Christian Nationalism Goes Mainstream, Moody Still Kinda Woke, IVF, & Those TicTok Dancers

Fellow patrons, fellow countrymen, and everyone who listens to the

Conversations That Matter podcast, good afternoon. I hope you're having a wonderful afternoon wherever you are.

This is an unannounced podcast. I announced it about half an hour ago and I'm starting it a few minutes early, which maybe is different for me.

Some of you are used to me starting fashionably three to five minutes, maybe sometimes 10 minutes, depending after the announcement date to make sure everyone is here, but I'm on a little bit of a time crunch, so I'm starting now and we have lots to talk about.

We're gonna have fun today on the podcast, I hope, I think. For those who are gonna see me in New Mexico this weekend,

I am very much looking forward to it and I need to let you know about that before I say anything else, because I'm the worst at telling people about where I'm gonna be, but I am gonna be in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the

Reclaim Conference, and that's March 2nd through 3rd. You can go to johnharrispodcast .com

if you click the link. It's working now, Reclaim Conference at Redemption Hill Church, and there's more info there.

I'm gonna be talking about biblical definitions, really just how the social justice movement has corrupted definitions of certain words and how we should go about navigating that.

So that's gonna be on Saturday, and then Sunday morning, I'm gonna be talking a bit about,

I think, Gideon. I've been looking into that, and I love Gideon.

He's one of my favorite Bible characters. I have a number. It's hard to pick, but he is one of my favorites, and anyway, so we may talk about that.

And the reason, really, just briefly for everyone, the reason I'm thinking about that is, I've spoken on Gideon at least once before because I know of no other better encouraging story to help people gain courage.

There's many in scripture, but for some reason, Gideon, to me, because he's kind of like such a mess up in some ways.

Like he just, he lacks faith. He's hiding, and then he goes in against all odds, and he wins, and I don't think

God's changed. I think he's the same God today that he was back then. So it'll be encouraging, and looking forward to seeing you all in New Mexico this weekend.

And one other thing before we get into the myriad of topics, I wanna just play, this is a one -minute spot for our sponsor,

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All right, so equippingthepersecuted .org if you're interested in finding out more about that.

I don't know exactly where we should dive in first because there's a bunch of different topics. I think we'll start with social justice stuff.

There's actually a few things, I guess, related to social justice, but the most overtly social justice stuff first, if that's okay.

A few people sent me this clip. This is from Charlie Dates. He was a pastor in the

Southern Baptist Convention up until, I think it was like two years ago, he left in a huff because the

SBC is not taking racial justice seriously, in his mind. And I mean, this is after everything the

SBC does every year to bend over backwards in their resolutions and their seminaries, which have been pumping in social justice stuff.

It's still not enough for someone like Charlie Dates. And we've talked about him on the podcast before.

I think we've played some of his clips. I know he spoke at Southeastern and he showed up in one of those montages that we talked about on the podcast.

He's a guy though, that thinks that there's like, he sees a civil rights movement and what

Martin Luther King Jr. was doing as intrinsically tied to the gospel. And I don't know exactly where he lands on, like, what is the gospel to him?

I'm not exactly sure. I know he says things that sound like they're liberation theology, but here's what he had to say just a few days ago.

It was this week at Moody. I said, I think, did I say Wheaton before? It was at Moody, at Moody Bible Institute.

And, you know, Moody's been known, at least traditionally, as a fairly conservative evangelical institution.

And, you know, I looked at, I watched the whole chapel and there was a number of things in there that I picked out that I was like, okay, this is definitely, they're definitely swallowing some of the woke stuff.

But this is just one clip I wanna share with you from the sermon. It's nothing earth shattering. You've heard this kind of stuff before, but it's still happening at places like Moody.

So Charlie Dates at Moody in chapel talking to students. Some of them will be prospective pastors.

Here we go. You cannot separate the holiness of God from the demand of the justice of God for the oppressed.

In other words, you cannot have just this high, holy, lofty God and not be concerned about low marginalized people.

We have all kinds of organizations today that wanna protest, but they don't know how to pray.

And yet we got people who know how to pray, but they refuse to protest. I just wanna say one thing.

This is a serious charge, whether you realize it or not. This is Charlie Dates saying that there's a big problem in the evangelical landscape with presumably pastors, but leaders in evangelicalism and Christianity who are making a separation between the character of God, his holiness, and then working towards lifting oppression.

And so he's saying if you fail to lift oppression and fight just against injustice in this kind of thing, in his scheme, whatever that means, civil rights stuff definitely plays into it, but there's definitely, if you track with Charlie Dates and what he said over the years, there's definitely a

CRT adjacent thing going on there as well. But if you fail to protest, okay, against racial injustice and that kind of thing, you actually don't really think that God must be that holy.

I mean, that's a serious accusation. And so I just don't want people to miss that. It's not something casual.

He's saying like, you've missed the boat on who God is. It's like coming very close to saying you're an idolatry.

Like you don't actually have the right God perhaps. Like you don't know him. You don't take him seriously because you're failing in whatever social justice stuff.

So, all right, let's keep going here. And I know this, I'm trying now to work with pastors in our city across the racial line to prepare us for this election, to train poll workers and to get people ready so that we can actually serve the marginalized.

So nobody will be able to stand up and say the election was stolen. No, we need Christians in the place where these things are happening.

And I'm struck by the reticence and the hesitance of people who have never suffered from oppression, who know how to pray, but they don't want to step into the place to help folk get liberated.

Okay, so we've gotten a window into what this liberation now looks like, like a concrete example.

It's him working with pastors to do what? To get people registered to vote. And so that no one will be able to say that the election was stolen.

I guess that's so, I don't know exactly. I mean, he's not saying what candidate, but I know he might still be on the board.

