Session 3: Egalitarianism and Marxist Theory in Christianity

Oppression in History and Why Christians Should Not Import Marxism

I wanted to begin this session by heading off at the past a very common objection, which is sometimes somewhat of an emotional objection, but it's an objection nonetheless that deserves at least somewhat of an answer before we continue, and that is that there has been oppression throughout human history.

You can open your Bible and read about the oppression that took place in the times of the Old Testament and New Testament. It's part of the human experience. It's part of the result of sin and how man treats his fellow man, and in the context of the United States, there has certainly been oppression to various groups.

There are certain groups that are certainly used more, I should say, their experiences by the social justice advocates more than others, but we can certainly look at the history of our country and we can see that there have been things like slavery, like the extermination or putting Native Americans on reservations, things like that.

There are things like really every immigrant group who has come to this country has faced barriers that they've had to overcome. That's not something unique to the United States, though. That's something that exists across the Western world.

I remember my wife and I went to Turkey a few years ago, and Turkish people are very proud of their culture and their heritage, their history, and they do not like Armenians in Turkey, and there's very much been historic oppression against Armenians, but that's not the kind of thing that when you're in Christ in the church worshiping together makes a difference as far as the way you treat each other because you're in Christ now, and those hostilities that may have existed at one point, historical wrongs, these kinds of things do not shape the way in which you treat each other because you recognize that you're a sinner, this other person's a sinner, you're both messed up, you both come from lines of sin, and so by nature of being in Christ, there is a certain sense of peace and unity, more than just peace, but a unity in that relationship and that bond, so I wanted to mention that, and the reason that I mention it is because oftentimes things that actually did happen in real history are overblown, they're used by the other side, they make that the narrative, the only narrative that existed, they reduce everything down to those stories of oppression, very often cherry-picking the historical record, trying to avoid talking about things that don't fit that narrative, and so they end up telling what amounts to a lie, and so they use things that are legitimate, and they overblow them, and they politicize them, and when Christians get involved in this, it honestly rips apart the fabric that we should have at the communion table.

I think of the IFCA, which is the organization that's sponsoring or this conference is part of, and there was a time in its history when they did not accept the membership of some churches, of historically black churches, and they came to a realization later that that was a wrong thing, and so now it doesn't matter what ethnicity you're part of, what church tradition, if you agree to the statement of faith and the beliefs of the organization, you can join, and that's the right way to handle this kind of thing, not to do, let's say what the Southern Baptist Convention has done, which is try to renew some kind of lamentation and repentance about sins of racism and abuse of now, and now the sexual abuse, etc.

Every so often, every year when they get together, they have to somehow renew the forgiveness that's already available in Christ, generally for things that they weren't even part of. It was things their ancestors were part of, and generally things that are very much overblown, very much not contextualized, not understood according to the context of the time, so I wanted to just mention that up front to say, I hear that objection a lot, you know, I agree with everything you're saying, John, but don't you think there has been oppression?

Don't you think that, what about what happened to Native American tribes? And I said, absolutely, of course there has, that's just part of the human condition, but we don't import Marxism to rectify that.

That's not the way to do it. There is forgiveness in Christ, and forgiveness in Christ doesn't mean we steal from one person to give to another. It means you repent, you move on, and it's perfectly fine to look back and to talk about, to celebrate even, to how far your particular group has come, cultural group.

What this understanding of the social justice theory does is it doesn't just go back and, let's say, honor, you know, we're going to have, you know, Hispanic Heritage Month. It has to rip down Christopher Columbus in order to do it.

It has to rip down things that came before in order to do it, and so there's a lack of recognition that there's actually some good things that we're taking down. It's like going to the dumpster and just throwing out a whole bunch of junk without any discretion as what's in there.

Maybe there's some junk in there, but maybe there's some things that we're throwing away which are actually good. Maybe there's some character in some of these men for exploration or military leadership, or maybe it's their ideas that had nothing to do with oppression that we honor them for, which is often the case.

