Understanding the New Christian Right

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I am your host,

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John Harris, and we have today, I'm going to pull it up, an episode, a short one hopefully, on some of the disagreements between Legacy Ministries and the

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New Christian Rite. And I said I would do this on X, and I want to keep it short, but I had someone email me the other day, and he was kind of discouraged and confused.

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Why are these conflicts happening? And it's probably beyond everything that I have here.

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This isn't necessarily comprehensive, but I did jot down a few things on a list, and I want to talk about those.

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And also, I'll just give you a little preview of coming attractions. I have written on much of this more extensively in a book that I have coming out, and so you can look forward to that.

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But specifically on the propositionation and then liberalism, I have a lot to say.

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And so I'm not going to say that all now, but I want to give you some basic framework, and hopefully along the way, give you some encouragement where I see maybe there can be some working together against common enemies, even if it's just some co -belligerency, because we desperately need that right now.

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So please pray for unity within the church, or if there needs to be some division, let's make it clear, and let's make sure we know what it's over, because the confusion happening in the pews is not good.

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And it's something I am slightly concerned about, but I know that God's going to build this church, and I trust that the

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Lord knows what's going on. He's going to expose what he needs to expose. He's going to promote who he needs to promote, and all of that, all of that is going to happen, and he's going to have the last word.

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But let's just get to it. Let's just do it. This is the list I made. So I have five different categories on understanding some of these current debates between legacy ministries and the new

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Christian right. And we'll start, you know, maybe we'll start from the bottom and we'll move up.

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How's that? So motivation, motivation is my first category here.

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And in motivation, I'm talking about rationale, starting point, interest.

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So the new Christian right guys tend to value tradition. We'll start there, whereas I think a lot of legacy ministries are more into liberal ideology.

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Now, there are ideologues who are trying to influence the new Christian right. There's no doubt. But I think that the new

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Christian right is going in a more paleoconservative direction. That would fit every conversation I've had lately with any of the leaders in that movement.

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They are looking to reconnect themselves to traditions that they've been severed from.

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They're also looking to try to make sure they promote and protect the traditions that they've haven't been severed from.

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And this means that they're looking at human experience, the wisdom of the ages, older writings and understandings about how things should be arranged in society and so forth.

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Whereas the ideologue generally has these abstract principles like equality or they have some kind of like a racialist principle or something and they just impose it and it becomes the key that unlocks every door.

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It's it's kind of dangerous because you have a little bit of knowledge and think you're intelligent and make big mistakes because you're just you don't understand things.

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But you think you do because, you know, you were told that it's everything. Every problem comes down to, you know, one impulse or one thing.

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And I think for a lot of legacy ministries, when they look at civic society, it definitely comes down to some kind of equality principle or freedom principle.

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And and then you just kind of impose it. And I don't think that that is where the new

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Christian right doesn't buy that anymore. And we're going to get, I think, a little more into detail as we get into the proposition nation stuff and move up this list.

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And I'll flesh that out a little bit more. But these are two different ways of approaching and justifying some of the, you know, plans and purposes that these groups have for society.

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Another thing is the starting point is different. I think that many of the more baptistic, especially legacy ministries, have somewhat of a blank slate biblicism that will often come out.

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It's like, you know, whatever the Bible teaches, even if it's in contradiction to church history and the way that Christians practice things for a lot of time, two thousand years almost in some cases, like they will overturn those things for innovative readings of scripture that they think are justified based on some hermeneutical ground.

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But, you know, often it's like a reconciliation of some kind of liberalism with the

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Bible. So like a good example might be, you know, even some of the questions of what is a nation.

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I hear guys all the time go to Ephesians and the wall, the barrier wall between Jews and Gentiles.

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And they think that that shows that they're like, they'll look at the reality of the universal church and they'll say that that passage is about racism or something.

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And like I know, you know, Tim Keller obviously did this, but there's a lot of I've heard a lot of sermons like this.

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And it's an innovative reading of the text. Like this doesn't match previous readings of the text, but they, you know, they're going to hear

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I stand on the word of God, like, you know, come what may. That's kind of like the stand they have, whereas I think new

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Christian right guys are more open to tradition, to reason, to nature. They believe that nature and the

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Bible are reconciled, that the Bible is not going to say something that is obviously contradicted when they look around them and see how

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God's order creation, they they're, they're very open to, you know, what has the church set on these things for a long period of time?

