News Roundup: Trump's GOP, Two Roads to Compromise, and Thriving in Division

that matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We are forging a bold Christian vision for America.

And we are gonna talk about the election results last night. We're gonna talk about ecumenicism and why it threatens

Orthodox theology within Christianity and a number of other news items. So I'm really happy to be here, happy that you are listening as well.

Wanna let you know that I will be in Vancouver, Washington, which is right near Portland, Oregon on, is it

Oregon or Oregon? No one can tell me, but it's June 12th through 13th, the

Church Militant Conference. And you can go to mastersbiblechurch .churchcenter

.com or you can just go to my webpage, johnharrismedia .com speaking engagements and you'll find right there where I'm gonna be.

So looking forward to seeing you there. And what they've asked me to talk about is co -belligerency, unity, political organization, how should

Christians think about this? I've talked about this in the past. I think there's a lot more that needs to be said about this, especially as things progress or digress or develop, which is it, right?

There's good things happening, there's also very bad things happening and Christians having discernment to navigate those things is in short supply.

So we do need to talk about it. We do need Christians to produce good materials on what it looks like to be politically active and where the boundaries are.

So that's what I'm gonna be talking about. Well, to start off the podcast today, I figured

I would share with you something I forgot to share in the last podcast. And that is, there was this controversy and I'm not directly involved, but I did get text message over it.

It's regarding Canon Press. Canon Press, which is a publication company, it's a, they publish books and materials, they have an app.

And this is, I wanna say connected with, that's probably the best way to put it,

Doug Wilson and Christchurch in Moscow, Idaho. I think they are separate, but they are connected.

Anyway, the controversy involves Kevin DeYoung. Kevin DeYoung had a number of books that Canon Plus, their app, they were able to receive.

I don't know if they purchased rights to it or what, they probably did, but they got rights to this. And they ended up putting it out there, advertising that Kevin DeYoung is in their panoply of people to listen to.

And then Kevin DeYoung found out and he was not happy about it. And so his company, or the company he published with, decided to pull the books.

So those were audio books, Crossway was the company that originally published them. And so now they are no longer there.

Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is because Canon Plus just recently published my book, my last book,

Against the Waves, the audio book version of it. So if you have the Canon app, you can listen to it. And so people were curious as to whether or not they had asked my permission to do this.

And yes, they did. And I decided to do it because I thought,

I don't really care where it's sold. And this is gonna get into some of the things we're gonna talk about later regarding partnering with others and where are the lines.

But let me give you my idea on this first. If Amazon is selling it as a book merchant, if Barnes and Noble's selling it, if online secular companies are selling my book, and they're going to get a little bit of the profit, sometimes more than a little bit.

Amazon gets a pretty big cut, actually. Is that a sin, first of all?

And no, it's not. It's not a sin to, well, why would it be a sin? Well, I guess you could make the case, aren't you enriching these companies that also sell bad things and have bad policies in certain areas?

That's a prudence issue. And there are circumstances in which I do think it could be a sin, especially if your conscience condemns you, but it could be so unwise and it could be so flagrant that you are obviously enriching a company when the cost -benefit analysis does not make sense.

It is not something that actually is contributing to the greater good.

You're not getting your message out there, but it's enriching this bad company. There are circumstances like that. But in this case, I think prudence would dictate that someone who is searching on some of the biggest marketplaces on earth for books and finds your book and you have a good message in that book and you want that message to get out, it is wise to let those companies market your book.

I don't think most people have a problem with that. Canon Plus is different in one way.

They are Christian overtly and a certain flavor of Christianity.

They have certain theology that they believe in, some of which I don't even agree with, but they market themselves as Christian.

That's their entire identity. It's not like Amazon, which is more secular, and you could say maybe neutralist, but is any company really neutral?

That's a question, too. I don't know that that's even the case. I don't think any company is purely neutral, but you could say they're more neutral.

They sell all kinds of things. You can get things on all kinds of different subjects from Amazon .com. So when

Canon Plus asked me, I didn't even have a problem with it, sure. If it's being sold in all these other places, certainly

Canon Plus can sell my book. And I would be fine with other, I even thought this, if the

Mormons came to me and said, can we sell your book? I would probably say yes. Is that an endorsement of Mormonism?

No, I'm not sharing a stage with them in any kind of an affirming way. I'm not legitimizing them.

Now, you could talk about the optics of it, right? This is, again, this is a prudence thing.

Like if the optics were such that they're using the book to promote themselves, and I'm like a bigger name that they need to grasp to prove themselves or something, then yes, that would be very unwise, and it might even be, you could say, sinful or wrong.

Again, this is a circumstantial thing in certain ways, and it's a wisdom issue. But the mere fact of letting a market, letting a business sell your book is not a sin in and of itself.

And I think the people at Canon Plus could use to hear my book. So just like the people at Amazon.

So I have no problem with it. And I do think for someone like Kevin DeYoung to be really against having

Canon Plus market his stuff, but okay with other book distributors. I mean, even

CBD, right? CBD is so broad. I mean, like what kinds of things are they marketing? Terribly heretical things at times,

I'm sure. So I see this as selective and not a conviction that I share with Kevin DeYoung.

So I figured I would give you my thought on that. I don't think this is a partnership that is compromised.

This isn't partnering with evil in a way that's going to compromise me or compromise the people listening or compromise people who would get the message that I'm letting this company sell this book.

