Cancel Proof Christianity with Bobby Lopez

The Problem of Cancel Culture for Christian Men

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm John Harris, and we have a guest with us today, Dr. Bobby Lopez, who some of you who have listened to this program before, or if you're a regular listener, you'll know Bobby because he was the one that now, I guess, man, is it a year and a half ago, two years ago?

It's been, I guess it's been a little while. He was let go from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. We talked about it at the time because it was pretty significant. Bobby wanted to share his testimony, included in that testimony is his story of not just redemption from sin in general, but redemption out of a lifestyle of homosexuality.

He has a family, he has children, and he wanted to spread that message. Let's just say that based on the recordings we have of some of the officials at Southwestern, they did not like that. Anyway, Bobby was let go from there.

We just want to take some time today to just find out what's Bobby up to? How is he doing? What kind of projects is he doing? One of his latest projects is about fighting cancel culture. Bobby, thank you so much for joining us.

Welcome.

Thank you very much for having me, John. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Awesome. Go ahead. It has been about two years, believe it or not. It's been a while.

Building an Alternative Christian Life Sphere

Yeah. I know. It's amazing to me because it feels like yesterday in some ways, but yeah, time really is going fast. I think last year, for some reason, made it go faster, but tell us what you're up to now.

Well, I'm working with the people at Gatekeepers. I really enjoy working with them. They're an emerging, I hate to use the word emerging because it sounds like emergent Christianity, but they're definitely a media outlet that I think is going to grow.

They brought together a really good group of people who are Christian and who want to move forward. The project that we're working on right now, which I hope people will attend the summit for is called Cancel Proof Christianity.

That's the name of the book that I'm writing for Gatekeepers. It's also the name of the conference, the first one that we're having on September 25th. If you go to cancelproofchristianity .com, you can get to that landing page and you can register, you can live stream, or if you're in the Dallas, Fort Worth area, you can come.

Basically, what that project is about is trying to build a Christian life sphere where we can live out our faith and we don't have to live with the constant fear of not being able to provide for our families.

Jeff Dornick and I, in the materials that we have put together and in the curriculum that we've prepared for this series of conferences, we're really attuned to the fact that not all cancel culture is the same.

The way that we've used the term has really confused a lot of people because I think people might believe that cancel culture means that a famous speaker like Ben Shapiro doesn't get to give a speech at a university.

And while that's a problem, that's not what we're talking about here. People get canceled all the time. People are told that they're not going to be given a speech or that their book deal falls through.

What we're talking about is the fact that Christian men now in America, in so many different parts of their lives, have to choose between living out their Christian witness and being able to provide for their families.

What we call cancel culture has now extended to mean that you can't get licensed, you can't find a job, you can't get a job, you are denied the ability to advertise for your business, you can't hire employees, you know, things that make it so that you are not able to provide for your family.

And that's a critical breaking point because I've heard so many people over the last couple of years say, where are all the Christian men? Why are they not speaking out? Why is it always, you know, women who are at the front lines?

You know, why are Christian men cowards? You know, you hear this about pastors. Why are Christian pastors so cowardly? Well, the problem is that these men love their families. And we, as a conservative Christian movement, while we have been very good at pointing out everything that's going wrong with fake conservatism and with liberals, etc., we have not done the work that we needed to do to build an economy, to build an independent life sphere so people have somewhere to go.

I was a perfect example. And there are other people, someone like Stephen Baskerville or someone like Russell Fuller, people who we were encouraged to make a public stand for the Christian witness. We were encouraged to stand up to people.

But then where do you go when you lose your job? Our movement doesn't really answer that question. They don't. They just they really don't. And I think it's a lack of love on our side. You know, you cannot expect people to go and to take controversial stance in the public square.

And then when they say, I've just lost my job, you can't your answer to them can't be, wow, I'll pray for you. You know, send me your resume and I'll get back to you in six months. I mean, for a lot of us, this was how are we going to put food on the table?

I mean, we have to come home and tell our wives and children that we've lost our income. We've lost our reputation. For a Christian man, when you get fired, the chance that your wife will divorce you increases significantly.

And you have to figure what that means for a lot of men. If your wife decides to file for divorce, she's going to get the kids. You're going to lose your house. You're going to be in a spiral. You're going to be stuck having to pay child support.

