Culture and Ideology

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. You are going to get a sneak peek today at my next book.

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Some of you have my first book, which is called Social Justice Goes to Church, The New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism.

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If you don't have it, you should get it. If you have already read it, please go ahead and rate that on Amazon or wherever you get books.

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It would be helpful to me. But I'm offering it for 15 bucks. You get an autographed copy. You can go to socialjusticegoestochurch .com

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or worldviewconversation .com and you can find it there and order it. And you'll get an autographed copy, like I said, for $15.

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This does help me. I wanna thank everyone who has helped me in writing this next one. It takes a lot of time, and especially,

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I'm very meticulous, and there's a lot of other things going on right now I'm doing. So in order to have the time to even write this second book, and I think

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I'm in the middle of the fifth chapter, then I definitely need people to help support me and your prayers are also awesome and appreciated.

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And so I just wanna thank everyone for helping me with that. That being said, you're getting a sneak peek today. I'm gonna share with you an insight, a thought that I think may help you.

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And if anything, maybe it will put you on the right path to ask some of the questions that I think are not being appreciated today in even conservative circles.

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Sometimes people call it the uniparty. I don't know if that's exactly true, but Republicans and Democrats both seem to be infected with ideology.

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And because of that, I think of the quote by Robert Louis Dabney in like, I think it was 1870s, he said that American conservatism is the shadow that follows progressivism on the road to perdition.

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I'm paraphrasing. Why is that? Because it seems that that's true. Why is it that conservatives, they'll fight something, fight something, fight something, they lose, they cave.

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That becomes part of their platform now. They fight something, fight something, they cave. It becomes part of their platform now.

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If you don't believe me, look around you. See how many rainbow flags Republican groups are putting out there on their social media.

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Look at even what's happened in Canada with their conservative party. If you wanna view into the future, we're not gonna be arguing about single payer healthcare.

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Conservatives, quote unquote, are gonna be arguing how best to manage single payer healthcare. We're not trying to get rid of the

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Department of Education. We're trying to be the ones to manage education better instead of returning it to the states.

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And of course, there's voucher system, things floating out there and stuff. But by and large, they're not constitutional remedies that conservatives champion.

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They kind of follow that shadow. It does seem to be that way. And one of the reasons for that, I think, is ideological thinking.

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And so I want to share with you a portion of my book with you where I talk about this a little bit.

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I also want to start off, though, with something else. And I think it'll give us a little better of an understanding, a foundation to approach ideological thinking.

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Because I can illustrate it better if I start with this post. This is a post that I made on my phone. I was probably at the gym or something.

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And that's sometimes where I'll make little posts. And I just put some thoughts in there about conservative values in the family and culture.

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And I want you to hear this. And I wanna give you some analysis, some thoughts that I think will help you be able to recognize ideological thinking and be able to understand what true conservatism is, at least one aspect of it.

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So this is what I wrote on June 8th at around noon. Conservatives value their culture as an end in and of itself, not as a means to one.

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They don't justify their love of place and people on abstract grounds. For example, they never say,

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I love my culture because of the ideas it produces. Or I love my culture because it accomplishes equity, diversity, and inclusion.

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They would never base their love for family on these reasons. And they understand culture is an extension of family.

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Can you imagine, I'm just gonna take a break here. Can you imagine saying that about your children or something? I love my son because of the ideas he produces.

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I love my son because of how equitable he is or how diverse he has made the environment under which he has authority.

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It sounds funny because no one would ever do that. They love their son or their daughter because it's their son or their daughter.

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There's a relationship that exists there that's actually, it's God -ordained, but it's based on these, it's a natural relationship.

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It's a, even if your son goes off the deep end, you still love your son.

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So let's keep going here. Families are imperfect, and so are cultures.

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Yet they are also tangible realities flowing from the creative hand of God and worthy of appreciation because of what they are, not what they can do.

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Big difference there. We appreciate our family because it's our family. On Father's Day, did you give your dad something that said world's best dad?