He was on the board. I know he was for the and campaign, which means he's more on the left. I'm assuming this means that I guess the

Democrats are going to win and there's not gonna be a question. It's gonna be so large that no one's gonna be thinking that there could have been a stolen election here because the

Christians are motivated on the left side of the spectrum. I don't know how else to make sense of it, but voting, getting people registered to vote, that's your justice thing.

So you must not think God is that holy if you're not involved in doing that.

And you must speak from a place of privilege without having experienced injustice if you're not involved in doing that.

If you just pray, but you're not actively being an activist, essentially. You have to do this thing.

And I've said this many times about social justice warriors, especially in the church, they will use the gospel, they will use your theology against you to try to motivate you to take part in left -wing activity.

And with the assumption that if you don't, then you're lacking somehow in your Christian witness, your

Christian identity, maybe even the gospel itself. And so Charlie Dates is doing something that we've seen many times here.

I'm saying that you listening to me here today, especially you, my vanilla brothers and sisters, when you come of age and you get into ministry, you cannot leave your chocolate and brown brothers and sisters to the margins fighting for the oppressed by themselves.

But you gotta do it. So he's singling out the white people now.

He's saying, if you're white and you're not registering people to vote, I mean, that's the concrete example he gave, you're not out there doing this political thing.

You're not making sure that the election is not even a close call, that people don't have to question it because you got involved in fighting against injustice.

If you're a white person and you're not doing that, then I mean, what are we supposed to assume?

Well, I guess you're kind of a racist, I guess. You're someone who doesn't really care about your brothers and sisters.

This is how you prove that you care. It's so manipulative. If you, you can't just pray, you can't do something, you can't do something that you consider to be before God, a generous thing, a nice thing, a

Christian thing. You gotta fit into this pattern that Charlie Dates is laying down, this political thing.

And that's how you prove that you really care for your black brothers and sisters.

On the basis of the character and the holiness of God, nobody's asking you to sacrifice orthodoxy, to fight for justice.

Hold on to the fact that Jesus is the only way to the Father. Hold on to the fact that we believe in the

Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Hold on to the fact that there is a heaven to be gained and a hell to shun.

Hold on to the fact that we ought to walk up rightly. But because of that, we refuse to accept injustice against the marginalized.

Now, some of the things he mentions here, I mean, obviously it's pretty general. I don't disagree with, you know, there's a heaven, there's a hell to be shunned, he said.

There's Father, Son, Holy Spirit. I mean, a lot of the liberation theologians can even affirm this stuff, but they mean different things by it.

So I don't know exactly where Charlie Dates is on all of this. I do know though, that's been the tempting thing for Christians really since the 60s, 70s, when

I, the era I wrote about in social justice goes to church. It's this idea that you can hold onto your orthodoxy because let's face it, you lose it so easily when you go down this path.

You know, you can look at the main lines for that, but in fact, my dad and I were talking this morning about just kind of like the

North and the South, and especially the Northeast is basically godless at this point. They're pagan, they're pagan.

Churchless, unchurched, right? I mean, it's becoming like unreached people status. And in the

South, you still have all these churches and people in Christianity, but it's becoming so heretical.

So you have a semblance of Christianity, but it's heretical. And if you turn the clock back a hundred years, you would have said, well, the

North and the South both have, you know, churches and stuff, but the North was more heretical, at least

I'm not saying across the board, you know, but in general, I'm saying. And there is this like, this progression that takes place.

It's not like regions go from, we're just saturated in Christianity with blue laws to now we're pagan overnight.

It does take a little time, and there are these gradual stages in between, and there is usually a kind of apostasy.

And, you know, churches that people are still meeting there, but they don't actually love the Lord, they don't follow his word.

It's not really a church, it's a social club, it's something else. And that's what we've seen in our country.

And when people go down this road of paganism, the social justice is mixed in with that.

Social justice is really becoming, broadly speaking, a religion in and of itself.

That's the premise of my second book on social justice, Christianity and social justice. And so the churches that adopt this end up syncretizing, and they end up going heretical eventually.

So that's why Charlie Dates has to say this, because that's the association. People think that, okay, you're gonna have a rainbow flag outside your church, and you're going to, and it's funny, he didn't use that example.

He didn't say, like, you can hold onto biblical gender roles or something. He used other stuff. But, you know, eventually, you are gonna deny the

Trinity or redefine it, really. That's usually what they do, they redefine it or something. So this has been the temptation, that you can keep your theology and just go socially left.

And the evidence shows that you really can't, that over time, if you go socially left, it's gonna pull your theology with you.

So that's Charlie Dates at Moody. And, you know, I'm sorry for those who, like John Senny, who say,

I'm so disheartened by the direction of my school, Moody has gone. I'm sorry for all the Moody folks who are watching this.

And Andrew asks, wow, does this include Paul or Jesus? Didn't the left always treat the renderer unto

Caesar? Even the right would want to introduce social politics. I'm not exactly sure what you're asking in the last section there, but I think

I understand with the Paul and Jesus. Yeah, I mean, did they not fight enough for the gospel?

Did they not really believe that God is who he said he was? Because they weren't doing a social justice thing?

Yeah, and Pastor Michael asks, who is this guy? Yeah, Charlie Dates, Charlie Dates is who it is.

So you can look him up. I've talked about him before. All right, so that's number one.

The second thing I wanted to talk about on the podcast is it's a point I've made many times, but I figure we'll make it one more time.

How's that? Because there's been a bunch of things this week that kind of point in this direction, and it's getting silly at this point.

And of course, I'm talking about this whole debate over quote unquote Christian nationalism. This was a clip on MSNBC from earlier this week.

That unites all of them, because there's many different groups orbiting Trump, but the thing that unites them as Christian nationalists, not

Christians, by the way, because Christian nationalist is very different, is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don't come from any earthly authority.

