Who's Funding the Evangelical Social Justice Movement?

Conversations That Matter

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00:03

Hello again, and welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I am John Harris, and I'm joined today with Judd Saul, who is a director.

00:12

Hi, Judd. Nice to have you. Glad to be here. And Judd, why don't you tell us a little bit about the project you're working on right now,

00:21

Enemies Within the Church. Give us the 30 -second synopsis. Okay, we are working on a film called

00:27

Enemies Within the Church, and what our focus is is essentially the infiltration by the left into our churches, seminaries, and parachurch organizations.

00:41

And the film is going to expose and name the names of those who are advocating for a non -Christian left -wing agenda, but also taking the money to look the other way.

00:53

And on top of that, we're also going to take a look at a historical look from the American churches, how we got to this point.

01:01

Where did we go wrong? Where did we start going wrong? And what are things we can do to correct the error and get us back on the right trajectory?

01:09

Well, that sounds excellent. I want to tell our audience a little bit about how God works, how

01:15

I met you about a month ago at the Social Justice and the Gospel Conference, because a lot of us are still suffering from whiplash over how fast the social justice movement has infiltrated evangelical organizations.

01:30

And I put out a video about a month ago on my experience at a prominent Southern Baptist seminary.

01:36

I had no clue that there was this conference on social justice going on the next week, but I'm on the phone with you that night, never talked to you before.

01:43

You're telling me about the movie and you invited me to come down and I come down there. And because my video had gone viral,

01:52

I guess, in the evangelical reformed world, if you want to call it that, a lot of the speakers recognized who

01:58

I was and I was able to make some connections for you guys, which I just, I never thought four days before that I would have ever been doing that.

02:05

I didn't even know any of these guys, but I think the Lord worked that out. And we've talked since then, you've told me, you've educated me on some things that I just was not aware of.

02:15

And one of those things I want to talk about today, and that's the funding aspect of this. I know the film is going to be focused on more than just funding, but in order to understand what's going on, we do need to draw some lines.

02:30

And just two things I want to say about that before we really get into that. Number one is,

02:36

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so to speak, and I don't want to give people the impression that we're conspiracy theorists in the sense that we don't have evidence to back up what we're talking about.

02:50

And you have more evidence than I do, I just know a little bit. But if there's an actual line that we can draw and we can say, look,

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George Soros is funding this, or some left -wing group is funding this in a Christian institution, then we should probably let people know about that.

03:05

That's not a good thing, obviously, so that's the first thing I wanted to say. And then the second thing

03:11

I wanted to say is, I do think this is a battle of ideas primarily, and that's where we need to keep most of the battle.

03:17

But that doesn't mean we should ignore who's funding what, because a lot of the ideas being propagated are being propped up.

03:25

They're being given a shot in the arm from outside organizations and the money that comes from them.

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So why don't you tell me, list a few, you don't have to list everything, but give me a few organizations that are funding seminaries,

03:40

Bible colleges, Christian institutions that we should be aware of. Well, one of the biggest ones that we've discovered that we can tie direct money and direct results to is a foundation called the

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Kern Family Foundation, that's K -E -R -N. And what we've discovered is, is somewhere to the tune of $40 million has been doled out to this movement so far, and we can attribute it directly towards conservative seminaries.

04:15

These are not liberal seminaries, these are not typical liberal theology seminaries, these are going after conservative seminaries, such as the

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Southern Baptist Seminaries, the Presbyterian Seminaries, and so on. And what we can find is a direct correlation between grants received and immediately following those grants are social justice programs being implemented in these seminaries.

04:40

Yeah, can you give an example, maybe a specific example out of the hat of one of those?

04:46

A prime example, and I'll just put this out there, the

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Kern Family Foundation recently gave a large grant to the North Greenville University, which is a very conservative seminary in Greenville, South Carolina.

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And what happened shortly thereafter, there was a couple of professors that objected to what was going on and said, no, no, no, no, no, no, we do not want to implement these programs, we don't want the gospel coalition coming in with the social justice stuff.

05:16

And they actually raised objections, and the next day, their head of their theology department was fired because he objected to these things.

05:24

Oh, wow. Okay. And is this out there on the online? It's not. It's not out there online just yet.

05:30

But this particular professor is going to be coming on camera and talking about his experience and he has, and it's a pretty decent name that many have probably heard of.

05:39

Wow. Okay. So we're going to be looking forward to hearing more about this. And I'm assuming when you're saying on camera, this is going to be part of the movie that's going to be part of the movie.

05:46

He is, he has agreed to do an interview with us and discuss what has happened. And unfortunately, this is the case that we're finding in other universities like Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, for example.

05:58

There are a lot of professors that are not happy with the direction this is going and they either told to shut up or get fired.

06:09

Yeah, their entire careers are ruined if they stand up against the social justice movement. And a lot of them are afraid to come on camera.

06:15

And I encourage those of you that are watching, contact me, come out and do this.

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Because if you don't fight this now, there's nothing else left to, there won't be nothing left of your career to fight for later on anyway.

06:28

Yeah. We're telling people to come out, be bold and take a stand. Yeah. And to put a little pause on, we're going to get into this a lot more, but I failed to mention, you all need a chump of change, to put it mildly, to do this film.