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Many of you did. Is he really the world's best dad? Did you run the test? No, you love your dad.

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To you, he's the best dad. Even if he's imperfect, which all dads are, you love him.

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Even if you know he's not the greatest dad, you still love him. And that's the difference here.

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You don't love your dad for what your dad can do for you, even, if you're a child. You don't love your wife for what they do for you.

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In other words, that's not the basis of your love. Yeah, it maybe helps you appreciate them more.

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You like it when they do certain things. There's a function that they have, and fulfilling it really helps things go a lot smoother in your relationship, but that's not the basis for your love.

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You have a natural connection. Paul, think about Paul with his people. Think about how he would say,

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I wish I could be a curse for the sake of my people, Jewish people, Israel, people that were hunting him, persecuting him.

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He even said, look, I love them. So this is a love that is, natural is the word

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I like to use. It's ingrained, it's organic.

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That's what loving your people or your culture is. In fact, I had recently,

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I'll just tell the story real quick. I was in a very rural area in Virginia. A friend of mine was preaching and we went to someone's house.

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And the first thing that the person asked me, it was an older guy, and he goes, where were you born?

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In the North, they would never ask that question. In metropolitan areas, you usually hear, what do you do?

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But, hi, my name's John, where were you born? So I was born actually in California. And he says, well, if you were born around here,

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I was gonna ask you who your people are. This is that natural, organic appreciation for home that conservatives have, that home is worth defending.

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Modern conservatives, political conservatives, don't have this anymore. Even if they do have it in a sensible way, just a natural way in their hearts, they feel as though they have to justify these things based on something else.

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So what happens is your family becomes a means to an end, your culture becomes a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

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It can't just be appreciated for what it is, it can only be appreciated for what it does.

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And some of you know what that can be like, when sometimes fathers or mothers can put expectations on their children that unless their children carry out a certain kind of function, and may be good at sports or something, they're not going to receive quote -unquote love.

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And we know that that's not really real love. Real love is irrespective of whether your son's good at sports or not, you love him.

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You may like him to do sports, you may want him to follow in dad's footsteps or something if your dad was an athlete, but the love isn't based on that.

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So this is what I said. Yes, conservatives appreciate scientific advancements, philosophical breakthroughs, and many other accomplishments their culture may endow them with, but they never confuse blessings with basis.

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They would cherish, preserve, and even correct their family members, whether they were foolish or wise.

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This care is the most natural affection, conferring identity, belonging, and meaning.

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This is why Jesus' command to hate family in comparison to one's love for him is so radical.

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He was not saying that it is ever acceptable to hate family if they fail to meet some moral standard.

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Rather, he was saying that love for God should be even deeper than the natural ties between people

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God created. Forsaking him because of family obligation is never acceptable.

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It is in Christianity that we find a basis for natural affection and the limitations of it.

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It is in conservatism we find a willingness to preserve these natural social bonds in the face of artificial forces that seek to corrupt them.

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Now, it seems a little abstract. It's a little, it's really a thought you've never had. That's why I'm breaking it down into family instead of culture.

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But culture is really just an expression of family. When you have families that settle in an area, live in an area, exist in that area for a while, customs start forming.

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Societies are created. And there's natural ways that people get along.

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And they adjust themselves over time. And those adjustments get woven into a tradition and a law.

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And so this is a part of, this is the organic nature of society. And I believe that there's an organic nature of society.

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And that the problem, one of the big problems today is that not just progressives who are totally abstract in the way that they approach the worth of people, it seems like, it's political advantages and disadvantages and power relationships.

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And everything gets squeezed through some kind of a grid, ideological grid. As to see whether it matters or not.

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Or there's worth, I should say, intrinsic worth in it or not. Conservatives are now doing some of that same thing.

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So I'll give you an example. And it's gonna be from, this is from the book that I'm writing on social justice.

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It's called, let's see if I can open it. I haven't opened the document yet. I gotta open it up here.

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It's probably gonna be called Christianity and Social Justice. But the section that I've been writing recently is on this idea of ideology.

