Session 1: The History of Social Justice

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Just to give you a preview of what we're going to go through, because it's a lot, I was trying to narrow things down, because there's just so much that we could talk about.

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It's a new religion, and it would be like if you were going to do a conference on the

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New Age movement, or on even a cult like Mormonism or the Jehovah's Witness movement.

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I mean, if you're going to try to tackle that in one day, you have to narrow the information down, because it just, this kind of thinking, since it's religious, can work itself into every single area of life.

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And so I think I've been able to do that. And what I wanted to do first was to walk you through the history of how we got to this point.

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So what is social justice? So I'm not going to be reading a lot of scripture in the first session.

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It's just more explaining what is it we're dealing with. I think that's the biggest challenge, because once you can identify what this heresy is, what this false religion is, then you know how to deal with it.

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The problem is that it's very hard to identify, because it's very syncretistic. It attaches itself to all kinds of other belief systems,

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Christianity being no exception to that. And so that's what

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I want to do to begin with. I'm going to give you a historical kind of survey of how this whole movement started, how we got to this point.

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And then for the two sessions in the afternoon, and then the Q &A, we're just, it's going to be a lot more fluid.

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So we're going to be reading some scripture. We're going to be, you know, going into detail about the current incarnation of social justice, what it looks like, how we can respond to it from a biblical standpoint.

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So that's kind of where we're going. And I, you know, some of you know I am a history guy.

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That was my last master's was in history. And so I love, I've become kind of a,

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I don't know, a snob for using sources. So this is a sequential walkthrough of the social justice movement.

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And there's a lot of sources, so a lot of information. So if you're taking notes, feel free, you don't have to write everything down.

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What you do need to understand is just the basic beliefs that have carried through this whole movement.

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So we're going to start with egalitarianism and go through Marxism and postmodernism and all the things that have been added, attached to this theory throughout the last 300 years.

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So we're going to go through 300 years of information, so hold on to your seatbelts. In Birmingham, Alabama on June 1st, 2019, the largest

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Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention, approved a resolution endorsing two modern social justice teachings, critical race theory and intersectionality, as analytical tools which could aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences.

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So long as they were subordinate to scripture, did include that language. Pastor John MacArthur, a popular evangelical leader outside the denomination, predicted its demise since the majority approved of using external cultural cues to interpret the

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Bible. James Lindsay, a secular expert on critical theory, concurred stating that the move invited a huge wooden horse outside the door, which would be used as an eisegetical tool, his words.

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From the Federalist, a politically conservative news source, one writer stated the Southern Baptist Convention is being infiltrated by an ideology that is antithetical to the

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Christian religion. Yet most messengers representing the denomination did not see the problem with this.

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Pastor Tom Askell, one of the dissenting voices at the convention, believed people didn't understand what they were voting for, and as a result, in his words, were played.

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Yet since the recent increase in social justice rhetoric inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, it has become apparent that whether self -aware or not, many professing evangelicals believe some of the core assumptions of modern social justice theory.

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The Gospel Coalition, a popular neo -reformed organization, hosted a lament session in which popular evangelicals denounced white privilege and systemic racism in both the country and the church.

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Phil Vischer, the creator of the popular children's show Veggie Tales, argued in a viral video that racism in the

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United States was normative. Most of his information came from Michelle Alexander's revisionist work, The New Jim Crow, which even drew directly from critical race theorists like Derrick Bell and Mary Matsuda.

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J .D. Greer, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, proclaimed the phrase Black Lives Matter to be a gospel issue and moved to retire the use of both the name of the denomination and the gavel used to preside over meetings by associating them with slavery.

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These examples only illustrate the tip of the iceberg, which includes many denominations, organizations,

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Bible schools, ministries, and individual Christian leaders who have taken it upon themselves to show solidarity with the latest incarnation of the social justice movement.

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And despite new terminology such as get woke, decolonize, and mansplain, the current call for social justice is not a recent phenomenon.

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And I really want to stress that. This isn't really anything new. It's actually a repackaged configuration of egalitarian ideas heavily influenced over the past century by postmodern and Marxist derivatives.

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And because groups as diverse as traditional socialists, secular New Left scholars, progressive religious leaders, and today's critical theorists have all appealed to the principle of social justice in furthering their agendas, the various movements and contributions which fall under that umbrella have made the term very hard to define and identify because what's social justice to one group may not be quite the same to another group.

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And so anytime you try to define this, you're going to get groups who disagree with you about their version of what social justice is.

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So let me be clear in giving you the history behind this that there is a redistributive social justice which has a longevity, has a history behind it.

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And there may be—it's kind of like Christianity. There's different denominations. There's different sects. But at the end of the day, there's some core principles

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Christians, Orthodox Christians believed, even though a Pentecostal might not agree with a Calvinist, right?

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It's the same thing with this movement. You may have different groups, but at the end of the day, there are some core principles, and that's what we want to focus on.

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In 1971, political philosopher John Rawls released the popular book, A Theory of Justice, which conceived of social justice as the kind of benefit -allocating system reasonable people would choose had they known what social identity— had they not known, sorry—what social identity, such as gender or race, they would be born into when they came into existence.

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And so this was called the Veil of Ignorance. And he said, if you didn't know that you were going to be a certain gender or a certain race or, you know, whatever external factor, this is the kind of system you would try to promote.

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It would be—and he called that social justice, you know, if you had no knowledge of who you'd be.

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Now, that's kind of vague. That's kind of—that can—that's very rooted in man and subjective, in a way.

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Five years later, economist Frederick Hayek concluded that social justice was, in fact, a vacuous term used to justify the redistribution of larger shares between unequal social groups.

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And I think because of what John Rawls did, it just became this kind of— whatever side wanted to claim social justice, whatever group wanted to claim it, they would just claim it and say they had moral virtue because they were promoting social justice.

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And John Rawls basically ushered in something that Frederick Hayek noticed is— this is just used by socialists.

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They're just using this as— to kind of baptize their own version of socialism by not calling it that.

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Today, Oxford Dictionary defines social justice as justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.

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And this basic understanding developed organically in common parlance over the last century and a half.

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Though doctrinal disagreements over the domain and degree of the problem, as well as different solutions emerged between organizations claiming the mantle of social justice, the commonly shared belief is that disparities and advantages between social groups are immoral and must be rectified through some kind of reallocation.

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It should be noted that before the influence of Karl Marx, the term was rarely used and generally referred to protecting the legal rights of citizens equally.

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In fact, Roman Catholics had a short history of teaching a type of social justice without advocating redistribution.

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And I'm going to bring you through some of that. They eventually succumbed, though, and we'll see that.

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Following the Industrial Revolution, Roman Catholic social teaching sought to preserve the natural order which had previously existed through agrarian social bonds and obligations.

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So in short, before the Industrial Revolution, in a more of a feudalistic society, you had the lords, the people who owned the land, and then you had the people that worked the land, and there was a working together between the two.

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And there were certain bonds and obligations. And we don't even understand what that would look like today.

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That's so far outside of our experience as 21st century Americans. But this, just a short while ago, that was the world that pretty much everyone in the

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Western world lived in. And so Roman Catholic teaching sought to preserve those bonds, that there were obligations.

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And now that you have more employee -employer relationships instead of people working the land and those who own the land, they tried to say, well, those who are the employers have the same kind of obligation the lords had when they owned the land, that kind of thing.

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And there's more I could say about that, but that's essentially what they were trying to do. And so neither capitalism's unrestricted competition of forces nor socialism's opposition of classes were acceptable philosophies in their mind.

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Instead, a social justice concerned with the common good was to ensure both the right to private property and a living wage.

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And that wasn't a living wage because the government would necessarily enforce it. It was the obligation of employers, they thought, to provide that living wage, just as they had done when they were the lords of estates.

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However, beginning in the 1960s, Catholic teaching started highlighting economic and social differences and became more concerned with the common good as understood in a more socialistic framework.