And if you can't find a job and you can't come up with the child support, you could very easily fall into arrears. So we have to do something about this. We can't just constantly complain about being canceled.

So what we're trying to do with Cancel Proof Christianity is we're trying to bring together educators. We're trying to bring together entrepreneurs and people who have business investment potential, who have businesses.

We want to bring together media creators such as yourself. And we want to bring together people in the church community who are interested in launching independent churches because we have to, in all four of these realms, we have to unplug.

Right now, we are totally dependent on the people who hate us for everything. And the way we talk about cancel culture makes it worse because we're constantly asking to be uncanceled, to be brought back into the very institutions that hate us.

Well, I don't I would not want my job back at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I wouldn't want that because I'd be then subject to the exact same suppression that I was in before. So we have to build, if that makes sense.

Jeremiah 29 and the Call to Build, Not Depend

Yeah, yeah. And I'd like to get into more what you mean by building, how that works and stuff. I know that you mentioned Russell Fuller. I know. And I'm not familiar with Stephen Baskerville. I don't know if I've heard of him, but with Russell Fuller's case, I know he was discouraged from, I mean, he was they they wanted the gag on him.

I mean, there was a few people like me who probably who I mean, not many people were even aware that he was kind of silently being muzzled. But we wanted him to talk. But it was a very small group of people with hardly any influence or money.

But the people that actually had influence and money didn't want him to speak. And when he did speak out at this point, I know he is he's got his theology classroom stuff. Things are the Lord's provided for him.

And we praise God for that. And that's and I kind of I value what you're saying, because, you know, there it would be really good to have an alternative, a place for someone to go when they are persecuted for the sake of righteousness.

Right. Ultimately, though, I know his faith and my faith is in God that look, if I like I'm blacklisted from a lot of places myself just because I speak out and and that's OK. Like, I know that the Lord had his prophets and he has people and I'm not saying I'm a prophet necessarily, but I'm just saying like the Lord provided for people in way worse situations than than you or I or Russell Fuller or anyone's in.

And and so I guess I want to ask, first of all, so this I want to get into the details of this plan. But where so is this something where you're just kind of relying on God, trusting God that he's going to provide the right people with the right paycheck books and everything else to kind of write checks to to give to people who are canceled?

Or is it more intricate than that? Is it like a fine, finely tuned mechanism that's going to put how does this whole thing work? Because because I'm on board with like, let's help people. But how do we do it?

Well, that's what we need to do. First of all, it has to be a complete all fronts approach. OK. And yes, of course, we're relying on God. The verse of the Bible that inspires us that we're kind of making the focal point of this effort is Jeremiah 29.

Five. When the Israelites were expelled from Jerusalem and they were told by God that they were going to have to live in a pagan society that essentially hated them, God said, you're going to have to pray for the prosperity of that society.

You're going to have to try to bless that society because even though that society is pagan, if they prosper, you will prosper because I'm sending you to live among them. But he said, plant your gardens and build your houses and eat what you grow.

In other words, don't be dependent on that society. So there is a biblical directive that we don't just sit passively and tell people God is in charge. Something's going to fall out of the sky. We do have to build resources for people.

We have to build. I mean, the ability of somebody to apply their talents and earn a living and feed their family is not a small thing. It's something that really takes an entire community to be able to work together.

So the reason why we have four fronts that we're focusing on the schools, workplaces, churches and the media are so that we're cutting ourselves off from all of the cancellation power that the pagan world has.

We're not declaring war on the pagan world around us. We're not saying that we're going to destroy them. We're just saying that we can't be dependent on them for our livelihood. I think Russell Fuller, he's kind of doing exactly the kind of thing that we're trying to do, but we're just trying to make it so that it is a broader base of people and so that people with a broader range of skill sets are going to be able to find work.

So what that means is first you have to found the independent schools. That's the that's the first step, because we've got to have a place right now where young people are trained, where they're going to have a biblical worldview and they're going to be inside of the Christian sphere and they're going to be given skills that then they can bring to a workplace.

And we need to know that the children are safe during those hours. If that means building homeschooling co-ops, if it means hybrid independent Christian schools, that that's a lot of the details that we're going to go through in the first conference, which is focusing on schools.

