News Roundup: Trump & the Pope, Islam & Jesus, Matt Chandler's Mess, Cult future, & More!

That Matter Podcast, I'm your host, John Harris. I hope you are having a wonderful tax week. My oh my,

I gotta tell you what, I every year think I'm gonna get out ahead of it and I won't be scrambling on April 15th.

And I did start like two weeks beforehand but I was still scrambling on April 15th. And then to make matters worse,

I've never had to do this. I had to file an amendment and I think I got it in 15 minutes before midnight.

So it was one of those, my taxes are so complicated. And at this point in my life, like there's all these different, like I feel like it's nickels and dimes that are keeping me afloat, keeping me surviving, keeping my family going and from all these various places.

But we got it done. I'm not very happy with the government. This is the week that I'm probably the least happy with the government, but the weather does make it nice.

So after we were done, the next day I was like, we just gotta go get some ice cream.

So I took my little almost two -year -old and my wife out. She loves ice cream, so it's a wonderful thing.

But that's what's going on in my world. There's a bunch of stuff out there and also stuff that I'm gonna be putting out there.

You can check out on my sub stack. Today I released, well, I'll show you later, but an article on the lost cause as they refer to it today in academic circles on Southern slash

Confederate history in honor of the esteemed governor, Abigail Spanberger, who has decided that that particular history of Virginia should just be erased.

We should forget about that part, I guess. And there's so much more

I'm forgetting, but there's a lot we have to talk about today. We have some international news.

Most of it, I think, good news. We're gonna talk a little bit about some of the elections that have just happened a few weeks ago in France.

I haven't talked about it because I was waiting and now I feel like I should talk about it a little bit. That coupled with the election that just recently happened in Czechoslovakia.

And what does that mean? What are the results of these elections mean for us as Americans, if anything? Are they bellwethers?

Is there any relationship? We'll talk about that. We're also going to talk a little bit about this inter -Catholic

Protestant debate that emerged on social media last week. It got pretty nasty in some posts.

I'm trying to exercise as much judiciousness as I can have. This is after all the conversations that matter podcast.

So I try not to give air time to things that really don't matter that much, but this did get pretty big.

And I even on X put out a few pro Protestant tweets. I think there's some separations that should be made.

And I've in the past on the podcast talked about this with cobelligerency versus theological compromise.

Obviously you never want an allyship that compromises you, compromises your beliefs, compromises your theological commitments, that kind of thing.

But from my perspective, this really got going from Catholics looking down their nose at Protestants.

And it's like, man, you know, Protestants really do supply the votes that keep

America going, that keep America, America that really is intrinsic to America's own identity.

So we'll talk about that a little bit. Friend of mine who is Roman Catholic wrote a piece, and I think it's well worth looking into to determine how do we go ahead?

How do we forge a vision? Because we have so many enemies. It's not like Catholics are the primary political threat or anything like that.

But it's like, don't try to have a superior posture or cut

Protestants out of the party or smear them because they are Protestant. And I suppose you could say the same vice versa.

So we'll talk a little bit about what all that means. Of course, I am very much a Protestant and will continue to be so.

We're gonna talk a little bit about just Protestantism and evangelicalism more broadly. We've got some evangelical news for you, some wokeness stuff,

Southern Baptist stuff. And then we're also gonna talk a little bit about just what's on the horizon.

What's coming? Because I was watching this documentary on the FLDS church out in Utah on Netflix.

And it's kind of a rare opportunity that I even have Netflix. There was something else.

I can't remember what it was now that I wanted to watch or my wife did. I think both of us, there was some movie.

It'll probably, I don't remember what it was for some reason. I don't know if it was some film that we could only get it on Netflix.

And I was like, okay, it's cheap. I'll pay one month for Netflix. Normally no money goes to Netflix.

We do not want to support Netflix, but there was this one film that we could only see on Netflix. And it might've been,

I'm trying to think now. It might've been the All Quiet on the Western Front because I really wanted to see that.

Maybe that was it. Anyway, this happened to pop up though. And I think like tomorrow my subscription ends and I was like, let's watch this thing.

It just came out and man, it was fascinating, but it really made me think about cults in general and how cult thinking works and why people follow cults and what actually jolts them into questioning the cult mentality they have.

And I really think we are on the verge of more and more of that.

More cult thinking, fracturedness, just everyone in the little bitty echo chambers and in tribes.

And I don't think it's a good thing, but it is a real thing. Like it's something we have to talk about and navigate as believers in the

Bible and the Lord Jesus Christ, who think there is a universal truth out there that people are going to be held to.

And so, yeah, well, and we'll talk about some other Christian news as we go. So hopefully that sounds good.

That's what I got for the podcast. You can certainly put in your questions, comments, cries of outrage, whatever they are, and I will get to them as we unfold today's

Friday edition of the Conversations That Matter podcast. So let's start off with the international news.

This is from the Jerusalem Post and I wanted to choose this particular headline in particular because it is from the

Jerusalem Post and it's the way they're framing it. Trump confirms the Strait of Hormuz open for all ships and prohibits, that's their word,

Israel from bombing Lebanon. So I do wanna point out that Trump is prohibiting, is holding

Israel back, is I guess in some sense controlling Israel, telling them they can't fight against the

Hezbollah group, which is pretty much an Iranian proxy in Lebanon because the war is coming to a close.

And so that's the headline if you go there right now. The headline at the Epoch Times is

Trump says Iran agreed to hand over nuclear dust. That's huge by the way. That was the thing that JD Vance couldn't get any momentum on from what

I understand. There was this 10 point plan. I still don't know what the 10 points are. They were supposedly leaked, but that wasn't the actual 10 point plan.

And they agreed on everything except the nuclear program. And it sounds like through the blocking of the

Strait of Hormuz, they were able to use some leverage to get the uranium that was up to 60 % refined and sent to, or some agreement to handle the getting rid of that.

You can't just bomb that. You can't just, I mean, that's the problem with these highly toxic chemicals, right?

When you have them, you have them. And there, I don't even know how long the half -life on uranium is, but I'm sure getting rid of that is, you know,

I don't know what process they have, but it may be a longer process. So that's going on.

And we also have a good news, national news. I wanted to show you. Mississippi bans abortion inducing drugs amid continuing threat of mail order abortion.

This is a great headline and you need to know about it. I don't think this is being covered broadly, but Mississippi has banned the prescription and distribution of abortion inducing drugs.

One of the most common methods used to terminate a pregnancy in the United States. And this is what the abolitionists talk about a lot, that look, you can have these heartbeat bills.

You can have states that have banned abortion at early stages, but what if people are just getting pills in the mail that help them do an at -home abortion?

You still haven't banned all of it. And it's a good point. And Mississippi is trying to take some measures here, which good for them.

The Republican governor, Tate Reeves, signed house bill 1613 into law last week. The bill amends the state drug trafficking laws to make it illegal to sell, prescribe, or distribute an abortion inducing drug, which is defined as a medicine drug or any other substance prescribed or dispensed with the intent of terminating the clinically diagnosable pregnancy of a woman to cause the death of an unborn child.

Reeves approved approval of the measure follows its passage in the Republican state house. So this is a big thing, 77 to 39 vote in the state house.

And then in the state Senate, 36 to 14, pretty good margins there. I think it's gonna be these really conservative deep red states that are able to really do anything about this, because in a state like Virginia or New York, or certainly

California, you're never gonna get momentum on something like this. And even in a swing state where this becomes an election issue, the

Republicans don't wanna touch it. It's only in a very deep red state, and even there it's tough, that you even have momentum towards these kinds of things.

So let's just thank the Lord that there was a decision made in the right direction. And hopefully these kinds of things can continue.

This can be a domino effect in other states. So wanted to let you know about that. Let's talk a little bit about the

Catholic Protestant stuff. Oh, I should say, I just caught a comment from Hannah.

Uranium 235 used for nuclear fuel has a shorter half -life of approximately 700 to 710 million years.

Well, we don't have to wait that long then. That's a, oh man. Okay, well,

I don't know. I don't know. Do you bury it? What do you do with it? I really don't have any idea. Trump angers

Catholics in targeting Pope Leo over Iran war pushback. This is in the

Hill. President Trump is escalating a rare feud with the Pope over pushback on the

Iran war, a move that could isolate the president's Catholic voting block and complicate the Catholic members of his administration, including the first lady.

Trump posted a lengthy truth social post Sunday night calling the Pope a weak on crime and insisting the Catholic leader believed it was okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, though Leo has not expressed such a notion.

The Pope in return said that he has no fear of Trump. So this began this whole issue. And then it got worse because the

Pope decided that not only would he make statements, I think I actually went over them in the last podcast because it was at the end of the last week.

He would not only make these statements about the Iran war needing to end, that war doesn't solve anything.

He sounded like a hippie. He sounded like Francis. He didn't just do that. He decided also the same this week, this past week, to make statements of communion with Muslims and how

Muslims are, he didn't say that they're on the same level of Christians, but that it was very strange.

In fact, I don't know if I have that pulled up. Do I have that? I should probably add that to the stack of stuff that we're talking about today.

Let me see if I can find the exact quote for you. On the news. So Vatican news is probably, is that the best place to go?

Probably. So let's go to the Vatican. Oh, this is one day ago. Pope Leo meets with several

Muslim leaders in Cameroon. That's not it. Religion news service, they're progressive, but what do they say?

Pope Leo will encounter a distinct example of Catholic Muslim connection in Algeria. I don't see the quote here.

So maybe I'll have to skip that for now. But he made a very strange quote about Muslims and feeling a religious kinship with them.

And so this sparked a bunch of debates. And the first was, of course, the Catholic Protestant debate and it went in all kinds of different directions.

There was a really good article, I thought, from Mike Sabo at the American Reformer, the vice president of the

Pope and the coming elections. And he just talks about a number of factors. First of all,

Viktor Orban in Hungary, who's been a friend of the Trump administration, lost. He's been in power 16 years.

