Justin Giboney's TGC Talk

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I've had a backlog of videos and presentations people have wanted me to review, and because of the

SBC and all sorts of other things, I've said, no, can't do it right now. And I don't always get to review everything either that people send me, but there have been a few things that multiple people have asked me, could you talk about this?

And this is one of them. Justin Gaboney is one of the founders, co -founder of the AND Campaign, along with Michael Ware.

And I've talked about the AND Campaign before, but this particular video is about, it says the lies that serve us

Christians in critical race theory. So he's talking about critical race theory, and this is from the Gospel Coalition, TGC Talks.

So the Gospel Coalition is the one that is featuring this. And so I thought this will be a great opportunity to together go through it.

I haven't listened to it yet, but because I know some of you are in situations where you're at conferences or you're hearing a sermon, and sometimes you're wondering, okay, what's getting by me and what's not?

What should I focus on? What should I listen for? I thought this would be a really good exercise in that of, okay, when am

I gonna pause it? What kinds of things am I going to, how would I approach this?

How, if there are problems in this talk, which I'm pretty certain there will be, what are they and how do

I identify them? That's the purpose of this. So let's start it, Gospel Coalition, Justin Gaboney, The Lies That Serve Us Christians and Critical Race Theory.

We all hate the lies that falsely accuse us or misrepresent our intentions.

We're rightfully indignant when others bear false witness at our expense or at the expense of those who we deem worthy of our compassion.

But what about the lies that serve our purposes? What about the false narratives that absolve us?

The cultural myths that glorify us and the mischaracterizations that obstruct our opposition?

My question is, what do we do with the lies that are useful? The lies that artificially boost what we consider to be a good cause.

Lies can come in many different forms. Intellectual dishonesty, pretext, conflation, overly broad label, straw man arguments, et cetera.

And we all hope right now that what he's gonna say is that's what critical race theory does. It forwards this political operation agenda and it's based on a false myth about systemic racism in America today.

I don't think that's what he's gonna do, but we're all hoping for it, right? When given this introduction. And unfortunately, the

American church's ongoing debate about racial justice is full of all variety of lies, especially the lies that serve those who would rather not talk about the subject at all.

Let's be honest. We're all expected to lie to protect certain cultural narratives.

Okay, so I'm gonna stop it right here. One of the things I want you to notice is how serious this accusation is.

I think sometimes because of the way it's delivered or we're used to hearing it, we miss how serious this is.

He's saying that the American church and he didn't really qualify it much. Just the American church is engaged in a lie.

That's a serious accusation to make. So I just want you to hear that as we go forward because if that's really happening, if that's really a serious thing like that is taking place, we ought to be, we need to know what this is.

We ought to be engaging it, right? So this is something that pulls you in wanting to listen, what's the lie?

Refusing to promote the myths that glorify our ethnic or ideological identity is considered disloyal.

So is he talking about critical race theory again? What do we do? We pretend.

Some conservatives pretend that Christians lived in a moral golden age before the liberals took over.

Some progressives pretend that whiteness is responsible for almost all sins and pathologies and those things might be flattering, but they're lies.

There was no golden age of morality in a country that enslaved people and constantly used color as a reason to deny human dignity.

And every culture has plenty of sins and pathologies of its own making.

Okay, so he's, I think I know where he's going with this.

This sounds to me like this is the trying to go for a middle ground moderation.

Hey, these guys over here are extreme. These guys over here are extreme. I'm the one that's got kind of the balance, the third way type of thinking.

And notice kind of the way he's setting it up. So he, the category he initially takes from conservatives is mythology.

Now every culture does, he's right about this. Every culture, I think he might've said ethnicity, but cultures have legends, myths, if you will.

Sometimes, and that's not necessarily, I mean, you can use the word myth as if something's not true, which is why it's not always the most helpful word to use.

Sometimes I like to use the word legend, but there is a positive use of the word myth where it's just, these are social, these are stories that help social bonds form because they're, everyone has them, knows about them.

They become the lingua franca. Sometimes they teach moral lessons. People will form identity based on them, gain inspiration from them.

George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, Pecos Bill, and riding the whirlwind.

Abraham Lincoln is a huge symbol right now, or was up until, I don't know what's going on with Lincoln exactly.

He's kind of at the crossroads, but a big symbol of national unity, never telling a lie.

These are kinds of things that promote national unity. America is a young country, so we don't have as much as maybe another country that has recorded their history for thousands of years and still celebrates things that happened thousands of years ago.

And we do with Christmas, right? But it's not uniquely American. Anyway, what

I wanted to say is that you can tell that Justin Gaboni, look at the categories he's using. So on the right, if you will, conservative side, he points to legend, a legend of a golden age, right?

So that there's, that there was something better. There was something valuable that we've lost that we need to kind of get back to, right?

This is the make America great again stuff, kind of. On the progressive side, he points to their metaphysic, their ideological metaphysic, where everything is connected to white supremacy in some way.

So these are two different things because on, he's not, so the metaphys, he's not like comparing apples with apples necessarily here.

So he's trying to position himself in the middle, but he's not taking, let's say the ethics, we'll say.

He's not taking like the ethics of the right and the ethics of the left and comparing them. He's trying to, and I would, for lack of a better term,

I wish I had a better term, but it's almost like a cheap shot to take against the right in a way, to try to say, well, their problem is they're looking for this golden age.

And that's such a huge problem. It's just what, I mean, is it destroying people's lives? Is it shutting down business?

