation. And so I was talking with the cops about that just this morning.

And it's sort of a universal human experience, but even more so amongst

Christians or should be amongst Christians, that concern for the future in that way.

And I'm just sorry. I've taught the first class I taught as an instructor, as a teacher, after I graduated in seminary, it's church history.

I've taught it many times since then. There are many people that watch this program because you watched, you listened to my church history series and you found it very, very helpful.

And we do church history on this program all the time. Well, it's not just church history.

There's church history took place within a broader history and it's all God's history.

It's all the unfolding of his sovereign decree. And it's beautiful. And I cannot just sit around and watch people edit it and try to change it, to control it and destroy it without saying something about it then.

So to RJ Garner and to everyone in that same place, I hear you.

I don't think Jeff Sermon is on YouTube yet. It will be. I understand that Rob's sermon is supposed to be up sometime today.

I'm not sure you're going to post a link to that or something like that, be posting a link to that on the website. There were a couple sermons preached yesterday.

It seemed like yesterday when the saints met, the saints realized it's important that we're meeting.

We've never seen, we have simply never seen the number of people we had at Apology yesterday.

We were packed out. We could not put 10 more people.

I mean, we were literally putting chairs out into the foyer and every place else. We were packed out. And so many of them have been saying the same thing for weeks.

When visitors come, we just wanted to find a church that was still meeting.

We need this. And we had a bunch of baptisms yesterday.

In fact, the elders, since we come forward to receive the supper, then we have an elder on each side.

And when one of the trays of cups of wine is finished, you move the tray, get the next one ready.

But both Jeff and Luke, normally Luke helps me with that, but both Jeff and Luke were getting ready for baptisms.

I got a quarter mile running during the supper just trying to, and then one of our deacons said, you know, we've just got so many people there.

Once the first tray is done, I pass it off to him and he took it in the back and quick filled it up because we just had so many people there.

It was wonderful. It was awesome. It was great. There was a real spirit. And I think that was all over the place. But be watching for Jeff's sermon from yesterday because I needed it.

When I got there, I needed it. It was sort of the practical application of being anxious for nothing.

But it was a rebuke to my unbelief, but also in an encouraging way.

So my wife said, yeah, I needed that too. So my wife is sparing with her positive comments.

So when she says, yeah, I needed that too, that means it was well done. So I would highly recommend it to you.

It's priced on the Facebook page right now, the live version, the streamed version, but the

YouTube video will be up eventually. And I thought Jeff's commentary on the writing that presented the gospel was really, really well done too.

That was posted a couple of days ago. Now there has been, oh, oh, oh, oh, maybe

I'll get to that one tomorrow. I did want to read this. I've had a lot of disagreements with Peter Lightheart over the years, but Andrew Sandlin posted a article that he, that Lightheart wrote.

And I think it, well, maybe I just want to read it because he quotes John McWhorter.

And the last time I quoted John McWhorter, I was again, run out of town by the mob. And so maybe this way

I can just sort of quote somebody else quoting John McWhorter. No, it's not going to make a difference. I'll still be run out.

I'll still be run out by the mob one way or the other. But I wanted to get to this.

So we've got a little time left this hour. This is, like I said, from Peter Lightheart.

Anti -racism, one word. Anti -racism has become, as John McWhorter pointed out in 2015,

America's new religion. It has its holidays, its saints and martyrs, its liturgical processions and gestures, its symbols and sacraments, its scriptures and sermonizers, its modes of confession and almost absolution.

Catch that part. There is no final absolution. Its eschatological hope that America will somehow and someday fix racism once and for all.

McWhorter isn't wholly hostile to the anti -racist religion. McWhorter is black, by the way.

It's a good thing, he suggested, that many are profoundly committed to seeing all people as equal and calling for more people to feel the same way.

It's a good thing for blacks and whites to join in condemning abuses of power and recognizing the unique suffering and crucial gifts of African Americans.

David French is right. The consequences of 345 years of legal and cultural discrimination are going to be dire, deep -seated, complex and extraordinarily difficult to comprehensively ameliorate.

Some nice long words. French says we need to say two things at once. Yes, we have made great strides.

But second, the central and salient consideration of American racial politics shouldn't center around pride and how far we've come, but in humble realization of how much farther we have to go.

Yet, McWhorter argued anti -racism makes racial justice more difficult to achieve.

It short -circuits the painful honesty we all need. Certain questions cannot be asked. Questions like, quote, why are black people so upset about one white cop killing a black man when black men are at much more danger of being killed by one another?

Question mark. Remember, almost 8 ,000 black

Americans were murdered by other black Americans last year.

You would think that was all done by cops. It wasn't. It was done by other black

Americans. But you can't talk. No, can't talk about that. Some do publicly raise such questions, most of them on the right, but then the questions are taken as evidence that the questioner doesn't get it.

The many African Americans who raise these questions are little better than traitors who deserve to be shouted down, and I can name names of people who fulfill exactly that description.

Anti -racism's eschatology, its hope for a judgment day when America owns up to racism, is not a political program so much as a tacit promise of catharsis.

