The Evangelical Obsession with Anti-Racism

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:01

We are live now on the Conversations That Matter podcast. I hope you're doing well.

00:07

It is a beautiful fall -ish, it's getting fall day in my neck of the woods.

00:12

I hope that you're enjoying the seasonal change wherever you are, unless you're in Arizona or New Mexico or Southern California or Texas, in which case,

00:20

I guess it's just the same as it's always been. We have a lot of things to talk about. I don't think we're gonna get to all the things.

00:26

In fact, I just saw that someone, Squidward, okay,

00:32

Squidward wants to talk about, or wants me to talk about the

00:37

Rufo space from last night. And what he's referring to there is there was a discussion, it was very long,

00:44

I didn't listen to all of it, but I listened to enough of it. I probably listened to, I would say at least an hour of it, if not more, on the no enemies to the right concept.

00:53

And I don't really have much to say right now, except, wow, it just amazes me.

01:01

We're gonna get into a different issue, but still kind of related in this sense.

01:07

It amazes me the way that people are so comfortable misrepresenting, and they just don't have a self -awareness about it.

01:15

The whole thing was an exercise, it seemed to me at least. And you had two individuals who were very critical of no enemies to the right.

01:23

But what they were actually critical of was their conception of what that meant. It wasn't actually a critique of what

01:31

Charles Haywood and Nate Fisher were advocating with no enemies to the right. It was a critique of something else.

01:37

And I think I outlined it on Twitter this morning that either the critiques are that this can't be a universal rule.

01:46

Well, of course it's not. The concept only fits in a situation in which the left controls rewards and punishments and has political power, ultimate political power.

01:58

It doesn't really work in another situation. That's the situation though we are finding ourselves in. I compared it to a prison camp.

02:05

If you're in a prison camp, let's say in East Germany or the Soviet Union, you could pick Nazi Germany if you wanted, whatever.

02:12

And you're in this scenario where you have no power. And there's other prisoners there along with you.

02:19

And let's say you have disagreements, intramural disagreements with them about various things, how to handle the situation you're in, what strategies to use to try to push back, that kind of thing.

02:29

And you don't agree with some of the strategies you hear. It wouldn't be wise to then go just rat out your buddies.

02:39

I mean, there's so many problems with it. It'll obviously cause you to lose respect and break trust and fracture your side.

02:48

But it also increases the authority, the fear that comes with the ability of those who are your overlords to oversee you even better, to control you even more.

03:02

It increases their power essentially is what that does. And so in a situation like that, the goal should be to work together even if you have some disagreements.

03:10

And if you can't work together, then kind of let people who disagree with you do what they're gonna do.

03:17

Maybe you don't want them influencing what you're gonna do. So you have your own group, your own opposition unit or whatever.

03:24

Maybe, I don't know, you're digging a tunnel or doing something that another group has a different idea on.

03:30

They wanna oppose the guards in a different way. But the point is in this scenario, it would be foolhardy to fracture among yourselves and start doing purity tests that are designed to, and this is the key thing, make in the framing of the prison guards and the framing of your overlords make you a pariah so that your life is destroyed, so that the guards come down on you, so that you use a hammer that you don't actually control, someone else does who's your enemy who will also willingly bring it down on you.

04:05

You allow your enemies in the prison to experience that kind of destruction.

04:12

And it's because, well, it benefits you or something. That's what we're talking about when we talk about no enemies to the right.

04:19

So anyway, I didn't wanna get into it more than that, but those are some of the objections. They're kind of weird to me.

04:25

So that's one of them, it's universal. Another one is that, well, we should be able to critique people on the right.

04:32

Yeah, of course. No one's saying that you shouldn't, right? We should be able to keep them out of our movement. Okay, yeah, no one's really saying that you can't do those things.

04:39

The only, no enemies to the right is primarily about this scenario that I just explained, where you're not going to expose someone publicly to the left, or at least you're not on purpose trying to get the framing of the left to come down on them so that they get canceled, lose their ability to provide for their families and that kind of thing.

05:00

And I know people who've gone through that and it's not pretty. So you actually build up more trust, you make your movement stronger when the critiques are,

05:08

I would say, more respectful and when you're keeping it more in -house as much as possible.

05:14

In fact, a good example of this is something I just did recently. I wrote a piece for American Reformer and I critiqued the

05:21

Nazis. And the point of the piece was that conservatives today are using a leftist framework to critique

05:26

Nazis and they're expanding it to the point that George Washington now would qualify as a proto -Nazi. It's kind of pathetic.

05:32

But I give a critique that is an older critique of the Nazi regime from people who are closer to the situation,

05:39

Bavarian Christians, and then also American, Anglo -American conservatives in the 1950s, and their critique was different.

05:46

They critiqued the ideological component of it, how it perverted things like love for people and place and how it didn't really, it was a lie.

05:53

That was a slogan that didn't really mean anything, blood and soil, at least. That was kind of a meaningless slogan in a way.

05:59

And so their critique was that this was statism, masking as something that seems natural and good, but it's not natural and good.

06:09

It's actually flattening the entirety of the national identity into this state regime kind of thing.

06:16

So anyway, there's more that could be said, but that was one of the critiques. And yeah, I do know of someone who,

06:24

I would say they are going in a more radical, I don't even know what word to use, far right, radical right, but they're going in a direction that would be maybe softening on, maybe the

06:36

Nazis weren't as bad as we thought kind of thing. And I understand that to an extent because everything the left vilifies, you find out later, it seems like, wait a minute,

06:45

I wasn't being told the whole truth. So you start assuming that about everything. Well, this individual is going that direction and they love my article.

06:52

And I think it really did help pull them back in a sense and see, oh, wait a minute. No, that's not conservative at all.

06:59

So anyway, all that to say, there's fair amount of critique that can happen. It's just the idea that there is an enemy.

07:07

This is on a political level. This isn't spiritual necessarily. There's obviously connections, but this is a political battle and it's war essentially.

07:16

You have people who want to destroy your lives and they want to destroy not just your life, but the lives of other people.

07:24

It's better to use your resources to fight that enemy. That's the threat, right? And it just makes sense to me, but that whole thing was, man, that thing,

07:33

I don't even know if I'd recommend people listen to it. I know Charles Sayward was saying, go listen to it. It's like two and a half hours and maybe it'll help you understand it more, but man.

07:42

So anyway, we start the podcast with a bang this afternoon talking about an issue.

07:47

I wasn't actually planning on talking about, but now you have my, as my wife calls them, my file on the situation.

07:55

A .D. Robles is here. Hey, A .D., good to see you. We got Arthur Dunn. Hello, Arthur, good to see you.

08:02

Tim Miller says, you know what religion they practice if they're more offended by an insensitive comment about a minority group than they are about blasphemy.

08:10

These people aren't Christians. I'm assuming he's talking about some of the people we might be talking about here soon in the podcast.

08:17

And he also asks, you know, what are these conservatives conserving? These people would be considered hard left -wing by anyone 10 years ago.

08:23

It's true that the right looks more like the left and it's happening in an increasing space. We've traced some of that.

08:29

But anyway, I have something more specific I wanna share with you. As many of you know, I was away for the weekend.

08:34

I was at a men's retreat and I was the organizer. Not only was I the organizer, I ran the PowerPoint and I did the video recordings of which

08:43

I think three of them, I didn't even realize the mic was on mute. So I'm already thinking through ways next year to have other people take some of these responsibilities.

08:50

But I was handling check -in, I was doing everything. So I was busy, just to put it mildly.

08:58

And this is, you know, like a year ago, this was my church retreat, right? We never recorded stuff. It was kind of loose and just, well, now it's, we're getting to the point now,

09:07

I think we keep doing this. We have people coming from all over and this is a thing. This is bigger than just my individual church.

09:15

And so anyway, we're gonna be discussing next week what to do about that and that's all good.

09:21

But because I was away, I didn't have a chance to talk about the things that were happening in real time.

09:30

You had the G3 conference going on and it seems like there was another development. Like every day, someone would be sending me a tweet or a talk or something that they wanted me to listen to.

09:41

And comment on, and I just couldn't. And I'm kind of glad I couldn't, to be honest with you.

09:48

Because hopefully people have simmered down a little, maybe. Maybe cooler heads prevail when you have a few days.

09:57

But yeah, I mean, there's nothing that surprised me. I should say that first. There's nothing that surprised me that happened.

10:02

I'm not like shocked. This was all predicted. We kind of knew what was gonna happen before it happened because it had already been happening on social media.

10:12

So you didn't really need to be a prophet or a son of a prophet. So anyway, the title of the video is maybe a little intentionally provocative.

10:25

And I do wanna keep within that theme. I do think that evangelicals today, neo -evangelicals we're really talking about.

10:31

I'm not talking about the theology of evangelicalism like the Bebbington quadrilateral. I'm talking about the evangelical industry.

10:39

The evangelical industry, the people who manage that tend to be obsessed with anti -racism.

10:45

And of course I can say that because I've written two books on it essentially. And I've traced some of this.

10:50

I've gone back and I've looked at the strains of evangelicalism that were obsessed with this from back even in the late 60s, early 70s and how that's become now mainstream today with people like David Platt and Matt Chandler and others.

11:04

I would even put John Piper in this category to be quite honest with you. Some of the people that are considered more moderate and they're not woke and they still have somewhat of an obsession with being anti -racist, making sure everyone knows they're not racist, qualifying every remark that could be considered insensitive so that people know that that's not what they really believe.

11:27

And I don't think there's anything innately wrong with qualifying your remarks at all. But it's the attempt though, and here's where, and I could probably pull out many examples and I don't know that this podcast is for this purpose, but I think the purpose though of qualifying many of these things is to fit within a framework that's been developed and brought to us by the left.

11:49

And this does relate to the no enemies to the right thing I suppose to an extent. Do you want to adopt the left's framing is the real question.

11:56

Do you want to live within the boundaries of what they consider acceptable and give them the authority to set those parameters?

12:05

That's really the question. And we do this on a number of topics, right? It's not just obviously race.

12:11

Race is just one topic of many, but we certainly do do it on this topic. And I think evangelicals, new evangelicals in particular have a greater weakness on this than they do on other topics.

12:23

For example, adopting the left's framework on gender, sex, that kind of thing.

12:33

I assume, and I think it's a right assumption that evangelical leaders do somewhat adopt that framing, but it's much more likely that they'll push back on it at times, in certain moments.

12:46

And there are figures who have built their platforms off of doing that and they've been fairly successful. To be anti -feminist is not necessarily as bad as to be against anti -racism, for example, right?

13:00

And so anyway, we're using terms that if you watch the podcast, you know what I'm talking about.