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And here's the section I wanna read for you. Historian Kerry Roberts describes ideology as a rationalistic closed system of thought designed to explain all of human behavior through simple precepts.

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I'm gonna close this out, all right. In fact, let me see if I can while I'm recording this.

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Let me see if I can get this on the screen. I'm not sure if I'm, so you can read it along with me. Okay, now that I have it adjusted,

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I'll start over. Historian Kerry Roberts describes ideology as a rationalistic closed system of thought designed to explain all of human behavior through simple precepts.

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In other words, ideology explains human nature and activity in total by reducing it to a singular impulse.

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For Marxists, class conflict motivates human action. For feminists, it is patriarchal domination.

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And for critical race theorists, it is whiteness, et cetera. One can see how making one determining principle the exclusive factor in accounting for all human relationships can destroy social bonds by arousing mistrust.

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Sacrificial actions such as philanthropy, benevolence, and leaving an inheritance for one's children are simply interpreted as ways to advance one's own class, gender, race, or some other quality.

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In fact, history itself becomes a series of stages characterized by the singular motivations of the powerful exploiting the powerless.

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Philosopher David Hume referred to ideologues as pretenders of wisdom who replace virtuous and tender sentiments with a certain sullen pride and contempt for mankind, contempt of mankind.

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Often this disposition manifests itself in those who love humanity in the abstract, but show little affinity for the particular humans they know personally.

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They profess love with word or with tongue, but not indeed in truth. They may say they care deeply about the condition of the poor and the downtrodden, but maintain little connection to either.

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Instead, they seek to use institutions of power to achieve a theoretical status for the destitute that often fails to improve actual human lives in any tangible way.

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Modernity is filled with such examples, from the way slavery was abolished in the United States in which an estimated quarter of the 4 million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness, to the way

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COVID -19 lockdowns resulted in more deaths from other causes, some cures are frequently worse than the diseases they are intended to eradicate.

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Instead of reforming society in natural, gradual, and localized approaches, ideologues reflexively attempt to revolutionize society through immediate and all -encompassing action.

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Mechanisms of the modern state force their innovations upon humans within their jurisdictions in a posture approaching divinity.

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This is why many members of the modern intelligentsia idolize those institutions that exercise power and produce ideas that best place them in relationship to those powerful institutions.

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Now, there's a lot more that I said. In fact, that was in a section about liberal media bias and why people in the media seem like they march in lockstep in a coordinated fashion.

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It's because they have the same ideology and they're matching everything up to this abstract proposition in their mind, whether it forwards, advances, or whether it detours and retards the march of equality or liberty, some kind of egalitarian liberty.

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So everything gets reduced to this. And we've seen this with critical race theorists. They can go into a situation and they can find out whether or not something even unrelated to equality is either forwarding or retarding the march of equality.

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That's what we're living in right now. And so conservatives have been tempted to justify themselves and their own bills and their very existence, it seems like, as a party based upon these principles.

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So the Republican Party, you've often heard it, is the good party because they were against slavery and the

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Democrats were the evil slaveholders and segregationists. This is a very horrific reading of history.

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If you know anything about the beginnings of the Republican Party, and I've pointed this out many times, the

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Republican Party is not as clear as the driven snow on equality. And it's not this black and white thing.

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I'm not gonna go into all the details of it right now, but let's say it was. Let's say that is the Republican Party. Is that really the thing that makes existence worth it, that justifies your existence?

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Is it what makes life worth living, just equality? Well, no, it doesn't.

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In fact, there's so many other things, so many other, there's all these virtues, real virtues that are embodied in God that we see in virtualists and in scripture.

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There's sacrifice and there's bravery and there's leadership.

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There's, I mean, there's so many other things. Self -control goes through the fruit of the spirit, right? There's so many other things that we can point to, virtues that are honorable, that need to be, that we can't really live without.

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They're necessary for having trust and social bonds. Think about your own family.

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What's necessary for your family to live together, to maintain a kind of trust? Is it just equality?