That same hope obscures the actual progress we've made on race relations. As McWhorter says, if hatred and dismissal of black people were really still as much the bedrock of this society, then anti -racism, complete with the logical elisions and willful contempt of self required, would not be the new religion of enlightened white

America. That eschatology functions as justification for the persistent demands of anti -racism.

Judgment day is postponed, perhaps indefinitely. I pause for a moment.

What did I say at G3 when I spoke about the woke church?

There is no redemption in the woke church. There is no forgiveness. There is no atonement.

There is no reconciliation. So, judgment day is postponed, perhaps indefinitely.

No matter what America does, it's not enough. We haven't reached the promised land.

Like many perfectionist religions, anti -racism is satisfied with nothing less than total surrender.

Which, by the way, these pictures and videos of government officials, the

Democrats today wearing some kind of tribal stuff, kneeling for nine minutes, taking a knee for nine minutes.

Police captains laying on their faces in front of crowds, as if this is, you know,

I posted it yesterday. I said, so this is it, right? This will end it all. We're all good after this? No.

It's an empty symbol. It's never enough, because there is no basis for reconciliation.

Critical theory does not have a biblical view of man. There can be no reconciliation in it.

So, anti -racism is satisfied with nothing less than total surrender. For the anti -racist, racism is the equivalent of original sin.

The master explanation for all African American problems, anti -racism siphons energy and imagination from practical solutions.

Confession of white privilege relieves white guilt. But, McWhorter asks, does self -flagellation by the ruling class actually help anyone?

Black students don't score as well on standardized tests? The tests are racially biased and must be changed.

Why not instead, McWhorter suggests, make a massive effort to get black kids practice in taking standardized tests?

It's another question anti -racism won't let us ask. If anything is, anti -racism is the established religion of the

United States, dominating mainstream in social media, education, entertainment, and sports. One of the two major parties has walked the sawdust trail and given its heart to this new

Jesus. The GOP is often tarred as a safe haven for racists, but most

Republicans at least give lip service to anti -racism. Anti -racism manifests the intolerance of many established faiths.

It prohibits blasphemy and enforces its strictures through public shaming or lawsuits.

Christian cancel culture is an example of that. Anti -racism is trying to capture public squares throughout the nation, toppling old monuments.

It's agitating to capture public time as it erases offensive holidays from the American calendar.

Anti -racism is attractive to sensitive Christians for obvious reasons. The gospel announces God's hospitality to all peoples, tongues, and races, offers forgiveness and reconciliation as the spirit knits us into a community of love.

Christians agree racial hatred is evil. Christians stand for equitable justice and abhor abuses of power, especially against the weak and vulnerable.

Christians can support calls for reform of policing. Long before Trump threatened to deploy the military, paramilitary police units were already patrolling our streets.

Like many contemporary movements, anti -racism illustrates G .K. Chesterton's observation that the modern world is overrun with old

Christian virtues gone mad because they have been isolated from one another and are wandering alone.

Think about that picture for a second. Let me read it again. And this is Chesterton. Chesterton is not my favorite person in the world, but he said a lot of wise things.

Chesterton's observation that the modern world is overrun with old Christian virtues gone mad because they have been isolated from one another and are wandering alone.

You mean Christian truth needs to be balanced with all the rest of Christian truth?

Have we ever said that? Has that ever been uttered on this program before? Yeah, like pretty much every program.

It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the lonely mad virtues and the community of sane ones.

Though disguised in Christian colors, anti -racism is a rival faith. And not only a rival in a general sense, a competitor for hearts and minds, it's a rival in the sense that Orthodox Christianity is one of anti -racism's targets.

If there's one thing a newly established religion cannot tolerate, it's the persistence of the old establishment.

Over the decades, racism has expanded to include every form of discrimination against any minority, including especially sexual minorities.

Which is why if you look at BLM's materials, they've got all sorts of stuff on homosexuality, transgenderism, the whole nine yards.

Negative judgments are excluded. Anti -racism morphs into a tyranny of non -judgmentalism.

For many adherents of our new religion, Christians are the bigots. And the Bible is our manual of authoritarianism.

We're sexist if we deny a woman's right to abortion, fascist when we refuse to celebrate transgenderism.

We're the heretics and the blasphemers, dissenters from the new established religion.

There may come a time when Christians are a little wistful for the good old days when a president was willing to do a self -serving photo op holding a

Bible in front of a church. Peter Lightheart from theopolisinstitute .com.

I think it was today. Think about it.

Think about it. Yeah.

So that Facebook thing that I responded to at the beginning of the program was posted very shortly after Friday's program.

And so I promised the time to respond to it. I would like to try to avoid these topics tomorrow if I can, but we'll see.

We are living in absolutely unique times. We are living in absolutely unique times.

At the very least, our voice is one that echoes in your ear saying, no, you're not crazy.

No, you're not crazy to be concerned about these things. You're not crazy to see what this is going to lead to. And you're not crazy to go, man, this stuff that I am hearing just, there's something off about it.

There is something off about it. We've been talking about this for a long time now. And yeah,

I get tired of talking about it. No twist about it. But anyway. All right. Thank you for listening.

Tomorrow at some point we'll announce when, probably the normal time at two o 'clock our time, 5