Mega Ed: SEBTS, Fractured Conservatives, Kanye, Pastors for Fauci, & Ex Post Factor Abortion Laws?

Streaming, I haven't announced this to anyone, but I just had the hankering, I had a window before I need to go out, and I thought, let's do a stream today.

I haven't done one for a little bit. And there's a number of topics, I don't know if we'll get to all of them.

Looking for my camera so you can see me. There I am, hi, for everyone who's streaming right now.

It is a beautiful fall day. It's probably actually today, the most beautiful day of the week. And I had the opportunity of going out and doing some sight, well, not really sightseeing, sort of.

We went for some walks, got some drinks, some teas and things, and experienced the fall air over the weekend with my wife.

So I want to show you just a few pictures of that. This is from my Gab page,

I'll blow these up for you, for those who are streaming. If you wonder what New York looks like during fall, this is a pretty good idea.

This is the Northern Catskills, which is a little bit of a drive from my house, but it wasn't peak at my house.

I think in the next few days it's going to be, it's getting there. But in the

Northern Catskills, it was approaching peak. In fact, Windham Mountain was just already there.

So absolutely beautiful. Here's a picture of just a trail that we were able to walk down.

And unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your situation, if you're a business owner, it's fortunately.

If you're someone who likes recreation, it's unfortunately. But a lot of people from New York City have come up to the area

I live in. I'm on the border of,

I'm actually near the Hudson River. So I'm in Ulster County, Dutchess County is across the river from me. And it's the mid

Hudson Valley, not far from the Southern Catskills, if I want to go there.

And so that area though, is so, since COVID, so infused with people from New York City that on a weekend, especially in the fall, it's not the place you want to be.

So we went to the Northern Catskills and it's a little more out of the way.

And we were able to find some places actually with, that weren't that crowded, which was a blessing.

So anyway, there you go. There's for those who can look at it and weep from other parts of the country where you don't have fall colors.

I'm sorry. I feel bad for you. And maybe I'll be in that situation. I was kind of in North Carolina and Virginia.

I know you think, well, they have colors. It's not the same though. And people from Maine probably think that where I am is not the same.

Generally, the colder it is, at least if you have hardwoods, it's going to be more spectacular.

And it's actually been kind of warm around here. So the colors aren't as vibrant as they could be, but still absolutely spectacular.

And I love the fall, except for one thing. I have some allergies that I've forgotten about the last few years

I've been in North Carolina, Virginia. I haven't had a problem in the fall and this year, oh my goodness, I've been having trouble even sleeping just with like tearing eyes and runny nose.

And I think it should last maybe another week because it's going to be so cold, whatever is blooming is going to have to die.

And then we'll be contending with snow. But until then, I'm enjoying this.

Wanted to make a few announcements to everyone out there who might be listening right now.

One is, oh, and I didn't pull it up. I should have pulled this up. Well, you can go to Worldview Conversation and check it out.

Worldviewconversation .com. Hopefully, I'll be able to announce it later in the week as well and remind everyone. But if you live in Indiana, I'm going to be in Indiana.

I'm going to be in, I think it's Kendallville, Indiana, near there. And I'll be in Syracuse, Indiana.

And I would love to see you, two different churches and two different presentations. One is going to be just on social justice in general.

And then at the Jesus in Politics Conference in Syracuse, I'm going to be talking about rebuilding from the ruins.

And I have been doing some research and some writing this week on that topic.

And we'll likely do more of that later in the week, which might prevent me from putting out as much content as I'd like to.

But I will at least do, I think, one more video at least before leaving on Thursday for that.

But if you're in the area, I'd love to see you. So please come on out. And so that's going well. Retreat stuff is really coming together.

We have 83 people, 83 men right now signed up to come to the retreat. And I think it's going to be a wonderful time.

So I am finalizing some of the legwork in that. And if you have signed up, you are going to get an email from me soon with some details, more details, instructions for when you come and what you need to do and all of that.

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The standard beard care dot com. All right. Let's get into some new stories today for those we have 28 streaming right now.

So yes, hello from Washington. Hello from New York. Hello from Raleigh.

We got people all over the country tuning in right now, and I'm assuming in the next three minutes when people get off work, we'll probably have more.

Wanted to just feature this, an encouraging thing to some extent. I know we've done a lot of work on Southern Seminary, Al Mohler in particular, and I'm not saying everything's turned around there at all.

I'm certainly not someone who trusts Al Mohler to be anything more.

Unfortunately, it sounds terrible, but it's true because I've watched him for years now. Then really a political weathervane.

He's someone that kind of goes with whatever's popular. He's a trendy, but he's not someone that I see is on many issues, very important issues, very principled.

And so this was really good to see. This is something I think actually he has been fairly consistent on, and it is the meaning of pastor.

And the fact that in the Southern Baptist Convention, and I believe this is biblical as well.

I know there might be a few that are listening to this podcast who don't agree with this, but the Southern Baptist Convention, at least this is where they've come down on it.

The role of pastor, the office of pastor, both those things, right? Same thing. They're reserved for men.

There's many verses on this, but this is something that is unfortunately being called into question.

And so the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Al Mohler's the president, put out a press release on the 13th of October, 2022,

Paul Trustee Meeting Board commends Mohler's stance on the meaning of pastor in Baptist faith in Message 2000.

And it recounts the history of this, what happened. We covered it last June at the convention for the

Southern Baptist and how Al Mohler took a stand from the convention floor on this particular topic. And he was commended.

And I just thought that this was good to see in a sea of sometimes not so great things.

It's really good to focus on something that is a positive. This is something that needs a line that needs to be held.

And definitions honestly are, the battle is so much, being waged on us is so much part of a larger battle.

So I'm saying the battle in the Southern Baptist Convention and in Christianity and in regards to social justice is part of a much larger war on definitions and reality itself.

And the loss of the definition of pastor is just one of those things. We have the loss of a lot of things.

We don't know what a nation is anymore. I just figured that out this week. Well, I kind of already knew that that was something that was present, but it's starting to become a flashpoint.

What is a nation, right? There's all this talk about Christian nationalism. Well, that begs a question. What's a nation? We talked about it on the podcast before a little bit, and we're going to talk about it some more in more detail.

I'm going to give you some tools to help you. Biblical tools. We're going to talk about, though, even what some of the founders of this particular country, the

United States, what they thought of this. And it's not, in my opinion, very complicated, but that's one of the definitions that's attacked.

Of course, the definition of what a man and a woman are, gender. Those things are under attack. What a marriage is, is under attack.

It's probably, it's hard to even see where there isn't an attack on definitions.

And so we're seeing the walls come down, the barriers. And I was actually talking to my dad earlier today.

He said, made a comment. He goes, it's almost by design. It just seems like it's by design that so many of these conflicts are in this murky soup.

So we're debating them. And one person has one definition of what nationalism is.

Another person has another definition. And they're all coming together. And emotions are high, but reason is very low.

And it's like that on so many different topics. And so one of the things on this particular podcast

I've tried to do is give you an idea, when I can, to clarify things, to navigate these waters, and to show you what the working issues are.

And we've done that on a number of topics. What is critical race theory? Let's go through what critical race theorists have said.

Let's distill that and let's apply it. Let's understand a meaning. So we, on this podcast,

I'm not into that. I hate vagueness. And there's a place for generalities, for sure.

But when you can be specific, we want to be specific. We want to be clear as much as we possibly can, when we can.

So that being said, good for Southern Seminary. Let's see here.

I wanted to go to the next thing. This is from, okay, this was a thread

I saw this morning. So we're moving from Southern Seminary to Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, another major seminary in the

Southern Baptist Convention. I actually graduated from there. And I put out so much material on Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, as far as showing, proving that they've really gone down a more of, in the popular vernacular, a woke direction, but pro -social justice direction.

And there was a thread this morning that contained a number of things that I'd seen before, but they just strung them together.

And I thought, you know, I haven't talked about any of these, but it's just a reminder. There's a few things we're going to talk about in this, but I think the main reason

I wanted to talk about it is it's a reminder that things aren't, things have not adjusted themselves to a point at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary where the social justice issue is a dead issue, where it's, it's a, there's a return to orthodoxy or anything like that.

Some people, I think, think that because, well, John hasn't talked about it for a while and I don't hear anything overtly woke, it's because I'm not focusing on it.

And because a lot of it, I think, has gone underground to some extent. But I, you know, I got this in the mail.

This is earlier today from the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

And I looked at it. It's, it's a fundraising thing, you know, thank you for your support. Well, I didn't give them support other than all the money

I gave them when I was a student, but they want me to give them support anyway. So I was reading this thing and it is totally about missions, just the

Great Commission, spreading the gospel. They have on the back a number of professors, you know, smiling with their kids and their families and just glowing statements about how the

Great Commission is being spread, how God is using Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. And this is the kind of thing that you would have seen also probably in 2014.

