Cancel Proof Christianity with Bobby Lopez

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:13

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, this program before, or if you're a regular listener, you'll know

00:26

Bobby because he was the one that now I guess, man, is it a year and a half ago, two years ago?

00:32

It's been, I guess it's been a little while. He was let go from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

00:38

And we talked about it at the time because it was pretty significant. Bobby wanted to share his testimony, included in that testimony is a story of not just redemption from sin in general, but redemption out of a lifestyle of homosexuality.

00:54

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

01:04

And so anyway, Bobby was let go from there. And we just want to take some time today to just kind of find out how, what's

01:13

Bobby up to? How is he doing? What kind of projects is he doing? And one of his latest projects is about fighting cancel culture.

01:20

So Bobby, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome. Thank you very much for having me,

01:26

John. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Awesome. So it has been about two years, believe it or not, it's been a while.

01:33

Yeah, I know. It's amazing to me, because it feels like yesterday in some ways. And, but yeah, time really is going fast.

01:42

I think last year for some reason made it go faster. But tell us what you're up to now.

01:48

Well, I'm working with the people at Gatekeepers. I really enjoy working with them. They're, you know, an emerging,

01:56

I hate to use the word emerging, because it sounds like emergent Christianity. But they're, they're definitely a media outlet that I think is going to grow.

02:05

And they brought together a really good group of people who are Christian and who want to move forward.

02:12

And the project that we're working on right now, which I hope people will attend the summit for, is called

02:18

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 25.

02:27

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

02:35

Dallas -Fort Worth area, you can come. Basically, what that project is about is trying to build a

02:43

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.

02:53

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.

03:06

And 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.

03:20

And while that's a problem, that's not what we're talking about here. People get canceled all the time.

03:26

People are told that they're not going to be given a speech or that their book deal falls through.

03:32

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

03:43

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.

04:08

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

04:15

Christian men? Why are they not speaking out? Why is it always, you know, women who are at the front lines?

04:20

You know, why are Christian men cowards? You know, you hear this about pastors. Why are Christian pastors so cowardly?

04:27

Well, the problem is that these men love their families. And we, as a conservative

04:34

Christian movement, while we have been very good at pointing out everything that's going wrong with fake conservatism and with liberals, etc.,

04:42

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.

04:53

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

05:04

Christian witness. We were encouraged to stand up to people. But then, where do you go when you lose your job?

05:11

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.

05:20

You know, you cannot expect people to go and to take controversial stands in the public square. And then when they say,

05:26

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.

05:34

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.

05:44

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.

05:55

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.

06:09

So we have to do something about this. We can't just constantly complain about being canceled.

06:14

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, you know, investment potential, who have businesses.

06:26

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.

06:41

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.

06:57

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.

07:07

So we have to build, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, and I'd like to get into more what you mean by building, how that works and stuff.

07:15

I know that you mentioned Russell Fuller. I know, and I'm not familiar with Stephen, would you say Baskerville? I don't know if I've heard of him, but in Russell Fuller's case,

07:24

I know, you know, he was discouraged from—I mean, they wanted the gag on him.

07:30

I mean, there was a few people like me who probably—I mean, not many people were even aware that he was kind of silently being muzzled, but we wanted him to talk.

07:39

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,

07:49

I know he's got his theology classroom stuff. The Lord's provided for him, and we praise

07:54

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

08:10

Ultimately, though, I know his faith and my faith is in God that, look, I'm blacklisted from a lot of places myself just because I speak out, and that's okay.

08:20

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 the

08:27

Lord provided for people in way worse situations than you or I or Russell Fuller or anyone's in, and so I guess

08:35

I want to ask, first of all, I want to get into the details of this plan, but is this something where you're just relying on God, trusting

08:46

God that he's going to provide the right people with the right paycheck books and everything else to write checks to give to people who are canceled, or is it more intricate than that?

08:58

Is it a finely -tuned mechanism that's going to put—how does this whole thing work?

09:05

Because I'm on board with, let's help people, but how do we do it? Well, that's what we need to do, first of all.

09:11

It has to be a complete all -fronts approach, okay? And yes, of course, we're relying on God.

09:18

The verse of the Bible that inspires us, that we're kind of making the focal point of this effort, is

09:24

Jeremiah 29 .5. 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,

09:37

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.

09:50

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.