06:44

And we're going to be talking about how the social justice side is very well funded. In fact, from what

06:50

I've heard, which we'll talk about, they have essentially an endless stream of money coming in. But those who are opposing it, the few that are willing to risk their careers or to take a stand for righteousness here, they don't have money, not much at least.

07:06

And you all could use a chump of change. So if any of the viewers who are watching this want to give towards your effort, where can they go?

07:15

They can go to our website, www .enemieswithinthechurch .com. That's enemieswithinthechurch .com.

07:24

And you can donate online if you're not comfortable doing a donation online. We do have a snail mail option available as well.

07:31

You can go on the website and find the address to send a check or that kind of donation.

07:37

But what we are up against, though, literally is billions of dollars being flooded in to this movement.

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And, you know, our budget's $300 ,000 to do a film that names the names and exposes all this.

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And hopefully it spurs a movement so people can bat it. And so you have that angle.

07:55

We have the Kern Family Foundation on the other end. And what the thing that people have to realize is, is that you have the same talking points, the same memos, the same books, the same language coming out of these organizations that is directly correlating and mimicking exactly what the

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Open Societies Foundation is saying. Speaking of Open Societies, that's

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George Soros money, right? That is a George Soros funded organization, yes. And they are pouring money into the

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Gospel Coalition, ERLC. Okay, so this is how it works. So money changes hands.

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It doesn't go directly from Soros to these entities. What we're finding out is money changes hands about four to five times before it gets to its end source.

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And what we're also discovering is that some of these Christian foundations that are pushing and funding social justice have all recently within the past six years opened up accounts overseas in the

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Cayman Islands. Interesting. So you have to ask yourself this question.

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Why would a US -based nonprofit, which is already tax exempt, be opening up offshore bank accounts in the

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Cayman Islands? That is a good question. They're already tax exempt.

09:21

People are already getting salaries. But why would you set up accounts overseas? And this is a thing that we are digging into and investing heavily right now.

09:29

I do not want to give away anything that you want to save for the movie. But can you give maybe one name of a seminary,

09:36

Bible school, Christian institution that's opened up an offshore account like this? Or do you want to save that? It's not a seminary that's opened up the accounts, but it's the foundations that have.

09:45

Oh, I got you now. Okay. So there's foundations that are changing hands. So the Soros money, you're saying, there is Soros money, it's changing hands.

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And these foundations that are Christian now have opened up. Can you give one name of a Christian foundation that's doing that?

09:58

Go for it. The Kern Family Foundation has opened up accounts. And what you see magically is they started off with, they claim they had assets of $500 million.

10:09

Right. Okay. After the offshore bank account is open, now they're claiming $750 million.

10:17

Wow. Where did the extra $250 million come from? Yeah. Okay. So we're going, okay, this is kind of fishy.

10:25

Like what's happening here? And the Kern Family Foundation is not just a seminaries, but they're funding education programs all over the country.

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Yeah. I want to get into them more. I really do. I want to just, like I said, skip over the surface though first and just give a few names.

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Koch Foundation. I know I had mentioned that to you a while ago. I had seen that the seminary

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I went to was taking money, not just from Kern, but also from Koch Foundation. Is that a bad foundation?

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You need to keep an eye on the Koch money, Koch money, Koch Foundation, because...

11:02

Yes. Keep an eye on the Koch money as well. Yes. The Koch brothers are not

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Christian conservatives. Okay. They are libertarian. Right. At heart.

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So what you see a lot of money going towards from Koch Foundations and Koch money is more libertarian leaning, but it's actually anti -Christian conservative.

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Their programs and a lot of things they're advocating for. Yes, they might fund good things in business here and there and do things over here, but as far as having a moral standard and what they fund, far from it.

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And actually they do fund LGBTQ activities. Yeah, I was going to say probably anti -social conservative.

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Very anti -social conservative and they fund very liberal, socially liberal things.

11:52

Okay. Well, any other names that you want to put out there as far as foundations go before we jump into Kern Family a little more?

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I want to hold off because we're still investigating and we're gathering more evidence.

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So I'm going to hold off on other foundations, but there are others out there. Okay. But I'll give an overall view to kind of help people understand what we are up against.

12:17

Money that is going towards these movements is coming from places like the Ford Family Foundation, the

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Carnegie Foundation, the Tides Foundation. Every major American institutional foundation that has existed has been hijacked by the left and by liberals, and they are using this money to fund these movements.

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Now Judd, this is something that I've known about for a long time as far as just in general culture, like business culture.

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These foundations of course are left leaning, but it was a little bit of a shock to me when I started finding out that some of this money makes its way into Christian institutions.

12:56

How long has that been going on? Do you know? We have seen, from our research, what we have seen is a major influx since about 2012.

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Okay. And since about 2012 is when they really started pouring money in, but now the money, like every year since then, really kicking off in 2014, they put it on steroids.

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And after 2016, after the election of Trump, now we're seeing everybody flooding it in and doubling down on social justice and these efforts.

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Now, I have to explain something. For those, this movie is not about Trump, it's not about Republican, but you have to understand that the left has blamed the election of Donald Trump on white

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Christian evangelicals. And they have, I mean, they have said it with their own words, you can find tons of examples of them saying this in the media, that they blame white

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Christian males for the election of Donald Trump. So they see this as a necessary political evil to destroy.

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And so that's why we are seeing the massive ramping up of social justice, LGBTQ rights in the church, and so on and so on and so on.

