A Social Justice Evangelical Vocabulary of Terms

The Problem of Social Justice Vocabulary

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. For those watching and wondering, I am in a closet basically. This is actually the room that I grew up in, in my elementary school, early junior high, well, actually junior high and early high school, I think, days.

I was much smaller back then and it looked much larger and now that I'm larger myself, I'm taller and everything, I'm looking around and I'm saying, you know what? This was a closet. But it was converted into a little sewing room for my mom.

She doesn't have any projects now, so she said, go ahead, take that for the next, you know, one, two, three weeks, however long I'm here while we are doing renovations and repairs on my house, which has not been lived in by myself or my wife for about four years.

So we're working on that and working hard just about every day. And this is a temporary situation. But hopefully you're happy and I'm happy, I know I am, that we can return to some of the quality podcasts in this sort of mini studio that we had just a few weeks ago.

So today the topic is actually very important in my mind, very applicable, very practical. It's going to help you as you're looking for churches or even sitting in your own church. Yellow flags will now go off as you hear some of the terms I'm going to talk about.

But the topic is social justice evangelicals and their vocabulary of terms. Social justice evangelicals and their vocabulary of terms. I'm going to start with this. The left for the last hundred years, more than that, 150 years, perhaps, the early days of it, they've been really taking the dictionary and redefining things, emphasizing things, creating categories for things that fit their conception of reality, eliminating categories that do not fit their conception of reality.

And that's how they've been progressing by one of the major ways, by owning the language. And I'll give you some examples of that. One is the word honor. Honor. How often do you hear the word honor or maybe duty?

These used to be words that you hear all the time. In fact, in the recent past, people used to duel. They used to kill each other over defending honor. Wasn't that uncommon? Wasn't that long ago? Not saying, not defending dueling.

I'm just saying it was very important. Today, you hardly ever hear about it. What do you hear, though? What kind of words are important? Equality, inclusion, diversity, equity, to some extent, tolerance.

But tolerance is even kind of falling out of favor. You don't hear that word as much anymore because now the left is intolerant, and they have gained the upper hand, and they want to push their conception of reality onto everyone else.

So this is what we've been living in. And I want to give you some more examples of how the left has twisted some concepts and words or how really words evolve over time. I'm not even saying there's a smoke-filled room, and they're deciding what words to pick and to redefine.

It doesn't necessarily work like that. It takes place over time. Sometimes it's even sometimes organic, not all the time. I think lately, especially, there's been very purposeful ways in which the dictionary is being abused and things are being redefined.

But the examples I'm about to give to you just show a shift in society over time in how they view some of these terms. What comes to your mind? And this is an experiment here for yourself. What comes to your mind when you think of the terms life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from the Declaration of Independence?

Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. A few years ago, I was at a church, and the pastor there opened his sermon with that line and then proceeded in the rest of the sermon to denigrate the Founding Fathers and the United States for being a system in which rights are protected and preserved and that this was a bad thing because Christians are supposed to be giving up their rights and privileges.

And I did not disagree with the conclusion that Christians should be willing to give up certain things and make sacrifices. Here's the problem, though. He did not understand what the Founders meant by rights.

He did not understand the American system, if you want to call it even a system. Or systems, really, is more accurate. The American systems, the extension of British common law that took root in the United States, have attached to them a concept of negative rights.

Not what FDR gave us, positive rights. You have a right to all these privileges. You have a right to health care, right? No, you don't have a right to health care. You have a right to a living wage, and you don't have a right to a living wage.

I mean, it's not something that, you know, there's not an obligation on the central authority, the government, the national government, to provide a living wage for you. The issue is that, and the central issue here, the issue that gets misunderstood is that rights were tethered to responsibilities.

In the minds of the Founders, rights meant you had the duty, another word that's not used much today, to fulfill your responsibilities before God. For your family, for yourself. So when you read Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, what's the Pursuit of Happiness?

Is it just pleasure? That's what this pastor thought. Pursuit of Happiness means LGBT stuff. It means sexual anarchy. And it doesn't. That's not what they meant by it at all. It meant self-sufficiency.

It meant self-government. It meant you have the ability to make something of yourself and to live. And yeah, there were hierarchies. This was written at a time. There were hierarchies in place that were pretty much, in large part, unquestioned.

Women could not vote at that time. Slavery existed. So what's the Declaration of Independence about then? What can it possibly be talking about? The Pursuit of Happiness? Doesn't that mean egalitarian equality of some kind is necessary for this?