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You had some of the Catholic documents sort of highlighting things like the differences between nations and genders as being problematic, as well as accommodating a more expansive understanding of the state's regulatory role.

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In 2009, Pope Benedict promoted a distributive and social justice which supported state -imposed mechanisms of wealth redistribution, including the worldwide redistribution of energy resources.

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In his own words, the Pope now also believed in pursuing justice through redistribution.

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That is a quote from the Pope. Through this kind of redistributive justice, though this kind of redistributive justice was not a new idea, it did not originate within Christianity.

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So, to sort of summarize what I've already talked about, Catholic social teaching originally was not socialism, but it morphed into that over time.

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And we're going to see the same kind of thing happen in the Protestant circles and pretty much every time the word today, social justice, is used, it just about 99 % of the time refers to redistributive social justice, not what was advocated by Roman Catholics in the 1840s.

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Following the Industrial Revolution, Roman, oh, sorry, we already talked about that. Let's talk about the French Revolution, because this is where I think things, where we really want to trace the roots of social justice teaching.

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There was a man named Grouchous Bebouf, and he was a socialist and leader in the

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French Revolution. He was the first one to clearly and publicly advocate for a version of justice which required state redistribution efforts on behalf of the poor.

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In 1793, he stated that the right to private property should be limited so as to prevent the injustice of depriving certain individuals of social and economic equality.

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Bebouf stood on a moral platform built by Jean -Jacques Rousseau, who imagined a world in which an egalitarian utopia replaced the traditional hierarchies and maintained itself by means of the social contract.

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So when we're talking about social justice, this is where we want to start, right? Some people want to start with Roman Catholic social teaching so then they can say social justice has some kind of Christian base.

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It doesn't really start there. It starts before that, the kind of social justice we're talking about today, and it starts with these guys.

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Rousseau famously stated, man is born free and yet universally enslaved. Society itself, he believed, imposed political inequality by allocating different privileges like wealth and honor and power to some and not to others.

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Social institutions promoting inequality justified themselves by appealing to sacred maxims and claiming divine rights.

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In contrast, Rousseau advocated a social compact drawing its moral authority from the general will which eradicated personal dependence and compelled citizens to be free.

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His goal was to return mankind as closely as possible to a state of nature in which socially imposed disparities did not exist.

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Rousseau's teaching contained three major objectives, and this is important because this has carried through for the last 300 years, three major objectives which have carried through.

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First, achieving an egalitarian ideal. That's number one. Second, dismantling social institutions which prevent its achievement.

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And third, the implementation of a force capable of executing the utopian dream. I'll read it one more time.

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First, achieving an egalitarian ideal. Second, dismantling social institutions which prevent its achievement.

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And third, the implementation of a force capable of executing the utopian dream.

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Interestingly enough, some of you might not know this, Jean -Jacques Rousseau claimed to be a

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Calvinist until the day he died. He was from Geneva, and that was his tradition.

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And some people have said, well, you can't be a Calvinist and believe in social justice. Well, maybe not a consistent one.

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But from the beginning, those who started this whole, this ball rolling actually had a

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Calvinist background. And certainly, though, Rousseau, as you can see from the quotes I just read of his, was not trying to appeal to God anymore for the validity of social institutions and hierarchies.

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He was trying to get away from that and root justice in a man -centered view. Not very Calvinistic, but I just figured

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I'd throw that out there because I know a lot of people listening probably have that bent or at least a conviction similar to a

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Calvinist conviction of some kind. After the French Revolution, these ideas took on various forms and spread to other

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European countries. By the 1840s, the spirit of revolution filled the continent. August Becker, a

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German socialist who wrote, What Do the Communists Want?, in 1844, this is before Marx, identified the basic rule of communism in this phrase, each according to his abilities, each according to his needs.

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This is before Marx wrote. Four years later, during the revolutions of 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the

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Communist Manifesto, calling for mechanisms to abolish bourgeois property, state control of credit, transportation and production, and free public education.

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That was one of their planks. We, some of these things we just assume are not communist because we just grew up with them, but this was one of his goals.

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Religion had no place in Marx's framework. He declared saintly socialism is but the holy water which the priest blesses the fulminations of the aristocrat.

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So Christianity was bad. Christianity, this is continuing on Rousseau's kind of theme, of you can't root justification for hierarchies and social institutions in anything divine.

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As a result, Marx attempted to answer the objection that communism would abolish eternal truths, including justice.

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Marx's answer was not to argue for a common transcendent principle of justice compatible with communism, but rather to criticize the established understanding of justice as a form of exploitation common to all past centuries.

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In a way, this is why the alternative phrase social justice eventually became popular. So Marx is saying, people are saying to Marx, what you're doing is destroying the foundation for justice in the first place.

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You get rid of God, you get rid of justifying social institutions based on God, you can't have justice. And Marx says, well, yeah, well justice is just a social construct essentially to pick, to use some modern postmodern terminology.

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He's saying justice itself, what is that? That's just a tool that the oppressors use to try to oppress their victims.

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So he destroyed any kind of justice. But in a day when most people were religious, that doesn't fly too well.

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Most people in the world interpreted the world in religious terms. Harnessing the concept of justice in the cause of egalitarian redistribution made socialism more palatable.

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So in other words, if you call it social justice instead of socialism, you can actually, you can maybe get more support, especially if you're in an area where there's a lot of people who believe in religion.

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They're not going to buy Karl Marx, it's too atheistic, it's too secular. In 1888, John Ray, a

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Scottish journalist, stated this. So firm is the hold taken by the notion that the socialists are the special champions of social justice that one of the most respected prelates, the

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Bishop of Rochester, has actually defined socialism in that sense. It's 1888,

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John Ray is saying, when people talk about socialism in Scotland, or social justice in Scotland, they're just talking about socialism.

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When the bishops, the religious leaders, talk about social justice, they're talking about socialism. That's what he's saying. Ten years later,

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Alfred Russell Wallace, a famous British naturalist, spiritualist, and socialist, told the

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International Congress of Spiritualists that charity had utterly failed. And it was time to demand social justice.

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In his book, Unjust, Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, Noah Rothman stated that social justice came from utopian theological movements in the 19th century before becoming an element of the left's governing program in the mid to late 20th century.

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Social reform movements for abolitionism, women's rights, anti -masonry, and temperance all took on almost revolutionary form of immediacy in the northern

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United States. Simultaneously, socialist utopian schemes like Brook Farm and Oneida Community, as well as the influx of socialist immigrants like August Becker, who we just talked about, came into the

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Union Army in American journalism after the failed 1848 German Revolution. And that prepared the way for both secular and Christian social justice efforts.

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Franklin Sprague, a Christian minister in Springfield, Massachusetts, and a member of the Socialist Society called the

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Connecticut Valley Economic Association, wrote Socialism from Genesis to Revelation in 1892.

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In it, he argued for Christian socialism, which he claimed applied Christian ethics to the economy and was the only basis for peace.

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Though Sprague wanted to reclaim the term socialism, he admitted there was prejudice against the word and often used the term social justice instead.

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He argued that there were two competing visions for the state's role. One was individual liberty, which protected individual license, social inequality, and individual tyranny.

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So that's our founding fathers right there. And the other was social justice, which demanded the public good.

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In 1897, Charles Allen, a contributor to the socialist -friendly magazine The Arena, portrayed the

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Hebrew prophets and Protestant reformers as the first to define the principles of social justice by taking the side of the people against privileged classes.

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The same year, J. Stitt Wilson, a former Methodist minister who later became the mayor of Berkeley, California, ran for Congress on a socialist platform, founded the

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Social Crusade to preach socialism as the means to realize the vision of a truly Christian society.

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Wilson described his effort in salvific terms. The Social Crusade, he said, goes forth to give light to them that sit in industrial darkness, condemn the industrial and commercial inequities, placing them in the fervent light and heat of the new social ethics of brotherhood and social justice, and to call men individually to become saviors and redeemers of their fellow men, and socially to a great salvation.