Gender, Nation, Ability, and Hierarchy as Created Differences

So I want to just recognize that before we get into this, which is egalitarianism. I want to talk about the ways in which we are different and the ways in which we are the same as human beings, because the differences are the wedges that Marxists use, social justice advocates use, to tear apart the communion table unity, and we need to understand from a biblical perspective what are the differences between us and what are the things we have in common.

So let's start with the differences. Gender is a difference. There is no compromise on this from a biblical perspective. Matthew 19, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?

This is something that God determined, and it's for a complementary reason. They're male. Men and women are different, but when they get together, they actually form something which complements itself and which reproduces the human race and brings up the human race and perpetuates and fulfills the duty that God gave to mankind, which was to have dominion.

I know that's not politically correct, but have dominion over the earth and to fill the earth. And so gender is a big difference we have. We can't erase that. We can't say that that's just not a difference.

That is a difference. God is woven into the fabric of creation. Culture and geography, and I put the word organic here for a reason. I'm going to read a verse and then explain that. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, Acts 17.

So you see in that boundaries, you see borders, right? You see the word ethnos, you see nation. Nation being a sociolinguistic group. It's not necessarily primarily something that's ethnic, but ethnicity certainly plays into it.

It's the extension, and this is why I put the word organic, it's the extension of a family. That's what a nation essentially is. It is a family that has reproduced, reproduced, reproduced, and pretty soon you have a nation.

It's a big family in many ways. And families, as you know, have differences. They have different traditions, different mannerisms. Oftentimes when you're in a church, or anywhere really, and you see kids running around, you don't have to know who the parents are.

If you know the parents well, you can figure it out because they act like the family that they come from. There are certain things that give them away as members of the family. So culture forms organically.

Families move into an area, they establish themselves, they have property, they live, they form traditions, laws, a legal system emerges. This is way different than the way Marxists view culture. Marxists don't view culture as something that forms organically from the bottom up.

Marxists view culture as something from the top down. It's something that oppressors, it's categories oppressors make in order to subdue some and not others. So power relationships are what culture is about.

In fact, this whole engaging culture thing you hear in Christianity, the gospel coalition talks about this all the time. This comes from a view that culture is something that can be artificially created.

We just need to do something in order to create a culture. We don't really create culture. I don't think that's actually a biblical understanding of what culture even is. Culture develops over time as people have children and as they experience life and they form traditions, etc.

So we all come from different cultures because we come from different families, many cultures. Then you can extend that out into the nation you live in, the local area, the state, the nation, however you want to put that.

We all have differences that come from the context in which we live. In America, often those differences aren't really ethnic differences. They can be. It can be that you're in an area that has an ethnic difference, but quite often because we're such a melting pot, you have all sorts of people of all sorts of different genetic makeup living together and they have much more in common with each other than say someone who looks like them from the other side of the world.

For instance, I have much more in common with the people that I grew up with who are Italian. I'm not Italian. Irish. I don't have a lot of Irish in me. Black. I'm not black. People who are even Hispanic.

I'm way more in common with them than I do a white guy from Eastern Europe. That's just a fact. So anyway, all that to say, despite the fact that Marxism would want to cut the pie that way and make us all kind of at each other's throats because we have different cultures, it doesn't have to be that way.

It's not that way in Christ and it's a difference that doesn't have to be. It's actually real diversity. That's what it is. God has created a place in which there's real diversity, divided us all up at Babel.

And then we have different abilities. The Lord said to him, who has made man's mouth or who made him mute or deaf or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Exodus 4 .11. So even disabilities, which, I mean, you talk about the ultimate lack of privilege, even disabilities are from the Lord.

There's a sovereignty behind this. And we have different abilities that we have. We have different spiritual gifts. There are varieties of gifts, but the same spirit. And there are varieties of ministries in the same Lord.

