SPECIAL EPISODE: Critical Theory: From Marx To Modern America

The Shepherd's Church

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All right, let's go ahead and begin let's get started I Yet there for you turn the music down for me you got it

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John MacArthur recently said that one of the most insidious and Wicked attacks inside of Christianity is coming from critical race theory

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It's something that if we don't understand it, we could be led astray by a false gospel and that's what it is

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It's a gospel Presentation that has a false view of salvation a false view of sin a false view of everything

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And then that how Satan normally works that he takes something very subtle and he twists it

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It makes it seem reasonable and then before we know it we're Far down the path and wondering how we got there.

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It's one of our privileges This is the first time we've ever done anything like this to have dr. Sunshine come and be with us today

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I met dr. Sunshine a couple years ago at an event at Genesis called perspectives

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Which is a it's a class on the history the history of missions

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From biblical all the way through the history of of how missions have gone and in really great class, but I met dr

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Sunshine there got a chance to talk to him and the lecture was was wonderful I don't want to put any pressure on you, but it was it was it was great

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Became friends with Glenn and then I just noticed him posting things on critical race theory Which was something that I was starting to understand starting to get a hold up and I ended up on YouTube and watched a lecture

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That dr. Sunshine gave my mind was just blown. My eyes were open. I was like, this is amazing

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We've got to get this at Shepherds and then I did what any reasonable person would do I messaged him on Facebook and said you got to come to you got to come to our church and he's like, who are you?

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But it's our privilege it's our pleasure to have dr. Sunshine's here. So if you would would you welcome him this morning?

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Thank you after that introduction. I'm kind of anxious to hear what I've got to say First of all, let me ask you the question.

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How many of you have heard of critical race theory? Okay, that's most of you

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What I'm going to tell you right off the bat is that critical race theory is really a misnomer

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Because it's not really just about race Okay now the other thing you got to understand is

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I'm a historian and So for me the best way for you to understand what's really going on with critical theory critical race theory and so on is to Look at where the ideas come from because if you understand where the ideas came from and you understand how they develop

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It will help you make sense of a whole lot of things that frankly don't make a lot of sense

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Okay, so that's where we're going to begin Our first slide here.

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We're looking at the again the roots of critical theory now I'm using the word the phrase critical theory rather than critical race theory intentionally critical race theory

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Suggests that race is the race is the the what it's all about and The fact is that the way the word is being used the way the phrase is being used on a popular level

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Race is only one of many Elements that are part of the agenda now race is there and it's sort of the tip of the spear in a lot of ways

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But there's a whole lot of other stuff that comes along with it So I'm using a broader term here critical theory to discuss what we're talking about and the roots of it

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Start with the guy on the right there That's Karl Marx now

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Marx Actually prefer Groucho, but but Karl here is the guy who's really important for our purposes

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Marx believed that Society that the history of civilization is the history of oppression and That oppression was based on economic categories who has economic power and who doesn't and He believed that history follows an inevitable inevitable process

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Where the people who don't have economic power gradually more and more of them get economic power until you get to the point where?

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Economic power is spread equally over all of society, which is a communist state and that's going to be the end of history

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This is the trajectory that history moves on but it's always this battle between the oppressor and the oppressed the haves and the have -nots

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That was Marx's vision of history He predicted that there would be an uprising of the proletariat the urban working classes

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The factory workers and things like that who would seize control of the means of production

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They take control of the factories and this was going to be the thing that would move you into the communist utopia

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Now at that point the guy in your bottom left there Antonio, Gramsci comes in Gramsci was an

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Italian communist between World Wars one and two Actually died in prison by Mussolini, but Gramsci was completely baffled as to why

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The Communist Revolution never happened. Why didn't the workers rise up and He concluded that the real conflict was not

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Economic it was cultural That in fact the people who have power in society

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Essentially controlled the worldview of society they determined how everybody saw things With the net result that the people who were oppressed in society didn't even realize that they were oppressed

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Because they bought into the ideology of the oppressors So the solution for Gramsci is to well, it's not just economic people who are

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Oppression isn't just economic it hits a whole lot of other things So the solution is to try to wake the lower classes up To their oppression now, he calls the ideology that drives society.

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He calls it the hegemony This word used so the alternative is you need to get the intellectuals and the workers together to create a counter hegemony an alternative ideology

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That would undermine the ideology that dominates the society and therefore lead to freeing the oppressed people

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That idea was picked up by the group on the top left That is the

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Institute for social research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany known as the

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Frankfurt school they picked up on Gramsci's ideas and started to move with them started to develop them started to work with them and Then Adolf Hitler came into power.

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So they moved to Geneva and then they were invited to the United States. I believe by Dewey and they relocated to Columbia University and so the

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Frankfurt school is really centered in Columbia University and they start a Movement that is known ultimately as the new left new be new because it's not it's sort of neo -marxism

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It's a new version of Marxism Based on Gramsci's ideas of this idea of it being an ideological rather than an economic struggle next slide

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Now anybody who is as old as I am, which is very few of you Will recognize some of the terminology here what the new left said is

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That the problem is there are all of these groups in society that are oppressed. There are blacks

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There are women there are ultimately Gay people, you know and so on all of these oppressed groups in society have a false consciousness

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They have bought into the ideology of their oppressors So the object then is to raise consciousness by making people aware of the fact that they are oppressed and what this will then do is lead to class consciousness, which is the root of of group identity identity politics things like that where you see yourself primarily in terms of the group that you belong to Rather than as sort of a unique individual and all those kinds of things

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The idea is to develop a counter hegemony as Gramsci would say an alternative worldview

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So that the people who are oppressed will recognize they're oppressed and then all of these various oppressed groups will join together to overthrow the system

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Okay, that's the program of the new left and that is really what's at the root of critical theory

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In fact, the term critical theory comes from these guys Okay now it turns out though we have to add one other wrinkle into this next slide

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The sexual revolution It turns out although we don't really normally recognize this the term sexual revolution

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Was actually coined by the guy in the bottom left there That's a guy named Wilhelm Reich.

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Wilhelm Reich was a member of the Frankfurt School, although he got sufficiently weird that they kicked him out Died in prison there's a bunch of things there, but he was a psychiatrist and What he did is follow the guy ideas of the guy in the top left that Sigmund Freud but mixed them with Marxism Now, how does this work?

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Well Freud says that Okay Society is really built around Sexual taboos

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He really believed that that was the root of society The reason is that people he said have sex drives that we instinctively want to fulfill but society says you can't do that and What this does is two things first of all, it's what produces mental illness according to Freud and unhappiness and all of those kinds of things

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But on the other hand it forces people to redirect the energy that they get from their sex drive

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Into new areas and that redirection of the energy is what produces civilization.

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That's why you get great artists architects You know all of the different things that drive society forward drive civilization forward come from redirecting the sex drive

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So one of his main books is called civilization and its discontents Civilization comes about because of the repression of the sex drive

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So you've got a positive with civilization, but you have a negative It's discontents because it produces unhappiness mental illness all those kinds of things

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Well, right here comes along and combines that with Freud but with with Marx so you get a kind of Freudian Marxism here and the way this goes is

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Freud says society comes from repression Marx says society is oppression

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So Reich takes takes Marx's idea and says well if society is really

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Oppression and Freud is right that it comes from these sexual taboos we've got the solution to getting rid of oppression has to be found in getting rid of the sexual taboos and so in the 1930s he wrote a book called the sexual revolution in which he

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Advocated the complete elimination of sexual taboos and things like that as a way of leading into the

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Marxist Utopia he argued with actually Marx himself that the natural family husband wife children is the root of Bourgeoisie society which to a communist is the enemy and so in order to get rid of bourgeois society you've got to get rid of the family and This fits in very nicely with Freud's idea of eliminating sexual taboos and those kinds of things so you've got undermine the family you've got to replace the family and you've got to have basically sexual free -for -all and That's what will lead to the

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Marxist utopia. And as a Freudian it's got the additional benefit of eliminating mental illness.

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He's wrong Okay, dead wrong. In fact Freud was wrong Marxism. They're all wrong

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But this is what they believe and so Reich begins pushing this and this is picked up by people like the guy on the right

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There that's Herbert Marcuse a key figure in the Frankfurt school He is going to be one of the people who's going to be pushing this idea of Eliminating the natural family as a critical element of leading to this new utopia

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Now next slide How are they gonna do this let's talk tactics

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The first of them is something called the Long March through the institutions. The term

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Long March comes from Mao Zedong Mao did the Long March across China where his communist forces swept across China and basically turned the whole

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Country communist the nationalists who were opposing him fled to Taiwan and through this

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Long March Mao conquered China The guy on the left there, that's Rudy Dutschke Dutschke Used what

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Mao did and said what we want is another kind what we need to get to the communist

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Utopia is a different kind of Long March. We need a Long March through the institutions we need to go through the various institutions of society and gradually infiltrate them and convert them into Well entities that have class consciousness that are aware of oppression that have raised consciousness and all these kinds of things and when we have the

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Institutions will get the society Because the society is built around these institutions now

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The term Long March of the institutions is usually associated with Marcuse here rather than Dutschke And that's because Marcuse have picked up on the terminology and the idea in his book counter revolution and revolt

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He popularizes the term. He popularizes the strategy and In particular he believed that the way you turn society around is you focus on the media if you get control of the media

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You will move society in the well, I would say the right direction, but in his case, it's the left direction

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Okay, so Think about the media in the

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United States Would you describe it as being primarily leaning to the right or to the left and How far left is it the

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Long March of the institutions worked? They've gotten control of the media, but it doesn't stop there next

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Max Horkheimer another member of the Frankfurt school Said this the revolution remember we're talking

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Marxism here. The revolution won't happen with guns rather It will happen incrementally year by year generation by generation

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We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices Transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move toward universal

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Egalitarianism, so we've got the media now. We're also going to look at education

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We're going to infiltrate the educational system and we're going to infiltrate politics and as we gradually

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Transform all of these things we will move the society to Marxism Have you taken a look at what's going on in education

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He's saying this in the early 70s This has been a long systematic approach that these guys have taken to get in control of the levers that move culture and They've done it frankly very successfully

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But this isn't the only tactic that they've got they've got another there were several others But the other big one is our next slide.