They don't come from Congress. They don't come from the Supreme Court. They come from God. Wow. So, man, it's really broad at this point.

I mean, it's beyond just Christians. If you just believe our rights come from God, then that makes you a

Christian nationalist. Thomas Jefferson all of a sudden became a Christian nationalist, right? And this is something that from the beginning, from like 2020, when this started really being talked about more in mainstream media.

I've said this. I know others have said this. All this is, is an attempt to spread a wide net around all

Christians who would wanna be influential in the government. I mean, this net is even wider than that, though. This isn't even just Christians.

If you just believe our rights come from God, then you're a Christian nationalist, according to this panel on MSNBC.

And there's a movie right now out. I haven't actually watched it, but I read the book and did a review of the power worshipers, but the movie is God and Country.

And from the people who have seen it, who have talked about it, at least online, and told me about it, it's pretty much the same thing.

It's this really wide net of like, if you're a Christian, you wanna influence society or government, then you're a

Christian nationalist and you're someone who's very scary and to be feared. And so obviously everyone who wants to maintain a

Christian witness publicly is going to get this title, going to get this label. You can't really avoid it.

And I think that's important to note. Yeah, there's some people out there that I've even had some of them on the podcast, like Stephen Wolfe.

There's really, I'm like, who else is there? Stephen Wolfe, I guess Andrew Torver wrote a book that talks about Christian nationalism and Andrew Risker.

But okay, so those guys have taken it positively and then they've taken their own ideas about, politically about, and socially, and they've kind of used the banner of Christian nationalism to represent those.

But this whole thing predates them and it's just been a smear the media's used.

And so Christians, Christians predictably, many of them at least, want to somehow still create all this space as if it's gonna help them.

I really don't get it. Like they wanna distance themselves from it still and say like, just like we saw in that clip from MSNBC, it's not

Christians, Christian nationalists, not the Christians, they're okay. And so a lot of Christians wanna be like,

I wanna be in that category so bad, the Christians category, not the Christian nationalists category, which is impossible.

You can't, if you're gonna be a serious Christian, you really, there's no way for you to win that, but they're still trying to do it.

So there's been a bunch of pieces on this. Let me give you, let me show you one of them, if I may.

This is from Mere Orthodoxy, Mere Orthodoxy. And it's a piece in, or no, sorry, not

Mere, no, Pathios, my bad, Pathios. Why did I get those confused? All right, Christian nationalism as folk religion by Roger Olson, February 23rd, 2024.

I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but let me give you the gist of it. One of the most influential articles I read was by sociologists of religion,

Robert Elwood, who I got to know personally later. It was about Christianity's down home turn.

Right now, I don't remember where it was published, but I cut out the article and kept it. He goes on, he talks about what folk religion is, anti -intellectual, ahistorical.

And then of course, within the second paragraph, the religion of Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s was the

National Socialist idea of Germania and Aryan race. And it's, these people cannot, like they have like two categories, and one of them is

Nazis. They just can't even like write without somehow referencing the Nazis somehow.

So the rest of the article goes as predictably as you would imagine. And again, this is, you know, supposedly there's a

Christian website and there's an author who thinks they're Christian. And he says, the problem of course, is that almost every

American Christian nationalist will deny that their nationalism is religious and reject any claim that it borders on idolatry or is a folk religion rather than biblical

Orthodox. But one has to pay attention to their rhetoric about America and their actions in placing

American patriotism above even commitment to Jesus and the church. Or they mix and mingle, blend their patriotism with their commitment to Jesus and the church inappropriately

Jesus is Lord and America is God's chosen country to save the world, are placed on an equal plane and mixed together to the point that, all right, so he's talking about certain self -professed

Christians out there who, and I know who he's talking about. So I mean, it's the cartoony really goofy ones who really have bought into a cartoon of America that it's basically like Israel and America is

God's chosen nation now. And because of that, it's gonna survive forever.

It's perpetual. It's never gonna go away and we need to fight for it. And it's, and they merge, they mingle things.

Okay, I'm not gonna say that those people don't exist at all. I don't think they're as influential as the left wants to make out.

But again, the point of me reading this or showing you this is that you don't miss the attempt being made here.

The attempt is to quarter off Christian nationalism to it's those guys, it's the crazy uncles over there.

That's what it is. And of course the media is not using the term that way. The media never used the term to just mean that.

They may mean those people, but they mean more than that. They mean you and me. And so when Christians try to do this thing where they quarter off Christian nationalism to it's those guys, it's not us.

Then what they do is they effectively keep the vilification of the term and the people associated with it going.

They do the media, they carry the media's water. They agree with the media. They come alongside the media and say, oh yeah, those

Christian nationals are really bad, but it's really these guys that go after them. It's them, not us. And this is the same thing that we saw.

I feel like I'm replaying history here a bit. And it's not even old ancient history, it's recent. It's the same kind of thing we saw in 2020 and before that a bit with Christians trying to be like, hey,

I know that there's racist evangelicals out there according to the media. And I know there's these sexist evangelicals out there, these misogynists.

It's those guys though, go after them. It's not us, we're the good Christians. And Russell Moore, of course, has done this shtick for a long time.

It doesn't work though, it just doesn't work. It ends up, you end up actually infiltrating your own people because your own people now are like thinking, okay, the media is reporting accurately on this.

There is this big threat. And they just end up thinking that, they end up getting confused, the water just gets muddy.

Why not just say, hey, let's fight the media. Media is trying to make us look like we're this scary,

Christians are scary because they think something like, well, our rights come from God and that's scary. Let's talk about that.

Is that scary? Why is that scary? What if our rights don't actually come from God? What does that mean?