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That's important to them. So they're, you know, when they make the stand, they want to have these things informing their stand.

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Another difference is, and this is one of the impulses that I've heard be the explanation for all of it.

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And with some guys, maybe it is, but that there's these legacy ministries are just trying to gatekeep upstarts because they don't want competition.

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Now, that's a that's I don't know. I can't tell you what's in someone's heart, but there have been times

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I remember specifically talking to someone during the G3 controversy a few years ago, and I was like. I don't know,

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I don't know, it doesn't make any sense, like they're nitpicking you and choosing things to disagree with you on that, I don't think they can possibly be in disagreement with you on.

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So it's very weird. That would make sense of it, but I don't know. And so, like, that's that's another potential area of just, you know, like why there might be a disagreement.

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Now, that's something that with some humility can be overcome. I think, you know, ideology and tradition, that's a heavy one.

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That's hard to overcome that, especially when it gets worked out into things like the propositionation between how nations have traditionally been defined as collections of people in a place with shared experience over time and with a core, you know, a core ancestry that stretches back.

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And there can be assimilation, but they must have this core like that, that kind of thing, like you can't have it's one or the other, like it's diametrically opposed.

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So ideology is like this where, you know, it's it's rigid, like you can't

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I don't see ways around it. The ideology would have to be broken for there to be agreement on some of those issues.

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But but I think, though, that like, you know, there's hardly any issues that without some humility, you can't actually have discussions and make progress.

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Right. Let's go to eschatology next. And I don't mean eschatology as in like eschatological flavor, like pre post and Amel.

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I mean, like because anyone of those persuasions can be on either side of this. I mean, in a broader sense, whether you're on the right side of history or you're going to support the created order, this is a broader social division.

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It's a broader civilizational division, really. And the new Christian right is on one side of it.

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They want to support the created order, whatever that might be. That's why they tend to be more impervious to accusations of racism and sexism and these things, because they're just, you know, if that's the way

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God designed it, I'm going to hold to it. Whereas I think the legacy ministries tend to want to be on the right side of history.

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They let their, their, their strategizing and winsomeness and wanting to have influence and those kinds of things, they let those things sometimes bring them to places where they have to be the slave of human approval, basically.

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I mean, it's, you know, what are people going to think? We need to think about how this is going to come across.

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And because of that, on this particular issue, we need to just really soften this or we need to, you know, firm this up.

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And and so they let the sort of like equality principle drive them because the the arc of history is bending towards equality.

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And we on this this next fight, we want to make sure that we're standing here. And so, you know, it might be something

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Jonathan Lehman said a few years ago about, you know, I forget what disagreement it was that he was having, but he was saying like it might have been

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COVID. Like we have this he acted like we had this stash of cachet, this influence that we can spend at certain points and we don't want to spend it all now.

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Right. Like, you know, we know we're kind of odious to the world on some things. So like, let's go with them on this thing.

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And that just like makes you the I mean, who are you making the decision for?

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So the reason I put this in eschatology, though, is because like the progressive and even the woke kind of ways of viewing things is is that like we're going to greater and greater levels of equality.

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And the LGBT is like the next thing. And they have these these different levels. And this is the shadow that follows liberalism.

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The legacy ministries are pretty much that. Whereas I think the new Christian right wants to put a stake in the ground and say we're not moving.

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Regarding the church, a lot of these legacy ministries, especially the more baptistic ones, tend to be ecclesiocentric, so they see the church is like that's

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God's mission in the world and that's it. And and that's why I think there's a de -emphasis sometimes on politics and other things.

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They want to ensure that when you make decisions or decisions that you make,

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I would say the most important ones are the ones that are made within the church. And I've been

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I've had experience, we'll say, with some of this where the elders make all your life decisions or they should at least be informed.

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And if you're not informing them, you're not submitting the elders. They should know who you're going to marry and have input on that and where you're going to work, where you're going to move.

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And the activities should go through the church. Those are the most. So the new Christian right doesn't really buy the end of that.

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They're more holistic. They see different. Responsibilities and hats you wear in public and the church is just one of them, and so they will put more of a stress on the political and and that does invite accusations of like, you don't believe in the power of the gospel or something because you talk too much about politics and and it's like you should only really be talking about church related things online or something like that.

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And so that's not something the new Christian right engages in. They they don't see it that way. Another thing is and this is under the heading of domestic, but domestic arrangements should be complementarian and within many of the legacy ministries, meaning that the husband and wife have different roles.