And it's not just that Viktor Orban lost. Viktor Orban was soundly defeated, pretty overwhelmingly.

I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this, but what does this mean for us? I mean, I'm on a tangent here.

I wanna get back to the Catholic stuff, but yeah, Viktor Orban, Roman Catholic, Hungary's Catholic.

So maybe there is a connection there, but they've been allies with the United States. And the

Tizia party got almost 55 % of the popular vote.

They got 138 seats. The Fidesz party, which is Viktor Orban's party, only got 37, almost 38 % of the popular votes and they have 55 seats.

This was destruction. This was an annihilation, really.

And it had the highest turnout post -communism that Hungary's ever had as a percentage. So this was a big recall on Viktor Orban.

And the guy that they elected was essentially, is essentially, they call him center -right, but he's not really center -right.

Well, not from an American perspective. He's like, he's soft on LGBT stuff.

He's more globalist, more pro -European union. And so what does this mean?

Is this a trend that's gonna continue or something? I mean, Hungary's economy wasn't that great.

There were reasons people were dissatisfied with it. But this article from Mike Szabo starts off just acknowledging like there's some losses here and this is one of them.

You also have the Iran war. It was dragging. Now it was a short war, if you compare it to other wars, but it still was too long for the

American people and the gas prices did go up. And so this is at a point right now where Trump is not as popular as he was a month and a half ago.

And how can the Republicans continue? In other words, how do they find an election map that actually works in their favor, especially when they have a lot of major podcasts out there that are platforming

Democrats that are anti -Trump at this point, that suspect

JD Vance and the administration of being part of the, some kind of a,

I don't wanna say conspiracy, but they're part of the elites now, which is, it's interesting. I was saying this to my wife the other day.

When Trump got into office, one of the reasons he got into office was the fact that people viewed him as an outsider.

He was paying for his own campaign. Look back at the debates. He would say things like, I can tell you the truth because I'm not beholden to the donors.

And if he got booed, he said, those are the donors. Jeb Bush, he's beholden to them.

He's paid for by them, not me. And that was one of the reasons, I think it was a big reason that he got elected, despite some of the negative things that came out in his delivery and past character issues.

So he essentially comes into power as I'm the anti -elite. Well, the move being played on him now is kind of a similar move, only it's by people at this point who don't have any plan for who to replace him with.

They don't have a governing strategy. They're not builders. Trump was always big on that too. I'm a builder.

I actually build literal buildings. I work with people. I'll get things done. You don't really have that aspect, but you do have people who are talking heads like myself, of course, myself exempted from this, who have looked at Trump and said, you know what, he's just part of the cabal.

He's just part of the elites. He's just compromised like them. And this happened in a shorter span than a year.

I mean, this was a very quick thing. And we talked about it in previous podcasts, why this all came to be.

I'm not gonna reinvent the wheel, but it does pose a number of challenges for Republicans, not just in the midterms, but the next presidential election.

And one of the things that would really be bad for the Republican party is if Catholics and Protestants had a big political feud.

I'm not saying we can't keep our religious differences, which we should. I'm not saying we shouldn't argue those things passionately, which we should.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be trying to even convert one another, which Protestants should be doing.

But it does mean that for political reasons, we have an alignment, those of us who are conservative at least, on a number of the core issues, including abortion, including many social issues.

And we should try to keep that kind of an alliance going as much as possible. And so Mike Sabo says this rift is widening between Trump and the podcaster class.

And I think that's a good way of looking at it. It is this sort of talking head class of people. And they're more and more of a latch onto anything that's anti -Trump.

And including if it's a spat with the Pope, they'll join the Pope. So he gave a few examples of people who are doing that.

He talks about Marjorie Taylor Greene, although does she have a podcast? I don't know if she's part of that exactly, but she's part of the same general group.

And I don't know if he cites anyone else here, but he says one political angle that the president should consider in all of this is how to keep enough

Catholic voters in the fold to prevent the worst outcomes in the midterms. Though nowhere close to the support that white evangelical voters give to the

Trump -led Republican Party, Daniel McCarthy notes, I love Daniel McCarthy, by the way, that Catholic voters have supported the president in the past elections.

They accounted for more than one in five of his 2 ,024 voters, with Trump besting

Kamala Harris among Catholics. So he has an advantage with Catholic voters. Another thing to consider is the repercussions this could have for President Vance.

So President Vance did try to navigate this at a TPUSA event with a Gallican -like view, which basically means, look, the

Pope can be the spiritual authority, but you've got the civil magistrate, similar to a

Protestant outlook, that he is responsible for his domain.

So keep your lanes separate. During a Fox interview, Vance exhorted the Pope to keep to matters of morality and theology and to avoid commenting on public policy.

Of course, Vance is Catholic, so this creates an awkward situation for him if his own boss is feuding with the

Pope, but he navigated probably in the best way he knows how and tried to say, look, the

Pope has his lane, Trump has his lane, and the

Pope needs to stick to the theology, Trump needs to stick to the governing. So he said it, obviously, in a nicer, more diplomatic way than all that.

There's more to this article, but I think that's really the main of it. There has to be a lot of,

I think, not that the administration's listening to me, but there has to be a lot of measuredness on this and attempting to build as many alliances and keep as many alliances as possible.

Now, I'm not in a government position. I'm not a strategist for government officials.

It's not really, I suppose, even my place to start calling from the sidelines, like many of the podcasters do, and tell people what

I think on these matters. I don't know if that's exactly what Mike Sabo is doing. I think he is getting into some tactics, but I think his message is an

American reformer, and my message is to evangelicals out there who have their own levels of influence, including pastors and churches, and your people are gonna be asking you about these things, and you have politicians in your congregations, and I know that's where my influence at this point is, is helping pastors navigate those things, and those are very real things.

I've had pastors contact me that had very real political situations in their church, people who are in actual elected offices, and how do you navigate some of these things?

Keep your Protestant convictions. Don't ever compromise those things, but you don't wanna get into the dirt.

You don't wanna get into the mud. You want to be able to keep a clear vision on what your political priorities are.

If they're things like immigration, lowering taxes, anti -abortion, social issues, not necessarily in that order, but if those are your priorities, and you have people that can come alongside you, you don't want to alienate them if you can help it.

Now, if the gospel alienates them, so be it. Absolutely. If salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, alienate some of your voters, then so be it.

You gotta stick to what God has stated, but on those policy issues, I think we should try to keep a clear vision and focus on winning.

That's gonna be something that real soon we're gonna be getting a lot of messaging on, and we gotta be smart about these things.

Now, Catholics and Protestants are going to need each other for what's coming, says John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist.

I know John, and I know he's got the best of intentions about this. He is Roman Catholic, and he makes essentially the same argument, and says, look, there's bigger threats out there.

Let's stick together on the bigger threats. Islam is one of those things. So is the left. So let's keep going.

He even mentions that the Democrat -controlled Virginia signed a law by Governor Abigail Spanberger that would strip tax -exempt nonprofit status from Confederacy -related groups in the state.

Now, I just wrote a whole piece about this, helping people navigate and understand this, which I'll talk about a little bit at the end.

I'm gonna do a whole separate podcast on it, but listen to what I'm saying here. This is a big deal.

I understand there's a lot of people obsessed with a lot of different niche things online, and maybe some of the podcasts and things you're reading on Substack and other places are focusing on one particular issue, but remember what happened in the last five years, even.

Remember how they took down hundreds of monuments? I'm talking about the left. Hundreds, not just Confederate monuments.

It was monuments to Columbus, even Abraham Lincoln. And have all those monuments been put back?

No, they have not. Or have we restored America? Has the woke agenda been somehow contradicted and defeated?

And have we educated people enough so they understand what was wrong with it, so we can actually go back?

No, we haven't. We're not there. But it's like squirrel, right? There's all these other things to focus on, and not saying that there aren't other issues in the world, but this is an actual big deal in Virginia.

Virginia, you're losing your identity. You're losing part of it, at least. And there's an honorable tradition that you have, a military tradition, a tradition of being a gentleman, a tradition of, yes, being part of the

Confederacy. And that doesn't mean that you're still looking to go back and be part of a secession effort, or you're still looking to go back to make social arrangements the way they were in the 19th century at all.

It just means that this is part of your unique history. You've had many different things that have developed you as a state.

I guess I'm speaking to Virginians now. And all of those things should be considered as part of the story. And that confers identity.

You start excising parts of that. You start saying that various heroes and founders of institutions, and even

Christian men who have godly character, who have been American heroes more broadly, you start saying that all that stuff is bad, all that stuff should be thrown away, then you're doing yourselves a disservice.

You're creating a vacuum. And who's gonna fill the vacuum? Who are the heroes that Virginians should look to in their own state history that can confer identity?

Is it, I mean, who do you replace it with? Is it Michael Jordan? Is he, he's not even from there. He's from North Carolina. I'm trying to think, like, who's the

Virginian who's going to come in and provide the template for character? This is a big thing.

And if we lose our character and our identity and we understand who we are, we don't understand that,

I should say, anymore, then we are gonna have problems. And I think that is one of the problems we're having right now.

We just don't know. These things don't help. And we do need people that are politically in the game on the local level, on the state level, focused on the right things, not being distracted and passively watching honestly ridiculous stuff.

And there's just a lot of super ridiculous stuff. People think they're learning things from podcasts where they're really not, or they're learning a little bit that doesn't really mean a lot for their life.

Like, think of, just take inventory yourself on what matters in your life and then adjust your information intakes appropriately.

If you're online, then make sure you're following people that are helping you get information that actually matters in the real fights.

And this is one of them. And I think John Davidson is absolutely correct here.

We gotta focus on those things. We can't just be focusing on foreign policy as important as that is, or just,

I see so many forums going in ridiculous directions often at times on what the quote unquote

Jews do here or there. Look, think about your life from the ground up, believe your eyes, look at the grass, go touch it, and think about who's actually trying to prevent you in the real local and state level especially, but also on the federal level.