We're going to go over all of the different disciplines from mathematics to career and technical training to English and language arts, et cetera. How do you build all of those disciplines so that the Bible is a text in every single discipline, but people are moving forward and they're developing skills that they're going to be able to bring to a field of an industry or some kind of professional area?

Then you have to bring together the people who are entrepreneurial, the people who, you know, I'm not saying that they want to write a check, you know, to pay for people to live off of while they're sitting at home being angry about the fact that they were canceled.

But we do need to form businesses that we know are under the sympathetic custody of Christians, you know, people who are on our side and who want to advance the kingdom of Christ, who have the kind of love that Paul talks about in First Corinthians 13, where they feel that they want to endure and help people.

Love never fails. Love always protects. Love keeps no record of wrongs. We want to have that kind of a workplace that's available to people, and those workplaces need to know who they can staff their businesses with.

So the schools and the workplaces are obviously going to work together. Now, the two other sides of it, the churches and the media, that gets a little bit more complicated. But I hope that kind of explains to you a little bit of what we're trying to do.

You're trying to build a network of people who can take the Christian and give them a, not give, but present to them a life sphere where they can live out their faith and they just they can live the way that people were told to live in Jeremiah 29, you know, you have to build your own houses and plant your own gardens.

Right now, we're completely dependent on the people that we're constantly complaining about. I mean, it's very, very hard to get outside of. And any any time that your paycheck or your bank account or your credit card processing or, you know, your licensing or, you know, your Yelp reviews, any time that that is under the power of pagans, Christian men are not going to be able to speak up and stand up for the gospel.

They just won't because they love their families too much to be able to.

Fear of Losing Family and Income

Risk all of that. Yeah, you know, I'm trying to process what you're saying about loving your family, because the thing I see what you're saying, I think it was what you're getting at that because they feel like they'll lose their opportunity to provide if they take a stand that they're not going to do it because then they won't be able to financially support their family.

Because I get that at the same time, though, it's like if you think kind of big picture about this, if you do love your family and you don't take a stance, you're the frog in the pot and it's going to be worse for your children.

Like if we don't take a stand now and take a hard one and say no, then it's going to be a lot worse for our children and grandchildren. And so, you know, that's part of me for like what I'm doing here, which is blacklisted me from a lot of places is I love my family.

Like I want them to, I want to try to preserve whatever's left of Western society and culture for them and the freedoms that I grew up with. So how do we do this? Here's the thing, like there are people who work in industries that have not been fully, you know, they're not like academics.

Academics is just, you know, terrible as far as most places, but like there are industries where you can work and you're not going to have a problem. And, you know, if you're a lumberjack in Alaska, like, yeah, probably.

I don't know. Wait, wait, wait. There's an implicit bias training up there.

Well, yeah, no, there is no industry left, John. Alaska Airlines just fired flight attendants because of they didn't want to subject themselves. They didn't want to put in writing that they supported transgender politics, which has absolutely nothing to do with getting passengers on a plane.

There are people in the meat industry, meatpacking industry who were lost their jobs because, again, that people are called into these trainings, the Equality Act puts all these terms in terms every single industry is affected by it in every single place.

And so and even if, let's say, in that industry, you know, they're not going to have any problems. The thing about it is that, well, if they are on Facebook and they make a comment and they and people can figure out where they work, then now their industry is still at risk.

You understand what I mean? So we have to we have to unplug from all of it. We have to unplug from big tech. That's why the media is a big part of it. We have to have, you know, alternative spheres where we're just we're at liberty to speak, you know, and I'm glad that people like you and I'll put myself in the same boat.

You know, I made a statement and I did it and I stood up for it. But right now I'm in the mode where, you know, I just I don't think realistically that we can ask people to come forward and make a stand and stand up to these big bad powers.

And then, you know, knowing that they have nowhere to go for their industry. I mean, someone like Russell Fuller, he's kind of in a good situation because he was an established Hebrew scholar. There's a very specific group of people who are willing to hire him.

Other people, they don't have that type of of an outlet.

Building Independent Schools, Workplaces, and Media

Yeah, he built he didn't no one hired him. He just made his own. You know, I'll teach you Hebrew online. It's a skill God's given me and people supported it. But the thing that you're talking about as far as like the multiplicity of industries that are invested in the same narrative and canceling people who disagree with it.