No, it doesn't. That's the assumption today when people read modern ideas of happiness back into the Declaration of Independence. It wasn't a pleasure-seeking happiness. It was a happiness of economic self-sufficiency without the imposition of a government.

You have to think of the context in which it was written. You have to think of what the purpose of that document was. To complain. To show that the rights of British citizens were being violated. They were not able to pursue what?

Their own happiness. What was their own happiness? The extension of their ability to pursue economic, and in some cases, this went into, at least in the context of the time, there was a religious component to it.

There was concern that there would be the imposition of state church ideas or a state church of some kind into the United States. Freedom of conscience. You can look at what eventually the men who got behind this thing did when they formed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to find out what they meant by that.

It's not really a mystery. It was a stop sign. It was saying, this is as far as the national government can go and no farther. It was limiting another central authority, an entity, saying you can't impose on these rights because these are things that we are responsible for.

We have to fulfill our duty. It's not up to the national government. It's up to us. If you're limiting us in fulfilling our duty, then this is wrong. I explained this to someone a few days ago who reached out on Patreon.

By the way, if you're a supporter on Patreon, it's guaranteed I get back to you. I can't say that on all the other formats. I try to get back to everyone. I try to return emails, but if you are a patron, your messages are prioritized.

There's my little plug. Someone asked me this and I said, look, you have to understand the context of the time, what pursuit of happiness actually meant at that time. I've waxed long enough about that.

We are now going to get into the topic at hand. I want to start with, let's see, if I can do this. I have this set up on Gab. I haven't pushed the post button yet. I just put it on the screen and I'll push post later on.

This will be, just for everyone to know, this will be available in written format on any of the social media links pretty much that you have to me and conversations that matter. Social Justice Evangelicals, vocabulary of terms.

The Image of God and Equal Social Status

First one, image of God. Image of God. What is the image of God? The Imago Dei. The Imago Dei is the worth that we all have before God. In some ways, I don't know if you can completely quantify this, honestly.

It's an imprint that God has made on every single person. It's what we derive value from. It's what separates us from the animal kingdom, from the plants, from other created things. There's a difference between human beings.

We have a soul. We are eternal. We can think in the abstract. There are certain things that characterize us that also are shared attributes. They're communicable attributes with God that the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom do not have.

What does the image of God mean when Social Justice Evangelicals use that term? Well, I'm reading a book right now by Lisa Sharon Harper, The Very Good Gospel it's called, and she uses the term image of God all over the place.

I realized, you know what? She's not the only one. I've heard this many times. What they mean by it is equal social status because any time that there's some kind of a disparity between people groups, whether it's ethnic or gender related, it means that the image of God is not being respected.

There's an attack, she'll say, on the image of God. People are attacking it. How are they attacking it? Well, because look, this group of people doesn't have as much access to education as this group of people.

Really? That's an attack on the image of God? Well, she's smuggling in her own assumption about what the image of God means. The image of God to her and to Social Justice Evangelicals means equal social status.

That's not what the image of God means. The image of God means individually everyone has self worth. Wherever they are at in a hierarchy, because they're made in God's image, because they have the imprint of the Creator on them.

This would include a slave in Roman times. This would include women in Jesus' time who were treated much differently than women are today and did not have the same privileges. They still had the image of God.

And it doesn't come in percentages. It's not like someone has a certain amount of the image of God because of the way society views them. And if society viewed them differently or eliminated a disparity, they'd have 100 image of God.

But that's often how you hear it used. That there's some lessening of the image of God in someone because of the way they're treated. No. It's always there. It's there. The image of God is there. Christians and non-Christians alike have the image of God.

And that's why it is wrong to murder because man is made in God's image. That's what it says in Genesis. That's why it's wrong to take someone's life in an unjustified fashion. So this is the hijacking of a Christian term, biblical term, to further an egalitarian agenda.

I want you to watch out for it when you hear it. And now, hopefully it doesn't cause as much confusion when you hear it used this way, but it's so subtle. We don't pick up on it. But there it is. And if you doubt me on this, ask yourself this question.

In the New Testament, not even the Old Testament, we can go there, it really proves my point, but in the New Testament, Jesus, the apostles, living in the situation they did with Roman, and I'll use some current terms, that kind of sort of describe what was happening.

Roman colonialism, Roman slavery, the privileges that accompanied being a Roman citizen as opposed to not being a Roman citizen. We see Paul using that privilege, his Roman privilege, right? Go through all the other things.