Who's making the decisions in front of you that are affecting your life, stopping you from doing what the

Lord wants you to do. That's really how you gotta look at this. I think it's liberal ideology. It's radical leftist revolutionaries.

Obviously there's other groups in there. You could say that secular Jewish people have been overrepresented in some of these causes.

You can certainly say that white Protestant Northeasterners have been overrepresented in some of these causes and are the origination of most of them.

You could say there's a problem with immigrants coming from other countries who do not share our religious beliefs at all, including

Muslims and Hindus and now various other groups in places like even Texas now. It's not just Dearborn, Michigan.

It's not just Minneapolis. It is so many other places. And so we have to have a wholesome kind of broad view of these things.

And when we do that, where do Catholics stand in all of this? Well, I'll tell you what, they're not the...

Maybe if you go back a hundred years, the Know Nothing Party and the concerns over will Catholics have an allegiance to the

Pope, that was a war that was fought at that time. Looking at all the various threats now and triaging them,

I don't think Catholics stack up that far. Now that could change depending on...

If the Pope tomorrow starts calling for very liberal policies and Catholics start following him,

I mean, the conditions do change, but as it stands right now, we gotta try to maintain the political alliance while keeping the theological differences.

I hope that makes sense. Now, in this whole situation, to make it even more complex, should we make it more complex?

I guess so. In comes the sort of two veins.

One is Protestants are basically stand -ins for Jews.

And if you already believe that Jews are the problem behind everything, Protestants are their allies.

Protestants are the reason that Jews can operate the way that Jews operate, right? So this narrative has gained wide acceptance, but that became one of the things that I saw last week.

And then the other thing was, Muslims really aren't that bad. And I'm like seeing this from people who supposedly are on the right, who five seconds ago would have said so, maybe some of them still do.

And I'm like, what is going on here? So let me give you just two examples, okay? Representative, I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this.

This is the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm talking about things that matter. However, once you get, even if it's dumb things being said, once you get enough people to believe dumb things, then they become things that unfortunately start to matter.

And so I'll show you dumb thing number one here. Dumb thing number one is

Tucker Carlson posting this. The people in charge don't want you to know this, but Muslims love

Jesus. All right. Now, which Jesus are we talking about?

Do Jehovah's Witnesses love Jesus? Do Mormons love Jesus? Who actually understands and loves

Jesus? That's a question that's valid. And I think as Protestant Christians, as those who believe in what the

Bible depicts of Jesus, we have to say there's a number of false Jesuses out there. About 45 minutes south of me is the headquarters nationally for the

Church of God, or I should say the World Mission Society Church of God. Now, the World Mission Society believes that Jesus came back in the 1970s as Aung San Hunk, and that the

Holy Spirit is living in South Korea today. Now, they love Jesus, at least they think they do, but it's not the same

Jesus. And this is one of the things that we have to keep clear in our theological, under our theological parameters and our theological categories.

Many political talking heads are trying to tinker in the realm of theology, and they really don't know what they're talking about.

Sadly, some of them are pastors, but those who have really wanted to be political, social commentators, who don't understand theology well enough to comment on it are deciding they're going to now comment on it.

And because there's a vacuum left from just discredited theological institutions, whether that's

Protestant institutions like the Southern Baptist Convention, or whether it's Catholics, I still live in an area where people still remember the whole church abuse scandal, and they don't trust the

Catholic church. So who are they going to trust now for their theology? Well, I'll just trust the political guy I'm listening to.

So this is why this becomes an issue. I've only read the first sentence, let's read the rest. Islam reveres

Jesus as a major prophet and messenger of the Lord, believes he performed miracles, and states that he will return to earth to defeat the

Antichrist. That's why Donald Trump painted a painting. Now, I haven't mentioned this yet,

I was waiting to, and I'm going to talk about it, but his painting depicting himself as the son of God offended the president of Iran.

It was an attack on his religion as well as Christianity. So now Trump is attacking

Islam. Today's Morning Note newsletter covers Masoud Pezikian. I'm going to have trouble pronouncing this name.

It's Pezikian, that's my best attempt. Condemnation of Trump's desecration of Jesus, the

Iran wars, gutting effects on America's housing market, Columbia's plan to murder, okay, so other things as well.

Now let's just talk about this for a minute, okay? And by the way, I did forget that part of the thumbnail that I just showed you is the

AI generated painting of Trump where people thought, myself included, that he was reposting something that made him look like Jesus.

I didn't mean to show that to you for the same reason that I didn't mean to, that I did not actually post anything about that couple a few weeks ago, who everyone was showing, look at this husband who said his wife has a promiscuous past.

Let's make her famous, right? I was like, that's ridiculous. If you want to bring back public shame, why would you share that if that's what you're about, right?

It's the same reason people are saying this is idolatry. I was like, well, we shouldn't share the image. So my mistake, sorry,

I didn't realize on the, so Tucker shared it and I just showed you what he shared, but regardless, this particular image, apparently according to Trump, was supposed to be him as a doctor healing someone.

Now I said online, I said, you know what? It very well could be, I know people might hate me for this, they might think, you know, let's not give

Trump the benefit of the doubt here. It very well may be, he should have someone screening these things because you know what, to me and to a lot of other people, it really looked like it was

Jesus. In fact, I'm pretty sure whoever made it initially intended it to look like Jesus. There's a red robe.

Franklin Graham didn't think it was Jesus apparently, so there's people who didn't, but Trump says he didn't.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, but it's like, you know, that of course, that is going to offend Christians, is going to offend all members of Christendom, whether Catholics or Eastern Orthodox or Protestants.

However, Muslims, this is the distinction here. Muslims don't believe in the same

Jesus. The Jesus of Islam did not die on the cross for the sins of mankind.

The Jesus of Islam mirrors a lot of the apocryphal stories told of Jesus, not the biblical account of Jesus.

The Jesus of Islam reveres Mohammed and submits, and he's just one of a line of many prophets who have come.

He is not the Messiah. So Islam is obviously very different, and this is something that is creeping into the right, these

Islamic interpretations being valid somehow. And this is something that I honestly didn't think

I would see on the right. Of course, I live, what, an hour and a half, two hours north of New York City right now, and I didn't think

I'd see a Muslim mayor there either after 9 -11. I remember 9 -11. I didn't think you'd ever get that population to vote for a

Muslim mayor, but here we are over two decades later, and it's acceptable now.

It's acceptable to be a Muslim, not just a Muslim, but a Marxist. So here's where we're at. So let's put up the fence right now and say, look, guys who do this, who say these kinds of things, they're not being accurate.

Make the theological distinction here. Jesus is not the same Jesus in Islam as the

Jesus of Christianity. They are very different. And this is the problem.

This is basically the issue with having a different Jesus that 1 John talks about too.

Like this is a Jesus that can't save you. You got to figure out who the identity is you can actually believe in that Jesus.

So the idea that Trump is somehow offending Muslims and offending

Iran, it's like, now we're very, I guess we're concerned about what Iran thinks in this whole mess.

It's amazing. Not wise of Trump to do that at all.

He needs someone guarding his social media, but people have been saying that since 2016 and no one seems to take that seriously.

So I'm expecting more cofefe's if you know what I mean. So I figured

I would mention that and also mention this too while we're on that, if I may.

One of the things that I keep hearing this is that this comparison made between Jews and Muslims that at least the

Muslims believe in Jesus. I've heard pastors online say this kind of thing.

I've heard this multiple times. And it's unbelievable to me that people would do this who have any theological acumen.

And the reason I say that is because if you go to the book of Romans, go to Romans chapter 10, verses two and three, what does

Paul say about unbelieving Jews? Stress on the unbelieving part there. He says,

I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not in accordance with knowledge. For not knowing about God's righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.

That's what Paul says about unbelieving Jews. What does Paul say about people who actually get the wrong

God? Muslims would be included in that. Allah is the wrong God. Totally. What does he say about them?

It's different. And there's many passages that talk about this. Even in Romans, you go to Romans chapter one and talk about how you're making, this is a man -made idol that you are making.

You're taking the creation and you're worshiping instead of the creator. That's the essence of idolatry.

Whether you're worshiping something in the image of man or of beasts, you're taking something God made and you're treating it like it's

God. That's the problem with Allah. That's the problem with all these false religions.

You're taking either something that's physical or something that's spiritual.

Demons, for example, that was a problem with Baal. You're worshiping a demon. You shouldn't worship demons.

That's a false God. That's what Islam is, by definition, from a Christian perspective.

Paul talks about unbelieving Jews differently. Now, does that mean that unbelieving Jews are somehow now proto -Christians or they're going to heaven or there's a dual covenant?

Absolutely not. And Paul is crystal clear on that as well. And in that vein, I'm skipping ahead here,

I guess, but I wanted to share with you another post.

So here it is. And I don't normally talk about this kind of stuff.

And this is a John Hagee quote here or John Hagee, I guess

I didn't pull up the video, so we're not gonna do it. I'm trying to even think, have I ever talked about John Hagee? John Hagee's not typically been someone, he's a kook in my mind, he's a heretic.

I don't consider him usually worth my time. And I don't think his tribe is growing and it's certainly not making any inroads into reformed evangelicalism so far as I can tell, which has generally been my disposition is to focus on things that relate to that particular community.

Although I think I'm getting a little bit broader just because of circumstance. The fracturing of reformed evangelicalism has led to, the tribe gets smaller and smaller and different and in new lines form.

But at the same time, I think people who actually genuinely love Christ, care about the Bible, wanna worship God, they're kind of finding each other and they're sort of like a new,

I don't wanna say movement, but let's just say people from Calvary Chapel, sort of like some of the people that are with TPUSA are finding each other.

