Reckoning With Evangelical Covid Insanity - Response to Brad Littlejohn

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You know, I wish sometimes that I had the training, the psychological training, to really identify everything that's been going on here.

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Now, you know, I don't really, to be honest, I think that psychology and psychiatry, there's some questionable elements to it, no question about it, but there's a lot going on here right now.

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And I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. Welcome to the show. So, yeah, so if you follow me on Twitter, you saw me going in on Dan Darling.

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I went in so much that I decided to create a new Dan Darling playlist on my channel.

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You can check that out. I'll put the link to it at the end of this video, and you can check it out. Dan Darling, I haven't talked about him too much, but he is, he's a real beetle borg.

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Let's just put it that way, a real beetle borg. Now, I wanted to just take this tweet in isolation.

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What he's doing is he's responding to William Wolfe, and William Wolfe says this, he says, we need a church and COVID accountability project, a central hub that documents how

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Christian leaders pressured Christians to comply with mandates and get vaccinated in a place where resources can be found to help members fight back and hold their pastors accountable.

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Interesting tweet, very provocative in my opinion, but hey, I'm in support of that kind of thing, because the

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COVID situation, in my opinion, for a lot of people was just a bridge too far.

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I mean, the pastors that manipulated their congregations into getting vaccines, the pastors that shut down the worship of Jesus Christ for months and months and months, some even years, it was just absolutely unacceptable in any way.

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It's just, it's just, it's so beyond the pale, it's hard to put into words. So I actually like this. I think this is a really good idea.

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So Dan Darling responds and he says this, he says, alternatively, we could give grace to pastors leading during difficult times with conflicting information, trying their best to pastor at the moment,

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Christian unity instead of quarrelsomeness and division. And then he quotes Galatians 5, 15.

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Now, what I mean by the psychology of this is if you read this tweet and you didn't know anything about Dan Darling or anything he said in the past or things like that, you almost read it from a perspective of Dan Darling got it right, but he's willing, he's able, he wants to lead the way to show grace to all the pastors who didn't get it right.

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Like Dan Darling, he was reasonable about the vaccines. Maybe he got it himself, but he was never pushing it.

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He never said it was loving your neighbor as yourself. He never slandered Christians that didn't want to do it or anything like that.

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But he's leading the way. He's going to show the winsome, gracious perspective, because if you didn't know anything about Dan Darling, that's how this tweet reads.

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But in reality, Dan Darling is this leader who has misrepresented the scriptures and said that it was loving your neighbor as yourself, the law of God to get the vaccine.

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Dan Darling is the guy that slandered Christians and things like that. And he's almost like he's distancing himself from that or dissociating himself from that.

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There's a weird psychology at play here. And maybe it's just straightforward manipulation, but it's just,

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I find that hilarious. But also, I think it's interesting. Somebody else pointed this out and I don't know who it was, so I can't give you credit.

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But this phrase here, conflicting information. This is a very interesting phrase because this is different.

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By the way, guys, this is an example of how I know we are winning. This is different than the way

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Dan Darling would have explained it before. In fact, Dan Darling went on Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough's show, and, you know, he took his little act, his little beetle act to Joe Scarborough.

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And Joe was just ripping Christians to shreds, as he normally does. I mean, this is what

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Joe does. This is his shtick. He rips Christians to shreds. And Dan Darling's there like, yeah, yeah.

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In fact, here's it. So what he now calls conflicting information, he used to call crazy conspiracy theory.

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Let me play you a little clip, because when I said that he had went on Joe Scarborough, someone said, you should put the link there, because I didn't know about that.

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And somebody found the link. And I just want to play this section here, because this is where Joe kind of goes in about how dumb and stupid

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Christians are. And and here's here's Dan Darling with his beetle act. You know, he goes to Joe Scarborough.

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Here's what he had to say. To wrap our arms around, why is it that many of our fellow brothers and sisters are not listening to their pastors, not listening to their doctors, not following the words of Jesus, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, and instead,

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I mean, and not listening to their family members. And instead clinging to lies that are spread on Facebook, what explains this?

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It's deeply disturbing to me. What explains that people of the evangelical faith especially? Well, I do think actually there's some good news.