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End quote. Wilson's aim was to create, quote, the eternal social ideal, the kingdom of heaven on the earth.

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In 1910, Thomas Cumming Hall, a professor of ethics at Union Theological Seminary, observed that the kind of people who became

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Fabian socialists in England called themselves Christian socialists in the

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United States. Like their Fabian cousins, Christian socialists sought to gradually enact policies for communal ownership instead of attempting violent revolution.

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So it's just a different strategy of how to get to the same goal, essentially. However, unlike the

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Fabians, who were humanists, Christian socialists were motivated by social justice and the kingdom of God.

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Two years before, Leslie M. Shaw, the former Secretary of the Treasury, expressed his alarm that not only educational but also religious institutions trended towards socialism, or the idea that men must succeed equally regardless of aptitude.

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Christian advocacy for social justice rose in the United States and culminated in the social gospel movement of Walter Rauschenbusch.

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Rauschenbusch was a Baptist minister and professor in Rochester, New York. He became interested in Fabian socialism after visiting

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England in 1891. He eventually promoted a view which embraced the economic doctrines of socialism while repudiating the atheism, free love, and red -handed violence associated with the broader movement.

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Sound familiar? In 1907, Rauschenbusch published Christianity and the Social Crisis, in which he lamented that an individualized faith in the future life had subdued the demand for social justice in Christianity.

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In order to Christianize the social order, he advocated the abolition of unjust privilege in Christianity.

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According to him, powerful men frustrated the cause of social justice in order to hold their selfish social and economic privileges.

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It was therefore the job of Christians, following Jesus' example, to turn the energies of religion from the maintenance of conservative institutions to the support of movements for political emancipation and, he said, social justice.

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Rauschenbusch's teachings spiritualized socialist ideas by recasting the gospel as a call for social justice.

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His ideas influenced progressive Christian figures like Reinhold Neiber, Martin Luther King Jr., and Desmond Tutu.

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Theological conservatives, however, rejected Rauschenbusch's reconfiguration. Fundamentalists like Charles Erdmann, a theology professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, argued against the social gospel.

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Instead, he applied the social principles of Christ to the hierarchies of family, labor, and civil relationships while denying the idea of an earthly heaven realized through human effort.

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Unfortunately for theological conservatives, though, while they may have slowed the march towards social justice, they were not able to stop it.

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For the next century, Rousseau's original paradigm morphed into today's social justice movement and gained greater acceptance within the ranks of American Christianity.

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So this is the social justice movement, its roots, its origin. It is a Christianized socialism in the

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Protestant world. Catholics at this time, they're still marching towards redefining social justice.

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But in the Christian world, this is basically Christianized socialism. And this is where the cultural

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Marxism starts coming in. The next major thinker that we're going to talk about is Antonio Gramsci.

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For Gramsci, bourgeois dominance ran deeper than economics. The working class often failed to revolt against their overlords because they consented to the hegemony or reigning ideologies manifested in the political, cultural, and moral leadership of the upper class.

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So in other words, it's not just economics. They're oppressing you through these cultural institutions as well.

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From the perspective of the workers and peasants, it was common sense to remain under the control of the property class and the democratic parliamentary state, so long as it benefited them.

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But what they did not realize, according to Gramsci, was that their passivity was the result of values imposed on them through things like libraries, schools, voluntary associations, architecture, street names, and the church.

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So he's saying that the world in which the oppressed, the underclass live, is completely controlled by the oppressors.

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And because they're basically brainwashed by the oppressors through these cultural institutions, they're not going to revolt.

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That's the problem. They won't usher in, they'll work through the democratic process. In order to overturn this complex interdependent web of power, socialists needed to cease contenting themselves to operate within the values of the state and start criticizing the status quo, building their own hegemony and waiting for the collapse of the old order.

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Gramsci believed intellectuals could play a pivotal role by helping the members of the oppressed class form a common identity through art, technology, and the creation of new organizations.

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And this is where you see the start of those in academia, those in college, those who are the intellectuals start forming a bond with those who they think are the oppressed and helping them to organize, form their own alternative to the hegemony, the culture that exists and its values.

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From 1926 until his death in 1937, Gramsci, a leader in the Communist Party of Italy, remained in custody in Benito Mussolini's fascist government.

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And this event sealed Gramsci's status as a martyr in the cause of revolution and also afforded him the opportunity to write the prison notebooks in which he developed his ideas.

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Gramsci had a profound impact on new left intellectuals and 1960s radicals. Rudy Duce summed up his strategy in 1967 with the famous phrase, the long march through the institutions.

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You've probably heard that before. Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School described this as working against the established institutions while working within them and building counter -institutions.

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So this is what we're seeing today. This sounds exactly like what we're seeing around us right now. As the 20th century proceeded,

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Western Marxists like Gramsci drilled deeper into the culture, identifying conditions by which the powerful exerted their dominance.

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And this is where we start seeing what, at the time, it wasn't called postmodernism.

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It was pre -postmodernism, Hegelian ideas, Kantian ideas, ideological ideas instead of realistic ideas.

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This is sort of the ground in which postmodernism was built. But we start seeing these ideas come in.

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I'm going to give you a few examples of this. And this is the tools they used to drill deeper into the culture. One of Gramsci's friends, a

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Hungarian communist leader named George Lukács, argued that capitalism was actually a reality -altering mindset.

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This is going deeper than Gramsci went, saying it's in the mind. That's the real problem.

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He stated, not until the rise of capitalism was a unified economic structure and hence a formally unified structure of consciousness that embraced the whole society, was the society brought into being.

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Capitalism was essentially a way of thinking that reduced everything to a disposable commodity from journalism to marriage to human worth itself.

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However, there was an escape from this mental enslavement. I'm going to read for you. This is a quote from Lukács.

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And it's very telling. It reads like the newspaper. The knowledge yielded by the standpoint of the proletariat stands on a higher scientific plane objectively.

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Proletariat's the underclass, the working class, the oppressed. It stands on a higher plane objectively. It does, after all, apply a method that makes possible the solution of problems which the greatest thinkers of the bourgeois era have vainly struggled to find.

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And in substance, it provides the adequate historical analysis of capitalism, which must remain beyond the grasp of bourgeois thinkers.

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So here's what he's saying. The elites, those who control the society, they can't solve the social problems that we have.

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You know who can? The oppressed. And you have to look at things from their perspective and from their standpoint. If you're privileged, you'll never be able to understand.

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So it's better for the privileged to just shut up and listen to the oppressed perspective. This was the

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Hungarian communist, George Lukács. Though both the working and property class lived within the reality of capitalist society, capitalism used the motor of class interest to keep the bourgeoisie mentality imprisoned.

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The working class, on the other hand, had the ability to achieve class consciousness and transcend their social dilemma based on their experience of being more powerfully affected by social change.

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So it's experience that determines truth now. Interestingly, Lukács assumed that the working class also needed insights from bourgeois thinkers like Marx, Hegel, and Kant in order to realize their ethical and epistemological superiority.

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So this is the Achilles' heel. Every time this is brought up, it's a trope.

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You need to go to the working class to find out, or the lower class or the oppressed people to find out the solutions to injustice.

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But meanwhile, the only solutions that qualify are solutions from bourgeois thinkers like Marx.

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It's privileged people that are the ones that are representing the working class perspective.

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You're not going to the factory and getting John Doe on the microphone to see what he wants to do about social change.

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You're going to the intellectuals again. So this is kind of a deception in a way. But this is what they think.

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The significance of Lukács' teaching lies in the fact that he helped make censorship intellectually justifiable as Marxist regimes and organizations restricted viewpoints they believed did not accord to orthodox, lower class perspectives.

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He also inspired the writers of the Frankfurt School to see through the specious abundance of the American dream to the inner and subjective alienation that was concealed by it.