10:00

So there is a biblical directive that we don't just sit passively and tell people

10:05

God is in charge, something's going to fall out of the sky. We do have to build resources for people.

10:12

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.

10:20

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.

10:42

We're not declaring war on the pagan world around us. We're not saying that we're going to destroy them.

10:48

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.

11:08

So what that means is first you have to found the independent schools. 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

11:24

Christian sphere, and they're going to be given skills that then they can bring to a workplace.

11:30

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

11:38

Christian schools, that's a lot of the details that we're going to go through in the first conference, which is focusing on schools.

11:44

We're going to go over all of the different disciplines from mathematics to career and technical training to English and language arts, etc.

11:52

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.

12:08

Then you have to bring together the people who are entrepreneurial, the people who, you know,

12:14

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 1

12:36

Corinthians 13, where they feel that they want to endure and help people. Love never fails.

12:43

Love always protects. Love keeps no record of wrongs. You know, 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.

12:55

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.

13:08

You're trying to build a network of people who can take the

13:13

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.

13:28

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.

13:36

I mean, it's very, very hard to get outside of, and anytime that your paycheck or your bank account or your credit card processing or, you know, your licensing or, you know, your

13:50

Yelp reviews, anytime 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.

13:58

They just won't, because they love their families too much to be able to risk all of that. Yeah, I mean, you know,

14:04

I'm trying to process what you're saying about loving your family, because the thing,

14:10

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.

14:23

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 stand, you're the frog in the pot, and it's going to be worse for your children.

14:36

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.

14:43

And so, see, you know, that's part of me for like what I'm doing here, which has blacklisted me from a lot of places, is

14:49

I love my family, like I want them to, I want to try to whatever's left of Western society and culture for them and the freedoms that I grew up with.

14:59

So, like, 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.

15:10

Academics is just, you know, terrible, that's for most places. But like, there are industries where you can work and you're not going to have a problem.

15:17

And, you know, if you're a lumberjack in Alaska, like, yeah, probably. I don't know. Wait, wait,

15:23

Alaska Airlines. They're doing implicit bias training up there. Well, yeah, no, there is no industry left,

15:28

John. Alaska Airlines just fired flight attendants because of, they didn't want to subject themselves.

15:36

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.

15:45

There are people in the meat industry, meatpacking industry, who were lost their jobs because, again, people are called into these trainings, the

15:54

Equality Act puts all these terms in terms, every single industry is affected by it in every single place.

16:02

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.

16:20

Do you understand what I mean? So we have to, we have to unplug from all of it. We have to unplug from big tech.

16:26

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.

16:34

You know, and I'm glad that people like you and I'm, look, I'll put myself in the same boat. You know,

16:39

I made a statement and I did it and I stood up for it. But right now

16:44

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.

16:54

And then, you know, knowing that they have nowhere to go for their industry.

17:00

I mean, someone like Russell Fuller, he's kind of in a good situation because he was an established

17:05

Hebrew scholar. There's a very specific group of people who are willing to hire him. Other people, just, they don't have that type of, of an outlet.

17:13

Yeah, he built, he didn't, no one hired him. Made his own, you know, I'll teach you Hebrew online. It's a skill

17:19

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.

17:33

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.

17:39

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 find. Yeah. A credit, a credit leasing.

17:50

I mean, you, you, we have to create all these things. Yeah. I'm totally on his, on his, on his page.

17:58

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 like there, 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.

18:15

So, so this is an effort to kind of do what he's doing on a bigger scale then sort of, is that, we try, we actually try to get in touch with him, but he's, he's a busy man.

18:25

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

18:31

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.

18:38

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.

18:45

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.

18:53

Yeah. Three years. Cause I remember 2018. Yeah. When I started talking to you, you know, we've been in the trenches.

18:59

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.

19:06

We know that the people on our side, you know, you have this huge chunk of people who are just kind of lukewarm,

19:13

Laodicean Christians, you know, the Russell Moores, the Beth Moores. Okay. So that, that layer is also kind of, we've already criticized them.

19:20

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

19:25

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.

19:33

So yeah. Yeah. So, so you're, we're, we're left with a really, really small number of people we're talking about.

19:40

You're, you're down to 1 % of the country, but guess what? 1 % of the country is 3 million people.

19:46

I'm a little more optimistic than that. I think it's probably, I hope, maybe you're right, but I hope it's a lot more than that.