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But that's within the house and that you almost get the sense it could be arbitrary because it's not necessarily rooted in creation or that in the church pastor should be men.

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They'll affirm that sometimes they'll be soft. They'll say, well, the office should be a man, but the function could be a woman, whatever.

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Patriarchy, though, is a little different because in patriarchy it's rooted in creation. So this is the reason that men occupy this place and women occupy this place.

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And that's why the new Christian right is not very optimistic or enthusiastic or supportive about women being in police combat or political roles.

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In fact, some of them have gone so far as to say maybe women shouldn't be giving political commentary in these kinds of things.

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And this is, of course, very offensive to legacy ministries. And they try to use that against the new Christian right.

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People who say these things as examples of their bigotry. And then you have identity.

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So this is a huge one. I mean, this is like my middle name. This is funny because before I started recording this, there was a bunch of guys on X with not guys with a big following or anything, but they were just trying to get me to answer whether I thought

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America was a proposition or a people. And I just thought, like, you spent two seconds on trying to understand my online platform.

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And you'll know that one of my biggest issues has been defeating the proposition nation.

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And so the proposition nation is this understanding of America that it is a the proposition of equality, that America is about equality.

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And anyone who agrees with that mission and that value is essentially an

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American and is compatible with America. And, you know, this is how you go play in America and other places is by teaching them about equality and the outworking of that, which is democracy and that kind of thing.

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And so it's not what a nation is, though, like ultimately a nation is like,

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I think I said before, people in a place living intergenerationally with each other.

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There's common experiences. There's a core ancestry. Sure, you can have assimilation, but you can't ever destroy that core ancestry or you don't have the nation anymore.

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And this is this is something that you find in the Bible. This is just something that I think you find in even classic literature.

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It's just an understanding that hasn't been questioned until recently. But the legacy ministries tend to go along with the liberal order that values the proposition nation and thinks that it's not really about the particularities of a people.

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It's it's this universal principle of equality that defines a people. And this is used to justify every leftist innovation out there.

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That's the reason we need to have gay marriage was because of equality, right? Equality is used to justify all of it.

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And if you don't go along, well, you're not really an American because being an American means being supportive of equality. So I think that a line would be drawn.

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Legacy ministries would draw a line and say, well, not that, you know. But they still can't get away from the fact that they do think that this proposition of equality is what defines

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America and not so it ends up being a value. And it's not this more rooted, actual, tangible element of a people in a place in a place over time.

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And so so this creates a lot of problems, to be quite honest with you. This is the basis of our immigration problem.

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This is I think what's what's made people on an individual level not value where they live and their parents and all kinds of other things.

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Go to Mudhead Mama dot com today. Those things really don't matter. It's it's just what kind of abstract notion of equality do you have in your head?

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And are you motivated to forward it and support it? Or are you going to rip it down?

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And if you rip it down, then you're a bigot of some kind. So it's a revolutionary instinct, but it definitely exists on the right.

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And this is where they'll get off saying, well, you know, the Democrats are the real racists. The Democrats are the real Nazis. The Democrats are like because what they're doing is they're trying to say we're the ones that actually care about equality.

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So more could be said, but that is like my wheelhouse. Go watch the 1607 project, Virginia first online, free on YouTube.

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I was the one who produced it and took me like half of last year to do it.

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And I am proud of it. But it's taken apart this proposition nation myth. And I have a couple of chapters in the book

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I have coming out this year on this particular subject as well. All right, civil, civil realm.

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Let's talk about this. The civil character is really either religious pluralism or cultural

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Christianity. And so legacy ministries a lot of the time believe in some kind of religious pluralism. On the civil level, these aren't things that are a lot of these things, if not all, are not they're not in a statement of faith, you're not going to find it there.

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It's only when the disagreement comes up that you realize, oh, wow, those people that were so right on ecclesiology are so wrong on their civil, you know, their their civics.

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And in this case, there's a lot of straw manning that goes on. They'll say that if you want cultural

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Christianity, that means that you want a bunch of hypocrites who don't know Christ. And so more people go to hell and that kind of thing.

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That's not at all what's being said by the new Christian right when they say they want cultural Christianity. And this is true across the board.

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Pretty much all believe this. We want they want a society where the

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Christian mores and social settings and values and laws are in place. And so we want to see

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Christmas trees and manger scenes and not Kwanzaa displays.