Of course, there's a lot of new apostolic reformation people that have been in that, but I know guys on the inside and there's a concerted attempt to now try to get those people, let's say just replace those people with more solid people as much as possible.

And I do think this is a long -term process and I don't know where it will all go. So some of the audiences that may be guys who are wanting to just be basic Christians and keep a certain level of basic orthodoxy, they may be rubbing up against guys like John Hagee.

I don't know, but I figured it was a good opportunity to make this point because I did happen to see it. And the original post is that John Hagee says that Jesus Christ is coming back to the world as a

Jewish rabbi. He says he can only rule the world as a Jewish rabbi and nothing else. He's going to return to the earth as a second coming as a

Jew. Jesus Christ is coming back as a Jewish rabbi. And then Jesse Hughes, by the way, follow Jesse Hughes.

If you're on X, it's at Jesse Hughes. He's been pretty good on a lot of the issues that have come up lately.

He's in law school at Liberty University. But he said, and I think he was, if I'm not mistaken, one of the young Republican guys, like the head of the young Republicans at Liberty, if I'm not mistaken.

But anyway, he says, someone wanna show me where in the Bible this is because I always thought it was Christ who was returning as a conquering king.

Now, here's what I wanted to say about this. There's something bigger going on here.

Jesus was a Jewish rabbi by definition. And there's multiple scriptures that say this. I just listed two of them here,

John 1 49 and John 3 2. And these are verses that rabbi is teacher. It literally means teacher.

So rabboni, teacher, he's just a teacher and he's Jewish. He's practicing the true

Jewish religion, okay? Which means teacher. He will be coming back as a conquering king, but there's no reason to believe he loses his

Jewishness or teacher status, right? Like those things don't go away. He's still a teacher and he's still Jewish. Now, the issue with a clip like this, so the issue with John Hagee saying

Jesus is coming back as a Jewish rabbi is not helping his audience understand the modern categories that they're likely going to assume.

So he's, John Hagee says that, you know, the prophets, the apostles, Jesus, all these people, there's not a

Baptist in the bunch. They're all Jewish. They all had their bar mitzvah. They wore a prayer shawl, whatever.

They went to the temple. Like, look at all these things that they did, which are Jewish, which modern

Jewish people who are practicing a religion that, I guess if they're messianic, they believe

Jesus is the Christ. But if they're not, they are practicing a religion that is in unbelief. They do not believe in the

Messiah. That is a different religion. Now, and that would fall under the category of Paul saying they're unbelieving.

These are unbelieving Jews. And their zeal for God does not have the knowledge. So that's the category.

Now, those people do those things too. So when you start saying, well, those guys are

Jewish and you don't qualify it, then you can lead people to assume that, oh, Jesus is like modern

Jews. Modern unbelieving Jews, even. Not a good thing to be doing to your audience.

And I'll explain why theologically it's a problem in a moment. Bringing in modern categories like this to impose upon Jewish believers, communicates confusion because religious, i .e.

non -messianic Jews today are unbelieving. Jesus is not coming back as an unbelieving

Jew, obviously. The patriarchs, prophets, and apostles would all have been believing

Jews as are in a spiritual sense, the Baptists. That's a profound claim that I need you to, if you're listening, just think about for a moment.

I'm gonna repeat it. The believing Jews, the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, they are linked to modern

Baptists in a spiritual sense. This is Christian theology 101. Father Abraham had many sons.

I am one of them, so are you. I am a believing Jew in that sense, just like you are a believing

Jew in that sense, in a spiritual sense. So this is very Christian theology 101 stuff.

You see the same kind of presentism fallacy expressed by people who want to impose modern political categories of Zionism on the past or extend dispensationalism somehow to predispensational thinkers.

This is something I see more often, like going back in time and being like, oh, they're practical dispensationalists.

Or look at that Postmal guy. He's a practical dispensationalist. Or look at all these guys that say things that are, you know, from the past that either insinuate or state directly that there's some kind of a future for ethnic

Israel. Well, they must all be believing dispensationalism or something. And it's like, and the

Catholics love this because they're just like, they think that they have everything, at least a certain quarter of Catholics online.

They think they have everything kind of wrapped up in a bow. And they're the true church that is anti -Jewish and the

Protestants are, they're so pro -Jewish. That's the problem with them. In fact, I saw someone who commented on my, sorry, on my ex, who put a picture of all the

Jewish shills out there, because they're all Protestants. And in it, he included Martin Luther and R .C.

Sproul and Votie Bauckham, and the list goes on. And I was like, you know, you

Catholics, he was a Catholic, but yeah, you see that a lot. You see people wanting to impose categories on the past that exist today in present political circumstances or present theological circumstances.

And you really got to be careful of doing that. And John Hagee does something like that here. So very intellectually insulting things like that shouldn't happen.

And if we respect academic integrity, theological precision in the scholarly process, we won't engage on them, in them,

I should say. So there you go. Wanted to share that. Now let's talk about the Protestants for a moment.

And where do I want to go with all this? Let's actually, I have one more example to show you. I have a video

I wanted to play for you. This is, and I debated with myself. I'm going to be honest with you. I debated with myself whether or not to play this because Calvin Robinson has become such,

I mean, maybe he was always this way and I didn't know it. I had him on the show once, but he has become clownish and just saying dumb stuff.

I don't understand exactly why, because I don't know him well, but he has just taken the cake on many, saying many dumb things online.

And there was one post I saw from him not long ago where he's like saying that the Holocaust math doesn't add up because, you know, how many people who are

British were alive during World War II versus how many Germans versus how many

Holocaust survivors? And it's like, you're comparing apples with pears. How many people were alive at the time versus people that could have been kids today, who are back then, who are still alive today, who are survivors of the

Holocaust? Like you're comparing apples and pears. People who were alive back then constitute a group that is going to range in age of mostly of people who are dead now versus people who are still alive, who might be children.

So it's just like, and he doesn't retract when he gets things wrong. But anyway, he was,

I think, wasn't he the one recently that was going off about the, yeah, he was, the 440 Hertz being, it's a

Jewish conspiracy to make everyone mad by playing 440 Hertz for A, getting everyone on the same wavelength when it comes to tuning.

Those tuning forks, you know, those were big psyops. But one of the things he said, and I was like, you know what,

I'll play it just because this is sort of representative of a lot of the things that we saw online, even though, like,

I don't know, I don't want to degrade the audience by playing this stuff, but kind of stuff that we're seeing more and more online.

So I'll just give you a representative example of it, of how Protestants are being attacked for being proto -Jewish and you can listen along with me.

Let's be honest, I've always been under the impression that atheism is just -

Believing anything, yeah. Atheism is Judaism, like in many ways, I think that -

Well, it's a denial of Christ, for sure. It's a denial of Christ, but atheism is, it's a

Jewish project in many ways, like - You could argue that Protestantism is, too. Yeah, no.

We got layers here, guys, we got layers. I enjoy a good joke. Okay, this isn't a joke. We'll determine that.

Many reasons, one is the canon of the Bible, okay? So the Catholic canon of the Bible. Right, you have some extra books in there.

Right, because the Protestants said, let's look at what the Hebrews have in their canon. Let's take the

Jewish canon. Rather than the Catholic, the Christian canon, they took the Jewish canon. Likewise, Protestantism is a

Jewish breakdown of the order of God. So it's more like, you can believe that, but not that.

You can believe that, but not that. It's the picking and choosing of bits of Christianity in order to lead people away from Christianity.

Whereas rather than having the fullness of the truth, you can have that bit of the truth and reject that bit and still be in good stead with God.

That's like the Jewish loopholes of, we can turn the lights off automatically and not break the rules, that's not true.

We know that not to be true. I hear you. I think Protestantism is the inevitable and tragically, and don't miss that word, tragically, tragically necessary reaction to the abuses of Rome.

I think that if Rome would have cut the crap, then

I don't think any of this would have happened. But it's a two -pronged approach. So the Jews have been infiltrating the Roman church for a long time.

Most of Vatican II was Jewish and or Protestant. Nostra Aetate, which people often say is the one that, is the document that makes it sound like Jews can have salvation outside of the

Christian truth, which is not true, that document was drafted by a Jew. Like there's lots of infiltration within the church, but also

Satan wants people to leave the church. And so I think both fronts. I'm sorry, that's not the end of the clip, but I can't take it anymore.

I really can't. It's so insulting to intelligence. I don't even, we're not gonna focus on all the quotes.

Let me just give you though, like two things that Calvin Robinson said there that are just bonkers. And why this was affirmed on the show, like this was true,

I don't know. But here's the first thing. The Protestants took the

Jewish canon. They like specifically chose the Jewish canon to be their canonized books.

Roman Catholics, they have the true books. They have this broader canon of some kind.

Now, the problem with this is that it was at the Council of Trent in reaction to the

Protestant Reformation that the Roman Catholic Church canonized books that were not previously canonized.

Now, if you go back to Jerome, remember Jerome is translating the Latin Vulgate. He's doing it in Bethlehem. And he does translate some of these books that made it into the

Catholic Bible. Like you have like Tobit and the Book of Wisdom and First and Second Maccabees.

And he himself does not believe those are canon. Those are useful books.

Those are books that you can gain something from, but they are not part of Holy Scripture. Jesus, the apostles, the early church.

Now, there is this, I don't wanna get into the whole development of this necessarily, because the Catholics have their view where it's like you need the ecclesiastical realm to canonize.

Whereas the Protestants believe that the ecclesiastical realm simply recognizes. But when we're talking about the

Old Testament specifically, which is the only relevant part here because the Jewish canon is what's brought up. This is what the early church, the apostles,

Jesus all held to. And it wasn't until the Council of Trent when was the Council of Trent?

The middle ages, 1546 that you see the Catholics being the ones who changed things.

So no, this isn't like the Protestants chose to go along with the Jewish canon. No, the early church was

Jewish in the sense that it was mostly composed of ethnic Jews and it was an extension of, it was the continuation of the religion of true

Judaism. So why is this hard to imagine? Like it's, I don't know, but that's one of the things.