So just because someone's able to do a certain task in a church, implement a spiritual gift, preach, doesn't make them any better. The hand can't say to the eye. The church is a very complementary organization.

And I'd like to suggest that, in general, God has made humans that way. We all have differences that we can benefit each other with and we can bless each other with. And then there's different hierarchical positions.

This is the most controversial of all, probably. Ephesians 5 and Romans 13, you have relationships like wives and husbands, different responsibilities there. There's a submission. There's actually a hierarchy.

For lack of a better term, and I could get in trouble for this, but there's a chain of command almost in that. And you think of the Trinity, Jesus said that he came to do the will of his Father. Now, was he God?

Yeah, he was God. Did he submit to the will of his Father? Yes. So it has nothing to do with whether Jesus is equal to the Father as far as worth, but he had a different function. And it's the same in husband-wives relationships.

I was talking to someone the other day about this, and I said, you know what, in our culture at this point, and since I'm a young man, I probably can't diagnose this as well as someone who's older, but we're all feminists.

That's what I see around me. From the time, even in the most fundamentalist church, a little girl is told often, and I've seen this with my own eyes at least, they're the little princess, and they can be, grow up to be anything they want to be.

And there is some truth. There's some truth to the fact that in the United States, we have the freedom to follow different vocations, but God has a plan woven into his created order for women, and he has a plan for men, and it's not anything you want to be, all right?

That logic has now been taken itself into people that don't want to be a man or a woman. They can just be anything they want to be. No, you don't get to define yourself. God defines yourself. We have children and parents.

Children are to submit to their parents. The Lord commands this, Ephesians 6 .1. So, there's a blessing that comes with that, and you know what happens if children don't submit to their parents? They're going to have curses that come upon them, and we're watching that play out right now.

So, this is actually something that the Lord gives us to bless us. You're not going to have a properly functioning society if you don't recognize that these hierarchies are woven in to creation. Also, master-slave relationships, and of course, we apply this today in the area of labor relationships in the workforce.

So, you have employees. You have employers, but fundamentally, I mean, the command given to masters and slaves is the same command that applies to those in the labor force today and those that are managing the labor force, and there is a submission there, and it's politically incorrect to say that.

In fact, businesses have gotten to the point of, I mean, HR just eats up all the businesses now, in my opinion. It's with diversity training and sometimes standing in the way between employees and their employers, and I'm not saying there's not a place for trying to alleviate certain kinds of discrimination, but in our culture where we've come to today, there's efforts to get in between that relationship, to somehow soften it so that management doesn't have the kind of power, so that it's in the name of keeping management from abusing their employees, but what often happens is a new kind of bully comes into town called the big labor, big unions, and so forth, and so you have that relationship.

You also have rulers and subjects. You also have governing authorities and those who are under those governing authorities. Now, in all these relationships, there are elements, there are circumstances in which you cannot follow, you should not follow the commands that are given to you or the desires.

A wife should not submit to her husband when her husband wants to beat her and abuse her. That would be actually participating in the sin of her husband, and that is not right to participate in someone's sin like that, so there are always circumstances, but that is when the boundaries are overstepped, the God-given boundaries, and so I think the Bible is actually, this is the foundation of Western society.

This is a beautiful thing because this actually gives us boundaries to try to alleviate abuse. There's checks and balances within this. Rulers can intervene when laws are broken in these other hierarchical relationships, and it gives us a place to belong, gives us an identity, gives us a sense of purpose, and it tells us exactly what we're supposed to do, so we're not left guessing like so many people are guessing today, so these are the ways in which we're different, and I'd like to suggest that these differences are beautiful differences, all of them.

They're all complementary. They're all things to be that, you know, celebrate diversity. This is what it would look like if you're really going to truly take that statement seriously. We can celebrate cultural differences, and we do every time there's a potluck.