It is a business transaction, a business decision first and foremost.

So I'm willing to hear any pushback on that kind of thing. But these are my principles going into it.

And this is going to play into what we talk about later when it comes to conference stages and the impression you give.

Because the bottom line is the end result is I don't think you're giving the impression that you endorse a particular company just because you let them sell your book.

That message is your message. And they're merely gaining a percentage off of what you've done for work that they're doing in getting your message out.

It's your message that's the one going out in that kind of an arrangement. So if Jesus is at the synagogue and he's preaching to the people at the synagogue, is that an endorsement of the synagogue and the

Pharisees teaching? No, he's using the venue to get his own message out.

There is a way you can do that. There's also a compromised way in which you are unfortunately giving the impression that you endorse what's going on in a place that's compromised.

And so if you do it wisely, I think you can do it. All right, well, that was the first message.

I just needed to get that out of the way because that was something from the last news roundup I failed to cover. Emmett Kellogg asked, didn't

DeYoung and Wilson have somewhat of a falling out previously? Was it personal? They did. DeYoung wrote an article about the

Moscow mood and didn't like it. So I didn't have a great opinion of Kevin DeYoung before, a lot less now.

It really shows how not conservative he is. Yeah, maybe. I don't really know exactly what it shows.

I think he probably has a number of issues with Doug Wilson, Moscow, and Canon Plus, but I think you're gonna be consistent.

And I can respect someone who wants to be consistent and say, you know what? I'm gonna be the only one to put this out there.

I really just don't want anyone getting monetary reward for selling my material.

But if you're gonna do that, make sure it's not on these other platforms as well that are compromised. It's weirdness, says

AD Robles, that makes the Dorian principle ring true. Oh, you know, I haven't heard about that principle in a long time.

Thank you for reminding me, AD. This is such a mess. Business decisions, fracturing into Christian, or fragmenting,

I think is probably what he meant to say, into Christian teaching. Couldn't agree more. Oh, this is off topic.

We'll get to this later. If you are for Trump's puppet and not for Massey, you are a low IQ individual.

I feel like that's coming from the Trump playbook. It calls someone that. Was Trump, I don't know that he has a copyright on it, but he does seem like the first one in my political memory to start calling people low

IQ individuals. That's like a Trump trademark. So don't use his catchphrase.

Sorry for my spell checker issue. That's fine. Yeah, look, I have problems with spell check all the time. It's a proof that you don't use

AI, really, is what it is. It is a shibboleth today that you are a real person that actually does real things.

Now, and the unfortunate part is people are gonna start telling AI, make little grammatical mistakes to prove that this isn't written by AI.

And now then we'll never know. But at this point in the process, recently someone looked at something

I wrote and they caught a grammatical mistake. And it's like, well, at least you didn't use AI. And the sad part of it is

I wrote the whole thing, which is what I always do. But I did ask AI to spell check.

I usually ask AI spell check, grammar check, and what was the other thing? Punctuation.

Now, I don't always do that, but I have found that helpful in proofreading just because you might miss like there, there, there, which there did you use?

But in this case, actually AI missed it. AI is not perfect. And while I don't condone using

AI to produce material, to do your thinking for you when you're publishing, especially sermons at all,

I do think that you can use it to check your grammar. But if you don't do it, even for grammar, you are in fact a real person and it lends to your credibility.

Matthew says, just followed Pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan here. Keep crushing it, bro. Well, thank you, Matthew. That's very kind of you to say.

All right, well, let's keep going on the podcast here. We are gonna talk about Francis Chan. There's some talk about that already.

Yes, I know he's in the thumbnail. We gotta talk about Francis Chan. He's actually next on the list.

So here we go. Good old Francis joins Pastor James E. Ward Jr. in a documentary that they may be one, calling the church back to unity.

Pastor James E. Ward believes the growing political, theological and cultural fractures inside the church reveal something deeper than denominational disagreement.

A spiritual crisis that can only be healed through repentance and surrender to God. The cultural issues of our day, the sociopolitical issues of our day have infected the church.

Now, I want you to hear that. I wanna emphasize that. Listen to what he's saying. The sociopolitical issues are the problem.

So there's these fault lines forming. They're over sociopolitical things. Now, what kinds of things would those be?

I mean, go back to 2020. We had disagreements over BLM, Me Too, the

COVID shot. Today, disagreements over foreign policy, especially as it regards Israel and the

Middle Eastern foreign policy. Disagreements over immigration. Disagreements over these new, the latest thing, the hot topic now is these

AI centers that are going into various communities. And even some places, the government is using imminent domain to evict people to make way for the

AI data center that's coming in. These are all fractures. And you're going to see more and more social and political fractures over more and more minute things.

And it's gonna fracture people more and more. So those conditions are real. I affirm what this pastor is saying, but he says, look, this has infected the church though, which has then affected the church's ability to be salt and light.

So look, this is the major thesis. This is the problem. The church can't be salt and light. Can't do the church's mission.

You can't go make disciples. You can't make your communities better because you're fracturing.

You're not united. Imagine if we could all unite. Imagine we could take all our resources from across Christendom and we can put it into one big pot.

Don't worry, I'll control the pot. I'll tell you where to invest. And you take all those resources.

And then we could go have the biggest rally, the biggest churches, the most beautiful buildings, the most, you fill in the blank.