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It's a thing called repressive tolerance Repressive tolerance is a term again Marcuse who came up with this one

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Repressive tolerance is the idea that we can we should tolerate ideas coming from the left but not ideas coming from the right we tolerate liberal ideas, but not conservative ideas and Marcuse argued that we need this

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We need to do this because if people hear arguments conservative arguments or arguments from the right

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It will prevent them from actually objectively considering arguments from the left

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So we only give them arguments from the left and this is in the name of freedom of thought Okay, so he says this has to take place in education.

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We only educate people from with perspectives from the left it's going to Indoctrination from the left is perfectly okay, but not from the right.

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We need to promote this and even violence needs to be

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Understood and supported if it comes from the left, but not if it comes from the right case in point

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Think about the treatment that we see in the media of Antifa and the riots not just the protests, but the riots in the wake of George Floyd And now not everything that happened to the protests in the wake of George Floyd were riots, but there were riots

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Think about the way those are treated in the media versus what happened in the Capitol now,

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I'm not justifying what happened in the Capitol that was that was stupid and Frankly the people you know, the a lot of it needs to be prosecuted

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But that's also true of Of the Antifa and it's also true of the riots elsewhere and yet you have mayors who when the people are arrested release them

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We're gonna tolerate violence from the left, but not the right Anyone who questions the new left or its agenda?

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Cannot be Tolerated they should be Silenced or to use modern terminology cancelled

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These ideas this this approach this strategy has been in place for decades and It's just now becoming blatant enough to be really obvious Okay, next slide now most people who deal with Critical theory talk about it in terms of cultural

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Marxism, which is okay But you need to go beyond that you need to in particular bring in ideas from a movement known as postmodernism

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There are a bunch of thinkers here who are important I'll just narrow it down to one key figure this guy

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French thinker by the name of Michel Foucault Foucault was really interested postmodernists are really interested in language

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And the reason they're interested in language is first of all They don't believe that it is possible to be objective

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Objectivity is impossible What what counts as knowledge for them is number one subjective if it's not objective

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It's subjective, but number two it is also very tightly tied to language because the words we use

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Shape or help determine how we think Okay, this is something called the

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Sapir -Whorf hypothesis. Don't worry about it And there are different versions of that out there, so this connection between language thought and Well knowledge all of these kinds of things is a central issue in postmodernism the way

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Foucault took this is You get the the impossibility of objective of objective knowledge

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But he goes he then takes the next step and says that knowledge what counts as knowledge in any society is

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Determined by the people who have cultural power in other words the elites in society

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Determine what that society thinks of as knowledge Okay, so knowledge

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Is and it's well to go back to Gramsci knowledge what what you think of as knowledge is an expression of the hegemony

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The people who control the ideology of the society Now the difference here is that Gramsci believed that there were things that were objectively true

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Foucault doesn't Further he's going to take the next step and say that language is a way that these the power structures in society reinforce their own power

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So the way the words we use the expressions we use all of these things shape our thinking and all of that is either deliberately or unconsciously

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Designed to maintain the people who have power in power to maintain their power

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So Foucault sees language as being a critical element of the existing power structures and if in fact you are

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Like Foucault influenced by the left and you think the power structures are intrinsically oppressive

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One of the things you've got to be thinking of is what do you do with the language? How do you change the language to move things in the right direction?

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Foucault is also by the way gonna argue that sex and sexuality are social constructs He's one of the first people who will do this

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This should sound very familiar if you paid any attention to LGBTQIA plus stuff

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And he says this is tied to power. It's tied to the existing power structures in society thus society supports

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Heterosexuality because this somehow reinforces the people who already have power He himself is homosexual.

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So this is the way he's arguing this and thus The power structures use language and other things to delegitimize

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LGBTQIA plus people. So that's

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Foucault. Foucault comes into the mix with Cultural Marxism. He begins shaping a great deal of what's going on in cultural

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Marxism. Next slide So you get what I would describe a second generation critical theory.

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First generation is just the stuff coming out of the Frankfurt School but what we have here is

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You've got Gramsci's idea of the hegemony the the cultural ideology and the calls for a counter hegemony and alternative ideology

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You have the new left's concept of oppressed classes and identity politics.

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Add to that Foucault's concept of the use of language to reinforce power and The result of this is the conclusion becomes language is a tool of the people who control society

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It's a tool of the hegemony. It's a tool of the ideology of the oppressors therefore

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Language must be part of the focus of the battle against the people who have power

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It's got to be a tool of the counter hegemony as well. And therefore you are political correctness

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This is what's behind political correctness, okay, think about it like this, okay

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I'm going to use a concrete example that I I can tell you just from growing up when

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I grew up I was born in 1958 So I remember the riots in 1968

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I grew up near Newark, New Jersey. My mother taught in Newark and In between the riots my mother and father during the day drove us into the area where the riots were taking place to tell us

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To show us and say look this happened here this happened there. This is why the riots are happening

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You need to understand what what the situation is. They actually, you know, it's 10 years old.

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They took us in showed us this When I was a kid, there were certain words that were slurs against black people that were obviously slurs

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But there were other terms that were considered perfectly acceptable a word like Negro That was that was an acceptable term in that period and in fact, it still survives in something like the

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United Negro College Fund still exists or Referring to blacks as colored people was acceptable.

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We see this in the NAACC NAACP which stands for the National Association for the

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Advancement of Colored Persons both of those terms were rejected as being prejudicial as Creating bad impressions of black people and so they began looking for alternate words

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So black became popular except the problem is not all

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African Americans are black. They've got a range of skin tones Duke Ellington wrote a piece called black brown and beige

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Okay, so Black was considered know that that and besides, you know

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We talked about the guys with the white hats and guys with the black hats white magic black magic blacks associated with evil

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So we're not going to use black. We'll call them Afro Americans and Then for some reason

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Afro American was viewed as being inappropriate so it turned into African Americans and That one's still okay, but black has made a comeback

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But at the same time, although you can't say colored persons you can talk about persons of color

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What's going on here? the reason why you have all of these different terminologies trying to come in is because of the belief that language shapes thought and therefore if you want to eliminate prejudice against African Americans people of color whatever term you want to use currently if you want to eliminate

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Discrimination bigotry prejudice against them you do it through controlling language because if you can come up with a sufficiently neutral term to describe them it will be impossible to be bigoted

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Because your language itself it's an attempt frankly at reshaping culture reshaping thought by reshaping language

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Okay, that's what's going on through all of this and that's just one example political correctness now extends into all kinds of crazy areas

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But the point to note here is that some of this is from a very admirable perspective

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But it ends up. I mean the goal is good in some cases but it ends up leading you into all kinds of other things because of The way it is being used as a tool within this broader ideology

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Okay Next slide Now here's where we get into critical race theory proper

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We need to be a little bit careful here because critical race theory is used in two different senses today critical race theory proper critical race theory in its technical sense is a theory of law

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Developed initially primarily by this gentleman Derek Bell who's a professor of law at Harvard What Bell argued yeah?

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He's somebody who is by the way influenced by the Frankfurt School what Bell argued is that US law is intrinsically white supremacist

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That US law is specifically written and designed to protect and to promote the power of whites over blacks

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You know he believes that this is systemic it is embedded deeply into the entire system of American law

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So It's designed to keep blacks in their place. It's designed to keep blacks down now

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What what Bell? Argues is that you know well people would as a counter argument.

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Well. What do you do with the Civil Rights Act? I mean blacks have made tremendous strides haven't they?

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Bell's argument is interesting. He says well, you know advances in civil rights actually only occur when they really benefit white people

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Now that seems on the face of it a bit bizarre, but consider his evidence.

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He says if you look at State Department communiques during the era of the civil rights movement

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What you will find is that the State Department was getting reports from people all over the world saying look

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You know the issue of how blacks are treated in America is a major foreign policy issue

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This is really hurting the US and the US's reputation overseas We need to do something about this and so Bell's argument is the civil rights movement was put in place as a way of whites preserving their power, but also

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Their reputation and the power of the United States meaning the white people in the United States overseas

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So the argument may not be quite as strange as it seems. I don't believe he's right

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But it's it's an argument that is made not without at least a certain amount of support

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I think that there are other ways of understanding it, but you know he's got that there So anyway, that's

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Bell and this becomes the basis of critical race theory Which is a part of a broader field called critical legal studies, which we don't need to get into Next slide okay, so critical race theory makes a couple of There are a couple of different premises and there are different ways people do this

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I'm gonna simplify it down to a few of them First of all the idea that race is a social construct that is to say race does not have any

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Objective reality to it and the fact of the matter is they're right the critical theorists are absolutely right about this consider

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The the changing definitions of the word race, I'm a historian remember when you go back to the 18th century

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You will find discussions of race in which the British race is Distinguished from the

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French race the German race and the Italian race in other words race was originally

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Almost synonymous with with nationality culture that kind of thing Then as you move into the 19th century things begin to change and they begin to change for a couple of reasons one of them is

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Darwin one of them is that the European powers are busy trying to figure out an excuse for what they are doing and when they're going out and in the

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Neocolonial period beginning to dominate in Asia and Africa and so many other areas what justifies them doing this

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Well, what they do is they develop an idea that is technically referred to as scientific racism

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Scientific racism is actually a way of analyzing Humanity and it divides them up into different categories.

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There are three primary categories here, by the way Well, I'll show you the connection in a moment one of them is the

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Caucasians Caucasoids the second are the

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Asians the Caucasoids are obvious Europeans The second is the Asians the Mongoloids named after the

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Mongols and the third are the Africans the Negroids Okay In case you're wondering where they get these

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Shem ham and Japheth The next point in this is alright, so we've got these three races.