The other thing is the Protestants, they pick and choose what they want. They're just like cafeteria.

Now this is an attack on solo scriptura as solo scriptura. It's a misunderstanding of it.

In fact, it's just the opposite. Solo scriptura is actually a bedrock anchor. It means that the authority of scripture does not change.

The authority for the church does not change because scripture is that authority. So if someone is off, if someone who says

I'm a Protestant, I'm gonna go off over here and pick and choose, well, they are now in violation of Protestant theology.

That's the problem with it. Now it's different for the Roman Catholic church because the Roman Catholic church believes that there is a continuing magisterium.

They believe in a three -pagod stool. It's tradition, it's papal authority when the Pope speaks ex cathedra and tradition is,

I should say, ensconced in the rulings of the bishops when they come together and have their councils.

And then you have scripture itself. So scripture is only one third of this equation. So if you wanna talk about picking and choosing, they have an entire mechanism that allows you to adjust, change, if you will, pick and choose.

Protestants don't have that, not in their theology or else they're not a Protestant. That's the kind of the whole point of it.

But here you see this attack that, well, they're Jewish and because they're Jewish, they're able to go pick and choose and how that relates,

I don't know, maybe it's like because the Talmud has, the rabbinical tradition has reinterpretations and contradictory interpretations and people have,

I don't know if that's what he's getting at, he didn't say, but that is somehow making it Jewish, but also they adopted the

Jewish canon. This is just historical hogwash, but that's what you're seeing online. That's what you're seeing people believe.

And unfortunately, Protestants are receiving this messaging and some of them are going to Rome because of it or Eastern Orthodoxy.

They're going to one or the other because they think, well, my religion's compromised. I didn't know it was compromised, but now

I've learned something and now I think it's compromised. No, it's, look, go, if you want to be an authentic, true

Christian, you follow Jesus, you follow what he believed. You go back to his, what is outlined in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, he is the one that authenticated the

Old Testament. He's the one that authorized the theology that came after him in the form of what the apostles taught.

It's the doctrine of the apostles and the prophets that makes up the true

Christian religion. The attempt of Protestantism is to say, there's corruption, we gotta go back. That's the attempt.

Now, if you think Protestantism is corrupt, then you're going to inevitably, if you want to purify that, do another

Protestantism or else you, if you jump to Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, you're saying, no,

I do believe in some kind of a development. I do think it's okay. So this is, I think the standard is not applied to themselves is what

I'm trying to say. This is sort of the hypocrisy of the whole thing. But this is unfortunately what you see on social media every day now.

And there is a concerted attempt, I think, to convert Protestants by using this kind of logic. And we do need to be aware of that kind of thing when it comes up.

And not adjust accordingly who you listen to and what sources you think are worth it because you might think you're learning something and you're not always doing that.

All right, more evangelical stuff. I'll get to questions at the end. I'm kind of on a roll here. So I want to keep going.

Let's switch gears here just a little bit. And let's talk about Matt Chandler. Matt Chandler on political idolatry, deconstruction, and why spiritual growth is slow and disorienting.

And for some reason, I cannot slide my browser. It's the

Catholics, it's the Papists. They have come in and they have decided that they are going to foil the podcast today.

Well, let's see if I can pull it up on another browser. All right,

I'm pulling it up on a different browser. And maybe we'll just let this sit.

Hopefully that changes and I'm able to use it. Matt Chandler himself is coming out with a new book,

Becoming Like Jesus, The Everyday Journey to Living a Life of Holiness. And he said he wanted to write an honest book about how this happens.

The timing is not accidental. In recent years, he has paid close attention to the rise of what he calls deconstruction, a term he describes as a broad and imprecise because it's kind of a junk drawer word, but it's still revealing.

Beneath many of those stories, he hears a common thread, disappointment, when faith does not remove suffering to struggle or struggle.

And so he talks about the hardship of deconstruction, goes through all that, talk about his own personal problems with brain cancer and so forth, which is just terrible.

And then he moves on and he says that, he says, he gets into politics.

And Chandler explained that, though he's often misrepresented, moi, who has gone after Matt Chandler quite a bit?

I guess me. So he's often misrepresented that his confession is just telling

God the truth. So he's just being brutally honest now. And I don't wanna create distance from the

Lord. Let's see, I'm looking for the policy. Okay, here it is. Chandler, who has been critical of both political parties, believes this is one of the areas that will require significant reform.

So we need reform in the church on politics. Now, Matt Chandler's a guy that went out there and regretted supporting, or I don't think he ever supported

Trump, but he's regretting Christians supporting Trump. He bought into the whole BLM narrative and the

COVID narrative and all that. And now he's here to tell you, I think the political idolatry and ideology today is just killing us.

And I think that'll be something 10, 15 years from now, we look back with maybe some embarrassment and shame around because I think it's so subversive in how it plays out.

Now, that's such an interesting thing to say as someone who, like, is there any self -reflection, any looking in the mirror, any thinking, hmm, maybe

I contributed to this. Like, now, if he did, there has to be a full -blown repentance for doing it.

I subverted my religion to a political agenda and I should never have done that. But I don't see that in here, in this piece at least.

He just says he wants to be careful. I think every generation has compromises and that Jesus is healing his church, rewriting.

I mean, it's healing it from your damage, Matt. That's the thing. That's the thing that I think frustrates me so much about this is you get this article from, this is on the

Christian Post, but it's Matt Chandler. And it's like, I'm misrepresented, kind of woe is me, and I'm just trying to be honest.

It's like the motives are always pure, right? This is what, it's like such a tactic that's so, it's so effeminate in my mind and passive -aggressive often.

It's like my enemies, even if they're right, they all have bad motives. And then, like,

I disagree with them, but I'll misrepresent them. I'll misrepresent, and especially going ad hominem and talking about their motives.

I'm not saying there's no place for motives. Out of the heart, the mouth speaks. But when there's nothing really of substance, when it's just motive, motive, motive, they're being mean to me, they're not treating me fairly, but then you start saying some of the things that they've been saying, like, hey, you're subverting your church and your religion to this political agenda that doesn't match it.

Now you're saying something kind of similar to that. You want to correct that, but you're not taking any responsibility for it, and your critics are still bad.

It's just so such a lack of humility in my mind. And I just have no respect for it. That's just not what a man does.

It's not what a leader does. A leader says, I was wrong. I repent. And you know what?

Maybe my critics weren't right in every sense of the word. Maybe they got some things wrong, but they got this right. And there was some political idolatry in me.

They're right about that. I really did conform my religion to a political agenda that didn't match it.

And now I'm here to say, I'm sorry, I repent. I want to undo the damage. That's it. That's what you do. So I've not seen anything from Matt Chandler expressing that in those terms, which

I would hope comes eventually. But it's like, at this point, how can you still maintain significance as a leader, right?

Is there any credibility left? I don't think so. It would take a long time to build that kind of a thing back.

In other news, we have Nate Schloman out there talking about the

Southern Baptists. Clovis Hills removed, this is a church that's a

NAM, or a what? Send plant? This is a North American mission board. So Southern Baptist plant. Removed all the titles from their staff outside of lead and campus pastors.

Sneaky, sneaky, a page right out of the field manual. So basically they had female pastors,

I guess. They're called on the carpet for it. And they decided that they would change the titles, pull the controversial names and stuff like that.

This is a church that your money's going to if you're Southern Baptist, because your money goes to NAM and NAM does church planting.

So in that vein, I also wanted to point out something else. And that is a church that I have looked into, and I had some help from another guy who's looking into some of these with me.

By the way, it takes a lot of research. When you contribute to the Conversations That Matter podcast, if you go to Patreon, what is it, patreon .com

forward slash John Harris podcast, or subscribe on Substack and give, however you do it, or just pray for me, whatever.

This is what I think is the biggest contribution I'm making to the spiritual fight.

It's right now, this Southern Baptist Convention's coming up in June. There needs to be institutional reform.

People need to elect really Rice. They need to, I mean, that's the only shot you have at trying to reform this convention so far as I can tell.

And they need to treat things like women pastors and their doctrinal commitments at the same level they treat things like quote unquote abuse and quote unquote racism.

But they don't do that. And that's a problem. And we've been exposing this now for months.

Here's just the latest installment of that. Slate Community Church in Irma, South Carolina is a member of the

Southern Baptist Convention and the South Carolina Baptist Convention. They practice what they call the Big Tent, which allows

Christians to disagree about many beliefs. Interestingly, being an intentional multicultural community which is part of their motto is not one of those things.

Senior Pastor Ray Washington says he uses books on racial reconciliation to help majority culture members understand alleged racially motivated incidents like the shooting of Michael Brown.

East Lake Community Church even has a class on racism which they are still running. Based on your commitments and based on your completion of racism, we declare you are now ministers of reconciliation of East Lake Community Church.

And here's what that means. You will choose understanding before opinion. You will pursue diversity with intention, not with comfort.

And you will reject division and practice unity. Apparently the Big Tent also allows for female pastors.

Good morning, East Lake. Good morning. I'm Pastor Michelle and I am the adult discipleship pastor.

East Lake Community Church has female elders and pastors, including Michelle Robinson who preaches during Sunday morning services.

I want you to think about those things as our worship team plays and as our ushers and greeters pass the elements of communion.

Heavenly Father, I pray that what I have received as a pastor to these people that I will have passed it on to them.

Pastor Michelle, why does the Bible not tell us more about Jesus growing up years?

Heavenly Father, we come to this text this morning with open minds and open hearts.

You might say, Pastor Michelle, I'm tired of hearing about these three things that we should be doing in our groups.

But I went to seminary, I invested time and money and resources and I believe

I'm a better pastor for it. The Bible says no female pastors. The Baptist faith and message says no female pastors.