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Vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals has dropped significantly. And actually, if you follow the work of someone like Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University, a sociologist, actually evangelicals are not the most hesitant cohort.

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There's hesitancy among young people who have no faith. There's some hesitancy among African -American populations.

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But secondly, I do think the reason why there's vaccine hesitancy and there's a tendency to believe conspiracy theories is twofold.

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I think, first of all, as I said, there's a deficit of trust in our institutions. And when when trust goes down, belief in conspiracies goes up.

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Number two, I think many of us are more discipled and catechized by our political pundits and people we prefer on the left and the right than we are by scripture.

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And I think we need to return to really being discipling by our being discipled by our faith.

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And so I. The chutzpah on this guy, that's the exact right word. It's called chutzpah because this is a trick.

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This is a trick. He's just saying something that is just so out of bounds, so out of left field. But he says it with his beetle conviction.

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And it sounds like he knows what he's talking about. But did you notice conspiracy theories? That's what he called it, conspiracy theories.

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And it's because of a lack of trust in institutions. By the way, I reviewed this entire segment on another video.

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It's on my it's on my Dan Darling playlist. So go ahead and watch it. But he started off saying, well, you know, lack of trust.

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But I really do believe you can trust the vaccine. And it turns out that what we were saying about the vaccine was true from the beginning.

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It did not have the proper testing, even though Dan Darling got on this show and said it's been through rigorous testing and it has all the but it was all a lie anyway.

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But see, this is all beside the point, though, because the reality is it's not about the science and and being suspicious of the vaccine itself.

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Like that's left up to each individual person, right? Like if you think that you want to trust

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Pfizer when they say it was tested, knowing that Pfizer, they're known liars and stuff like that, that's up to you.

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Nobody's saying that you have to do what I do. Right. But the thing is, that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is the fact that pastors told us that this was a matter of Christian morality.

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This if you're not doing this, you are not obeying the law of God. And they said that and they held people accountable to that.

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And they and they put a burden on people because of that. That's what this is about. Primarily, the rest of the lies that that that Dan Darling told here,

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I go into those in another video. That's a separate issue. It's definitely an issue, but it's a separate issue.

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But just going back to Dan Darling, you know, again, he pretends like he wasn't one of the ones that's doing this is a very self -serving, manipulative tweet, because, again, you read this and you think, well,

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Dan Darling, he's just a very gracious guy. No, this guy's trying to avoid apologizing himself. He's talking about himself.

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He's saving his own skin. This is all very self -serving. And by the way, this is not the only person who's been doing this.

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I saw this guy and I mentioned this tweet in a podcast and I mentioned this on Joel Webben's show, which apparently is going to be airing next

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Tuesday. Definitely check it out. Right Response Ministries. We go into this at length. And, you know,

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I knew a little I'd seen Brad Littlejohn's tweets before, and it's always been kind of a mix, but he said some good things.

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And I was kind of I was kind of I didn't agree with this tweet, but I was kind of easy on it. Right. Here's what Brad Littlejohn's tweet says.

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This is the same again. The same kind of weird psychology is at work here. If you read this tweet, you don't know anything about Brad Littlejohn or, you know, very little like I did.

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You would think that Brad Littlejohn is one of the guys who got the vaccine stuff right. You know, he never pretended like this was the law of God.

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He never pretended that this was the most the best thing since, you know, the Holy Spirit. But but he's willing he's he's he's above it all.

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And he's willing to bestow grace upon those who got it wrong. I got it right. But I will be willing to bestow grace upon all those who got it wrong.

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And here's what the tweet says. It says, should pastors actually have to apologize for passing along to their congregations the best information available to them at the time and trying to make responsible decisions in light of it?

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If so, no wonder so many are giving up on such an impossible profession. And at the time

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I said, you know, I said, look, this is a reductionistic view of what happened. It's not nobody's upset at pastors for passing along CDC information just for your information, right?

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Nobody's nobody's passing. Nobody's upset at pastors for for passing along, you know, how they feel about the vaccines or even getting the vaccine.

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Like I'm not nobody's upset at pastors if they got the vaccine. That's not what's happened.

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At least not all that's happened. What's happened is a bunch of pastors said it is a matter of the law of God.