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The next point in this is that when you look at Darwin Darwin tells you on the basis of survival of the fittest that there are certain

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Individuals or groups that are going to rise to the surface in any population Remember Darwin does not refer to competition between Species it refers to competition within a species

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Which of this group which of which group of ants out competes the other so that they survive?

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Which group of humans out competes the other so that they survive and the argument goes

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That because Europeans live in such a harsh cult a harsh climate

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They had to be tougher and smarter than other people who live in a much much more gentle Climate I mean after all

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It's so much easier to live in Africa than it is to live in Scandinavia Said people who've never been to Africa and I'd also like to point out that I spent some time in Mongolia remember

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Mongoloid Ulaanbaatar the capital of Mongolia is the coldest national capital in the world the average temperature there is 30 degrees

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For the year the average temperature is below freezing I've done.

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I actually when I want to complain about the winter here I actually kept Ulaanbaatar on my weather on my phone, so I could always check what it was there

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I've seen it at minus 40 Yeah, the Europeans are in so much of a harsher climate

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Okay, but this argument allows them to use racial thinking to justify their domination of the non -caucasian peoples of the world and This is an indication that I see all the time anyone who emphasizes race in this sense of the word

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Anyone who puts a huge emphasis on race Inevitably becomes a racist now in case you're wondering when

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I say race is no objective identity or no objective biological marker Think about it like this no matter what

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Trait that you're going to use to define race. There's no clear breakpoint so if you're going to use skin color

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I've seen people who have skin nearly as black as coal and people who have skin nearly as white as paper and Everything in between where do you draw the line?

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Hair color eye color. What are you going to use? There is no biological metric for race

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So they're correct it is a social construct and it is used to perform a social function

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Said whenever you start putting a lot of emphasis on race sooner or later it becomes a which one's better Now that brings us to the second point here definitions of racism

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This also has changed over time when I was a kid growing up racism was thinking another race was inferior to you or Viewing them with contempt or something like that Then that changed

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It changed to add the concept of Access to power or having cultural power to it

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So it is thinking another race is inferior when you are in a position of strength when you're in a position of cultural power

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Okay, in other words people who do not have cultural power cannot be racists Which means that whites can be white racists and blacks can't that's where that goes now the problem with this

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Has to do with the notion of what it means to have access to power Consider for example, you know, this didn't show up first with regard to race

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It actually first showed up with reference to feminism when I was a grad student at the

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University of Wisconsin I One semester. I was a teaching assistant actually two semesters, but first semester.

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I was a teaching assistant I had to take political now. I had to take sexual harassment awareness training okay, and When I got there among other things what they told me is that Males were in a unique position to sexually harass women because they had access to institutional power

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Okay Now as a TA I was in a classroom

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That European economic history at the time The class immediately before ours in that classroom was a class that was headed that was taught by an endowed chair of women's studies

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Now for those of you who don't know the academic food chain an endowed chair is that is as high as you get in academia

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There really isn't anything above it So there's this endowed chair in women's studies who by the way did not allow men into her classes

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Which I would argue is illegal, but in any event that we're not gonna go there one day.

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I went I'm a chronic reader I'm an academic. I read everything that gets put in front of me. I used to read cereal boxes

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Okay at one day I walked into the classroom and there were handouts Left over from the class in front of it one of the handout that what the handout said

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I was about pornography and One of the main statements in it is pornography is a textbook teaching men how to treat women.

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I Looked at that and said, okay Now at this sexual harassment training workshop

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I heard this thing about institutional power and all of that So I went up to during the break.

38:54

I went up to the the guy who was leading this and I said to him I'm not putting in a complaint here.

39:00

This is not a complaint I just would like clarification and I told him about this handout and I said to him now if I were stupid enough to make a statement as idiotic as Harlequin romance is our textbook teaching women how to have relationships with men.

39:21

I Said oh, yeah, absolutely. I said so what's the difference between that and what the professor handed out? He said to me with a straight face.

39:28

Will you have access to institutional power? Now think about this I'm a grad student

39:34

TA She's an endowed chair, which of us has access to institutional power

39:40

She could have crushed me like a bug if she wanted to except I think I was beneath her notice this idea of what constitutes access to institutional power is

39:50

Is problematic Okay, but it goes beyond that.

39:56

So the newer definition you can't be a racist unless you have access to institutional power therefore only whites can be racist moves to the next step where you get people like Robin DiAngelo white fragility whites are racist period

40:11

Because you have access to institutional power you are implicit in a racist system. Therefore you're racist.

40:19

That's where this goes Now that is not academic Critical race theory.

40:25

It's not academic It's not a critical race theory in the formal sense but it is the way critical race theory gets translated on the popular level and Robin DiAngelo's book is mandatory reading in a lot of Anti -discrimination kinds of workshops and places around and if you don't want that one, it's anti racism by Abram Kendi That makes essentially the same kind of argument

40:51

The cultural hegemony to put it in Gramscian terms really revolves around white supremacy and white privilege

40:58

We'll talk a little bit more about that later but basically what it's saying is that the whole system is rigged to make it beneficial to whites and To hold back anybody else

41:10

Okay, Alex. It will return to some elements of this later Now one of the reasons why

41:17

I need to emphasize the distinction between critical race theory as an academic theory as part of critical legal

41:23

Studies and the way it is applied popularly with Abram Kendi with Robin DiAngelo With black lives matter all of these kinds of things

41:31

One of the reasons why I have to emphasize that is something that's technically known as the Mott and Bailey fallacy

41:39

Mott and Bailey is a castle design from About year 1000.

41:45

Okay The word Mott is an old English word meaning a mound So what they would do is they would dig a ditch and pile up all the dirt in a mound

41:54

You'd put a palisade around a larger area with the mound inside it and you would that's called the

42:01

Bailey or the courtyard and you had so you've got a mound and a courtyard mound in Mott and Bailey and On top of the mound you would build the keep

42:10

This is the the final stronghold if everything else falls. This is the place that you can defend yourself from Okay, so that's the

42:16

Mott and Bailey castle. A Mott and Bailey fallacy is When people are using a word like critical race theory

42:26

In the the broad sort of popular sense someone like Kendi or DiAngelo or those are the two big ones

42:31

When they're using it that way that's like the Bailey and if you start attacking the arguments there

42:38

What they do is they retreat to the mound they go to the to the keep on the top of the mound and they say Oh, no. No, that's not what critical race theory is critical race theory is part of critical legal studies

42:48

Case in point they're teaching critical race theory in schools. Oh, no, we're not. We're not teaching critical race theory in schools

42:55

That's part of critical legal theory. We don't get any legal theory in elementary school. That's only something that happens in law schools

43:01

Yeah, except for the fact that critical race theory is something much bigger than just critical legal studies now

43:06

Okay, so you be aware that that's a standard tactic that is used when when

43:14

When these things are criticized particularly in the area of public schools, but even in other areas as well

43:19

Okay, so in any event, those are some of the key elements of critical race theory, but we're not done next slide

43:27

This is Kimberly Crenshaw another important younger Theorist on critical race theory

43:36

Crenshaw is important major contributor to a lot of elements in critical race theory and she is in fact

43:42

One of the ones who's honest enough to admit that its roots are in Marxism but She also is the one who really promotes an idea called intersectionality

43:55

Intersectionality is really looking at the ways that oppression works for different oppressed groups so case in point if You're black you are oppressed

44:08

If you are a woman you are oppressed if you are a black woman You are oppressed more than a white woman because you're getting it both for being black and for being a woman

44:17

Okay, so there's an intersection of different categories. That's what intersectionality is about in its origin next slide

44:27

So the way this works is you start with a series of what I would have described as approved categories of oppression

44:34

There are certain ones that they ignore Oddly enough poverty tends to be one of them, especially with something with roots on Marxism.

44:42

Why do I say that? They are utterly unconcerned about white coal miners in Appalachia So poverty is not a category that they use

44:53

Okay Instead it starts with race particularly in critical race theory. Then you add sex.

44:59

This is what Kimberly Crenshaw did those two then Chronologically you add lesbian and gay to that maybe bisexual and Most recently you add transgender to it so What you see is these these and there are others as well these are the primary ones you have these categories of oppression and Intersectionality says that Your identity really is found in where you fit.

45:28

You're either an oppressor or an oppressed in each of these categories So, how do these different things your your status as oppressor or oppressed?

45:37

Fit together. So for example, the example used before oppression of blacks oppression of women and oppression of black women well

45:43

What that means is that a black man is is oppressed because he's black but he's an oppressor because he's a man and if he's a cisgendered heterosexual

45:55

Then he's an oppressor because of those things as well a black woman

46:01

It hat is more oppressed because she's oppressed as both a black and a woman but assuming she's cisgender heterosexual

46:10

She is an oppressor in those categories Now, I don't like the terminology, but I'm Using it just for the sake of that if she's a black lesbian that ups the ante suddenly she's oppressed as both a black a woman and a lesbian and Transgender sort of crowns them all

46:32

Okay. Now, why is that important next slide? Okay, the summary of intersectionality

46:41

Intersectionality is kind of a weird idea in a lot of ways when looked at from the perspective of the history of philosophy because one of the main things in philosophy historically particularly in the area of metaphysics is

46:54

In other words, what's real is is the issue of whether something?

47:01

It's the issue of universals in particular so the way this applies here is There are no universals in intersectionality.

47:08

There are no universals about humanity. There's no no such thing as a universal human nature Okay, basically all we are is a product of various intersectional categories.

47:18

There's nothing universal that unites us We're also not individuals You are simply the product of your intersectional categories you think of yourself as an individual

47:29

But everything that's significant about you is determined by the intersectional categories you belong to in intersectionality, so your entire identity is really based on How all of these various categories of oppression or oppressor intersect in your life now

47:50

The reason this is important is actually our next slide Who not yet?