14:11

They're throwing money at this like it's nothing. Right. Yeah. And again, to reiterate, this is not the main focus of your film.

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Right. We're going to deal with ideas, but this is a necessary component to understanding why, for those of us who have whiplash, why did this happen so quickly?

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How come there's all of a sudden overnight, it seems like organizations that weren't there before or entities within organizations that weren't there, departments that are committed to social justice, where did they get the money for that?

14:41

And so connecting some of these dots will help explain that. Yeah. So I want to share a little bit about my experience, but I want to weave it into your expertise so well, because you've done more research than I have on Kern Family and Oikonomia Network and I guess mostly those two, because that seems to be in my wheelhouse, at least from my experience at seminary.

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That's what I've noticed that is behind some of the things that have gone on. So we'll start with Kern.

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Kern Family Foundation gave, and it's interesting, you said around what, 2012, but it really started going to that was in 14, some of this money.

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So if you just go online and I did a search for Kern Family Foundation and the seminary that I went to,

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Southern Baptist Seminary, in 2013, apparently they get a bunch of money.

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Since then, I guess there's been more or less other things that I saw. There's been money coming in through other means, and I don't know how much because they're not necessarily advertising everything, but they funded an integrating of faith and economic conference at the seminary.

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So there's conferences. I've been told by students that there's some funding,

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I guess, for scholarships for students. I'm not sure what the stipulations are, what the strings attached to that are, but they fund that.

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They fund, they give a grant, this was in 2013, there's a $200 ,000 grant to do work and economics in academic classes.

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And through their Oikonomia Network, so Kern Family is funding this network, they're committed to preparing pastors to describe work and the economy in moral and spiritual terms in order to help people live out

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Christianity full -time in all they do. And they came up with some classes on the seminary that I was part of,

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Theology of Culture was one of them, Theology of Vocation, and then Economics, Poverty, and Wealth was another one.

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And as they had some of the faculty at the school, as Christian University helped write some of the curriculum, and the curriculum was actually designed, this is a quote from the provost, for lay people in our churches.

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So they want pastors to take this information back to churches and disseminate it. They also fund, at the school

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I went to, a project called the Intersect Project, and I'm gonna give more definition to what these things mean, but it's basically a website and there's articles and blogs and classes you can take on this website.

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And so that's quite a bit right there, just for one foundation to be. Now, I've just given sort of a brief run -through, but it sounds all good, right?

17:31

They're helping people integrate their Christian faith with economics and social life. Judd Saul, how can you be against integrating our faith with economics?

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What's wrong with that? Oh, exactly. You're a terrible person if you dare ask questions to the talking point of the program, but you have to dig deeper.

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What does that mean? See, what you find out is, is that these programs don't get in.

17:57

If they were actually talking about what they wanted to actually do with their end goal, they wouldn't get anywhere into these seminaries and universities.

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But if you manipulate and change language, which is what these guys are experts at doing, well, then faith in economics means something completely different to them than it does me.

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So, would your critique be that when they are integrating their faith with economics, it's not really necessarily all biblical principles that they're integrating.

18:29

There's other things that are being, maybe secular ideas that are being peppered in with this.

18:34

Is that the act? Okay. Yes. 100 % secular ideas. It's not biblical economics. It's what at the end of the day, what it is, is socialism wrapped up in a completely twisting of words.

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It's what this ends up being. For some people that may sound shocking when they hear that. How can socialism be funded at a seminary or a

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Christian institution that never before was involved in that? They were conservative. They were anti -socialist.

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So I want to get into oikonomia because I think that might help answer some of these questions. So, the oikonomia network, the word oikonomia just means economy or stewardship,

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Greek word, and the network is supposed to do what we just talked about, curricular integration.

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So they have speeches and articles and things that, and curriculum that they want to disseminate at seminaries and beyond.

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And it's supposed to integrate faith and culture, which is also the intersect project, which I had mentioned earlier at the seminary that I was at, and it does sound really good.

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I went to the intersect website. There's actually, there's a lot of good stuff there. There's also some really not so good things there.

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It's kind of a mixed bag and it's the deeper you go into it, it seemed like I was finding more and more of the

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Russell Moore, the Tabeti, the more social justice evangelicals, the deeper I went. But there's also some really good stuff and I want to give credit where credit is due.

20:00

It's not all bad. But what it, the thing that came to my mind is it seems to, this is intersect, they seem to sort of muddy the waters.

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It's just, it's super vague. I'm finding, I was looking at some of the terms they used and they seem to want to take this middle ground and they call that the

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Christian position that, well, there's conservatives over here, there's liberals over here, and we're just kind of in this

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Christian middle ground where we don't accept either side. And this, one of the ones

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I looked at was an article on Revoice, which is in the PCA, there was this homosexual, gay affirming conference more or less, and they're having another one this year.

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And there was an article and the article actually made some good critiques, but it also, it wasn't very strong at all in the critiques it made.

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It kind of said, well, they have a point, but they also went too far over here and we're going to kind of stay in this middle area.

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And it's the same thing on a lot of their articles. And so it seems to just, I don't know, it's like nailing jello to a wall.

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I'm like, what do they stand for? I don't really get it. How are we integrating our faith and culture? Maybe some of the articles are good. I haven't read all of them.

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But anyway, that was my perception of it when I looked at it. When I got into Oikonomia, which is the parent organization that's funding this stuff, or I guess the money's going through them, their organization

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Kern Funds, I saw some of the same things, the muddying of the water, so to speak, with terms.