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We want to see prayer given. That's a Christian prayer at town gatherings. We want to see in God we trust in the courtrooms.

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We want to see, you know, I don't know. We want to hear Christian music when we walk into businesses if possible.

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We we want church bells. We don't want Muslim call to prayers. We want a city ordinance against that. Right. It's that kind of thing.

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And this is going to look different in different places. Different. You need majorities of people who want that for that to actually work or at least a strong enough plurality of people in your society for that to work.

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So where I live right now, I don't think that's necessarily some of these things aren't going to happen because it's so you could call it secularized or paganized.

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But the goal is to get there. The goal is you want you want to see those things. You want to see

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Christian values and even Christian identity reflected in society. So we don't have a problem saying this about families.

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Even if there's kids that aren't saved in the family, we don't have a problem saying about bookstores or music or other things. But when it comes to localities, regions, nations, empires, people have a problem.

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But the alternative is religious pluralism. You know, you want Muslims and Hindus and all the rest, even

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Satanists having equal access to all the public privileges.

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Like, that's basically the alternative. And you saw it during this whole, like, you know,

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Satan statue debate last year. There were some people from some legacy ministries that were basically condemning some of them for reasons of like it was vigilante violence or whatever.

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You know, the guy who tore down that statue. But but there I saw some arguments that were all also like, well, this is

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America. And, you know, kind of like David French's Blessing of Liberty, you know, drag queen story hours, Blessing of Liberty.

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Like they just think, oh, that's that's just part of living in this country. So that's one of the differences.

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Another difference is like who has control. And this parallels this what I just talked about. But on the right, you've had in Christian legacy.

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Christian coalition type religious. Right, organizations, this notion of family values and now even just values like, you know,

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Judeo -Christian family values, values. There's been this slide towards broadly, including everyone in what was supposed to be a uniquely

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Christian political engagement. And there's all sorts of room for co -belligerency in politics. But you want to be careful that you if you're supposed to be a

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Christian approach, you keep that. And I think the new Christian right wants Christendom. They want a people leading the country who are

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Christians, who have a Christian vision for it. Now, it might look different in different places. You could have a born again Christian who doesn't understand policy and a

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Jewish guy who understands it better. And you vote for the Jewish guy. That is perfectly possible and acceptable.

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And different regions are going to look different. But the goal is the overall goal for the new Christian right is they want to bring back some kind of a

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Christendom. The posture is different, too. I think a lot of legacy ministries see neutrality as the way to go.

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I mean, this is this parallels a religious pluralism. But I think that they look at it this way, that equality before the law means treating everyone equally.

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And if you treat everyone equally, you got to treat Christians equally with Muslims, with Buddhists, with atheists, etc.

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Whereas I think Christians recognize the Christian right, I should say, recognizes that actually you need a justification for the laws that a society has, which means there's going to be a religion.

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There's going to be a God. The God of Scripture has different views on what is acceptable than the false

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God of some pantheistic or pagan system that, let's say, sees sexual degeneracy as something positive.

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And so it's going to look different. Beginning of the country, there are anti -blasphemy laws, anti -pornography laws.

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Right. These are some of the things that the Christian right is interested in bringing back whenever they might get the political power to do something like that, where it's feasible and impossible and all of that.

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And so they think that we're in a society where there's a death struggle going on. I mean, that you're competing essentially with these other views and one's going to win out.

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And so, you know, you can't just be like, well, equality before the law, Islam or Christianity, like one of them has to win out.

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So even in the Old Testament, I mean, you had equality before the law, but that didn't mean that pagan religions were favored just as much as the true religion.

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Right. And that's basically what that means. And then, of course, rights is the last one I'll talk about. This is kind of controversial, but you have individual equality for social hierarchy.

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A lot of legacy ministries believe in a version of egalitarianism and there would be limits to this because they would probably all of them say, like, well, there should be a separation legally between children and parents and stuff.

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But I think the new Christian right guys are willing to go farther in recognizing social hierarchies in nature, in scripture, and then trying to apply those to the country.

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Now, this is all in the theoretical world. There's not enough people that have been elected on the new Christian right to do anything about any of this.

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But you have some guys who have tried to rethink the 19th Amendment. You have some guys who have said maybe we shouldn't have everyone voting.