What's that doing? As opposed to the progressive left, the social justice side, making decisions to cancel people in businesses and break things based on the idea that everyone's a white supremacist, right?

Or so many things are that really aren't, but because they use critical race theory to make those logical leaps, they somehow recruit people into white supremacy who aren't.

So I would suggest his scale is kind of broken from the beginning. It's just not quite a fair comparison.

And I think it's that way on purpose. And oftentimes, I hear Tim Keller doing this. I hear a lot of guys who preach social justice in Christianity do this.

They try to take something that they can criticize. They're looking for things they can criticize on the right. And they often will take something that's just so minor compared to what they criticize on the left, right?

So take something like abortion on the left, right? And then on the right, well, they wanna stop illegal migration.

Now, I believe we should, or they believe in border security, et cetera, and it's white nationalism, however they wanna phrase that.

It's not really a fair comparison. And I would quibble, and I have quibbled in many videos with that interpretation of that position.

But even if, let's say everything they're saying is legitimate, let's say everything Tim Keller and Russell Moore say about immigration is legitimate, you still have abortion over here, right?

So the scale is, it's the mountain in the molehill.

And I see that dynamic playing out with Justin Gaboni right now a little bit. He wants to take something that's kind of a legend, something that's really, it's not affecting people's lives.

Now, maybe he thinks it is, but it's not like critical race theory is. And he wants to make that out to be kind of like, that's on the same plane.

Now, what that does is it takes the critical race theory stuff, and it basically brings it down, it flattens everything.

So that, yeah, the right has problems, the left has problems, and they're right here. They're both kind of flat. But we need to transcend them, or be in the middle, or something like that.

So I know I'm only two minutes in. I should probably stop talking. But I will say this too.

I probably should address what he actually said, that the right has this idea that there's this golden age.

I don't know of anyone, and look, I know some people who are really rah, rah, rah America. I don't know that anyone thinks that there's a quote, they would agree with that statement, that they believe that there's a golden age.

I think, and I know I certainly wouldn't phrase it that way. I wouldn't say there was a golden age. I think when we look at some of the problems we have today, abortion being one of them, but just the assumptions that come with postmodernism and Marxism, and then we look back even 30 years, we can see that it is so much better.

And I wanna let you, sort of bring you into something here, just for a moment. Trust me, we will watch the end of the video, but I wanna let you know this.

Conservatives tend, real conservatives, I should say, paleo -conservatives, the conservatives of even 15 years ago and before, 20 years ago and before, they tend to evaluate things based on condition, and progressives tend to evaluate things based on status.

You're gonna see this, and once you hear this, you're gonna start seeing it everywhere. In the immigration debate, you're gonna see that.

Condition, status. The left likes everything to be equal, right?

This sort of theoretical status, everyone must be equal. Voting laws, you'll see the same things.

It's like almost everything. The left wants everyone to be equal in this theoretical way, even if they're equally miserable, well, at least they're equal, right?

And conservatives tend to look at status. They tend to look at things and say, okay, this might not be the ideal situation, but look, we need a border.

This situation's going to be worse. The condition is going to be worse if we allow this to continue or to happen.

So they're making laws and evaluating things based on condition. The left evaluates things based on status, and that's one of the reasons,

I think, when you even go back in history, and conservatives will look at,

I actually just did a section on this in my book that I'm writing, that conservatives will look at, okay, what was the socioeconomic position of black people, the fidelity of black families, the morality, incarcerations, they'll look at all these metrics, and they'll say, okay, when were they doing better?

When were they doing worse? When were they improving? When were they going downhill? Is that connected to policies?

They try to evaluate. Thomas Sowell does this all the time, right? Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams. And that's what they're looking at.

They're looking at condition. The left says, wait, hold on. You're comparing a time before integration and saying, well, at least the family was more intact.

That's so horrible because everyone needs to be equal. And conservatives generally say, well, yeah, no, we're not for segregation, but we're just pointing out that there's actually more significant things at play that affected the condition, which is the more important metric in our minds of black families.

And so they have totally different ways of evaluating things. So oftentimes when the right looks back, when conservatives look back, they're looking at condition.

What was America like? What were the families in America like? How were they doing?

Were they together? Were babies being killed everywhere? What was the moral fabric of the country like?

What was playing on the radio stations? So they're looking at all these kinds of things and they can still critique it and say, yeah, because every time is going to have problems.

Yeah, hey, look, we don't agree with this segregation. That wasn't good. And they can look at a number of different things and say, we don't agree with that.

We don't agree with that. We don't agree with that. But they're looking at a condition, not a status. So this is one of the things I think Justin Gabon is probably missing because he's probably approaching this with a more status -minded, progressive -minded assumption.

But ultimately what I think he's doing is he's taking a real problem over here and then taking something that's really not affecting a whole lot of people's lives and he's equalizing them to make the right and the left somehow equally on a moral plane.

And they're just not. Which doesn't deny the fact that majority culture is responsible for a lot of injustice and dysfunction.

We should be - What's majority culture, by the way? One of the things to ask progressives is to define that.

What do you mean by that? Because usually they just boil it down to it's white power, basically. That's majority culture. But as many of you know, if you travel the country,

I'm about to go to my 49th state. And I know I'm young, but this is my goal.

I wanna get to all 50 of them, okay? And as far as cross -cultural experiences, it's just been, what,

Mexico, Canada, and Turkey. I've been to Turkey. But as far as this country is concerned, you go to different places.

Go to Minnesota, you go to California, go to Mississippi, go to Massachusetts, right? Go to these different places.

And is there a white power, majority culture thing going on?