In fact, here's Dr. Ken Keithley. I'll just read one of them. Okay. Dr. Ken Keithley. The worldwide impact of Southeastern's ministry cannot be exaggerated.

Lord has called his choice servants to attend this school. And after they graduate, he is sending them to every part of the earth.

Central to the Great Commission is the making of disciples. We know the truths of scripture to be the best of our, to the best of our ability.

If we are going to make disciples, equipping students to do that well is my goal as a professor.

Sounds great. Right. And that's all they're saying to donors. I've gotten this stuff for a long time.

They're not talking about any of their, the social justice stuff that they push. It's just that.

And I think that's what a lot of people, especially the pew sitters, the people funding these institutions, that's all they know.

Especially if they're not listening to this podcast, if they haven't gone on YouTube and typed in social justice,

Southeastern, they're all they're getting, if they haven't seen enemies within the church. I mean, now there's a lot of places that have exposed what's been going on at places like Southeastern.

But if they're not aware of all that, if they're just getting letters like this, they're going to keep funding it because they think that's what's happening.

But I want to show you a few things. And I'm just debating in my head right now, which order I want to do this in. Because some of these are more major,

I suppose, than others. But I want to start, let's start here. If I may, I'm going to work backwards.

I'm going to do a little bit out of the order that I wanted to do this in. Ken Keithley is the person that I just read a quote from.

Here's Ken Keithley again. He's a professor there. And he says, this is what he says, 10 on a scale of 10, 10 on a scale of 10, well, meaning this is as good as it gets is perfect.

What's perfect? What's 10 out of 10? He retweets the L. Rush Bush Center for Faith and Culture.

That's on the campus of Southeastern. And they had a talk recently by Dr. Jonathan Moo on creation care.

And this is what, this is just a quote, and this is the quote that Ken Keithley retweets. In order to be faithful to the gospel, this is this morning, he tweets this out, 10, 16

AM, October 18th. In order to be faithful to the gospel, we must care for God's creation.

In order to be faithful to the gospel, we must care for God's creation.

And Ken Keithley says 10 on a scale of 10. And it reminded me of so many of the quotations that I was combing over for the book that I did last year,

Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict. And you can still do this, really.

Go to any Christian website, any Christian college, you can go to their blog and do a search, type in gospel and just see where does the word gospel, where is it used?

And sometimes you'll find it's used in a very orthodox sense, the way that the apostle Paul uses the term gospel, the way

Jesus uses the term gospel. But you're also going to find, and sometimes exclusively, you're going to find that gospel is applied to a much broader category than that.

Gospel is used to give you the impression that unless you're doing something towards, to alleviate some kind of a racial disparity, you're not being faithful to the gospel.

Unless you're doing something political, something to, during 2020, it was in some quarters, if you were not practicing some of the mandates and guidance from the

CDC, you were not being faithful to the gospel because that's involved with loving your neighbor.

And, of course, there's all these conflations between the law and the gospel, and those two categories just got mixed, which is a no, no, that's not, you can read my book,

I talk about it, but this is not something that I think the most, probably the best book in the

New Testament about it would be Galatians. But this is something that you're, the two must remain separate, they're separate categories.

And the danger you run is when you give the impression that there's some work that you must do or some achievement you as a person must make, a contribution to the salvation that you have.

Frankly, that's really what it comes down to, to your justification that the gospel, if the good news is you need to do something, you must care for God's creation.

That sounds like good news. Well, I'm never going to care for God's creation perfectly, even if I'm part of,

I was going to say the Sierra Club, but I don't know how good some of those environmentalist groups are. If I was part of some conservationist group, a good one, let's say,

Ducks Unlimited, I don't know. Am I going to be doing it to the extent that I should?

Am I going to be perfect in my care for God's, my stewardship of God's resources? I'm never going to be perfect.

My works can't get me there. And the good news is that, of course,

Jesus has fulfilled God's law on our behalf, that Jesus has taken our sin and paid for it.

It's been applied to his account. He's paid for it. And then he's taken his righteousness and applied it to our account. So there's nothing

I can do. Right. This is simple stuff. I understand many of listening, if you're Christians, you know what I'm talking about.

But you have even seminary professors who muddy these waters so much. And it's a big problem.

And it's a big problem, the social justice movement. And it was a problem when I was at Southeastern. And it's still a problem, apparently, because that is at best, at best, an extremely sloppy sentence.

In order to be faithful to the gospel, we must do something. We have to do something in order to be faithful to the gospel.

In order to, I mean, we have to we have to believe we shouldn't undermine the truths that the gospel rests on.

I'm thinking of biblically orthodox beliefs about Jesus, about who he is, the

Trinity, those kinds of things, the nature of the word of God, perhaps. I mean, these are things that the gospel rests on, perhaps.

But you can see in this that there's a new kind of a test for orthodoxy that the social justice movement has produced.

It's not enough to have biblically orthodox doctrine now in the classical sense of that term.

Now there are other things that we must do. We must be a part of. We must political things, social things.

And so this is at best, in my mind, this is danger language.

You know, red flags should be going up. And I don't think that was in the thread that I was highlighting here.

But there were a couple other things. This was one. Some of them are some of them are interesting.

But this was one that I wanted to highlight a little bit. This is a I guess this is an example of a graduate.

Just one graduate from Southeastern. OK, not every graduate's like this, but this is an individual who, according to their

Twitter, Erin, I think it's Harding, is very, let's see, well, this particular let me just read this to you.

This is someone tweeted out with their pronouns. Natalie, she, her with a

I think it's a transgender flag or icon. Just so you know, we will respond with grace.

First, this is sort of in the middle of a conversation. First, you aren't worth it. Second, we're strong women.

We can't help but show grace, especially towards those who are consumed with so much hatred. It's truly a pity that that's your baggage to carry.

And then, Erin Harding, I'm so proud to call you my sister in Christ. And I don't care who drags me for saying it.

Thankful for you. And I think the point of them posting this screenshot was like this is someone who is pro -transgender, you know, pronouns in her bio and a sister in Christ.

And I think this must have something to do with transgenderism. More telling, though, and maybe more, you know, there's her graduating,

I guess, with Danny Akin. Danny Akin says that he's proud of her publicly on Twitter.

And she commends the staff. She says, Danny Akin and the entire staff are some of the greatest, most encouraging believers I have ever met.

And and so this is this was the more telling thing,

I guess. So according to this recent Southeastern grad, this is someone named

Eric Tilley posted this. Let's see here.

Danny Akin would be a white supremacist. And here's the tweet from Erin Harding.

Kennism is a theological framework. We talked about that with the last podcast. I talked about this another one of those nebulous definitions.

Kennism is a theological framework that justifies racism by using the Bible to promulgate white supremacy,

Aryanism. Much like complementarianism, whoa, much like complementarianism, white men abuse the scriptures to tell women and people of color that they are subject, second class, thus white male rule is

God. So apparently complementarianism is it's just like the rankest form of racism of some kind.

And she's against complementarianism, right? And this is something that. Southeastern would say, well, we're complementarian, soft complementarians, perhaps gentle, kinder complementarians, we're complementarian, though.

And the graduates, though, they're producing, I'm just here to tell you, I was there and the people who graduated since I've been there have been telling me that it's even it's worse, that there's a lot of woke social justice types coming out, being produced at these institutions, and then they're making their way to churches.

And I even know of one, one person who was telling me that it was

Southeastern that actually caused their friend to lose their faith in some way. I mean, that's the way that they phrased it.

But to to reject Christianity just because they're hearing how bad the church is, how terrible the church is for oppressing women and minorities and all these things.

The church is the worst thing ever. And it convinces you eventually, well, why would I want to be part of the church then?

Because I think people who say that they want you to be part of a change. They want you to be a change agent, an activist in the church.

But honestly, why would I want to be part of that institution? Right. This is like what the new atheist said 15 years ago.

But now woke, more social justice minded Christians are saying these kinds of things. And it does have an effect.

It impacts the generation that's graduating now. And so anyways, SBC Underground on Twitter highlighted

Aaron Harding is just sort of an example of this, that this tendency, this this trend.

And no, I don't know of any major studies. I don't even know how you would do that, too. But just on a ground level, observing this, knowing people that observe this, then yes,

I've totally seen this. So there was one thing, though, I wanted to point out or talk about.

And this is switching gears a little bit, but we're still talking about Southeastern. This is someone who graduated from the

College of Southeastern. And it's Kaylee Melissa is the name.

And this is a video from March 12th, 2021. And this is her parents are involved in H.

Actually, I think the thread that I was just on says what they were involved with,

Open Door Church, a church led by an SCBTS leader. Pillar Network was founded there.