But East Lake Community Church says no. All right,

East Lake Community Church, man, saying no. Saying no to what the Bible says and what the Baptist faith message says.

Do you really think the woke wars is over? That social justice just went in a cave somewhere?

No one's doing that. It's still happening. It's still ready to make a comeback. And this is what I've been saying is that, look, you could have a few lost elections and things go in a totally different direction than the way they're going now.

And there seems like there's a lot of people invested in Republicans losing. I don't think they realize what that means.

Or if they do realize it, they're not doing you any service by wanting you to accelerate that.

Acceleration is a terrible idea. Look at Europe. If Europe was accelerating and things were getting worse there with immigration and so forth, then they should all be waking up right now and going full right -wing conservative.

They're not. They're slowly boiling like the frog. And that's what happens. You gotta fight. You gotta build with what you have.

That's the instinct of a man, not just a conservative, but someone who actually is a responsible adult male. So that's what we do.

We're not children who watch from the sidelines passively. We are people who build.

And right now the building means taking back the largest institution for Protestants really in the world.

I think the Anglican church has more members, but they're pretty fractured. The Southern Baptist Convention is, look, not always have

I thought this was possible. I think for ministry purposes, it's probably not even wise to be affiliated unless you're doing the $12 a month thing.

Years ago, I made a video with eight reasons to leave the Southern Baptist Convention. I still believe all of that for ministry purposes.

If you can't justify it, if it's a headache every convention, then it might not be the thing for you. If you're down for the political fight though here and you wanna take back the

SBC and you're still in the SBC, you better show up this June. This is your chance. I have never thought there has been as big of a chance as there is this year.

And the momentum around it is somewhat lackluster compared to previous years. We need to up that. This is actually important and the war's not over guys.

So I just wanna remind you of that. Okay. Well, what else do we got going on here?

We got some wokeness updates for you. Some woken, other woken,

I mean, that was a wokeness update. We got other wokeness updates for you though. So here's one.

A city sponsored drag ball for kids, for toddlers to teens to dress up and meet drag performers in the

Southern California city. Which city is this? Pasadena. Man, Pasadena.

So for kids, it's terrible when they do it for the kids. Only in California?

No, it's in other places. The drag stuff is still happening. Maybe not as much as it was, it's still happening.

And that's really the point of this. And if Gavin Newsom becomes the governor, he's the guy,

I mean, he just did something. I don't have the story pulled up, but was it Long Beach? I think it was

Long Beach. Wanted to do a big 250th celebration of fireworks extravaganza.

And I think it was Newsom. It was the government of California saying, no, there's environmental concerns here and stuff.

And it's like, man, if that guy becomes the president, he is the front runner for the Democrats right now. Yeah, can you imagine the whole country being governed the way

California is being governed right now? Another update, I just wrote this on Substack. It is fresh off the press.

So you can go there and read it. You can like it, share it, whatever. Brand new, the war after the war, re -examining the lost cause and its critics.

And it is just a mountain of scholarship for you on what the lost cause is, how it has been conceived of over the years, why historians treat it the way they do, the development in that.

I don't know of anyone who's actually done this, who's put together why there's been a changing view of the

American Civil War from an academic perspective. And so I just decided to do it. So here it is.

You can go to johnharris .substack .com if you wanna read it. And it is in reaction to what's going on in Virginia.

Governor Abigail Spanberger recently passed HB 167, which strips tax exempt status from organizations such as the

Virginia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, and the Virginia Division of the

Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society. And also HB 1344, which passed, revealing the state's authorization to issue commemorative

Robert E. Lee license plates. So that is happening in Virginia. Virginia, a state I love dearly.

I made the 1607 project because I'm part of how much I love Virginia. A lot of people have benefited from that.

I've actually had two messages this week of appreciation for that particular documentary. If you haven't seen it,

I think it's still the best resource on the proposition nationwide it's wrong, what it is truly to be an

American, the difference between North and South. And I want people to understand these things.

We are a country that should respect every quarter of its heritage, every region, every group that has given service to defending this country.

And there is one group that seems to be vilified and they don't have many people in their corner. And that seems to be your

Bible belt, Christian Southerners. They really are the people that they don't have many people to advocate for.

The MAGA does to some extent, but kind of limping along. It's there are hundreds of these monuments and memorials were eradicated never to come back.

And there's not much of a movement around that. And so this is just one more step in it. It's not getting a lot of press, but I wanted you to understand the world you live in if you're a

Virginian, or if you're just an American, go read that article. And I will do a separate podcast where I'll go through the article if you're not one to read, but I think it's good to read and sort of contemplate, think, so you'll wanna share that if you like it.

Some miscellaneous things before we get to questions. Oh, did I wanna, I might wanna end on this.

Let's end on this. So let's start with this. Just, and this is from the Times of India.

So this is an Indian newspaper. And here's a story, an

Indian man converted from Hinduism to Christianity, denied asylum in Australia. Tribunal says, no risk of harm on return.

An Indian man who converted from Hinduism to Christianity has failed in his attempt to secure asylum in Australia with tribunal ruling that he faces no real risks.

The decision was issued last month after Australia's Immigration and Protection Tribunal rejected the claim. The evidence does not establish risk.

The tribunal said, it's a 23 year old. And the tribunal accepted the applicant that he may have experienced violence, but it ruled that these incidents did not amount to persecution under the refugee law.

So this guy from India is looking at the closest place he can go practice his religion, which is probably Australia.

I mean, where's he gonna go, China? I mean, he's looking at where can he go that's somewhat culturally maybe navigable for him.

So I think there's an Indian diaspora probably in Australia and he's a Christian. And this is a problem that I often hear about is

Christians are persecuted in India. There is violence against them. They do die. Islam gets a lot of attention, but Hindus are also persecuting

Christians. Major cities such as Delhi and Mumbai were viable options where he would not face an ongoing threat, apparently, according to the tribunal.

So you can move around, go to a more multicultural place in India. And it is in these more rural regions you have this problem.

But just a reminder, we're very blessed to be in the United States. We are very blessed to have a country that allows

Christianity, not just to be practiced, but even privileges Christianity in many ways. And I know that has cracked in recent years, but we're living under the

Trump administration and it's still being privileged. Every time Pete Hegseth says anything in praise, we were reminded of that.

So just, it could be so much worse. I know some people wanna make the perfect, the enemy of the good, realize what it's like in the rest of the world.

I'm just gonna recommend this piece for the sake of time, I'm not gonna go through it. It's called, Bring Back the Southern Gentleman.

And it is a piece on the Abbeville Institute webpage. I just thought it was really heartwarming, it's touching.

And it talks about the kind of man that used to exist, that you all remember. You know, the guy who would dress up in formal attire for work and took his place in society very seriously.

He had this code that he lived by. Like, it goes through all of these things and talks about this

Southern gentleman who had chivalry. And what has replaced this kind of a guy?

I mean, it is, oh man, it is so sad to me to see the level of discourse.

And look, I voted for Trump the last two elections that he ran.

The first one, I didn't. The first one, I wasn't in a swing state, so it didn't matter a whole lot. But I didn't vote for the

Democrats, but I voted third party. And looking back, I don't think it would have made a difference. I don't know.

I saw Trump, I thought we could maybe last four more years at the time. I thought maybe this calculation will work, you know?

Like, I wanted Trump to get in. I really did, over Hillary. I don't know why

I'm on this tangent, but the threat, here's my point. The threat I saw from Trump was he is lowering standards, moral standards, ethical standards, especially standards when it comes to the way you treat other people, language, journalistic integrity, all that.

He wanted people to just sort of outsource their thinking to him. He was a source of authority now. And because the mainstream news media was so bad, many people were willing to do it.

When people say it's cult -like, yeah, there is sort of a cult -like element that some people have. There's no doubt about that.

But, I mean, you can't make me, and I mean you, I mean anyone out there. If I turn on Trump, it's gonna be a decision of my own.

You can't make me do it because you're just throwing slop at the wall, which is what I see today. Trump, I was a supporter of the last two elections, but Trump did sort of, whether he was the result of something already happening or he was ushering this in in part or both, there is something that happened in 2016 and it's happening with a vengeance now where there's no academic standards anymore.

There's no scholarly process and there's no journalistic integrity. It's just like you with a microphone and you're not expected to do those things.

On this podcast, one of the things I've tried to implement is I do wanna maintain those standards. I do wanna, as so far as it is possible, go through peer review when it's merited.

I do want to make sure that I'm looking at things objectively that I'm being transparent about things

I should be transparent about, that I'm following a scholarly process, handling primary sources correctly, ensuring that I'm actually doing real research and not just going to AI to do it for me, obeying the rules of grammar and using integrity when

I talk about people, not just going low and doing ad hominem and questioning motives all the time, unless there's very clear indication that there's bad motives from out of the heart, the mouth speaks.

I mean, these are just like tip of the iceberg for what I've wanted to instill. I think actually when

I came along, one of the things, there were a few outlets that were already talking about some of the things in a different way, but they were talking about some of the things

I was talking about, social justice infiltrating the church. One of the things that I have been told so many times, and I know this is true, is that because I came from the academy, seminary, and then the academy, and because I was already, that was my mindset.

Social justice wasn't even something I was interested in. I'm still not, I still don't like talking about it. It's true.

This is like, I like to talk about history, especially American history, even some

European, especially England's history, but mostly American history. I love talking about that. The federal period, the early period, the exploration.

I love the Revolutionary War. I love the Civil War. Like that's kind of my jam. And to an extent, I like World War II also, just because my grandpa was a

World War II vet. And in the Pacific theaters where it's at, by the way, I mean, everything's about the European theater today.

I think about the Roman Empire and the Pacific theater almost every day.

Not a joke. I really do. Every other day for Roman Empire. I think about the Pacific theater of World War II constantly, like fighting the

Japanese, island hopping. Like, man, that's the stuff I really want to study. Anyway, I studied social justice instead and wrote a bunch of books on it.