The way women were treated, the sexual norms of the day, depending on, in Corinth, let's say. All the things that we would look at today in the United States or the Western world and say, oh my goodness.

And back then, how did Jesus react to it? How did the apostles react to it? Was their reaction, oh my goodness, you are not treating these people according to the image of God. You are taking away from their image of God, or they're lacking something, they're lacking part of the image of God in them.

No, you don't hear that language at all. In fact, what you hear is a reaffirmation that wherever you are, you are made in the image of God somehow. You have even hierarchies. There is a way that masters are supposed to treat their slaves, right?

Paul didn't say children, parents. Parents, you just need to emancipate your children and let them do whatever they want. Husbands, you just need to make sure that your wives have equal social standing in everything.

Or masters, you just need to let all your slaves go. I mean, that was, that would have been a positive thing, but that wasn't the command that Paul gave. What did he say? What did he say? He gave commands for how to treat them.

Why? Because they're made in the image of God. That's how our New Testament approaches this. And so, when you hear someone abuse this, when you hear someone use the image of God to then forge some kind of an egalitarian social agenda, they're misusing it.

And that's all I'm trying to say. I'm not saying even some of their conclusions might be right. But the way they're getting there is wrong. Using that concept and claiming that there's a violation of it to motivate Christians to act in some certain fashion.

One of the ways you hear this a lot is in immigration. Russell Moore uses this all the time. That if you don't, if you deport people, or if you fail to let people in, unvetted, I guess, that's the sense I usually get, across the border into the United States to receive all the taxpayer-funded privileges that come with being a United States citizen.

If you deny that at all, you're denying the image of God. That's manipulation. That's absolute manipulation. So, that's one term. Image of God. How about this one? Human flourishing. What does human flourishing mean?

I can give you examples of ways in which humans can flourish more if they take responsibility for themselves. If they take responsibility, they'll flourish more. If they look at the book of Proverbs and they apply the wisdom principles there, they're going to flourish more.

What do social justice warriors mean in evangelicalism when they use the term human flourishing? Socialism. Generally. Not all the time, but generally. That's what they mean. That there's an assumption that humans can't flourish unless there's some kind of a redistributive scheme going on.

Unless there's some central authority taking from one group and giving it to another group, you can't have human flourishing. Unless there's some kind of way that people can receive free healthcare, you can't have human flourishing.

That's the assumption. Human flourishing, everyone agrees with. Everyone wants humans to flourish. The Taliban has a very specific idea of what they think that means. It's called the Sharia. That's their idea of what human flourishing would mean.

It's kind of a vacuous term. It's going to be defined according to the group of people who are the assumptions of the group of people who are defining it. Who are using it. Tim Keller uses this term quite a bit.

I think he in Every Good Endeavor, I know he uses that term quite a bit. I believe in generous justice he does. That's basically what it comes down to. We do want the free market, but you know what? We also want human flourishing.

What is that? It's some hybrid. Some kind of socialism has to come in somehow. Here's another one. Racial reconciliation. How many of you have heard racial reconciliation? This is a term that's used a lot.

Today, most of the time this term is used, it's just Christianized critical race theory. That's all it is. Jarvis Williams is probably the best example I can give of someone who has syncretized critical race theory with Christianity.

In detail, he has gone through, I mean this is a big section in my book on social justice and Christianity which is coming out next month. Early part of October, I mean like a month from now it's going to be out there.

I'm excited for it. Social justice and Christianity, religions and conflict. I have a whole section on Jarvis Williams showing that when he says racial reconciliation he means critical race theory. The assumption is you can't have racial reconciliation unless there's some kind of a critical race thing going on.

You got to platform people that look like this. If you don't do that, then you're not serious about reconciliation. You're preventing reconciliation from happening. Or you have to redistribute these resources over here.

You have to take down certain statues or else you're preventing reconciliation from happening. That's a very serious charge because in his mind, racial reconciliation is part of the gospel. So you are actually denying the gospel if you don't platform certain kinds of people.

That's pretty serious. This is the term that I heard used at Southeastern when I was there years ago. I'd say starting in 2014, 15, 16 and then 17 it was on steroids. Racial reconciliation was the hot button word.

And at first I was like of course we want that. The first time I heard it, I was like, yeah. But I was like, something's off about this. We are reconciled in Christ if we're Christians. So what's the big deal?

And usually the push is, well, how come your church looks so white? If your church was truly about racial reconciliation, it would have everyone of every tribe, tongue and nation. We'll tell that to the guys in Iowa who have only Dutch people or only German people in their town.