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But there was something more that I could grab. I could sink my teeth into it.

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And I have a bunch of quotes that I'm ready to go over to talk about. But I want you first, if you have specifics about Oikonomia, I want you to share those first, because you may have more or better information than I do.

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Well, to tie it all together, and it's really hard, because if I go to where I want to go, everyone's going to say, well, that's conspiracy theory, that's, you know, what do you, you know, how do you go on there?

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And I have to let everybody know is that, to explain my background, where I come from, okay,

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I am a Christian conservative political activist. Okay?

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All right? So I don't just have the Christian over here and leave it there. But I'm a Christian conservative political activist, meaning that I have dedicated and spent most of my life in the political realm since 2009.

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I have seen and been in many battles, and seen how the sausage is made behind closed doors, which is what led me to really get back into filmmaking and get back into my career.

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So I have to tell everybody what I'm talking about comes from years of research.

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And the information is out there, and it's very hard to digest if you haven't done the research and been where I've been to explain this.

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But I'll go to Okonomia, or how do you pronounce it?

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You know, on the front of the website, they actually gave two pronunciations. They said were acceptable. So I say

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Okonomia, Okonomia, but you can... I call it Okonomia. That's fine. Whatever.

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Anyway, you have to look at kind of the overall objective.

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And I mentioned globalism earlier and what all this means. Okonomia network and what they are saying is virtually identical to what you get from the

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United Nations version of sustainable development. And United Nations agenda for the 21st century.

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Agenda 21. Agenda 21, which is agenda for the 21st century. And so when you look at the language of Okonomia network, you are actually virtually seeing the same blend of language and words and defining of terms identical to what the

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UN is putting out. Just wrapped in a Christian veneer and a bit of a faith -based veneer and a few different words.

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But at the end, the end goal is the same. Can you give an example of similarity?

24:16

Okay. So agenda 21, they actually have a faith -based initiative with agenda 21.

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And guess what? It's the same words. Faith, economics, work, family, development.

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And it's saying you can have your faith and have it be part of your community and have it be part of this.

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But their definition of faith and our definition of faith is different. Now, when

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I see agenda 21, this is all free online. You can go to United Nations, download the PDF, see what they want to do.

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It seems to me, basically, alleviation of poverty and climate change, trying to stop climate change.

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So we need to consume less. Businesses need to get in line with this agenda so that they're producing less.

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And we need to kind of all tighten our belts. And I don't know. There's just a little bit of a communitarian spin on it.

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But it reads like a utopian -ish plan of some kind.

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A very utopian plan. But it fails, always fails to understand the sinful nature of man.

25:19

Right. And that's where the Bible comes into play. And that's where the gospel comes into play. And the whole thing is that, okay, so you said it yourself.

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You looked at the terms, and it's like they're always taking a mushy middle in all their positions and what they're saying.

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They do not want people to stand and hold their ground on biblical truth.

25:43

I want to get into one of the articles. Because that would disrupt faith economics and the harmony. Okay.

25:50

Now, they would never say that. Right now, we're not talking about agenda 21. We're talking about Okinawa Media Network.

25:56

Right. And this is on a number of seminaries, this network. Yes. Including other

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Southern Baptist ones. But some of the words, actually,

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I'm going to reference this. There's a bunch of curriculum out there. But one of the ones that I had looked into was called the

26:13

Theology That Works. Theology That Works, which I don't like that name from the beginning.

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I'm already, what? Theology Spirit Works. It's very pragmatic.

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But okay. Theology That Works, Making Disciples Who Practice Fruitful Work and Economic Wisdom in Modern America by Greg Forster.

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So this is one of their curriculum that they put out there that's presumably being taught at seminaries,

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Bible colleges or seminars and so forth. And one of the things it says is that they're not going to use the term free markets or social justice because of their association with political and non -theological agendas, which begs the question in my head.

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I thought that was supposed to be integrating politics, economics with biblical truth.

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So we're not going to use the term free market because that's too political. I'm like, okay, I thought we were integrating, but okay.

27:10

Right, right. So they don't use those words. But the interesting thing is the words they do use. So it's very mushy.

27:19

Like if something is wrong, they'll call it a challenge. I kept coming across that as I was reading through different sections.

27:25

Well, this is a challenge. A challenge. I almost caught myself. I was going to say free market.

27:31

They don't call it free market. They said the enterprise system at one point. So one of the challenges to the enterprise system and what follows next is some critique on maybe capitalism.

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If something is right, it is good for human flourishing. The word human flourishing. Oh my goodness.

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The book, every page seems like it has like five references to human flourishing.

27:55

Right. I'm trying to think when have I ever heard this word before? Again, that's only one word.

28:02

The word service is used a lot. Stewardship is used a lot. But it doesn't seem to have the same biblical definition of stewardship that I'm used to.

28:11

It's not a dominion type stewardship. It seems like it's got a communitarian flair to it.

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I can't quite put my finger on it. Right. I don't know if there's any other words you can think of.

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Like I said, you have to look up what is human flourishing. You've got to look up human flourishing.

28:28

There's actually different definitions to what human flourishing actually is. Yeah. Very true.

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And the word challenge. What does the word challenge mean? Who is writing this material and how is this developing?

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Because guess what? These same talking points are happening on the left.