So her family is very involved with this church, apparently. And this was actually sent to me last year,

I think, when it closer when it happened. I just didn't talk about it. But I want to talk about it now because not because of Southeastern.

I mean, Southeastern is neither here nor there. You know, I'm not blaming Southeastern for this situation.

I have my own opinion about what might not have helped coming from Southeastern.

But this is a Southeastern grad. And she has, man, she has like 1 .8 million subscribers, which is just crazy.

That's a lot of people. And and this is what she says.

And I'm just going to give you a let me play this for you. This is a just a little montage and we'll then go over it together.

It's about three minutes long. Labels that I use for myself often are bisexual, queer and fluid.

I have experienced attraction to multiple genders in my life. I grew up in a really conservative environment and I was homeschooled.

So my circle was pretty small. And I didn't know anything about gay or queer people until middle school.

I think I was 13 at this point. My friend and I were talking about the new meaning of the word gay.

And she mentioned the term lesbian. And I was like, oh, well, that's a funny word.

What's lesbian? And she was like, oh, it's when girls. And I was like, when girls what? I was so obtuse.

She kept like trying to hint and I wasn't getting the hint. So she finally had to like look me in the eyes and be like, Kaylee, it's when girls like girls.

And I was like, oh, and in my mind to say that a light bulb went off would be an actual understatement.

Like, I was like, that's what those feelings were. I get it now. Of course

I liked those girls. That's what liking somebody feels like. And that was the first half of the second after I heard about girls liking girls.

And in the second half of the sentence, I remembered what I'd been taught about gay and queer people. And I realized

I'm one of them because of what I've been taught. I was like, I am a despicable human.

I'm like a murderer. Me, a 13 year old girl, just like.

What do I do? And the only answer I had was, shh, don't tell anybody ever.

No one can know this. This needs to be buried as deep inside of you as it possibly can be.

It needs to never see the light of day. You have to take this to your grave. In the foreground, I'm dealing with undiagnosed depression and anxiety, which

I had even before my sexuality mystery revealed itself to me. And I knew that I thought and felt differently just in general about the world than the community that I was in at the time.

And the hard part about that was that like it was conform or be ostracized.

It was be this person or you will be kicked out. Very much felt like I couldn't be any of the things that I was because any of the things that I was meant that I would lose everything.

I would lose love. I would lose belonging. I would lose my community.

I would lose my family. And I prayed. I pleaded with God, please take away all the ways that I'm different.

This is too hard. I am doing everything I can and I still keep having these feelings and they won't go away and I'm not strong enough.

Just please, please take it back to a point that I'm strong enough. My entire dialogue about my sexuality was gaslighting and bullying.

It was just all these internalized messages that I'd gotten around my sexuality from people growing up and from church and from mainstream media, from all this stuff.

And I had internalized it and I was using it to gaslight and bully myself. I was using it to hurt myself.

And with the help of friends, siblings, therapists, I started to bring my sexuality into the forefront.

So there you have it. Man, this is just sad to me and it's much longer.

She gets into a number of things. She talks about getting married, getting divorced to a man.

She talks about when she was young and heard this word for the first time, someone telling her, it's the worst sin, which

I'll just take her at her word. I don't know, but that's what she says. And what

I don't want to do is get, psychologize it, of course. I don't want to analyze it too much to the point that I'm assuming things that I shouldn't be assuming.

A few things, though, just based off of what she says. She has some assumptions here already that are not obviously biblical.

Like, it's so bad to be like a murderer. Like, it's so negative to be like a murderer. And that's just biblical teaching that we're all sinners.

If one has broken the law, they're guilty of all the wages of sin is death. The gift of God is eternal life.

This is where the grace of God comes in. This is where the gospel comes in. That Jesus took our very sins upon himself.

That there's nothing, you could be the worst person imaginable.

Paul was killing people. I mean, he was a murderer and God turned his life around.

God saved him. God can, God had grace on David. I mean, there's the

Bible's filled with examples of sinners who have done evil things and the grace of Christ covers those sins.

And so, her background seems like, what she describes at least, is that she felt she had to shut this all, she had to hide it.

She had to shut it in. She couldn't talk about these curiosities, feelings, admiration, whatever it is she had.

She talks about the first time she saw someone, she was very attracted to them and didn't really know. It doesn't even sound like it might have been even sexual or physical.

It was just an admiration perhaps for someone. But then this blossoms into her talking to people who are describing what lesbianism and she thinks, well, that's what

I am, lesbian, I guess. How often does that happen, I wonder? Where people are just, they might have experiences that are not even that abnormal as far as they're not outside of created,

God's created design. They didn't have a sexually evil thought or motive. But then it's suggested to them that they are this way because, look, it matches.

You're a tomboy, you must be actually a lesbian or you must be a trans person or something.

And it's like, no, this is a phase that they're going. This isn't anything that's, no, right?

So generations past, that's how they would have viewed it. But, and I don't know if that's 100 % the case for her, but she describes this environment where she just feels like she has to shut this in.

She can't talk to people about it. And then when she does start to have conversations, it sounds like they're not the best.

They're the wrong conversations perhaps. And whatever Christians were involved in this, and maybe there were some good, solid

Christians steering her in the right direction. But she seems to think that it was just a condemnation in which there was, that was it.

There was no bearing of one another's burdens. There was no encouraging the faint -hearted, helping the weak.

It was just, don't ever talk about that. If you do, you're not a Christian.

That's what she says actually at another point in this particular video, that you just can't be a Christian if you're this.

So super sloppy categories for someone who graduated from Southeastern. There's just a basic lack there for someone with a four -year degree from an institution that's funded by the

Southern Baptist to train people in ministry. She does not have a basic understanding of even just the gospel and how that works.

And the fact that, yes, you can't be a Christian who holds on to sin and says that my sin is part of who

I am, and there's nothing wrong with it, and I justify it, and that's somehow part of my

Christian. You can't do that. But of course you can be a Christian and sin. Of course you can be a

Christian and have struggles with sin. There's the Bible's full of examples of this.

And that's where it's, whether it's a situation like this or the situation that's maybe closer to what

I'm referring to, because I don't know the ins and outs of this particular situation, but I have noticed in some circles there is a tendency to be very rigid.

Rigid, though, in the wrong ways. We should be rigid on morality, on biblical ethics.

We're not going to compromise right and wrong. We should be rigid on the orthodox beliefs that we have, our beliefs about Jesus, our beliefs about the gospel.

But when it comes to ministering to people, to individuals who are often complicated messes, and more so the more dysfunction in families becomes normalized, we have got to approach these things as best as we can in a way that we communicate the full spectrum of biblical theology.

So we communicate grace as well as law. Not just law, not just grace, both of them, right?

We have to be able to not jump to conclusions when we see someone and to just necessarily with limited information, just fit them into a category, which is possibly what happened with her.

I mean, some of the things she says lead me to believe that that may have been the case where, you know, you're a lesbian because you feel this way and she just kind of goes with it.

And then on the other side, well, if you feel this way, you can't be a Christian. And it just,

I guess, illegalism is what I'm getting at. There can be illegalism. And the social justice movement is one of the worst, in my opinion, from my own experience, worst examples of legalism.

And I mean, second, third degree separation that the fundamentalists would be blushing at happens in social justice circles.

They just have a different law. They just, if you're not, if you're, I guess, don't care for the creation enough, right?

As we just saw, or if you're too white or you're just not down for the struggle enough for BLM, you're not supportive enough of quote unquote, people who say they're abused.

Whatever the case may be, it's more along political lines, but they can be very rigid on those things that these man -made standards that they've adhered to, they are, they make that everything.

They make that the test of your faith, of your, whether you can be friends with that person, whether you should have any standing in society or else you're canceled.

But there's versions of this that exist. It doesn't have to be social justice, right? There's versions of this that exist all over the place.

And I wasn't quite surprised when I saw this. I could see this happening, especially years ago, perhaps at a place like in that environment at Southeastern.

I think that the, it's different now. They've exchanged one set of standards for a new set, for a different set of standards.

That's even less resembling a biblical understanding of ethics and morality.

But it was a good reminder to me when I watched this. I just thought, everything I even do on this podcast when

I talk about this issue, because obviously as Christians, we know this is wrong. What the situation that the transition or whatever choice is being made here to sin, whatever is being used to justify it is absolutely evil.

It's wrong. It has to be condemned. Those things have to be. But hiding sin because of fear that you're gonna be shunned from the community.

So you're just not honest with what's happening. There's no approachability there. There's no, there's such a fear that if you let someone know you're a sinner in some way, and now the fear is running in a different way.

If you let someone know that you're perhaps conservative or you voted for Trump or something, there's a shame or a stigma.