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Christian morality, your faithfulness and your Christian witness hangs in the balance. Either be a good

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Christian, a faithful Christian, a moral Christian and get the stinking vaccine, or you can be a wicked, hypocritical, evil

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Christian and not get the vaccine. That's what we were told. So it's not about they passed along the best information possible.

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And it wasn't even in retrospect. It wasn't even the best information possible. It was propaganda. They passed on propaganda.

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But you see, that's not even what we're complaining about. We're complaining that they passed along propaganda and then put

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Christian morality attached to it and said, this is Christian morality. This is what you ought to do.

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We're going to close down our church. I know the Bible says meet. We're not going to meet. The CDC says don't meet. The CDC says get the vaccine.

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It's a matter of Christian morality. Christ would tell you to get the vaccine. That was spiritually manipulative.

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That's what this is about. And so, but the point is, and we're going to go into Brad Littlejohn's, we're going to destroy this guy's perspective in just a minute.

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But the point is this tweet, this tweet, if you read it in isolation and you're like, man, like Brad Littlejohn, he's gracious.

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He got it right. But he understands that sometimes you get it wrong. He's willing to bestow grace.

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They don't have to apologize. Brad Littlejohn has spoken and he's like disconnected from this, dissociated from it at all.

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It's like it's the same thing that Dan Darling did. You know, like we can just bestow grace. Like, no, no.

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What he what he's Dan is asking for is bestow grace upon me. I was the guy. I don't want to have to apologize for it.

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Let's just pretend it never happened. That's what Dan Darling's asking for you to do. And actually, that's what

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Brad Littlejohn is asking you. What is this? There's a pathology here. What is going on here?

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Because look at this one. I did not know this when I criticized this tweet. Here's what

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Mallard Reborn pointed out. He says, in case you missed this gem from Nuance Marm, here's

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Brad Littlejohn. He's quoting he's tweet quoting an article that says vaccine obstinance is fueling

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Delta variant spread across America. And Brad Littlejohn says, quote,

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I have seen this, people. And it is indeed a stiff necked people. So again,

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Brad Littlejohn is now saying the same kind of thing that Dan Darling was saying. He's like, look, that quote from the scripture.

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It's talking about the fact that the Israelites, the Jews were refusing to actually obey

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God's law. They were a stiff necked people. God's law wanted them to go this way. They're like, no, no.

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And God is rebuking them for their sin. And Brad Littlejohn sees someone not wanting to get the vaccine.

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Vaccine obstinance, whatever the heck that means, and uses that quote. It's a sin.

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And so somebody challenges on it, challenges him on it. This guy, David Meyers. I don't know who he is.

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David Meyers says, come on, lose the high horse. If you want a shot, get a shot. If someone else doesn't, leave them alone.

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If the vaccines work, the vaccinated are safe. If they're not, what's the point? Plus, the vaccines are failing all over anyway.

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Follow Eriks Berenson. I don't know who that is, right? But this is the thing. And at the time, and this is, again,

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I'm not wise in retrospect, right? Like, at the time I was saying this, and David Meyers here in 2021 is saying the same thing.

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He's like, look, we knew how to do this back during flu season. We knew how to do this during swine flu and all the different flus.

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Like, if you want a vaccine, you get the vaccine. If you don't want a vaccine, you don't get the vaccine. It's just a very simple, reasonable solution.

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And I remember at the time I said, people like Dan Darling, and I guess people like Brad Littlejohn as well.

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I didn't know who he was at the time. They think that's a radical position, that if you want to get the vaccine based on your particular situation, go ahead and get it.

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If you don't want to get the vaccine, don't get it. And everyone's fine and lives their life. That's how we used to do it before the propaganda.

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And that's the correct way. Nobody has to force anybody to do anything. Nobody has to manipulate anyone to do anything.

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That's what we were saying. But Brad Littlejohn, at the time, not now,

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I'm talking about the time, said this. I guess the whole love your neighbor thing is passé and doesn't apply anymore in our libertarian age.

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So again, Brad Littlejohn is doing the exact same thing that Dan Darling did. This is a matter of Christian morality.

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You either get the vaccine, you wicked pagan, or you will pay for that sin.

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I guess Christ could cover that sin as well, but it's a sin. If you don't get the vaccine, it's a sin.

