A Response to Shiny Happy People, The Duggars, and Alex Harris

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Hey everyone, welcome once again to TruthScript Tuesday. I'm your host, John Harris.

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We have a lot of articles, as always, on the TruthScript website. In fact, that's not the article.

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That's Russell Moore's face. Hold on. Let me see if I can get the article up. There we go. We have right now featured on the website a article about, a poem actually, about Father's Day that actually

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David, who is our guest today, I'll introduce in a moment, wrote. And then the top performing article is

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Shiny Happy People. It's a review of this documentary that was produced and I think is out, well,

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I think, I don't know if, is the whole thing out right now? I think it is. Yeah. Yeah. It's four episodes. They're talking about doing a second season, but it's, right now there's, it's sort of a,

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I mean, it's not a whole show, but it's, it's like four 45 minute episodes. So yeah, there's, there's an article right now,

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Shiny Happy People and Not So Thinly Veiled Attack on Conservative Christians about the Duggar family. And then another

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Father's Day article on the website, The Courage of My Father Remembered. So we have two tributes to fathers.

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Russell Fuller wrote an article that was featured early last week, the 10 theological resources that I find helpful and one more, and you can go to the truth script .com

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website to find out what theological resources Dr. Russell Fuller, who is an accomplished Hebrew scholar, uses when he studies scripture.

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And then there's a few other articles, Heroes or Heals by Pastor Troy Skinner, an encouraging article about some of the people in the

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Bible who had failures and yet God used them. And then Mark Coppinger on manliness, Mark Coppinger was a professor at the

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Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for years, and he wrote this right ahead of the SBC convention. And it's actually pretty brilliant.

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He says some things I hadn't really thought of. For example, he talks about how Rick Warren doesn't have a problem violating

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Lady Wisdom and Lady Scripture. And I just thought that's true. They're personified as women in scripture. And Rick Warren says he's so pro women, but he has no problem violating

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Lady Wisdom and Lady Scripture to forward his agenda. So anyway, there's a lot of good stuff on the truth script website.

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And the top performing article, of course, is this Shiny Happy People article and a review.

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And so David Harris is the one who wrote it, my brother. And so he's going to talk to us a little bit about it.

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Did you watch all four episodes of that show? I watched all four episodes. I watched three in one night.

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I stayed up till like two in the morning. And then I watched the next one, like the next morning.

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So I watched it all very quickly. I watched it in sequence. Okay. So you wrote this article. You're also the president of TruthScript.

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And so you're busy. I know we were talking before I started recording, getting the donations up and running.

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Hopefully, by the time this drops, we'll have that up and running. And you can go to the link in the info section. And it is a 501c3.

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And we would appreciate whatever you can give to help sustain something like this.

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This is basically our answer to the Gospel Coalition. It's a very similar type of format, as we'll talk about today.

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Very important topics that concern Christians, that are very relevant.

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And you're not going to find this information in other places. You might find really good exegetical information.

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You might find good theological resources. You might even find good discernment -type ministry stuff. But short, digestible, hard -hitting, and very accessible articles on very relevant topics that Christians are asking questions about now.

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There's not a whole lot of websites like that. The left is good at that. We aren't as much. And so I think we can be, though.

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And that's what TruthScript is about. So anyway, David, tell us a little bit about the documentary.

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And let me know when you want me to play the clip, because I have it cued. Sure. So this is a very, very popular documentary right now.

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I didn't check the stats of how many people have watched it, but it's a lot. And the sort of like exvangelical, they often just refer to themselves as survivors.

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But the exvangelical community, if that's a thing, is really, really kind of gushing over it, because it's an expose.

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It's an expose of the Duggars, sort of. It's one of the things that I write in the beginning of the article is it's not, like the series doesn't seem to quite know what it is, whether it's an expose on the

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Duggars, an expose on the guy, Bill Gothard, who they were involved with.

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I didn't, it seems I had never heard of Bill Gothard before seeing the series.