Andrew Torba, I know, I know you followed him. He's he's kind of looked at this and been like, look, I want to just build a social media platform. Yes. And then I had to build a bank, you know, or I had to build I don't remember what it was, but he had to pay for processing.

So he had to go to a credit credit leasing. I mean, you we have to create all these things. Yeah. Go to browser. Yeah, I'm totally on his on his on his page.

Yeah. Right. So like at the end of the day, it's like, well, you kind of like need almost every industry like an alternative because you know, like they're you know, if they don't get you on one thing, they're going to get you on like three other things that you need in order to make whatever product you're trying to sell work.

So so this is an effort to kind of do what he's doing on a bigger scale than sort of.

Yeah, we we actually try to get in touch with him, but he's a busy man. He's a busy man. Yeah, that's that's we tried to to get in touch with him. We have gotten in touch with other people that you may know of.

I don't want to like, you know, put their names out there yet, but we're in touch with other people who are are trying to do similar things. You know, my area is education. So that's the side that I'm working on.

But you're right. We do need people in all industries. The way I look at it right now is, you know, and you and I have been in the trenches now. I think I've known you for three years, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah. Three years. Because I remember 2018 when I started talking to you. You know, we've been in the trenches. Obviously, we know that the left is is completely depraved. But, you know, that's almost like I don't even talk about that anymore because it's already obvious.

We know that the people on our side, you know, you have this huge chunk of people who are just kind of lukewarm, Laodicean Christians, you know, the Russell Moores, the Beth Moores. OK, so that that layer is also kind of we've already criticized them.

We already know that they're not going to be on our side. Then you have the people who come out there and are criticizing Russell Moore and who look like they're on our side. And then behind the scenes, they will do something completely at odds with what they do publicly.

So, yeah. So so you're we're left with a really, really small number of people. We're talking about you're you're down to one percent of the country. But guess what? One percent of the country's three million people.

I'm a little more optimistic than that. I think it's probably I hope and maybe you're right, but I hope it's a lot more than that. It's just that the people that so as far as the numbers are there, but the platform isn't this the people that have the unique skills and academics or whatever they need more platform, those people aren't identifiable.

It's like as soon as you get to a certain level, the temptation to just become enmeshed in the machine is kind of like overwhelming and people just automatically want to play ball with with people that have a platform and all that.

So so this is if there is a way and I've thought this before and maybe this is what you're doing, like if there's a way to energize all those people that really do disagree and they don't really they don't care about optics or what we look like internationally in the United States or what the liberal media is going to think about us like those people.

And there's a whole lot of them. If you can energize them to get involved in something and you have the leaders who and they have to be like rock ribbed, like uncompromising people to be able to even that, then you have something.

The problem is the deficit has been I don't know where the leaders all are. There's just hardly that's that's where it becomes very hard to even find out. And I have what you just talked about. I have that story repeated multiple times where I'm like, oh, this person's probably like with us.

Look, they're criticizing Russell Moore. And then I get to know them. And and exactly what you're talking about. I'm like, oh, my goodness. No, they're not there. Right. This to make it look like they're a leader for people to follow them.

So how do you solve that problem? Or is I mean, there might not be a solution completely, but what do you do?

And so, well, well, first of all, you do have the leaders look in the mirror. I mean, you have a big following, you know, so you're there. And I think one of the things that I would say is like what we're doing to have a summit, see, you know, see who you can get to the same table.

Just, you know, start start the ball rolling. I think the existing leaders, it's going to be very frustrating. I think that some of them might be good. But you have to understand that we've spent a lot of time really focusing on the anti-Christian forces that are out there.

And we haven't really been able to look closely and think about the anti-Christ spirit in the church, which we were warned about in the Bible repeatedly, that that, you know, that that a major threat are people who don't look like the enemy.

They look like they're on your side and they're, you know, they're they're wolves dressed in sheep's clothing or they're Satan disguised as an angel of light. They're people who don't practice what they preach.

This comes up again and again and again in the Bible. I mean, Jesus Christ warned us about this. So, you know, the the thing about it is that I feel the best way to do it is to found New Testament churches.

I think that we have to just, you know, you hear all this energy right now about people saying, get the kids out of the public schools. I think that we should have just as much energy to say, get get people out of these denominational churches.