One of the things I brought though, was this sort of intellectual respectability that people didn't feel like they were getting from other places.

They felt like they couldn't, there wasn't really anyone representing the more responsible approach to explaining, discrediting, and understanding the woke movement inside the evangelical church.

And I'm not saying that I'm the only one who has been doing that the entire time or anything like that.

I just know that that was a gaping hole and I did do a lot to try to fill that. And I still feel the same way that I felt then about all these things.

I'm still, whatever I'm doing, I apply that same rigorous standard. It's still got to follow the rules of scholarship, the rules of interpretation.

If I'm doing history, it's got to follow historiographical lines. I've got to answer the questions we're asking as historians and not make up things, not give you half truths that don't give the clear full picture about the questions being asked.

That is one of the problems with the lost cause narrative or not the lost cause, but the sort of the approach to the lost cause narrative is the alternatives to it, especially today in the academy have often been this sort of cartoonized narrow approach that just sees one thing and one thing only, social power dynamics as it pertains to race and all of history.

If that's all you're looking for, you are not going to see the big picture and understand how these things connect with each other.

So, you know, I just thought this piece was kind of touching and just sort of sad in my mind. Like we got to bring back the

Southern gentleman and not just the Southern gentleman, just the gentlemen. Robert E. Lee had one rule at, now it's

Washington Lee College, but it's Washington College when he was there. And he had one rule. And what was that rule?

It's still the same rule they have today. Be a gentleman, be a gentleman, that's it. There's no other student honor code, just be a gentleman.

People knew what that meant at one time. I don't think they do it anymore. And that's the tragic thing. If you really want help with this, by the way, get books like this, get

George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior. You know, start actually trying to recover some of these things.

The way that, you know, I've talked about this when it comes to patriarchy, there's a paternalism. It's the way that the genders relate to each other.

There's rules that used to dictate these things that prevented men from being tyrants and prevented, you know, women from being men.

And those things have eroded. We have to bring those back. And we can only do it at the local level as we train people, our children most notably, in our local settings.

This is gonna be pastors on the ground. This is gonna be as you're teaching a parenting class or teaching just how to fellowship with one another, how to conduct oneself with good manners, showing hospitality.

That's one of the things that we're told to do. That's how we restore these things. And it's standards in every area.

It's moral standards. We don't just rehab a guy who had an affair and is kind of like, you know, it's amazing to be the things that people think they can survive, but they can now on the internet.

You know, it's like you could have a terrible train wreck of a marriage.

You could totally like, you know, leave your church in a terrible position and blow it up.

And they be on bad terms with them. You could have drug addictions. You could like, there's so, like you do almost anything.

And there's a place for you online where you could just sort of rehab yourself as, you know, with other people, usually with the same kinds of hangups.

And this is not a healthy situation. Find someone healthier than you to follow.

Not someone that just gives you an ax to grind you're angry about all the time. Find someone who's, this is how discipleship works in following Paul, as he said, he followed

Christ. That's how it works. Find someone that's ahead of you in that and then go follow them. Find people with better standards, better approaches more self -control, more virtue, follow them.

That's the whole point. That's the only way we get back. And so when it comes to a guy like Trump or everyone in the podcast world with any noted seeds it's not quite true.

That's hyperbolic. But it's like, what you have to do is look at people that are doing good things in certain areas and recognize that that's a good thing.

Recognize that Trump does have a loyalty to the United States. He loves his country. He's trying to do the best.

He's useful. He's better than the alternative. There's a loyalty that should be there as a result but that doesn't mean you make him the standard for conduct or behavior in every way.

And I know it's almost impossible to do because your president sets the tone but that's what we have to do. We have to just come up with leaders from the past local leaders, set a good example.

So that's one of the articles that I just thought was really good to focus on. And then this is the thing I wanted to end on before we get to questions.

And that is the FLDS documentary about Samuel Bateman. It's called Trust Me, The False Prophet.

Basically Samuel Bateman decided to fill a vacuum in this community in Arizona.

I think it was Arizona. And there was a previous cult leader who had gone to jail for child molestation. So Samuel Bateman comes in and under the conditions he wasn't supposed to have any wives, no children, no sex.

And the reason for that is the previous guy said, no, he's the prophet and you're not supposed to do that anymore.

And so Samuel Bateman breaks the rule and says now I'm the prophet essentially. And these four episodes show you how this develops.

And there's this symbiotic relationship I noticed that the hierarchy that develops is of course inevitable in a sense, because we all need hierarchy.

We all want hierarchy. We all need leaders. But the hierarchy that develops is so narrow. This is a very sheltered group and it follows these mechanisms that basically reward the worst kinds of behavior you can think of.

He ends up with 19 wives and it's a predator's dream. He can verbally and physically abuse them behind closed doors whenever he wants.

He has an excuse for every misdeed. He convinces people in the community to donate to him.

Everything was always justified. There was no real contrition. And I think the thing that stands out is how the people including his wives went with him on this.

Some of them even looking like they're happy adoring him for it. Like just, they didn't know anything else or any one of the security of knowing he's the prophet.

He speaks for God. And how many people get into these situations outsourcing their thinking, even to podcasts because they think that's where they can gain stability.

I'm sorry, you gotta be careful with who you follow especially the more distant there is.

And podcasts have a lot of distance but this guy was in close proximity. They could watch the evil things and they were still choosing to put their heads in the sand.

Even fathers giving their daughters to this guy and their own wives. It's insane the things that he was able to get away with.

It was an extreme case. But I just, you know, I sort of like noticed in the whole thing that the saddest part is those who are innocent.

Cause there were like young, his youngest wife was nine. There were people that really did not know what was going on. And they just went along with what everyone was going along with because it was closed community.

And I see that the same dynamic exists everywhere. It could happen geographically. It could happen in a chat room online.

It could happen in your close cloistered church. It could happen, like you get into sort of a small space that's got tight hierarchies.

I mean, they've done social experiments on this where you're in a room and everyone said, like everyone looks up and then like, you're gonna look up or everyone says they see something in an image and it's not the same thing.

And like, you know, your lying eyes are lying to you if what they're saying is true, but you go with what they're saying because that's the group cult mentality, right?

So anyway, that's sort of what happened here. And there was this one girl who was hanging on to Bateman's every word.

She chose to overlay reality itself with his sloppy religious fictions. Like she just trusted him.

And then she gets in trouble because he tells her to kidnap one of the wives or the younger wives and run away, run to Mexico or something.

And she gets caught, she goes to jail. And in jail, somehow they put her next to Bateman by mistake.

And so she's talking to Bateman and they're realizing, oh my goodness. Like she goes, you're lying.

She realizes like he's talking for hours and she realizes he's lying. And then it's like everything clicks.

And I do think this is kind of what I wanted to get to. I do think we are heading into a moment where there's a lot of different voices.

There's just so many of them. And a lot of people rule their audience through the force of their personality.

Or that's the thing that makes them appealing is their style, whatever it is.

It's all these things that you can't quite quantify. And I think on a religious level, people are natural worshipers.

They're gonna find somewhere to go. Whether it's online or in real life, they're gonna find a place where they can become

Christian. And Lifeway actually, I don't know where it went. I had a whole thing of Lifeway. Lifeway is saying, maybe

I'll write about it later. But look, there's sort of an awakening happening. I mean, we've been hearing this for years.

I've written about it before. I'm skeptical of that a little bit because I do think there is an interest in spirituality.

Like the new atheism is not really that powerful. But at the same time, is it Christianity? Is it the real

Jesus people want? Is it the Jesus who judges you for your sin, who came, died, rose again?

Is it the Jesus of scripture? Or is it some kind of other thing that allows you to keep your sin and feel superior?

Because that's what the law does. It makes you feel superior despite your life being a train wreck in other areas. You just adjust the rules so that you feel good now.

And I'm seeing, in my opinion, a lot of that. A lot of adjusting things to try to gain some kind of a spiritual superiority and feel spiritually fed and nurtured in a way.

But it's not always true. And I think we're gonna have more of the cult activity, like the real cult activity springing up.

We may just be on the cusp of it, to be quite honest with you. And my hope is that that doesn't happen.

I'm praying it doesn't. You should pray it doesn't. Pray that the Lord Jesus Christ does a spiritual work in the hearts of men and that people humble themselves and seek him.

They don't just adopt a legal system that makes them feel good, but that they actually wanna please

God knowing they can't actually please God because they're sinful. But Jesus paid the price, pleased

God for them. And now if they are repentant and in Christ, they can please him. I mean, it's out of love for Christ that we obey him, that we follow his law.

And that's the only thing that's gonna even restore the standards of the past too. I mean, that's the kind of thing we need.

But when people do get into these cults, sometimes you can't do anything. And that goes for politics and for religion.

Sometimes people are so absorbed into layers upon layers of slop and echo, whatever the ecosystem is that they're invested in, they just can't really transcend it.

It's like, it takes over your mind. And I've tried to keep a broad perspective here partially.

Like I don't wanna get too like obsessed with like one issue or one thing. But what happens

I think inevitably is, eventually reality does not comport with the fantasy you're building up.

If you're really believing lies, eventually a situation will arise where like this girl in Bateman's cult, it doesn't jive anymore.

And that's when everything comes crashing down. And the danger is you deconstruct fully. You just say, well,

I don't know if Christianity is true. Or I don't know if like, I have to doubt everything. And we have the comprehensive word of God.

We have the perspective that is broad, that takes into account all of reality that matches the world that we live in, that gives us an understanding and helps us interpret it.

And we can't hold that back. We gotta let that light shine. That's what we're attempting to be as Christians.

It's not for us, it's for the Lord. We're not trying to build a particular church. We just want people to know Jesus because he's the creator and he's the one that's gonna keep you from these narrow, cultish kind of things that basically, eventually the path leads to hell, right?

This is not, there's no salvation in any of it. So it affected me a little.