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So there's all this progress happening in the 1950s and people are living well and the American dream is happening and the

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Frankfurt School was able to take this idea and this thinking and say, yeah, but that's all mental captivity. You may look good.

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You may think it's good. There's all this material goods and so forth. But actually what's really going on is the upper classes are still imposing their dominance on the lower classes.

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More and more, Western Marxism took on a religious dimension. Only Marxism, an all -encompassing view of reality, held the key for social liberation bound up in the sacred knowledge of the workers.

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Soon, this kind of profound insight broadened to include identities other than economic class.

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We're seeing that today. So this is in the early 1900s. We're still there.

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In 1924, the Institute for Social Research, which came to be known as the Frankfurt School, started in Germany.

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At the inaugural address, the director, Carl Grunberg, announced that he saw Marxism not in terms of party politics but rather in terms of an ideological -driven research methodology.

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This research primarily focused not on the economic base but rather the political and cultural superstructure of society.

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Marx Horkheimer became the director in 1930 and charged his colleagues to examine the entire material and spiritual culture of mankind in order to expose hidden oppression woven into the fabric of society itself.

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This approach he referred to as critical theory and described its goal as man's emancipation from slavery.

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So that's where critical theory started, and that was its goal. It's still the same utopian goal as Rousseau.

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Man is enslaved everywhere and can't do anything about it. Critical theory is going to help free man from slavery.

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Horkheimer lamented that a success -worshiping society confines social justice to issues like theft and murder while turning a blind eye to the universal injustice surrounding them.

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He observed that progress toward utopia was blocked by a system of social power which controlled the masses by what he called the technocracy, which derived from the

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Enlightenment and reduced objects to mathematical formulas. Along with Theodor Adorno, another member of the

34:18

Frankfurt School, Horkheimer published Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947, which argued that culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.

34:29

In their view, essentially, what was going on was film and radio and all these media outlets that were now popular.

34:37

This is the rise of media in that time were enslaving people. They're by using people's own self -interest against them.

34:44

So the advertisements, you don't need what they're trying to offer you, but you must get it because it's part of the mental enslavement.

34:53

It's actually a slavery of choice, but they're using your choice against you. They're manipulating into choices that you shouldn't make because they're bad for you.

35:02

And so this is why the American Dream was bad that whole time period. Instead of the bourgeoisie oppressing the proletariat, it was the producers and advertisers enslaving consumers by using their desires against their own interests.

35:15

Increasingly, the problem with society was not capitalism in and of itself, but a culture that tolerated and propagated capitalism.

35:23

So there's a shift going on from the economic system to the culture itself. It's not just an economic problem anymore.

35:30

This is a social problem. The Frankfurt School thus analyzed and uncovered the totalitarianism baked into various aspects of culture, including commerce, education, religion, entertainment, and sexuality.

35:41

And I'm going to give you an example of that. There was a book called The Authoritarian Personality, which was published in 1950 by Theodor Adorno.

35:52

He collaborated with some other sociologists. And remember, this is after World War II, right?

35:58

And it had a profound impact on the direction of university research. And here's what the study did. It created something called the

36:04

F scale. Some of you might have heard of that, which stands for fascism. So it measures how fascist you are, essentially.

36:12

And it suggested that traits such as submission to parental authority, a belief in traditional gender roles, family pride, fear of homosexuality, a strong devotion to Christianity, and the notion that foreign ideas posed a threat to American institutions signaled implicit pre -fascist tendencies.

36:36

And there's other categories he used as well. But if you just loved your family, loved your country, and submitted to your parents, well, you may be a fascist or going in that direction, all right?

36:48

And this got into university research. This is the root of what we're seeing today in all the ridiculous critical theory research that we see.

36:56

It was this political philosophy combined with postmodernism, cultural Marxism, combined with postmodernism that provided the rationale behind the new left movements of the 60s and 70s.

37:07

And one note about cultural Marxism. If you say the word cultural Marxism, many people will tell you that you are an anti -Semite.

37:15

You can't say it really in the academy anymore without someone calling you an anti -Semite. The reason being that the members of the

37:21

Frankfurt School were primarily Jewish. And the argument is that in the 1990s, some people started using the phrase cultural

37:28

Marxism. And they were anti -Semites. And therefore, it's anti -Semitic.

37:36

I found some sources from the 1970s that were not anti -Semites that called the

37:41

Frankfurt School specifically cultural Marxist. So you are free to use that phrase. It is an appropriate phrase. It's Marxism applied to the culture.

37:50

Herbert Marcuse is sometimes called the father of the new left. He's a member of the Frankfurt School. The movement begun primarily among students who protested for social justice against the oppression of middle class cultural standards and expectations.

38:03

In 1965, Marcuse wrote that the small and powerless minorities must be helped, even if it meant suspending constitutional rights and liberties.

38:14

In Marcuse's mind, free speech and assembly should not be allowed for groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, et cetera.

38:28

So if you're opposing socialism, or in the minds of the Frankfurt School, if you're a racist or a sexist, et cetera, you should not have the ability to speak freely or assemble freely.

38:39

Those constitutional rights should not apply to you. This is Marcuse. And we can see where that led.

38:45

We can see in today's political correctness where that led. Marcuse taught that liberating tolerance actually meant intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.

38:59

That's his quote, not mine. So whenever you hear the word tolerance and you think the old definition of tolerance, think

39:07

Marcuse's definition of tolerance. And so those who propagate capitalism, those who are part of the hegemony, they are not to be tolerated.

39:19

That's the moral of that story. Let's talk about postmodernism now.

39:32

Marcuse gleaned a lot of his ideas from actually a Nazi Party member, ironically, named...

39:40

I don't have a slide for that. I should have. There's a Nazi Party member named Martin Heidegger.

39:45

Martin Heidegger inspired Marcuse, but he also inspired these guys, which

39:50

I'm about to talk about, Derrida and Foucault, who are postmodernists. Heidegger believed that things were, in part, defined by their context and not simply their essence.

40:02

They're defined by their context, not their essence. Where they exist in a social framework, that is what defines you.

40:09

Your identity is defined by that, not by who you are on the inside.

40:16

This is anti -Plato. This is anti -Platonic. This is really anti -Christian, this kind of understanding of definition.

40:23

Things are defined by their context, not their essence. For example, factors like time, language, philosophy, and reason itself shape the identity of individuals.

40:33

Marcuse put a Marxist spin on Heidegger by applying this idea to the examination of social arrangements, economic orders, and political formations.

40:41

Thus, cultural institutions and associations should be defined and described not according to what they are in and of themselves, but by their overall effect.

40:51

What am I saying? Because parsing these postmodernist guys and pre -postmodern thinkers is very difficult.

40:58

What he's saying is that you don't come into the world as someone with a magode, a definition of yourself, certain responsibilities you have as being a son or a daughter, and then a father, a husband, etc.

41:15

Those define you in part, but you're actually part of a bigger matrix of things that define you. Your culture defines who you are.

41:23

So identity becomes this big thing, and it creates some insecurity, because there's really nothing solid by which to claim your identity.

41:29

You can't say, this is who I am, because it's, well, this is who I am contingent on where I exist in a social framework.

41:35

My power level, all sorts of other factors. Two influential French postmodernists,

41:40

Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, took these ideas much farther.

41:47

Derrida, who is often called the father of deconstruction, believed language did not correspond to reality, but rather to itself.

41:54

This was summarized in his famous statement in 1967, that there is nothing outside the text.

42:01

In other words, the symbols which make up language are enmeshed in a sea of other symbols which relate to one another according to the arbitrary norms and rules of institutional structures.

42:12

To put it another way, meaning was not found in what was said, but rather by what was meant in accordance with the hegemony of language.

42:21

You ever hear political liberals talk about dog whistles? Conservatives say, we support the free market.

42:28

Well, that's a dog whistle to all the white supremacists. Think Jacques Derrida. The words don't mean what you think they mean.