It's more nuanced, it's more complex than that.

It is just so different depending on where you go and Dutch people that immigrated here are different than English people who immigrated here, are different than people in, let's just face it, everyone's different than people in California.

I can say that, I was born in California. Anyway, all that to say, there's all kinds of different,

I just think it's an oversimplification to just say that. But I'd never heard really that question asked.

Like, hey, define that for me. What do you mean majority culture? And why in the world are you putting everyone in this kind of bag?

When the Irish came here, they faced all kinds of barriers. When the Italians came here, they faced all kinds of barriers. Jewish people faced barriers.

And I can give you examples of those things. And normally in a lot of the demographic studies, Jewish people are, they are contained in, if you're looking at like socioeconomic income, et cetera, it will be white people, it would include

Jewish people. So like, are all these different quote unquote white people groups, are they all equal?

Because it makes it sound like they're all like together to oppress or something like that. All right, let's keep going.

Be able to acknowledge the brokenness in all of us without resorting to false equivalencies.

He just did what I would consider to be a false equivalency. Or suggesting that some people are responsible for their own oppression.

The Bible shows us that promoting. Now, notice how he phrased it, oppression. Some people are responsible for their own oppression.

Some people are responsible for, there's various reasons. I mean, you see whole nations being oppressed.

And they're responsible for it because nation of Israel, God's chosen people, right? They were responsible for some of like the captivity because they did not follow the covenant.

He uses the word oppression though here on purpose. If there's a disparity between certain people groups, right?

There is a disparity actually right now between quote unquote white people and Asian people. Does that mean

I'm oppressed because of that? There's a huge disparities on many different levels for people in Appalachia who are predominantly white than the rest of the country.

Does that mean that it's all the result of oppression? Now I can point you to things that,

I can put you a number of things actually that I could weave a whole narrative of oppression. But number one, it's not helpful.

Number two, there are some legitimate personal responsibility things and lifestyle things and cultural things that contribute to this state of affairs.

People from a lot of Asian countries tend to study really hard. They tend to have higher levels of education.

They tend to get better jobs financially. That's not because they're oppressing me.

And so maybe it's complicated. Maybe there's a number of factors, but to choose the word oppression is very, that's a careful choice that he made here.

Why don't you just say in poverty, disparity? I don't know, but let's see what he's gonna say.

The lies that serve our purposes is nothing new. As is often the case, those with position and privilege rarely receive the reproach of those of lesser station with humility and grace.

That's because power rooted in this world is usually very insecure and obsessed with self -preservation.

I actually agree with a lot of that. I think that's true. But I see that as being characteristic of academia, entertainment industry, the news industry, major media, political, it is an industry, the political industry.

I see that as the elites that are mostly pushing the social justice agenda that this would characterize.

By the time we get to Matthew 26, the religious leaders have resolved to kill Jesus, to rid themselves of this nuisance that was exposing their lies and undermining their authority.

And verse 59 tells us that they're now looking for false evidence to prove that Jesus had been blaspheming.

They would eventually find witnesses to corroborate the allegation that he planned to destroy the temple.

Now they didn't make this claim up out of nowhere, but they did twist his words and take them out of context.

Small details, I guess, for such a serious crime. You see, the lies were convenient and they served their purposes.

They were presented perhaps in such a way that they could be rationalized by those claiming to still uphold the ninth commandment.

Again, we see similar tactics in the debate about race in the church.

I'm gonna stop it here. Realize what he's saying too, again. This is one of the reasons you know social justice is a different religion.

It's one of the reasons you know that this chasm is extremely wide.

This isn't just some in -house like, oh, they just disagree a little bit about ethics here or a little bit about politics, but they're united.

He's accusing those who would use national mythologies for their own power, et cetera, as being

Pharisees. They're doing the same thing that the Pharisees did. In the same level of deception the

Pharisees used against Jesus is what they're doing. So this is kind of like a big, whichever group he's accusing this of, this is kind of big.

And I think he's still trying to strike that balance. I think he's saying maybe there's extremes on both sides who do this, I'm guessing.

If you know anything about the end campaign, you know it is very far left. You know Justin Gaboni is pretty far left.

But let's just keep seeing what he says, see if he kind of like starts defining who he's talking about here with more definition than just, because think about it.

Someone who's conservative, right? Who just looks at the past. The only thing he's really given us is that, well, they think there was a golden age, right?

Okay, you think there's a golden age. That is leading to you're a Pharisee.

Like just listen to these sort of jumps that he's making here, pretty serious.

Christians have resolved to maintain the position that all demands for racial justice are overblown.

And they're willing to employ all manner of useful lies. Okay, so he's talking about conservatives.

This isn't, he's not talking about the left guys. He's talking about conservatives right now. To bolster that argument.

One way we do this is by romanticizing American history. Acting like virulent racism was just a small blip in an otherwise pristine historical record.

Or pretending the explicit racism in our laws existed so long ago that it couldn't possibly still linger in our systems and institutions.

Well, that's absurd. Actually, what he's saying is kind of absurd. So yeah, you can locate actual laws that divided people by race and customs.

Once those things have been done away with, once those things are off the books, once those things have been voted down by representatives of the people, by majorities, by our representatives, people have basically spoken and said, we don't agree with this.

To keep saying, well, you know, it's, this is still, and don't miss this, this is still the fundamental thing that America's about.

Because that's what the other side is saying. He's kind of minimizing the target by saying, well, you'd be crazy not to say that, you know, there's still some lingering effects of these things.