We see all these different foods. It's a blessing to have those kinds of things. It's a blessing to have different abilities and gifts and positions. Now, there are certain things that make us equal to one another in the sense that we're the same.

We're made in the image of God, Genesis 127. We are accountable to God, Acts 1730. We need to repent. All of us need to repent. It doesn't matter who you are. You have to repent of your sin. We're subject to the law.

The law of our land applies to everyone living within the boundaries of the land. We're all sinful. We all fall short of the glory of God, so we have that in common with one another. We're all in need of salvation.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. This is a need that everyone has. I heard someone recently apply that to creation itself, that this wasn't just about humans.

This is about the environment. No, it's actually in the context. It's about humans, and it's all humans over the course of the whole world. If redeemed, if we are truly in Christ, we're part of the body of Christ, and we have that in common with one another.

There is neither Jew nor Greek. Neither is there slave nor free man. Neither is there male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ, Galatians 328. Now, this does not mean all those differences are now erased.

It doesn't mean that men are no longer men. It means that we have something in common by nature of being in Christ. So those are the ways we're different. Those are the ways we're the same. Now, egalitarianism and how it's developed up to this point, and you hear these words, equity, diversity, and inclusion, gives us a false sense of equality, and it plays around with our identities in ways that are just not biblical.

Egalitarianism, Victim Categories, and the Tools of Deconstruction

There's a quote. I just inserted this because I thought of it when I was putting this together yesterday. J .D. Greer is the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He recently was tweeting to Beth, well, it's actually two years ago.

He was tweeting to Beth Moore, and he said, it's time for complementarians to take all the word of God seriously, not just the parts about distinction of roles, but also the tearing down of all hierarchy and his gracious distribution of gifts to all his children.

That's dangerous language, because as I just showed you, hierarchy, there's hierarchies that actually the Lord has given his blessing to. There are hierarchies that he has regulated. There are hierarchies that are part of the fabric of creation as well, and certainly the hierarchies that are part of the fabric of creation, to rip those down would not be a just or merciful thing.

It would be a cruel thing. It would be like having a bunch of children who are being watched by the babysitter and saying, well, that's a bad hierarchy. We shouldn't have a babysitter, so they play in the road.

Hierarchies are here for a reason, and so here are the victim categories, and this goes on ad infinitum, but you have income, you have gender, race, sexual minorities, that's the word they're using now, disabilities, et cetera.

You have all these different victim categories who are the victims of hierarchies, so the victims of authority structures that have been used against them is the idea, and then still being used against them to this day, and what needs to happen is these hierarchies need to be restructured.

We have to rip them down. That's the deconstruction, and then remember intersectionality. We build back up, and we build it in a way in which those former hierarchies are not allowed to abuse their victims, so what are some of the tools used to do this, and these are some of the tools that I see in the church.

This is the syncretism, I think, before us. Corporate apologies is one of those, so this was when you see groups of Christians get together, and they will lament or apologize for how bad the church is, how bad the church has been in the past, especially, and all the horrible things the church has done.

Well, this is part of ripping down those hierarchies. This is part of saying that the church was this hierarchy that existed in society that had all this influence, and it abused that influence by hurting people who weren't part of it, or maybe who were part of it, and the leadership in the church abused them.

Positive rights, so this idea, you know, our constitution was built on negative rights. There are boundaries. Government can only go so far because you have a responsibility before God to pursue life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

That's your God-given responsibility. Rights are tethered to responsibilities. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of the key ones, at least rhetorically, to change that because now it's freedom from fear, freedom from want.

That's not liberty. That's not freedom. That means you're owed something by a central authority, namely the government, and this will promote equality. This is an egalitarian equality, so it is the taking away.

It is the ripping down of hierarchy. It is the idea that those who have abused the poor, those who abuse certain demographics, they need to have their resources taken from them or their positions and given to rectify that situation.

Holistic pro-life, this is one you hear in the church all the time, and this is on steroids now. I mean, there is a website now for pro-life evangelicals who support Joe Biden, and there are some big names in that.