47:55

I'm sorry. I'm forgetting my order here Intersectionality also fits in with standpoint theory now

48:04

Standpoint theory is an approach to I'm sorry about this philosophical term Epistemology that is to say how you know things

48:12

It's a theory of knowledge Okay, and if the origin is this woman

48:18

Sandra Harding it begins with feminist epistemology And where this goes is it says that what you think of as knowledge?

48:25

That's a phrase that should ring bells because we talked about it with Foucault and post -modernism what you think of as knowledge comes from your

48:36

Intersectional categories, so if you are a white you think one way if you are a black you think a different way

48:44

If you're a man you think one way if you're a woman you think a different way and so on whites in particular value

48:56

Objectivity They value facts and evidence and statistics and numbers and science and all of those kinds of things

49:05

All of those are identified as characteristics of whiteness people of color

49:14

By in contrast to that people of color have lived experiences which are self -validated and Self -interpreted and these lived experiences are things that qualify as truth for them and the thing about this is

49:34

Neither is superior to the other. So the lived experience of African Americans to use the group that is most often cited here is

49:49

Just as valid as any kind of statistics numbers proof or evidence That a white person might marshal in argument against what they see as their lived experience now

50:03

Further now this we have to take this one step further since whites Control the culture whites naturally understand their own culture

50:13

Minorities have to live in that culture So they need to understand white culture, but they also have their own lived experience.

50:20

So they have a broader base of Approaches to knowledge to draw from than whites do and therefore

50:29

Minorities tend to have a superior understanding of the world Now if this sounds a little strange to you next slide.

50:36

We see this in spades in Sonia Sotomayor in her Testimony before Congress when she was before the

50:46

Senate before a confirmation She said this I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences standpoint

50:55

Would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life

51:03

Now people looked at that and said what? But it is a perfect expression of what standpoint theory is about as a as a

51:14

Latina That is to say a female person from the Latinx culture

51:21

She has experience as a woman that the white male doesn't she has experience as in the

51:27

Latinx culture that a white Anything doesn't and Therefore because of that kind of experiential knowledge self -validated self -interpreted that she has there

51:40

She had and because she already knows how to work within white culture.

51:46

She is a much richer Well, how's she said? Richness of her experiences.

51:51

She has a much richer base to draw from in order to reach conclusions that standpoint theory in action Okay, so these are the key elements formal elements of critical theory

52:03

Let's move to the next one What nobody talks about in connection with critical theory is that they view?

52:13

Everything in the world as a zero -sum game What a zero -sum game is is a zero -sum game says that in order for one person to advance another person has to be pushed down So, you know, it's not just that you score points.

52:28

It's that when you score points, you're taking the points away from the other person Okay, that's a zero -sum game.

52:34

It's most frequently used in economics You hear the argument that the super rich, you know

52:40

The 1 % out there own so much wealth and because they have all of this wealth The rest of the people are impoverished.

52:46

The poverty is caused by people with having too much wealth There are cases where that's true, but they're mostly in global South countries developing countries

53:00

The the metaphor that they use is that if one person takes a big piece of the pie there is

53:06

Less pie available for everybody else. The problem is we don't just have one pie. We have bakeries and The net result is frankly, this is bad economics.

53:16

Any economist will tell you this makes no sense in economics, but It's applied economically in many cases, but it is also applied literally to every other area of life anybody who has any sort of Advantage or privilege or dominant position got that by oppressing someone else

53:40

Western civilization is You know dominates the globe why because it has oppressed non -western civilizations

53:48

Men have power because they have oppressed women whites have power because they've oppressed people of color and so on Okay.

53:55

Now, here's the trick It's not just power and things like that and by the way critical theory is all about power in case you haven't picked that up That's really the central theme of this.

54:06

It's not just power That is involved in a zero -sum game. It's also moral authority

54:15

Because you see if you are in an oppressor category you lose moral authority because oppression is

54:23

Evil, but since it's a zero -sum game when you lose moral authority the oppressed gain moral authority and When you add intersectionality the more oppressed categories you can be in the more moral authority you have

54:38

Next slide So your identity again is defined by your inner sexual Intersectional categories you lose moral authority from oppressor categories you gain moral authority from pressed categories more oppressed

54:50

Categories you have more moral authority now. Here's the thing In this system oppression is sin and in fact oppression is the only sin therefore only oppressor sin

55:06

If there is any a possible if there is any possibility of salvation for an oppressor it

55:14

Consists in becoming what's described as woke a term by the way that is

55:20

Taken from the african -american community. So it's really cultural appropriation and Or or if you prefer the

55:29

LGBTQIA plus terminology, it's becoming an ally Okay, in other words you have to the only possibility of salvation is for the oppressed to wreck excuse me the oppressor to recognize that they are oppressors that this is all evil and to accept the entire critique of the system by into critical theory and Thus basically

55:57

Accept the counter -hegemony Okay, some versions of critical theory don't let you do this So Robin D 'angelo, if you're white you are racist you can never do anything about it

56:07

There's no amount of apology or anything else you can do, but you should do it anyway Now what they don't understand is that this is a recipe for creating white supremacists think about it if You are white and you are an oppressor and there's nothing you can ever do about this.

56:25

You can never escape your guilt Why would you even bother accepting that system? Why would you ever bother thinking it was appropriate to share power?

56:33

Why not reinforce it? If you don't have a Christian ethic, that's that seems to me frankly to be the logic of it.

56:40

Anyway continuing on This is what next slide. This is what?

56:47

Creates the Seemingly incoherent alliances that you get in the identity politics realm

56:55

I Refer to this as creating communities of virtuous victimhood because if you're a victim you're virtuous you say so women are victims of male

57:04

Oppression LBG and so on are victims of heteronormative oppression people of color are victims of white impression

57:09

Muslims are victims of Western oppression pagans are victims of Christian oppression undocumented workers are victims of American oppression the poor are victims of corporate oppression and get this the planet is a victim of industrial oppression and So when you look at this what you see is the identity politics and at the dark green ecology stuff

57:34

You you see the formula here. This is why You will find

57:41

LGBTQ plus activists opposing Islamophobia Despite the fact that if they were in a

57:47

Muslim country, they would be stoned or thrown off a building This is why you see women supporting

57:55

You know opposing Islamophobia feminists opposing Islamophobia despite the fact that women can't drive in Saudi Arabia Okay, these weird coalitions that form form because of the idea from intersectionality that all oppression is the same and Thus all of these groups because they have experienced oppression have got

58:19

Virtue and they're they're basically fighting the same battle against oppression It creates frankly some rather incoherent alliances if you think about LGBT by itself

58:31

Lesbians and gays historically never really got along The only time they began to get along was in the wake of the sexual revolution.

58:39

They identified Heterosexuality is the enemy so they united to fight a common enemy when you add

58:49

Transgender into that it's even more coherent Because if gender is completely a social construct and you can be male or female as you choose

58:58

How do you become a lesbian or gay? They don't really go together it's incoherent

59:05

It's what a sociologist named Philip Reef called the death work and by that what he meant is it's aimed at tearing something down There's no positive thing that it's really advocating or pushing for it's really aimed at destruction

59:17

And a lot of the stuff we see here is in wreaths terminology death works. Okay, but anyway moving on Question.

59:27

Why is this so popular? The fact of the matter is this is the dominant worldview in a lot of the world right now

59:35

It's dominating HR departments in business. It's dominating the universities. It's coming into elementary school classrooms

59:42

They're promoting this in the US military It's essentially the worldview of the

59:47

Democratic Party and the significant part of the Republican Party, okay, why is it so popular? I would suggest that there are a number of reasons for this.

59:56

One of them is there are elements of truth here We live in a fallen world

01:00:02

Fallen people create fallen institutions sin embeds itself in every human institution therefore

01:00:12

We should not be surprised at finding sin in Pretty much anywhere

01:00:21

Okay, there are elements of truth here The fact of the matter is although I don't think every example for up to pick the the black community

01:00:28

I don't think every example of what the Disadvantages that show up in the black community the the problems that you see there

01:00:37

I don't think all of it is a result of racism some of it is We got to be honest about this Okay, so there are in fact elements of truth there.

01:00:44

There are some elements of truth in methodology We do to a degree See the world based on our own personal experiences the culture we came up in and all of those kinds of things elements of truth

01:00:54

There that doesn't mean however where it fails is that doesn't mean it that there's no objective truth

01:01:00

So there are elements here that you can grab hold of and say, you know, there's a point there The second reason it's popular

01:01:07

I think is emotional appeal It's hard. It is really hard to watch some of the videos that have come out like with George Floyd or any number of other people

01:01:18

The the video evidence that has come out in a number of these cases is really hard to watch and It properly should outrage us

01:01:33

Standpoint theory the problem with this by the way in the emotional appeal is that standpoint theory?

01:01:39

Argues that the emotional appeal is as true as anything else the lived experience of people in the black community their reaction to these things is

01:01:54

Just as true as any counter evidence. You might be able to supply and in fact, it's also more powerful

01:02:01

Because you see evidence the emphasis on evidence objectivity and things like that are whiteness So we've got a we've got difficulty in dealing with it

01:02:10

What you know trying to respond there, but there's an emotional appeal to the other thing though That is worth noting particularly is that it's parasitic on Christianity.

01:02:19

What do I mean? Wokeness is a Christian heresy If you read books by an atheist like Tom Holland who wrote a book called

01:02:27

Dominion What he says in this book is, you know, he's an ancient historian and when he looks at ancient history

01:02:35

He finds it impossible to really understand or sympathize with these people Because the level of cruelty

01:02:42

That they exhibit sort of casual cruelty is stunning They're they're complete disregard for any right or value in the underprivileged

01:02:51

It's just you know it he finds it baffling and he tried to figure out why this was the case and he looked at Cultures all over the world and it's the same all over the world

01:03:01

Since the only difference is Christianity Christianity is what made us recognize the value of the underprivileged person the value of People who are weak or who are poor that they have intrinsic inherent dignity.