Lingering effects in the sense that there are people, individuals who have racially insensitive ideas and well, they show partiality.

Well, that's inescapable, that's humanity. You're always gonna have that. But in this, he's talking about systems and structures.

So like the criminal justice system, for instance, to say that, well, this is just, it's racist because of those laws that have been rejected by people that are off the books.

You're gonna have to show, you're gonna have to prove, you're gonna have to, and it's not, showing a disparity doesn't do it. You're gonna have to, it's a big uphill battle you have to climb in order to actually show that.

The onus is on them to show this, but they wanna turn it around and make the onus, so the burden of proof, on people like myself to say, for me to be on the defensive so that I can be like, well,

I guess that's possible. And if I can see that it's possible that there might be racism in a structure, quote unquote, or an institution, then they end up going the extra mile and saying, well, then there is racism.

So it's an assumption they have that there is racism, that is systemic, that it is affecting this, but they can't really point to it.

They can't show you. The examples are like police shootings that are at the very best for them.

They're examples of individual officers or maybe a certain department here or there that have racial insensitivities.

More often than not, it's not that though. You can't even find where the racial element is.

It's just, they insert it, they assume it. It's an assumption that's being made. And Justin Gaboni is doing that again here, but it's kind of like, it's making you feel crazy because he's saying, well, it's absurd.

If you don't see it, if you don't think that there's racism in systems, then you're the one that's absurd.

You're the crazy one. And I like to turn it around. No, I'm not. You show me, show me where it is.

If you can show me, then I'll stand against it with you. If someone is being treated wrong because of the color of their skin or there's violence against them or there's disparaging things being said about them, hey, look, let's you and me right now, we'll go and take care of it.

But that's not what's going on. I'd like to remind you that Jim Crow and mass incarceration and redlining and black veterans exclusion from the

GI Bill all happened within the lifetime of some of the people watching now.

So here's, so this is the same tactic Phil Vischer uses. This is really all Michelle Alexander, the new

Jim Crow. That's what this is, which I read a few years ago, year ago. And so he, the rhetorical, the reason that it's rhetorically powerful is because they can just like name a bunch of things.

So he just named like four things and be like, look, all this stuff happened and it happened within a lifetime of some people who are still alive.

Now, my grandfather was born in 1922. He's still alive. He remembers, he actually down the street from him was a guy who he was friends with, who was a former slave, literally a former slave that remembered getting captured in Africa and told my grandfather the story.

My grandfather is still alive. So, I mean, you could even say that, hey, there's even slaves who were alive in the lifetime of some people that are still alive today.

And that would be true. That would be a true statement. But the real, it's shifting the question from is it today affecting things in your here and now daily life?

Is it the cause of these disparities, right? Like he just mentioned mass incarceration.

So he's already going to the disparities here. Are these things the cause of the disparities or is it something else?

Is it because of a red lining that you have these disparities or is it something else?

Now, interestingly, I'm gonna do another video about this soon. I did though, if you look at the one I did of Phil Vischer's Race in America, I showed you how during this period of time,

I showed you black homeownership. I showed you a lot of different economic statistics just to prove that, look, the mass incarceration, the gap in homeownership, these aren't things that were like so much worse back when all of the things that Justin Gammoni just mentioned were happening.

In fact, a lot of these things have gotten worse since then. In other words, since the civil rights bills, since the great society, things have gotten worse in many of these respects.

Many of these disparities have grown is what I'm trying to say. Why is that? Why have many of these disparities gotten worse?

And I think that it's because there's actually a lot of other factors going on. And maybe the ones that Justin Gammoni is pointing to aren't the significant ones.

Maybe there's something culturally going on. Maybe there's something about fatherlessness and government stepping in and acting, incentivizing out -of -wedlock births, acting like the father, the provider.

Maybe there's something about that that is contributing to this. Maybe there's something, the cultural thing. Maybe, and you can look at some of the

R &B music and stuff and you can see this trajectory in a way. It's not like the old blues. Anyway, not to get off on that because I'm gonna spend a lot more time on that in a future video, but there's an assumption behind all this.

Justin Gammoni is selling you something. He's not identifying his assumptions though. So you just, many people who hear this, they just buy it.

Oh yeah, well that makes sense. I'm gonna make a connection between the disparity in mass incarceration and redlining.

Okay, that's, they're all connected somehow. Well, maybe not, maybe there isn't that direct connection.

The impacts of those things don't disappear just because the thought of them. Question, when do they disappear?

Is there any time they disappear? Jewish people, even the ones who immigrated from Germany after the

Holocaust and Poland, et cetera. Think about Armenians who came over, right?

Fleeing genocide in Armenia, in Turkey. Think about the

Chinese people who came over, worked on the railroad, faced lots of barriers, believe me.

Japanese people, I mean, they were put in internment camps, many of them, during World War II.

There's a lot of different things I could point to and I could show you that in many of these different groups, they're, like I just mentioned,

Asians have higher incomes and higher wealth in general.

How did they close the gap? How did they, within a very short period of time, become as successful as they are?

Jewish people, they make religious Jews, I guess it's

Orthodox Jews, I'm trying to remember the study that I was looking at last week, make four and a half times in family income as the general population on average.

Why is that? Why could a people that have experienced so much hardship and suffering and all these things that are supposed to be haunting them still, how come in such a short period of time, they were able to overcome that?

It's a legitimate question, guys. And Justin Gabonese, where's he going with this?

Does he acknowledge that those people, their experiences have been different?