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That's the perspective Brad Littlejohn presents right here. And so again, I have to go back to what is this pathology?

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There's something psychologically going on here with a tweet like this, where it's like you write the tweet.

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You're not really lying, but you're writing it in such a way that you pretend to be asking for grace for others, but really what you're doing is asking for grace for yourself without even acknowledging you've done anything wrong.

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You just want people to forget it ever happened. Forget it ever happened and try to show a little bit of grace and mercy, but you write it in such a way where you're not asking for yourself, you're asking for others to try to appear like you're other -centered, but really this is all self -serving.

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It's a very weird way to go. But anyway, let's talk a little bit more in depth about Brad Littlejohn here, because Brad Littlejohn's perspective, it's beyond reductionistic.

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It's actually rewriting history. It's like rewriting what happened. It reminds me very much of a lot of these economists, and you might find this boring, but we're in a massive period of inflation right now, and basically the main economists that we see, the propaganda economists, the main ones on TV, the

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Federal Reserve, all this stuff, they're basically saying right now, who could have ever seen this coming? I mean,

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I know we did the wrong thing. I mean, the monetary policy was wrong, but I mean, we worked with the best information we had.

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Who could have ever seen anything different? And it's the same kind of thing with this vaccine stuff, right? It's the same thing.

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I did the best I could. It's like, who could have seen? But the thing is, they act like nobody saw this coming. But lots of people saw it coming.

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Lots of people knew that the COVID policy for the Federal Reserve was awful. Lots of people saw the last two decades of monetary policy was going to lead to massive inflation.

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Lots of people saw it. So stop acting like it's some kind of a mystery. They're trying to rewrite history.

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Nobody was saying anything back then. Everyone was saying things back then. You're propagandist is what you are.

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You're a great reset theologian. You're a great reset pastor. You're a propagandist. It's just that simple.

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And so I don't want to disparage Brad Littlejohn because I know very little about him, right?

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But this thread is a disaster thread. I hate the term dumpster fire, but that's what this is.

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This is ridiculous, Brad. And from what I understand, a lot of people that I know respect you.

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They think you're a good thinker. This is not careful thinking, Brad. So let's talk about this.

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So here's what Brad Littlejohn's thread says. A couple of days ago,

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I was rash enough to argue with this post from James Wood, Theo1. The result was a radioactive dumpster fire of sub tweets.

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That's not best to engage, but I do want to clarify the substantive point and why I'm so passionate about it.

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So this is his clarification. This is not, this is him being careful with his words, right?

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This is him trying to clarify what he had said previously. Here we go. So before I read this thread,

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I had responded to the original Brad Littlejohn tweet where he said, you know, pastors shouldn't have to apologize.

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And what I said at the time, he said, being a pastor is an impossible job. That's what Brad Littlejohn said.

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And I said, Brad, it's not impossible. It's only impossible when you're trying to serve two masters.

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That's what makes it impossible. It is literally impossible to serve two masters.

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That's something that came right from the mouth of Jesus Christ. It's not my opinion that it's impossible. It is impossible.

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Jesus said, you cannot serve two masters. You'll either serve one or the other, but you can only serve one.

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You cannot serve two masters. That's what I said before I read this thread. And here, and Brad Little, I believe what he's saying here.

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I think he believes this, but he's articulating the exact point that I was presenting then.

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He's saying, look, 2020, that was hell for pastors because they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

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Because they were going to upset someone in their congregation, no matter what they do. Do you see what's happened here?

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The congregation has become a master for pastors. Public opinion has become a master for pastors.

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And so in this issue, they were attempting to serve public opinion. And I suppose

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Christ. And what did Christ say? Jesus Christ. He says, you cannot serve two masters.

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You'll either love one and hate the other, hate one, love the other. And that's exactly what happened here. Because this is not damned if you do, damned if you didn't.

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Only if you consider the congregation and the public opinion, someone that can damn you, only then can you say you were damned if you did, damned if you didn't.

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But if you serve Jesus Christ, then you weren't damned if you did, damned if you didn't.

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Because if you serve Jesus Christ and refuse to tow the narrative and attach the law of God to it.

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So CDC says something and you refuse to say, this is actually a matter of loving your neighbor as yourself.

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In other words, if you refuse to turn government propaganda into dogma, then you're good.