01:03:17

This is a Christian idea that has come into the world therefore

01:03:24

Oppression is sin. It's not the only sin, but it is sin and what

01:03:33

CRT does is it takes this idea of oppression Picking on people who are less powerful or less influential or whatever than you are

01:03:43

It is sinful. They pick up they pick that up and run with it. So that that becomes the centerpiece of everything

01:03:50

This is quite literally heresy. The word heresy comes from the Greek word high rain, which means to choose

01:03:57

What's that got to do with it? Well, the idea here is that you choose one idea that is true

01:04:03

Within the faith and you grab it and you run with it so far that it distorts everything else

01:04:08

Think about a sweater where you grab one of the threads on the sweater and pull it and the whole sweater distorts That's what heresy is.

01:04:15

And that's what CRT is. It's picking up on truth from Christianity and running with it and And particularly in our culture which has been so heavily influenced by Christianity we recognize the fact that oppression is sin and we

01:04:30

Instinctively want to deal with it want to do something about it. The problem is their solution

01:04:36

Well creates real difficulties, especially for a Christian next slide Where CRT goes wrong?

01:04:42

I'm gonna use a bunch of theological categories here. So anthropology It's not just a field in the social sciences.

01:04:49

It has to do with the doctrine of man Theologically, it's anthropology is wrong race their race is they're correct race is not a biological category

01:04:58

It's a social construct, but it is also not a biblical category. The Bible doesn't talk about people in terms of race

01:05:05

The closest it gets is Jews and Gentiles Okay, that has to do with your relationship with God In fact what the

01:05:14

Bible tells us is that the single thing that is most important about each and every human being you will ever

01:05:19

Meet is that they are made in the image of God Now that's got a lot of there's a lot to unpack there.

01:05:25

That's a whole weekend seminar but the the point here is that Human value human worth in scripture is based on the fact that human beings are made in the image of God in Genesis 9 6

01:05:41

God says to Noah whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed because Man is made in the image of God Again, there's a lot to unpack here

01:05:52

But the term image of a god in the ancient Near East Meant that you were claiming to be that God's official representative on earth

01:05:59

So in Genesis where it says human beings are made in the image of God Let us make man in our image and let him have dominion.

01:06:05

Those two are the same thing It's parallelism in Hebrew being made in the image of God means you were

01:06:10

God's rep on earth Therefore an attack on a person is an attack on the

01:06:15

God in whose image they are made Which is why whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed

01:06:23

Not to put too fine a point on it But anytime you place anything ahead of the image of God in Determining human value or human worth you are committing idolatry and you are frankly insulting

01:06:36

God to his face period And yet critical theory is based on the idea that there's that what we are is our

01:06:49

Intersectional categories that these are the things that determine value These are the things that determine who has moral authority and who doesn't all of those kinds of things it fails on anthropology

01:06:59

It also fails on martiology a really obscure word that refers to the doctrine of sin

01:07:06

Are the oppressed really Innocent all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God all are in need of salvation the oppressors aren't the only sinners out here and Yet, that's fundamentally what critical theory argues

01:07:26

They also make the argument that you know, their evidence for this is disparate outcomes

01:07:31

In other words of two different groups have different different outcomes The only possible explanation for that is oppression

01:07:38

My response is a really Case in point if you look cross -culturally around the world

01:07:45

Meta meta studies of these meta analyses of the studies that have been done show that Universally children do better statistically when they are raised by their biological parents who are married

01:07:59

That is a universal yet, if you look at a group like Black Lives Matter or Any number of the other groups that are out there?

01:08:08

they make the argument that the only reason why that is true is because the system is rigged to benefit those families in A truly fair world.

01:08:20

It wouldn't matter whether you were raised by your biological parents or somebody else It wouldn't matter whether you were raised by a male and a female two females two males or multiples

01:08:29

Village anything like that. It should all produce exactly the same outcomes. No Because that is a violation of the way

01:08:39

God made us Oppression isn't the only reason why you get disparate outcomes and yet that's fundamental to their arguments

01:08:49

So it's not just the anthropology of the cardiology. That's a problem next We also have soteriology the doctrine of salvation

01:08:56

There is in critical theory no possibility of grace and frankly logically no possibility of redemption this is again the idea that if you're white you're automatically a racist and It's eschatology is really lacking as well

01:09:14

What you have here is what again Philip Reef the guy who coined the term death works. He calls this an anti culture

01:09:20

It is really based primarily on Eliminating what's there rather than presenting a positive vision or program

01:09:29

For how you reach it and what the final destination actually looks like Basically given the insistence that although race is a social construct

01:09:39

It is a natural thing and there's nothing that you can do about it. The only way that you can really deal with Racism.

01:09:49

Well, you can't really deal with racism But the only thing you can do is replace one set of oppressors with another because everything's a zero -sum game

01:09:56

So there's no real eschatological vision either. There's no doctrine of the future It doesn't really offer hope

01:10:04

Okay next It also fails on a couple of other levels Epistemology again the branch of philosophy dealing with how you know stuff.

01:10:12

The fact is objective truth does exist You know, that's not that's not whiteness the same that you know, they're talking about in Seattle schools

01:10:22

They're talking about math being whiteness and insisting on getting the correct answer is really not Appropriate because that's a white value.

01:10:30

I got news for you the same math that builds a bridge in the United States We'll build one in Africa There is objective reality here's objective truth not all worldviews are equal example

01:10:44

When I was in college, I spent a summer in Norman, Oklahoma, and I volunteered to I was in a program

01:10:54

Part of my undergrad degree but on Sundays I joined some people going into a federal prison to do some ministry there

01:11:00

And I got to know a guy in there. I was a musician. He was a musician. We talked guitar things like that and He's a

01:11:08

Hispanic guy with a lot of Native American in him that's going to be important in a second and At lunch one day after you know,

01:11:15

I'd been hanging out with this guy. Somebody asked me says You know what he's in for he said no didn't come up Said drug offenses and murder said in fact one day because of Some things drawn from his background in in sort of the

01:11:38

Native American cultural things he decided that he was immune to the white men's bullets and Went to walk out of the prison the guards

01:11:47

Disobeyed their orders to shoot to kill and instead shot his legs out from under him and he spent months in the hospital having them rebuilt which worldview

01:11:59

Conform more conforms more closely to reality Not all worldviews are equal

01:12:08

Another failure here variety the another one varieties of black lived experiences. Not all blacks have the same lived experience

01:12:15

You know, you you can go to Thomas Sowell you can go to Clarence Thomas you can go to Any number of very successful?

01:12:26

black people black scientists black mathematicians and so on Carol Swain and there are any number of them that we can point to and they don't have the same

01:12:38

Experience of the world as critical race theory says they should and the way they get around this is they say there's a difference between a black person and a person who happens to be black a

01:12:52

Person who happens to be black is someone who's bought into white culture and is bought into its lies Whereas the only authentic black person is the one who's oppressed

01:13:01

And I don't buy it You also this was pointed out by Wilfred Riley who is a professor of political science black professor of political science in a historically black school in Kentucky a

01:13:15

Professor Riley said that Historically black college I should say specifically professor

01:13:22

Riley said that you know The fact that racism isn't the only problem affecting the black community is demonstrated by a number of things

01:13:30

One of which is that parallel problems exist in poor white communities? You know many of the pathologies you see in inner -city black communities

01:13:38

You will also find in poor white communities. So that suggests the issue isn't racism. It's poverty

01:13:44

Okay So but but they have no way of explaining that or they don't ever bother explaining it then there are sociological problems

01:13:53

They ignore so they ignore social class social class really is relatively little to do with the way they analyze things

01:13:59

They ignore family structures. I've already talked about that well, if it Riley points out that immigrants from Africa don't have the same pathologies in their communities as African -americans do there's something else happening there in the community that cannot be explained simply by race and Lastly it ignores

01:14:19

Asians Asians succeed at a much higher level than they should according to critical race theory because of people of color and oppressed minority now the way they get around this is they say they're white adjacent meaning they're very close to being whites and But what that ignores is for example, do you know what ethnic group has the highest income in the

01:14:41

United States? Indians Really tough to make that argument

01:14:50

Everybody thinks of the Japanese Chinese Koreans, but it's actually the Indians Okay, so the bottom line here is there are all kinds of things that we can critique about this

01:15:02

I think it's dead wrong on a whole lot of levels. So how do we respond to it? Next slide? Oh A couple more this this is just sort of my summary statement here

01:15:11

I would say that the the thing that I am most personally Bugged by with critical race theory is that they deny agency to minorities

01:15:21

That is to say they deny minorities the ability to do anything about their situation. All they are are victims of the whites.

01:15:31

I Don't believe that I believe that that the black community has got far more energy and creativity and far more things that that that they can do

01:15:43

If they don't buy into this there are a lot more things that that can happen But what this says it completely denies some agencies

01:15:50

It rejects the idea of purposes in nature LGBT is a great example of this.

01:15:57

There are natural ends in biology You know, the the the things that are involved in sexuality are called the reproductive system for a reason that's their purpose and Yet the whole

01:16:09

LGBT thing completely denies that and They also apply the wrong solutions

01:16:19

To give you an example of something concrete here Driving while black I've talked to any number of young black men who talk about being pulled over Regularly for things that white people aren't pulled over for It's a real problem.

01:16:34

It does happen now. We can talk about all the reasons why police might do this I don't care about that if you are a young black man and you are innocent

01:16:42

You keep getting pulled over where your white counterpart doesn't what do you begin to think the police have it in for us?

01:16:49

Whatever the reason is whatever reasons they may give that is going to create a real distinct impression that The police have it in for you and for good reason.