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I, but I didn't watch the Duggars, but I've also heard from a lot of people that, who are really into the

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Duggars. I have friends who were very, very much into the Duggars, and they had no idea who Bill Gothard was. Which kind of undermines the whole point of the series, because the docu -series basically is postulating that the

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Duggars were, and TLC, it's sort of like, not backhandedly, it's kind of attacking

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TLC too. That TLC used the Duggars as a vehicle to promote Bill Gothard. And when

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I just, just thinking about myself, we started to watch this thing because a bunch of friends were interested,

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I had family that were interested in it. And I immediately was kind of like, that's

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Alex Harris, and I'll go into that connection in a second. But it's sort of, it undermines the overall point of the film that, you know,

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I was homeschooled K through 12. I grew up in a conservative, I guess what you could call fundamentalist.

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I mean, the church that we went to was part of a, like explicitly fundamentalist church association.

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We check pretty much, I check all those boxes, and I never heard of this guy, ever.

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And I wasn't familiar with the curriculum that his ministry produced, that apparently all these homeschooled, that was super influential, it was all over the country.

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Never heard of it, don't really know anybody who had heard of it. So it appears that this thing's a lot more niche than they're kind of making it out.

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But the thing that really got me to sit down and watch the entire thing was, it says in the description on Amazon that,

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I don't know, where is it? I can't find the exact quote, but basically that the

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Duggars and Gothard and this whole homeschooling cult, I guess, are a threat to democracy.

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And their goal is world domination. So there's a very, they never say Christian nationalism in the show, but the connection is impossible not to make.

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It's very obvious that there's a, look, the Christians, the conservative homeschooler

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Christians, they're trying to take over the world. And so you'll see these, there's no explicit connections to Donald Trump, and yet there's these passing clips of Donald Trump.

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Actually, that's not true, there's one connection. It's like this person worked on Trump's campaign or something.

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So it ties in homeschooling, it's a cult, there's all this abuse, the

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Duggars, pop culture, the Duggars are popular all over the country, all over the world,

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TLC bankrolled them and made them famous. And the goal basically is world domination by conservative

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Christians. Towards the end of the series, the Handmaid's Tale is brought up.

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And there's these ex -evangelicals, because it's interspersed with these clips of ex -evangelicals talking about their abusive situations, which a lot of them were in genuinely.

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And it sounds like Bill Gothard was a pretty abusive guy, or still is, he's still alive. But there's this talk about this one girl is talking about how, when

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I finally read The Handmaid's Tale, I realized that was my life. Which is a little rich, because The Handmaid's Tale is all about,

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The Handmaid's Tale is basically the left's version of 1984.

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But in The Handmaid's Tale, all women are forced to reproduce. They're basically forcibly reproduced, they're like baby factories.

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And they're forcibly raped and all this stuff. And there's so much stuff tied in together, but the overall narrative is really, really clear.

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It's a hit piece on conservative Christianity. And there's all sorts of evidence

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I can go into that. But I guess that's the overall, that was why I sat down, that's why

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I wrote this review. I should say, cuz I know that I'm gonna get questions about it. Alex Harris is not related to us, maybe distantly, but not directly.

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So I get that all the time with Josh Harris, people used to think you must be related, I'm not.

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But so, this is broader than just the

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Duggars. And I had never even heard of Bill Godford, I can't even say his name. Bill Gothard, thank you.

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Yeah, I never even heard of him until, I think it was Rachel Denhollander, started saying that he's connected with John MacArthur.

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And I'm like, who's connected with him, who is this guy? And so I guess he was very influential with a small group of people, with a,

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I guess, influential group. Because the Duggars were part of his group. But yeah, I mean, obviously, he doesn't reflect all of conservative

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Christianity, or homeschooling, or the right wing, or any of that. And if he is a bad guy, which it sounds like I guess he was, then even that,

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I wonder whether or not, to what extent that actually reflects on his people.

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How many of them were duped? How many of them rejected him when they found out he was abusive? I mean, I don't know answers to these questions.

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But it seems to me that TLC, or not TLC, but who made this?

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Who accompanied him? But one thing to note, just on TLC, so my wife and I were talking about this yesterday.

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TLC, to kind of attack TLC as the, you know, that they're purposefully, or at least, you know, they're just either really stupid or they're maniacal.

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They're trying to make Bill Gothard's ideas famous through the Duggars. Think about the other shows that are on TLC, My 600 -lb

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Life, Hoarders. So it's all freak shows, and the Duggars are in that lineup.

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So you literally would watch the Duggars before My 600 -lb Life and after Hoarders. And you're making the case, the

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Duggars to Hollywood were, I think, a freak show. The fact that they had a great relationship with the people who filmed the show, because these people were living, basically, the cameramen and the people who were producing it.