13:05

Some of you who are new may not. And so it's important for me to probably at least give you some of an understanding of what

13:11

I'm talking about. When I talk about anti -racism, I'm thinking of it not just in the

13:18

Kendi fashion, right? Where it's basically critical race theory. And in order to be anti -racist, you must take down these oppressive structures that exist.

13:31

Sometimes they're invisible, essentially, but they certainly do exist. And the proof is that there's disparities, right?

13:37

So that's an aggressive form of anti -racism. But I think there's milder forms of it out there.

13:46

Let me just pick a very baseline form of this. I would say your normie normies in the church would resonate with most of this.

13:56

But if your first reaction, let's say, when you see a problem, let's say there's a problem, like right now in Philadelphia, there's a problem, right?

14:04

There's mass crime. There's just, I mean, they're looting Apple stores, the people, the criminals, they're going into stores and just,

14:13

I mean, the police can't, it's anarchy. The videos are out there on Twitter and social media, right now.

14:20

And of course, the people who live there, the people who are fomenting these things, they happen to look a certain way.

14:28

They happen to be generally younger and they happen to mostly be male and they happen to mostly be black.

14:37

And those are the demographics of the area of Philadelphia, I'm assuming, where this is taking place.

14:43

Now, if the first instinct someone has when they look at that is to immediately be very uncomfortable with the visuals, with the optics that you're seeing, no commentary has happened.

14:54

Of course, the mainstream is getting, mainstream is putting out articles on juveniles, how juveniles, right?

15:01

If it was, obviously, if it was white men, it would be white supremacy or something. I was, I've done videos on the

15:07

January 6th thing and I was there and I just was amazed at how diverse the crowd was.

15:14

And of course, yeah, there were a lot of, quote unquote, white people, people of European descent, but there was a whole lot of Asian people.

15:21

There were black people, there were people from the Middle East. There were all kinds of people who were concerned about election integrity.

15:28

And of course, what did the media do with that, right? So we obviously know there's a double standard and it doesn't, I probably don't even need to repeat that, but anyway, that's the frame, the left has their framing for this.

15:37

They, there's a certain acceptability to when we saw in 2020, when racial minorities are complicit in some kind of a crime, there's a certain pass that that's given, an acceptability, whereas if it's someone who is not a racial minority, they are not given that same pass.

15:57

And we can see that fairly clearly. Now, if you're an evangelical leader, I think the instinct is to immediately try to, before any commentary has been given, give a reason for why this isn't, there's no racial component here, right?

16:11

It's like no one said there was necessarily yet, but you're already, you're afraid that someone's going to bring that up.

16:18

And so you're going to instead focus on, this is sin. This is, you know, and sin doesn't know a color.

16:25

And all of those things are very true, but it is a peculiar reaction, in my opinion, is a peculiar set of behavior.

16:32

If you had, I don't know, let's say people that all wore, you know, striped shirt and a baseball cap.

16:40

And that's, they all wore that. They all look like referees. And they were complicit in some kind of a crime, right?

16:46

And then if you were quick to say, well, referees, aren't the problem. It's not referees, okay?

16:52

Because not all referees were in this. Not, there's a referees who were not, you know, participating in these bad calls or,

16:59

I don't know. I don't know why I picked referee, but just, you know, a particular class of people that have a certain, you can identify them.

17:06

And if your first instinct is to say, it's the darkness of their heart, you were technically correct, but you're not very helpful.

17:13

You're not very helpful in examining what are the conditions here? What has allowed this to take place?

17:20

Is it because there's less policing in those areas where those kinds of people live? Is it, right?

17:26

What I'm saying is that there's nothing really like public policy -wise you can do about it, or very little.

17:32

There's, you can't really examine it. You can't get under the hood. You can't ask questions because if you do, you're gonna be anti -referee, right?

17:40

In that case. I don't know why I picked them. I've, you know, God bless referees. In fact, a friend of mine texted me yesterday and said they were at a

17:48

Little League game and the referee apparently, I guess, made a call that a parent didn't agree with.

17:53

And the parent went ballistic and I guess punched someone. And it's like, you know, referees have a hard job sometimes.

17:58

So nothing against referees. See, here I'm qualifying. That's the kind of thing

18:04

I'm talking about. I'm doing this on purpose, by the way. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Obviously I'm not anti -referee, right?

18:12

So anyway, that is super, super mild and not something I would ever really highlight or care about, but that reaction is odd.

18:20

And that's what I want you to just see is that it's kind of weird. Why is that there? Why is that instinct built into,

18:28

I would say even generally speaking, us? Why do we immediately wanna jump to, like maybe there's literally a problem with that area.

18:37

Maybe the black community in that area is, there's a breakdown of some kind and it's whether that's parents or preachers, they're not doing their job or it's lack of policing or like, we can't really get into that though.

18:51

That's kind of my point. And so anyway, oh, Tim Bushong's on.

18:56

Tim and I recorded an episode earlier today. I'm gonna probably release tomorrow that y 'all need to listen to. So anyway, a lot of people weighing in.

19:06

I'll just get to one more question. Hey, John, wondering if you're going to address the Buswell Library situation at Wheaton College, the name is being changed on anti -racist grounds.

19:14

You know, Brian, this is probably a situation where I should be looking into that.

19:19

Let me see if it's easily available here. Library, I'm just gonna see if there's like a news story out there.

19:29

Right now on the topic, because I think that fits in, you're right. I actually, someone yesterday, I think it was, messaged me about the situation and I had a few situations queued up, but this is definitely one of them.

19:42

Let me see if it'll come up. Yeah, okay, so the Chicago Tribune has a story on this. So we'll include that.

19:49

Thank you for letting me know. If it'll let me pull it up, let's see.

19:56

I hope it will. Some of these news organizations, they don't allow you to read them if you are not a subscriber, which makes sense.

20:08

All right, it let me in, good. So we'll queue that up. All right, well, let's talk about a few situations and we're gonna get into some of the

20:19

Owen Strawn stuff. I know that's what some of you were waiting for because I have an overlapping audience, I guess, with G3.

20:26

But we'll start with some examples from, I guess, more Big Eva or what we were critiquing in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 more so which was these organizations and institutions that kind of went woke, right?

20:40

So we'll talk about them. We will start with, well, let's start with the situation before we get to that.

20:46

Let's start with the situation we're in. Because I think, here's just a few news stories that I think set the tone for this whole thing.

20:55

Just a reminder of the world you're living in. This is from Bloomberg. Here's the title of the piece.

21:04

It says this. Corporate America promised to hire a lot more people of color.

21:11

It actually did. The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S &P 100 added more than 300 ,000 jobs.

21:19

94 % went to people of color. 94, that's insane.

21:25

That's insane. And here's, well, here's the next paragraph. For a brief moment in 2020, much of corporate

21:32

America united around a common goal to address the stark racial imbalances in the workplace. Mass protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd led to a flurry of company promises, both specific and vague to hire and promote more black people and others from underrepresented groups.

21:47

Exclusive analysis by Bloomberg News shows how many of the biggest public companies did. And so it gets into the actual numbers here.

22:01

And the job growth, the new jobs, the overall job growth included 20 ,524 white workers.

22:11

And here you can see it graphically represented. That's 6%. The other 302 ,000, 300, yeah, it's a big number.

22:19

302 ,570 jobs or 94 % of the headcount increase went to people of color.

22:26

People of color, and so it breaks it down, made up a minority of the U .S. population. And in most cases are underrepresented at big

22:33

U .S. company. In 2021,

22:39

Hispanic, Asian, and black people made up a vast majority of the added workers. And it shows the actual percentages here, 40 %

22:45

Hispanic. I thought you're supposed to say Latino. So I guess Bloomberg is still in the dark ages here.

22:54

23 % black, Asian 22%, other races 8%. Even the other races were 2 % more than white people.

23:03

The biggest shifts happened in less senior job categories. White people held fewer of those roles in 2021 than they did in 2020, whereas thousands of people of color were added to the ranks.

23:13

So I don't know if I need to keep reading this. It just breaks it down more and more and more and shows you basically what these big, and these are big companies, right?

23:22

What they're doing, how they're diversifying their corporate boards and their actual jobs that they offer to people.

23:29

And so this is the world we're living in where that pressure exists.

23:35

And here's the thing that you need to realize about this. This isn't some government affirmative action thing, right?

23:42

This isn't like the government is... Now, I'm not saying the government doesn't have a say in this to some extent and exert their pressure, but they're doing this themselves for moral credibility more than anything else.

23:57

They're doing this because a particular class of people in the upper levels of our institutions have a certain view on diversity, that they think that diversity is...

24:11

First of all, it's not real diversity in the sense of they're not necessarily adopting aspects of other cultures for their own and becoming friends with people of different ethnicities and that kind of thing necessarily.

24:26

It's more of a formula for what true equality and freedom and success looks like, prosperity in the modern

24:35

West, in the United States and other Western European nations. And so their idea is that we can dilute the influence of white people who bring oppression to the table and therefore there will be more equality.

24:51

There will be a good outcome from this. That's what's going on. It's not like there's the

24:56

Supreme... They don't wanna do it, right? And the Supreme Court is forcing them to or some laws forcing them to or the executive administration.

25:03

It's because they have a certain view of things. We don't even... You can change the laws and this would still be taking place to an extent.

25:12

And that should kind of concern you a little bit at least. I mean, I think in this...

25:17

If you're someone at least who's... Let's say you're of European descent and your kids are that way and you're wondering, are they going to have the opportunities that you did?

25:27

Is this going to be a situation like the one you grew up with where it was based on merit more, whether you got the job and competence or is it based on other factors?

25:37

And I'll tell you where this gets really dangerous is the military. And that's where we all have to be concerned. When the military, and they're already doing this, start handing out jobs to incompetent people simply because they have a certain ethnic makeup, then it hampers our fighting force.

25:53

That means the standards all go down. Just like when women were admitted into combat roles, the standards had to go down for them.

26:01

They couldn't be held to the men's standard. So in this case, when you had people competing for jobs and whether they were racial minorities or not, they had to meet a certain qualification to get the job.

26:17

Now, there's really, it's inevitable, those standards have to be dumbed down in order to get an increased presence of minority people.

26:27

Now, some people immediately, the knee -jerk reaction goes off right now. I can already feel it, that you're saying that racial minorities aren't as smart as white people or something like that.

26:38

It's like, no, I'm saying statistically that certain demographic groups have a higher percentage of people in them who achieve success in certain areas.

26:47

So it's not like it's a superior order, inferior order thing as far as human worth, of course, or even like, it's not even saying that in all cases, there's a general trend in this particular ethnic group or racial group to be better at something than other people.

27:06

It's just the truth, the real world that we live in where, guess what? Jewish people tend to be better at banking, or at least they get positions in those roles more likely.

27:17

They're very disproportionate. Same in Hollywood, same in law, right? Not a lot of white people in the

27:25

NBA, right? So you can look at different industries and see different people are attracted to them.