There's no way that they can do this. But even in some places, like the place I live right now in New York, there are churches that appeal to different people groups. There's a Chinese church right down the road from here.

And they have a service where they speak in Chinese. Or no, is it? Yeah, it is Chinese. I believe it is Chinese church. Then there's in downtown, there is a church that is historically black. And it's very political.

But there's also cultural things that come with that particular culture. It's not even an ethnicity thing. It's a cultural thing. And they are going to feel more comfortable together, a lot of them. And there may be some people who aren't black who go there.

But it's not like they're racist because they have a church that appeals to people who want to sing a certain way or want a certain kind of preaching, which is more of a dialogue than a monologue, and is very emotional, and all these kinds of things.

The assumption is, well, the racial reconciliation can't be happening if that exists. But yet, we are one in Christ. So the reconciliation has already happened if you're a Christian. Now the term did use, you look back, even Booker T. Washington, I think, Booker T. Washington used the term racial reconciliation.

But he did not mean the kind of redistribution schemes and attempts to integrate churches or forced integration of churches with one another. That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about people getting along.

People not hating each other because of external factors. That's not what they mean today by racial reconciliation. It means you have to accept pretty much everything the left is pushing. So it's a hijacking of a term that used to mean something else.

Justice as Equal Distribution

How about justice? I mean, this is the one that I think most of you probably are familiar with, because social justice, I mean. But sometimes they won't put the word social on there. They'll just say justice.

Justice means eliminating disparities. David Platt's sermon at T4G 2018, what did he say? Basically, the church is in sin. Everyone at this conference is sin, and it's so white in here, and America is in sin.

Everyone's in sin. It's horrible, and it's because there's racism still around. Where's the racism? What is it? Well, there's disparities. It's easier for white people to get jobs than it is for black people.

That's it? That's what he's talking about? Yeah, that's what he was talking about. And the fact that Christians aren't doing enough to eliminate that disparity means they're in sin. And the term he used throughout the sermon was justice.

There's injustice going on, and Christians aren't standing for justice. It's manipulative. It's wrong. It's scripturally, I mean, honestly, McLean Bible Church should just fire the guy if these are the kinds of sermons he's preaching.

He just isn't doing the work in the text. He's not even understanding what mishpat meant, and what in applying that situation in the Old Testament and Amos to today. Let justice roll down like waters.

In applying it to today, he smuggles in the assumptions of the new left. Justice is not about eliminating disparities. Justice in society. It's not about redistribution. It's not about egalitarianism.

It's about it's actually distributive, not redistributive, distributive. It's meting out punishment for those who have broken the law equally. That's where true equality comes in. Not egalitarian equality.

Equality before the law. Doesn't matter if it's my cousin, or someone who I disdain, or someone who's poor that's pulling my heartstrings, or someone who's rich and I would do myself a disservice if I condemn them.

I need to apply the law equally to them. That's justice. That's not what they mean by justice. They mean egalitarian equality, eliminating disparities, redistribution. Same-sex attraction. That's another term you'll hear a lot.

Now this one doesn't really require a whole lot of, this isn't like a hijacked term, this is like an invented term. To try to create a category in everyone's mind for homosexual desire that is permissible.

That's what that is. It's not a biblical term. There is no category in the Bible for, hey, there's homosexuality and that's a sin, but then there's same-sex attraction and that's not a sin. Marcus Hayes at First Baptist Church of Naples a few years ago, and he was in a Q &A there.

Someone had asked, and I guess the moderator or whoever was conducting the interview asked him, what do you think of is homosexuality a sin? And he said, listen, homosexuality is a sin, but same-sex attraction, that is not a sin.

That is not a sin. That's a direct quote from him. Why did he say that? Because there's a new category that's been created artificially and then imposed on Christianity. When you see that, realize that this is an artificial invention.

It is a category that is meant to, and I'm not saying there's no such, I'm not saying that people don't experience attraction, but I'm saying the category for same-sex attraction, where it is you are not allowed to question people who experience that as far as having a sinful tendency.

You can't probe that because they're protected because that's the assumption that's brought along with that term. That's what you need to realize. Here's one. Some of you, I got to be careful with this one.

Some of you are going to be offended right away because you've used the term and I've used the term. So I need to express a caveat here. Servant leader. We should all be servants. We should all be, well, to some extent we're leading someone.

We should all be leaders and followers. But servant leader, it's not necessarily a bad thing. I need to say that up front. Sometimes people use this, it's not bad. I've noticed a trend, a tendency that I want to throw out there because I've seen hints of it over and over.