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They're living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for a few years, filming all this. I think it's just a testimony to the

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Duggars as a family. I'm not defending the Duggars, necessarily. Like, I don't have a dog in that fight. I don't really care that much.

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But there's Hollywood producers around them for several years, and they have a good relationship.

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TLC, the people who are watching the Duggars, I think it's very similar to the Duck Dynasty phenomenon.

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The Duck Dynasty is supposed to be these Christian freaks. They're supposed to be these, look at these crazy guys. They all got these big beards.

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It's a funny show. But then, like, Christians took them and said, like, yeah, that's us.

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You know, we're proud of this. And so they blow up and become really big. And now, where can you hear Duck Dynasty guys?

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On The Blaze. You know, that's where they are now. So it is kind of weird. Yeah, comedy show ends up becoming a serious political commentary.

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Not that Phil Robertson shouldn't have that, but it's just what, yeah, what the world or what TLC thinks is crazy and is going to be.

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It will shock you and you'll watch it because it is so abnormal. Ends up like Christians are like, hey, we're on TV.

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And then at some point, at some point, people do actually look at that.

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You know, I have a lot. I had a lot of friends in college who looked at the Duggars with longing. They thought, like, man, that that would be so great.

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I wish I lived in a big family because, you know, for whatever the Duggars faults. And obviously there's a fair amount of, you know, there are problems in that that family, as there are in all families.

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There's no perfect family. Every I mean, the Harris family, not I mean, our family, but like Alex and Brett and Josh, man, they got they got some some pretty serious issues, too, that I guess we can address in a second.

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But people looked at the Duggars and thought, that's man, they have community.

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They they love each other. Everybody supports one another. You know, and now we know that, you know, some of that there were there probably was some dishonesty, but a lot of it wasn't a lot of that was most of that probably was very legitimate.

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Like the family still even the ones who have gone off like only one kid talks in the show.

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The whole show is based around the one kid who would talk. Jill Duggard, Jill and Derek, I forget their

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I think it's Dillard. They were the only ones that would talk. They're the ones who have kind of gone the most. I think they've kind of drifted the most left.

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They're a little I think a little woker in some ways, but other ones like Ginger Duggar. She is she's married to a guy who

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I think is a master's grad and they would not cooperate with the show. They didn't go on it. There's no clips of them, but they have been talking about some of the negative aspects of Bill Gothard while maintaining complete respect for their parents, complete respect for the family, respect for most of the values they were raised with.

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So it's just it's kind of ironic that they're put on as a freak show.

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It doesn't really work because a lot of people look at it and they're like, man, I want that. That looks great. And so then they need they have to take them out.

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But you saw the same thing with Duck Dynasty because they did that to Phil Robertson. You know, GQ interviewed him and, you know, he said something about he said something about gay men.

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And that was kind of the end of the the Duck Dynasty empire, at least on on any. So it doesn't really work.

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Segregation or something first. And then, yes, and then the thing that got the most headlines was this what he said about the homosexual marriage or something.

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But, yeah, these these left leaning outlets in Hollywood want to they look at these families and think, how can we make money off of this?

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How can we? And they're not in it to promote their theology or their way of living.

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They're in it to poke fun at it, to if anything, it's to discourage people probably from that. And maybe it backfires on them at times.

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But I don't think that TLC wants people to be hoarders or to live a 600 pound life.

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You know, they're not like after that. They probably want to show this as an example of, hey, things can get crazy if you eat too much or you hoard too much.

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So I think there's a few angles to look at here. One is how and maybe we'll pick this up with the

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Harris's, the other Harris's, how there is this trend of people who grew up in these.

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They call them conservative. I wish there was another word for it because I don't know that it's actually conservative. These hyper ideological, legalistic, legalistic, ideological families that just they almost make the family into some kind of an abstract thing where you're supposed to.

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Your loyalty, your allegiance, your whole worth is wrapped up just about in this family unit and it's supposed to fulfill all your needs somehow.

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And obviously no family unit can because God didn't design it that way. It fulfills a lot of needs, but not all of them. And so anyway, people grow up in that and end up rejecting it.

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And I have a lot of personal stories I can tell about this. They go hard woke. They are the worst as far as like the most extreme form of social justice warrior, usually they'll because they reject all of it.