But whatever it is, if it's actually sinful, right? In this case, it eventually led to some actual, it developed to actual sins.

There needs to be in your church, in your family, a way that you can approach that without feeling like you're gonna be immediately ostracized.

Like your love for you is contingent on this, or that Christ loves is the same as the people around me.

Like, he's not gonna love me if I'm like this or something, or if I have these struggles, for this story, she starts off with struggles, with questions and bottles them up.

Because if she were to say anything, and that's where, it's not every

Christian community, it's not every church, it's not every family, but there does need to be in some places, whoever

I'm listening to, and if this hits them and they feel convicted, then maybe

I've done my job. But there definitely does need to be a humility there, a coming to the cross, an admission that sin is evil, but that Christ's grace is greater.

I have sinned, you have sinned. Yes, some sins in some ways are worse. They have worse penalties associated with them.

They're unnatural, in Romans one language, but sexual sins are against the body, but all sins will get you judgment.

All sins send you to hell, no matter lying, sends you to hell. All liars will have their pardon like a fire,

Revelation says that. So it's important, I think, that that impression is given.

And the thing I'm concerned about today isn't so much what Kaylee is dealing with here, but it's now that the impression that's given, that if you're not equitable, inclusive or diverse enough, which we're even stepping out, way outside biblical categories now, that you can't share it, you have to hide it.

Otherwise, you're going to be completely ostracized. And that includes from many, quote unquote,

Christian communities now. The level of aggression, the rigidity, the pharisaical nature of the social justice movement is just amped up.

But there's a point I made in my book, or sorry, Social Justice Goes to Church, that those who had parents who were more on that very conservative sort of fundamentalist, in that direction, people who would have been against alcohol and that kind of thing as sinful in and of itself.

People who came from those environments ended up being the most aggressive social justice warriors.

And I give you like six or seven bios. And it's that way, that's a pattern. Institutions that go woke after being legalistic in the traditional sense that we understand legalism to be often, they end up being the hardest woke.

And I don't know completely if Southeastern fits that to a T in every way, but I've talked to a number of people who have told me that, yes,

John, that that was the flip that happened. There was a legalistic leaning there.

There was already this sort of man's, certain laws of men can replace

God's law. We think about them in the same way. They become taboos, can't talk about those things.

And it becomes very easy to just switch out and get laws, other laws that men have now made, equity, diversity, inclusion type laws, and switch them out and make those the new tests for whether you're spiritual or not.

So that's really why I wanted to talk about this and just, I guess, riff on it for a little bit, but it's sad to me and just please pray for her, for Kaylee Melissa, just pray for her today.

So some other things, let's see, switch gears here a little bit. Oh, we're not switching gears completely.

Forgot about this at Southeastern. Patterson Hall, named after Paige Patterson, is now the

Logan R. Carlson Hall. And this was predicted on this podcast,

I know years ago, I don't remember the episode, but after I left, so probably what, 2020 or so, they took down the pictures of Paige Patterson and his wife from Patterson Hall.

And I knew, and this is when the statues were coming down. This was, they still are, but this was when it was like the popular thing to do to rip down history.

And now it's happening again. Patterson Hall, Paige Patterson, his legacy, gone.

And there's a lot I could say. I've toyed with the idea of doing a podcast on Paige because it would just be complicated,

I think, to get into it. Paige hasn't really publicly defended himself. There's a few people who have tried to, but I was there before I started the podcast.

I was at Southeastern when that was a thing. That was, I remember it was overnight. And I was wondering at the time,

I didn't even know much. And I was like, who planned this? This seems like so coordinated to get rid of him.

But they're finalizing it now. And for those who don't know, Paige Patterson was one of the giants of the conservative resurgence in the

Southern Baptist Convention. He was also the president of Southeastern for years. He was responsible for really bringing

Southeastern into a more, at the time he was there, a conservative Orthodox Christian mold where it had been, frankly, the way it is now, it's bad.

But the way it was before the resurgence from people who have told me it was worse and Paige cleaned up that mess and now his legacy is being completely erased.

And it's because of things, it's just interesting. It's things that he's apologized for. It's things that he's denied.

It's things that are unconfirmed, things that are disputed, things that, even if some of them are true, it doesn't, you can't take away the fact that this guy, his achievement is what gave him his name on that building.

It's the achievement he made. It's what he did to turn Southeastern around. It's what he did for the

Southern Baptist Convention. It's like when people talk about Christopher Columbus, he had this view. It's like, okay, but we celebrate the fact that his daring adventure to come to the new world and to essentially discover it.

Yes, I know there are Vikings up in Northern Canada, but he did something at that time that was not done.

And it's his achievement. That's why we celebrate Columbus, right? It's not these other views he had. And you could say the same about someone like Patterson.

But even then, the stuff that people try to get him for are things that are in dispute. So to me, it's telling.

It's bigger than that. It's actually indicative of something much larger, that there's an attempt here to,

I don't wanna say, I don't wanna say that, because I don't have primary evidence, but I don't wanna say that they're trying to wipe away the conservative resurgence, but it's an attempt to out with the old, in with the new.

That's all I'll say. It's out with the old, in with the new. And Patterson, of course, represented the conservative resurgence.

So, all right, let's switch gears now. I think we're switching gears. Okay, yes. And now that I don't have much time,

I'm gonna spend a little bit on this. So just because I've been reading, I thought I had it out here.

I have it somewhere. Maybe it's, oh, it's in my bag. Hold on. Here it is. I've been reading.

I'm now, what, 42 page, 44 pages into Stephen Wolf's book, The Case for Christian Nationalism.

I have a, I have an early copy to review.

And I've already, I booked Stephen yesterday to come on the podcast. And what I wanna do with him is a number of podcasts.

So we're gonna probably do like a long video, most likely. And I'll chop it up and we'll make it a few episodes.

But I want him to be able to just answer a lot of questions, but also have the freedom to clarify things that just,

Twitter is horrible for communication. Can I just say that? I've talked to him a little bit about this, but I'm not a

Twitter guy. Here's though what's been happening, apparently, on Twitter. So Samuel Perry, and Samuel Perry, I thought, didn't

Samuel Perry write a book, if I'm not mistaken? I'm gonna look it up right now. I thought he wrote a book on Christian nationalism. Let me see.

Either way, this tweet's getting a lot of attention. Samuel Perry, let's see,

I'm looking it up right now. He's written on it, but I don't know if he has a book on it.

Oh yeah, he does. Taking America Back for God, Christian Nationalism in the United States. There you go. Okay, so he would be a competitor,

I suppose, to Stephen Wolf. They have books in the same genre. And so this is what he says.

These pro -Christian nationalist dudes will literally accuse folks of racism while the author of the pro -Christian nationalism book they rave about has tweets bouncing around saying, inter -ethnic marriage is sinful, says

Stephen Wolf. And this is just all over though.

This is, I mean, there's tweets all over the place about this. I mean, it's just, okay. So here's, let me just show you.

These are the tweets. Man, and this is in a context too of a conversation.

Stephen Wolf, the author of The Case for Christian Nationalism. And let's see, he says, where do

I start here? Okay, if they didn't separate, and he's talking about nations.

If nations didn't separate and they married each other, then nations, peoples, ethne would cease to exist.

It would turn into a mass monoculture. I'll stop right there. That's true, right? If nations just, if everyone just married everyone without any distinction whatsoever, you wouldn't have a nation.

Everyone would be the same, right? Like before people were separated at the

Tower of Babel. Well, even then there may have been differences but in the pre -Diluvian world, but okay.

So let's go back to at least, at least Adam and Eve and their children, right? It would have been a monoculture.

But we are drawn to similarity as Aquinas said, which is therefore a part of our nature. And so part of our good.

This gets into natural theology. This gets into places some Christians are uncomfortable going.

But I've been reading the book and I think Stephen actually makes some pretty good cases, not even in regards to this issue necessarily, but just on the natural theology front.

Anyway, he says, and thus while intermarriage is not in itself wrong as an individual matter, now hear him say that, intermarriage between nations, it's not wrong.

Groups have a collective duty to be separate and marry among themselves. So he's saying, you gotta make a distinction between macro and micro levels here.

And this is hard on Twitter. People have a difficult time, but he's saying it's totally fine.

It's not a sin. Even in some circumstances, maybe it's right to marry someone who is in a different nation or a different race, okay?

And this is where, again, there's so many definitions that you have to understand the definitions to, to get to the point of even having this discussion.

What is a nation, right? So Stephen Wolfe is obviously seeing nation in a biblical sense.

He's using ethne. The word ethne, we get ethnic from it, but it's often translated nation in the

New Testament. You can get it back to the Hebrew word for people, goyim. You can look at the

Bible and see every time there's a translation of nation and see what is the Bible talking about? And I've talked about this before.