That's scary to me, right? We're not doing that. Instead, we're looking at, and I say we loosely,

I'm saying people with platforms in evangelical circles, they, maybe I'll say that.

See, now I gotta make the division. Okay, well, we, we'll go back to we. We look at what the media is doing and we see power.

We see the ability to punish and we're afraid. And I think it's just a lack of fear of God.

I think that's what drives this kind of thing. And so we want to somehow get in their corner, have them on our side.

And if they can be weaponized against other Christians, that's okay, as long as they're not coming to our house. So my two cents,

I've made this point, I don't know how many times, but it merits making the point again.

Okay, so let's see. Not many questions coming in, but many comments.

Anita Smith says, would these naysayers prefer Muslim nationalism? Leftist probably, yes.

Well, yeah, they never go after that. And there's probably a myriad of reasons for it.

They see their political enemies as Christians, right? So that's why. They don't see Muslims as their political enemies.

It's that simple. It's the friend, enemy distinction. It's that simple. Okay, let's switch gears here a bit.

I'm debating what we ought to talk. Oh, sorry, I can't switch gears. I forgot, there's a good piece on this whole topic that I was gonna let you know about.

So let me let you know about that, and then we'll switch gears. So this is by Steve Dace. The debate is over, we're all

Christian nationalists now. The debate is over, we're all Christian nationalists now. The Christian nationalism debate was always a scam, he says, which is why as someone who by God's grace is one of the largest audiences of Bible -believing

Christians in the country, I never bothered to wade into it. Instead, I waited for those provoking it to reveal their true purpose for doing so, and finally it happened last week.

So he talks about the clip that I just played. He wraps up the piece, it's short.

He says, if you are guilty of loving the Lord while also daring to show any respect whatsoever for actual American history, and that is still a lot of people who have various opinions about Donald Trump, then you are pronounced guilty by the very forces trying to destroy the last morsels of a country once called exceptional.

And no amount of nuance or aw -shuckery can save you. And that's what he's talking about, what

I was just talking about. For the spirit of the age offers no forgiveness. It only demands your compliance.

I assure you that every time you turn onto Tolerance Boulevard, you will find it is a one -way street.

The debate that never was is now over, we are all Christian nationalists now, I agree. That was always the purpose of it.

So, all right, that is, now we can switch gears. Now we can switch gears. Let's talk about, what should we do first?

Should we do the dancing stuff on Twitter or the IV? Let's do the IVF stuff. I don't think it'll take me long.

And it isn't comprehensive. Just a few thoughts I wanna share. And also just preview,

I guess give you a preview. I do plan at some point, not right this second, but I do plan on giving a much more comprehensive kind of direction on not just IVF, but fertility treatments in general.

And the reason for me is somewhat personal. When I started looking into this kind of thing,

I'm gonna be honest with you. I couldn't find any, and I'm not saying they don't exist, but at the time

I could not find any good Christian resources on the topic, they don't exist.

They're outdated, a lot of the information. Some of them are silly and some were decent, but it's just, it was incomplete.

And so that is something that I want to get out there at some point to help people.

That's my goal is to help people. But let me just say a few things, because it is in the news, it is a moral issue.

Christians are weighing in on it. And so I think that I probably should say something about it.

Briefly speaking, as many of you know, in Alabama, Supreme Court, essentially, there was a case that came up where there was some children, we're gonna call them what they are, they're children, right?

Fertilized embryos, blastocysts that were in a freezer. And there was, and I don't know if the,

I don't know what exactly what happened with the freezer, but they ended up, they died. And so this is a tragedy, right?

And so they were liable in the case. And so you have three, at least three now,

IVF clinics, the biggest ones apparently in the state, that are until they get some clarification legally, they're just not doing

IVF anymore because they don't know how to proceed apparently.

So this has opened up a whole discussion in evangelicalism and beyond about IVF, the morality of IVF, what is permissible, what is not, that kind of thing.

And there was what I would consider to be a decent piece. Now I can't find it.

I thought I had it pulled up. Give me a second, I will find this piece.

There was a decent piece that was put out by Breakpoint. And yeah, here it is.

And it's pretty short, it's actually very short. There's an interview that accompanies it, or I guess it's a, maybe it's a reading of it.

It's like six minutes long. And so I'm not endorsing everything Breakpoint. I'm certainly not endorsing everything

John Stone Street. There's things he said that I've disagreed with in the past. But it seems like this is somewhat, in my opinion, of a balanced take.

He says, a decision by the, so he talks about what we just talked about, this case. He said, the panic, which has been typical of the media coverage about the decision, makes sense given that the court finally addressed the central question of IVF, a question that the

IVF industry has largely depended upon not being answered in order to grow and expand.

He's absolutely right. Specifically, the court's decision has only put a certain kind of fertility called in limb care, in limbo.

Fertility care that involves the creating, storing, preserving, and destroying of human embryos.

That is key. Let me read that again. The only thing this has affected, even though there's been a media frenzy saying this ends all

IVF and all assisted reproduction technologies and so forth, it doesn't.

This is what it actually specifically addresses. Fertility care, that involves the creating, storing, preserving, and destroying, big, flashing, destroying, on that word, of human embryos.

Asking the question, what are they, was long overdue, given that approximately 1 .5 million embryos left over from IVF services are currently stored in freezers in the

United States, which is crazy. It's crazy, okay? The vast majority of which are destined for either destruction or donation for medical testing.

I mean, this is a travesty. There's no doubt about it. Even if late incoming pro -lifers have been right to celebrate this small bit of ethical clarity for an industry with little of it.

Even if late in coming, sorry, I read that wrong. Pro -lifers have been right. During IVF, eggs are fertilized with sperm in a lab.

Often multiple embryos are created and tested for viability. So it just explains the process of IVF. Pro -lifers are right to celebrate the court's recognition of the humanity of these embryos.