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On the left of side things. The same words. The same terms. Definitely. And it's funny. It's no coincidence.

28:57

J .D. Greer, two weeks ago in his sermon on Romans 1, he used the word human flourishing to talk about how

29:03

God's problem with homosexuality is that it doesn't make for good human flourishing.

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And it caught my ear. And I said, what is he talking about? Where is that in scripture? It's not.

29:16

But it's in this material that the Oikonomia Network is putting out. Yeah. So he's getting it. Now, I think he referenced

29:21

Tim Keller in his draft or whatever. His transcript he put out there.

29:27

So let's talk about Tim Keller for a second. Okay. Tim Keller and Greg Forster co -wrote a book together.

29:35

The guy Greg Forster, who is head of the Oikonomia Network. Well, there you go. And Tim Keller and Greg Forster wrote the blueprint together for the

29:45

Oikonomia Network. Interesting. And so, okay, let me just ask your audience this.

29:54

Where is Tim Keller on the topic of homosexuality right now?

30:01

He might be slightly to the left of J .D. Greer. Well, he is to the left of J .D. Greer because he joined the

30:08

Living Out Conference in England. And him and his wife actually signed on to an audit for churches to audit themselves of how welcoming they are to the gay community.

30:21

Fascinating. I did not know that. Yeah. This happened, what is it? Happened about six months ago is when he did that.

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And it was about the same time ReVoice was happening here in the United States. So the Living Out was in England.

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ReVoice happened a couple weeks later and virtually the same talking points and the same things came out of both conferences.

30:43

Wow. Wow. And Tim Keller keynoted the Living Out Conference out in England. And so what

30:51

I'm saying is, so Keller is an interesting guy because he is running around with all the left -leaning people in all these circles.

31:00

And he's actually helping develop a lot of the talking points and material that's coming out. So Tim Keller has a direct influence with the

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Oikonomia Network. And Tim Keller, for instance, I'm just going to target him for a second, is never there to lend a solid 100 % stance, biblical stance on any major social issue.

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He never draws a line in the sand of what is right and wrong according to the Bible, but he always dances around the issue.

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And same thing with Russell Moore, always dances around the issue on all these things. And that's what you get from the leadership coming out of the

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Oikonomia Network and these things is they are never taking a 100 % biblical stand, moral stand on what the

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Bible says, but they muddy it down with words. Yeah. And I think

31:52

I know what you're talking about. Essentially, they're not going to use biblical language, the language that the

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Bible actually uses to talk about sins such as homosexuality. They're going to try to get around while holding on to biblical truth somehow.

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Or at least maybe pretending. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

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Let's say that Tim Keller is trying to hold on to biblical truth, but he's squirming every which way he can to try to also please the culture and what the culture wants.

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And so it's interesting. I had read Every Good Endeavor and when I was reading through this booklet by Forster from the

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Oikonomia Network, there was a lot of similarities

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I noticed in the language. Now, I thought Keller's book was not great at all.

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And I don't want to get into a big discussion of that right now. But I thought this Oikonomia book,

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Theology That Works, it was worse. It was much worse. I'll read you a couple of quotes and get your reaction.

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So let's start with this one. This is from this book,

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Theology That Works. Large salaries and bonuses extracted without a productive contribution to serve the needs of others are an increasingly visible evil.

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Evil not because they are large, but because they don't arise from serving others. It is the one who works that is the one who serves his or her neighbor who is worthy of his wages.

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Luke 10 7. Now, I didn't see a lot of scripture passages in this book, but here we have one,

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Luke 10 7. And essentially critiquing corporations that would give that aren't contributing enough.

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They're giving bonuses and large salaries to corporate executives. What a horrible thing.

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And the first thing that came to my head, they're quoting Luke 10 7 here. Worthy of wages is a good thing.

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Well, what does Matthew 20 say in the parable of the vineyard? Who's responsible for determining how much money someone receives for their work?

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It's not. I mean, this book is like teaching us to be the referee, so to speak.

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We get to say what is wrong or right for a corporation to do. But in the parable of the vineyard, it's the one in charge.

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It's the owner. It's the boss. It would be the corporate CEO. I mean, or the board, I guess in this case, but they are the ones that own the business.

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It's the owner that gets to determine wages. And they don't have to make sense to us. It's so subtle.

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What do you think about that quote? It's another verse taken out of context to push a false narrative.

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The Bible calls us, and throughout the entire Bible, to be content with what the

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Lord provides. We're not supposed to covet what someone else does. Who am

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I to tell another corporation that I didn't start, I didn't risk my money starting what they should be doing with their own money?

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Right. If I want to get a job for said corporation, they offer me X amount of dollars, and I say, okay,

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I'll work for this wage. I work for that wage. But who am I to... Where does the Bible tell us what to tell someone else to do with their money?

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It doesn't. In fact, it tells you the direct opposite in several scriptures. And so, here is another example of them trying to take a scripture out of context to justify something that's false.

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Yeah, the principle of private property is so intrinsic to what the Bible says about...

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Old Testament, New Testament, even people like to use the church in Acts, but when Ananias and Sapphira come, what does

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Peter say? He goes, was it not yours before you sold it? It was yours. So, yeah. Anyway, let me...

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Let's just go to another biblical example. And let's go to Judas. Okay? And how evil this thinking can get, and how evil this thinking is.