Get them out of the system, you know, because I don't think the system is recoverable. I really don't. I don't think the Southern Baptist Convention is recoverable. I don't think the Roman Catholic Church is recoverable.

I think that if you try to, you know, effect change within those structures, you're going to be beating your head against the wall. You're going to end up funding the very people that you should be trying to pull away from, and you're going to become more and more dependent on the things that hate you because the Antichrist spirits are very real.

The anti-Christian energy in America, it fills people who look at the bride of Christ and they think it's ugly. They think the whole church world is hideous. The Antichrist forces look at the bride of Christ.

They see that God loves his people. They see that the bride of Christ is beautiful, but they want it for themselves. They don't want it for God. And so, you know, you have to navigate out of those two things.

And I think the best way to do it is to just found New Testament churches, and we have to create the leaders from scratch. I mean, I think there are some good people that are out there. You know, they will find them.

But a good test is, are they going to work with you? Yeah. You know, if you're constantly sending an email to this famous person and, you know, they only respond to like one out of your 10 emails, you can never get them on the phone, you know, that you never then that person, you know, brush the dust off your feet, that that person is not going to help you.

And we have so much work to do. You know, the work is many. The work is great. And the workers are few.

Founding New Testament Churches and Training Leaders

So it was interesting in my local area, I just sent an email out because New York state is mandating health care workers need to get the basically they can't have a religious exemption. Like that's that's the issue.

I thought, OK, churches are going to be motivated to fight this because clearly this is anti-Christian and anti-religious. But Christianity, you know, being the predominant, you know, Christendom being the predominant kind of tradition, they're going to want to say something about this.

You know, there there's all kinds of other exemptions for other things. But for this one thing, you know, you can't have a religious exemption. So I emailed 100 pastors in my local area, 100, and was just like, hey, there's, you know, love to connect you with some people in the area who are trying to fight this.

And maybe we can have some events. You could maybe do invocations, that kind of thing. Guess how many emails I got back? How many? Zero. That was that was about five days ago. Right. So. Right, right, right.

I'm not saying this to complain. I'm just saying this to I was a little surprised. I thought I maybe I mean, my my hopes were low. I was like, oh, maybe six people will get back to me. Zero. And this is the situation I know, not just in my neck of the woods, but in other places where is why I even tried to start discerning Christians to try to locate, OK, where are there churches that are against the social justice movement that hold on to biblical orthodoxy?

But here's what I'm finding, Bobby. I'd love to get your reaction to this. People who are were like carpenters or some blue collar job now are starting to say, you know what? There's no the seminaries aren't cranking out any anyone we want to hire here.

Our church has been pastoralist for six years or there's no church in our area. I'm just going to do it. You know, that's it.

That's it. That's what our movement is. That's that's what we're trying to do. We're trying. But see, that's one front of it. You need the churches to pull out, to pull away from the denominations and unplug and, you know, have home New Testament churches.

And you don't what the heck do we send people to seminary for? I mean, it is that that is such a waste of time and energy. It is a waste. One of the things I'm working on with Jeff Dornick is we're trying to launch a two year Christian online college, you know, to give people associates degrees, hopefully that you can get in conjunction with your high school diploma, which is now an increasingly common practice.

Just skip the whole accreditation process, skip the whole four year degree we need to create. And a lot of people are talking about building these two year college programs in churches so that they're kind of going to build off of each other.

And I think what that does is it keeps the colleges honest and have ministry be one of the tracks for an associate's degree. And then, you know, if if a major denomination doesn't consider that a legitimate ordination, then do exactly what you're talking about.

You know, I mean, be a bivocational pastor. You can be a carpenter or an electrician or a bank teller. And then you can also run a small New Testament church with 60 people in your home. And then you can launch a school on top of it with that, you know.

And then if we have big tech companies that are sympathetic to us, kind of on the level of Andrew Torba, then we can have content delivery systems and communication systems that can't be canceled. We can't be canceled by the Twitters and the Mark Zuckerbergs and all of those guys.

So I think that all the pieces do come together. I don't think it's impossible. I think it's extremely possible. I think right now we have the people who want to do it, too, you know. And when I say three million people, I mean, I think that's optimistic.

But, you know, even if it were even if people look at that, it's like, wow, that's a small number. There were two million people in America when they declared independence from the British. Two million people.