And why have they been? These are logical questions that need to be answered, but they're not, they're not being asked. It's something we don't like.

Why is it that some Christians will actually become irate when you bring up verifiable facts about the history of race in America?

I believe that it's because their pride can't process the truth.

Or maybe it's because those things are being used against others as a wedge. That's why a lot of people that I've seen get angry about it get angry about it.

Why are you bringing up slavery? I didn't own slaves. I'll speak for myself. I don't, you know, my line, my direct line going back, there's no slave owners.

Why is it that you bring this up against me? And even if there were, that's not me. Am I responsible for this?

Is there something that I have to do? So it's the assumption behind why they're being brought up.

It's not like people are just all of a sudden historical nerds walking around, just citing facts about history, any fact about history.

No, there's activists citing particular facts that they can use as a wedge to serve their political purpose.

That's why people are upset. Nothing, it's not necessarily to do with pride. The truth is

America has some exceptional achievements and some exceptional transgressions.

It reminds me of when the religious leaders just couldn't handle hearing Peter reminding them about what they did to Jesus.

They wanted to be lied to. When it serves us, we tell lies through pretext, meaning we justify our actions by claiming good motives while concealing our real intentions.

It's just, again, it's like the religious leaders claiming to be protecting the temple when they really just wanted to crucify

Christ. What he's doing now is he's just questioning people's motives. That's all this is. And it's,

I don't know. It doesn't come across as particularly interesting because we've heard this kind of thing so many times probably.

But it's just, the reason that you do this is because you're a Pharisee. That's the reason you do it.

And there are other possibilities that I've just mentioned that don't include being a Pharisee.

That tactic has been used throughout history to deny justice.

As you know, reconstruction was a short period after the Civil War when our government attempted to reset a nation that had undergone a most necessary fracture.

I would quibble with reset, but. Booker T. Washington called it a time of storms and stress.

But he also noted that it gave rise to brilliant political leaders in the newly enfranchised race.

At the height of reconstruction, around 2 ,000 African Americans held elected office, including in the

United States Senate. Again, this was only a few years after emancipation.

But these achievements would be short -lived because lies would prevail.

Unreconstructed Confederates would begin to massacre black communities to prevent them from enjoying full citizenship.

This is way, way, way, way oversimplified. There's actually a book.

Oh, goodness, let me see. Okay, hold on, hold on one second. Okay, so I found the books. If you are someone who likes to read a lot,

I would recommend this. This is called The Story of Reconstruction by Robert Self Henry. It's kind of thick.

If you really wanna know reconstruction, I'd read that book. The other one is, if you don't have a lot of time, Southern Reconstruction by Philip Lee.

It's kind of a newer book, but it does a good job. If you wanna know more about Jim Crow segregation,

I would read The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Van Woodward. And these are all great books that give you,

I think, a really good insight into the situation, the why there were poisoned race relations, how that developed.

And what Justin Gaboni is telling you is way oversimplified. And I've talked about it a little bit before.

If you watched the video I did on Phil Fisher's Race in America, I talked about it.

I will probably talk about it again more in the future. Reconstruction studies are poisoned, worse than Civil War studies at this point.

Only attributing everything, all the evils and maladies and the horrible things that happen in this country are just, the

South gets to, Southern white people get to bear that whole burden. They're not talking about carpetbaggers or what the

Freedmen's Bureau did or what the Union League did or how, in some ways, there's almost like a parallel to the way the

Democrats treat black people today and the way the Republican Party did at that time and I'm not saying they're exactly parallel, but there's similarities in using people the way that the parties did.

There's, anyway, there's a lot more that could be said, but because we don't have a lot of time, I'm not gonna go over everything.

Just suffice it to say, here's some resources if you hear that and you wanna be educated on it more.

Let's keep going here so we can get through this. The Southern states would paint even the federal government's most lackluster efforts to restore order as violations of states' rights and federal troops would eventually withdraw almost completely.

Well, it kinda was. You're passing amendments to the Constitution and you don't even have all the states that supposedly, under Lincoln's theory, never left, represented there.

So there's even some thought that some of those amendments aren't even legitimate because they didn't do it the legal way that it should've been done and they made, the

Radical Republicans made as a barrier to basically become part of the Union again, even though they never left, according to Lincoln.

Anyway, you have to accept some of these amendments, et cetera. So yeah, there's been a lot of, and it's not just the

South, by the way. If you look, especially before the Civil War, there was a lot of challenges, states' rights type challenges and even talk of secession and that kind of stuff from the

North, states in the North, and today you even see it on the West Coast, which is interesting.

But Justin Gaboni is, everything is just one shade, and it seems like, in this guy's mind, it seems like it's ideological thinking, and I've talked about that in the last few podcasts.

What an ingeniously evil ploy. Federal intervention to prevent slaughter was said to actually be an unlawful occupation, an un -American violation of federalism.

Confederates would re... Yes, the federal troops who just killed all kinds of civilians, the ones in Sherman's army especially, and all kinds of slaves and black people, in fact, a million of them dying or being diseased after the war, those are the people that are coming down to protect.

This is not, this is cartoon history you're getting right here, and it's sad to me, because it doesn't do, not only does it oversimplify the narrative, but it attributes the problems.

If you get the wrong problem, you're gonna get the wrong solution in many cases. If you identify the wrong problem and say, well, the reason these people are not doing so well and there's disparities is because they were put down.

Years ago, they were put down, and that's what's happening. You're going to think, well, that's clearly the problem, and it's to goad you into thinking that's still the problem, and it's just not.