27:32

When you go to a hotel or a gas station, you're going to see possibly, there's a higher percentage,

27:38

I'll put it that way, of people from the Middle East or India. Why is that? Why are the hospitality services more like that?

27:45

Now, there's reasons for all this, and they're complicated, some of them. Not racist in the, and I'm using the traditional sense of the word racism.

27:53

You're not hating someone by pointing something like that out. It's like pointing out the weather. That's just what's happening.

27:59

That's just what's out there. So I think most of the audience here is on the same page, but that's the world we're living in where things are exceptionally weighted against people of European descent in corporate

28:12

America, in the advertisements we see. Here's another article. The headline is

28:18

ADL defends Ukraine's neo -Nazis. They don't attack Jews or Jewish institutions.

28:23

Now, of course, the Anti -Defamation League, you gotta understand this about them. An Orthodox Christian is an anti -Semite to them.

28:31

If you believe Jesus is exclusively the only way to heaven, if you think that Jewish people are, in any way, complicit in the death of Christ, you are the worst kind of anti -Semite.

28:44

You're in the same category as Hitler, basically. I mean, you are repeating centuries of European hate against Jewish people in their minds.

28:54

And they say things like this. I could have pulled it up. I didn't need to, though, because it's easy to find it. Now, here's the thing about the

29:01

ADL, though, right? And they're the premier, I would say, they were the ones that define and enforce anti -Semitism stuff, right?

29:12

The word really kind of belongs to them at this point and groups like them. And here they are.

29:19

This is, it's so funny to me. You can't hardly do this without laughing.

29:25

There are neo -Nazis in Ukraine. This is an article on the ADL website, just as there are in the

29:31

US and in Russia, for that matter, but they are a very marginal group with no political influence, and they don't attack

29:38

Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine. Now, of course, we saw what just happened with the

29:43

Canadian parliament, and boy, that's a mess. And so if you scroll down on this article, it shows that the

29:51

ADL used to actually critique the Azov battalion in Ukraine, which has ties to neo -Nazis and white supremacists.

29:58

I mean, there's literally pictures of them with swastikas and all that kind of thing. I mean, it's what you'd expect. It's the image you're drawing in your mind.

30:03

That's the image. Our latest report on international white supremacy details how they try to connect with like -minded extremists from the

30:09

US. So this was, when was this? 2019, the Azov battalion was dangerous, anti -Semitic, watch out for them.

30:17

We don't want them influencing us. And now, well, I mean, they're not against Jews. It's crazy.

30:23

And the reason is, is because why? Why is there a reason for this? It serves a narrative.

30:29

It serves a narrative. What's the narrative it serves? We need to be giving our treasure and our resources to Ukraine.

30:40

That's the purpose it serves. And so when Ukraine is actively partnering with what are described as neo -Nazi groups who want to fight

30:53

Russia, especially in the Eastern regions of the country, then you have to go along with it.

30:59

In fact, there is no question that the money that the

31:05

United States is spending in other Western European countries going to Ukraine, some of that is winding up.

31:11

And the military, the guns and the bullets and all of that, it's winding up in the hands of the

31:17

Azov battalion. And it's, but that's okay. That's okay.

31:22

That's permissible. It's okay to partner with Nazis if they're fighting Russia, apparently. That's the message, right?

31:29

And they're less scary because they're fighting the real Nazi, which is Putin, right? It's comical.

31:35

It's absolutely comical. The people that actually are closer to the ideology of Nazi Germany, I mean, and they use the symbols and everything.

31:45

They are not as much Nazis as Adolf Hitler. So what is a

31:50

Nazi? It's just, at this point, it's a word in the modern context that's just wielded around to smear anyone that the left disagrees with and to try to compare them to the worst crime in all of human history in their minds.

32:07

And this, of course, this is the same thing that they do with anti -Semitic.

32:14

It's the same thing they do with racist. They have, there are so many words and they own those words.

32:20

That's what you have to understand. They own them. The ADL is saying right there, they own it. If they're able to take a neo -Nazi group and say they're not anti -Semitic, essentially, they own that term.

32:30

They own that concept. And to use that framing, to try to still maintain some kind of a static definition for that term and insert it into a

32:44

Christian context, when it's such a new term anyways, it didn't even exist until like 130 years ago. It's a hard thing to do.

32:54

I don't even know how you do it. And I think it's a very unwise thing to do when there's a certain universal understanding that now exists in the world about what that means.

33:03

And it's not what Christians who are well -meaning think it means. And this is getting to something we're gonna talk about these memorials in the

33:11

CREC soon, but I figured I'd plow, I'd till the field first. Wow, a lot of people weighing in.

33:23

Let's see, we got someone here. John Carter asks, are

33:29

Indian people particularly good at running convenience stores or hotels? Is there over -representation due to competence or nepotism and in -group preference?

33:35

I don't know. I never researched it. It may be in -group preference. It may be that they tend to give jobs to each other and they employ each other.

33:45

That's very common. It's a natural human tendency, to be quite honest with you. It's white people who, as you just saw in the

33:56

Bloomberg story, that seem to be the anomalies in all of human history in that they think it is morally much superior to not favor people that are like you.

34:08

Now, of course, there is a twist to this, I think, because the higher positions, they're given to the people who will benefit them.

34:16

I mean, it's gonna be your nephew or if it's not your nephew or your uncle, it's a friend who will allow you to get away with your corruption and that kind of thing.

34:26

So of course, there is a self -benefit thing, but people, cultures that look at each other, look at themselves as corporate entities, that we're one, we're one family essentially, a big family.

34:36

Yeah, of course, if they look at themselves that way, they're going to favor each other.

34:42

All are the things being equal, and that's just the way human history has been written. Okay. Man, I wanna comment on some of these, but I can't.

34:51

I'm way behind where I thought I was gonna be. I'm already over half an hour in, I haven't even scratched the surface.

34:57

So might be a mega edition today, we'll see. All right, so here's the next story. Okay. Well, let's do this one first.

35:06

Morristown family from Germany fears deportation after more than 15 years in the US. To try to save some time,

35:12

I'm just gonna summarize here. There's a family from Germany, been here 15 years, and they left

35:18

Germany because, seeking asylum basically, because they wanted to homeschool their children and the

35:24

German government wouldn't allow them to do that. So they've been here and now they're gonna be deported. And here's the thing.

35:30

This is so rich that it's coming at a time, here's a story for those who can't see it.

35:36

It's coming at a time when you have the border essentially wide open, more than it's ever been in human history, in the, well, in the

35:44

United States history. And you have people pouring in here from all over the world, all over Asia, all over South America, but this

35:52

German family, they need to be deported. And it's just the irony of the situation. Why, why do they, why are they a threat?

35:59

Or why do they, not a threat, but why do we apply the rules to them?

36:06

But we don't apply any rules to our Southern border. I mean, this is, and we know the reason, I think. I mean, and it's not like anyone has to come out and say it because we've lived in this scenario for so long.

36:15

What do they have that's different than the people pouring across the Southern border right now? Well, they come from a

36:21

Western European country, i .e. they are white. They're white and they're

36:27

Christian and they're homeschoolers and that means they're dangerous. They're a threat to the regime, more than all the people who are coming across the

36:35

Southern border who will likely be voting Democrat when they do get an opportunity to vote and all of that. And so, yeah, we know why this is happening.

36:42

And this is the situation that we live in. Here's one more thing. And I figured I should at least mention it since someone brought it up.

36:49

Wheaton College examines its racial history, but absence of hijab wearing professor.

36:56

LGBT rights question. So this is, I guess, I don't wanna read all of this. This is kind of a longer story and maybe later in the week or next week, we can talk about this more.

37:07

But essentially, they're doing what has been going on now for a few years. They're renaming, it looks like their library because I guess a guy who had some insensitive views on race or something.

37:19

The legacy of slavery or something like that. Oh, it talks about the

37:24

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Brown University. Yeah, so this is happening all over the place, these debates, but they're actually doing something about it.

37:31

They got rid of a marker, was it two years ago? Because it used the word savage in it to talk about a pagan population that Jim Elliott was trying to reach.

37:41

But anyway, there's a couple of things going on there. And this is, of course, Wheaton.

37:46

This is a Christian college, Christian institution historically. And they're just caving like everywhere else to this stuff.

37:53

So I think we have to start here. We have to start with where we're at. And this is just within the last week, right?

37:59

Where I'm not going deep into anything. This is just stuff that I couldn't avoid.

38:05

It just fell in my lap. And all this kind of, to summarize, all this shows us is that there's definitely a bias out there.

38:14

There's a bias against our own history. There's a bias against white people as there's a suspicion about them, about the descendants of Europeans.

38:24

And sure enough, it's Europeans in authoritative positions who are fomenting this, there's no doubt.

38:30

I don't know if they think that they're going to get some kind of a credit for it, or they can separate themselves from those other deplorable descendants of Europeans because they're more enlightened.

38:41

No, whatever it is, there is this bias and it's being reinforced by the people, the very people we trust in our own institutions or we trust until very recently.

38:51

So I thought it was important to lay that groundwork. Now, let's talk about a few of the things going on.

38:58

I guess that's a good transition in Christianity. Southern Baptist Convention, let's start with them.

39:06

William Malhotto, who if you click on his profile is a reporter for the

39:11

Texas Tribune and his pronouns are he, him with an LGBT flag. So he says, packed house here.

39:19

There's a panel, it's a Robert Downen panel on the rise of Christian nationalism at TribFest 23.

39:25

So this is not, I don't think this is a Christian conference I don't think it's like tribulation, like eschatology tribulation.

39:32

I don't even know what TribFest stands for. Well, Ted Cruz is there, so maybe it is a conservative. I don't know what it is.

39:38

I haven't looked into it, but anyway, it's not like an evangelical thing as far as I know. And he says, so he's quoting,

39:47

I guess, Anthea Butler and says, let's talk about Christians who want to persecute people who just want a better life.

39:55

Right, that's persecution, wanting to close that border. Efforts to bring chaplains into Texas public schools is a direct effort to challenge longstanding church state separations, says

40:04

Amanda Tyler. A bill in Texas passed earlier this year. That Texas schools can replace counselors with chaplains.

40:11

Okay, now here's the key part. Bart Barber, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said most of the evangelicals who are contributing to Christian nationalism's rise don't actually go to church.

40:26

What's the use in calling it a culture war when it's a war for power? Dr. Butler asks, the use of Christian morals to oppose abortion,

40:33

LGBTQ rights and more. So Bart Barber got on this lefty panel and essentially,

40:40

I mean, I guess he's sitting there and I don't think we have recordings of it. We just have pictures in this report. He is, he's reinforcing the framing.