And we can actually get something done, right? There is somewhat of a assumption behind this that the more cooperation, whether that's financial or energy and effort, the greater produce, the greater harvest you're going to reap.

There are limits to this, I think. I mean, this is the, if it's gone afoul, this is the reason the

Seeker Sensitive Movement was the way it is and why it's not doing so well now because they thought if we just blur some of these theological distinctions, these lines, if we keep it really simple, if we just make it as broad as possible, we can get the most people in the church building.

We can get the biggest crowd. And then you just end up though compromising yourself. I'm much more in favor of, and I think this is much more biblically consistent to say, there are denominational lines, there are differences.

And there are secondary issues in which you can participate in things like evangelism efforts, publication, endeavors, et cetera.

I can be a co -host with someone like a Matthew Pearson. We are different. He's a PCA member. I'm an independent

Bible church member. We can cooperate because on 99 % of things we, well, 90%, whatever, it's high, we agree.

And because we agree, we are able to have unity. And the main unity though, isn't even in our agreement over secondary theological matters.

It's over the primary doctrines of our faith. We agree that Jesus is the son of God. He is

God in human flesh. He's the savior of the world. We believe in the hypostatic union, the Trinity, the authority of the word of God, including its inspiration, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, by grace through faith.

So a tremendous amount of unity there, but I'm not gonna be going to the same church most likely.

It's possible, but if I have an option to go to a church that practices what I believe when it comes to ecclesiology and baptism and these other matters,

I'm gonna go there. And he's gonna go to a church that practices those convictions he has, but we're gonna still have tremendous unity.

And even we can have a shared unity in para -church ministries. But if we don't get the person of Jesus right, if we're worshiping different Jesuses as the

Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses do, if we don't understand the inspiration of the

Holy Spirit, then, and when it comes to scripture, some, like if we have different canons of scripture, we are going to have different authorities, right?

I mean, this is one of the root reasons that while there can be a social cooperation with Roman Catholics who have extra books in their

Bible, or even religious Jews who deny the New Testament's authority, but have the

Old Testament. Work with me here, guys. I know there's gonna be fact checkers on both those, both those statements who come out and say, actually, in the general, in the main, you know what

I'm saying is true here. We can't have spiritual unity. That's the problem. We have different doctrine because it's based off of, in part, these different authorities.

So you see the point. If you have a different gospel, certainly you can't have spiritual unity. You're compromised at that point, but you can still cooperate in political endeavors and other things.

So there are, there is a spectrum on this particular topic, and there are lines.

Now, the question about this particular piece that Francis Chan is doing is, what lines does he have a problem with?

If you're saying, look, the Presbyterian church down the street doesn't wanna do evangelism with us, I agree. Why can't we get together?

We have the same gospel, do evangelism. But if you're saying the Roman Catholic church isn't doing evangelism with us, why can't we take down the walls?

Then look, you're in the wrong neighborhood. The Roman Catholic church has a different gospel than the gospel, the

Protestants, and I believe that historic Christians believe that. It is not by grace through faith alone.

So for my Catholic listeners, I'm not gonna go into details in this podcast, but this is a conviction of Protestants, if they're actually true

Protestants, and this is not something that we're willing to compromise on. If we are, we lose our Protestant identity.

And I think the reverse goes for Catholics as well. Despite Vatican II, you still have the Council of Trent.

You still have to say that people with Protestant beliefs in this area are anathema. Okay, there might be some confusion in the

Catholic church, but that confusion alone means you can't cooperate in these endeavors. So what is this documentary that they maybe one do?

Well, it says, look, we gotta stop fracturing over these political things because we have a Christian unity. What does it say?

The film explores Christian unity through documentary interviews, historic reenactments that reflect Catholic and Protestant leaders alike.

So that's what it is, guys. We're gonna get the Catholics together. We're gonna get the Protestants together.

Everyone come together and get rid of your convictions on these matters, these distinctions, and even your social views, some of which

I think actually root back into theological views that are important. Like, you know, the church shouldn't meet. COVID, the reaction to that, not a good thing.

Church shouldn't meet. Jesus established the church with the intention that they would come together. So that's actual unity.

And if you're the one that's bringing the disunity, if you start saying liquor stores can be open, but not churches, we've been through this on the podcast.

But that's a social political view, but it roots back into a theological matter. The film features theological reflections from pastor ministry leaders.

It includes deep, pivotal moments in church history, Pentecost, the Azusa Street Revival. Now that's an interesting one because the

Azusa Street Revival is the birth of Pentecostalism. And in the Azusa Street Revival, you have a number of different forces that come together, and it goes in all kinds of different directions, most notably into Catholic circles.

That's why you have charismatic Catholics. So this was a unity, but it was a unity that led to,

I think, compromise eventually. It doesn't mean everyone associated with that was compromised on the gospel.

I think it's a wrong view of the Holy Spirit, but I don't think that everyone who's charismatic is obviously compromised on the gospel.

I can have great fellowship with my charismatic brothers and sisters, including people like Juan Riesco, but that movement did make this

Holy Spirit, quote unquote, experience, the main barometer by which you knew someone was a

Christian. And then it downplayed these other distinctions. So it doesn't, you know,

Catholics, Protestants, yeah, they disagree on justification by grace through faith alone, impute and infuse righteousness.