Could it be a fraction here or there? I mean, I'm willing to talk to someone about it, but when we actually look at actual numbers and we try to find actual causes, we don't come up with this narrative.

And this narrative, from a historical standpoint, this narrative is, it would actually reveal lies and hatred against quote -unquote white people.

That's what I'm getting from this. Reclaim their land and reclaim their cause, and black representation was wiped out for decades because the union chose a fraudulent unity over true justice.

Did you know, I just was reading about this recently, black people broke in large numbers to vote for Woodrow Wilson.

I thought that was interesting. I thought Woodrow Wilson. And you know, Frank FDR, you usually think FDR. Woodrow Wilson, though, was a

Democrat, because why are a lot of black people primarily voting Democrat in the

United States? He used to vote Republican, right? And Woodrow Wilson was one of those candidates that a lot of black people started breaking for to vote for Wilson, who is like the quintessential now white supremacist president, right?

He's been canceled from a number of places, and he did actually have some progressive white supremacist views. But maybe there's other concerns.

Maybe there's economic concerns. Maybe there's other things going on that would cause that. So, I mean, there was never a point where maybe other than, right, during and after the

Civil War, right after, when black people could not vote.

There were, there was restrictions. There were, it's very true that there was racism going on that was preventing them in certain areas, but it really did depend on your area.

And there was never really a time when none of, no one can vote just because you're black. There wasn't like a law that's like, well, if you're black, you can't vote.

There's more creative ways to do that. But black people did vote. And ironically, when all this stuff was at its height, a lot of them voted for Woodrow Wilson, a progressive

Democrat at that time. So, not a Republican, it's, I don't know, I'm getting carried away a little here on my own interests, but oversimplifying again from Justin Gaboney.

I'm gonna try to just keep my mouth shut and let him get through this narrative because I don't want to stop at every two seconds. Just as many are urging the church to do today,

Reconstruction's end is an example of pretextual lies. It's also an example of reconciliation without a full reckoning.

Reconciliation without a repentant spirit just doesn't work. Today, many are using the threat of Marxism as pretext to avoid reckoning with the church's race problem.

They're conflating biblically sound pleas for justice with clear distortions.

No, we're not. Now, to be clear, Marxism does present a real threat to truth and moral order.

But Marxism and critical theories aren't wrong. How? This is the one question that I think decimates the left, the social justice side that tries to be

Christian. How? Because they have an obligation to say Marxism is wrong. Tell me why.

And if the thing that they say is, well, it's atheistic, materialistic, and if it's not the ethics of Marxism, then you identify right there, that's the issue.

That's usually what happens. I'm not a Marxist. I'm not an atheist. I'm not a Marxist. I'm not a materialist. Well, I'm not a

Marxist. I disagree with this or that, but is it the ethics of Marxism? Because if it's not the ethics of Marxism, you have the same goals as the

Marxists. If you agree with them on the ethics, you're trying to get to the same kind of place, basically. You just don't agree with their foundation.

So practically speaking, you're in favor of the same stuff. For critiquing abuses of power and means of exploitation, the

Bible does the same. They are, however, perilous and unbiblical where they often tell lies to strengthen their arguments.

According to the law of God, the Bible is against abuses of power because it's in a violation of God's law.

That's why. So anyone who's critiqued critical race theory or Marxism, what was it,

Jonathan Lehman had said a while ago, like, oh, you know, intersectionality and Christianity, they're co -belligerents, kind of like,

I think he said like France and America are two allied countries against the Nazis, something like that.

And my question was like, well, who's the Nazis then? Because the target of the critical race theorists, they say it's white supremacy, et cetera.

Now they're saying Christian nationalism, a lot of them, but it is, it's Western civilization.

It's Christian civilization that they're after, that they wanna take out. So we're being co -belligerents with them?

So that's the key thing. Where does the law of God fit into this? But they essentialize our identities and spurn truth to flatten reality.

The reality is one's race, class, or gender can often tell us something about their experiences, but it tells us nothing about their character or competence.

Suggesting otherwise might make for a cleaner and easier argument, but it's a lie.

There are men who are honest. There are women who are honest. There are men who are dishonest. There are women who are dishonest.

There are black leaders who represent their people with integrity and white leaders who represent their community with integrity.

And there are folks on both ends that only represent their own ambition. Are there really white leaders who represent their communities with integrity?

I would be curious who the names of those people are. Because generally, quote unquote, white people want to represent

Americans or their local area or something like that. They would never say, I'm representing the white community.

I just think that's interesting. Who does Justin Gabonese think, wouldn't they be white nationalists or something?

And that takes nothing away from the importance of representation. But it is our reality in a broken world.

The point is our identities often tell us less than some critical theorists would have us believe.

Still, not every mention of racial justice is Marxist or a promotion of critical race theory.

Can you see how vague he's getting? Now, let's see if he gets specific. Because there's not much you can sink your teeth into this.

And this is one of the problems in Christianity, especially people who push this, is they're so vague and it sounds kind of good and you want to agree with it because you don't want to be an extremist.

But what is he actually saying? I don't, it's kind of fluffy. I don't even,

I don't know who he's talking about, what he's talking about. To conflate every demand for racial justice with the worst aspects of critical race theory is deceitful.

To label everyone who's concerned with social justice as a Marxist is intellectually dishonest.

Yeah, except that social justice, the term itself, and I'm not talking about the

Catholic, there's a Catholic kind of teaching that goes back that it was not popular, it was not,

I know the Heritage Foundation wants to reclaim it, it's not a historically viable, I mean, you can try, but it's not gonna happen.