40:50

We'll put it that way. Now, I don't know if I have it queued up. Let me see. Joshua Abitoy, Joshua Abitoy said, wonder how

40:59

Bart Barber formed his opinion. Everything I've seen runs contrary to this. And it is true. I think

41:04

Jeff Wright had posted some actual stats that people who identified as Christian nationals were much more likely to attend services.

41:11

Bart Barber responded though, and he says, in response to a number of statements linking Christian nationalism with kinism and white supremacy,

41:19

I cited research I had read suggesting that that particular strain of Christian nationalism that is kinist or white supremacist is often less church -going and involvement in missions, trips and evangelism works against that.

41:32

Now, I have no clue what he's talking about. He doesn't provide a link. It's just,

41:38

I don't know who tested for this. I mean, is there a literal, I mean, all five kinists out there, right, were polled and they didn't go to church or mission.

41:46

Like, what is he talking about? How do you test? I'd love to see how that poll works.

41:54

But that was the Southern Baptist Convention. Well, then you have this. This is, oh man, and I'm sorry if, no, okay, everyone is seeing it.

42:02

Good, I thought for a minute no one was seeing what I was showing. Then you have this from Owen Straund at the

42:10

G3 Conference. So I'm just gonna play it, this clip. This is the clip. I haven't clipped this. This is G3 putting it out there.

42:16

Does not love a merely white church in America. God loves a global people of all backgrounds and tribes.

42:26

This is under fire today from different corners, but we confess it and we'll stand here.

42:32

Come what may, God loves the global body of Christ.

42:39

God. Okay, all right. Well, thank you, Captain Obvious here. I don't know of one person.

42:47

Even people, now, and I have, I never knew kinists. I still don't really actually know any kinists that I'm aware of, personally.

42:55

But I have seen, what, in the last year or two, I think I know two people.

43:00

I can think of two people on Facebook who say that they're kinists.

43:09

And I don't even think they, and I don't know them well, but I'm really pretty certain, I've never seen anything from them that would suggest that they believe anything close to what

43:21

Owen Straund is saying here. And that's kind of like, if you're trying to even, like, forget about Christian nationalism for a minute.

43:27

If you're trying to critique self, kinists, people who take the label for themselves, if they don't even agree with that, then what are you actually critiquing?

43:38

And I'm not an expert on kinism, but as I understand it, the kinist perspective, and I think it's a broad range, and I don't even know what the definition quite is because it's so, now it seems so malleable the way people use it.

43:51

But as I understand it, historically, this came out of a certain vein of theonomy.

43:57

And the idea was that some of the laws in the Old Testament that apply to pagan nations are still in application, okay?

44:04

That's all I understand it to be. And so they try to find a modern application for those laws.

44:10

And so that gets them into positions where they try to say things like, you shouldn't marry outside of your race because that would be a violation.

44:18

And I don't know, maybe more extreme forms. I've never seen this, but I guess it's possible there are more extreme forms that would say that's not even a valid marriage.

44:26

Don't quote me on that. And I'm certainly not trying to slander them, but I could see how you could come up with extremes forms of that.

44:33

My point is in the most extreme form of that thinking, which I don't agree with, but I understand the logic of how they're getting there.

44:41

In the most extreme form of that, that's not saying that God doesn't love non -white people at all.

44:50

It's saying, in fact, the rules would be the same for every group, right? So they're not saying that white people have a special status that a certain rule only applies to them or certain benefits only apply to them.

45:05

It's saying across the board, they just think that's part of God's order. Now I disagree with taking,

45:11

I think that's a reductionistic approach to it, to people groups, ethnicity, race, all of that.

45:17

But that's, I think, that's the perspective. And hopefully if anyone is a

45:22

Kinnest, if anyone's watching, I don't think there are any Kinnest watching right now, but if anyone later on who takes the label for themselves, hopefully they can let me know whether they think

45:31

I'm fairly representing them or not. One thing I know for sure though, is Owen is not fairly representing them, nor is he definitely, he's definitely not representing

45:39

Christian nationalists. There's no question, people who take that label on themselves. I've never once seen anyone say anything close to that.

45:47

So what do you do with this? Now, context is important here. This has been a debate online for years, not years, sorry.

45:58

I guess it has been years, but when it comes to Christian nationalism, not years, sorry, weeks, months, but definitely weeks.

46:06

In fact, Stephen Wolf has already been basically predicting this, saying Owen's gonna come and call me a

46:12

Kinnest, and that's a lie, I'm not. In fact, as I understand it, Stephen has reached out to Owen before he did this, already correcting him for what he was about to do, and Owen did it anyway.

46:24

And Stephen has tweets going back years saying that he's critiquing Kinnism, saying he's not a Kinnest, saying even holding up certain interracial marriages as good and fitting, that kind of thing.

46:36

And yet there's no ability to interact with that. There's one particular tweet from I think about a year ago that Stephen made where he was pontificating on interethnic marriage and whether it could be a relative sin, meaning even if it's not a sin in and of itself, is it possible that marrying outside of your group, and in Stephen's mind, and this is what you have to understand about that, is in Stephen's mind, when he talks about ethnicity, he has a particular definition, and he talks about in his book,

47:09

The Case for Christian Nationalism, that's more holistic, that includes things like religion. So you have to look at it as, is it a sin to marry outside of your faith group?

47:23

And you could expand that perhaps to culture, but faith is a part of this. And so he was asking something very different than how it's being framed.

47:34

And people want to latch onto that. They want to insert their own definition of ethnicity, which is reduced to genetics.

47:41

They want to then, even though Stephen went and basically retracted it and said, yeah, I don't even,

47:47

I think it was silly. I don't even agree with that. They want to say, wow, ha ha, that was the moment where Stephen revealed his true colors.

47:55

The racism is right under the surface. Stephen Wolf has it, and we can ignore everything else he said.

48:00

In fact, multiple times, even on this podcast, which is why it's pointless for me to bring Stephen on again to have him explain for the 15th time why he doesn't agree with kinism and he doesn't disagree with interracial marriage and that kind of thing.

48:13

It's pointless because it's been said so many times, Stephen's clarified it so many times, and disagree with them all you want, great.

48:21

Have a robust conversation. An actual conversation would be nice. But instead what we get is mudslinging, is slander.

48:29

And it is slander. Biblically speaking, this is slander. And not only is Owen saying it, but G3 is promoting it.

48:35

And you have the organizers of G3 circling the wagons around it. And that's the thing that I find so disheartening.

48:43

And it probably doesn't do me much good to say this as far as like, do I want to make enemies of G3?

48:49

No, not at all. In fact, I still would say to everyone listening, look, if you're in the area and it comes to town and you're thinking of going to a good conference, you're going to find some good preaching there.

49:00

But some of the people running this conference, they are fine with slander. They're fine with destroying a brother in Christ who doesn't even hold these positions.

49:12

And I don't even know what to say beyond that, except this is very reminiscent of the way

49:18

Russell Moore treated Christians. He would make the exact same kind of statements. That MLK50, I remember he did something very similar to this.

49:28

He does it on immigration. He says things like, he gives the impression that there's this group of Christians out there who somehow don't care about immigrants.

49:37

And it's like, what are you talking about? There's some group of Christians that just care about white people. There's some group of Christians that think that Jesus only belongs to them and he's

49:47

Republican. And every time he would say things like that, I would say, what are you? Come on, man.

49:53

To quote Joe Biden, come on, man. And he would do it anyways. It doesn't matter how many times.

49:59

And of course, it's always kind of vague and couched. There's this big group. Maybe there's one figure we can pull out and say it's him, but then we'll smear a whole group.

50:09

And this is the same thing. Owen's taking one person, Stephen, and then he's gonna use that to smear a whole group.

50:15

Now, maybe he mentioned a few other people in his particular talk, I don't know. But it's the same kind of tactic to say there's this large group of people that have this impression that Jesus doesn't care about people who aren't white.

50:31

Yeah, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And I shouldn't really have to need to say anything beyond that to be quite honest with you.

50:38

But surprisingly, instead of being laughed out of the room for saying something like that, you have stuff like this.

50:46

Getting, and it's got a lot of traction, this tweet. Nothing is shocking about Owen's statement. What's shocking is that this statement needed to be made currently in the church in America.

50:54

That's the exact same play the woke people made in 2020. Not saying Ken's woke, and I'm not saying

50:59

Owen Strawn's woke to the point that people who went woke in 2020 are woke. But there's a little bit of wokeness there with Owen.

51:06

And he had it before 2018. So it's not a surprise. The way he treated like police shootings and that kind of thing.

51:14

But this tactic though, is definitely what I saw the woke people doing. It's confirmation bias.

51:19

So you say something that's crazy, right? You say something that's slanderous, and then someone comes out and says, objects to it.

51:25

There's like, this is slander. And then you double down by saying, the fact that people object to this must mean that they agree with the sentiment that Owen's critiquing.

51:36

It's sad that it even needed to be said. And you grab your pearls and you have your virtue signal time.

51:43

And I think is this man, you have people, tweets like this from Scott O 'Neill, throw a rock into a pack of dogs.

51:52

The one that yelps the loudest is usually the one that got hit. It's just not helpful. If you're complaining about this,

52:01

I mean, it's in a context. So he's putting this in a context where if you're complaining about this, then hey, if you're yelping the loudest, maybe it applies to you.

52:10

Maybe we should be suspicious that you're a racist. And by the way, if anyone, and I'm sure there will be people who try to take even what

52:16

I'm saying here in this podcast and try to start smearing me, right? I'm racist for critiquing it.

52:22

I must agree with it or something. Then it's the same tactic. And it's a lying, slanderous tactic, which is manipulative.

52:32

It's just, it's what the world does. Now, Owen doubled down on it. He was corrected multiple times, but he decided to double down.

52:40

And he decided to post this thread from Justin Taylor, who has been with,

52:47

I don't even know if he directly works for the Gospel Coalition. I think he does, actually. I think he draws a paycheck from them, if I'm not mistaken.

52:54

But he's very associated with the Gospel Coalition. And so now you have, oh, it's John retweeting someone from the

53:01

Gospel Coalition who makes the same critique, essentially.

53:08

Or a similar, actually his critique is not even as harsh as Owen's. And he says, this is what Owen says. "'Do not miss this very revealing thread on kinism "'in our circles from Justin Taylor.

53:17

"'It is no imaginary foe. "'It is alive and well.'" So you click on it. Here's Justin Taylor from the Gospel Coalition, which, frankly, as soon as it's

53:25

Gospel Coalition, I'm out already. I'm already kind of like, yeah, it's probably not true.

53:32

Just because of years of reading their stuff on politics and realizing how terrible it is. But here we go.