01:17:00

So the question is what is the solution to driving while black? We've got two solutions here Critical race theory because everything is a zero -sum game

01:17:07

Critical race theory would suggest that the solution is to start pulling white people over for exactly the same

01:17:12

Non -reasons that you pull blacks over for the alternative is to not see the world as a zero -sum game spread privilege and Stop pulling the blacks over for things.

01:17:23

You wouldn't pull a white person over for which solution makes more sense It's it's a ladder it's pretty obvious and this is exactly what

01:17:31

Martin Luther King was fighting for That black should be treated the way whites are treated.

01:17:37

It's not a zero -sum game. It could be done But it's also worth noting that critical race theorists look down on Martin Luther King many of them for this reason

01:17:51

Okay. So next solution next slide. How do we respond? The first thing I would say is take a deep breath I do this presentation a lot or variants of it and what

01:18:00

I hear from a lot of people is I'm scared There's no reason to be scared Jesus is still raised from the dead.

01:18:07

God is still on the throne. God is still sovereign over the affairs of humanity God is the one who determines the rise and fall of nations and God and even if he's determined that this is the fall of our

01:18:18

Nation, I don't know that he has But even if that were the case, he still promises that all things work together for our good

01:18:25

So there's absolutely no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to let this stuff bug you I mean we need to respond to it, but we need to respond to it appropriately

01:18:34

But the first thing we have to keep in mind is God still large and in charge

01:18:40

Okay next First thing in terms of practical, you know nuts and bolts responses is we need to recognize that CRT advocates are not our enemy

01:18:52

The enemy is our enemy the enemy being of course

01:18:58

Satan we need to think of CRT advocates or anybody who opposes the gospel as People who are caught in the

01:19:08

Stockholm syndrome for those of you don't know what that is it's a phenomenon that happens with prisoners of war and and Kidnapped victims and things like that where they as a way of dealing with the psychological pressure of their captivity flip sides

01:19:24

They become collaborators Okay It's a well -known phenomenon among psychologists and the fact of the matter is anyone who opposes the gospel is

01:19:34

Not the enemy is a victim of the Stockholm syndrome They are not the target for defeat

01:19:44

They are in fact someone who needs rescuing So what we need to do is have a two -pronged response here the first of them is recognized that Satan is still very much active and very much behind a lot of this stuff and We need to engage in spiritual warfare

01:19:59

This is you know Ephesians 6 is one of the classic passages of this where it talks about the armor of God and all of those kinds of things

01:20:06

We can look at a number of other passages from Paul and elsewhere but one thing I would like to highlight that people tend to ignore in Ephesians 6 is after it goes through the metaphor of all the pieces of armor

01:20:17

In about two verses Paul uses words referring to prayer or something like six times So put on all this armor and pray pray pray pray pray pray

01:20:30

It's inescapable if you actually pay attention that Paul's real focus is on the importance and the significance of prayer

01:20:36

So make sure you're praying and then we've got to think about the programming How do you get through to people who have been captured by the enemy?

01:20:48

The challenge that we're facing is that again as I mentioned before reason evidence and things like that are seen as examples of white supremacy and They also if you can look at Robin D 'Angelo

01:21:00

You're in what's known as a Kafka trap? and that that comes from the book called the trial by Kafka a surrealist author and Basically the way this goes is you are accused of being a racist if you agree with it

01:21:15

You're a racist if you deny it, that's proof. You're a racist That's a

01:21:20

Kafka trap and that's literally what Robin D 'Angelo does So we've got a challenge facing that and then we also have what

01:21:26

Vodie Bauckham talks about is ethnic gnosticism if you are a member of a minority community you have

01:21:34

Intrinsic knowledge of what racism is that's invisible to a white So if a minority accuses you of racism

01:21:40

You are a racist even though you don't have any racist intentions or don't think of you as right of yourself as a racist

01:21:46

You are a racist because that person has secret knowledge based on their lived experience So we've got to deal with the problem of ethnic gnosticism

01:21:54

So, how do you address it when you're faced with these kinds of very specific and very concrete challenges next slide?

01:22:01

first of all Don't do a head -on attack instead build relationships you do this with individuals you do this with communities and particularly for those of us in the white community never

01:22:19

Never Have the audacity to try to present yourself as the one with the solutions to the problems

01:22:27

You don't actually know enough to understand the problems in the minority community

01:22:33

You need to let them educate you and lead you Okay But relationships here are critical because When you are in a relationship with a person it is much harder for you to be just simply thrown into a category

01:22:54

It's much harder for intersectionality to actually block real communication

01:23:01

Ask questions The importance of asking questions cannot be overstated

01:23:07

This is true for a wide range of things. First of all, the person who asks questions controls the conversation

01:23:14

You don't want to be the one giving answers. You want to be the one asking questions and Secondly, unless you actually understand you are never going to be able to effectively

01:23:25

Interact with another person. So learn from them and Also important weep with those who weep

01:23:34

Don't do things like say well, you know the statistics show that you know It isn't really open season on blacks on the part of white police officers when somebody's just been killed

01:23:47

Don't do that We need to weep with those who weep. Okay next

01:23:54

Francis Schaefer said love is the ultimate apologetic We must speak the truth

01:24:00

We cannot compromise on speaking the truth, but equally we cannot compromise on speaking the truth in love

01:24:11

There's a challenge here as well lack of affirmation is often seen as hate If I if you do not affirm me as a gay man or as a transgender woman

01:24:23

That shows that you hate you hate me That's really not what hate is

01:24:29

But that that that's the that's the the challenge we have to face. You're gonna see this

01:24:34

This is why I would argue that building relationships is primary it's harder to make the accusation of hate in the context of a relationship and We got first John 3 18 little children.

01:24:47

Let us not love with words of speech, but with actions and in truth The importance of how we treat others is critical

01:24:57

Like said, you know in in our daily life. We're not going to be typically in a position where we're going to Be able to affect significant change in a worldview that is coming to dominate the culture

01:25:10

But that's not our job. Our job is to do what we can do and that begins

01:25:16

As Chuck Colson used to say over the fence and in your backyard talking to your neighbor

01:25:21

At a barbecue at those kinds of things it is building the relationships That where you demonstrate your love and respect for other people where you honor the image of God in them and you treat them

01:25:34

Well, even when they treat you badly that is going to be the key to begin to heal these things that are

01:25:42

Genuinely wrong in our culture and in our churches and it will begin also addressing the sin

01:25:51

That is at the root of a lot of the complaints that are being made

01:25:57

But the proper things that are being objected to within critical theory. I believe that was the last one

01:26:04

Okay. Yeah my For more information slide. Okay, so I have no idea how long

01:26:10

I went any questions And I refuse by the way to believe that I was so clear that there won't be any yeah first If we could just a thank you to And in order so the sessions been recorded and so in order for us to capture

01:26:30

Continue to capture the essence of this conversation. We have a microphone in the back So if you do have questions if you could head back there and speak into the microphone so that we could capture the question for the recording as well as the

01:26:41

Answer that would be very much appreciated. So David you're at first it seems Chomp at the bits back there.

01:26:47

That's right. Hey, thank you very much So what do you say when you're in the conversation? You're developing a relationship with someone where you are

01:26:57

Worlds apart, but I Was in it I'm there's a friend of mine where I've asked tons and tons of questions and I have pretty art

01:27:05

Clearly articulated to them what they believe he knows that I know what I that He knows that I'm aware of what his position is and we have a great relationship.

01:27:14

He's incredibly Anti wasps white anglo -saxon Protestants. He you know,

01:27:20

I learned that term from him And then eventually got to the point where he said well, what do you believe? I kind of shared what

01:27:26

I believed and it was so It's disparate the right word. We're so far apart

01:27:32

We had a it was a very amicable conversation, but it was so clear there was almost no common ground at all where do you go at that point when you have a relationship and There's even a desire to continue the conversation, but I was kind of at the end of it's like I don't have any more questions

01:27:49

You got to just you got to believe in Jesus. I don't know where how do you where do you go from there? so Tell me

01:27:56

What is the end game here? I'm giving you some questions. So what is the end game here?

01:28:03

What what that what is it that that you think the ideal society would look like and how do we get there?

01:28:11

That would be a really good question And what you would find is well, it would be a society in which there wouldn't be any more oppression at all

01:28:22

Something like that, you know, there wouldn't be any, you know any whatever Okay Well, how do we get there if you hate wasps?

01:28:37

I mean, how does this happen? You're telling me that you hate a group and yet you're also telling me you want everything to be level and equal

01:28:45

How does this work? How do these things fit together? That kind of question.

01:28:50

How does this fit with that is a really good way of sort of putting a pebble in their shoe

01:28:57

Okay The other thing is you you know, I prefer asking questions, but you could say, you know as a

01:29:06

As a Christian, I believe that everybody's made in the image of God, which means everybody's got equal intrinsic dignity

01:29:13

It seems to me that that would be a lot better foundation for Building a a just society if it were actually followed through then what you're suggesting you hate wasps

01:29:26

How are you going to do this? You know, so so things along those lines would be how

01:29:34

I would approach it the bigger problem by the way comes when you have family members or something like that who you're in relationship with who disown you because You don't agree with them and under those circumstances

01:29:45

I would argue that the relationship was not as strong as it should have been in the first place because If those kinds of things will divide you from family members or old friends

01:29:54

They're you know, the their ideology is more important than the relationship and then all you can do with that is break

01:30:06

How do I as a parent with two girls in a public school system

01:30:13

Be able to find out what it is that they're learning and then I'll say combat that information

01:30:22

When I don't have that Experiences that they are having today. I mean my experience is going through a public school system was different How do

01:30:31

I go about that? Yeah The first thing is you need to find out what they're learning and you can get that you can you know

01:30:37

You can contact the school board. You can contact the school. You can contact the teachers ask them for the curriculum those kinds of things

01:30:46

You can also Work very hard at home to Raise your kids understanding the biblical worldview and particularly

01:30:57

I cannot Over -emphasize the importance of helping them to understand the image of God and what its implications are

01:31:04

So we agree that mistreatment of people is wrong We disagree on what the roots of that are and we disagree on what the solution is

01:31:13

But we agree that this is wrong. We agree because of this This is this is the reason it's because everyone is made in the image of God everyone has equal intrinsic dignity

01:31:24

And it doesn't matter whether they're black white Asian Native American whether they're handicapped whether they're physically or mentally handicapped, but none of these things matter everybody

01:31:37

Is valuable everybody is made in the image of God and we need to honor each person that way that I think most kids will recognize

01:31:45

My suspicion is most kids and then if you live that out at home, too

01:31:51

Most kids will end up recognizing that is really a better way of approaching it and you can actually address the issues directly as well

01:31:58

As you learn what they are You can also ask your kids what they're learning. Let them tell you But you

01:32:07

You can you can do it. You can do additional research by asking the teachers asking the school board as You think about the

01:32:17

Long March through history. Where are we at in that March and Are there any effective counter revolutions?