It says though, at the same time, the decision fails to answer another question. If an embryo must be considered a child, if destroyed by accident, what about when it is created, stored in a freezer and destroyed intentionally?

The three couples involved in the Alabama case wish to hold the clinic responsible for the loss of their embryonic children.

But as the court's opinion plainly states, the Fondas selected, this is the family, in their contract with the center to automatically destroy any embryos that had remained frozen longer than five years.

The LePages chose to donate similar embryos to medical researchers whose project would result in the destruction of the embryos.

And another family agreed to allow any abnormal embryos created through IVF to be experimented on for research purposes and then discard it.

Their ruling creates or reveals a legal contradiction similar to that which exists in states with both abortion rights and double homicide laws.

If a pregnant woman and her preborn baby are killed, the perpetrators can be charged with two counts of homicide. Yet, if that same woman escaped an assault and drove to an abortion clinic, the same day there would be no charge of homicide, legally speaking.

In the Alabama case, the court established that the moral nature of an embryo gives it the same legal protections as a born human under the state's wrongful death statute.

Why then should the same embryo not be afforded protection from imprisonment, trafficking, experimentation, and eventual destruction?

So it doesn't go far enough. Strictly speaking, IVF can be done in a way that does not lead to the creation of excess embryos.

And then it talks about that. And some of these embryos may be implanted, but most will not.

So it just talks about that. So let me just briefly say this about this whole issue since, you know, and I'll probably just make people who are hardcore on either side mad at me because I'm not giving myself the time to, you know, go down every rabbit hole here.

But essentially, you know, what you have with IVF is you have, you know, like other medical procedures where you have the human body being affected by the fall, things aren't working properly.

And the normal process of fertilization that takes place in the womb isn't happening.

For whatever reason, it could be the husband, it could be the wife, it could be both. And there is a way to fertilize an embryo by taking sperm from the man, taking a woman's eggs, harvesting the eggs.

So you have to go through, there's a surgical procedure here, and you can take them, and then you can, the procedure can be done in a lab.

Usually it's an ichthys, they call it, but it's a procedure where they will take and actually inject into the egg a sperm.

And it doesn't have to be that way. There's other ways of doing it, but that's a common way today.

And then it is implanted again in the womb, in the wife's womb.

And so then the wife continues and is pregnant, right?

Or if it doesn't implant, you know, they're not. And of course, there's risks to this. A lot of clinics will freeze the embryos anyway.

Some clinics, that's just what they do, because there's actually a higher percentage, generally speaking, of fertilized embryos, of humans, that will implant and come to term if you wait the month after the eggs are harvested.

Because oftentimes the surgical procedure, there could be damage from that.

It's kind of, it's a traumatic thing. And so when you let the body calm down a month, then, and freeze the fertilized embryo, the human, then it's a safer, it's more of a chance that the embryo, that the fertilized embryo will actually implant, right?

So along the way, and I've just given you such a thumb sketch, there's so many more things, but along the way in this whole process, there's a number of moral dilemmas that come up.

So one of them is how the sperm is collected, okay? Is it a man alone, or is it a husband and wife in a godly relationship, all right?

So that's a moral crossroads right there. Another issue that comes up is, is it permissible to freeze fertilized embryos?

Is there a risk in the dethaw that they won't make it? Are you putting these little lives at risk? So that's another issue.

Now, it's like 95 to 99%, depending on the clinic. And like I just said, many of them now think that it's actually a higher chance if they freeze it than if they don't.

If you don't though, you do a fresh transfer. Now, this isn't as much perhaps of a moral dilemma.

It could be, I suppose, but do you, does the woman in the situation, the wife, does she take hormones that are gonna make her produce a lot of eggs?

And then how many of those eggs, this is the moral issue, do you attempt to fertilize?

And so you don't, if you go through this process, you're a couple that has fertility issues or whatever, and this is, you end up here, you've tried the other drugs and IUIs and whatever else, and this is where you end up, then there is a decision you have to make about that.

You don't have to do that though. You can just harvest whatever you're naturally, one egg, and you can do a fresh transfer.

So you don't have to do those things. It's still IVF. And then here's the biggest moral question of all, which this case at least hits on a little bit.

Do you discard the embryos, the fertilized embryos? They're humans, again, that you do not use.

That's obviously, of all the questions, that's the clearest one for a Christian to answer. Of course you don't because they're human.

And this is what IVF, the IVF procedures have unfortunately produced in our country and in many other countries, freezers full of human beings that have no hope of ever being implanted in the womb of the mother.

And now Christians can do embryo adoption, which is a wonderful thing. But there are countries that regulate this kind of thing, like Italy, a

Roman Catholic country, they regulate IVF. Even as I understand it, the amount of eggs that can be fertilized.

So the question for Christians is, and I just gave you a bunch of questions to think through, but the question is, what do you do with IVF?

There are people who right now are taking this opportunity to try to say that no reproductive technology at all.

It's all bad. And of course, generally citing the most egregious examples.

There's other Christians who think it should be regulated. There's a way, there's a moral way to proceed here, but it needs to be regulated appropriately.

And then there's a range of answers to how should it be regulated? So that's the issue.

Those are the issues, broadly speaking. There's more that you could probably talk about. I mean, there's always other stuff, but those are the major things.

And so I'm more here just to kind of let, to educate you, to let people know who don't know this, what these debates are actually over.

So you are better informed in the discussions that you have. And one of the things that I've noticed is that pastors even are ill -equipped oftentimes on this issue because it's such a new issue.

And so they've sometimes end up giving, good pastors even, very bad advice on this kind of thing.

And people will punt it to the doctors. Yes, there's good advice to ask the doctors for, but there are moral questions here that, yes, as a pastor, you are more than qualified to navigate.