19:52

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, or whatever they need more platform, those people aren't identifiable.

20:07

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.

20:21

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

20:39

United States or what the liberal media is going to think about us. Like those people, and there's a whole lot of them.

20:45

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 do that, then you have something.

20:58

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.

21:07

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.

21:13

Look, they're criticizing Russell Moore. And then I get to know them and, and exactly what you're talking about.

21:18

I'm like, oh my goodness. No, they're not. They're using this to make it look like they're a leader for people to follow them.

21:25

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

21:34

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.

21:42

And I think one of the things that I would say is like what we're doing is have a summit, see, you know, see who you can get to the same table, just, you know, start, start the ball rolling.

21:54

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.

22:08

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

22:16

Bible repeatedly that, that, you know, that, that a major threat are people who don't look like the enemy.

22:22

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.

22:29

There are 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.

22:36

So you know, the, the thing about it is that I feel the best way to do it is to found

22:43

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.

22:52

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.

23:03

I really don't. I don't think the Southern Baptist Convention is recoverable. I don't think the Roman Catholic Church is recoverable.

23:09

I think that if, if you try to, you know, affect change within those structures, you're going to be beating your head against the wall.

23:18

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, the things that hate you because the antichrist spirits are very real.

23:29

The anti -Christian energy in America, it fills people who look at the bride of Christ and they think it's ugly.

23:36

They think the whole church world is hideous. The antichrist forces look at the bride of Christ.

23:41

They see that God loves his people. They see that the bride of Christ is beautiful, but they want it for themselves.

23:47

They don't, they don't want it for God. And so, you know, you have to navigate out of those two things.

23:54

And, 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.

24:01

I mean, I think there are some good people that out there, you know, they will, they will find them, but a good test is, are they going to work with you?

24:09

You know, if, if, if you're constantly sending an email to this famous person and, you know, you only, 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.

24:27

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

24:34

I thought it was interesting in my local area, I just sent an email out because New York state is mandating healthcare workers need to get the, basically they can't have a religious exemption.

24:43

Like that's, that's the issue. I thought, okay, churches are going to be motivated to fight this because clearly this is anti -Christian and well anti -religious, but Christianity, you know, being the predominant, you know,

24:56

Christendom being the predominant kind of tradition. They're going to want to say something about this.

25:01

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.

25:07

So I emailed a hundred pastors in my local area, a hundred and was just like,

25:13

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.

25:21

You could maybe do invocations, that kind of thing. Guess how many emails I got back? How many?

25:26

Zero. That was, that was about five days ago. So I'm not saying this to complain.

25:33

I'm just saying this to, um, to, I was a little surprised. I thought I maybe, I mean, my, my, my hopes were low.

25:40

I was like, Oh, maybe six people will get back to me. Zero. And this is the situation

25:45

I know, not just in my neck of the woods, but in other places where, um, is why I even tried to start discerning

25:51

Christians to try to locate, okay, where are there churches that are against the social justice movement that hold on to biblical orthodoxy?

25:58

Um, 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?

26:08

There's no, the seminaries aren't cranking out any, anyone we want to hire here. Our church has been pastorless for six years, or there's no church in our area.

26:16

I'm just going to do it. You know, that's it. That's what our movement is. That's, that's what we're trying to do.

26:22

We're trying, but see, that's one front of it. You need the churches, um, to pull out, to pull away from the denominations and unplug and, you know, have home

26:32

New Testament churches. Um, and you don't, what the heck do we send people to seminary for?

26:38

I mean, it is that, that is such a waste of time and, and energy. It is, is a waste.

26:44

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.

26:51

Hopefully that you can get in conjunction with your high school diploma, which is now an increasingly common practice.

26:57

Um, 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, uh, college programs in churches so that they're kind of going to build off of each other.

27:11

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.

27:19

And then, you know, if, if a major denomination doesn't consider that a legitimate ordination, then do exactly what you're talking about.

27:25

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

27:36

New Testament church with 60 people in your home. And then you can launch a school on top of it with that, you know.

27:43

Um, 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.

27:54

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.

28:01

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.

28:09

Um, and when I say 3 million people, I mean, I think that's optimistic, but, you know, even if it were, even if people will look at that, it's like, wow, that's a small number.