42:34

The words mean what the cultural hegemony intends for the effect the cultural hegemony wants them to take when they say them.

42:42

So this is where the postmodernists can deconstruct your language and tell you what it really meant.

42:47

Because it's not according to what you thought it meant. It's not authorial intent as much as it is what it means in the context and the effect it's having.

42:59

So using certain tools of analysis, many of which were inspired by Marx, Derrida endeavored to deconstruct messages in order to expose the prejudice embedded within them.

43:11

In so doing, he was actually deconstructing the entire identity of nation -states as represented in their language.

43:18

Derrida stated himself that deconstruction was a radicalization of a certain Marxism. His words, not mine.

43:24

And its purpose was political. Because language applied to everything, everything became political.

43:32

Does it feel that way? Like everything's political? You can't get away from politics because it's embedded in language.

43:38

In the same way Derrida deconstructed language, Mikhail Foucault deconstructed knowledge by making it dependent on power.

43:46

Foucault found the classical Marxist critique empty because it failed to understand this reality. He stated that a phrase like liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism may be a good slogan, but it will never be more than a slogan because in actuality, knowledge and power are integrated with one another.

44:04

In other words, science itself is embedded in a discourse. That's the word he used. Discourse is kind of like Gramsci's hegemony.

44:12

The discourse is what controls everything. The discourse is the language used, the narrative of the culture used to enslave.

44:20

So science itself is even embedded within that, in that discourse. Or in a way of thinking which occupies a social space.

44:27

You hear a lot of talk about spaces today, right? Space is the jurisdiction that the discourse has.

44:32

I heard this all the time in seminary. Approved by the powerful and used to dominate the bodies.

44:39

It's reducing people down to bodies. The bodies of the less powerful, all right? So a space is the area where the discourse enslaves people.

44:49

So you hear about white spaces, black spaces, safe spaces, right? These are certain areas where there's a reigning narrative.

44:57

And if you are on the outs, if you are an oppressed person of that narrative, your body will be affected in a bad way.

45:09

So the police shootings, et cetera, a lot of times you hear people talk about those things in terms of, well, it was a black body or a brown body or Beth Moore said recently, you know, it's important to realize

45:20

Jesus was a brown body who died on the cross. Why is that important? That's Foucault. That's Foucault talking.

45:26

So that's what the discourse does. It oppresses bodies. From the 1960s to his death from AIDS, he contracted at a sadomasochistic bathhouse in 1984.

45:38

Foucault argued that modern ways of thinking about things like insanity, disease, criminality, and sexuality were all motivated by an exercise in control and oppression.

45:48

Institutions like hospitals and prisons developed to enforce the prevailing social knowledge.

45:54

Now there's some thought that as Foucault was dying in the hospital from AIDS, he started to rethink some of this.

46:00

A little too late. He was being cared for in one of the institutions he said existed to oppress people.

46:06

And he was getting good care. Foucault became more popular in America than in France, which is interesting, and helped propel critical theory into new areas of study.

46:18

Edward Said used Foucault's power -knowledge dynamic in the creation of post -colonial theory, which traced ways in which

46:25

Western scholars treated Eastern peoples as a cultural and intellectual proletariat through their research.

46:33

Feminist scholar Cathy Ferguson appealed to Foucault's theory of social appropriation to explain how university programs were instruments of power to reinforce the bureaucratic discourse.

46:44

Anna -Marie Jargozy, in her 1996 book on queer theory, stated that Foucault's writings have been crucially significant for the development of lesbian and gay and subsequently queer activism and scholarship.

46:57

The important thing to remember about the contributions of Foucault and other postmodernists to various critical theories is that they offered

47:03

Marxists the insights and tools needed to resist and remake the social order in an almost infinite number of ways previously unimagined.

47:12

Roger Scruton, a conservative political philosopher, pointed out that the thinkers who motivated the

47:17

New Left treated things like the patriarchal family, prisons and madhouses, selfish desire, and heterosexual respectability as manifestations of the power of the bourgeoisie.

47:28

Thus, new disciplines, which are constantly emerging, are really more complicated versions of Marxism. And I put a few of those, just representative ones, on the screen for you.

47:38

You can see even things like fat studies. That's a social construct. There's really no fat people.

47:43

It's just what society, for the purposes of oppression, developed a category of fat. You have queer theory.

47:50

You have ageism. Ageism is one that you don't hear about a lot, but that's another one. It's a social construct, how old you are.

48:00

This list goes on. I'm going to tell you about one of the theories that I have started digging into a little more, and I haven't heard anyone talk about this yet.

48:07

And I think it's because it's about to make its debut, and we haven't gotten there yet. But this thing makes the 1619

48:13

Project look like child's play. If I have the note for it here, yes.

48:20

It's called Memory Studies. This is a new field, and it draws on concepts like Derrida's method of deconstruction to show how cultural memory shapes human psychology.

48:31

Astrid Erle and Engsar Nooning describe it as an approach which proceeds from the basic insight that the past is not given.

48:40

It's not a given, but must instead continually be reconstructed and re -represented.

48:47

Yet subfields such as Africana cultural memory studies trace the denial and manipulation of African rights, privileges, and identity using the speculative process of Black cultural mythology for the purpose of liberation.

49:00

Their words, not mine. What should become apparent is how interrelated, yet infinitely narrow, many of these new disciplines are becoming.

49:09

I'll tell you this. When I was looking up memory studies, because I had, I'll just tell you a personal little aside here,

49:14

I had found this doing a study on Civil War historiography. And one of the reigning

49:20

Civil War researchers, historians, is a guy from,

49:25

I believe, Yale. And David Blight is his name. And he talks about memory studies.

49:31

And I thought, what in the world is this memory studies? And he uses that to say, he divides

49:36

Civil War historiography into three. There's the South methodology, which is, of course, racist and lost cause.

49:42

There's the North methodology, which is the reconciliation motif. And that's also racist. Not quite as racist, but it's pretty racist.

49:49

And then there's the emancipationist perspective, which has been suppressed for apparently 160 years.

49:56

And just now, it's time to bring it back. And this is the way a modern social group remembers the event.

50:04

And that's the important thing. So you see how this destroys any objectivity in history to try to reconstruct what happened.

50:11

What it does is it actually disqualifies certain perspectives. And so those perspectives can't be used to find out what really happened.

50:17

We have to go to an oppressed group, usually, to find out what actually happened. What did they think happened?

50:22

And we're going to find that out by going to what they think today happened about it. What was the memory that they have of this event, as if memory carries through culture?

50:33

So this is all around us. Well, when I started looking up cultural memory studies, it was ironic.

50:40

The Center for Memory Studies is in Frankfurt, Germany. And I thought, oh, that's interesting.

50:46

So I haven't looked into it much deeper. But that is one of the emerging critical theory disciplines that we have not heard a lot about it yet.

50:53

But it's coming. And I'll put one more aside. The gentleman

50:58

I was reading about, the Africana memory studies, he did not like the 1619 Project, because it was a bunch of white men and white people who were trying to reconstruct their history.

51:07

And that's just not right. So the 1619 Project is too tame. So that tells you where we're going.

51:16

Let's talk a little bit about critical race theory. This is the one that we hear about today. This is the flavor of the month. It'll be a new flavor.

51:22

Remember when Me Too was the flavor of the month and all of that and the feminism? Right now, it's critical race theory.

51:28

So let's talk about it. In 1989, actually, 1987, critical race theory pretty much formed.

51:35

But it's been around since the 1970s. It just wasn't formed, fully formed. People didn't get together and call it critical race theory and identify what its tenets were.

51:44

And this is what Richard Delgado says in critical race theory, an introduction. Derek Bell, a professor, a law professor at Harvard and one of the originators of critical race theory believed progress in American race relations is largely a mirage, obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain control.

52:06

The theory's basic teaching is that racism is systemically embedded within minority experience.