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The time where Jesus went into the house, and they were going to pour expensive perfume and ointment on his feet, and Judas says, hey, this is very valuable.

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Maybe we should sell this and give to the poor. And Jesus stops him and says, no.

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No. This is what these people are doing for me, and allows the people to pour this expensive ointment on his feet.

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And Jesus stops Judas right there in his tracks. And that should tell people where the Bible stands on these things.

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So Judas was the original social justice advocate? Yes, and he hung himself.

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He did. His end was not a good one. I want to take you through a couple more quotes, and I use the word intellectually insulting to describe this, and probably because I'm pursuing a graduate degree in history right now, and I'm probably reading a lot of history books, and they're on the college level, so maybe

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I'm biased, but this is supposed to be college level curriculum, I'm assuming, and it just does not make the cut in my mind, but here we go.

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So this is the history of economics in a couple paragraphs.

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I'm not going to read all of them. I'm going to skim a little bit here, but it starts off, and this is where it gets intellectually insulting.

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The economy before Christian dualism. This is one of the,

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I think it's a subheading in the book Theology That Works. The result, this is before Christianity, the result was a social system in which human dignity was unequally distributed.

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The result of their dualistic thinking, that's what they say. Dualistic meaning they're separating the sacred from the profane.

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The world of work from the spiritual world. That's what the critique is.

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That was wrong. They shouldn't have separated those two things, and the result was human dignity was unequally distributed.

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It goes on, it says, as a further consequence, in such societies, now what societies, we don't know, because this book has not talked about one single society in this critique of pre -Christian cultures, but he said in these societies, dignity was not intrinsic to the human person.

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Rather, people only acquired dignity insofar as they participated in systems of meaning. Each person's dignity was therefore associated not with human personhood, but with fulfilling the social role assigned to that person.

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The individual human being was merely a cog in the social machine. One practical result was oppression.

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People were radically less free to follow the calling of God for their lives because they were neither free to control their work, which was assigned to them, nor the fruits of their work, which was extracted by the aristocratic classes of meaning workers.

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The freedom to discern what work we are called to do is equally fundamental to human dignity.

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So, a couple quotes there in excerpts I took from a paragraph.

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Now, the intellectually insulting part to me is, what the heck are they talking about? Right. It sounds like gobbledygook.

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It's just like, be clear with what you're trying to say. So I read it a few times and I tried to pick up what is being said.

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And here's essentially what's being said. This is the history of economics. Before Christianity, people were fulfilling a social role that was assigned to them at birth.

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And this was fundamentally wrong because it didn't distribute human dignity in the right way.

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Certain people were more important than others. So it's almost like a slave master or there was hierarchy.

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So this is anti -hierarchy to begin with. I don't know what

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Paul would have said to that. I mean, look at Scripture in 1 Timothy 5, let the elders who rule be considered worthy of double honor. Ephesians 4, spiritual gifts, he gave some for apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists.

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Even Colossians, we talk about slaves and masters, husbands, wives, parents, children. Hierarchy is in Scripture. So, right there.

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Since Genesis. That's right. And it's unavoidable. I mean, Edmund Burke made this point.

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But you can never get rid of hierarchy. Someone will always rise to the top. That's always going to happen. Human nature.

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Exactly. So it's a denial of human nature to say that this is a problem. I mean, of course it's a, yeah, in some ways, maybe in some circumstances, it is a problem, but you're not going to get rid of it.

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There's this incredible naivety here. So then, the history moves on, and I do want to get your reaction.

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I'm sorry, I'm being long -winded here, but I want to get the full history here of what they're trying to say, the argument that's being made. Marxism is then critiqued.

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Hey, Marxism was wrong, but why was it wrong? That's the thing that I wanted to focus on. Why was

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Marxism wrong? The argument that's made in this book is that it's because of the labor -capital separation.

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So Karl Marx made a separation between labor and capital, and that's dualistic because capital and labor are one and the same.

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Okay, what about the other issue of Marxism? The fact that it doesn't work, and the fact that it's extremely naive concerning human nature, and it's not based on the idea that man is evil.

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It's based on the idea that man is good, and we can create this utopia. So it doesn't really talk about that.

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It instead takes a different route to critique Marxism, and the route it takes to critique Marxism, which essentially boils down to Marxism is materialistic, and that's wrong.

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Okay, agreed. But then he says, Adam Smith, Keynes, the Austrian school of economics, those are also wrong.

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It even goes so far as to say that Milton Friedman, he was just the rebellious stepchild of Keynes, and he's wrong.

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So basically everyone's wrong. Free market is wrong. They don't say free market. Again, they aren't going to use that word because that's too political, which is laughable because they use all these other words.

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That's wrong. Communism is wrong for the same reasons. And then they get to America, and one of the things they say about America is that, you know, there were some

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Christian ideas at the founding of this country, and those are good, but this is a direct quote from the book, there are also naturalistic grounds for it, in many strands of enlightenment thought that attribute an autonomous integrity to nature, including human nature.

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So they're saying that the economy that America has, or had, could also be based on naturalistic grounds.

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Now I had to stop myself and say, is this a Christian book? I'm sure there are naturalistic grounds.

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You can base it on, yeah, there was a mixture of Christian and naturalistic ideas, and you can base this on naturalistic grounds.

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The first constitution that was written, the first state constitution that was written was actually borrowed from church bylaws.