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And they'll throw out the baby with the bathwater. And and I wonder whether or not some of the

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Harris boys are in transition. Obviously, Josh Harris went like all the way and just threw it all out.

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But he's got his younger siblings who I guess were featured in this. It seems to me that they're part of their they're going that direction.

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And some of the Duggar kids, a few of them, not all of them, but are going that direction. And it's like that's a sad thing to me.

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When you reject this, you reject so much more than just this ideology. And Gotherd's teaching, which wasn't good, but you reject all of Christianity or you reject all of literal biblical interpretation or male leadership or all these things that are important.

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And so let's play the clip here. Maybe this will be a good segue into that from this is on Russell Moore's, I guess, podcast.

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And this is Christianity Today. It's the podcast he has on. I guess it's the Christianity Today podcast.

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And this is with Alex Harris, who many of you know, Josh Harris wrote, I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

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Alex Harris is co -author of Do Hard Things, and they're big in that conservative Christian homeschool world, or at least they were.

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And so now he's this is years after that success. I would say 15, 20 years. I don't know. After their success,

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Alex Harris is on the Russell Moore podcast. That's a good question that many people ask me.

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Why, having seen all of this stuff? Both just sort of the gut intuitions that said something's wrong here.

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And then having seen what we what we saw in the in the series, which is chilling.

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Why are you still a Christian? The grace of God. I am so grateful for my parents who

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I differ and disagree with on some some things. And yet I can say they taught me the gospel.

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And they taught me to love God's word. They taught me that the church always needs reforming.

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They set me up to to think and read and reflect on on what was going on around me.

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And as I've as I've grown, I mean, God has just been kind to place me in positions where some of my presuppositions were challenged to put me in some churches, maybe a little bit more removed from some of the cultural background that I grew up in with pastors who just faithfully preached the word and helped me see

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Jesus more clearly. And Jesus is not just a card carrying member of the

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Republican Party or any political party. And and over time,

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I think I was able to disentangle the beauty of the gospel and the beauty of Christ from from some of the distortions that had previously been just kind of enmeshed in my understanding of what it meant to follow

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Christ. All right, so that's interesting. And he sounds like he's a lot more careful than his brother,

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Josh, as far as trying to, he said, disentangle and find what are the things that were wrong with my upbringing. Let's excise those things.

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But of course, it sounds like he's excising the politics and he's excising the social, at least some of the social stuff.

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So I don't know, you know more about him than me. Why do you want to play that clip? A couple of different reasons. And so I didn't when

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I started watching the series, I didn't realize that Alex was. I didn't realize that Alex had done an interview for the show, and so it kind of popped up and surprised me.

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And the reason why it surprised me is Alex and Brett Harris, for me, were in terms of like the young restless reform movement that a lot of us millennial millennials were in, you know, in 10, 15 years ago.

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Alex and Brett Harris were the most influential guys to me because they wrote a book called Do Hard Things.

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And when I was 17, I read it and I kind of read it at the perfect time to get really, really impacted by it.

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And it guided my life for, I'd say, at least five years. And it's

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I mean, it's a good book. I would still recommend it for teens to read. And like the premise of the book is basically if you're a young person, then you should take, you know, that the verse that says don't let anybody despise you for you.

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If I think it's in First Timothy, but basically to be an example instead. And their whole thing was rebel against low expectations.

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So just because you're young, don't use that as an excuse to just kind of mess around and waste your waste those years.

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Use I think the way they put it was use your young, young, young adult years as the launchpad for life.

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And they had a ton of like really specific examples. And they really impact a lot of people, including me. I mean,

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I ended up living in southern Africa and doing like work with a mission for a while. And there's just all sorts of things

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I did because I got a lot of gas in my tank from that book. So when I saw Alex on that show,

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I was like, dude, what happened? Like, I remember, you know, whatever it was, 10, 12, 13 years ago being totally animated by by you.

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You know, we were going to go. We were going to we were going to take Jesus to the whole world.

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And now you're now you're on a podcast with Russell Moore. Like what happened? So that's kind of the context.

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And that's why I wrote the article to begin with, because I was just really kind of surprised that Alex had taken part in that.

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But just a note, I guess, on the Harris family. So the Harris family, Greg Harris, who's the sort of the patriarch of that family.

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He was very him. He was sort of the Doug Wilson was influential at that time in terms of home homeschooling.