Where we get social justice is from Americans who are Fabian socialists, like Walter Rauschenbusch.

That's where we get the term social justice today. It's socialism by a different name. That's all it is.

And there's a, I write about it in the book that I'm writing now, it's in the first chapter, but this is, he's trying to make a separation from Marxism from social justice.

And I mean, you sort of can, I guess, today's social justice is so thoroughly influenced by Marxism, I don't know that you can do that.

But if someone wanted to say, well, I believe in social justice, but not Marxism, and they wanted to trace it back to Fabian socialism, which isn't, they might say that they're not really

Marxist, I guess you can sort of try to do all sorts of gymnastics, but it's just not helpful, it's not, it doesn't really communicate much.

And at the end of the day, it's like, so what? You believe pretty much the same things Marx believed. So, on many key fundamental issues, so.

It's a lie. It's a lie that's useful because it evades the true merits of the best arguments by centering the worst arguments.

Have you noticed we're over 10 minutes into this, and he started out, I thought he was gonna go that middle direction, hey, there's these really extreme critical race theory types, there's these really extremist

Christian nationalist types, and now we are almost 10 minutes in and he's just railing against the conservatives, that's what this is.

To center critical race theory in a conversation about race when black Christians have been fighting and weighing in on the subject for hundreds of years before critical race theory was even a thing, is wickedly insincere.

All right, okay, so this is what we'll do then. I got here, right? Maybe Justin Gaboni will go for this. We will say that anything associated with, okay,

I don't, we'll say derivatives of Marxism, any derivatives stemming from Rousseau or Marx, or who else do we wanna put in there?

Liberation theology, we'll put that in there, right? But that would be included, that's a Marxist derivative, so we don't have to say that.

We'll say Marx, Rousseau, and transcendentalists and Unitarians of the 19th century, because they're all heretics, right?

And they're all, well, they're all false teachers, heretics, or just rank anti -Christians.

Let's say that any of the ideas stemming from them, we disqualify, and we say, because they conflict with the

Bible. And let's just break everything down into sort of this. Let's say that the idea that we can have, that all these various hierarchies and institutions are preventing social equality from happening, and that social equality is an egalitarian flatlining of everyone so that they have the same status, and that we need a central authority to maintain that status and to get rid of these mediating institutions and hierarchies that are preventing it from taking place, that whatever you wanna call that, whatever label you wanna put to that, that that is not

Christianity, that that is against Christianity because of what Paul instructs about hierarchy in the New Testament, because of the way that Christians are supposed to be reformational and not revolutionary, because of the skepticism that we, well, because the state, the modern state, takes the place of God, because that the justice itself ends up being an egalitarian equality of outcome instead of equality before the law, which is what biblical justice is in a civil setting.

Let's just say that any of those ideas, any idea that would also say that you can delegitimize the views of, quote unquote, majority cultures or certain institutions because they don't have a certain level of oppression, of experience with oppression, is also against the

Bible because it's actually, it destroys the idea of objective truth, it's subjective.

It lets man make these determinations. Let's just put all of that in a bag and say, look, whatever you wanna call that, that's not

Christianity, that's disqualified, okay? That would, sure, that predates critical race theory.

Goes back a long way. We could go right back to the French Revolution if you want. And that's the issue.

It's not the label, it's the ideas. I think sometimes social justice advocates would rather it be the label in a way because they can always push their ideas using different labels.

They don't have to. They can say, well, I'm against critical race theory, but y 'all have white privilege and need to check your privilege and they can do that kind of thing.

So, all right, let's keep going. Don't simply argue against the disheveled postmodern academic who knows nothing about biblical justice.

Argue against Christians like Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer. I have. Hamer. And I should say with respect in some ways, but I do argue with some of the things that, well, anyway, let's let him keep talking.

Reverend William Augustus Jones, who coupled orthodoxy and orthopraxy, who stood 10 toes down on scripture while living out their faith under the sword of oppression.

And if you listen to them close enough, you'll realize that American racism has always done much of the work that you fear

Marxism would do. It's undermined the family. It's undermined the church and turned it against itself.

It's robbed people. I'm gonna be honest. He brought up a name I haven't heard of, William Augustus Jones, and maybe I have and I just forgot, but I just, so I just searched him real quick just to see if I was forgetting something.

And I guess he's an activist affiliated with Al Sharpton, Pentecostal. I'm drawn a blank.

I don't know, unfortunately, who he's talking about there. So I can't really comment on it. Earnings defiled women, violated religious freedom and denied individual liberty.

So when you don't get the response you expect from talking about Marxism, it's probably because we already know that racism has done the same thing.

The idols that some Christians are protecting have already produced the outcomes they fear from Marxism.

Some Christians are. I think he's trying to say that racism has produced what

Marxism also produces. I don't even know how,

I don't even know how to. It doesn't make any sense. He has to argue for it before I can comment on it.

So worried about the Marxist barbarians at the gate that they've been completely ignored, the white nationalists who are already in the temple.

Name them, who are they? If we're ever going to address the race problem faithfully, we must not only confront the lies that offend us, but also the lies that serve us.

Because no lie can serve the church. Jesus, after all, was the truth.

God bless you. Brought to you from the Gospel Coalition. And that's not surprising.

So it's what we get all the time. It sounded like what Russell Moore would say.

It sounds like what Karen Swallow Pryor might say a speech she might give. It sounds like a speech J .D. Greer would give.