They disagree on the nature of the canon. They disagree on papal authority and mariology.

They disagree on purgatory. I mean, these are all very important things. They disagree on all these things, but I don't know, he had the sign of the

Holy Spirit. He's doing the speaking in tongues thing. I think he's okay, right?

That's what happened. These more secondary and more really tertiary, secondary matters, they became elevated to such a point, they replaced the primary matters.

That's always a danger. That's always a threat to orthodoxy. So they wanna use that as, hey, that's the good positive example of what this unity should look like.

I don't really need to know much more, but that's where the documentary is going.

Here's another write -up on it. This is from Word on Fire, which I believe is a charismatic publication.

And they reveal that it starts, the whole documentary with the story of an Italian nun named

Saint Elena Guerra, who was canonized by Pope Francis in 2024.

And she had a deep devotion to the Holy Spirit. Toward the end of the 19th century, she wrote a series of letters to Pope Leo entreating him to promote a renewal of the church in the power of the

Holy Spirit. This Leo did enthusiastically. He penned an encyclical on the Holy Spirit in which it established a novena to the spirit between the

Feast of the Ascension and the Pentecost. All right, so it goes to the

Yazooza Street Revival. From there, this is a Catholic -Protestant joint effort. And Francis Chan is involved in it.

And it's not a huge surprise. Francis Chan has been involved with Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics and some of the

IHOP people, more word of faith type, charismatic Pentecostal folks. And I've gone up and down in the way

I view, I was gonna say Pope Francis. He's not the Pope, but Francis Chan. At one time, maybe he was becoming the

Protestant Pope. I mean, he was really popular in whenever his book, Crazy Love came out, so early 2000s.

And he had some good things to say in the book. It was very simple, but I think it did help some people.

But since that time, I've just been kind of up and down in my evaluation of him, because he's doing this weird thing over here and giving the impression that, hey, these are brothers in Christ here.

These Franciscan monks, man, they know the Holy Spirit. And then he'll say something that's better.

And so I'm just gonna conclude this man is so confusing at best, that's best case scenario.

You can't follow him. You can't follow someone. It's like Peter, in that best case scenario in Galatians.

If he's not clear on the gospel, if he's not clear where the boundaries are on this, then it's an association thing.

Why are you sitting over here, Peter, with the people who are saying you gotta be circumcised?

Why are you giving the impression they're okay? Again, this is a fellowship.

This is a connection. This is a impression one is giving that these people are just fine and not having clear boundaries about what the true gospel is.

And that's Francis Chandemy. Not a guy I could follow, not a guy I'm interested in.

I'm not saying he doesn't do good things here or there, but this is a man who, if he's not a heretic, if he's on these matters, then he's at least muddy on them.

And no endorsement coming from me on that. And I would avoid a film like this.

Don't promote it, don't bring it into your church. If people do try to bring it in, you better nip it in the bud and say, look, we have convictions, we have theology.

It doesn't mean we can't cooperate with Catholics on pro -life. It means that we have to be clear that there's no spiritual unity, though, with people who do not believe the primary doctrines that we believe, especially on the nature of Christ's work in salvation.

We're not doing a mass every Sunday to, and I'm trying to think how to phrase it in a way that Catholics would find palatable.

Because Protestants do this thing where they say, well, you're resacrificing Christ every Sunday, you're worshiping saints, and Catholics will come back and say, we're venerating saints.

And they don't like to frame it in such a way that it's a resacrifice. I'm trying to remember the word they use, but it's essentially a memorial to the sacrifice.

But effectively, what they're doing, and I'm obviously a Protestant saying this, though, is they're saying that the blood of Christ does have to be spilled in an actual transubstantiation in a way that is physically the body and blood of Christ every day, whereas Protestants say, look, it's once for all finished.

There was one sacrifice, it's done. That's kind of a big deal. It's kind of a big deal to say things that definitely sound like worship to people like Mary.

Whether you call it veneration or not, there's only one person that we should worship, and that's God. These are issues, guys, that, again, you can't say like, oh, we're just gonna come together.

If you're really gonna come together, why not be at the same church? What's the problem there? What kind of togetherness are you looking for?

It's a togetherness where they wanna say the gospel doesn't really matter as much as this

Holy Spirit experience that you can see manifested in obvious external ways.

And I'm not gonna say members of the Catholic church that they're just not necessarily

Christians. I think there are members in that church who are trusting in Christ.

They don't follow all the things the Catholic church says. They don't necessarily agree with all the doctrine. And I think there are true believers.

That's a different thing, though, than saying Roman Catholic doctrine get to pass.

All right, so hopefully that's clear and we'll keep going. Let me, you know what? Yeah, let's keep going, and then

I'll take a few more questions because along these lines, I wanna talk about another conference. Now, I kind of have to talk about this.

I've received questions about it, namely because last year at an earlier iteration of this particular conference,

I was a panelist. So this is a completely different conference than the one that existed last year.

Here, I'll show you the full screen. This is Christ is King, America after Trump. Kind of interesting,

America after Trump, and Trump's still got two years, over two years left. But let's see if I can, it doesn't,

Dale Partridge, Harrison Smith, Calvin Robinson, Alex Stein, J .P.

Sears, Joel Webben, James Fishback, Joshua Hames. Okay, these are the speakers this year. And I don't think any of these speakers are the same as the speakers that were there last year, except for Calvin Robinson and Joel Webben, which is fascinating.