This is not just social justice-minded people, although they're probably the ones who use it more this way. But this also flows into all kinds of other traditions within evangelicalism, other groups.

Servant leader tends to be a pacified man. When I hear the term used, I tend to think of that. It's a pacified man. Not every time. Look, please don't be offended. If you use that term and you didn't mean that, I'm not talking about you.

But it is a fairly new term. It hasn't been used for that. You're not going to go read Charles Spurgeon. I hope I'm right about this. Someone's going to Google it and find Charles Spurgeon said this. I'm pretty sure he didn't, though.

You're not going to find in Charles Spurgeon the term servant leader. You might find where he talks about being a servant and being a leader. You're not going to find the term servant leader. Fusing these two.

The fusion of these two with servant on the front has often been used to pacify men. I'll give you an example. You're experiencing a problem in your marriage. Husband doesn't get the wife. Wife doesn't get the husband.

They're mad at each other. Oftentimes, counselors can be very harsh on the man. It's more permissible in our society to be harsh on the man. It's justified in many circumstances, but they'll say, you need to be a servant leader.

What does that mean? You need to serve your wife first as you're leading her. What does that look like? What are the assumptions that you bring to serving your wife? If there's a direction you want to take the family, if there's something that you think is important that you say, this is what we're going to do, you got to start by approaching it by taking this very humble and lowly posture first.

It's the foot washing example. Before you get to the thing that you want to hammer down. Serve her. Bring her flowers. Do the dishes. The normal things that in a traditional role, as we conceive of them in the United States, 1950s, do all the things that she would normally do and then approach her.

I'm not saying across the board everyone's used it that way, but I have heard it used that way more often than not. If a pastor is supposed to approach their congregation, you got to take this very gentle tone.

Be winsome with them before you lay it down, lay down the law with them. You just need to approach it really progressively. There's some wisdom in doing that, but what happens is that term servant gets so softened that it's this softness before the leader part, which is more, that's kind of harsh.

The servant is put there to lessen the harshness of the term leader. That's my take on it. That's why. I would just prefer... The Bible talks about being a servant and talks about being a leader. Just talk about both.

But fusing the two together, I think there's a reason behind that. People want to soften the leadership part. The leadership part is real. There's times to lay it down and you're not going to be softening it.

That's what I see. That's the danger sign I see on that term. Again, not trying to berate anyone. Please don't be offended by this because, look, I wrote a whole paper, I remember years ago, on being a servant leader.

I think it was, if I do say so myself, I think it was a pretty good paper. I don't think that the term itself was very helpful for getting across the points I wanted to get across. There's a lot that goes into being a leader.

It's more than just being a servant. You could put caring leader. You could put all kinds of other words there before leader. A tough leader. A resolute leader. I think that's the agenda behind the servant part, though.

It's much more permissible in our more egalitarian-minded society for husbands and leaders in the church and leaders in business who are male to be servants and politicians. They've got to be servants.

Yeah, they do have to be servants. But if you can't say leader without having to put servant in front of it, then there's a problem. You should be able to just say leader as well. Alright. Let's go to the next one.

Radical, Cultural Intelligence, and the Global Church

Radical. Radical. What does radical mean when you hear that term? It means uniquely virtuous. And this is my own, I'm putting my own construction on this because this is just something that I've imbibed over time by hearing the word used.

Uniquely virtuous. Radical is a really cool term to use right now. Think about the book Radical by David Platt. Or think about there's, oh, I'm trying to remember the name of the author now. It's a book on hospitality.

The gospel comes with a house key. And for some odd reason the name of the author is escaping me right this second. Rosaria Butterfield. There we go. What does she talk about in that book? Radical, ordinary hospitality.

And the first time I heard that I thought, that's one of the, what? I can't really, how can it be radical and ordinary at the same time? Radical, ordinary hospitality? What does that even mean? That's like kind of, it sounds almost like an oxymoron.

Ordinary is not radical. Radical is not ordinary. But the term radical today, it means uniquely virtuous. So when you hear, hey, I'm what is, Rosaria Butterfield says that when she wrote that book, this was the kind of book that Mary would have written, which is I don't know if that's too ordinary, but Mary would have written this book.

I believe it was Mary she said. I don't think, I'm trying to remember, Mary or Martha. I think it was Mary would have written this book and this is what, how to be hospitable. And when she says being radical, she's attributing it to herself.