52:13

I'm sorry, within the fabric of society. Racism is systemically embedded within the fabric of society and can only be addressed by first attempt interpreting the world through the lens of minority experience.

52:23

So everything's racist. And the only way we can identify the racism and respond to the racism is by going to minorities to get their experience.

52:32

And you know if you talk to a minority who does not agree with their perspective, they're not a minority anymore because race is a social construct.

52:41

It's a power relationship. It's not a DNA. So there's an ideology behind race.

52:49

So this is what Derek Bell argued. The theory's basic teaching is what we're seeing all around us.

52:57

It's the Black Lives Matter narrative. It's, I mean, leading up to the Black Lives Matter narrative, we see similar narratives when it comes to gender, right?

53:06

Believe women, right? You have to look at things through this perspective of a minority class or else you're getting it wrong.

53:15

Now, while critical race theory accomplishes deconstruction, right, remember Derrida, intersectionality, a sub -theory, accomplishes construction.

53:25

It is this element which has become perhaps the most important concept of understanding the modern social justice movement, intersectionality.

53:33

I'm going to tell you about that. This may be the most important part of this whole presentation for what's happening today.

53:39

In 1989, one of Bell's students, Kimberly Williams Crenshaw, developed intersectionality, which she said linked politics with postmodern theory.

53:48

Crenshaw believed identity politics failed to take into account the existence of groups with more than one socially oppressed identity factor.

53:58

She argued that someone who was a woman and a person of color needed unique political representation.

54:04

James Lindsay and Helen Pluck rose in their book, Cynical Theories, how activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity, and why this harms everybody, state that intersectionality is the axis upon which the applied postmodern turn rotated in a seed that would germinate as social justice scholarship some 20 years later.

54:21

So they're saying this is social justice scholarship, intersectionality. Identity politics was developed in the late 1970s by black feminists and lesbians who wanted to apply

54:31

Karl Marx's analysis to their own economic situation in which racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression were interlocking.

54:38

Crenshaw stated that while identity -based politics was a source of strength, it was in tension with the dominant conceptions of social justice.

54:47

The reason was that social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination.

54:56

It can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction. In other words, if you're oppressed because you're a black female lesbian, which the people who started identity politics were, that's not something to be upset about.

55:11

That's not, oh, society's oppressing me. That's something to use to build the new society. Construction.

55:19

And so this is what we're living in today. So it's not something to view as a negative.

55:25

Something to view as a positive. And it could replace Marx's idea of class consciousness with an almost infinite number of new groups aware of their oppression and willing to do something about it.

55:36

This is where the get woke happens. When you understand, wait a minute, I'm part of oppression. I didn't realize

55:42

I was oppressed, but now I do because of my socially contrived identity. So identifying as a social victim implies a right to some kind of social compensation of some kind.

55:56

Because you're realizing, well, I've been gypped, and I didn't even realize that I was gypped. So Crenshaw went farther than this.

56:03

She said that oppression was basically, the way she treated it was it was this monolithic quality.

56:10

There's oppression, and different people have different degrees of oppression. Some identities experience it more than others.

56:16

So this is a glue. It's a glue that helped groups with differing identities see themselves as victims afflicted by the same problem.

56:23

And here's a quote from her. She said that race can also be a coalition of straight and gay people of color and thus serve as a basis for critique of churches and other cultural institutions that reproduce heterosexism.

56:37

So what she's saying is that you may not care about homosexuality, but if you're a minority of some kind, you're

56:43

Hispanic, or you're African, you came from Africa, if you came from South America, if you're some kind of minority in a white culture, then you should care about homosexual oppression.

56:59

Because that's the same kind of thing that the hegemony is using against you. All the same thing. So this,

57:06

I'll give you an example. In Lynchburg, Virginia, it's a Bible Belt place, they recently held a

57:11

Black Lives Matter protest with a gay pride protest. Same protest. They were together, waving

57:17

Black Lives Matter flags with gay pride flags, because they are seeing themselves as, it's not just that they have a common enemy, it's that they actually are, they do have a common enemy, but it's that they actually are part of the same movement.

57:36

So it's not like we're two different movements, we disagree with each other, but we'll go after this guy, it's actually no, we're actually the same movement. We're both trying to get rid of the oppression by those people over there.

57:44

So that's what Kimberly Crenshaw ended up doing. The effect of her teaching, at least. And so identities have oppression, this means society needs to repay them back somehow, or compensate for their oppression in some way.

58:02

And the more victimized, the more compensation is required. So now we're seeing all kinds of, it pays to be a victim now, because of this.

58:11

Therefore being oppressed or lacking privilege can have its benefits. It also, when informed by critical race theory and postmodern attachment to finding truth, through an oppressed lens, creates a knowledge hierarchy whereby social power means greater access to knowledge about systemic oppression in society.

58:26

So if you are more oppressed, you are more worthy to talk about oppression, and people should just listen to you.

58:33

If they're not oppressed, they don't understand. Shut up and listen, if you're someone who's not oppressed. So this is why you see people trying to out -oppress each other, or out -victimize each other,

58:43

I should say. They're trying to come up with a way that they are the ultimate victim, so they're the ones that should be listened to and grandstanded the most, because they know the most about oppression.

58:52

And we're getting weird victim categories now. If you're gluten -free, you're a victim sometimes. I mean, how many learning disabilities now are out there?

58:59

Everyone's a victim. And if you're white, you're in trouble. You're born white. You've got to be gay or something. You've got to figure out a way to be a victim.

59:06

Otherwise, you know, your voice means nothing. So this wouldn't be important unless everything was political.

59:13

Because now everything's political, no matter what area you're talking about, whether it's art or music or whatever, then your status as someone who's oppressed means something now.

59:26

So to close this out, Karl Marx believed the bourgeois were biased in their conception of justice because it was rooted in their own dominance.

59:37

Lukács thought the key to solving the problem of capitalism rested in the knowledge of the proletariat. But it was

59:43

Crenshaw who established the building blocks for a scale whereby the less privileged someone is, the more right they have to be listened to concerning oppression.

59:53

Patricia Hill Collins, a pioneer of intersectionality, refers to this prioritization as rooted in standpoint epistemology, which she states defends the integrity of individuals and groups in interpreting their own experience by positing that experience provides distinctive angles of vision on racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalist class relations for people who are different, differentially privileged and penalized within such systems.

01:00:22

Thus, if someone possesses a privilege by nature of being part of a dominant cultural identity, such as straight white heterosexual

01:00:29

Christian male, they are less qualified to address issues of injustice and their posture should be one of listening.

01:00:36

Thus, the modern social justice movement has thoroughly combined principles of postmodernism with Marxism in order to not only redistribute material resources, but also power, privilege, and truth itself.

01:00:48

From the streets of France to the heart of American evangelical Christianity, the past 300 years have seen many changes in the nature of redistributive social justice.

01:00:58

Jean -Jacques Rousseau imagined a centralized power capable of achieving egalitarian equality. Karl Marx wanted to accomplish this dream through the redistribution of resources from the haves to the have -nots.

01:01:10

Walter Rauschenbusch Christianized socialism under the banner of social justice. Antonio Gramsci believed it was the cultural hegemony and not simply the haves which was actually responsible for oppressing the have -nots.

01:01:22

George Lukács saw capitalism as an oppressive mindset and not just an economic system.

01:01:28

French postmodernists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault deconstructed language and knowledge as social constructs and power dynamics.

01:01:35

And Kimberly Crenshaw Williams developed intersectionality, which attempts to construct a new hierarchy based on a matrix of socially constructed victim categories.

01:01:45

Achieving social justice has gone from the redistribution of income to redistribution of privilege, from the liberating of the social classes to the liberation of culturally constructed identities, from lamenting victimhood to promoting victimhood, and from changing society through politics to changing politics through society.