It definitely shows you that there is a very particular direction that presumably

Joel Webben has decided to take his, I don't know if he still calls it a ministry, his platform.

And it's a different cast of characters. Now you have to ask yourself, what's the difference? I think we all know, but I will pose the question as we discuss it before answering it myself in the way that I think it should be answered.

Now, I wanna say something briefly. Last year, when the Christ is King conference happened,

I had said yes to going to the conference a year before that time. So it was, if memory serves me correctly, spring of 2024, when

I had first heard about it and replied and said, sure, I'll go. When it got closer,

I did have a conversation about it. I was nervous about the direction that I saw, especially

Joel going in. And I said, look, I said, let my yes be yes, I'm gonna go.

And I don't think there's anything innately wrong with going to a conference, even if there's potential compromise, even if there's problems, even if it's a bad look or whatever, whatever the issue is,

I don't think there's a problem unless you give a pass to that problem.

So I decided that if there were issues, I was there. And during whatever time

I had to say something, I would talk about them, which if you look at the panel that I did, that's exactly what

I did. And that's exactly what Steve Dace did. He was sitting right next to me. We basically both shared our concerns with the very movement that was forming around us, the very room we were in.

And we were polite, but we were also direct. And I'm trying to remember what I even said. I think

I said, well, I know one thing I did was I mentioned Christ. I mentioned Jesus. I said his name probably four or five times.

I talked about the gospel, making sure that that's front and center, making sure we don't lose that.

That was one of the concerns that I had. I didn't wanna lose the orthodoxy. The other concern I think I had was

I wanted to make sure that people weren't just grabbing shallow identities from the internet, but instead were rooting themselves into actual, tangible,

God -produced natural identities that he's given us. So like, you're a dad, you're a father, you're a church member, you're a member of a community, there's a local area.

What happened underneath your feet? What happened in your family's history? What kinds of things are part of your story?

Where do you fit as a link in a chain of the story that God's making, spiritually, physically, nationally, whatever?

Like, make sure that you know those things. For me, this has been just, I think something I've inherited,

I've assumed. And it's been now maybe three years or four that I've started to really notice that, wow, that's not the norm for everyone, especially in the online world.

There's a lot of people that have fractured, broken, dysfunctional backgrounds, identities, they're looking for something to belong to.

And it's easy to find your chat group, your tribe, your thing, it's a little bit like, I think

I said this in the last podcast, it's like music, right? Remember when, in the early 2000s, guys started saying, I'm a hipster and I'm gonna do the non -corporate music thing.

I like this band over here. And like, they had a whole identity based off of it. And you're like, dude, you grew up in a totally different area.

Like, you've changed your accent. You've changed your entire wardrobe because of this band.

And you knew it was probably a phase, you knew, but it was also kind of damaging and harmful to just kind of drop everything that the way

God wired you and the place God puts you in to adopt this. Like, you wanna be a little more gradual about these things, you wanna learn, you wanna actually be rooted.

So all that to say, I already had some of these roots. I'm not saying that, like,

I'm not trying to say like, everyone else is unstable, I'm the only functional person. That's not the message one bit.

I'm saying though that because of the nature of our society, people moving around a lot, a lot of divorces, a lot of relationships being facilitated online instead of in real life, there's,

I think, a lot of short circuiting of the human interaction that God has intended for us to have.

And it's that interaction that provides for us a basis upon which we can naturally function and know our responsibilities and duties and where those things lie.

So you have spiritual duties to the people of God, you have natural duties to the people who are part of your family and community.

This is something I fleshed out in my book, Against the Waves, you can go get it. I mean, I've connected all these dots and I've tried to show you this.

Those are the two things I talked about. It's like, look, don't just latch on to like, I'm just white and it's like some, it's a genetic thing or I don't care if you try to do it two or three steps, you're gonna do the traducian thing or I don't care.

It's just, it's sort of a shallow, like I'm becoming part of this very sort of narrow, abstract thing, because white can mean multiple things.

But what I've noticed online is it sort of takes very often this very narrow, abstract kind of dimension to it.

And it's not really fulfilling. Like you have a culture, you have a cuisine, you have manners and language and religion plays into this and customs and all of those things make you who you are and provide security.

So that was probably way too long. And I probably said everything I said at the conference, but I said those things, because I was like, here are the two like warning bells that I'm going to ring.

Like if you start getting into ideology land where you just abstract identity and everything's rigid and you start like, it's not holistically rooted.

Identities, it's more just like, I'm part of this chat group. And now this is what I'm, this is the clothing

I'm going to wear. And if it's, if you lose orthodoxy as a primary identifying factor, certainly then it's not going to be

Christian anymore. It's going to go in a direction where it slides into compromise. That's basically what

I said. And I hate to be, I think kind of right about this. So here, here's the concern, right?

The concern with this is the big front and center is Christ is King. So it's very overtly about Jesus Christ.

Can you do a political conference that's Christ is King? I think you can, but I think it's dangerous and you got to be careful of it.

Okay, let me give you an example. I did Christianity in the founding. That was last year. It was,

Stephen Wolf was there. The number of Christians, Zach Garris, a lot of people who were going to focus on various strands of Protestantism.