28:19

There were 2 million people in America when they declared independence from the British, 2 million people.

28:25

That's it. When they left Egypt, the book of numbers shows us that the population of Israel was about 1 .5

28:32

million when they came into the Holy land. You can have an entire economy. The Amish do this with 350 ,000 people.

28:38

And I don't, I think we have enough people. We're not going to have to live like the Amish. Okay. So it starts with, okay. Pastors, new

28:44

Testament churches. I love it. Start there. Then education. It sounds like what you're saying, uh, then, then where, where do you go from there?

28:50

And then, well, well, we have to start at the same time. We've got to find the entrepreneurs, people like you,

28:56

I know that you do like woodworking and stuff like that. So we have got to bring together, you know, in some kind of Christian chamber of commerce.

29:03

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.

29:17

Right. You know what I mean? Investors need to know they have a return right on the end. This is actually what I'm going through right now with, um, discerning

29:24

Christians. Cause I talked to a guy about building an app. I'm like, all right, look, we have the website. We, we have, it's a lot of good things there.

29:31

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 30 ,000 bucks.

29:36

I'm like 30 ,000 bucks to build the app. And I was like, okay. I mean, like, that sounds reasonable workers worthy of his wages, but like getting an investor to say,

29:45

I'm going to put 30 ,000 bucks behind your app. That's going to go on an iPhone or on an

29:51

Android when there's a good, I mean, there's that small chance it could be canceled, you know, it's against the social justice stuff.

29:59

It's totally politically incorrect doing this. It could totally be canceled. The investors don't want that.

30:05

Right. They, they want to know that they're going to have a return. So this, what you're talking about sounds like you want it.

30:12

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.

30:20

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,

30:26

Oh, guess what? We had our server, you know, hosted with Amazon and now they're pulling it parlor, you know, it's not right.

30:33

Right. Right. So, so, so you want guys with a hard drives and servers?

30:39

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, people are talking about that.

30:48

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.

30:59

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.

31:14

So you wouldn't have to come up with $30 ,000 upfront. But there would be some way of securing a loan and then being able to guarantee it.

31:23

You know, if there is collateral, we have to just look at what assets we have and how we can leverage them.

31:29

And I do think we do, I think it's urgent. I think we're overdue to create a totally independent financial system.

31:37

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.

31:46

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

31:59

Christian label as a first amendment protection to avoid any kind of ethical standards.

32:06

Because this happens, if you look at what happened in Stephen Baskerville's case, he was working for a Christian college.

32:12

They forced him into not just a non -disclosure agreement, but an entire mandatory arbitration agreement, which basically,

32:18

I mean, it was horrific, but they were able to do that because the courts won't intervene because that's considered a religious institution.

32:26

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

32:33

Was he Patrick Henry by any chance? Yes. I do know who he is then, nevermind. I remember this.

32:39

Yeah. And he's one of many, there are a lot of Christian organizations are terrible.

32:46

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 just abusive management, no transparency, rank nepotism, you know, and so, and that's all anti -biblical.

33:01

Would you agree? I mean, the Bible is clear that the way that we should do business with each other. And I'll say this cause

33:06

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,

33:13

Al Mohler is a good example of this. Everyone pretty much I know of who's worked for Al Mohler. Can't stand the guy.

33:20

I mean, I've just been, I mean, I've done, this is years now that I've done work on Al Mohler and please, you know,

33:26

I know some people might be offended out there. I said that, but I'm, I'm, I'm the secondhand guy. I'm relaying to you what people have told me that he's, you know, kind of petulant and just big dictatorial and everything you just said, and it's a terrible work environment.

33:44

But the same people, some of the same people who say these kinds of things will go out publicly and praise him online for this or that, because they're relying on him and the whole system that the

33:54

SBC is for their job. And if they say, you know, get out of lockstep one iota, they're in trouble and they know it.

34:02

And so that's, that's the kind of thing I think you're talking about where you know, a lot of people see the problem, they know the problem, but it's like,

34:10

I don't want to lose my job. I don't want to rock the boat too much. And so, so no,

34:17

I love it. We got to come up with independent and alternative ways of doing business and all of that.

34:24

And there is, there is a lot of character building and individual self -development as Christians that we do have to engage in.