Some Richard Mao is on that. Ron Sider's on that. Jim Wallace is on that, and there's some younger people, too, and there's more joining, but this kind of this logic was first popularized in evangelicalism by Ron Sider, and it's the idea that every, basically even socialist programs, every issue just about seems to be a pro-life issue.

So you have abortion, which is pro-life. He accepts that, but smoking is also a pro-life issue because that's killing people, and the environment, global warming, that's a pro-life issue because that'll kill people, and the list goes on.

Black Lives Matter is a pro-life issue. He got an ovation from the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention two years ago when he said that. These are not pro-life issues.

Pro-life means, and this is historically what it's meant, is that we are against murder. The law of God says, thou shall not murder, and being pro-life means you're against the taking of life, the unjustified taking of life.

Well, what this does is it says quality of life issues are on the same level. So in other words, if you have free health care, let's say, maybe you can live longer if you're someone in a poor income bracket.

Therefore, having free health care becomes a pro-life issue. So it's not no longer about the law of God as it pertains to thou shall not murder. It's about making sure that we implement programs that will give people a better quality of life, and that's on the same moral plane.

I often use the analogy. It would be like going to Nazi Germany and saying, well, we realize there's a lot of Jews in concentration camps and other groups as well, but we're not going to care about those.

We will care about them, but no more than we care about the fact that Nazis also cared about the environment, and we should take that into consideration whether or not we would want to keep Nazism going if there was a choice to vote for Nazism.

Well, that's ridiculous, you'd say, but not if you're buying into the holistic pro-life approach. Of course, the environment would be just as important as a pro-life issue. So the reason I put it in this category is because it is the weasel word.

It's the logic that is being used to convince Christians that reallocating privileges and income, socialism essentially, is important, and that all goes back to the taking down of hierarchies. It comes back to egalitarianism.

We must all have the same outcome. That's pro-life. Hate speech laws. This is also part of this. Anything, and these have gotten ridiculous now, anything that would offend a certain demographic, supposedly, you must have a muzzle on that.

It must be against the law. You must be fired if you said something. I mean, people have sometimes, recordings have popped up of people where they've said something maybe 30 years ago, and now their whole life is turned upside down because of something they may have said offhanded.

It might have been a joke. There might be no context behind it, but it's all about you supported the hegemony. You supported the discourse. You're part of the problem. You must be canceled. This is why, and I've noticed this, there's certain words that you can hear maybe, you know, hundreds of times in certain genres of music, and those people will never be canceled for it.

For instance, like an R &B artist or a, you know, a rap artist or something. They can say some of the filthiest things, but they are not part of the hegemony. So, it doesn't apply to them. So, it's very one-sided, but that's another way to rip down hierarchy.

So, if you find a mode of thinking in someone that is oppressive, you locate it, and you rip them down and make way for someone else who is not oppressive. What are the consequences of this? Well, mission drift, number one in the church, because now the goal of the church is not just to do evangelism.

It is to fight hierarchies. It is to fight oppression, and this becomes part of the problem when you try to have both together. Harvey Kahn was one of Tim Keller's mentors at Westminster Theological Seminary, and he wrote a book, I believe it was the early 90s, about evangelism, and it was about doing justice, in this sense, and spreading the gospel.

You can do both. Well, I'd like to suggest one will eat up the other. You can't have both. You can't add to the Great Commission, and that's what that is. So, it's certainly not wrong to engage in charity.

We're commanded to give to one another. We're commanded to be generous people, but this is outside of the ethic God has given us, and it's also not to be confused or conflated with the Great Commission itself, but that's what we're seeing.

It also creates a new order of sin. I don't know if you've noticed, but there are certain sins that are protected or at least diminished, and other sins that are thought to be the worst things ever, which maybe they're not as bad.