So we all agreed on the gospel and basic Christian doctrine, fundamental Christian doctrine. But the last speaker,

I did this on purpose and I even clarified it on the podcast. I think I clarified it in the room while I was there was

Paul Godfrey. And Paul Godfrey is, has a Jewish background, but he is not a practicing religious

Jew. He is, according to what he told me, he is attracted to and sees himself more as a

Christian. However, Paul Godfrey has not made a profession of faith in my understanding.

I haven't seen it if he has. I don't believe he attends a particular church. He has not articulated a testimony to me.

So in that situation, why did I have Paul? What did I do? I had

Paul because it was an academic pursuit. It was an academic conference. We were exploring the nature of founding era

Christianity. Paul Godfrey, I invited because he is an academic who has studied these matters quite extensively.

He is one of the premier conservative political thinkers and he is an advocate for Protestantism over Catholicism, Orthodoxy, even his upbringing, his

Jewish identity. He's, he advocates for Protestantism because that's what America is about. And you know what the conference was about?

America is fundamentally Protestant. That was what the conference was about. So I could have a Paul Godfrey there because it's an academic pursuit.

And these things happen all the time in academic settings. Now, the challenge was the venue, which

I did not choose, but the venue that was selected for this was a church. So I determined that in order to pull this off, in order to do this conference,

I had to make it very clear. Paul Godfrey is coming at this as an intellectual to enhance, to forward, to promote, to reinforce the message of this academic pursuit, which is that Christianity and Protestantism specifically is foundational to American identity.

He is not, so that's the positive. The negative is he is not coming to you as a role model for Christianity, as a

Christian himself. So those, that's something that I did on the podcast. I was very aware of this and it's a prudence thing, but the line has to be there.

You have to have the line. If you don't have the line, you just give the impression that this person who is not a professing believer, he's just fine.

His beliefs are totally in line with Christianity. Then you have a problem. This particular conference is different in that it's even more explicitly a message of Christianity at the forefront and center in a cultural way.

What do I mean by that? I mean, having Christianity in the founding as an academic pursuit is less bullish, is less overt, is less, there's less of a reason in an academic setting like this to have professing

Christians than there is in a conference where you're explicitly saying the purpose of this conference is to promote Christ as King.

That is overtly spiritual. That is overtly a religious, not an academic, specifically a religious phrase, a religious slogan, a message that is, that it means a few things.

You have to have the right Christ. You have to believe in Christ, right? If you don't believe in Christ, if you don't have the right

Christ, then in what sense can you do Christ as King, right? When you say it, it's just words.

You also have to know what being a King means in this particular context. Christ as King means you must submit to him.

You must repent of your sins. You must put your faith and trust in him because he's gonna judge you. There's a day coming when your sin is going to be put on display and he is going to weigh the merits of your life.

And it's not like the good is gonna outweigh the bad. It's like, if you have any bad, you are going to a place of punishment called hell.

Christ is King. That's why he can do that. Christ is King, the Christ who is the third member or the second member of the

Trinity, who is fully God and fully man, who came in the spirit and in the flesh, who was a historical figure and participated in the creation of the world.

All things were created by him and through him. And without him, nothing is made that was made. It's not the

Christ of the Jehovah's Witnesses. It's not the Christ of Mormonism. It's not the Christ of the historical Jesus.

It's not the Christ of the Muslims. It's not the Christ that's at peace with false religions like Hinduism or paganism.

It's not the Christ that tolerates breaking his law and not repenting of it.

It is the biblical Christ. It has to be. This is the problem I have with Gropers when they try to do this.

People who follow Nick Fuentes, and they're not just that they're Catholic, but they advocate and say very filthy things that Christ would not have any relationship with.

And yet they'll say right beside filthy things, Christ is King. Well, it's a shame on Christ.

That's not the Christ. Christ said, if you love me, you obey my commandments. So this is the issue that if you're gonna do

Christ as King, you better not muddy the waters, especially in a cultural moment where there's a lot of mud. Unfortunately, this more than muddies them.

Why do you say that, John? What's the problem? Why can't we, right, Christ is King. Why can't we partner with people who aren't even necessarily

Christians who wanna promote that message? Because they're not promoting that message. That's the problem.

All right, so let me just give you a few things. J .P. Sears, I wrote about J .P. Sears in my book, Against the

Waves. And one of the things I said is like, look, he's not explicitly a Christian, but he's interested in God.

He wasn't before. He was new age. He was interested in Buddhism and that kind of stuff. And then COVID and all that made him interested in God.

So he's on this journey. That's a positive direction. That's less error than the previous error.

However, I was not aware of any statement of faith, any explicit conversion experience, any

Orthodox kind of testimony. And I still haven't seen any of that. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if someone produces like within the last few weeks or months, or maybe to come, he makes whatever statement because of,

I don't know, maybe what I'm saying here. But the reality of the situation is, and this is an article, fairly recent.

I guess I don't have the date on it because I put it in reader mode, but it's about J .P. Sears. And it's within the last few years.

He says, my hypothesis of why are people accidentally getting more Christian, listen, accidentally getting more

Christian, does that sound like a true conversion? I think at least in our lifetimes, I've never seen the presence of evil so obvious.

And I think something happens when you're experiencing the presence of evil.

If you do not resonate with evil, if you're not willing to sell the space where your soul should be in order to do the bidding of evil, you're naturally going to go the opposite direction of evil.