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Doug Wilson kind of went the classical Christian route. He became an advocate for classical learning. Greg Harris was the homeschooling guru.

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So he would do conferences all over the country. And, you know, his sons all kind of rose to or most of them, the three, the twins, which is our

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Alex and Brett and obviously Joshua Harris. Rose to prominence very, very quickly. And Joshua kind of deconstructed over a period of about five years.

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And now he's you know, he's completely secular. He's there's no evidence that he really has any

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Christian beliefs other than, you know, the ones the ones that keep the infrastructure of where he lives going.

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But Alex and Brett. Alex and Brett seem to Brett, we haven't heard from in a long time.

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All of these guys have had the whole family has had a lot of trials come on them.

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So my heart goes out to the family in a little bit, because it's been one thing after another. Their their mother died very suddenly about a decade ago, a little over a decade ago.

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And there seems to have been a fair amount of fracturing from that point to Alex's credit.

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So I'll give him credit. And then I'm going to get and then critique to his credit. He still maintains a respect for his parents, a respect for obviously

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Christianity. He still considers himself a Christian. So good. All right. That's that's great.

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But think about the implications of the question. Right. He's going on. He's talking to Russell Moore. And just think about that question.

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Why are you still a Christian? Why would you still be a Christian? Christians do horrible things. Why are you still a

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Christian? And that question, to me, really underscores why we're doing

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TruthScript, because that is, unfortunately, that's the assumption now from the

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Christianity Today and the Gospel Coalition. Alex expressed all this stuff in an article for the Gospel Coalition about two weeks ago.

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So, you know, thank God he's still under the umbrella of Christendom. But that's that's really that's where these organizations are at.

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Why would we we have we need to reconcile? We need to figure out why we're still Christians, because Christians do such terrible things.

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The framing of that question is insane, you know, because we could we could we could take a documentary. I'm a public school teacher.

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That's what I've done for the last 10 years. I've never seen a I've never seen a documentary on the abuse that goes in on in public schools.

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And yet you could make one probably about any district in the entire country. And you could probably find stuff that's just as bad.

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And most districts would be a lot worse than whatever they found with Gothard and the Duggars. But you're not going to see that documentary.

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Right. So we're not asking, how can you how do you still send your kids to public school?

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No, we're asking, why are we still Christians? Christians do terrible things. So all the assumptions that these guys have taken on Russell Moore and unfortunately,

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Alex did as well. There's there's secular it's secular framing. They're they're approaching this question from a secular vantage point.

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Yeah. And there may be in the background running a. Utopian vision for what it means to be a

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Christian or Christian family, a Christian homeschooler. And I met I've certainly met people like this who think that that's the key that unlocks every door.

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If you're a homeschooler, if you go to a good sometimes it's like you've got to be reformed church.

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Right. It's there's a, you know, some people think Calvinism is the key that unlocks all the doors. They would never say that, but there's whatever theology it is.

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There's some theology. There's some way of living. If you have patriarchy, patriarchy. And and I think

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I don't know, it just seems like it's too much of a strain for those theologies to bear to put to.

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Maybe I'll rephrase it this way. It's given that man has fallen and we have sinful tendencies and even as believers, we still struggle with sin.

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We are going to no matter what structure that we try to live in or theology we want to believe, we're still going to have problems.

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And if you start out with the expectation that, oh, now I've gained this theology or gained this family structure,

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I won't have problems anymore or it's going to be so good. It's going to look like that, I think, as the show says in the title, shiny, happy people.

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And then you're let down when it doesn't go that direction. And with the public schools,

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I don't think there is as much of an expectation there. I mean, you could go back to a century ago and you could look at maybe the really the founders of our modern public school system.

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And they would have said that this is going to be this great progressive thing. But I mean, today we're far removed from that.

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And people don't expect a lot of public schools. They expect there to be fights. They expect there to be drugs and all that stuff.

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So there isn't this like let down that, oh, there was we have a fight and drugs and the police showed up.

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And it's like, yeah, well, it's a public school. Well, that and just as I didn't go into this in the article really in any great depth.

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But one of the things that one of the sort of features of this documentary was people who were in I'll just call it a call.

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I mean, it seems like it was a call. So people who are in the Gothard cult, I guess, that they missed out on an education.