53:38

Here's Justin Taylor. Kevin DeYoung on Stephen Wolfe's book. So first he's gonna quote Kevin DeYoung talking about Stephen Wolfe to prove

53:44

Stephen Wolfe is a kinist. And Kevin DeYoung, of course, says that this could be used, that Stephen Wolfe's stuff could be used to try to,

53:55

I guess, stand against interracial marriage or something. So anyway, we got Kevin DeYoung's opinion here. And then we got

54:01

Alistair Roberts on Stephen Wolfe. That's great. We have Alistair Roberts. And Alistair Roberts is saying his opinion about Stephen Wolfe.

54:13

So we're still not going to Stephen Wolfe. We just have opinions about Stephen Wolfe from respective authorities. And then we have, and this was, by the way, at the time

54:20

Owen retweeted it, this was the last tweet in the sequence. And it's from a guy named Blake Callens, I think that's his name, who posted this video.

54:29

Now I'm gonna show you this video. For those who listen to this podcast regularly, you know because you watched it what happened in the discussion that I had the other day with Stephen Wolfe and Josh Abatoy and Nate Fisher and William Wolfe.

54:50

You'll know that there was a hesitation that some of them had to answer questions throughout the entire interview for a few reasons.

54:59

I think the first was they didn't want to interrupt each other, right? So if I didn't call on someone, there was just that awkward pause.

55:06

The other reason I think was some of the questions seemed directed at certain people. And if that person didn't answer, like if it seemed like it was a question for Stephen, but if Stephen didn't answer, then others were just reluctant to do that.

55:18

This happened throughout the entire podcast. It also happened though, during one specific question.

55:25

I'm gonna show you that video and then I'm gonna tell you what the context is. I'm gonna show you another video. So here's the video that Owen Strawn's retweeting in a thread that Owen Strawn's retweeting that Justin Taylor put out there as evidence that Christian nationalism has a problem with kinism.

55:39

Here we go. Audience, so here's one for 1999. Is it inherently better to marry your own race?

55:48

So the word race is used, not ethnicity, not culture. But so I'm assuming that there's a genetic component that Ian Franklin is bringing into this.

55:57

I mean, I think Stephen already kind of talked about this, but I don't know if any of you guys wanna answer that question.

56:05

Is it better or worse? Does it matter? I'll pick on someone if we have to.

56:18

All right, so it's trying to show like this is a comedy show and that it takes that one clip and that hesitation alone was enough to prove that kinism is a problem in Christian nationalist circles.

56:32

In fact, Owen even, I didn't pull it up, but he had a subtweet against this. It was something like,

56:39

I'm pretty sure it was this. My face when Christian brothers can't answer if interracial marriage is wrong or something like that, if it should be permitted.

56:48

And someone else though made a response pretty soon after it. Someone who had actually watched the podcast,

56:54

I assume. And this is what they put. And I want you to, I wonder if this changes anything.

57:01

Now, of course, this is meme world we're talking about. This is a world where people are mocking each other, but here is a second rendition of this from the audience.

57:11

So here's one for 1999. Is it inherently better to marry your own race?

57:19

Flashback. In one of my chapters, I say that intermarriage is good in creating a more like solid, more solidarity amongst a culture.

57:32

It doesn't matter that that's in there. It doesn't matter that my book says nothing about interracial marriage or interethnic marriage.

57:39

End of flashback. Okay, so that was the flashback.

57:44

Steven had already answered the question. And then if you actually watch and Josh Abatoy chimes in to answer the question again,

57:52

Josh Abatoy says, it's fine, there's nothing wrong with that at all. So it's, you have to selectively edit and like CNN and MSNBC would do.

58:05

And then you have to bring a lot of assumptions to the table in order to slander.

58:10

That's what's happening there. Now, Justin Taylor, let's see if I can pull it up again.

58:16

Justin Taylor added to this. So the next day he added to this, the 26th, that was yesterday.

58:23

And he says, I'll whack back my previous tweet and publicly apologize. So to his credit, this is something

58:28

Owen isn't doing, but Justin Taylor from the Gospel Coalition is willing to do. You can watch the full context here.

58:35

And then he's got to leave the parting shot here. The host who once wrote a seminary paper defending the

58:43

Confederacy, but then tried to pretend that he didn't. Asks a listener question about whether it's inherently better to marry your own race.

58:52

So here, this is such a leftist like tactic. Bring in something that's unrelated, okay?

58:58

But is equally egregious to the left defending the Confederacy, right?

59:03

And then try to attach that. Now he got his facts wrong here. Anyway, I mean, it wasn't, yeah, he's talking about me and it wasn't a paper defending the

59:12

Confederacy. It was, I'm comfortable saying that it was defending Southern denominations before the start of the war, at least.

59:21

But defending is not even the best word. It's more like trying to just represent them accurately because they've been so misunderstood.

59:31

And yes, when the Russell Fuller interviews came out, I still remember this and I still have all the tweets.

59:37

And there's no reason for me to bring it up now. I dealt with it at the time and did a couple episodes and just dealt with all of this.

59:44

But long story short, there was a professor from Southern Seminary. And Southern Seminary was bleeding at the time.

59:51

I mean, Russell Fuller was just taking them to the woodshed, exposing the liberalism there. And so there was a professor there.

59:59

I don't even remember his name now. Eschatology guy, I think. But anyway, he came out and he started trying to publicly, like get me into like a struggle session online.

01:00:12

That's what it felt like. And he was, at first, actually, I didn't know what he was talking about.

01:00:17

He wanted to know if I wrote this dissertation on defending the Confederacy or defending slavery,

01:00:24

I think it was. And I was like, first of all, it wasn't a dissertation. My paper wasn't a dissertation.

01:00:31

But I did not want to, like I was in a position of, at the time, we need to focus on what

01:00:37

Fuller's saying here at Southern Seminary. And they're trying to distract from it to impugn the motives of the interviewer.

01:00:43

And as if Fuller, I guess, was listening to my questions and getting, I don't know, dog whistles from the racist.

01:00:51

And they're trying to totally distract from it to find something they can use to malign.

01:00:58

And I thought this was telling. I thought this was a slam dunk because it's like, well, if they're that desperate, then they have no answer to this.

01:01:04

Fuller must be telling the truth. That's basically the takeaway. But I wasn't going to make it easy for them.

01:01:10

I wasn't going to come out immediately and just take credit for, yes, this is my paper.

01:01:15

And I've learned more since then. At the time, I was hoping, can we get back to the topic at hand? But I never denied it.

01:01:22

I never denied it. I didn't remember what my title was for the paper. This was years ago. This was 2011. I've written since then.

01:01:31

I've taken some of that research and I put it in book form. And you can find it on Amazon, Sacred Conviction, The South's Fight for Biblical Authority, Joseph J, it was a pseudonym.

01:01:41

I used it at the time because wiser men than me said you need to. And I debated it and I thought, well, the

01:01:47

Federalist Papers were pseudonyms. And they said, you'll never get a job in academia even though we agree with you, you're right, but you'll never get a job if you write something like this.

01:01:54

I was like, okay. So that's what I did. But I think the other side, the Cosmo Coalition side, what they've tried to do in their ignorance is they've latched onto this to try to discredit anything that I do.

01:02:05

They said, John tried to hide this. John is trying to, of course, you're gonna use, if you have unpopular views, using a pseudonym,

01:02:14

I think makes, that's part of the reason these anon accounts, I'm not against having an anon account.

01:02:19

I don't have one, but, and I've changed my view on this because I realized it's so easy to get doxed. So why even, you know, but if you're gonna get unpopular information out there, right, using a symbolic name of some kind,

01:02:33

I don't think that's a wrong thing to do that. I don't think it's, I don't think it's engaging in lying in the sense of like you're, it's like nicknames or, you know, it's what you're known as in a particular environment.

01:02:47

And it is for the purpose of protection. And frankly, we wouldn't have the concept, the Bill of Rights, if we didn't have people doing that back in the time of our founding.

01:02:56

So anyway, we can debate, we can disagree on pseudonyms and whether or not they should be used or not.

01:03:01

I'm less likely to use them myself, but I understand people who have jobs and families to feed, and yet they have, you know, a brilliant political mind and they wanna be out there talking about these things.

01:03:13

I mean, they really have no option if they don't wanna get fired, right? So anyway,

01:03:18

I don't wanna camp on this too long, but Justin Taylor, his facts are wrong. I never tried to pretend that I didn't.

01:03:24

I just wasn't making it easy for them. I wasn't admitting to things that they were misread, like saying it's a dissertation or stuff like that.

01:03:31

I just wasn't admitting to it. So, and I did right after that though. And look, it was,

01:03:37

I wrote it, you know, I don't know, I was 20, 21 or whatever when I wrote it. I might change some things if I had it to do over, but in the substance of it,

01:03:44

I mean, I was right. I was right. I think time has even proved more that I'm right with the way the SBC convention has been going.

01:03:50

So that's Justin Taylor's way of trying to link me somehow. Like it's understandable that he would have thought that we would have been against interracial marriage because at one time

01:03:59

I wrote a paper defending the Confederacy, right? Okay, Justin, after no one answers, he calls on a panelist who says it's not better or worse, but it's common and fine.

01:04:10

And then he tried, so this is not an apology guys. He starts with a public apology and then tweet after tweet after tweet.

01:04:16

Here's another one. Stephen Wolfe is a tweet I talked to you about earlier about Stephen Wolfe. He brings that into the equation.

01:04:23

He's trying to bring other things in. I mean, look how long this is. Shen V, what does, you know,

01:04:30

Shen V think about Stephen Wolfe's work? What does John Reasoner think of Stephen Wolfe's work? So does who don't know who

01:04:35

John Reasoner is. There's no reason you should, cause I don't even, I barely know who he is other than he just viciously will attack people out of nowhere for being kidding.

01:04:45

It's actually quite comical, to be honest with you. The way, but it's just funny that he's using someone like that.

01:04:52

It goes, how many tweets is this? This goes on, this goes on 18, 19, 19, what?

01:04:59

Or no, 18, sorry, no 17, 17 tweets, okay. So 17 tweets, what was three tweets become 17 tweets because he's got to double down and walk back.

01:05:09

And it's just, it's just a sad little case of someone who, man, and I'm sorry, none of you could see all, but let me show you now.

01:05:16

So here, here's the, here, oh, that's not it, man. Let me pull it back up. I feel bad that I was, you saw me talking, but you didn't see what

01:05:23

I was talking about. So here it is, Justin Taylor. So here, here's the whole tweet thread. So you can see it there.

01:05:31

There's the one where he talks about me. There's the one where he talks about Stephen. So it just keeps going. So anyway, so, so Justin Taylor, you know, doubles down, uses mostly people's opinions about Stephen to try to prove that Stephen's this terrible guy.