01:02:05

Gramsci's long march through the institutions is almost complete, and its final stage is to capture the last stand for Western civilization and conscience of the country, the

01:02:15

American evangelical church. So in the next two sessions, we will talk more about what this is doing to the church, how to identify it, how to respond to it, and it'll be a little less rigid.

01:02:29

Because I wanted to get you all this information as best as I could on the history, but we're going to talk about the application of this.

01:02:37

And I got some important things to share with you. So with that, I probably went over.

01:02:44

Oh, do I have more time? Want to take a few questions? All right.

01:02:50

Any questions about what I just presented? Yeah. There's some things

01:03:10

I skipped on purpose. Go ahead. From Rousseau.

01:03:22

So egalitarian objective. So that's their heaven on earth. Egalitarian objective.

01:03:28

A power or centralized authority capable of achieving that objective somehow.

01:03:37

And what was the other one? I got to look myself. What's that? Yeah, that was the force.

01:03:47

Yeah, dismantling the system. Thank you. So that was in between that. So you have the egalitarian objective, dismantling the systems that are enshrining that, keeping that objective from taking place, and then the implementation of a force capable of securing egalitarianism.

01:04:07

So yes. Lynchburg. It was in downtown

01:04:16

Lynchburg, Virginia. Was it part of Liberty? No, no, no, no. It wasn't part of Liberty, no. No, no, no.

01:04:23

It was secular. Yeah. Yes. I forgot my intention. Was that memory studies?

01:04:29

Yeah. Reconstructing on the top cursory? Where do you see that? Yeah, it's more academic.

01:04:38

But it's filtering down. So you had deconstructionism in the 1960s, which was like Howard Zinn.

01:04:47

And that's the American context. There were other people in other parts of the world that were doing it with really post -colonial studies is the main thing people look to when they say deconstructionism, which was the idea that people in the

01:05:00

Western world had stereotyped people in the East when they wrote about them. And this was a form of colonialism of the mind.

01:05:06

They're colonizing people by making them fit into their categories and oppressing them. And so people in the East think of themselves as subdominants because somehow the people in the

01:05:15

Western world are imposing their own narrative on them. And so this extended into America in memory or deconstructionism, which has rewritten the curriculum of a lot of our history.

01:05:27

The founding fathers were just a bunch of, you know, white males who their concern was to make sure that they could present their narrative in a way that was appropriate for their people.

01:05:36

they didn't really want to be slaves because they didn't deserve their money and things like that. They weren't really after Liberty. Obviously they had slaves. They couldn't be after Liberty.

01:05:41

Women couldn't vote. They couldn't have been after Liberty. So that's deconstructionism.

01:05:47

Memory studies is deconstructionism on steroids because it's not just deconstructionism, which, which we've been living with now for years, you look back at the past and you kind of, they usually cherry pick.

01:05:59

They usually take things that fit their narrative, cast aside things that don't fit their narrative in order to construct a narrative that they want.

01:06:06

Memory studies goes the extra step and says, we have actually a philosophical justification for doing that in the fact that only oppressed memories can speak authoritatively about the past, right?

01:06:18

That's where it's going. So in other words, if you try to bring a source to bear, a primary source to say, let's say

01:06:24

I bring up the fact that the founding fathers were ending the slave trade by 1808 and that was their goal.

01:06:30

And they, they enshrined this, that this is, we, we need to stop this. This is not good. Well, if I use that source and I interpret it in my, the memory of the class that I come from, you know, a white

01:06:42

American, then I'm disqualified immediately. We've got to, what do minorities think about what the founders did in that?

01:06:49

You know, what's their conception of that move? Interest convergence, which is what

01:06:55

Derek Bell came up with is the idea that whites just even the civil rights legislation was just more oppression from the whites.

01:07:01

They, it just, it didn't really mean anything because they're going to keep oppressing and it didn't hold them back from oppressing.

01:07:07

And so you could look at something like that decision that the founding fathers made and say, well, it's ending the slave trade.

01:07:12

They weren't after motives weren't because they had any care for slaves or, you know, so, so it just impugns and constantly rips down any, any kind of anything that Americans have taken pride in.

01:07:26

So I, I see it playing out everywhere, honestly. I mean, I think Jamar Tisby's color of compromise is a good example of what memory studies is.

01:07:34

In fact, crew campus crusade, they have a something called the lenses Institute. And recently they did a training and they,

01:07:43

I, I can't say this a hundred percent, but it looks to me like what they're doing is they're taking different segments of crew and putting them through lenses training at different times.

01:07:51

So those who haven't been through it don't really know what, what's coming and they think crew is still safe, but they're there.

01:07:58

It's, it seems like it's very well planned. And I know, I know a bunch of people in crew that have been, you know, they have to basically make an agreement.

01:08:05

They are not going to share any of what's going on at the lenses meeting. So I can't publicly share any of it, but they've sent me screenshots.

01:08:12

And one of the things in a recent crew mandatory training at lenses was they, they talked about memory studies and it was exactly what

01:08:20

I'm talking about now. And that's what woke me up to this more. I thought I, that, that was the thing that I thought there's something to this.

01:08:26

This isn't just what I read in David Blight. What is this? And I started doing some homework and realize what it was and it's critical theory applied to history.

01:08:35

And, and so this is an evangelical Christianity now. Yeah. And I, like I said, no one's written about it as far as I can tell from a conservative perspective.

01:08:43

Yeah. I guess I got three questions from the zoom folks. I'll try to be short.

01:08:50

Okay. The, the first is what is the greatest detriment? A deterrent rather. What is the greatest deterrent to those seeking to accomplish the goals of this movement?

01:09:00

The greatest deterrent from their perspective, what they think is Trump. They think

01:09:05

Trump is the one that's holding them back. What, what can we as Christians use to deter it more?

01:09:13

Honestly. So, so I'm going to take you to a little story real quick. I'm going to try to make this brief. I was sitting in class at Southeastern Baptist theological seminary in a spiritual formation class of some kind.

01:09:23

And they there, the professor played a clip from like over 10 years ago of Al Mohler on Larry King.

01:09:30

And they had a Bishop or a Rabbi, Rabbi Shmuley on there.

01:09:36

Rabbi Shmuley was saying, Christians are responsible for the Holocaust and for the Crusades.

01:09:41

And they're just the worst kind of people, what Christians have done. And Al Mohler kind of put up a sort of defense of it, like kind of, well, you know, usually the, and this is what

01:09:51

I hear the most. It's like, well, they weren't really Christians. And there's, there's some truth to that. You know, obviously people who claim to be Christians who don't follow Jesus, are they really good?

01:09:57

No, they're not. But that was really, as I remember, the only defense he was really capable of was trying to kind of walk away from that.

01:10:05

Well in class, someone raised their hand because the professor said, what should we do when we're confronted with this? And a student said, we should just apologize.

01:10:13

We were wrong when we did those things. We should just apologize. And the class, I could tell, I looked through the class and they're all like, yeah, these are pastors going into churches.

01:10:21

They're going to be pastors. And the professor said, you know what? That would not have been possible 10 years ago. But I think today you're absolutely right.

01:10:28

And basically gave him the approval that that's the right thing to do to just apologize. I'm sorry about the Crusades.

01:10:33

I'm sorry about the Holocaust. I raised my hand and I said, honestly, I think we should be teaching

01:10:39

Christians to interpret history correctly and, and not to buy into the idea that it was

01:10:44

Christians who were responsible for these things. I think once you say that you've given up the whole debate you're and then painting those things like obviously the

01:10:53

Holocaust is horrific, right? And that wasn't Christian motivated. It wasn't based on Christian assumptions, but something like their Crusades, that's not, it's not as cut and dry as people want to make that.

01:11:02

So you need to understand what the history of the Crusades was and why the Crusades happened and how it was a response to Islamic aggression.

01:11:11

And, and the other bad things that happened in the Crusades, but, but it's just, it's not nuanced.

01:11:16

It's oversimplified. And that was my answer. And the professor did not, I could tell, they didn't care for my answer.