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Right. That was one of the things that was you know, that was a form of abuse. That was one of the abuses that they experienced was they were basically they were never educated.

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They were illiterate when they came out of school, which literacy is the ability to read and write.

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It's not necessarily the ability to reason, you know, complex arguments or to be able to articulate why it's

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OK to mutilate kids. That's that's not the definition of illiteracy. But that's one of the forms of abuses that they talk about.

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And, you know, documentary filmmaking is powerful. We know this. We've worked on a few documentaries. What you cut in during the interviews, that's the weight of the documentary, you're actually getting more from that than the people talking, because that's the whole point of a documentary.

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It's meant to be a visual sort of you're trying to market ideas or or push a narrative or tell a story.

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And you're using that using that visual components, why people don't like talking heads. They prefer documentaries that are interspersed with, you know, pictures and video and stuff.

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So the pictures, the videos for these ex -evangelicals talking about the abuse they experienced from not getting educated are the

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Duggars at the Creation Museum. You know, that's that's so it's very clear what the narrative is. The narrative is they didn't learn.

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You know, they didn't learn truth. They didn't learn science. They they learned this this this pseudo

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Christian extreme science. Creation Museum is is is a massively popular place.

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I was there two weeks ago. People come from everywhere to go to the Creation Museum, partially just to see the ark.

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But, you know, even around here, like I live in Tennessee, even around here, people who I'm like, that's you're not a

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Christian. They go to the Creation Museum like they go to it because it's because of the quality of of how good it is.

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And, you know, that that's that that's sort of the the poster child for for not being educated is that we we we believe in creation.

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We don't believe in evolution. So there's a lot of those I guess you'd call that a straw man. And there's a lot of those straw men throughout the series.

29:55

And really what it winds up being is creationism. They call it patriarchy, but it's just male male headship.

30:02

That's all it is. The theology of male headship, creationism, male headship, homeschooling and political involvement with Republicans.

30:10

That comes up over and over again. There's all these connections to the Huckabees. They're connected to the Huckabees, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

30:18

So even though it's about the Duggars and Bill Gothard, it's very clear what the target is.

30:25

It's you. It is you. If you are a red state, a red voting conservative evangelical or just conservative

30:32

Christian, you're you're the target of this. You are the one who is a threat to democracy, which is another narrative that comes up over and over again.

30:40

Yeah, wow. Well, thanks for watching it. So I don't have to. And and hopefully the viewers don't feel like they need to watch it.

30:47

I mean, you didn't have to pay for it, did you? No, it's it was it was I mean, I use I think I use somebody else's account.

30:55

Is that stealing? I don't know. Yeah. Prime is some of those services are weird where you can have like multiple people on the same account.

31:05

But I won't let everyone know, I guess that we already did, that you have prime. That's you know, I told Danielle to get rid of the prime anyway.

31:13

All right. So if you have prime, I guess you can you want to do a review. I guess you could watch it. But I would.

31:19

Well, if you're just a quick note on that. So if you're a pastor. It's it might not be the worst thing.

31:26

I mean, you know, your pastor, you got tons of time to throw around. If you're interested, if you know you have people in your church that were influenced by the

31:33

Duggars or, you know, I don't know, influenced by Gothard, which is probably very unlikely, but it's possible.

31:39

But if you have people who are really into the Duggars, enjoyed the Duggars, or maybe maybe they have a chip on their shoulder because they were abused before, which happens, there's all sorts of abusive situations in churches to all throughout this, you know, this land in the world.

31:52

It might be worth just seeing what they're seeing, because if you come, this thing is very clearly marketed towards millennial zoomer exvangelicals, people who are in the process of deconstructing with a chip on their shoulder, because those are the people, for the most part, that they have that they interview.

32:11

One is like this blue haired YouTuber who that's her whole shtick. She just talks about she has a

32:17

YouTube channel and she she gets called Fundy Fridays. And I went on and I looked at some of her videos and she just basically just she spins out some, you know, this is how bad the

32:28

Christians are and fundamentalism and it's dangerous and oppressive. And I was oppressed by it. And there's her only expertise is that she has a

32:36

YouTube channel. So but she fits this category, this exvangelical category. And at the end of the series, that's sort of the that's the capstone of everything.

32:44

It's like, well, some people are at different different steps in their deconstruction journey. So it's assumed that this is this is your natural course.