You'll polarize in the other direction. And what's in the other direction? It's God. There you go.

The best statement I could find from J .P. Sears is like, hey, there's people accidentally becoming

Christian because they see evil. And look, that puts you towards God. There's a lot of people on this red pill journey where they saw, hey, my secularism didn't make sense because there's actual evil in the world.

Good. Where should J .P. Sears be sitting at a Christ is King Conference in the audience being preached at.

If the fields are white with harvest, he should be reached. And you know what the unfortunate thing is? Big Eva, the evangelical industrial complex, all the people that I've written books and put copious amounts of time into critiquing, those guys, you know, your

J .D. Greer's, your David Platt's, they put so much time into that blue city liberal and moving in the liberal political direction, guys like J .P.

Sears can see that's towards evil. They go in a different direction. And I've said for a long time, look, pastors need to be aware of this.

And what they should be doing is cultivating where there's interest in God, interest in Christianity, they should be cultivating that.

They should be trying to not in compromised ways, but preach the gospel to those people. They seem like they're a little more open.

That's where J .P. Sears should be sitting in the audience, hearing the truth of the word of God, having an actual conversion and then growing.

It amazes me that people who have a problem with an ex only fans person like Nayla Ray, share her testimony, which

I think is perfectly within boundaries to share your testimony. If you just your story of your conversion, okay, you're not becoming the

Bible teacher and if you're not being platformed as like someone to learn from to know that Christ is

King, but you're just sharing, I am sharing my own story. This is what Christ did to me, an actual testimony, okay?

I don't see a huge, huge problem with that, but I understand the concern some people have that, look, this person became a

Christian five minutes ago and they were in sin before that. How can you do this? I don't get how those same people can look at someone like J .P.

Sears and be like, who doesn't, from my understanding, even have a Christian testimony.

If that's his Christian testimony, my goodness. And just got a divorce with his wife, like just recently.

And like, he certainly hasn't been a Christian if he's a Christian at all for any length of time. And like, we're gonna make him front and center headliner at Christ is

King. That seems like a hypocrisy to me, but more than a hypocrisy, it does communicate something that is not good.

How about like James Fishback? James Fishback is a Catholic, number one. So that tells you a little bit about, okay, what kind of Christ are we talking about here?

What kind of version of Christianity? Now, in addition to that, even if he was not, I wrote a whole article on James Fishback called

The Grifter in Florida Politics in January of this year. You can go check it out. I avoided the accusations of improprieties and having sexual relationship with minors and all that.

I didn't wanna get into any of that stuff. I just wanted to keep it based on what is publicly known in the verifiable record.

And since then, there's been much added to this. But what I talk about is essentially, look, James Fishback is, according to public record, someone who lied, who stole, and who doesn't pay his bills.

And like, he's irresponsible. Is this the kind of person that you want in politics?

I was like, look, Trump at least had competency. He lacked in some character, certainly.

This is why I did not want him to win in 2016 in the Republican primary. But he did have some competency in running businesses, which is why

I think he primarily got to the position he's in. James Fishback doesn't even have competency. So like, are we gonna erode our qualifications that much in politics?

That's politics. Bring it into the arena of Christianity, of the

Christian world, of we're gonna advocate and promote Christ as King with someone who's a Roman Catholic and who has deep character defects that are proven, that are public.

That creates a problem. You're sending a message, again, to people that this is someone who represents the message.

And is it someone who represents the message? I don't think so. How about, now, this is maybe the most egregious one in a way, because this is

Alex Stein. And it's not that Alex Stein is more egregious in character. It's just that he's not a Christian.

So Alex Stein, who grew up in Texas and also lived in Los Angeles, believes in God, but not in organized religion.

Still, he regrets not experiencing a Jewish rite of passage. Now, that's kind of funny, because I'm gonna tell you in a moment what I think binds a lot of these people together.

This is an older article. This is from 2022. And here he is in an interview.

This is from 2024. And he says that inside of you are a spiritual being.

There is some God inside of you that's right because your DNA. So, and then later on, he says, you have this inner interdimensional soul.

And he doesn't understand, I don't know how you can't feel the Holy Spirit, he says. And he's talking to people who aren't even

Christians. I can't, his understanding of the Holy Spirit and of this

God, this divine power living within you is heretical. I mean, it's sloppy, but I think it's actually heretical.

He says, he doesn't wanna, so he's actually defending sort of a creationist view, which

I admire some of the things he defends, some of the things he believes, they could be right. But he goes, he says, you don't have

God, because if God is not in your life, you are very malleable. You are like clay and they can control you very easily.

I'm not saying that this God is better than that God. Are you pluralism? Okay, I'm not saying that this

God is better than that God. I'm just saying that inside of you, you are a spiritual being and there is some

God inside of you. What does that sound like to you? Does that sound like Christ is King? Does that sound like we have anything to learn from a person who believes this about Christ as King?

And if he's recently converted, which I couldn't find any evidence of, is that the person that needs to be headlining a conference on Christ being

King? What's he gonna contribute to it? I think that's a very legitimate, it's more than a question,

I mean, it's a problem. Now, you have guys like Harrison Smith.

I don't even wanna show you these screenshots, but he repeatedly takes Jesus Christ's name in vain, like over and over and over on his social media and combines it with the

F -bomb and stuff like that. It's habit for him. I did a post,

I didn't know this was Harrison Smith and then I realized it. So I did a post actually sort of against something that he made, because it was slop.