01:11:22

And so that was, that's my answer to that question is you have to, you can't give your kids to the public education and expect they're going to understand how to respond to this.

01:11:31

You have to teach them these disciplines, even science now, even math now, because there's now, it's worked itself into math that you have to, to train them the correct way to live in the world that God made objective truth exists.

01:11:47

It relies on the character and nature of God. There's tools that he's given us that everyone can appeal to no matter what their age, race, you know, whatever, whatever external factor, truth exists in the real world.

01:11:59

So that's my answer. So you have to educate your people on it. You may get to the point where churches have to start, not just applying hermeneutics to the

01:12:09

Bible, but at least showing people, Hey, this, these principles that apply to the Bible and studying the Bible, they also apply to everywhere else.

01:12:16

It's not just the word of God. These are things that God has given us to interpret the world. Authorial intent applies to the constitution, not just the

01:12:23

Bible. So I hope that answers the question. In your view, what is the end game of the

01:12:32

CRT and intersectionality? Is it deconstructing our U S constitution?

01:12:37

Is it replacing our current governmental systems? Both. Yeah, both. Definitely. They don't have any respect for the constitution.

01:12:45

Like you heard what Marcuse said, you know, bill of rights doesn't apply to oppressors. So it wants to create a communist, basically a communist regime, which is even more, it's more communist than the

01:13:00

Russians, because the Russians at least had modernity. They had, they believed there was science. They believed they needed it to construct their weapons.

01:13:08

What's happening now is, is postmodern Marxism. And that, in my opinion, that's even more dangerous because it gets into the realm of ideas and it deconstructs truth completely.

01:13:21

And so that's, their goal is same goal. Has God really said, no, he hasn't.

01:13:27

We are going to make a society made in our image. Intersectionality is a, its own hierarchy.

01:13:33

If you're more oppressed, you're more at the top of the hierarchy. Now things should adjust for historical oppression against you.

01:13:39

And so we're going to reconstruct recalibrate the whole idea of hierarchy.

01:13:45

Ultimately behind that, we know that the oppressed aren't the ones that benefit from this. They're the ones that hurt the most from this.

01:13:51

It's the sociologists and the elites who are using the press, the oppressed as a human shield who benefit because they get to democratic party, for instance, and gets to represent the oppressed.

01:14:03

They get to tell you that you need to take your immunization because it's required. And you don't have any argument against it because you're a white

01:14:10

Anglo male or whatever. You, you are disqualified from speaking. So there's a way this is a tool used to shut up any opposition against creating what's called an open society, which is what

01:14:22

George Soros wants to create. So yeah, if you look up the great reset, you'll find out more and look up China's social what they call it.

01:14:34

It's a socially based social credit system. There you go. China's social credit system where there's cameras everywhere and you have a social credit, which will determine whether you can take things out of your bank account and get a job and invest.

01:14:48

And it's all based on your behavior. So, yeah.

01:14:55

Third question. Is this ultimately an attempt to have the ruling elite control the masses by bringing the vision to competing victim groups and the elite will enforce peace to multiple groups, freeing them to serve only the elitist oppressors.

01:15:12

Yeah, that's what the, the Russians think. I think right now from what I've heard, we have a gentleman here that might know more than me because he's been in Russia as a missionary, but the

01:15:22

Russians, especially during the Soviet era, I mean, they were behind a lot of things, some things that we don't even want to talk about because there's obviously we agree with some of the core, the core understanding that the civil rights movement had, right.

01:15:38

Which was that the civil liberties needed to be extended. Well, they needed to apply to minority categories.

01:15:45

We would as Christians, we would agree with, with that. But what you saw in that movement was a lot of, there was a mixture of a lot of different things and Russians had their hand in a lot of what was going on because, and it wasn't because they cared so much about black people and the

01:15:59

Russians didn't care about that. They cared about disrupting civilization as quickly as they possibly could breaking it apart, trying to get

01:16:07

Americans to be at the throat of other Americans. And, and that's anything they can use to disrupt that they'll, they'll use.

01:16:16

And I see that certainly with the COVID stuff. If you, if you went to the world economic forum website, about three minutes after the

01:16:23

COVID pandemic struck, they had articles on how to restructure education globally for the future, where they're going to have tons of money to pour into education, where they can provide free computers and all the resources you need to educate your child in the world of COVID because you can't go to school.

01:16:40

They're going to be the ones to provide these resources and States will enforce them. You saw the global warming thing come back. We need to restructure our entire economy because the way we dealt with COVID is the same way we got to deal with global warming.

01:16:50

They had an endless list for, and it read like there is their platform. It's their plan.

01:16:55

So global elites have been chomping at the bit for something like this where they can see a, a disaster, see something that we're all afraid of come in and provide the solution to the disaster they created.

01:17:08

So yeah, this, yes. Dan Frederick's with a

01:17:16

United Indian mission had a very good comment on this. He said, working with native Americans, I get this notion with respect to Columbus coming to the

01:17:24

Americas. Many want to blame Columbus for all atrocities against native peoples. No longer

01:17:30

Columbus day now indigenous people stay appropriate on today. Yeah.

01:17:38

People stay other places. Yeah, that's, that's actually a good example because on Columbus rest the whole entire weight of all every atrocity that's happened in the new world when he was really just an explorer from lack of a better term, he wasn't he, he wasn't a conquistador but, but he bears the responsibility because of his participation.

01:17:58

And that's what you know, they'll get you to be a participant in some kind of injustice in two steps or less.

01:18:06

If you're conservative, if you advocate anything, they'll, they'll work it back to, well, you're somehow an oppressor because you were involved in this or your parents were.

01:18:14

And so, yeah, we see that with Columbus day for sure. Any more questions or I'm relying on you to tell us when we're out of time.

01:18:42

Yeah, it's deep.

01:18:54

They don't, it's usually not, it doesn't go by that name. Usually there's climate justice there.

01:19:00

I mean, yeah, you're right. Every field has its own justice now. So the idea that we have to decenter whiteness, which is part of critical race theory by promoting oppressed perspectives has made its way into everything, including research.

01:19:16

And so that's why at conferences, even Christian conferences, recently there was a conference in Michigan about a year ago now,

01:19:22

I guess where they had a bunch of, it was supposed to be Christian history. And I think it was at Calvin, but they had all these, you know,

01:19:30

Christian historians come and stuff, but the keynote was Jamar Tisby. Why does Jamar Tisby the keynote?

01:19:36

His book is terrible. He's not a good researcher at all. His thesis undercuts itself.

01:19:42

Thesis is critical race theory. It's that injustice never goes away. It just changes forms. So you never escape it.

01:19:48

But the whole point of the book is to try to get rid of injustice. Well, how does that, I guess it's an exercise in futility then, because you can never get away from it.

01:19:55

So why try, but but he ended up being the keynote and he told, he told the people that he's a

01:20:02

Christian budding Christian historians undergraduates that you need to use your your history, the discipline of history for the purpose of activism for political activism.

01:20:13

And he told them that's basically you're wasting your history degree if you're not using it for that purpose.

01:20:19

So, you know, this is this is pernicious. It's just an everything. And what needs to be restored is a sense of objectivity that they're actually there.

01:20:30

Yes, there are ways that we remember things differently, but historians have had tools by which to try to adjudicate those differences or at least come as close as we can to the truth.

01:20:40

None of us are God. We don't have a God perspective on any event, but we can look at the different perspective, like a battle.

01:20:45

Let's say Gettysburg. And you look at all the different accounts that came out of Gettysburg. You can look through those things and construct as to the best of your ability.

01:20:53

What happened to Gettysburg, right? Same thing with what happened when Jesus was on the cross. You can look and try to construct.

01:20:59

Okay, we got Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And we haven't and they're inspired. We believe that as Christians, these are inspired word of God. So we can look at these things and we can construct a reality.

01:21:07

What God wants us to know from that. We weren't God, but we have his revelation, right?