So that's my little encouragement there. All right, well, let's go to,

I think, the last but not least. You know, I gotta say, this next issue, these

TikTok dancers, I've wondered about whether I should, like, am I degrading the podcast by even talking about this?

I've wondered this. Is this worth our time? Am I giving in to clown world?

And I kind of have to talk about it because I put a few posts out there about it.

And I actually, on Twitter, really, I don't know if I, I think, yeah, just on Twitter.

But two of them I ended up deleting, and I'm gonna tell you why I ended up deleting them in a moment, but I feel like I weighed in a little bit.

So I have to commit now. I'm committed, we'll talk about it. And I suppose, I suppose there's behind this, behind the issue of dancing on TikTok or Twitter or wherever, there is a bigger moral question that parents especially do need to think about with their kids.

And we are so influenced by trash world and the degeneracy around us, it can dull our senses.

And I think AD actually put out a video on this right before I started reporting. And I think he's 100 % right that we don't even realize to what extent we are influenced by what's around us sometimes.

And I think I'm no exception to that. I obviously try my best to think through things and not be influenced, but look, it's just the water we swim in.

So admitting that from the beginning. But let's start with the issue.

And then I wanna look at some scripture with you, if we may. So as far as I can tell, this whole issue started with someone who we talked about not too long ago,

Allie Beth Stuckey. I'm not intentionally trying to bring her up again. It's just the way it is.

So she posted or yeah, she retweeted this guy,

Chase Austin. And Chase posted this video, you can kind of see it.

And it's girls, young girls, they're probably like sorority aged.

Maybe some of them are a little younger, I don't know. But they're, I mean, they're young women, but they're dancing at a gas station in New Orleans, I guess, right?

So this is what you get. And Chase Austin says, why don't men want

Western women? And of course he's, the answer is the video. This is why men don't tend to want

Western women. And I'm presuming here it's for lifelong commitment, it's marriage, he's talking about marriage.

No, why don't men wanna commit themselves to girls like this? And so Allie Stuckey says this, of all the reasons girls dancing with backpacks on is the reason men don't want women in the

West, okay then. So kind of trying to kind of throw some shade at Chase Austin here.

I don't know what the backpacks has to do with anything. A lot of them have backpacks, a lot of them have these Stanley cups.

I don't know what that has to do with anything really, maybe, I don't know, materialism.

I don't know where she's getting this, but that's how she kind of like, it makes it sound ridiculous.

Like Chase Austin has a problem with girls with backpacks dancing or something. And that wasn't all. She said, she followed up, she said, also,

I find this post to be a bit of a cope. Of course, you're not obligated to be attracted to any of these women.

You can even find this silly or repulsive, but this is how sorority girls act together.

And I'm going to shock you, but most sorority girls don't have a problem with finding a guy who's interested in them.

And of course, this just sparked so much. I mean, people saying, yeah, of course there's guys interested in girls like this, but it's not for marriage, right?

You have this guy named Peter Hargrave said, yeah, I'm not interested in this. The fact women on Twitter don't find this insufferable shows the difference between men and women.

And then Allie Stuckey says, I mean, it's not for you. They're dancing with each other. They're not dancing for men.

Now, there's more that could be said, but that last comment I want to highlight, just to give Allie a bit of a benefit of the doubt here, okay, she doesn't think they're dancing for men.

Now, I made a mistake when I, a slight mistake.

I mean, I stand by 95 % of everything I've said on this, but I made a slight mistake when

I first weighed in. And the reason I made a slight mistake was because I kind of assumed the same thing Allie did, that these are girls that are just, they're goofing off, they're having fun, it's nonsense.

And so I went with that. I said that, yeah, some of them are dressed immodestly and some of the moves,

I don't consider that appropriate. I wouldn't want, if I had a daughter, I wouldn't want her doing that. But I'm not gonna broad brush the whole thing.

There's girls there that are more modest and they're not going like, it's not sexual necessarily.

And I'm saying some of them. So I just see this as like, this is just people that are dancing together and they're just goofing off.

And yeah, maybe some are more sensual than others, but that is before I listened to the lyrics.

For a whole day, I was weighing in on this thing, having my volume like way down and I didn't hear what was going on, which generally on a podcast,

I'd be more careful, but on Twitter, you can just pop off. And that's kind of what I did. And I think that might be what

Allie did. And I think that might be what some of the others did. I'm not saying that explains all the arguments surrounding this, but if you listen to the lyrics, it's some kind of like hip hop song and they're saying things,

I don't remember verbatim, but they're saying things like, shake it for the camera and shake it for your boy.

So Allie's saying, oh, these girls, they're not doing it for men. Some of them are singing this.

Many of them are singing this as they're doing it. Shake it for your boy, shake it for the camera.

And they're shaking their bodies, parts of their body, I guess. They're doing it for someone, guys.

And they're doing it for the camera and their own words condemn them on this. Boy is still a male term,

I think. There is a sense in which this is for men and there are men there who are not participating in the dance, but they're surrounding whatever party this is, watching and so forth.

So this is the benefit of the doubt that I want to give to Allie and others who weighed in and thought like, silly, but it's not necessarily, don't get too worked up about it.

I don't know how many of them actually listened to what is being said here and what many of these girls are actually singing. Because if you listen to it, you'll have,

I think, a different perspective. So that is number one. I wanted to get that out of the way and say that.

Number two, I want to defend the original tweet here because I think the guy who posted it is spot on.

This is not a snapshot in the life of a young woman.

I don't think. I don't think that many of the people who are so offended by this and are saying like, hey, in general, men don't want

Western women because of this. I don't think they're making a statement that if a woman ends up goofing off by dancing in a silly way at some point, then they're just not attractive at all or something.

I think there's something bigger here because he's making a sweeping statement about Western civilization.