01:05:45

And, and that's just, you know, just how it is. Let's see, what else did

01:05:51

I want to show you? Okay, and then Owen's Sean, this, he makes it worse. He makes it even worse yesterday. And this is where I was like,

01:05:57

Owen, I mean, you gotta stop. If you want any credibility left with, with the people who know what's actually going on here, this is terrible.

01:06:06

So Rhett Koppel says, and this is kind of, this is long. I don't want to read the whole thing, but he starts out.

01:06:14

He says, the consistent problem I am seeing with denominations and conferences, trying to police racism and kinism is that the biblical categories are almost always tossed aside in favor of modern sensibilities.

01:06:22

Good point. The sin needs to be explicit and explicitly defined within a biblical category of sin before the church has any authority whatsoever to correct or address it.

01:06:32

Instead, what we get are performative posturing and the condemnation of neoliberal buzzwords. Could not agree more.

01:06:39

From what I can tell, sinful partiality and legalism are likely the best grounds for charging a sin in the case of what is commonly considered classic racism, kinism, antisemitism, or even then neoliberal fervor seems to exclude any sort of biblical category for wisdom, preference, conscience.

01:06:54

For instance, saying interracial marriage is a sin is unwise, it isn't preferable. And as contrary to one's own conscience are four different categories.

01:07:01

But neoliberalism demands the same crudge will be used against them all. Despite the first being clear extra biblical legalism and the following, the three fitting well within biblical permissible categories of wisdom, preference, conscience.

01:07:14

Yet all four of these categories would be rightly or wrongly labeled as kinist. So anyway, he goes on and this is a great point that he's making, great point.

01:07:24

Because what he's saying is that kinism means anything you want it to mean basically now within like, if you're even a little, like you'd rather, you'd prefer to marry within your own ethnic group.

01:07:34

That's actually a quality that you're attracted to. And you, let's say you wanna even, let's say you wanna preserve your lineage.

01:07:45

And you think that marrying, if you're Ukrainian you wanna marry Ukrainian. Of course, it's not bad when you're talking about other countries, right?

01:07:54

That would be considered kinism is what Rett Koppel is trying to say. He's saying there's this, that's a legalism. You're binding people's conscience.

01:08:00

The Bible doesn't say anything about this. Yes, of course, you're not supposed to be unequally yoked which has a wide application.

01:08:07

And I think it applies to marriage, but that it's not giving a, you know, it's not, doesn't forbid these preferences.

01:08:13

And so great point. So what does Owen Strawn do with that? Wow, this is what he says.

01:08:18

It's very saddened to see that there are different forms of kinism, softer or harder that have definitely entered the reform community.

01:08:26

Such ideology is sinful. Like all sin, fleshly partiality calls us for repentance. Praise God, he loves to forgive straying people like us.

01:08:32

Now, here's the thing. That's just legalism. That's just, that's literally what the woke do.

01:08:40

It's what, you know, old time fundamentalists are kind of accused, they're associated with doing just making up a rule and then just saying the

01:08:47

Bible teaches this. Or there's a principle in the scripture and then you're trying to come up with a rule that maybe the principle could imply but it's not actually explicit.

01:08:56

And you're making it, you're making it a hammer. Anyone, everyone has to, you cannot go to a movie theater and be a

01:09:02

Christian or play cards or drink or you cannot say insensitive things. You cannot, you know,

01:09:08

I'm trying to think of the woke have a longer list, but it's more vague because it's, if you don't meet some standard of egalitarianism, you are outside the tent and unclean and where there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

01:09:23

And so Owen is characterizing what Rhett just said as kinism. All right, guys, that proves what

01:09:28

I'm saying. I guess kinism is, it doesn't mean anything. It is meaningless at this point.

01:09:36

Oh, I don't know why. Okay, so I brought, I guess I just had this on my tab because I thought it was weird. And it just, so someone sent me this.

01:09:42

Owen Strachan says, such an honor to preach alongside my, all caps, blood brother in Christ, Vodie Bachum.

01:09:48

It's just cringy. Now, is there anything wrong with it? No, you can say that, but I'm just, you know, blood brother in Christ.

01:09:53

Cause I guess it's a play on Christ's blood. You know, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just within the context of everything that's happening, it's like a, it comes across as a chide.

01:10:04

It's chiding people. You know, chiding all those kinists, he showed them, right? Cause Vodie Bachum says, but yeah,

01:10:10

Vodie Bachum is my brother in Christ too. And Vodie Bachum and I are also friends. And like, it's just like,

01:10:17

I don't know. Is that, you know, you're acting like there's this group of people who are against this. No one's against it.

01:10:23

Not one person I know is against it. Um, so there you go.

01:10:29

That's, uh, that's the Owen stuff. Now, um, I'm not sure why

01:10:35

I'm, I'm not sure why you can't see all this. I've been trying to show you stuff and I guess, yeah, we can't see your screen.

01:10:42

Everyone is, everyone and their mom is telling me they can't, sorry guys. John, I can't see. I'm not sure what was going on there.

01:10:49

I think I must've had a video pulled up. So you just got a little bitty screen of me. Sorry about that guys. So now

01:10:55

I have to go back and show you all of it real quick. So here's, uh, man, how far back do we go?

01:11:02

There's Josh's tweet. There's Ken, there's Scott, O 'Neal, there's Justin Taylor and his, his thread.

01:11:12

And then, um, you know, there's Owen. I almost feel like I have to go back and edit this, but I don't really have time to.

01:11:19

So hopefully people skip ahead so they can see all this. And then here's Owen critiquing

01:11:24

Rett Koppel. So, and there you go. And there's, uh, Owen, um, you know, saying

01:11:30

Bode Backham's his blood brother, which I guess is supposed to be, that's edgy or something. Okay.

01:11:36

So we're, we're back in business, screens back up, uh, and I'll put my face, uh, full screen for, for this.

01:11:44

So we have one last thing I want to talk about here. And that requires me to go to, um, my

01:11:51

Twitter. And by the way, I am back on Twitter. I've never actually said that on the podcast. So if you want to follow me, it's at JohnHarris89.

01:11:57

I'm back on for now. We'll see how long that lasts. But, um, this is a, uh, this is, let's see my

01:12:05

Twitter. I got to scroll down, I guess, to find what I'm looking for here. Let's see here.

01:12:13

Oh, there it is. That's not it. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Pictures of the Adirondacks, pictures of the men's retreat.

01:12:19

Here it is. Okay. Someone sent me this on what?

01:12:24

Saturday night, maybe? Friday night, I don't remember. He said, and it's these proposed memorials for the

01:12:31

CREC, which is a, you know, reformed denomination. Now, and the CREC is kind of broad.

01:12:37

You could be Pato Baptist. You could be Credo Baptist. Um, you know, you'd be federal vision and be in the

01:12:43

CREC. I mean, it's kind of, uh, broad, but theologically that is.

01:12:49

But they want to clamp down on something. And these would be binding memorials. It's kind of like a resolution in the

01:12:55

SBC, but in the SBC resolutions aren't binding. It's like an overture in the PCA.

01:13:03

And I did not know, I didn't realize, I found out since then, I guess Doug Wilson wrote like three of these or two of these.

01:13:09

And I did not know that at the time. So I did not realize I was critiquing something

01:13:15

Doug Wilson had written, but here we go. You know, we're equal opportunity here. I'm just going to give you my opinion.

01:13:21

Doesn't matter who it is. Uh, I'll read these for you. And then I'll give you my take. Cause my take's very simple.

01:13:27

Here are the proposed memorials that would be binding. So in other words, you can kick out a church for, you know, being outside the scope on this.

01:13:37

Knox and Huss Presbyterians have proposed these memorials. Number one, there's three of them. On ethnic balance, on ethnic balance.

01:13:47

Kind of an odd term, but okay. We believe the human tendency to congregate around shared affections is natural and can be good.

01:13:53

It creates the blessings of cultures and subcultures, for example. But as with all natural goods in a fallen world, there is a temptation to exalted it to a position of unbiblical importance, thus making it an idol.

01:14:04

While an ethnic heritage is something to be grateful for and which may be preserved in any way consistent with the law of God, it is important to reject every form of identity politics, including kinism, whether malicious, vainglorious or ideologically separatist, segregationist.

01:14:21

Now, you know, the first thing that stood out to me when I read that was I was like, I didn't think kinism was identity politics.

01:14:28

It wasn't like, it's not a political thing I didn't think. Could it become that? I guess, I mean, it's,

01:14:33

I thought it was more of a like personal kind of thing, but okay. Maybe Doug Wilson knows something

01:14:39

I don't. And we'll just, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt there and that kinism is a form of identity politics of some kind.

01:14:45

Now, one of the things, and this is probably a discussion for a later video, is when we talk about identity politics, in one sense, all politics is actually identity politics.

01:14:57

That's actually one of the things, the left kind of understands something. I think the right now has a hard time understanding because we're, so much of the institutional right is committed to a neutrality, neutrality in religion and culture.

01:15:08

Public square needs to be just kind of equal and neutral. And so anything that would come in and say,

01:15:15

I represent these people who identify this way, right? That's, I guess you could say that that's identity politics but what happened in the seventies was you had the left coming in and their identity politics was basically, let's get all the black revolutionary types together, like Black Panthers, let's get them together with the feminists, let's get them together with the anti -war coalition, all these different coalitions.

01:15:40

And we'll be able to outnumber the majority of kind of heritage Americans or just decent ordinary

01:15:47

American conservative types and we'll be able to outvote them. That's kind of like the thinking of identity politics.

01:15:54

And so once the Democrat gets into office, he's gotta hand out his favors to all these different groups, right?

01:16:00

This is kind of like the boss system of politics in New York. And conservatives want to instead cater to everyone.

01:16:08

We're gonna do something that's good for everyone, right? Our policies are good for everyone, including racial minorities.

01:16:14

And now it's even like, hey, well, our policies are even good for gay people. Well, it's just universally good because that's what we believe in.

01:16:23

But I think one of the things this fails to recognize is that the people who are interested in that kind of a thing, in some universal good for everyone in all the world, those kinds of people are actually in a certain group themselves.

01:16:40

Some people call them global Gnostics, but whatever, that's kind of not a favorable name. But whatever group you wanna, whatever label you wanna describe as irrelevant, they're in a group.

01:16:48

And so they actually, you could even say that advocating for that, for their group's preference on this, is almost a form of, it could be considered a form of identity politics.

01:16:58

So depending on how broadly or narrowly you view of identity politics, it's a hard word to use.

01:17:03

You have to define it. And there's certainly negative versions of that that are intended to break up the identity of the nation, but there are, which is what the left has done.

01:17:15

But those who want to fight back against that by restoring the nation to its founding principles and to its own identity, its

01:17:22

Anglo -Protestant identity or whatever, those people who want that core, that core understanding that gave us our constitution and Bill of Rights and all of that, they are now being accused of, in some quarters of engaging in identity politics.