In the pre -modern world, not just even the Bible, the understanding that race was different, then ethnicity was different, then nation was different than people, that these all things could be parsed out.

That was a concept no one would have thought of. It just wasn't an idea. The category for nation would have been race, would have been all these...

You couldn't have separated ethnicity even really from culture in the pre -modern world. These would have been one and the same.

Not saying there weren't specific situations in which you might have someone travel from a long distance usually to go to a country in which they were, like the

Bible says, aliens and strangers. But even then there's a categorization there, isn't it? Aliens and strangers.

There's a distinction made. There's a separation of some kind. There's a different category.

This is what even Russell Moore, I think, tends to miss when he's trying to chide everyone about immigration and he says, well, we're supposed to treat the sojourner well.

And it's like, well, okay, yes, but hold on a minute. Why is the sojourner in the category of sojourner?

Have you considered that? Why did they get to be placed in a different category than the rest of the people?

And God's the one doing it. So all that to say, nations used biblically, used in pre -modern times, it would have been parallel to ethne and that's how many of the translators of the

English translations of the New Testament did translate that particular word. So that's how

Stephen Wolfe is using it. And he's saying that there is this collective duty to be separate and merry among themselves on a macro level.

In other words, if they don't, and this is kind of a natural law argument, which is why I think it's very hard for people and I'm not gonna be able to, well,

I could try, but I'm not gonna parse it out for you here. But essentially what he's trying to say is that the very existence of a nation depends on the fact that not everyone's going to go, that the majority are going to marry within the nation.

Otherwise you don't have a nation. Pretty common sense, I would think, but we live in a crazy world a little bit.

So this is where, and then he says this, there is a difference between something being sinful, absolutely, and something being sinful relatively.

Interethnic marriage can be sinful relatively, but not absolutely. And this is, I think he's deleted this tweet since then.

And this is a tweet that I'm gonna let him, I might, I don't know if I'll bring up the tweet, but I'm gonna let him parse all this stuff out when

I have him on the show to talk about his book. Cause his book, I don't, I haven't, you know, obviously

I haven't gotten, I've barely scratched the surface. So far though, it's actually pretty good.

I don't know if he has a section dealing with specifically what he tweeted here, but what he's trying to say here though,

I know this about it at the very least. What he is not saying is that it is a sin in and of itself, that it is always a sin.

In fact, people that, I mean, he, right after this, he goes on and he talks about how he thinks

Clarence Thomas' marriage, Clarence Thomas is a black guy married to a white woman, is good and fine and great and he supports it.

And so he's not, he doesn't mean what everyone's trying to make him mean, but he has these two categories of sinful relatively and something being absolutely sinful.

So, which I would take to mean that there's a general, that it can be generally sinful to, on a mass level, if a people wants to essentially suicide their people,

I guess, to say we're going to purposely go and intermarry among other nations and destroy our nation.

I mean, that kind of thing does happen in times of war, in times of just famines and mass exodus from certain regions.

You'll see the formation of even new peoples as peoples merge together, but it takes generations to build up trust and to, it's a bit of a process.

So anyway, these are the tweets. And I was like, when I saw it,

I was like, okay, I didn't see anything in there.

This is what I thought. I thought this is Twitter. This is the problem with having these conversations on Twitter because Stephen's making like four different categorical distinctions here.

And then he has assumptions about what a nation is. And he's, it's parallel to culture here.

You notice that in his first tweet, nation and culture are the same thing. And so he's also saying, it's not just, it's not necessarily just ethnicity.

He's talking about culture. And someone who is simple -minded, who's not going to make attempt to figure out what

Stephen means by all these distinctions is just going to say racist and try to give him that scarlet letter right away, which is exactly what's happened.

And the disappointing thing to me is that, Stephen right now, by the way, has the number one best -selling book on Christian nationalism.

Number one in pre, it's not even out yet. It's pre -orders. So, and he's been on the show,

I think twice before. I mean, at least the people on our side, you'd think could give him a bit of a benefit of the doubt here, but, and here's some more lefty, just, it was leftists, you know, but some of them are getting tweets, like this is over a thousand likes.

I mean, there's just, they're dunking on him or trying to all over the place. The disappointing thing to me though, was to see there was a number of people that would be more considered on our side of the social justice debate,

I guess, that were also posting tons of, some of them were sub tweets. Some of them were direct against Stephen Wolf.

One of them was a guy named Doc Sandlin. And I don't, I'm not overly familiar with Doc Sandlin. When I used to be on Twitter, he blocked me.

I don't know why. I never even interacted with him. It's the first time I think I've mentioned him, but he was putting a bunch of stuff out there.

This is just one example. This is an example of kind of a, I guess a sub tweet for lack of a better term. The US was first, the first nation in history to stake its existence, not on geography, history, kinship or race, but on God given self -evident universal rights.

If you resent God endowed globally applicable truths, you can't be a patriotic American or a consistent

Christian. And so there's so many thoughts I have, and I don't have time in this podcast to parse everything out unfortunately with this, but this opens it up to a discussion

I just want you to be aware of. There's a debate really, within political conservative circles, there's a struggle for the, really the soul of the conservative movement and who's going to, it's not even a who, what philosophy is going to undergird it?

What is conservatism? It's really an identity point. It's an identity crisis. And there, you have libertarians, you have so many actually categories, people get offended when you even sometimes put categories or try to categorize, unfortunately, but this is,

I'm gonna, these are John's categories, some of them at least, not exhaustive. There's libertarians, you got neoconservatives, you got paleoconservatives.

I'll say there's like the theonomic kind of reconstruction types out there. They can sometimes dovetail with some of these others though.

You have, and of course, I think I already said it, paleoconservative is one of the major ones.

And what I see happening here is there is a split, broadly speaking, and it's libertarians on one side along with neoconservatives -ish.

And there's, I think you can have your theonomist on either side of this. So people who think they're theonomist.

So that's not even the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is libertarians on one side with the neoconservatives.

And then the other side, you have the paleoconservatives and now this emerging category of Christian nationalists, which if it's what

Stephen Wolf describes, which number one for pre -orders and the people who have gotten the copy that I've talked to, they seem to really like this.

If that's what it is, then it's a tug of war between these two groups. And if you know anything about the struggle between post -World

War II conservatism, neoconservatism, and sometimes people draw that net narrower or wider, depending on who they are, but some people would put even like National Review in that category.

They would put certainly a lot of the talk show hosts like the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannity's and people like that in that category.

Maybe even some of the Claremont people, but people in general who would have been supportive of maybe trying to plant a democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and thinking if you just give them ideas, if you just give them these things, you can just, you can plant democracy or a republic if you wanna use that term.

But they usually say democracy, you can plant it all over the world. It's a responsibility of the United States. And so, and that's just an example of it.

But what undergirds this is this idea that America is an idea, that America itself is a bundle of propositions.

It's about liberty or it's about equality or it's about freedom. It's about, that's what being an American is. It's not about a language or a people or a religion in the case of Christian nationalism.

It's not any of those things. It's these principles, these other, these very broad principles, universal principles, right?

That's kind of, most people who use the term neoconservatives, that's what they'll tell you it is, right?

Paleoconservatives, meaning old, paleo, sometimes Burkean conservatives they're called, you know, they would be much, they would not adopt that.

They would say, actually, it's a culture, it's a people, it's rooted, there's tangible facets to this.

You, in fact, they would say that the constitution was, is suited for the people to which it was given.

It's not universally suited for everyone. Even if you believe in universal

God -given rights, the way that those things are protected, the mechanisms for protecting them and so forth, those things are unique to the

United States. And so the constitution was made for a religious people. It was made for the kind of people that had an inheritance from Great Britain of English common law.

They spoke the same language. George Washington talks about this in his farewell letter, that the things that bind the colonies together, because colonies were so different.

I mean, it wasn't long after that there was a war between the North and the South, but he even says before that, you have the same language, you have the same religion, same culture, same history.

Like these are the things that bind you together. And I could give you quote after quote, if we had time today, from founding fathers saying much the same thing, even those who would have supported immigration.

Think of your James Madison. It was always to the benefit of the people who were there, specific people.

And the constitution itself is, who is it given to? To ourselves and to our posterity.

In other words, our babies and their babies and their babies to secure the blessings of liberty.

The blessings of liberty are to directed towards a certain kinds of people. And it's a certain understanding of liberty that's been developed over time.

So that would be a paleo conservative and I would be in the paleo conservative camp. This is my best way to explain it to people.

I think Doc Sandlin here, and judging by a number of his other tweets, would be more, and maybe he would decry this term.

He may say this is not the term I would use, but in my mind, at least, he would be veering more into what a lot of neoconservatives would agree with.