01:32:25

Is it too late? And if no, what should we do same question for yes

01:32:32

Yeah, there was a an anthropologist Hunger I think was the name

01:32:38

I'd have to do a little bit of going back on this who did studies on the collapse of civilization and Although he attempted to disprove this thesis

01:32:50

What Was very clear what he could not disprove And all of the evidence pointed to this is that when you hit a point in a society where there is

01:33:02

The kind of sexual chaos and confusion rejection of marriage all of those kinds of things

01:33:09

You are three generations away from societal collapse Universally We are well past that point now what

01:33:18

I will say is that in Britain in the 18th century

01:33:24

They were also at a very bad place 25 % of the women in the city of London were prostitutes

01:33:31

Okay that turned around because of the evangelical

01:33:38

Revival we usually associate it with the Methodist but there are a number of different branches of it the evangelical revival and the very

01:33:46

Pointed work of the Clapham sect with people like William Wilberforce that it said They created a situation

01:33:54

They they they they promoted a situation in England where there was a widespread revival of faith a

01:34:03

With Wilberforce put it a reformation of banners which really refers to a reformation of the way we interact with each other and morality all of those kinds of things and It's a

01:34:14

Britain it Can't that's the only example.

01:34:20

I know of historically that I can point to it can happen But what it takes is a lot of very serious

01:34:27

Uncompromising Christians who among other things place prayer at the center of what they do Apart from that apart from divine action,

01:34:37

I Don't really see how the United States survives on the basis or for that matter most

01:34:43

Western Cultures survive on the basis of what this anthropologist discovered as he's looked at civilizations across history

01:34:55

Yep, that's part of it as well The church

01:35:03

The church has a critical role here and we need to exist frankly at in a way we don't as intentional communities of mutual support for each other

01:35:15

You know when someone loses their job because they won't bow to HR On CRT we need to be there to support them, you know those kinds of things

01:35:27

So we need to have have intentional communities to provide a living model For a better way of life, you know

01:35:35

Archbishop Chappett Now deceased from Chicago said that he thought that he would die in his bed his successor would die in a prison cell and his successor would die as a martyr in the public square and His successor would help pick up the pieces of a broken civilization and rebuild it the way the church has throughout history

01:35:57

We Need to be thinking about being that fourth archbishop Being the church that will pick up the pieces on that cheery note other questions

01:36:17

Mine's more of a statement. I'm in New Hampshire, Southern, New Hampshire and last year I started getting pretty involved politically in New Hampshire actually

01:36:26

Made it illegal to teach CRT in New Hampshire schools I guess there's a bunch of teachers that are vowing to still teach it

01:36:34

So now what they're gonna do is try to see how they can expel the you get rid of the teachers, you know fire the teachers

01:36:42

But I think one of the things that we're doing and ask in our district is

01:36:49

Telling people get involved in your school committees become part of your school committee know what's going on Because I think that's what happened that they infiltrated the school committees and indoctrinate in these children

01:37:03

I'm actually thinking of running for school committee myself, but I think that that's what we need to do

01:37:08

We need to get in there. You need to get out. You need to get into the political arena You need to know I don't know how

01:37:14

Massachusetts all runs, but I'm learning New Hampshire New Hampshire just opened up last

01:37:20

Monday all the bills that are going to go forth January 2022 by Tuesday all the bills that hit in two days

01:37:28

There were four hundred and twelve LSR's or whatever the bills that are gonna hit.

01:37:33

I'm like, wow I learned this last year like 800 bills went in in January that the house house bills only that they had a vote on and it's insane the stuff that goes on But most people don't understand how everything works

01:37:47

I don't know how but I would encourage Christians to start getting out there and learning and getting involved

01:37:54

So we need to do that That's the only way I think we can ever turn things around in this country and you know in this world

01:38:01

But Christians need to get involved. We have to stop saying, okay. Well, we'll accept this

01:38:06

We'll accept that get involved politically get involved in your school districts get involved in your school systems in your in your local politics

01:38:15

Because you got to start locally and then go out right now New Hampshire has done great this year we have you know

01:38:22

Republican House and Senate and they've passed Abortion no abortion after 24 weeks if you're going to get abortion before 24 weeks.

01:38:31

You have to have an Ultrasound so Lisa got somewhere They're getting they're trying to push things through so New Hampshire's done a lot this year, but it's

01:38:42

Start in your town start in your cities start in your schools and then go forward there

01:38:48

That's the only thing I can you know, I would start small one person Can help make changes?

01:38:55

Yeah, the one thing that I would add to that is that all of this is very important The but is we can't fall into what's known as the political illusion

01:39:06

Which is the idea that the solution to all of our problems is political This is a spiritual battle and we need to keep

01:39:16

I have no objection to getting involved We really should be getting involved in these kinds of things It's part of our responsibility to our towns to our culture to our next generation

01:39:25

But don't lose sight of the spiritual dimensions in the battle Yeah, I just wanted to ask that you basically just said that earlier about our society is pretty much

01:39:42

I Don't know if you believe this personally is rushing towards a wholesale or maybe like a more refined barbarism

01:39:49

In a sense that a wholesale collapse of civilization Regard if things keep getting worse so if that's because I was kind of like I was reading another book regarding um the the collapse of Rome at the time and how they they collapsed with those it

01:40:05

I believe was a lyric the you know, he was the guy who led the Visigoths in the bar the so -called barbarians, right?

01:40:14

So I'm seeing that how Instead of people coming outside. I mean, there's there's always external, you know, you know nations out there that are kind of like, you know

01:40:23

Adverse to our society here, but I see it's it's becoming more ingrained inside of our culture

01:40:29

We're actually I think this guy is actually arguing that we're actually creating barbarians In the sense of like we have lost objective truth

01:40:37

We think that we're trying to they try to assume moral high ground of Like vert of a virtuous victimhood while ignoring like the virtuous victims like of babies in the womb, right?

01:40:49

That's like that's like it's really insane. And so Would you say that that's the that's the way it would come about in those three generations as you stated earlier?

01:40:58

Like would it be coming in like inside out or outside in? Yeah, let's take a look at what happened in Rome It's a great example

01:41:06

The reason why Rome Collapsed at least the western half of it collapses what we think of as the fall of Rome is

01:41:14

Because the culture itself had become hollowed out It rotted from within which opened up the door for The Germanic peoples and so on to migrate in and and and destroy it.

01:41:29

Okay I think that we're seeing a very similar process here when you look at things like the 1619 project what you're seeing is something that is

01:41:41

Systematically designed to delegitimize the United States Okay, are you familiar with 1619 project?

01:41:49

Okay, it's it's designed to delegitimize the country in the eyes of the next generation

01:41:55

What's going to happen when you raise kids with the idea that your country is intrinsically evil?

01:42:02

What happens one generation it's gone We are in the process of doing that right now among You know with things like the 1619 project and other things and the argument is well, you know

01:42:16

If you're not teaching this stuff, you're not teaching the truth about American history. Well, no I don't have an objection to teaching about the warts but you got to teach about the whole thing and Just focusing on this is no more teaching the truth of American history than making believe we were perfect is

01:42:32

You know, so there there are you know, but but I think you're very much Correct in your analogy as a matter of fact

01:42:39

I wrote a book a while ago called why you think the way you do and in that book what

01:42:45

I do It's a it traces the history of Western worldviews from Rome to the present and how changing worldviews changed culture

01:42:52

And what I argued in there and in the conclusion is that the Western world was created as a combination of Rome plus Christianity When you subtract

01:43:01

Christianity, what are you left with? Rome and all the pathologies that are associated with it and we see that in our culture now and We're heading down a similar kind of path the internal self -criticism of the country undermining

01:43:19

Undermining the like said the legitimacy of the country all of those kinds of things passing that on to the next generation

01:43:24

The the sexual chaos did the breakdowns of families the idea that we that that truth

01:43:31

There's no such thing really as truth All of that kind of stuff is destroying the country now

01:43:38

My guess is that it's good that one of one of a couple of things can happen from here One of them is that the country breaks up Which is quite possible.

01:43:48

You mean like a massive succession of sorts? Yeah. Okay. Yeah If that happens, it's likely

01:43:55

We won't go quietly into the good night. There will be a There will be a civil war probably The other possibility is totalitarianism

01:44:04

Either on the right or the left Either it's a way of trying to enforce The current orthodoxy of see critical theory or a backlash against it either way it results in a totalitarianism

01:44:18

Those are the directions the possible directions. I see things going But I'm much better at past history than I am at future history

01:44:29

And also have another question I think maybe not as related but in relation with the topic another

01:44:38

Thing that I kind of talk about, you know, because I'm actually a campus evangelist And so I go on campuses and you know have a lot of you know apologetically gear conversations and I just I just I've just learned that so basically whenever the topic of And I think she just brought it up about abortion comes up, right?