Now, I believe that all sin is sin. All sin is damnable, but there are different levels of sin. Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have said to cities in his day that did not accept his teaching that it would have been better for them if they were Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment.

We would not see different penalties, civil penalties, in the Old Testament law if it weren't for the fact that there are some sins which are more depraved, which show a greater falling away into depravity.

What this does is it changes that order, and I'll give you some examples of that. Tim Keller, I think, was the one that announced this. I think it was two years ago, but Living Out is an organization that Sam Albury heads up, and they put out, I believe it's a 10 or 12 part, essentially, trying to think of the word for it.

It's 10 or 12 points of how a church can make themselves gay accepting. In other words, if someone comes in the church, and they're homosexual, then those who are influenced by this Living Out church audit are to make sure that their church makes them feel as comfortable as possible in their church.

Because churches historically just haven't been very accepting to homosexuals, so this is a way to make them more accepting. Now, we have accountability groups for all sorts of things, right? Alcoholics Anonymous being a good example of that, and that's usually reduced to a disease.

There aren't any accountability groups, let's say, for racism, right? As soon as someone's a racist, they're canceled, they're done, it's over, it's bad. But something like alcoholism is accepted. It's a disease, right?

Homosexuality, like I said, that's just idolatry, and it's the same as heterosexual lust. Those two things are equivocated. I went on the Gospel Coalition website about a year ago, and I just was curious to see, I put in idolatry.

I said, what do they think idolatry is? Because everything that the left thinks is a sin, I've noticed progressive Christians use idolatry to categorize it, because it's not in the Bible as a sin. For instance, loving your country, nationalism, and patriotism, and sometimes other things are conflated.

Gospel Coalition and progressive evangelicals will often say, well, that's just idolatry. Well, you don't find a sin in the Bible about loving your country, but if you love it too much, it could be idolatry, because if you love anything too much, it could be idolatry.

And so that becomes an evil sin. It's the same as nativism. It leads into white supremacy, which is the worst sin of all. But I looked up idolatry. You know what kinds of things you could have as an idol?

Your family, your marriage. These kinds of things, according to Gospel Coalition, are idolatrous, because you could love them more than you love Christ. Now, these are good things God has given us, that God has created.

But do you see how that works? All of a sudden, good things that God has given us become danger zones. You're in danger of sin. You can't love that too much. And one of the problems with homosexuals not feeling welcomed, it's a church in which people have the idolatry of family.

So this easily creates a new hierarchy of sin, because homosexuality isn't as evil now as having an idolatry of family. Alcoholism isn't as evil now as being a racist. You see how this works? So instead of going to the Word of God and seeing what does God say about sin, we're going to the world to get our cues.

J .D. Greer, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, last year, his sermon, I reviewed the sermon, it's called How the Fall Affects Us All. And he said in the sermon this, the Bible only whispers about sexual sin, only whispers.

But it doesn't whisper about greed. So what's worse, greed or sexual sin? You see how we're playing things against each other now to make ourselves more palatable to the world? So you can say, hey, world, look, we're not concerned about your homosexuality.

We just, those capitalists though, those greedy capitalists, we want to get them. That's how this works. New order of sin, subverting leadership qualifications. I gave some examples of this earlier, but this is the idea that now the qualifications given in scripture for what constitutes an elder aren't really enough.

We also need to make sure that we're platforming minority voices. There was a, I believe it was a denomination. I'm trying to remember now. No, I'm conflating two things. There was a state, California, that made a rule recently that on your corporate board, you had to have a minority in order to diversify it, to have to make sure there's another perspective.

Well, this has happened to denominations as well. And I keep picking on the Southern Baptist. That's because I've probably done more research on them than anyone else. But every time they form a committee, they will, they brag about how diverse the committee was, as if that makes the committee better and more wise.

There's nothing in scripture that says diversity of ethnicity or gender makes someone more wise. What makes someone more wise is, do they fear the Lord? Do they understand the scripture? So we're changing the qualifications for leadership.