That actually the thing that makes America unique, a grand experiment, different than any other nation, is that instead of all these other things that bind people together, geography, history, kinship, race, whatever, all these tangible things, that it's actually just, it's mental.

It's in your head. It's these globally applicable truths. So it stands, the thing, there's so many difficulties with this in my mind.

Number one, if that's true, right? That the U .S. was the first nation, then doesn't that raise a little bit of a question mark?

Really? Like this is the only, this is the exception to the rule. The rule that's existed for all of human history has been that these other factors are what build trust and bind people together.

And yet all of a sudden, this is the anomaly. This is the one place where we did this grand experiment and look, it worked.

You can tell me whether you think it's working right now. But look, it worked. We're Americans because we agree with these

God -given self -evident universal rights. If that's also true, then it stands to reason that any nation that just simply, any region even, any, it doesn't even matter.

I guess nation doesn't matter because again, he's using the term nation in a different way than Stephen Wolfe is using it.

And I would think in a probably a different way than the Bible uses it. Or if a nation is just ideas in your head, it doesn't, nations don't have fathers and mothers.

They're not the extensions of families as A .D. Robles says in his book. And I totally agree. If it's just ideas in your head, then everyone can be,

I guess, an American throughout the entire world that they just assent to a certain set of ideas, right?

So everyone, so why not bring people here from all over the world who cares about open borders, who cares as long as they value universal rights?

I guess that would be the one thing. And what is universal rights, right? This opens another question because if you look at any point in our history, are you gonna go back to the constitution when women couldn't vote?

Is that universal rights then, right? No, no, no, not that, John. Okay, so do we go after 1848, after or after I should say, maybe women getting the right to vote.

Do we go there? And then, well, some people would say yes. Some people would say, no, John, you still had discrimination legalized in many states.

You had a segregation policy. So it can't be that. It's like, okay, it can't be that. So when do we get, is it 1975?

Can we all agree on that? And a lot of conservatives, yeah, that's a good time. And then you have a bunch of people saying, yeah, but we didn't have the

LGBT rights thing going at that time. So it can't be that. So who's, right, you see the problem here.

When you get into this equality thing, and that's what rights are understood as, are linked to this now, then you have a problem.

Now, I think Doc Sandlin probably would have a much better understanding of what rights are rooted in God -given responsibilities.

I would think, I'm just assuming this, I don't wanna speak for him. But again, you're still going back to a time when these would not, this, okay, we can all agree.

We have God -given rights. How do these apply? Should we have, there were amendments to the

Bill of Rights that had not been put in place yet that I'm sure Doc Sandlin would probably agree with.

So there's a difficulty here, I think, when you start going down this path of it's just universal rights, because that just has to be fleshed out.

That has to be defined. And I think between the two of us and between a number of conservatives, we could probably come up with a good list of what that might be.

But the problem is it's our list at a certain particular time. And we would have to come up with a document for our time, for our people, and every people is going to be different.

Every people is going to have a different mechanism that works better for them. In fact, the Constitution itself was made for a self -governing people who are morally religious, who had virtue.

We can't say the same about the United States today. So what does that mean, right? So I could probably get deeper into the weeds on things when it comes to that.

And I just don't think right now I have the time to do it, unfortunately. In fact, I've gone pretty long on this live stream already. But this was just one of the tweets that I thought

I wanted to talk about this, because not because of the individual who tweeted it, but just more because of the fact that this is a very common thing

I hear. And maybe we'll do some more in -depth stuff on it. And hopefully we'll get

Stephen Wolfe to comment on not this particular tweet, but at least these concepts.

Ben Crenshaw had some really good, I thought, response to this. He said, this is a half -truth read J in Federalist Number 2,

Madison Federalist Number 14, and various other Fed papers that clearly reference American geography, history, and common kinship as integral aspects of the nation.

He says, you cannot have form without matter, and not just any matter, but matter appropriately tuned to the form.

The founders knew this. Government founded on natural law alone is not possible. It must be applied to the right kind of people in order to work.

To see this, look at the comments of the Continental Congress, 7074 Declaration and Resolves. And speaking of their rights, the colonists appeal simultaneously to one, immutable laws of nature, and two, the principles of the

English constitution, and three, their particular colonial charters and compacts. The rights they enumerate are all part.

Determinations of the laws of nature mediated through English colonial institutions. This concern continued through 87 and beyond, even as the

English elements were uniquely transformed into American counterparts. You cannot impose natural rights on a people as a viable form of government, as our failed experiment of nation building in Afghanistan proved, which is, hey,

I just brought that up. Great minds think alike. This is why the founders provided for a moral and I think a religious education and state national support for churches in order to maintain a virtuous

Anglo -Protestant people. And historically, he's right. He's right about this.

That understanding of what natural rights were, it wasn't, it was filtered through, as he says.

Centuries of filtering into law, to common law that was adopted in the

United States. We're an extension of that. It doesn't just float out of thin air. These things, valuable things, important things that you wanna conserve, they take time to build up.

Unfortunately, not that long to destroy. And so if we were coming together now,

I'm just curious if we're a people that wants to create a constitution for today and you had a bunch of, let's say, good Christian pastors come together and say, what's a good form of government?

What do you think they would say for our people today? I'm just curious. On the state level,

I know I would be looking for, of course, I would want to, as much as I possibly can, preserve self -government.

But I also know when there's a lack of virtue, unfortunately, the government, and hopefully local is better, so maybe local governments more so when it's possible, but the government has to create order, or not create, but they have to maintain order.

They have to make it so, they have to enforce laws against evil. And it wouldn't,

I don't think it would look the same. I really don't. Even if the founders themselves are here today and looking at the situation, I don't think that they would have formed the same kind of government.

And what's our option then? We have to get back to, if we're going to keep the form of government, we've already lost it to really some extent, but if we want to get back to the form of government the founders gave us in general, we have to have a very moral and religious people who are aware of their history, who are willing to sacrifice for their neighbor, who have a sense of trust so that the markets don't work without trust.

Militaries can't defend a nation without trust. That must be there. We don't have it.

And part of it is we have so many different kinds of people. There's a lot of reasons for it, but that is part of it.

We've allowed to immigrate so many different kinds of people in such a quick period of time that assimilation has not happened the way it ought to happen.

And when you don't have that, mistrust builds among people in regions in which that's happened.

I've seen it firsthand. If you're from Southern California and you've been there the last 30 years, you know exactly what

I'm talking about. Importing a large group of people very quickly that don't share your history, your language.

And you can't tell me that, I mean, they don't look like, they look different and they themselves kind of stick together because they have trust already built with themselves because they have their own history, they have their own language, they have their own traditions.

They can look at each other and they can see in just the way that someone looks that that's one of my members of my people.

It takes time, guys. It takes time. We've done it so fast. So anyway, I'm not gonna go through all this, but just, yeah, other people who, more people against social justice who seem to just be against what

Stephen's saying here and not actually even specifically what Stephen is saying, but also just the larger point that Stephen's arguing.

Like here's one, this is Michael O 'Fallon. He wrote this, he just agreed with Doc Sandlin.

Doc Sandlin, again, the US, I think I just read for you this one. You can't be patriotic, you can't be

Christian. And Stephen Wolfe actually replied to it and he quoted Thomas Accord who, and this is, by the way, a lot of communists have said this.

There's probably a book somewhere that just has all the communists who've said this, but here's Friedrich Engels in the principles of communism.

Karl Marx's buddy, okay, this is what he says. The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves.

You know why? You wanna know why communists want that? Because if you lose your identity, if you lose your history, you lose whatever pride, whatever trust you have with the people around you and you can be easily manipulated and taken over and communists know that.

There is such a subversive element to the taking down of our history, of our monuments, of all the commercials even you see.

And it's, again, interracial marriage is not wrong at all. I think that, and sometimes it's right and you better marry the person who's of a different race.

I think, I believe that, but on a macro level, you gotta ask yourself the question, why are all the ads constantly featuring interracial couples as if that's the only couple?

It's a very small percentage of people who engage in that. And in my family, I have a number of those and no issues there at all from a personal standpoint.

I love my family members who are married into my family. I love my friends who are of different ethnicities and all that.

That's not the issue. And people get stumped on this and confused. That's not the issue. The issue is, is there a concerted effort to destroy the identity of a people, of a particular people?

And that's what Friedrich Engels understood. That's what communists in general understand.

That's the way to break any tie with the past, any genetic ties, any inheritance and all the rest, any sense of pride.

They can try to get rid of it that way. So anyway, this is the debate that's happening on Twitter.

There's probably much more, I could probably delve this, probably raise more questions in many of your minds than it's answered, which is totally fine.