01:17:39

So my opinion on this first thing is just that it's vague, it's general, it's just, it's not helpful.

01:17:45

And especially if you're making this a rule that if you engage in a form of identity politics, which could include kinism and words like being glorious,

01:17:54

I mean, this stuff is so, it's so general, it's so broad that it's just very, it's very hard to fight against those charges if you have people in authority making them.

01:18:10

And in their minds, they mean one thing and you mean something else, there's just gonna be a lot of confusion. Knox Presbytery, again, on antisemitism.

01:18:17

I guess there's a second one Doug Wilson wrote. We believe the conversion of the Jews is key to the success of Christ's great commission and is incumbent upon us to pray and labor towards that end while apart from Christ, the

01:18:26

Jews are as all others alienated from God. They have remained an object of God's care because the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

01:18:33

God's plan for converting them is for them to see Gentile nations under the blessings of Christ's Lordship, thus leading them to long for the same.

01:18:40

Hence the cancerous sin of antisemitism has no place in God's plan. Okay, another buzzword though, antisemitism.

01:18:47

What do we mean by that? That's part of the problem. I just told you what the ADL means by it, right?

01:18:53

If you're just a Christian, you're an antisemite, right? Apparently Nazis get a pass if they're fighting for Ukraine.

01:18:58

So how does this work? Exactly, this is part of the problem. You have to come up with extensive definitions for these things.

01:19:06

And I'll get to the main problem, I think, in a minute. All right, the last one is, I don't think this one's by Doug Wilson.

01:19:14

It's by Hus Presbytery. We believe God made all nations from one man, Adam. These nations were surrendered by sin, but God by the cross of Christ and the outpouring of his

01:19:23

Holy Spirit at Pentecost has and is reuniting and reconciling the nations, drawing them into one church, the body of Christ.

01:19:30

We therefore detest and repudiate all forms of nationalistic and racial hatred, okay?

01:19:39

Prejudice, segregation, discrimination and persecution, including antisemitism, white supremacy, kinism, oikophobia and critical race theory.

01:19:49

We seek to unite the nations in the worship of the triune God, sanctifying all people's languages and customs to his glory. I think this is the worst one, to be honest with you.

01:19:57

Because it throws out a number of buzzwords, a number of things we're used to hearing from the left, and it doesn't define them.

01:20:05

And this is supposed to be enforceable so that you can get kicked out of the denomination if you violate it.

01:20:11

So what I said was, I'm told these memorials, if accepted by the CREC and an upcoming council, are binding on CREC churches.

01:20:18

Notice how vague and general so much of the language is. Why not, this is my proposal, something like this.

01:20:23

We condemn using race as a justification to sin against someone or anyone. Wouldn't that be easier?

01:20:31

And I think it would. And this is one of the things that, that's actually very specific.

01:20:36

You might think it's general, but it's very specific because whenever someone starts sinning against someone, and the

01:20:43

Bible defines what sin is, you can find chapter and verse and say, you're doing this. Now your motive could be because it's justifiable because that person is of another ethnicity or another race.

01:20:54

But it's not justifiable because you're still sinning against them, right? So you're using this fake justification to do so.

01:21:01

That would be biblical. And that's all I was saying was like, why not something as simple as that?

01:21:07

Doesn't that cover everything? And so Doug Wilson said, easier, but it wouldn't do the job.

01:21:13

And no need to put memorials in quotation marks, it is our word for them. So I should probably clarify, I didn't mean, I wasn't meaning anything disrespectful by putting it in quotation.

01:21:20

I just thought for those who are uninitiated to memorials, they would, I don't know.

01:21:26

I don't know why I put it there. They just wouldn't know what that meant. It wasn't a slam. But so I asked, why wouldn't that do the job?

01:21:32

I haven't received an answer, but that's fine. But I think Doug Wilson actually did a whole blog about, or a blog about this yesterday.

01:21:38

But the blog, I read it. It was mostly just a defense of Moscow, of his church, of himself.

01:21:46

I don't know. I mean, he says, there's odd things in it too. Like he talks about like, I don't know if this was a slam at Baptists, but we need to be funding

01:21:55

Baptists who are doing good work in developing Baptist political theology, like Scott O 'Neill and Andrew Walker.

01:22:01

And I'm just like, okay, so not myself or Joel Webben or Josh Abattoir or William Wolfe.

01:22:09

No, apparently Scott O 'Neill and Andrew Walker, they're the people doing.

01:22:16

So I don't know if that was, I mean, look, if I was a Presbyterian trying to persuade Baptists to join me,

01:22:21

I would put those two as the thought leaders and say, those are the thought leaders you guys have. But the whole thing was basically a defense of what they're doing, of the offense of these memorials.

01:22:31

It didn't satisfy me. I don't think it really, it's clear to me that there's some kind of a problem and I might be somewhat uninitiated into this.

01:22:41

I have friends in the CREC though. And what I'm hearing from them is that essentially there's a concern that there's certain individuals,

01:22:54

I guess, in certain churches that have very unsavory views. And I guess on Jews and I don't know exactly what, but that's the impression.

01:23:06

And one of the problems I see is that this isn't being brought up in a specific case -by -case basis, really.

01:23:16

It's like, here's exhibit A, here's exhibit B, here's exhibit C. This is what we're trying to combat.

01:23:23

And how do we do that? How do we come up with language? Let's identify it as sinful and then come up with language to guard against it.

01:23:32

That's not what I see happening, at least publicly. I'm sure it must be happening behind the scenes, but I don't know who.

01:23:37

I don't know who or where this is happening. I have no clue. It supposedly is though. It's this great threat.

01:23:43

So hypothetically, maybe it would be a valuable discussion to have, what if, so this is a what if, you did have a problem with people in your church who were, and I'm not gonna use the term the left uses, but they thought it was, we could sin against Jewish people.

01:24:02

We'll take Jewish people for an example because they've oppressed us somehow, or the justification is that they're disproportionately represented in the higher echelons of society and socially engineering us.

01:24:16

And so we should be able to identify our enemy and lash out against them. And lashing out means,

01:24:22

I don't know, we're going to try to pass laws. I mean, who's even talking like this, but this is hypothetical land, passing laws that will prevent them from getting into positions of authority, right?

01:24:38

And if they're Jewish, that is. And so there's a discrimination of a kind there for our own self -preservation.

01:24:48

And this, of course, I keep having to say it's hypothetical because you know someone's gonna try to rip this out of context and say, these are my views or something, which they're not.

01:24:57

But if someone went down that road, right? And their whole thing was trying to strip someone of their citizenship or even just the basic decency that all humans should be treated with who are in a country.

01:25:18

Not saying that there are differences, by the way, between people in other countries and people in a country and people in other houses and people in your house.

01:25:24

These are all distinctions that must be made. But if you have people who are your fellow countrymen who have been here, who are working alongside you, and you want to start now taking things away from them based on this, you know, you're justifying it based on this logic over here.

01:25:40

How would you address that, right? And this is me giving an extensive amount of benefit of the doubt because I don't even know if this is the scenario.

01:25:47

I'm just trying to come up with the most, the best possible case for doing these memorials, which

01:25:52

I think that would be it. Why wouldn't it be better to just keep it in biblical categories, to just say, if you're sinning against someone and you're using anything racial as the justification to do so, we will disfellowship you for that because we don't believe you should sin against someone.

01:26:10

Then you have to do the work. And this is where I think more work probably should be done. If this is indeed the scenario, you have to do the work of making the argument that the

01:26:20

Bible specifically forbids these kinds of things or that in principle, at the very least, these kinds of things are against the biblical teaching.

01:26:33

So that takes exegesis, that takes work, that takes debate. It's not gonna, you're not seeing any of that though in these memorials, in my humble opinion.

01:26:42

You'd have to have like an extensive commentary, I suppose, on the memorials to even try to get there. So why not just ditch the words that the left uses as hammers against us?

01:26:52

Don't hand them that tool because then they'll use it as hammers against us more. They'll use it against people who don't even advocate beliefs that aren't sinful, but because the left has framed it that way, we're existing and working and living in their framing.

01:27:08

Why not just use the biblical framing? That's my whole argument, that's it. I have nothing else to say about it other than that.

01:27:15

Use the biblical framing. And words have meanings. Of course, the Bible wasn't written in English, so we're gonna have to use

01:27:20

English words. But when you're using the English words, be very careful. Someone came to me at the retreat over the weekend and was like, what word do we use?

01:27:28

Do we try to reclaim racism? Do we use, like Rhett Coppell just used partiality, racial partiality,

01:27:36

I mean, sinful racial partiality. I think that's a step better, sinful partiality.

01:27:42

But I think even in James, I mean, what it's talking about is basically people who come in who are rich, you give them the best seats because it benefits you.

01:27:48

It gives you clout, it gives you money, that kind of thing. And so it's not even, you can't really apply that to, like I hired someone who

01:27:58

I was part of my in -group and I wanted to hire them,

01:28:03

I guess, because they were my family, they were my brother. I wanna provide for them.

01:28:10

And so, yes, I discriminated, but it's because I have the freedom to do so and I was actually trying,

01:28:17

I feel like that's a responsibility I have. Like that's not sinful partiality, right? So what is sinful partiality?

01:28:24

It's doing something like that when it's, and it's very specific, it's in the context of the church to, and the ground is level at the foot of the cross.

01:28:33

So it's introducing a hierarchy to benefit yourself in the context of the church.

01:28:40

So, yeah, I mean, and that's where the woke people, they wanted to bring all this into the church, which was part of the problem. So I'm okay with using that term, but I think you just, you have to even, there's even dangers with that.

01:28:51

You have to be careful there. I'm comfortable just saying a mouthful. I think what

01:28:56

I've often said is racial insensitivity. I think I've just by default picked up that term because it just kind of covers the gamut and it defines it on the basis of what the left thinks.

01:29:06

So if it's insensitive to the left, it's racial insensitivity. But if you just say sinning against, justifying your sin on the basis of race or using race to justify sin, that's evil.

01:29:18

But good, that we can all gather around that as Christians, keep it biblical, right? And that's what it would do.

01:29:25

So I don't really, I think this is a work in progress. I think more discussions need to be had about this, how to flesh this kind of thing out and make it more simpler.

01:29:35

I'm hopefully making an attempt to get the ball going here by suggesting that kind of language, but I'm not even in the

01:29:43

CREC, I'm just saying in general. But these resolutions or memorials rather, they would have to be,

01:29:48

I think rewritten and hopefully they will be rewritten. Hopefully the language will be tightened up. Hopefully it'll be better.

01:29:54

And I don't, I have no knowledge of what's gonna happen, but I should say this. Someone did tell me, reach out and say that they thought they had evidence that this might, these things would be tweaked somehow, but I don't know what that's gonna look like.