34:34

It's not just a question of changing the structure. That's why I think the media part of it and the church part of it are so important, because we have to get

34:42

Christians to understand that being comfortable and having luxury is not something that God is going to, when we say

34:53

God is faithful and God never breaks his promises, that doesn't mean that you're going to live in a six bedroom house and that you're never going to have to move into a smaller apartment.

35:02

It doesn't mean that you're, you know, you're, you're never going to have to ride the bus to work because, you know what

35:09

I mean? It's like, you're, you know, we, we have to have reasonable expectations. Now I would say that a lot of the people who work in this

35:17

Christian space, they tend to have lower incomes than people who work in these totally secular sectors.

35:23

So I don't think that's that hard, but to get some of the Christians who, who have tasted the comforts of the secular world, it is hard to readjust everything.

35:33

For me, I'm going to be honest, you know, I was a tenured professor and I wasn't making a lot of money, but when you go from being a tenured professor to basically being, you know, persona non grata everywhere, that, that takes a certain amount of adjustment.

35:48

It was good for me, and I think that it will be good for other people, but we have to do some work. So we need good preachers and we need good cultural content to be able to adjust

35:57

Christians' expectations of what, what, what this life means, you know? Tell us about the summit, where people can go to find out more about that, sign up for it.

36:08

Can they do it virtually? Do they have to attend? Well, the summit is going to be on September 25th, which is a

36:15

Saturday. It is live streamed. There's a different price for live stream. It's, it's lower if you, if you get it live stream.

36:21

You can attend in person. It is going to be in the mid cities between Dallas and Fort Worth.

36:27

We're not releasing the location until close to the, to the date, but it's a really great location, and we're going to be introducing the concept of cancel -free or cancel -proof

36:38

Christianity. If you go to the website cancelproofchristianity .com, that's all one word, you'll go to the landing page.

36:46

We're going to have speakers that are going to talk about schools. Basically, we're going to be talking about the first peg of the four pegs, which is schools.

36:57

And so, we're going to talk about each academic discipline and what Christians need to do to build a

37:02

Christian discipline in that area. So, Judd Saul is going to talk about career and technical training because, you know, he's a professional movie producer, and he knows what it's like to try to staff a project.

37:13

He knows what kind of skills are needed to be able to get movie production moving, and that's a very technical field.

37:19

Even though it's creative, it's also very technical. So, he'll talk about that. I'm going to talk about languages and why it is so important not to abandon the language arts, which is what, you know, conservatives did for, for 20 years.

37:32

I was always told, why are you an English professor? Who cares about that? And now that you have pronouns being changed and, and people in the conservative movement can't even have a conversation with the people in France who are protesting because none of them learned

37:46

French, you know, languages are important. You don't abandon a field like that, or if you do, then don't complain when all of a sudden the left can redefine every term and you don't have any professional in any of these institutions who can change it.

37:59

So, we're going to do the same thing with mathematics. Jeff Younger is going to talk about why conservatives cannot continue to abandon mathematics.

38:07

Algorithms are the basis for most cancel culture. So, the fact that we have so few

38:12

Christians who even understand how algorithms work has been a major, major detraction for us.

38:18

We're going to do the same thing with history. Now, you were a history MA, right? I was, yeah. Do you remember once upon a time, like in the nineties, maybe you were too young for this, when conservatives said everyone should go into STEM.

38:31

No, nobody should even worry whatsoever about history. It's a dead field. And then now with critical race theory on everyone's minds, like who do we have in our camp to defend us in the field of history?

38:43

It's very hard, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Everyone, like the only people who go into history now seems to be activists.

38:49

And then there's a few nerds who, you know, they like certain eras and they want to study them, but I guess that was one of those, but yeah, no, it's some of the fields are just taken over by activism.

38:58

And I even, even in what the, you know, 2009, 2008, 2010, when

39:05

I was first in college a lot of my Christian friends, like,

39:10

I just, I realized, like, I go to the math lab, right. To, to like do my physics homework or whatever.

39:16

And like all the Christians, all of a sudden there they were, you know, the people from my Christian group, because none of them were in social sciences.

39:23

They were all in engineering just about, or something related to that. And I thought, well, why is this?

39:29

It's so weird that, but now it's because, it's because, I mean, the side of it, maybe you didn't see just because you're a little bit younger.

39:35

What are you like? You're, you're in your twenties. I'm 32. I'm 32, actually. Okay. So you're not that young, but, but there was, there was a period where conservatives were told just goes, just get an engineering degree at Hillsdale.