But you just need to be aware that this debate is actually happening. It's real. Okay. Switching gears again, we're going to talk about, we're going to read an article here by Megan Basham at the

Daily Wire, how church leaders aligned with Fauci to discredit experts opposed to COVID mandates.

That's right. In late February of 2022, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, I think, professor of medicine at Stanford, delivered a sermon to a

Silicon Valley church on the theme of clean and unclean, as he spoke of Christ's revolutionary compassion and physically touching lepers and other disease outcasts in the ancient world.

He paused to reflect on how our society, in which 64 % of the population possesses, professes to follow

Jesus, has conducted itself over the last two years. Quote, I started receiving emails almost immediately after the pandemic started from doctors and nurses asking me if it was okay to hug their wives and their husbands.

He shared from the metal music stand serving as his pulpit, because they work in the hospital, they were unclean.

Your COVID patients, they were unclean. He described seeing pedestrians swerve. Okay. So we know a lot of the examples he's giving, right?

I mean, I've been offended before. I don't get offended much. I was offended though. The mask thing grated me more than anything else,

I think. Like on a personal level, when I would like go hiking and someone would like see me coming like a quarter of a mile away and they're like waiting in the woods, like 10 feet off the trail for me.

And I'm like, what am I? Like a leper coming? So anyway, I get off my high horse, but this is what he's talking about, right?

He says the point was clear throughout the pandemic. Americans treated one another as if they were unclean and he rose to national prominence after he and a group of colleagues from Harvard and Oxford released the

Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that opposed pandemic policies like lockdowns and instead advocated focused protection for the most vulnerable.

Skip ahead here. So he talks a little bit about Francis Collins and how

Francis Collins labeled Batacara's medical opinions, fringe and conspiracy theories.

From the beginning of the pandemic, Collins leveraged his relationships with church leaders like purpose -driven life author

Rick Warren and apologist Tim Keller to convince Christians across the nation that submitting to lockdowns and mandates was a matter of obedience to God.

Collins and his personal friends, Christianity Today, Russell Moore and Billy Graham, Center Director Ed Stetzer also argued that Christians had a responsibility to tamp down on conspiracy theories.

That the notion that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, right? Now we know, don't we? But a public statement was unearthed on social media last week from BioLogos.

I do remember this now. At first, I didn't. I was like, I've never seen this. And then I was like, wait a minute, I did, but I just didn't think it was big at the time.

And well, it was big. An organization Collins founded in 2007 to create bridges between scientists and Christians reveals further spiritual manipulation to discredit medical experts like Batacara who disputed the establishment narrative.

Titled, Love Your Neighbor, Get the Shot. It was released in late August of 2020 and it was publishing, let's see, there was a bunch of op -eds and the signatories, which included celebrated theologians

N .T. Wright, Philip Yancey, Lisa Sharon Harper, Phil Vischer, Timothy Dalrymple, and several seminary presidents promised to actively promote accurate scientific and public health information from trustworthy consensus sources.

Keith Whitley from Southeastern, I think, signed it. They also promised to counter misinformation and conspiracy theories from non -consensus sources.

When Dr. Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, tells us what scientists have learned about this infectious disease, the

Christian intelligentsia exhorted their followers he should be listened to. And that is the root issue here, right?

It wasn't about science. It wasn't about loving your neighbor. It was about you need to follow

Fauci. What he says must be taken as gospel truth. And if you don't take what he says as gospel truth, then you, my friend, are the problem.

You are not loving your neighbor. You're failing the test of Christian orthodoxy somehow. See, this is the new legalism.

Can you see it? So it goes through a section on love your neighbor, on the statement to love your neighbor.

And they pledged that because of their faith in Jesus, they would wear masks. They would get vaccinated.

They would correct misinformation about, and conspiracy theories about these things. In the end, more than 8 ,000 people, many of whom were pastors, signed.

And the signers were basically saying, we need to treat the church as a mission field to the establishment. In the words of Michael Brendan, I think that's a great, great quote.

Isn't that how Big Eva treats? That is what they think. We need to treat the church as a mission field for the establishment.

A swift and devastating takedown. As the signers of the love your neighbor statement were pledging to combat scientific misinformation,

Fauci and Collins were working behind the scenes to make sure that Barakara and other experts who questioned their policies would be viewed as purveyors of it.

In private emails, Collins deemed Barakara and his great Baratang authors fringe epidemiologists and urged

Fauci to make sure that swift and devastating takedown of their work would be published. Let's move ahead a little bit here.

At the height of the frenzy to suppress misinformation, posters with his picture were plastered around Stanford's campus alongside

Florida's COVID mortality numbers. So they got personal with this. So they're blaming him.

People are dying because they're following the great Barrington Declaration, supposedly. When I asked,

Megan Bashan says, Barakara about efforts church leaders undertook, he answers from the perspective of both a doctor and a

Christ followers. He says, scientists and scientific leaders should allow debate to happen, not misrepresent that the debate is already settled and that essentially trick

Christians into following them. And I totally agree. To the idea that getting the shot was synonymous with loving your neighbor, he says it was also erroneous.

From a basic scientific perspective for a church to say that COVID vaccination is an act of love because you're protecting other people is not factually correct.

And now he's been vindicated. The lockdowns essentially were a policy that privileged the rich.

Laptop class, he said. The Biologa statements had it exactly backwards. It was the policy pushed by Francis Collins that destroyed the poor vulnerable working class.

It's estimated that 230 ,000 children died from starvation in South Asia due to COVID lockdown disruptions.

There's a millions of people who have starved as a consequence. The World Bank issued reports suggesting that almost 100 million additional people were thrown into poverty due to loss of income.

But Acara says he still admires Collins and praise for him. He believes that the former director of the

NIH abused his position. As for church leaders who signed the

Biologa statement and platform, Collins has suggest that taking a side in an unfolding scientific debate was a Christian duty. But Acara's bewilderment that they ever could have thought it was responsible.

He's bewildered that they could have thought it was a responsible decision. I just wanna say this about this.

Man, there needs to be apologies here. You will not have a road to building trust back up again with these leaders who signed these kinds of statements and made these kinds of statements from the pulpit of their churches.

Unless there's apologies made. There's a church not far from me, geographically speaking, that basically said from the pulpit, it's a big church in my area.

Bigger, you know, they don't get big in this area, but as big as they get. And he said that if you came to church,

I believe it, I'm trying to think it was mask or vaccinated. I think it was without masks that you're murdering people. Those are the kinds of things that have to be apologized for now.

Say, look, I was wrong. I was wrong. I was, whether I was wrong factually,

I listened to the wrong sources. I misapplied Christian ethics, ethical laws on this.

If that doesn't happen, then there's no hope for rebuilding trust with these kinds of people. And it's been now, it's been now two years, so.

All right, switching gears again. We're gonna talk about this real quick. This is

Kanye West. And why are you talking about this, John? Well, because I kind of opened that Pandora's box a few days ago.

And I, last week, I decided to talk about a tweet of his. And then it led me to have to clarify the tweet.

And now I'm just, I'm too committed at this point, I guess. So here's Kanye West making some anti -Jewish, it's not even, anti -Jewish media, let's put it this way.

Anti -control, what Jewish people being overrepresented in his mind in the upper echelons of the media,

Kanye West is against that. So he makes these remarks along this line. And this is, what show is this?

I thought Cuomo got canceled. Well, it's Cuomo's show, whatever show he's on now.

And this is what Kanye said. It's very short. I wore the White Lives Matter t -shirt. The Jewish underground media mafia already started attacking me.

They canceled my four SoFi Stadium shows, right? They had the press, the same people, the 78 outlets that when

I was arguing with Pete Davidson and Trevor Noah, they call me an abuser for arguing with people about my ex -wife and my family and when

I get to see my kids and when I don't. And they just immediately disrespect me. They keep the crazy narrative going.

They never call me a billionaire. We never talked about, even on this one right here, hey, tycoon, billionaire, visionary, inventor.

These are never used. If you go to like New York Times or Wall Street Journal, whatever, they always say the rapper, the rapper.

It was hard enough for us to get fashion designer. I'm gonna give a pause so you can address what you wanna address.

Appreciate it. So look, there is no Jewish media cabal mafia.

That is a figment of either your imagination or a projection of a prejudice, okay?

You may have had bad business dealings with people. It's about those people. It's not about their religion or faith.

And I know that you are intelligent and understand that when you target people because of their faith, other people may do so the same.

They've been targeted before. They've been abused and killed because of what they believe and who they are.

So we don't wanna tolerate that. And you're playing into that right now, whether you know that or not.

And I won't tolerate it as a black person. What you just said was a statement. You're trying to say that there isn't a collective, over 50 % of the executives in Hollywood, the

CEOs are Jewish. And these guys - All right, so that's the clip,

I guess. So here's the only thing I wanted to point out about this. So Kanye West is making this point.