It sounds like, you just fill in the blank. Speech Tim Keller would give. It's kind of the same stuff, which is why

I think I'm used to answering it and why you're probably getting used to it. But it is good for us to review these things, to go over them because each person has a little bit of a different way they communicate it.

Ultimately, it's a way, if you want to look at this tactically, start off by placing yourself at the center.

Flatline, the critical race theorists and the Christian nationalists, it's kind of like, yeah, they're sort of the same. And so you think you're going to get this very balanced message.

That's deceptive in a way, not saying Justin Gowen is intending to be deceptive, but it ends up deceiving people because they get into this mindset of, okay, this is going to be balanced.

And then the rest of it is mainly focused on bashing conservatives or the quote unquote

Christian nationalists. And at the end, it's basically a guilt trip and a scolding.

And then at the end, you're supposed to feel real bad about your country, about your history, your heritage, your complicity, your ignorance, all these kinds of things.

And what do you do about it? What's to be done? I guess the only thing you can do is apologize to who?

I guess to confess to God and then go to confess to people of color. I'm not sure exactly, but there's not usually a lot of hope in these sermons.

There's a lot of condemnation and that's what you're getting there. So it's also, it almost seems like there's a lot of projection.

There's a lot of the things that he said that we would agree with. It's like, well, aren't you guilty of that? The deception, the half -truths, the vilification of others, that's what's going on.

This is not a message of unity. If you can't tell that, this is a message of division. And that's what we get from the social justice side, unfortunately, so often.

The reality is all those who are in Christ, who have their sins forgiven by him because of his gracious work on our behalf as believers in him.

All of us have a brotherhood. We all are united in being equally sinners.

Some have sinned more than others and do it in different ways, but we all deserve punishment and we're sinners on that level and we're all forgiven before Christ.

And there's unity in that when we recognize the true gospel and we don't try to take other things and push them into the gospel, but we say that, no, the gospel, this is the good news is that Jesus has forgiven us.

And we can be patient with one another and we can strive to love one another. And we have a common authority we can go back to.

It's the word of God. It's the Bible. It tells us how to live. It's our GPS that shows us when we're off course so we can get back on, so we can rebuke those who need rebuking and we can correct the unruly and encourage the faint hearted.

We have a standard and what Justin Gaboni is doing right now and what you just heard is he's ripping that standard away.

This isn't a biblical standard. He just is scolding based off, it's really just his own, it's really just his opinion at this point.

He's just giving his opinion, questioning motivations, casting doubt on people who probably genuinely just love their country, that kind of thing.

It's not helpful. It's not helpful at all. What I would say about the social justice side, I critique people like Justin Gaboni all the time is look,

I don't know exactly where he's at because I haven't watched a lot of his stuff. I haven't studied a lot of his stuff. What I can tell is he's bitter.

I can tell he's frustrated. I can tell he's misinformed about a number of things, especially in history and connecting what happened in history to the present circumstances of today.

He's got an ax to grind. And what I would say to someone like him is like, please, first, would you be willing to listen?

You just gotta get in the gate first, get your toe in the door because sometimes with people like that, they're not even willing to.

But if they're willing to, then I would want to maybe spend some time, like sit down, maybe have some coffee or a meal or something and start talking about these issues.

But start in this way, start with the things that, start with the gospel itself. And if you never get off the gospel, that's fine.

But I would start with, okay, we know that people are sinners. We agreed, agreed, okay, right?

People are sinners. People do bad things. What's the remedy for that? Is it, like where does social justice fit into that?

And where does the gospel fit into that? And what's the difference between the two? And I think that would open up maybe a positive discussion if it's possible to have one.

Some people have said before, John, I've seen this comment a few times, why don't you do debates with people who disagree with you?

And those who have watched this channel well, you'll actually know that if you type in on debate on the

YouTube bar, you're gonna come up with an abortion debate and a debate on atheism from years ago that I did, moderated public debates where there was time allotted.

And the fact is, with some people, and my qualifications are pretty low,

I think, but hardly any social justice warriors that I know would meet them. But if they're willing to reason and they're respectful, in other words, they're not going to the debate calling me a racist or a sexist or something.

They're actually, even if they think that, that's not gonna be their primary argument is just personal attacks.

If they actually want to reason together, I would be more than willing to have a debate with someone if it was time, a proper debate, actual time.

So no one can steamroll anyone. We have topics that we've agreed to beforehand. I would be willing to have that.

But the fact is, it's very hard to do it. It's extremely hard with people that are so given over to this ideology.

They're not willing to because you are a villain. You're a bad guy. You're a racist.

I mean, look, I'm a Pharisee, apparently, according to Justin Gaboney. I am a liar, according to him.

It's not because I don't want anything to do with them. It's because they don't want anything to do with me. And that's how really this whole podcast even started.

It was that realization that, oh my goodness, I'm not welcome. My views are not welcome.

And I think that's how many of you feel. And when people start saying that you're the one that has the problem, you're like, wait a minute, hold on.

I'm not saying for every situation it's like that, but I think primarily that's what the aggressors are. Those are the emboldened ones to kick people like me out are those on the social justice side.

And so this isn't a comment about Justin Gaboney. I don't know where he's at, but that's what I would wanna do.

I think just what is his understanding of the gospel? Do you view people like me as a brother in Christ?

If not, why not? What is it that's preventing that from happening? How fundamental is social justice to your gospel?

And I think we would find a lot there. So I'm hoping that was helpful. Maybe just a little bit of direction and a little bit of thoughts on how to approach a little talk like this, maybe a longer one that you'll hear somewhere.