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No, in fact, there's a lot of inequality in a family and there needs to be. In fact, hierarchy is necessary in a family.

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So we bought into this perversion, much of us, and conservatives, political conservatives are no exception to this.

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One way to illustrate this is look at the immigration debate. Conservatives, populist conservatives, are much more, they see it as a threat, but the main reason is social.

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It's not even economic, it's social. It's, yeah, maybe this would promote some kind of equality in the sense that there's an opportunity for people who didn't have it in other countries to come to America, but it's also a threat to the culture as a whole.

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It's a threat to the values that build trust in social bonds.

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It's a threat to not just jobs, and that is, but jobs represent a way of life.

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It changes the demographics of an area so that English is not even the primary language that's spoken in some areas.

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And there's a whole host of things that we could get into, but it's a cultural threat to just allow mass illegal migration.

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And this is viewed as racist, as not promoting equality by the other side. Conservatives, though, political conservatives that are in high positions, they kinda, they have a hard time dealing with this.

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And I've seen the waffling. I've seen how hard, Trump was actually someone who was able to lead a charge on this, and he didn't use these abstractions.

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He just, it's not good for us as a people. That's all there is to it. It's not healthy for us as a people.

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Why? He didn't have to justify it based on some financial thing.

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He didn't have to justify it based on equality, inequality. All he had to do was saying, it's hurting the condition of our people.

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Condition, not status. Status is everyone's equally poor. Condition is, yeah, some people are gonna be here.

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Some people might be here. There's different ranges of that. But we don't live in a perfect world, and we want a world in which people can achieve the best condition that's possible.

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And it's not possible if you have someone up here coming down to meet someone like here all the time.

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This is one of the dangers of socialism, is they think that that's what will happen, is everyone will kind of reach this homeostasis level.

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It doesn't work like that. What happens is everyone goes down here, and then this all -powerful government that is supposed to be managing that homeostasis, that equality, they're the ones that end up becoming the big kid on the block that beats everyone else up.

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Anyways, I digress. The things that make life worth living are not equality and egalitarian understanding of liberty.

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It's mom's apple pie. It's the smells and the tastes, the things you see, the people that God's put around you.

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It's the neighborhood you grew up in. It's things that you can't quite 100 % describe to someone else who's not from there, but you really want to, and that's what you end up talking about.

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Those are the things that make life worth living. It's Norman Rockwell. It's what country music used to talk about a lot.

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Country music's caught the disease in some ways too. They can't talk about those things that really make life worth living as much.

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It's home, it's familiarity, it's natural social bonds. And this is what conservatives, political conservatives should be and traditionally used to be in the business of trying to defend.

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They're trying to defend a way of life. They're trying to defend home against forces that would disrupt it, against forces that would encourage mistrust, that would break apart social bonds.

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So that's just something that I wanted to put out there. I hope this helps you think through some issues. Hope it might give you more questions than you have answers for at this point, but I think it starts us off on a good path because there is a big disconnect between the population, which has these virtues still in some ways,

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Middle America, and those in D .C. supposedly representing a Middle America that can't seem to defend the monuments from Middle America, that can't seem to defend the way of life of Middle America, can't seem to even, they can't speak out against something like Juneteenth, which is being used by the

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Democrats in these nefarious ways and always, it was. I mean, Biden, at least on a national level,

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Biden even stated his purpose behind Juneteenth, that it's all about equality.

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He used that word and forwarding equality for ages to come. And conservatives don't wanna be on, political conservatives don't wanna be on the other side of that if they're in elected offices because they can't form in their minds, and they can't comprehend what actually matters,

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I think sometimes, and they can't articulate it. They can't sometimes do both and saying, look, here's the on the ground effect that doing this will have.

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Why don't we do it better this way? Why don't we celebrate the end of shadow slavery in this way that doesn't foment all these things?

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They're not able to do that. And it's because we only judge things based off of an abstraction, an idea, whether or not it conforms to this idea or not.

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So I wanna do, just bring that to you. Hope that helps. God bless, more content coming, more stimulating content, and we will see each other.