01:44:56

It's a set. It's essentially like like what you just said in your in your um in your presentation like Like it's like I don't know how you worded it

01:45:05

But like I'm pretty much just looked at as as within my class like you're a man So therefore you can't say you you don't have a you know, you don't have the a female reproductive organ

01:45:15

So therefore you can't say anything about this or they'll just say have you ever been pregnant?

01:45:22

And and it'll say these things and it's like, okay, you're you're just basically your entire argument is invalidated, you know, and so Like how can like it's just I know it's very it's absurd

01:45:34

But it's like how do I go about you know, I want to be I mean, I'm trying to be more humble I'm trying to be more gentle and yeah,

01:45:41

I'm just losing my mind I'm like what like and it's like it's like three of them at once. I just like okay.

01:45:46

What like It possible responses come to me. Yeah, I'm from New Jersey The first one is how dare you presume?

01:45:56

I'm a man Honestly, honestly I said

01:46:01

I said that and and I said is it possible for me as a man to have a baby in your worldview and they're like, yeah,

01:46:08

I'm like Absurdity, it's just that's what I'm trying to I'm not trying to be snarky.

01:46:14

I'm not trying to be you know It's just like this is insane. Yeah, well it is. This is literally a difference between us as I did intend to be snarky

01:46:23

But but the other the other way have you ever have you ever been pregnant? No, but I've had if I've been a fetus

01:46:30

I Wish I wish I had you with me.

01:46:35

I wish that They would love you. They would love you. So so, you know that Basically what you what you want to do in these situations is one of two things

01:46:47

I'm always a big fan of trying to turn around and ask a question Don't let that if they're asking the questions

01:46:54

They're controlling conversation. You want to find a way to turn it around and ask them a question. Yes, sir.

01:47:00

Alternately if that doesn't work Use their own worldview against them And I'm dead serious about that because both of those answers

01:47:12

Are ways of taking things that they say is true and showing them the incoherence of the argument that they're making

01:47:20

So it's snarky Yeah, I like that, but but it also you know, there's a tactic involved there that is that's worth

01:47:29

Worth I think thinking about and trying to figure out how to use it You know, those are sort of strategic ways of approaching it.

01:47:36

Thank you So another question back into the long march through history

01:47:43

There's there's certain pillars of Western society as you described that that need to be eroded or collapsed before Before this system can totally take hold if the end goal is communism.

01:47:54

We're still a ways from that but media Academia, I would say Christianity has to be a pillar that that they're looking to topple.

01:48:04

Oh, absolutely. Yeah now it doesn't seem and I could be wrong It doesn't seem as though the church is under the crosshairs as fiercely right now as Other cultural battles, but I think that's coming

01:48:21

Maybe they are but I was gonna ask what how do you see the attack coming right now? And how do you see the attack maybe and this goes to history in the future?

01:48:30

But how do you see that attack coming? okay, now I Am from New Jersey My answer about why the church isn't in the crosshairs right now

01:48:42

Is that the church is singularly ineffective and is rolling over and playing dead

01:48:47

Wow We are not a threat Therefore we are ignored.

01:48:53

Yeah, the only place we are a threat is when we defy mask mandates Wow, I Saw a statement from someone.

01:49:06

I forgot who said this but it was something to the effect of What we really need are

01:49:14

Preachers whom people want to kill Steve Lawson, okay, we don't have that we actually did a webinar on whatever happened to evangelicalism and Basically what what went wrong for us is we became popular 1976 the year of the evangelical according to time magazine

01:49:40

You know, we became up to up to about that point evangelicals and actually No, they won't get into all of it.

01:49:47

We were really sort of a very distinct minority Everybody thinks of the 1950s as this sort of Golden Age of Christianity was the

01:49:54

Golden Age of liberal Protestantism It was not the Golden Age of evangelicalism Starting in 1976.

01:50:01

We came out of the woodwork and started becoming popular and we got addicted to our popularity and The net result is what you get today are churches that are so concerned with being

01:50:13

Popular with attracting people with making people comfortable that a church service consists of a concert followed by a

01:50:20

TED talk We need we need churches that are going to be the church that are going to stand up without Compromise in their preaching and their teaching and in their worship because worship is warfare, too

01:50:34

We need to have churches that are going to be uncompromising in those areas because otherwise they're not a threat and they'll get ignored

01:50:42

So good. Thank you. I don't have strong opinions about things

01:50:53

Other questions Long walk

01:51:04

So you mentioned the Preparing as if we are that fourth generation Archbishop and that really resonates.

01:51:12

I think that's a you know, really astute especially with where we are today But I do wonder, you know as far as the church and its role today

01:51:19

Should we be? Like what's the balance between being inwardly focused and building up a really strong foundation within communities within church communities in order that In the event that this isn't that we are maybe that first generation, right?

01:51:33

We're the ones who are gonna die peacefully in our bed and our children are gonna be the ones dying in prison our grandchildren And so on and so forth

01:51:39

What is the balance that we strike of being really focused on building us building strong biblical biblically based communities around the

01:51:46

Word of God and You know, maybe being very visible in a culture that is growing in its animosity as opposed to its receptivity

01:51:55

Okay, you I think we have to work Hard at building intentional communities, but they have to be communities that are open open walls so that we are

01:52:10

You know, the Great Commission still applies to us We can't be so inwardly focused that we lose the fact that we've got a mission

01:52:18

To rescue people to bring them in to bring them into the kingdom to introduce them to kingdom life.

01:52:24

I Would say I'm not sure this is exactly your question But I would say that one of the best models for doing that is

01:52:33

To get involved in your community Every community has needs every community has got problems

01:52:40

How can your church help address those? You know cases an example for our from my church in Connecticut the

01:52:49

Deacons most of them didn't do this, but we had one guy who actually got what

01:52:56

Deacons were about who became the head of the Deacons and What he did is he went to the

01:53:01

Wethersfield food pantry and said to them. What do you need? Give me a list you know, what are you short of and they gave him a list and He went out with a couple of guys and went to the local grocery stores.

01:53:14

Now. You got to know Brian Brian is He's a biker He's got a tattoo that starts on his scalp and finishes on his instep

01:53:24

He's a scary -looking dude and and he had a guy with him named Chris Dukes Chris is is about this tall and about this wide

01:53:34

Was a shot -putter The two of these guys go to go to the local grocery stores and as people are coming in they say hey we are

01:53:46

We're with we're from First Church. We are Trying to raise, you know get get things for the

01:53:53

Wethersfield food pantry. Here is a list of things that they need If you know if you would be so kind as to just buy something on this list

01:54:02

Just buy one thing and leave it with us when you go. We'll deliver it. They had people got entire shopping carts other people

01:54:13

Just bought one or two other people gave the money Brian took all of the stuff to the food bank and kept the money.

01:54:21

Now keep keeping money is important for what's kind of about to come So the

01:54:26

Wethersfield food bank turns out it's now totally stocked He calls them a couple of months later and says

01:54:32

You know, we were given donations, you know some some money donations What do you need and they said, you know, we're still really well stocked with food what we need a personal care items

01:54:43

You know, so toothbrushes things like that So we went to Ocean State job lots and spent the money and just bought a boatload of that stuff and brought it in How much of an impact do you think that's gonna have on the community

01:54:56

How much of an impact do you think it has on the people who work at the Wethersfield food bank? And what he's doing there is genuinely kingdom work

01:55:08

Because the kingdom isn't just about personal evangelism. It's not just about me and Jesus That's a secular vision of what the kingdom is.

01:55:16

It's a secular vision of the gospel In in the kingdom everything that is wrong in the world is fixed.

01:55:22

Everything that's broken is repaired. Everything that's lost is restored That includes people but it also includes

01:55:31

Institutions it includes food banks. It includes all of those kinds of things. So question. What are the needs in your community?

01:55:36

Do you even know and What can you do to mobilize your community to meet at least some of those needs?

01:55:45

That's a way of simultaneously building community doing outreach Demonstrating the love of God all of these things together

01:55:55

So that would be a concrete suggestion of a way of moving forward

01:56:01

We do need to get engaged Certainly in you know, we we live in a republic.

01:56:07

We have a tremendous privilege there We can lobby our government we can write letters We can get involved in elections to school boards or local councils or things like that We can do all of those things and all of those things are good

01:56:19

But it's the church there are other things that we can do that go beyond that in many ways and start having a really concrete impact right where we are

01:56:30

Thank you, I know Derek said one last question, but I want to open it up Is there anyone who has any other questions because I got one more

01:56:39

I can go all day Okay Resources, where do we go if we want to learn more and What are some resources maybe at various reading levels and competency levels intro medium intermediate

01:57:01

So that we can just continue learning continue growing in this in this area Hands -down the best book on critical theory that I've read for Christians is booked by Thaddeus Williams called confronting injustice without compromising truth

01:57:17

Excellent book because it does what few others do it acknowledges that there are genuine problems here

01:57:24

But it approaches them through a biblical lens in contrast to critical theory and he shows the difference between the two

01:57:31

Easily the best book on it. It's a pretty pretty easy read beyond that Votie Bacchum's book fault lines is especially important for people in the evangelical community

01:57:42

Because it confronts us with the compromises that are taking place within the churches Beyond that the stuff that I've read tends to get on the rather technical side

01:57:53

So I'm afraid those would be the two that I would recommend more or less for general readership If you want something that's a little more challenging.

01:58:00

I would go with the rise and triumph of the modern self by Carl Truman That picks up on particularly the sexual revolution side of all this explains where that comes from What the ideas are and why that is such a critically important part of this whole package.

01:58:22

I Think I speak for everyone. Dr. Sunshine. Thank you so much for the lecture and for answering our questions.

01:58:27

This was great As far as right now we're officially dismissed but linger around talk to dr.