He's talking about a pattern. He's saying that this is what women in the

West are characterized by. So it's not like a snapshot. It's not a one -time deal.

This is just the way that young women now, and I'm going to include young men because there's a lot of frivolity with young men as well, but their lives are orbiting and surrounded by having fun, temporal pleasure, goofing off, silliness, extended adolescence, and a man who's looking for a wife or a woman who's looking for a husband who's serious about these kinds of things, who has a higher purpose, who's preparing themselves for marriage and family.

They're not going to be interested in that if that's who you are, all right? So I'm not saying you can't ever goof off and have fun or anything like that.

I'm saying though, if that's what characterizes you, and especially as a woman, you're still kind of engaging in childish things as a general habit, that's the thing that's not attractive.

And that's the thing that I think characterizes the West. And that's the thing that does not characterize many non -Western societies and pre -modern societies.

There's more of a seriousness. There's more of a focus. And this is why I posted some dancing from, one was a ballet.

I actually specifically posted that one, retweeted it, because there was a ballet dancer. And of course she had a dress on, but there was a,

I guess, is it stockings or whatever? There was some tight clothes there, but you couldn't accuse her of being sensual.

There was nothing about it that you could say, this is sensual. There was form in it. There was a story that was being told in it.

There was culture in it. It was rich. It was dignified. It wasn't, there wasn't even a hint of sexuality in it.

And it took skill, which is what these girls dancing, it takes no skill to do what they're doing.

I think of other folk traditions in dancing. I actually think dancing is great.

And I think I'm terrible at it, but I think that cultures actually may even need dancing.

They need art forms. I was at an Irish festival last year and I got to see all these young girls, mostly young girls who were doing

Irish step dancing. There's nothing sensual about it. Not even, there's not a hint of it.

It is, it takes skill and it's beautiful. And oftentimes it does tell a story.

It does say something about a certain cultural touchstone or it's just feeling, but it's not what you just saw.

What you just saw at best, I think, is just goofing off. And at worst, given the lyrics and given the way some of the girls are moving and how they're dressed, it's sensual.

So that's why I think it's spot on. That is a good point. Now, Ally, in the last podcast or two podcasts ago, whenever we talked about it, it was like last week.

She was kind of throwing some shade at the trad wife movement because A, it's not biblical. It's baking sourdough is great, but don't put pressure on yourself.

And then she kind of held herself up as an example of like, I've got this career. I've got my husband. I got my family along with me.

You can have it all. You can have both of these things. And that's fine. That's her,

I don't know much about her personal life, but she saw a problem with the trad wife movement with baking your own bread, staying home.

And holding that up is like a standard, I guess. And it's weird to me like a week later, this gets downplayed.

And so a lot of people are pointing this out. And I don't know, I don't really have a lot to say other than I think that the trad wife movement for all its flaws, for whatever low bar it is, right?

There's something positive in it that there is a higher purpose. Women have a calling to be wives and mothers.

And some women, obviously they're gonna be single, but, you know, and they have a calling. If you have the gift of singleness, you have a calling.

And, but either way, there's a higher calling there. There's something more to live for than frivolity.

That's what the trad wife movement gives you. It may not be Christian, totally.

You know, it may not go as far as it needs to go. It may, right, it's just really one basic thing.

That's my understanding at least. And yeah, it could be damaging if people obsess over it and take it too far and think that they're better than others because they're trad wives, right?

Yeah, of course that's all bad. Because that's pride, that's another issue. But what you just saw, the dancing you just saw, that's not good for society.

It's hormone culture. There's really not like a rich anything to it.

There's not a higher purpose to it. There's not skill. There's not, it doesn't prepare you really for anything.

It doesn't signal anything necessarily. It's, on its best day, it's silly. So I'm not,

I don't wanna like be too, I know that there's some guys on there that are just like, you know, making out like this is pornography or something.

I'm not saying that, but it's degrading. It's not good for society if that becomes the common thing.

And I will say, I think at weddings, and maybe I'm in a part of the country that has more of this.

I think in other parts, I went to a wedding in the Midwest. It wasn't as much like this. But in the area where I live, it's kind of expected at weddings that there's gonna be a lot of dancing.

And that dancing tends to be, it tends to not take much skill at all.

It's just moving. It's just, it's silly. And I'm not saying it's all wrong, but I am saying this. I think if that is what the dancing art form is reduced to, just a boom, boom, bass beat, and just, you know, jumping, and you can't even talk to each other.

You can't even hear each other. It's just, hey, try to move your body with the music. And melody isn't even important anymore.

It's just a beat. There's a degrading influence there on a culture, on a society.

And I know, you know, I was married. So some people wonder how. I wonder how sometimes, but I was married.

And, you know, my wife had some, she had some more tasteful, in my opinion, songs.

And there was some dancing at the wedding. I remember though, before we got married, I had this one request for the dancing.

And I'm not a dancer at all. But I said, could we try to do the Virginia Reel? Could we try?

And it takes skill. And, you know, men know their part. Women know their part. They, there's no question about what you're gonna do next.

If there's order to it, it's dignified. And we tried, and it was kind of, some people kind of got the hang of it.

I wasn't one of them. Didn't go that well. You know, English country dancing, which is what the

Virginia Reel is basically. That's, I think that's a superior art form. I do think there is, there's elements of subjectivity and object objectivity with art.

Just go watch like Roger Scruton's documentary on art, Why Beauty Matters.

And, you know, don't tell me there's not some kind of objectivity in art. You know, the painting of a toilet is inferior, you know, to a complicated painting of a beautiful woman like the

Mona Lisa. Architecture is the same way. And I think there's no exception in dance. I don't know where all those lines are, but I know

I sense them more than I can articulate them. And I'm sensing them with this. So that's my opinion on it.