And I've seen this in churches where they're promoting elders. They're giving people, you know, the guitar so they can lead worship and so forth. Not because, just based on the fact that they're qualified, but they're taking into very strong account whether they're a minority or not.

And this just isn't right. This is, this is discrimination, but they're doing it in the name of anti-discrimination, ripping down hierarchies. And of course, implementing unbiblical hierarchies. And there's a lot of ways I can go with this one.

I showed you the caring well earlier. So pastors need to learn from oppressed perspectives. I think denominations and para-church organizations have gotten into this, where sometimes the local pastor isn't the one with the authority.

It's, and I've told my audience this on internet platforms. I don't have the authority that your pastor has. I'm a guy on the internet. Just because someone, you like to listen to someone and they are, you know, they feel good or you agree with them, it doesn't mean that they are a source of authority.

You, we've been given a source of authority in scripture and it's elders. And they're the ones that watch over our souls. And then there are political consequences for this. Once we start making ripping down hierarchies part of the Christian message, then there's a certain political party in this country, I don't know if you've noticed, that really enjoys ripping down hierarchies and destroying organizations.

And they've done it to sports. We've seen that this year. They've done it to the Boy Scouts. They've done it to a number of historical organizations. Just about every organization that this country has basically held this country together in voluntary association has some kind of a problem with racism or sexism.

Or I mean, the Audubon Institute has a problem. Now the Sierra Club has a problem. You think they're a progressive organization. Well, John Muir was a racist, apparently. So the Sierra Club is now on an apology to her.

It's every organization. And the left loves this. The Democratic Party loves this in our country right now. And because they make their whole entire campaign about supporting the little guy against, it's an underdog campaign because Americans love that kind of story.

But it's a false underdog campaign because behind it are the ones who want to bring in a new hierarchy. There's no such thing as a blank slate. There's no church. There's no organization. There's no government that does not have a hierarchy.

That's inescapable. You cannot have an organization without a hierarchy. Even in just a culture, a small group of people, let's say, that moves to a place like the Pilgrims, someone's going to emerge as the leader.

You're going to have a hierarchy eventually. And the question really isn't whether or not to have a hierarchy, but what does that hierarchy look like? Is it a biblical hierarchy? Socialism, communism, that is a hierarchy.

And it's a very strong one. And there are no mediating institutions to shield you from the power of the all-powerful state. The state becomes God, and it's between the state and the individual. And it's the most cruel form of slavery imaginable.

And that's the kind of hierarchy that will be implemented when we rip down all the other ones. So there are political consequences for this. Reparations is one of the things we're hearing about now. This is about taking the resources from those who are supposedly the oppressors, redistributing.

It is socialism to those who are the have-nots. And we've seen some of this come into Christianity. I have some quotes here. This is from Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary. She's Anglican, I believe, or what's the Episcopalian in the United States?

She's Episcopalian. But in her book I read recently, she talks about global capitalism and corporations and how abusive they are. And their abuse is systemic injustice, exploitation, and environmental degradation.

They treat their workers wrong. I mean, this is a book that has been endorsed by basically a who's who of evangelicalism. And it's blatantly anti-capitalistic. We have John Perkins. I just wanted to throw out a few examples here for you.

John Perkins is one of the bridges between the progressive evangelical movement of the 70s and the woke church movement of today. And Crew, the Conforming Campus Crusade in Los Angeles, uses this curriculum from John Perkins for their missions.

And I'm not free to talk about all of it, but I've received some crazy stories from Crew. And one in particular from California, I believe it was Los Angeles, of a girl who was told essentially to go to a gay arts exhibit and not to evangelize everyone, but just to learn how homosexuals think, who they are, and to get rid of her straight bias.

And it was part of her work as a mission. And this is what people are giving to Crew, because they think it's spreading the gospel. Some of it's going to things like this. You need to go learn from the gay perspective.