And listen to Cuomo's response to him. He's like, look, you can't make,

Kanye say it's over 50 % of the producers or directors, whatever he said in Hollywood, they're

Jewish. And therefore they have over -representation, they have control. And the response is, you can't say that about a people group.

You have to deal with them as individual people. You can't make blanket statements about a group of people like this.

That's just, it's unfair, it's anti -Semitic, all that. I just want you to think about two years ago.

Two years ago in 2020. And what both of the Cuomos were saying on CNN about white people.

And what the entire media just about seemed to want to say about white people. Systemic racism, white privilege.

Isn't that what that is? Is it making an assumption about an entire group of people?

They're all this way. They all carry with them this invisible bag of privilege. They're all just helping each other out, whether unconsciously or not.

It's a big cabal. It's a conspiracy. It's stacked against minorities.

And here's Kanye West comes out. And what does Kanye West do? If he said white people instead of Jewish people, he would be in step, pretty much, wouldn't he?

With what you typically hear from the media. But because he said Jewish instead of white, he is being canceled by banks.

He's having all sorts of problems. A lot of shows have been canceled.

Venues canceling him. Just all kinds of things. Because he said Jewish instead of white.

And I want you to see it that way. That's why I brought this up. Put the shoe on the other foot.

Think of equal weights and measures. If you can't say it about Jewish people, if Kanye shouldn't say this, why should you be allowed to say it about Europeans?

Why? Why should you be allowed to say it about any people? The rules are not fair and balanced, equal weights and measures, any of that.

All right, that's the only point I wanted to make. Okay, someone asked how many gears are in this episode. There's a lot of gears.

It's a mega edition at this point. We're winding it down though. A few things coming up just to be aware of.

Brazil's presidential election is coming up. It's getting nasty. And just pray for them.

October 30th is the runoff. I thought there could be potentially violence there.

But of course, neither of them won. So there's a runoff. And it is,

I mean, it's close. The polls are saying, and the results of the last election are saying that it's probably not gonna go to Bolsonaro.

It's gonna go to, amazingly enough, someone who has been in jail for criminal activity.

Da Silva. But anyway, Lula, they call him. But I don't know if I trust it.

It's just, it's strange because you have Bolsonaro who's packing out venues and Lula can hardly get crowds to come together.

And yet Lula's the one that's beating. It's just really strange, guys. It seems a lot like the 2020 election.

And there are rallies across Europe, according to The Hill, over the Russia -Ukraine war. This basically comes down to that, unfortunately, winter's coming and you have places in Europe that they're not gonna be able to get the resources they need to heat their homes.

And there's already jacked up prices. I mean, it's a big problem, all these sanctions against Russia.

And it doesn't seem to be hurting Russia as much as it is Europe. And so there is civil unrest and it could get a lot worse as it gets colder.

So just something I wanted to let you know about. Last but not least, I wanna play this clip from Eric Swalwell, the gentleman from California, House representative who did some indecent things with a

Chinese spy and got very intimate with her. How he's serving in the House of Representatives, I don't know, but here's his latest ploy.

It's about a minute and a half. Mary Anderson?

Yes? I have a warrant for your arrest. Arrest for what? Penal code 243 violation, unlawful termination of a pregnancy.

You gotta be kidding me. Just an observation as you're watching this ad, you know how just about every commercial, they have to show an interracial couple, right?

Or if it's not interracial, they have to show LGBT, right? You never see two white people in a family in which their kids are also white, except in this particular political ad.

Why is that? Why is it a white family? They, all of a sudden, they're going back, they're trying, and even the way they're dressed and everything, they're trying to make them as middle -class, white, family -centered kids that love parents kissing each other.

The 1950s would be proud of this couple, right? It seems like what they're trying to convey. That is my personal business.

That's for the courts to decide, ma 'am. Your medical records have been subpoenaed, and Dr. Landry's already in custody.

No, my, my God, you can't just - You will have to submit to a physical examination.

What? By who? No, no, no one's touching her. Sir, sir, get back! I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't!

Of course, that's what police do, right? As soon as someone says, get back, they just draw their guns to shoot the person, and the baby's crying, and I mean, it's -

Ma 'am, turn around! Oh my God, oh my God! Put your hands behind your back, now! Why is this happening?

Love you, honey bear. She loves her honey bear who's alive, but -

We're just enforcing the law here. Elections have consequences. Vote Democrat on November 8th.

Stop Republicans from criminalizing abortion everywhere. Protect women's rights and freedom.

Because that's exactly what, that's what happens when you overturn

Roe v. Wade, is you have ex post facto laws.

You have a law that punishes you for what you did before the law went into effect, and not only that, but the police are going to come and arrest you for it.

I mean, it's fantasy. There's no law in the country like this. The pro -life lobby, not even the abolitionists, against abortion, would support ex post facto laws.

I mean, I've never met anyone who has. This is fantasy world. But this is, I mean,

I was looking at some of the responses. I'm like, people believe this. This is crazy. No one's gone through this in the

United States of America. And it's, the picture they're trying to paint is like, it's going to affect that, it's going to affect, it's for the moderates, right?

It's going to affect your middle -class family.

If you did that thing 20 years ago or whatever, six years ago, two years ago, before it was illegal, they're going to come for you.

And it's going to disrupt the family. In fact, it actually tries to flip it by saying, if you want to support family values, you're going to have to vote

Democrat because look who's disrupting the family. Look who's taking mama away from her kids. Except you don't think about the fact that this is the mama who had one of her children killed, technically.

But this is Eric Swalwell. And this is what the

Democrats are hoping is going to bring them victory this coming midterm. I don't know.

I don't know what's going to happen. I think in probably blue areas, there's going to definitely be like anger about that overturning row and stuff.

But I think in general, I don't think it's, funny enough, when it first happened,

I was kind of holding my breath, but I don't think it's going to be the biggest issue at all. I think the economy right now for working class families, especially, and middle class is going to be the big thing.

But anyhow, I figured I'd show that to you because it stuck in my crawl a little bit. And I was like, well,

I need to debunk that thing. So anyway, that's the show today. I'm going to just look over some of the chats here.

I thought I saw, let's see if I can find it again. Yeah, the Standard Beard Care. I talked about them at the beginning of the show and totally forgot to tell you 10 % off with the promo code

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So just looking at the other, a lot of people from a lot of different places, weighing in.

Susie Q says, when people of different ethnicities marry down the line, you end up with a mutt like me, racially ambiguous because I'm ethnically a melting pot.

And you know what? I would be like that when it comes to Northern Europe, even though you look at me and you think, man, like that guy's just pasty white.

But when I actually did my DNA thing and I'm like, wow, I got, mostly it was from the British Isles. It was like Scottish and then

English and Welsh and Irish. Wow, I got German in there. I got Swedish in there.

So I think there might've been a little French if I'm not. No, I don't think there was French. No, no, I don't have French. I can't remember now, but there was other stuff.

And I was like, oh, wow. And you find interesting things when you go through your

DNA. Let's see, people selling me

Doc Sandlin. I just talked about one of his tweets, he's a theonomist. And I kind of thought that too, that he probably was coming more from that end of things.

But like I said, theonomy, people who say they're theonomists, that they're, I just apply God's law. You have them on the neoconservative side and the paleoconservative side.

I've noticed this. And now you have woke theonomists. I mean, like, I don't know if Joel McDermott still calls himself a theonomist from you used to be

American vision, but that guy is like super woke now from what I understand. But let's see, vote

Republican, protect the unborn. Yeah, most Republicans, most Republican. I don't know about all of them, but I would say most of them.

So a lot of good comments. I'd love to weigh in more on. Someone asked,

I'm just gonna answer some questions if people haven't had a question. I just see one here. How can I RSVP for the

Jesus in politics conferences Saturday? Yes, if you wanna come see me on Saturday, if you wanna come to Indiana and check things out, then go to worldviewconversation .com.

Go to the speaking schedule. Trying to remember what it's under, events maybe.

But speaking, I think it's under speaking. And there's an email there. You can email someone and let them know you're coming.

And then that should be good. So it doesn't look like there's any more questions or statements here.

But anyway, I appreciate everyone's participation. And for those who support this channel,

I definitely appreciate it. I've been doing a lot trying to get ready for this weekend.

And I really do want to get another book out. There's just so many projects and so little time.

And so something has to suffer sometimes. And so the podcast has been one of those things, probably this week and next week that I might have to do a little less of.

But it's been a blessing just having the convenience of being able to in my office now.

I was in boxes last year for months. But I can just turn on the camera.

And so I'm going to try my best to get out maybe some podcasts that are shorter later in the week.

This is the mega edition, of course, for this week. But yeah, lots going on in my life.

And I hope you all are doing well out there. God bless and welcome.