32:52

You grew up in this abusive homeschooling, which, you know, we have we have we know plenty of people who went through that.

32:58

They deconstructed and home conservative evangelical homeschoolers tend to deconstruct hard because when they reject, they're rejecting a lot.

33:05

So they often completely fly off the deep end. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The most intense social justice warriors are always the former

33:12

Christians who are have an axe to grind and reject it all, which is it's kind of sad.

33:18

I think some people are surprised by that, but that's that's just what I've seen. And I mean,

33:25

I don't know, there's different situations of different reasons, but it seems like primarily it comes down to some kind of hypocrisy, some kind of a feeling like they they were stolen from, like there was some kind of experience that they were supposed to have, that they were prevented from having because they were in this restrictive environment.

33:43

And then it's just lashing out and blaming their parents or their churches for all the problems that they've had.

33:50

And it's not a mature way to look at anything. It's actually a fairly childish way to look at the world. And I don't know,

33:57

I could probably talk for a long time about it, but I have noticed a tendency. I'm not sure how to what extent this plays in.

34:03

But oftentimes in homeschool families, you are encouraged at a very young age.

34:09

They're very success driven. Right. So you're encouraged to go to college early to get high marks on your

34:14

SAT. So there's this kind of this standard to upkeep, this image of we are better.

34:22

We are superior to the public schoolers. We're superior. That, that, by the way, that's toxic and dangerous and don't ever, if you're a homeschool family, do not ever please give them that impression that you're better because you're homeschooled.

34:34

You could just say that this is the wise decision that mom and dad, because you know, as Ephesians says that it is the parents who are children who are to obey their parents and it is for fathers to raise up their children.

34:46

So, you know, in the responsibility that mom and dad have here, we decided this is the best course for you in the place that we live.

34:54

But that doesn't mean you look down your nose at everyone else who did it different or think that you have this magic formula or something.

35:01

And I think the kids who grew up in that and they think of themselves as, as there's an arrogance there of superiority, or there's a pressure there of,

35:10

I need to perform, I need to do well, I need to get into college early. I need to show that I'm worth it and that I'm, I'm successful and all that.

35:17

Like that, that eventually that gets old. You eventually realize you can't actually meet all these standards.

35:25

You don't maybe even want to meet all these standards and you're, you feel like a project instead of a kid.

35:31

And so I think there is a warning in that. And for kids who who grow up in this you know, it doesn't mean that it was homeschooling was the thing.

35:42

It doesn't mean that it was Christianity that was the thing. It means that some legalistic parents who, or maybe some parents who are under some legalistic teaching and thought that this was some kind of a silver bullet or some way to save America and didn't just view it for what it is, a way to educate your children and take that responsibility seriously.

36:00

They looked at it as something more than that. And you were a means to an end instead of an end as you should be an end.

36:06

Parents should be pouring into you cause you're their child, not because you're going to be some means to retake America or prove that homeschooling is the best or something.

36:15

That's what you need to reject. In my opinion, that's, that's, and fortunately we grew up in a house where we didn't have really any of that.

36:21

And I think we were also involved in the community, which helped a lot on, on, on, you know, soccer teams and things like that, where Boy Scouts and other activities that were not all centered around homeschooling.

36:33

So we interacted with the neighborhood kids. We had a lot of friends who were in public school and private school. And I think that's super important.

36:40

Get involved in the firehouse, get involved in four H, get involved in some kind of a community thing where you're interacting with people actually in your community.

36:46

And you learn to love your community, not just this formula. If you're just taught to love a formula and to vilify anyone who doesn't use the formula, uh, that is a recipe for disaster.

36:56

And you are potentially creating some of the worst social justice warriors. I think when you do that, um, that's just my two cents on it.

37:03

The irony, the bitter irony is that the, the deconstructed, you know, which

37:08

I mean, I would totally agree it's legalism. That's, that's the, it's not thinking through scripture in terms of like, what is, what is the scripture communicating to me?

37:18

And what, what, what are the principles here? Not the, not the rules, the principles. How do we, obviously there's, there, there are rules, but most of the things that are addressed, like in this documentary have to do with principles.

37:29

Why do you homeschool? Well, it's because you want, you're trying to raise up a child in the way that he should go.

37:35

Like, it's these kind of these proverbial principles that you're trying to put into use. The problem is Gothard and lots of similar,

37:40

I guess, cult leaning cult type, um, you know, Christian groups will turn those principles into laws.