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You're good. Because your congregation might be pissed at you. And that's, I'm not saying that they're not going to be mad, you see.

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But when you're not trying to serve the congregation or public opinion, right? Like the public might be mad at you.

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The pagans might be mad at you. Caesar might be mad at you. I'm not saying they won't. But when you're not serving them, you're not damned.

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Because you're serving Christ. You have an audience of one, like Kanye West said. You have an audience of one.

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And so Brad is admitting here. Yeah, it was 2020. It was hell if you're trying to serve two masters.

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And I would say that every person who thought 2020 and 2021 was challenging, was difficult, was hell the way

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Brad describes it here. I would argue that you need to examine your heart because you were trying to serve two masters.

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Look, it is very simple to know what God says to do on Sunday. You meet.

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You lay hands on the sick. You greet each other with a holy kiss. You sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. You preach the word of God.

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You know, you do all this stuff. This is what God says. That's simple. It's easy. It only becomes complicated when you're also trying to serve someone or something else.

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Then it becomes complicated. It's the same thing with vaccines. It's the same thing with vaccines.

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Look, nobody should be concerned about me judging them, right? Pastor bloggers on the other side of the country, celebrity pastor.

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I'm not a celebrity. So don't hear me saying that. Don't hear me saying that. But nobody should be concerned with my opinion.

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What you should be concerned with is what the scripture says. The scripture specifically gives you commands on what you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do.

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And what you're not allowed to do is to force any kind of cleanliness laws, even if it's backed by a scientist in a lab coat, upon your congregation that God himself did not give you.

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And that's what many pastors did. And so you're damned if you do. Damned if you didn't. No, only if you're trying to serve two masters, and then you are just damned in the first place.

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It's just as simple as that. And so Brad Littlejohn here, when he's trying to be careful and clarify, he actually puts a finer point on what

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I said about his little tweet the other day. Let's continue. The last thing the fractured church needs right now is

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Monday morning quarterback summoning pastors to repentance for not being omniscient, it would seem.

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But that's exactly what I see among many on the right in recent months. Brad, enough of the nonsense.

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Okay, Brad, this is insane thinking. And I know that this is what you believe because you're being careful and trying to clarify.

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This is nonsense, Brad. Nobody is upset with pastors for not being omniscient.

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Nobody expected me to be omniscient. I told everybody I wasn't getting the vaccine. Nobody expected me to be omniscient, like I either should or shouldn't get it.

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It did or didn't work. Nobody expected me to know that. But the thing is, what we did expect is for pastors to not lie about the law of God.

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That's their job, is to give you the law of God. And this is not one of those laws.

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And I said this years ago when this was all going on in real time. This is not one of those hard to understand laws where we can, you know, we can understand.

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Yeah, it's kind of out of context. And like, we can give you a little bit of mercy here. This is easy. This is easy.

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Does the law of God require you to get a foreign substance injected into your vein just because the

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CDC says so? No, it does not. No, it does not. Does the law of God allow a pastor to bar you from worship if you don't wear a mask or you don't get a vax or you don't do this, you don't do that?

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It does not. It does not. And the thing is, it's like this

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Monday morning quarterback. So, okay, Brad, enough of the nonsense, right? When nobody's expecting the church to be omniscient and you know that,

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Brad, come on. But this Monday morning quarterbacking thing, this is an interesting one too, because the reality is that we absolutely need to Monday morning quarterback this thing.

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And it's not so that we can feel superior. It's not that so we can just bring people back into a time period that they don't wanna think about and stuff like that.

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It's not for those reasons. Look, I'll tell you right now, if every pastor who demanded that loving your neighbor was getting the vaccine and shut down their church, if every pastor who has resigned, that would be the end of it because that would be it.

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I mean, they saw the error of their ways, they resigned or if they repented, that would be it. Because Christians are very forgiving, you see.

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Christians are very forgiving. If someone repented and said, look, I learned my lesson. I'm never gonna do this again.

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This is how I got fooled. I'm not gonna get fooled again this way. That's it because Christians are very forgiving.

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But this is why we need to Monday morning quarterback. By the way, this is why you Monday morning quarterback.

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Monday morning quarterbacking is essential to getting better. What do you think quarterbacks do on Monday morning?