39:49

And they thought that because Hillsdale existed, that would solve everything. Like there would be two conservative colleges and then like, we're done.

39:56

We don't have to worry about anything going. We can spend all of our time trying to get liberals fired for saying egregious things.

40:01

There was no building. And this is absolutely, I'm looking straight at you, all of you who complained about conservative, or bias against conservatives in education.

40:11

You wasted 30 years. You did not build up these disciplines. You didn't support people who were conservative, who were trying to stay in their jobs.

40:18

You let all of us get fired and driven out. And then now you have no grounds to complain about critical race theory or about the language, the pronouns, the transgender stuff, taking over all these languages, the math being completely beyond the capacity, because even with all of that, still, we don't, we have a shortage of Christians in math.

40:35

We're also going to have, Paul Church is going to talk about the medical fields and sciences, which is big because of COVID, right?

40:44

Paul Church, he was, he and I consider ourselves the original gangsters of cancel culture, because I was driven out of California years ago, and he was fired from Harvard at around the same time, because he was talking about the real health risks of homosexual activity to men.

41:05

He was a urologist for 30 years at Harvard, and they fired him because he told the truth about that. So he's going to talk about, in the sciences, and particularly in the health fields, why it's important for us to have

41:16

Christian -friendly institutions, Christian institutions, training people so that they have that expertise, and they also are affirmed in, on the basis of their

41:28

Christian faith. So we're going to go through all of those topics, and then Jeff Younger is going to be giving the keynote speech.

41:34

I don't know if you know who Jeff Younger is. He's the man who lost his son. His ex -wife is trying to turn his son into a girl.

41:42

Yeah, so he'll be the keynote speaker. It's going to be a good event, and I just, I really hope that people can come, because look, this is what

41:51

I would say to people out there, all right? We have a million reasons to complain. We're justified in complaining, but I mean, if we don't build this,

42:00

I don't know who you're expecting to build this world for you, you know?

42:06

I don't, it's true that we should wait on the Lord, but I mean, the Lord has already given the world us.

42:12

We're here, you know? Let's start building the stuff, and we have to start from scratch. We have to be thorough.

42:18

There's no part of this that we can just leave to somebody else or hope that it will go away.

42:24

All of these disciplines matter, and we're going to have similar conferences in the future about the workplace, all the different industries that we have to try to work on.

42:33

We're going to have one on the media. That one will come last, and then before that, we're going to have one on the churches, you know?

42:40

And I just think, let's start building. I've committed to myself to, I am not going to complain anymore about people who don't like me or people who have canceled me or people who won't hire me or people who won't find me a job.

42:54

I'm going to go out, and I'm going to build something, build a vision, and hopefully that will add something to the world, and then the ultimate baseline is

43:06

I want to make it so that Christian men can live out their faith and support their families.

43:13

That is the laser focus that we have to have. We can't get distracted by media celebrities or all of these little glossy sensationalist cases.

43:24

At the core of it, if your average Christian father has to choose between taking a stand like the one you're talking about, about the

43:34

COVID injections, or possibly losing his family, he's not going to speak out. That's why you sent your letter to 50 pastors.

43:41

I don't think that those men are cowards or terrible. It's just, if they're bivocational, they're going to have to worry about losing their income outside.

43:53

If they're just career pastors, they're going to have to worry about people leaving their church and then losing their jobs.

44:00

And a pastor who loses his job and is kicked out of the pastorate and can't get another job, there's a very high likelihood his wife is going to leave him and take away their kids.

44:08

I hate to be so blunt, but that's the reality that we're living in right now. We have to change that.

44:14

All right. Well, if anyone is interested in the summit, you can go to cancelproofchristianity .com

44:21

and sign up there. Bobby, I appreciate you coming on.

44:29

Anywhere else you want to send people or is that it? That's the main thing. I just want to really get as much energy into that as I can.

44:37

And also, if you want to contact me about ideas that you have about building a cancel -proof Christianity, you can contact me at bereanlopezatprotonmail .com.

44:48

That's bereanlopez, that's all one word, at protonmail .com. And the book, Cancel -Proof

44:53

Christianity, is coming out later this month, so keep an eye out for it. All right, Bobby. I'll be praying for you. God bless, all right?