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I don't think a lot of people quite really understand that, but the constitution of the United States started from a state constitution, which was derived from church bylaws.

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Oh, absolutely. Church ecclesiology completely figured into our understanding of political constitutions in this country.

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There's no doubt about any of that. if we left it up to nature to credit our founding of the

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United States, it was actually direct contrary to nature. It was a founding of our nation and how we became.

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Yeah, and there are some enlightenment ideas that were floating around, but it's not worthy to be compared to how much the

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Bible influenced the United States. In fact, I was just reading a book the other day, reading the

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Bible with the Founding Fathers. Basically, about three times as many quotes are made to the

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Bible related to government that the Founding Fathers made as compared to any other book.

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A lot of those other books, like even John Locke, was getting his ideas from biblical concepts. Anyways, that's just naive for them to say that.

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For a Christian textbook, though, to say that is incredibly my jaw dropped.

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Last quote, the definition of stewardship. You ready? This is what they say stewardship is.

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In the stewardship mindset, the meaningfulness of work no longer arises from what kind of work it is, such as the extent to which it involves intellect or the manipulation of symbols, but from why and how well we do it.

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A professor who writes a groundbreaking book about the meaning of life merely to satisfy private interest in the meaning of life, and perhaps get tenure, actually has less meaning in his or her work than the plumber who comes to his or her house and fixes the faucet in order to make a productive contribution to the good of others.

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There's a kernel of truth to that because, yes, I like what Francis Schaeffer always said, there's no small people, no small places.

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That was the Reformation's idea, too, that there is intrinsic worth no matter what kind of work you do.

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But be careful here. Don't reduce it all down to it's the motivation. Someone who is intellectually gifted and can write a book that affects culture in a profound way, well, yeah, but on a certain level, that actually is more meaningful than someone who can clog your toilet.

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So it's just a weird definition of stewardship to me. I don't see any

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Bible verses behind this. I don't see the dominion mandate behind this. It is very individualistic.

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And so anyway, that was the last quote that I didn't read the whole entire book.

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I skimmed it, and then I especially looked at their history of economics, but and that stewardship definition was in it, but man, it's so intellectually insulting to someone especially who is a

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Christian who's trying to understand these things. And they don't bring, there's barely any graphs. I don't understand how it's teaching economics.

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I don't see what good it does, but this is a textbook or a curriculum that is being used, funded by Kern Family Foundation and presumably in Bible colleges, seminaries, conferences, and this is just one of many things that they're putting out there.

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They are pushing this garbage. And I can't begin to tell you how much

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I've read over the past year and how much, I mean, a lot of it absorbed, a lot of it didn't absorb. I've been through so much, but I'm just going to say this, brother, welcome to my world.

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You're reading this stuff and you're going, wow, this is total garbage. I hate having to read these books and go through this stuff, but this is what we're up against.

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And you can tell how somebody who really doesn't know any better, somebody young going into seminary, 90 % of the time probably came from no foundation of American history or any good civics or economic history going into seminary and then getting this garbage, and they're like, wow, this is enlightening.

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This is worse information. And the thing that makes it so tempting is that, especially if you want to be one of those reasonable moderates, and you look at how those guys on the right are crazy,

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Trump's crazy, but look, those guys on the left are crazy. This offers you, in theory, not in reality, a third option where you can kind of be in the middle and be reasonable and try to, if you're growing a church, especially,

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I can have conservatives there, I can have liberals there, I can reach into both worlds and get people to come to my church because we transcend that.

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In one level, yes, of course, there's a spiritual plane here, but it's completely naive because Western civilization,

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I mean, let's go back to Alfred the Great and the Book of Doom, through the Magna Carta, I mean, I'm talking about our English tradition here, but through the

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American Constitution and the state constitutions, which we never talk about, up through the present,

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I mean, we have a Christian heritage and common law was built off this Christian heritage.

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So, essentially, this book is taking that tradition and putting it on the right side, in a way, and saying, well, that's the right, and stripping it of all its foundation.

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Its foundation is the Ten Commandments. So, yes, there is a Christian position on economics and politics and culture, but let's not throw out the

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Christian tradition that's been passed on to us, which I think is what we've been doing. Hold on one second.

48:45

Yeah, it's probably a donor. They're probably listening right now, and they're saying, you know, we need to give you a lot of money to help fund this movie.

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So, that's your plug. Sorry, got to take care of the wife.

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Well, that's important. Yes, sorry, guys. All of us have to go through this.

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So, anyway, that was my point, though, is that I think it does offer a deceptive third option that isn't really a real option.

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Because it makes you, you know, how do you have an option between let's take something very basic, but let's say stealing, being a thief, right?

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And then not stealing. Is there a third way between those two? There's not. And so, when we take complex, more complex economic systems, like socialism, on one side, stealing, and then on the other side, a more of a free market model, of course, a limited government, a government that fulfills

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Romans 13, right? What's the middle ground? There really isn't a middle ground there for a

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Christian to say, this is the Christian position. And I think, yeah. So, I don't know if you have any comments on that, but that's what

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I think is going on. My whole thought is, and to help simplify this for people, is that this book that you're reading is taking

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Scripture out of context already to prove a point that's false from the very get -go.

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And we have to go back to the fundamentals of who we are as a country and who we are as Christians, and that is, our rights first come from God.

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But we also do not have a right to tell somebody else what they can and cannot do with their property.