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What do you think they do? What do you think coaches do on Monday morning? Because this is the thing, this is not like the NFL because I'm not a quarterback, right?

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But this is like as if we were a quarterback. We're in the coaching room because we're in the game.

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This is our game. This is what we're doing. We're Christians. Monday morning quarterbacking is essential so that you can see the mistakes you made on Sunday and improve them for next

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Sunday. This is essential, Brett. What's the disconnect here? I just don't understand.

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Why don't we need to talk about this? Because the propaganda isn't improving. It's getting worse.

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The propaganda that so many pastors fell for and then turned into law,

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Christian law, on their congregations and held their congregations to it, that's not going away.

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If anything, it's getting worse. Brad, what is the downside of Monday morning quarterbacking this thing?

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This is not for the sake of it. It's not for just the sake of it because we want to feel superior and we want Dan Darling to feel like an idiot.

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No, it's because we want to know, for number one, can we trust Dan Darling going forward? Can we trust

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Dan Darling going forward? If you've got a quarterback who refuses to learn the lesson about a certain thing on the field, telegraphing his passes or refuses to learn the lesson of the defense, can you trust him going forward?

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Should that guy be the quarterback next week? That's what we need to wonder. So it's not just for the sake of it.

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You think we do this for the sake of it. No, we do this because we're in the church. First of all, we're in the game right now and we want to improve so that next time when the next propaganda lie comes, and they're already in the works, by the way.

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And by the way, your boys are failing this test as well. But the next time a propaganda push comes, are we going to be in the same position, lying about what the word of God says in service of the regime?

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That's what we need to know. We need to figure that out. And so, of course, we need a Monday morning quarterback this, Brad. But Brad, enough of being omniscient.

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You know full well, no one expects you to be omniscient. What we expect is for you not to lie about what the scripture says because of the propaganda that you've imbibed for some reason.

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Man, this has been going longer than I thought. So let's continue. Of course, he says, in cases where pastors got carried away with public health zealotry or anti -public health zealotry, as the case may be, and unjustifiably burdened consciences, they should humbly admit their errors and be held appropriately accountable if they won't.

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So Brad, so here's Brad is saying exactly what we're all saying. What we're all saying.

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This is what William Wolfe got critiqued for saying. This is what James Wood got critiqued for saying.

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So now Brad is here pretty much admitting that we're all right about this.

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But he still wants to say, oh, you know, were we omniscient? Like, Brad, like,

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I don't know you. So I'm not going to say you're a weasel. This is

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Weasley. If you were wrong, just admit you were wrong. You shouldn't have pushed back on this.

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This is exactly what we need. Because every pastor who said, every person who's a

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Christian who said that getting the vaccine is loving your neighbor as yourself was wrong. Even if it was the best vaccine in the world, they were wrong and need to repent of that.

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They need to never do that again. Adding to the law of God like a Pharisee, a cleanliness law.

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But in this case, Brad, we've been so blessed by God to have quite possibly the worst vaccine in the creation of vaccines in history.

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And so even if it was a great vaccine, you would have been wrong. Now that it's come out that there was just lie after lie after lie that you, for whatever reason, you were duped by, you got duped.

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But this, the urgency of repenting of this and being held accountable for this is intense.

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It's intense. And so you need to own that, man. This can't just be like tweet four and your tweet thread where you admit that you were wrong the entire time.

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And so why are you even writing the thread? Like this has to be owned, man. It has to be owned.

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It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy. Let's continue. I take

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James White's or James Wood's word for it that he's addressing such select cases.

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But I've spoken to dozens of pastors over these last two years, struggling to do their jobs as best they could. And I don't know of a single one guilty of such behavior.

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Yeah, I don't believe you. I don't believe you. Because here's the thing. This whole thread hinges on this idea of what is getting carried away by public health zealotry.

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I'll tell you what it is because we don't have to grade on a scale here. Shutting down your worship even for one

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Sunday was getting carried away because the scripture does not allow you to do that.

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Caesar has no authority over the church. Caesar has no authority telling you how to meet or what to do when you meet.

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No singing, no manual masking, all that stuff. They have no authority. So if you gave Caesar that authority, you got carried away.