That's it. When they left Egypt, the Book of Numbers shows us that the population of Israel was about one point five million when they came into the Holy Land. You can have an entire economy. The Amish do this with three hundred fifty thousand people.

And I don't I think we have enough people.

We're not going to have to live like the Amish. OK, so it starts with pastors, New Testament churches. I love it. Start there. Then education. It sounds like what you're saying. Then where? Where do you go from there?

And then, well, we have to start at the same time. We've got to find the entrepreneurs, people like you. I know that you do woodworking and stuff like that. So we have got to bring together, you know, in some kind of Christian chamber of commerce.

I hate to use that term because Chamber of Commerce is so tainted. But something like that where we can find ways that we could finance you to start a business, particularly if we can we can identify your potential to hire other people.

Right. You know what I mean? Investors need to know they have a return, right? I mean, this is actually what I'm going through right now with discerning Christians because I talked to a guy about building an app.

I'm like, all right, look, we have the website we have. It's a lot of good things there. We've been building it piece by piece. We I think we just need to do an app. And so he quoted me. He's like thirty thousand bucks.

I'm like thirty thousand bucks to build the app. And I was like, OK, I mean, that sounds reasonable. Workers worthy of his wages. But like getting an investor to say, I'm going to put thirty thousand bucks behind your app that's going to go on an iPhone or on an Android when there's a good I mean, there is that small chance it could be canceled, you know.

It's against the social justice stuff. It's totally politically incorrect doing this. It could totally be canceled. The investors don't want that. Right. They want to know that they're going to have a return.

So this what you're talking about sounds like you want it. There's like a force field. You want it to be like interlocked. If you need a service or a good from someone, you know, here's someone else that does it, who's of the same like mind so that if an investor comes in, they know the whole thing's not getting shut down because, oh, guess what?

We had our server, you know, hosted with Amazon and now they're pulling it. Parler, you know, it's not exactly right. Right. So so you want guys with hard drives and servers? Do you want guys with I mean, I mean, we're dreaming now, but like you want your own cell phone eventually, you know?

Yeah. Well, people are talking about that. People are already talking about, you know, producing your own cell phone companies, et cetera, because a lot of this we're we've been addicted to thinking on economies of scale, you know, that we could do we could do some of these things on a smaller scale.

Part of it is the financial leasing, you know, trying to get some kind of, you know, amortization situation where there are loans to people. So you wouldn't have to come up with thirty thousand dollars up front, but there would be some way of securing a loan and then being able to guarantee it.

You know, if there is collateral, we have to just look at what assets we have and how we can leverage them. And I do think we do. I think it's urgent. I think we're overdue to create a totally independent financial system, you know, where that where we know that we have a list of financial institutions that are not going to cancel people.

You know, it's part of their charter. It's part of whatever. And part of this is, you know, when we talk about Christian organizations, we have to be very, very careful that people are chartered in ways that they don't use their Christian label as a First Amendment protection to avoid any kind of ethical standards, because this happens.

If you look at what happened in Stephen Baskerville's case, he was working for a Christian college. They forced him into not just a nondisclosure agreement, but an entire mandatory arbitration agreement, which basically, I mean, it it was horrific, but they were able to do that because the courts won't intervene because that's considered a religious institution.

So we have to make sure that we're working with institutions that are going to agree to transparent processes.

Was he a Patrick Henry? Yes. I do know who he is, then. Never mind. I remember this. Yeah. Yeah.

And he's one of many. There are a lot of Christian organizations are terrible. I mean, places that you would never want to work. If you were to actually be able to talk to some of the people who work in these organizations, they would tell you it's just abusive management, no transparency, rank nepotism, you know.

And so and that's all anti-biblical. Would you agree? I mean, the Bible is clear that the way that we should do business with each other.

I'll say this because I mean, I can and I know it's true. And, you know, people in the SBC can't do anything about it. But, you know, Al Moller is a good example of this. Everyone pretty much I know of who's worked for Al Moller can't stand the guy like I mean, I just I mean, I've done this is years now that I've done work on Al Moller.

And please, you know, I know some people might be offended out there. I said that. But I'm I'm I'm the second hand guy. I'm relaying to you what people have told me that he's, you know, kind of petulant and just dictatorial and everything you just said.