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That's right. We have no right to do that, and we shouldn't be doing that.

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Also, punch the hole in social justice, the whole social justice narrative, is that we are to be content with what

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God gave us. Amen. And live according to His will and what He calls us to do and be.

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We are not supposed to be telling our brother what they're supposed to be and cannot be doing with their lives unless it's correcting a brother in error according to the

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Scripture. You know? And sticking to the Gospel. But generally, overall,

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I can't go to that group over there and say, hey, you need to be doing this with your business and your property and your money.

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I'm not going to go to my neighbor and tell him how to mow his lawn. Right. Unless he's mowing your lawn.

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Unless he's mowing my lawn. Then we can talk about it. Judd, what, one more time, plug the website, what can people do to, you know, final comments?

51:33

Okay, so final comments are this. So, we're doing a film that's we, there's a lot more we didn't get to go and talk about but, you know, there's a you know, we're going after how the church got here.

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We're going to discuss pietism. We're going to discuss antinomianism and the church's embracement on situational ethics which is kind of the crux of what we've been talking about with the

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Oikonomian Network. And we can go into that at another time but how they can help us out is one, guys, we do need financial support.

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That's, you can go to www .enemieswithinthechurch .com to help us out. The other thing we need is prayer.

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We need lots of prayer. Amen. And for our protection and other prayer for courage, for the courage of others to come out and share their experiences.

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The other thing we need prayer for is to get, to remove some of the barriers that are in our way.

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We have, because people are aware of what we're up to, it's kind of out there that we're doing this film and we have people within these networks that are actively, believe it or not, have their hands tied in between both circles of Christian conservatism and the left but the people on the conservative side don't know who these people are but they are actually going out of their way to disrupt our efforts because they don't want to be out of, they don't want this coming out.

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So we are up against a lot of things. This is called enemies within for a reason. They are within our circles.

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Joe, what kind of hope do you have to offer people who are concerned about this and they've given money or they're going to give money but they don't know what else they can do?

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The hope is this, is that this is not just a film we are doing, this is a movement and we are going to create a website that is going to resource safe churches that they can go to, safe pastors that have sighed on and said we don't want to have part of this social justice stuff, we don't want to have part of this nonsense.

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We are a solid Bible believing church and we need to unite together as one

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Christian body to fight this. And the hope is that there are many of you out there, there's people like John I've run into, there's people all across the nation that are fed up and they are tired of being marginalized and we're going to be a voice for truth and hopefully we're going to pack a big enough punch to stop this.

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So the hope is this, the hope is in the gospel, the hope is in Christ. If someone is a pastor, then should they be reaching out to you and saying

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I want to be on this network or is that premature? No, right away. Right away, say you want to be part of what we're doing let us know who you are so we can start telling people.

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We get, actually we get emails and calls in every week of going, there's no safe church in my area, they've all bought into this.

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And they're like, where can we go, where can we go, where can we go? And if Pastor Gordon has a friend or if I have a pastor friend or know somebody in their area,

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I'll say, hey, go talk to this person. And the thing is, don't, the last thing you want to do is tuck your tail and run and go hide in your own home and not be engaged.

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The whole thing is you have to show tenacity, you have to stand up for truth regardless if you lose friendships or not get invited to the next party.

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The whole thing is stand up for truth, stand up for what's right because these guys think they have the ball, they think they're going to win, and we've got to show them that they're not.

54:59

Now Judd I want to ask you a question, this is, we're talking about enemies within the church but I know that a number of the people who have followed social justice organizations and bought into some of the logic are in fact

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Christians. And I think I need people to know that we're not accusing all the people that are behind this as they're heretics or non -Christians, there probably are some behind the movement but I would say,

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I don't know if you agree with me, but the vast majority are probably people who have not thought this through and connected the dots yet.

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Would you agree with that? That is true, the vast majority and the thing is they haven't had a resource to go to to try to sort this stuff out, they're just going by what the pastor is telling them or what they're hearing from the latest

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Gospel Coalition article. Oh which by the way we have to out this and say this right now, the

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Kern Family Foundation essentially is housing the Gospel Coalition. When you say housing you mean funding?

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We haven't found direct ties but they're in the same headquarters. Oh my, so the same building?

56:08

Well, Kern Family Foundation is funding the Trinity Bible or not

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Trinity, what's Trinity Network? It's Trinity Theological Seminary.

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And Kern Family Foundation has a thing there, they're funding that whole operation and the

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Gospel Coalition is housed in that same headquarters. Judd, I look forward to hearing more of this.

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A lot of stuff to go out. You're probably overwhelmed by how many facts that you have in front of you. But thank you so much for explaining that to the viewers out there who are curious about this, giving us some hope, giving us a place that we can go to if we want to fight this to make a donation and especially to pray for you.

56:59

I will be praying for you and Pastor Gordon as well. I'm sure that you're getting the hate mail.

57:08

It's part of life but like I said, we're open. We also have a Facebook page, facebook .com

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slash The Enemies Within. Like us on there. Go to the website, there's ways to contact me.

57:21

If any of you have questions, I'm an open book. Feel free to contact me and I'd be happy to share with you more information.

57:28

Alright, perfect. If you want to go to the info bar, if you're listening in or watching on YouTube, both the links for the

57:35

Facebook group for Enemies Within the Church and the website are there and you can donate on the website.