37:48

They will turn them into, you must do this, you must do that. And so what happens is when they're rejected, and this is the thing that's ironic.

37:55

Um, and you're, you grow up in this legalistic system, and then you join the most legalistic system in the world, which is the woke left of the

38:06

West of Western civilization. There's nothing more legalistic than, because you must toe the line in every single area, you know, say trans lives matter, say black trans lives matter.

38:16

You know, it's, it's there. What is more legalistic than, you know, progressive woke ideology, the, the, the culture that we're kind of, you know, living in today.

38:27

So you're trading one form of legalism for a much, um, and then, you know, they talk about abuse and stuff, but I would say a much darker, more, um, you know, more demonic in a lot of ways, uh, legalism, you know, and that, and that was the, that was the thing that the double standard,

38:43

I'm watching this with, with my wife. And from the very beginning, I'm like, the same people who are making this would put their stamp of approval right down on a child cutting their genitals off.

38:56

They would think that that's, man, that's something that should be celebrated. Yeah.

39:01

Don't you dare talk to me about, you know, your morality. Don't talk to me about what, you know, uh, uh, the abuse that went on, the things that you support are, are just, they can't, they shouldn't be spoken out loud.

39:14

Well, it's a tool of truth suppression to justify their own evil and say, where the standard over here from Christianity isn't even a real standard.

39:24

It's all fake. It's all abusive or superior to that. Um, but yeah, reject the legalism. Don't reject

39:30

Christianity, reject. And if you reject the legalism, you'll have to reject the wokeness to when that comes knocking on your door.

39:37

A lot of these people who deconstruct or whatever, they never actually changed. They're just, they are the same way their parents were.

39:43

They just have a different set of standards. Now they've traded one set of laws for another set of laws and they maintain the same rigidity, uh, and, and fastidiousness and, and, um, passion.

39:55

So, um, they, they think they're not like their parents anymore. And it's like, you know, you're just like your parents.

40:00

You just have a little bit of a different or maybe a lot of a different moral code, but you are acting in the same way.

40:06

You're, you are conserving their habits. So reject those habits. Um, and, and, and, you know, and we could probably get in more into detail what we mean by that, but we're kind of, uh, we're almost 40 minutes in here.

40:20

So, um, thank you, David, for, uh, just giving a little bit of a periphery sketch of what was going on in this series for people out there.

40:30

Um, I want to just, uh, let everyone know again, uh, that the truth script website is up.

40:36

And, um, there is actually a conference, uh, coming up. If you can make it, uh, it's in September, late

40:43

September, but if you go to the true script website, true script .com, click on conferences, and it'll take you to this page.

40:50

And there's an overcoming evil men's conference, September 21st through the 24th in speculator,

40:56

New York. Uh, it's a wonderful facility. We were there last year. It, I actually wanted to do it in Pennsylvania cause

41:02

I thought, well, this is more accessible. But, uh, when I went to this area in New York, after I was there,

41:08

I just thought, nope, we have to do it here. This is a amazing facility. Uh, the food is amazing there.

41:13

They have culinary graduates who are, uh, in charge of the, the cooking and everything. Um, it's a great price where we're just really charging people at this point at cost that might go up, uh, depending on our expenses, but we have a lineup of six speakers and, um, you just, you're not going to get a better bang for your buck and fellowship.

41:33

We actually, I was talking to one of the speakers, Andrew Rappaport yesterday, and, um, and he was very positive about this cause he said,

41:40

Oh, I do my conferences this way. We're going to have a lot of breaks. So if you go to a big conference and you feel like, wow,

41:46

I'm missing sessions. If I want a fellowship longer, uh, and you feel torn in, in this particular conference, you will not feel that way at all.

41:54

There's, you will be able to make all the sessions and have plenty of time to interact in a fellowship with the speakers, uh, and with each other.

42:04

And there's going to be, um, you know, all kinds of things to do boating and fishing and hiking and basketball and, uh, all kinds of activities, or if you just want to sit around and have good theological discussions, uh, this is the place that you're going to want to be.

42:16

So, um, check it out. And, uh, that's at truth script .com go to the conference tab.

42:22

Um, anyway, well, thank you everyone for, uh, for listening today. We'll have more next week on truth script,