01:30:09

So anyway, that's my two cents on it. I'm gonna get to the questions now. For $20, and I'm sorry,

01:30:15

John Carter, I didn't get to this now. What's happening to Stephen Wolf shows that there's no point in denying accusations of kinism, racism, antisemitism,

01:30:23

Neo -Confederacy, et cetera. They take your denial and further condemn you for lying and concealing your true beliefs.

01:30:28

Yeah, so anyone, this is what we have to do. This came up last night in the discussion of No Enemies to the

01:30:34

Right, because Neil Shenvey was trying to make, I thought it was hysterical. I apologize if people find that offensive, but it was just,

01:30:41

I was like, he can't be aware of what he's saying. Neil Shenvey tried to make the case at one point that because the left, like CNN's going to use the real

01:30:53

Neo -Nazis to smear you, they're going to have the camera time, then we have to gatekeep them.

01:30:59

Like we have to let the world know that we condemn them, just like the world condemns them, we condemn them too.

01:31:07

And that's part of, that will apparently purify our movement and save us some hassle and that kind of thing.

01:31:16

And the first thing, as he was saying it, I was like, the problem is you're existing within the left's framing during that entire exercise, right?

01:31:27

You're reinforcing the left's framing during that entire exercise. What you need to do is train your people to ignore the left.

01:31:37

So if the left is going to lie about you, what you do is you say, don't ever trust

01:31:43

CNN. Oh no, because it's not like it's a neutral, you're assuming like there's this neutral platform, like CNN's a neutral media platform and people are going to be persuaded.

01:31:53

No, it's not, Fox isn't even. Train your people to not accept those sources as anything legitimate.

01:32:01

Don't believe anything they say when they're talking about a conservative or a Christian, just don't believe it.

01:32:07

That's the way you deal with that. You don't deal with it by playing into their framework and condemning harder those same neo -Nazis.

01:32:15

No, ignore them because they're irrelevant because they don't tell the truth. That's what you do.

01:32:24

So that's my answer to this question from John Carter, essentially. You don't exercise all your energy on denying these things.

01:32:34

I think it's helpful once in a while to just say these people are liars, but that's why you deny it.

01:32:40

Yeah, you know, Owen Strawn at this point, he's just repeating lies. Justin Taylor's repeating lies, right?

01:32:47

It's okay to say that, like these people are repeating lies because they're mischaracterizing and that's the point of saying it.

01:32:53

It's not to, you know, and I'm not, you know, I'm not a neo -Confederate, quote unquote, in the sense of, if you think that, you know,

01:33:02

I think we're downstream in the South, rising again and that kind of thing. I mean, I'd love to see

01:33:08

Southern culture kind of make a comeback in the sense of, you know, increased levels of Christianity and Christian involvement, like the

01:33:17

Bible Belt kind of gaining that boost, increased interest in localism. And I mean, those are the things that I think of are true and valuable in the

01:33:25

Southern tradition. I think some of the cultural aspects, the way that they think about work and leisure, and there's things like that, but I know we're downstream.

01:33:36

I know the divide is more urban rural now. I know there's Southern culture still in pockets in certain places, authentic Southern culture, but that's not who

01:33:45

I am. I live in New York for crying out loud, okay? So yeah, I mean, do I have an affinity for the

01:33:52

Jeffersonian tradition, for the compact fact of the United States, for solutions like secession and nullification, smaller government, more

01:34:04

Christianity infused in the government. If you look at the Confederate Constitution, there's more checks and balances. There's more acknowledgement of God.

01:34:11

Of course I'm for all those things. Of course I am. And I think I can defend it, and I don't have any shame in that.

01:34:16

And I'm not ashamed of my Confederate ancestors, right? Does that make me a Neo -Confederate? If the other side thinks so, fine, that's whatever.

01:34:24

But I'm not here to satisfy them. I'm not here. If they want to take their net, which is their term, and try to capture me and capture

01:34:32

Steven with their term and capture these other people, let them do it, but create a hole in the net.

01:34:40

They can put the net over you all day, but let everyone know their net has a hole in it.

01:34:46

It's not a real net. These terms aren't real. This is just fake smears they throw around. These people aren't trustworthy.

01:34:51

They're liars. Discredit them. And part of the reason I'm doing this podcast is to discredit people like Owen Strawn.

01:34:58

Now, a week ago, I wouldn't have done it. A month ago, I wouldn't have done it. A year ago, I wouldn't have done it.

01:35:03

I was saying things to try to encourage Owen Strawn up until very recently, because I knew he was kind of woke, then he was going in an anti -woke direction.

01:35:10

And I appreciated that, but no longer can I do that. He's been given every benefit of the doubt.

01:35:17

He's been given every evidence that what he's saying isn't true, and he doubles down anyway. That's not a man with character, in my opinion, at all.

01:35:26

And so, and I'm frankly very concerned about the way, we didn't talk about it in this episode, but in a previous episode, he thinks of the gospel.

01:35:35

I mean, he's tweeted out there that basically you don't have the gospel unless you have his views on race. That's insane.

01:35:41

No, you can have different views on race, different social arrangements you'd like to have, and still have the gospel.

01:35:48

In fact, many of the people throughout church history that we know of, that we respect did.

01:35:54

And I wonder if, could Martin Luther or John Chrysostom, would they be able to even live in the

01:36:02

CREC if these memorials pass? No, they wouldn't. So, it's just a sad state of affairs.

01:36:10

And some of these, I don't put Doug Wilson, by the way, in the same category as Owen Strawn at all. But I just,

01:36:17

I think there is a, some people seem to know what time it is, and other people seem to be catching up.

01:36:24

And I think one of the things going on right now with Christian nationalism, so -called, is there are some younger guys, especially, who seem to be more aware of what time it is.

01:36:37

I'm not sure why exactly. There's some older guys who are too, but it seems like it's more among the younger guys.

01:36:42

And the only way I've tried to understand this, that I can understand it, is they're experiencing social breakdown in real time.

01:36:50

Whereas people who are retired, who are shielded from that kind of thing, who have ministry jobs, they're not seeing that as much.

01:36:57

But if you're in a secular world, especially, you see exactly what's going on. And you're thinking of your kids.

01:37:05

And so, I think following leaders who know what time it is, is the important thing. Even if you disagree with certain analyses they have, if they see what's going on around them, they see how the net is encapsulating the church, is encapsulating

01:37:19

Christians, and the strategies that are being used, that's someone that's going to have a better solution, because they can identify the problem.

01:37:26

All right, we've been going mega edition here. I don't know if anyone else, man, there's a lot of comments here.

01:37:34

I'm not even... Douglas says, I'm betting Owen lives far away from the nearest ghetto.

01:37:41

Yeah, you know, I have no clue. I'm not, I have no clue, so I'm not gonna weigh in on it. But I will say this about people like David Platt, and others who talk a lot about racial injustice.

01:37:51

They do tend to live far away from it, which is kind of sad. See, any questions, get them in now, because I'm about to end the podcast.

01:38:01

Having a border that's not open is sinful partiality. Infinity migrants, or you're not being biblical.

01:38:08

Why not, right? Why not? Why can't that be? This is one of the things I've said before about Owen, because these guys will say, they'll rage against their idea of what kinism is, which is so general, you could drive a truck through it.

01:38:22

And then they'll say, but I want a sealed border. I want a closed border. And I've asked on what basis, why? What's the reason for wanting a closed border, or wanting border security?

01:38:31

Now, I'm not Russell Moore. I'm not like him. I want the border closed. Why? I don't know what the justification is.

01:38:39

The only one you could make, I guess, is it's economically bad, because you can't bring anything cultural into it.

01:38:45

You can't say because they're different than us. I saw David Platt the other day, someone posted a clip of him making a statement about how the nations are coming here.

01:38:55

So the Somalians, he said, are coming here. So we don't have to go to Somalia. We can witness to them here. And I thought, you know, that's curious to me, because I thought as soon as you stepped foot on American soil, or at least went through a citizenship process, you weren't

01:39:07

Somalian anymore, right? You were American at that point. You were part of this proposition that all men are created equal, and just as much as an

01:39:14

American as someone who's been here for generations. But, you know, but he said, hey, they're still Somalian.

01:39:20

You're still fulfilling the task of reaching the nation. So you're not reaching an American. You're reaching a Somalian, even if they happen to be an

01:39:26

American citizen, I guess. So it's interesting. These things have not been worked out. There's just been a lot of assumptions.

01:39:34

And it's obvious to me. I mean, this is something someone sent me from Thomas Aquinas, that a lot of nations at the time he was writing, it took,

01:39:44

I think he said two or three generations to become integrated as citizens. And I was talking to a gentleman who came to the retreat, wonderful guy from Russia, well,

01:39:52

Ukraine, I guess. And, but he was, I think he was Russian and Ukrainian, some are half

01:39:58

Russian, half Ukrainian, I don't remember. But he's moved to the United States. And he basically said, we were driving and he goes, look,

01:40:05

I'm not, I'm here, but I'm not like, I'm a guest. Like he's like, I know who I am.

01:40:11

Like I'm, I am in a community and I wanna reach that. He loves his people. He wants a podcast for specifically people from Russia who come to the

01:40:20

United States. And I was giving him advice on that and stuff. And I thought it was a great thing. I didn't say, how dare you?

01:40:26

You're partial to your own people. How dare you? No, of course not. I want him to, he can uniquely reach them in ways

01:40:32

I can't. And that's what I told him. And he said, he agreed. They're not gonna listen to my videos, but they'll listen to his. So he's here in the

01:40:38

United States and people who have been here for generations, he's not trying to come in and tell them what to do.

01:40:44

And he's, he knows kind of how he fits into it. Now, as his children grow up and as his grandchildren grow, there is something that happens kind of organically over time where they become more integrated.

01:40:56

Now he's already pretty integrated and he's making strides to do that. I mean, he's learned the language, right?

01:41:01

There's things, there's basic things like that. You do to integrate yourself into a culture and become part of it.

01:41:08

But during that whole process, you know, what about partiality? How does that come into play in all of this?

01:41:15

If you care about your own people still, you know, you haven't cut the cords of the country you came from completely.

01:41:24

What about, I don't know, living amongst people that are like you, is that partiality?

01:41:29

You're right, there's all these questions. And I don't see a consistent basis that people like Owen are using to try to make these separations.

01:41:42

Paul Howlison is correct. If America is so racist, why are the ones complaining about it coming here in the millions? Yeah, good point, good point.

01:41:48

We're pretty much the most open country in the entire world. So anyway,

01:41:55

I'm gonna probably end it there, but I hope this was helpful to you. At least hopefully it got you thinking and that's always good, even if you disagree.