She's saying, I'm practicing this. Here's examples from my own life of me being radical. What's radical? Inviting people over for dinner, making an extra pot of something, beans or rice, so that people when they come, if extra people show up for dinner that you can feed them.

Hosting a get together to talk about something happening in society that's disturbing people. And what's not radical? Well, what's not radical? I guess Donald Trump refusing to let refugees from Muslim countries where there's jihadists that could get in and if unvetted.

That's not radical. That's horrible. A policeman hosing a guy off is an example in her book. I believe I'm remembering all this. It was years ago I read it. But a policeman hosing a guy off who's, I think he was into drugs and stuff.

That's not radical. That's a horrible thing to do. That's not radical ordinary hospitality. Well, what's radical? Radical is the badge of honor you put on you. I'm radical. I'm a radical Christian because I'm virtuous.

I'm doing the right thing. And I'm setting myself apart from everyone else who's doing the wrong thing. The church is bad. You hear that a lot. The church is bad. The church isn't doing radical ordinary hospitality.

I am doing radical ordinary hospitality. The church isn't helping the poor and the people overseas. I'm David Platt and I'm radical. And even though David, well, without getting into David Platt, I mean, look at that.

You can look up his house online. I'll just, you be the judge of whether he's radical. You can look up the kinds of when he goes on a flight, whether he flies first class or not. You be the judge of that.

But I'm David Platt. I'm radical. We need to be radical. So that's a way of setting yourself apart. It can be a virtue signal. I'm radical. You all are not radical. And so it's a unique a virtue that someone has when they say that they're being radical.

So, yeah, is there an arrogance about it? I think oftentimes there is. Yeah, it is used that way, at least. But it's not the way that I mean, the term radical itself I mean, and of course we know the way it's used in the media, but I think of like it's towards the extremes of things.

You know, if you really like to go fishing and you're a radical fisherman, I mean, you're out there every day fishing, right? That's what I think of like radical. You know, you're gonna come up with all kinds of different ways to fish that are industrious and will help you get more fish.

And, you know, you're just really into it. It's to the max, right? But this is what they mean when they use the term radical. Okay, here's another one. Cultural intelligence. This is an important one, guys.

Cultural intelligence. What does that mean? Cultural intelligence. I first heard this actually at it was a course I think it was evangelism, if I'm not mistaken or theology. I think it was evangelism course at Liberty University that someone else was taking and they sent me the curriculum.

And the curriculum was talking all about cultural intelligence. And I'm reading this and I'm like, this sounds an awful lot like standpoint epistemology. This sounds a lot like someone has to take this lowly posture and just give their brain over to someone who is from a certain social location and represents that social location.

And the only way you're going to know about their culture and be intelligent about their culture is if you listen to them. And they will teach you. Now, there's a certain truth. There's a Motten Bailey going on because there's a certain truth to if you don't know something, you've got to learn something.

That's an obvious truth. Okay, everyone knows that you don't know. I mean, look, I'm doing work on my house and there's sometimes I don't know how to do that. And thank goodness there's tools out there.

There's YouTube, right? YouTube mechanics. They fix their car by looking at YouTube. You have to learn something. But there's an extra step when you say that someone from a certain social location is required to impart certain kind of knowledge that only they can understand.

Now, it may be true. If someone if you're trying to learn about India, someone from India, it would be very helpful because they've spent years in India. They know about India and they can probably tell you a lot about India.

So there's a truth in that. It does not mean though that this is information that you cannot gain by living in India necessarily or you have to learn it from that Indian person or you're incapable of knowing unless an ambassador from that particular context comes and speaks to you about it and usually speaking to you from a very left word angle, usually how this works out generally.

They're not just representatives of a certain social location. They're socialist representatives of a certain social location. They have their own spin on what they're going to tell you. But it's not like you have to listen to that authoritative voice.

What it is is you have to put in the work and the time. Let me make this a little more sense of this for you. Studying Scripture. You're in a Bible study. You're sitting around the room and Bible study leader.

This is how it often worked out in the 90s and the early 2000s. What does that text mean to you? And everyone goes around and gives their thought. Well today if that happens, the person with a certain cultural background or social location when they give, if they're oppressed, if they give their explanation no one can challenge it, right?

You can't challenge that because they're bringing in knowledge that only they have access to and you don't have the right to criticize it. This is a Gnostic stick idea. This is standpoint epistemology, how it works.

And cultural intelligence often means that. Now, does it have to mean that all the time? No. If it means what I first said, if it just means hey, we need to get to know a culture before we go in there and you know, well in fact, I don't even know.