Am I, you know, personally offended? Yeah, when I heard the lyrics, I guess I am offended by that, but not to the point, like I'm not, you know, not trying to cancel it.

I'm not, you know, it is what it is. I'm not like spending any time thinking about it, you know, and I do want people to be able to dance and goof off and have a fun time and stuff, but there is something going on with our culture.

It is getting degraded. That is just one little evidence of it. The fact that that's normalized. And I think that's worth,

I think that's worth saying. So I probably could say more. I'm not gonna please everyone on this, but those are my thoughts on that particular subject.

I wanna end with, I'll get to some questions, but I wanna end with talking about this.

First Timothy chapter two. I think that I closed my tab, unfortunately.

I don't know why I did that. First Timothy two, and I guess we'll go to verse nine.

Paul says this, and this is for Christians, but it says, likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.

A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness, but I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.

Now, many of you don't know that, I shouldn't say many of you, many of us don't remember perhaps that the admonition that women can't be pastors, they can't teach, is preceded by these general statements about how women ought to carry themselves.

And if this gets you canceled for being misogynistic supposedly, then so be it.

This is what the Bible says, this is what God says. And he references creation right after this.

This isn't like, you know, specific to a culture, there's bigger things going on here.

It's, the emphasis is spiritual, the emphasis is a woman ought to be, to adorn themselves, they ought to be known, they ought to be seen as a dignified person, modestly, discreetly.

This is, I think in the King James, it says shame, guiltiness. So basically, you have a sense of shame still, you haven't lost that sense of shame, that's what it's saying.

But Paul's saying that, hey, don't be like the pagans out there who lost their sense of shame, they don't have it, it doesn't work, it's broken, they're not embarrassed, you know, they're willing to show any part of their body, there's no shame.

No, you need to have a sense of shame still, and that's gonna show itself in the clothing that you wear.

It's gonna be modest, it's gonna be discreet. The emphasis isn't going to be the braided hair, the gold, the pearls, or costly garments.

It doesn't mean those things are necessarily wrong, by the way, that's not what he's saying, he's not saying it's a sin to braid your hair.

That it's just, that's not the emphasis of how you ought to adorn yourself. Rather, it should be good works, proper, it's proper for women to making a claim to godliness, to have good works, to have a quiet, gentle spirit, to receive instruction with entire submissiveness.

So there's a trusting that women have, not micromanaging, like many of the feminists say a woman ought to behave.

And so, you know, this word discreetly here is actually used in the very next chapter,

I believe, in the qualifications for an elder, when it talks about being, essentially, you know, not being drunk, not being, not letting alcohol take over.

You know, it's the same kind of thing that Paul's talking about in 1 Timothy chapter two, when it comes to women.

Not being a wild woman, not being out of control, okay? So hopefully people understand what he's saying here.

Doesn't mean that women can't be, ever be silly or have fun. Not what he's saying, not a killjoy here.

What he's saying, what should characterize a woman? Well, there should be a sense of shame.

And really, it's a sense of respect, respect the body God gave you. It should be a sense of control, that you're not just being, coming wild and giving yourself every impulse.

There needs to be self -control there. And it should be your character that shines brighter than any pearls or costly garments or braided hair.

So now the question becomes, if someone is characterized by silly dancing,

I'm not saying they do it occasionally, but if they're characterized by just really goofing off, and especially with lyrics that are not appropriate and that kind of thing, doesn't match this.

That's really the question that I wanna leave you with. So I hope that helps you think about it in a biblical way and hopefully a way that's just, yeah, that's helpful.

I mean, it's not, I don't think always, especially with art, it's hard to do this.

It's not always black and white. It's not always in every circumstance, this kind of thing right here is wrong.

But I think when you bring principles into it of what we ought to be striving for, these higher purposes, then you pretty easily come to conclusions on those things.

And so that's my hope and my prayer for all of you. Well, let's get to some questions or statements.

Man, there's a lot. I don't think I'm gonna be able to get to all of them, but let me just highlight a few.

Doug asks, does a good desire to have babies justify the killing of embryos in IVF? Does a woman have a right to a baby?

Answer, no. Yeah, no, no, I'm agreeing. No, there is no justification for killing any humans just because a woman wants a baby.

I just hope you understand, Doug, that there are Christian couples who go through this process and they're not killing any children in the process.

They're doing it in ethical ways. And so that was one of the things

I was hoping that I could at least let people know about, because you get the impression by some Christians that it's like, that's just what happens at IVF.

It's all surrogacy and killing fertilized embryos that are humans, and that's not the case.

But Law in Worldview says, what are they trying to shake for the camera according to the song?

Yeah, I'm assuming it's the backside of their bodies. That's my assumption.

So it's a singular it, shake it. So I don't know, maybe unless there's something else, but I'm not gonna venture there.

Let's see, some people have opinions about sorority girls. What is the

Virginia Reel? Go look it up, type in Virginia Reel on, I guess,

YouTube, and you'll come up with videos of it. It's, you know, if you watch those like old Jane Austen movies and they're dancing, like how many social things happen at those?

Like it gives, it's actually great because it gives men and women a place where they can actually interact.

There's accountability. They are able to impress the others, or at least, you know, show, it reveals a lot about you, the way that you dance and the way that you approach it, right?

So you get to reveal some of your character. There's rules and lanes, so you're not actually confused about what you should do.

I actually think that there's, we should bring it back. That's what we should do. Hey, if Christians wanna get involved in the dancing scene,

I think we should bring that stuff back. That's just my two cents. I and my families did the polka because John traces back to Poland.

That's interesting, I'd love to see that. The polka is something I'm not very familiar with.

So that's it for the comments. It's good to be with everyone and I'm looking forward to seeing some of you in person in Albuquerque, New Mexico.