That's why I wanna write about it. All right, now we'll get to some questions, comments, cries of outrage and see where we should go from there.

Okay, there's so many. I don't know who to pick and choose here. If you're still watching, then make sure you get it in now because it's speak now or forever hold your peace.

God's elect says evangelical dark web hosted JD Hall last night and they hinted that you maybe got a free trip to Israel and that you're basically paid off.

You're paid off to promote this dispensational Zionist theology. That's I think a term purposely, the two terms together purposely made to sort of create an association.

Anyway, can you address that? And then by the way, I support you over them any day. Okay, I've not seen that, but I will say,

I've said, if you've watched the podcast, I've said multiple times that I went to Israel and I said last December, it was as early as last

December that I was going to Israel. So yes, I did go to Israel. If you're a patron, you got access actually earlier this week to a presentation

I did for a men's lunch at my church where I talk about the trip and I show you some of the Christian holy sites. And I explain in that, that there's really one primary reason that I went on this trip.

And that is because I wanted to see where Jesus was. I wanted to be where he walked. I wanted to see all these sites. I've wanted to go there forever.

And I just haven't had the chance. The organization that invited me was the Herzl Institute, which is kind of loose.

I don't know if it's loosely or tightly connected. It seems like there's a lot of overlap with organizations like the Edmund Burke Foundation and the

National Conservative Movement. The way that you get invited is, and I wasn't trying to get invited by the way, someone who has done the trip recommends you.

So someone who had previously gone on the trip recommended me. I know a number of people who have gone on this trip.

It's actually a fairly common thing. I don't mean that trip in particular, but study trips in general in the academic world and to some extent in the political world, but especially the academic and the think tank world.

Not just to Israel, there are, I mean, people study abroad in all kinds of places. And there's even sometimes agreements between countries as to the limit or to help with the cost of those things.

But people will go to England or study abroad in France because there's so much history there, or Italy's a big one in my area.

A lot of people go to Italy when they're, usually when they're in college, they'll get a fellowship or a grant or something like that.

So this is sort of in that vein. The purpose of the trip, and I explained this in the video, but I guess only the patrons saw it, is to introduce people to the culture, the way of life in Israel.

That's sort of like one aspect, so education. The other aspect is to understand the history of Israel and that being the biblical history.

And so mostly it was, honestly, most of it was Jesus related. It was just places Jesus went. So I got to go to the

Sea of Galilee and Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Bethlehem and the Garden of Gethsemane and the

Via Dolorosa and all those places. And that was, honestly, it was an amazing experience just to be where Jesus was, especially on the

Sea of Galilee and in the Garden of Gethsemane. I got to go to some trees that may have been there when

Jesus was there. If this inspires you at all and you don't wanna pay the

Patreon fee or whatever to see this, just private message me and I'll see if I can get you in touch with the video.

I don't know if I can do that. I'll figure it out though. Cause I'd love for you to see it. But I mean,

I got some time there to just pray and think and it was an incredible thing.

And so, yeah, if someone's saying, it sounds like what maybe was said is like, oh, I'm like bought and paid for by Israel or something.

Like Israel didn't fund this. This is a different, this is a think tank or an educational institution.

And if there was any political motive, it would have been just to understand how nationalism works.

Cause a lot of these guys are affiliated with the national conservative movement. And Israel is of course, one of the places that practices nationalism.

So yeah, I will say, I already felt this way, but just seeing kind of the way people live there,

I did feel more so after I returned that I want some of that for my country, for my people.

I would love for us to have borders and to be very committed to what our country is doing and not to, even if we're attacked or even by the left, if we're attacked all over the place, not to be victims of that, not to see ourselves as victims, but to just build.

Like there's a lot of things that I was like, these are actually qualities that I'd love to see in my own country. So if that was a lesson that they wanted learned,

I think that probably was reinforced to me. But no, I mean, there was no like, there was nothing that would have made you like secretly, like maybe the thing behind this is like, the

Jews are so powerful in Israel. Like if you go on a trip there, somehow they're gonna own you or something.

I don't know. But I don't know, am I owned by the Southern Baptists or by, I mean, I got a scholarship in undergrad.

It was money that was given to me by, what organization was it? It was like, I don't even remember, it was some cultural organization.

It wasn't for white males, obviously. It was like for locals or something. But am I owned by those people because like, oh, the

Southern Baptist paid for part of your tuition. I think that for some people, if they're looking for a job, like if you're working for someone, like who are the people mentioned here?

Was it, yeah, Ray Fava and JD Hall. So if you're working for someone like, like JD works for Joel Webben, for example, like if you're working for someone and you're doing what they, like writing for them,

I would assume that probably does influence the things you put out there and so forth. I mean, like, how could it not in some way, like you're working.

But if you're going on a study trip somewhere, whether it's domestic or international, and there's a group committed to understanding it academically, typically that's just a mental endeavor that people don't usually consider as like, you're bought and paid for by that group or whatever, unless there's strings attached that lead to future rewards or something like that, which there aren't in this case.

I would say too, I guess to add to that, maybe I'm going on too long about this, but I think

I would say there's also kind of like piggybacking on what I said earlier.

There's also this understanding, I think, that a person's strength is going to be reflected in how they process the associations they have.

So in other words, what I mean by that is when I came out of Southern Baptist schools, I was at Liberty University too.

And I spoke out even against Liberty University on some things in a respectful way, because I love

Liberty University. But like Liberty University actually did pay for me to be part of their

GSA program. So I actually was, I was paid to go to school at Liberty University.

So did they buy me? Did they own me? I was respectful for them. I owe them that. They were certainly very grateful to them and for my time there.

But at the same time, if there was something broadly wrong they weren't addressing and I had the potential to help them in some way, because I love the institution, then

I did and I spoke out. And some people at Liberty didn't like that. Some people at Liberty really liked that.

But I think that's what you have to look at. People on this podcast trusted me because of those things, because I was willing to, coming from these institutions, also out of love for these institutions, wanting to bring back these academic standards and so forth that were being lost, and just standards of honesty.

I was someone who wanted to critique them in hopefully a respectful way.

And I've done the same thing. Israel didn't pay for this, but I have certainly been critical of our supporting

Israel with the money we spend over there, not to single Israel out. I just don't think, I just don't want foreign aid really going anywhere.

That's kind of my thing. And I understand it's complicated to unravel all of that, but that's something I've been pretty consistent on.

So people who don't like that, I have to do what's best for these institutions.

Not that I'm proud that they still exist, but maybe that's just a little more light on it.

If you have any more questions, I don't know why I can't share stuff.

Or what I can do with the next, that's kind of weird.

Know what the next question is? I can't share it for whatever reason.

It's from Jay Rodriguez. Trump didn't want to translate the apocrypha.

It was Augusta who pushed him to do it. I haven't heard that, but is that what you're saying?

I might have to re -upload this later. I don't know. It's kind of weird. Your stream sounds robotic.

Okay, I may have to re -upload this. Picking and choosing from the British minister who cannot keep a job or denominational identity for more than a few years.

Okay, that's talking about Calvin Robinson. Cosmic, okay, someone in a chat said, you're teaming up with Hitler Hated Christ and Wasson Watch as if that's a negative thing, whatever they are.

What can you say about that? Those are accounts on X. Maybe I retweeted something from them.

I don't know. I am going to do the Hitler Hated Christ is an account that invited me to do a discussion on an article that I wrote, sort of a historical survey and just really the point of the article.

And I talked about it on the podcast already. You've actually seen my presentation if you watch.

It's an article where I am trying to show the theological boundaries and what's been considered orthodox throughout church history and also educate people on just sort of some of the biblical texts and passages related to ethnic

Israel. And so it's, I'm reacting to,

I'm saying there is a rising kind of anti -Jewish theology out there and it has,

I think I reduced it to like four primary components that I've identified. And then

I just give you the theological boundaries and say, look, this is, I'm asking very particular questions. I'm not giving you a survey of what every theologian thought about every single issue related to ethnic

Israel. I'm trying to show you in relation to the new rising anti -Jewish theology, what are pertinent things to understand so that you know where the theological boundaries are and you don't go on this train.

That's basically the point. And so I do a survey of it. And I mean, it's,

I haven't seen any substantive critiques of it yet. Everything's been either smearing, misunderstanding the point, slop, literally quoting stuff

I don't say. I say things I don't say and that kind of thing. But I think what

Hitler hated Christ wants to do, which is this account on X, I know most of you probably don't even know what

I'm talking about, but I'll probably post it for the patrons when it happens. He wants to do, I think it's an X space on the article with someone who is more like Puritan reformed.

I don't know if they, to what extent they think there's promises for ethnic Israel, whether there's an in -gathering or land promises or whatever.

Obviously all of those things are fulfilled in Christ, which I said multiple times. There's no salvation outside of Christ.

The Davidic kingdom, the throne is Christ. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether or not there are promises specifically for ethnic

Israel. And I think that's the issue he wants to discuss in the podcast. So I'd agree to be on the podcast.

So if that's a partnership, there you go. I've also retweeted some things that I think he said that probably I liked, but I don't know if that constitutes some kind of a compromise.

That's like hysterical to me. I don't know everything he's posted. I mean, it's Twitter, right? Like you repost people.

Sometimes you see things on your wall that you like and the Wasson watch,

I don't really know much about. I would like another watch though. So if there's a true partnership forming, you will see it on my wrist.

So I probably retweeted something. All right, that's it for the podcast. Hope that is helpful.

Oh, I'm sorry. What Bible translation would you recommend? I do the NASB 1995. I think that is a fine translation.

Deo vindicae, resurgent. So it's Latin, it's God will vindicate. And that's,

I think, the motto of the Confederacy. So I don't know what in the world.

People are talking about some video I haven't seen here. I have no clue what's going on, but I appreciate everyone who's streamed, who's in the podcast.

And hopefully this was helpful for you. God bless and more coming, bye now.