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And here's the thing, guys. Christians are forgiving. So many churches did that.

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They got carried away with public health zealotry. And you know what they did after a few weeks or a week or a couple months?

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They repented. And so many good guys, Joel Webben is one of them. Not only did he start meeting again after four weeks, but he issued a public statement to his church.

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He said, you know, guys, I messed up. I messed up. Here is why I did what I did.

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Here's why, exactly why I was wrong. It will never happen again. And he went into detail about what he's repenting of and why he'll never do it again and all of that.

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So this is the thing. So that was getting carried away. Telling us the vaccine was a matter of Christian law.

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Loving your neighbor as yourself, that's getting carried away. If you got the vaccine and didn't say anything about it or just said, yeah,

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I got it and that's it. I thought it was a good choice for me and my family. That's not getting carried away. Pretending it's a matter of Christian law, that's getting carried away.

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Requiring masks for worship, that's getting carried away, Brad, because the scripture does not allow you to require masks in order to be clean enough for worship.

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Refusing to sing songs, hymns and spiritual songs to the Lord. I, a local Presbyterian church here that I visited during COVID, they're like, none, you know, no singing.

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Just kind of like, just kind of hum or, you know, kind of sing quietly to yourself. Like, we're not going to sing as a congregation like normal because, you know, daddy says it's too dangerous.

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That's getting carried away. You're not allowed to do that, Brad. You're not allowed to do that.

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You see, these are all getting carried away because the thing is, all of them are examples of trying to serve two masters.

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That's what they are. Trying to serve two masters because the word of God is crystal clear on these things.

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Crystal clear. So I don't believe you, Brad, because we're not grading on a scale. It's not like, well, you know, if they did three out of the four, then they, you know, they did it for six weeks.

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That was a reasonable, but if they did it for 12, you know, six months, that would, that's getting carried away. No, no, we're not grading on a scale.

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Every person who did one of these things that the scripture doesn't allow you to do, sinned. They sinned to greater or lesser degrees.

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That's it, greater or lesser degrees. But there's no scale where God's like, well, you know, you need to repent of your sins and confess your sins.

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You know, only if you got carried away. You know, only if there were big sins. Like that's not what the scripture says.

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And pastors ought to be an example of repentance. Pastors ought to be an example of confession.

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And so if you sin, you know, in one of these ways, but not all four, you need to repent and you need to confess to your congregation.

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If you sin for two weeks, you need to confess and repent and explain to your congregation what happened.

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Be an example, whether you did it for two weeks or two years. Be an example. That's what we're looking for.

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That's why we're Monday morning quarterbacking this thing here. Because what we need to do is figure out if our starting quarterbacks need to be starting next week when we play

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Pittsburgh. I guess we're playing the Packers next week. We need to know, are you ready?

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Are you prepared? Are you willing to do the work to play on Sunday? Or do you need to be put on the bench for a while?

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That's what we needed to figure this out. But Brad here is like, yeah, you know, he's sort of like agreeing to that, but like not really.

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He's not really willing to do that. And from what I understand, a lot of people are telling me this guy is like a notorious fence sitter, like a

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Matt Mundane type. Mundane Matt. That's an obscure reference, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure that out if you're interested.

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Anyway, many are burned and burned out. Some have been forced out of the ministry altogether. Are there arrogant pastors who need someone to hold them to account?

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No doubt. Though I doubt Twitter is the venue for it. Most, however, need support, prayer, and encouragement. Here's the last tweet

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I'm going to talk about, because this is getting long. If your pastor's burned or burned out, let them take a break.

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Maybe it's time to sit on the bench. That's what we're trying to figure out right now. Monday morning quarterback. And if you're too tired or you're too beaten down or your brain is fried, you can't play on Sunday, then you don't need to be playing because we need to win on Sunday.

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But this idea of arrogant pastors, right? There's two ways to be arrogant. You can be arrogant and like, you know, be very haughty and be very like loud and boisterous and pretend like your voice is the voice of God.

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Or you can be arrogant by telling people, thus saith the

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Lord in a very quiet, hushed, humble sounding way.

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And you can say it like this. It's like, I just, I just, we need to shut down to protect our neighbors.

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You need to get the vaccine to love your neighbor. As you say, you can even cry if you want. A lot of pastors would do this fake crying thing.