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It should just be landowners voting. The universal suffrage was a mistake. There's a guy

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I know actually on the new Christian right is pretty, you know, pretty prominent who favors a return to some kind of a monarchy.

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And so there's these ideas floating around out there like that. And who has the rights to base their privileges to, you know, like things like voting.

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But also, I think, you know, gaining the benefits of living in the country, for example,

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I think people on the new Christian right, and this would parallel just the right in general and the debate going on between establishment

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Republicans and the dissident right. But they would say that the new Christian right that, you know, people coming across the border just because they had a child here, that doesn't necessarily mean that they shouldn't have like an anchor baby because, you know, that person is necessarily now just an

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American because they were just born here. And, you know, this is a subversion of the 14th

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Amendment. I mean, it really does parallel arguments happening on the political right. But this determines like who actually has rights in your society.

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Where should the lines be? And there is an attempt on the new Christian right to draw the lines in places that used to be drawn and not the more open egalitarian ways that they're either not drawn or they're drawn more loosely today.

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So these are some of the differences. This doesn't apply to every ministry like the battle between it's not even a battle, but the disagreements between like Moscow and Ogden, Moscow, Idaho and Doug Wilson's ministries would probably, you know, a third of what

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I just talked about. They would probably agree like they don't want religious pluralism, for example. You know, they would want Christian to lower family values.

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So, you know, are they on the new Christian right? I don't think so necessarily. Maybe they see themselves as that.

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I don't know. G3 probably sees them as that. But there, you know, there's some hybrids and stuff in this.

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But I think, you know, broadly speaking, this is what we're looking at. This is the emerging movement of new

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Christian right guys. This is where they're going and they're moving away from the things on the left side of this chart or, you know, list of differences.

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So I hope that's helpful. I hope that's somewhat clarifying. I know that for some of you, you know, this might not be that interesting because you want to look at different theological categories and so forth.

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And there's obviously theology that touches on all these things. But a lot of this has to do with things happening socially and the reaction to it.

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And there's broader reactions happening out there that go beyond just the Christian world. But the fractures are also happening in the

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Christian world. And and some of this may need to happen. They may need to work itself out.

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But I am hopeful. I think as conditions change, you're going to find some people also changing their own views on these things.

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And, you know, as things even during Donald Trump's presidency, I think some things will get better. And I'm hopeful.

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I'm hopeful. You know, I would love to see national revival and stuff like that. But I think the trend will continue that things will also get more decadent if there's not a revival of some kind.

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And that means that I think there's going to be people switching sides.

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And I think there's an ascendance that you'll see with the guys who are willing to, on the new

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Christian right, take bold stance and against the liberal order. So that's that's what

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I see going on out there. I hope this is helpful. I hope this is somewhat clarifying for you. There's probably a lot of other things maybe some of you think

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I could have talked about. And, you know, I don't really know exactly, you know, do you want to hear more about patriarchy?

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Do you want to hear more about religious pluralism? Are Jewish people who don't have Christian values too influential in society?

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You know, some people really get upset about that one and think that there's some blurring of lines and some neo -Nazi sympathies among some members of the new

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Christian right and that kind of stuff because of that. And, you know, there's so many other things

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I could talk about, I will say just briefly on that one. All the guys that are any have any influence on the new

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Christian right that I've talked to about that subject have all basically distanced themselves from any kind of neo -Nazi type ideology.

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They're not or said things very much against it. And even guys who don't focus on it publicly because they don't think it should be a focus publicly.

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It's not something that is worth even entertaining. That's really a big part of the spirit.

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But some of those same guys will say, yeah, like I don't want to see other members of other religions, including Judaism, which on the right, there are a lot of in the left and the left has more.

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But there are a lot of people who are Jewish. And also, well, now we've seen the

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Calvin Robbins saying Roman Catholics is coming up as one of the things to Catholic to, I suppose, for the

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Protestant Christian right there. That then they have a lot of influence. And that means that some of the things that they value and some of the things like like Dennis Prager thinking pornography is fine.

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Right. Like these are things that are out of step with Christianity. And so there is this concern there. And and this makes legacy ministry members feel very uncomfortable, as you can imagine.

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Right. So there's more that could be said. There's more application that I could draw out and examples and so forth.

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But I wanted this to be short and I wanted you just to just to help you understand the categories and to think more clearly about it.

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So hopefully that's what it did. I guess that's all I have to say today. God bless and see on the other side.