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But as long as you're not, you're lying about what the scripture says in service of propaganda too.

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That's the thing that gets me. You're lying about what the scripture says. It doesn't matter how un -arrogant your tone is.

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That is the height of arrogance. When you're lying about, when you're saying thus saith the

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Lord, and he has not spoken. That is the height of arrogance, no matter how nice you say it or how boisterous you say it or how boy, they need to be held to account too.

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These, these, these limp wristed, soft -spoken, you know, quiet, hushed tone pastors that lied through their teeth about what

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God required of his people to come to worship on Sunday. They need to be held to account too.

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And I'm not saying they need to be yelled at. I'm not saying they need to be, you know, you know, you know, ripped to shreds, but they need to be held to account.

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They need to confess their sins and they need, and pressure needs to be put on them because Big Eva is so used to just, you know what?

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Pretend it never happened. I'm Dan Darling. We can have grace on people, other people. I'm not talking about myself.

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Definitely other people, we can have grace upon them. They just want you to pretend it never happened. Don't ever mention again.

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They don't want you to figure out whether or not they're ready for Sunday. You see, when a quarterback has a bad game and he's a little weasel, he doesn't want to Monday morning quarterback.

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He just wants you to say, you know, just trust me. I'll be there for you on Sunday. He doesn't want you to figure out, you know, are you really our guy?

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Are you really our guy? Are you really willing to put the work in? Do you really understand how these defenses work and how our offense work?

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He doesn't want you to do that because he just wants to play. He doesn't want to put the work and he doesn't want to be found out.

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This is why we can't just pretend it never happened because we're still in the season, guys.

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We're still in the season. We can't pretend it never happened. We've got a Monday morning quarterback this thing because at the end of the day, we've got a game on Sunday and it's going to be a much harder team than we played this past Sunday.

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And we need our best guys at the forefront, ready to go and playing the game. That's what we need.

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We need faithful men that are actually going to be faithful. Not trying to be faithful while being the opposite, right?

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See, trying to be faithful while you're giving the say at the Lord of what essentially what Joe Biden said or the

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CDC or Donald Trump or whatever, that's not going to cut it. That's not going to cut it. There are qualifications for elder and you don't meet them if that's what you're doing.

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In any case, in any case, Brad Little dot, you know, I'll do one more. At this point,

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I honestly don't care what someone thinks about COVID or masks or vaccines. It was a tough time with lots of fog of war and little reason to trust authorities.

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Lots of different views are understandable, but let's quit using COVID to tear the church apart. This is the tweet that infuriated me the most because it makes it seem like, you know, people are tearing the church apart on both sides.

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No, that's not how this went down. Those who lied about the law of God regarding vaccines, those who shut down worship, those who required masks or divided the church according to masks, according to worship, those who refuse to let people sing songs, hymns and spiritual songs, according to the law of God, those who didn't serve communion because it was too dangerous to spread germs.

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Those people divided the church. Those people tore the church apart. And then there were people on our side that are made to feel like radicals.

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And all we were saying is, look, if you're too scared to come to church, that's on you, but we gotta have church. Look, if you're too scared of germs, you don't wanna take communion, that's on you, but we gotta take communion.

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Look, if you're too scared to sing, don't come to church, but we have to sing. Look, if you got the vaccine, that's fine.

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I'm not getting it. And that's fine too, right? Those people were reasonable.

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They were biblical. They were long suffering. There's so many people that have come to me, man,

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I don't wanna leave my church, but this is what they're doing. I just don't know what to do. Long suffering, winsome in many ways.

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And now we want a Monday morning quarterback this thing because you might not care about COVID mask and vaccines anymore, but what

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I care about are the principles behind it because the propaganda is not getting better, it's getting worse.

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And the regime is not getting more freedom loving, they're cracking down more and it's getting darker and darker out there.

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And we need to make sure that the players that are in the game are the right players to be in that game. And we've got standards for this, man.

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We've got biblical standards for this. We've got a word from the Lord on who to put where. And so we have to talk about this.

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We have to talk about this because this game is still going on. This season is still going. And Brad wants you this, essentially

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Brad is saying this, look, peace, peace. Brad, there is no peace, wake up.