And it was a very popular montage he put together and it was on Israel and stuff. But I said, look, if you look at it, the first clips are of Gaza, that's the moral framing.

It's a hellscape. The people are talking about how bad it is, what Israel did, look how terrible they are, because look what

Israel does. And then the second part of this montage is a conglomeration of figures of different levels of influence, speaking out about winning the information war against the moral framing that he presented earlier.

So they're trying to say like, look, we gotta show people that the way that they're thinking about this happening, they're saying it's a genocide, saying that this is carpet bombing, this is unrestricted warfare.

There's like, that's not what's happening. We do have rules of engagement. Here's why, here's the way that Hamas is fighting us and the tunnels they're using.

And we don't even strike an area unless we minimize civilian casualties.

We warn civilians before, like, so he's got these clips next, but all he takes from them are the clips of people specifically saying, we gotta win this information war, not like the specific things they're saying about what that information war entails.

And then he talks about the various places in which people are coming down hard on anti -Semitism or anti -Jewish stuff.

And a lot of them are raging liberals who love controlling people, which none of us like, who likes the

ADL out there? No one, right? Like, they think that if you sneeze in the wrong direction, at least in the past, that you're anti -Semitic and must be canceled.

So he combines that with it. And then, this is the worst part of it, he inserts people like Melanie Phillips.

And there's a clip, and I noticed this because I had heard Melanie Phillips talk about this. Melanie Phillips, by the way, probably the most popular journalist in Israel, close to it.

And she's actually from Britain, okay? So she's not even as, I think she's, maybe she's a dual citizen,

I really don't know. But Melanie Phillips is really, really against the

Islamization of England and Europe. And he inserts this clip about how the West must look to Israel as an example in the war against radical

Islam or be conquered themselves. But it has nothing to do with forcing anyone to love Israel, but he puts it besides these clips that seem to, from people she would disagree with, that seem to indicate that people are being forced to love

Israel and that Israel is responsible for things like Islamization. So I just look,

I said, look, I'm against the ADL, I'm against censorship of Israel critiques, but throwing all these various strands together to paint a picture like Israel telling its side of the story and anti -Islamization rhetoric are the same thing.

Even the supposed smart stuff that smart accounts take seriously turns out to be slop. And I should eat my words a little on that because I don't think this is a smart account.

And I didn't realize who I was critiquing at this time because I, so Harrison Smith is on Infowars, I guess, right?

And so he puts out stuff there quite frequently that just is unverifiable, that is irresponsible, that is sensational, that's just kind of who he is.

It doesn't mean he doesn't ever say any true things, but he puts out stuff that slop without retraction.

What kind of stuff? Well, he'll just throw stuff out there. Like in 2023, he said that there were malaria transmissions happening in Florida, and this was all funded by the

Gates Foundation. No evidence, no, like just let's throw it out there because like play on people's paranoia over this kind of thing.

I mean, I just told you on the Israel stuff, I mean, he's very anti -Israel, so I mean, that's to be expected, I suppose.

But he exaggerates a lot, like he will just throw out numbers that aren't true about like Ireland planning to import 4 million

Africans. Ireland's importing a lot of people at a very high rate, but you don't need to just make up stuff, like huge numbers, right?

You don't have to just sensationalize it so much. And that's kind of what he is. So what's the deal with this?

Why even mention this? Someone with that kind of a reputation for not being honest, that's not the kind of person that probably represents the

Lord Christ, who is King, who cares about truth. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.

Truth is very important to Jesus. He went after the Pharisees and said that they opposed him because he spoke the truth.

If you have someone who's just known for not speaking the truth, having a very dubious relationship with the truth and not retracting when he's wrong, then that doesn't really emphasize the kingship of the

Christ who is about truth. So at best, it's unwise to have someone like that as your promoter, and especially someone who regularly does blasphemy.

And I haven't done any deep dive on the guys, just a very surface level perusal on social media.

But then you also have guys like Calvin Robinson here. Now, Calvin Robinson was there last year.

And I remember when this happened. I had a lot of sympathy for Joel at the time because I had

Calvin Robinson on my podcast. I thought he was Anglican. And I just assumed that he was

Anglican. And for the purpose I had him on, it was to talk about the

LGBT stuff because he resisted that. And for a Christ as King conference, you have someone who you presume is

Orthodox in their theology. He is resisting one of the main areas that is being challenged by the opponents of Christ.

It makes sense to invite him. However, it came out, and I presume this was after an invitation, that Calvin Robinson was, he was

Anglo -Catholic to the point of he wanted to have communion with Rome and didn't see the

Reformation as a big deal. So this came out and this caused a problem. And the way that this problem was navigated was saying, it's a political conference, and Calvin is just here for a very narrow purpose, which is to tell us about what's happening in England on matters of LGBT, because we see that as one of the main areas in which

Christ as King is being challenged. And I think I even went out and made a statement about it.

I said, okay, this is a political conference and Calvin is a guest, and it's very much gonna be emphasized that he is a guest.

He is not the face of this. He is only platformed as someone who can contribute in this one narrow field on this one subject.

And I think it's one guy, and you didn't know when you invited him, and this is sort of, he's gonna be respectful of the rules.

He's not going to advocate anything against the theology that should be represented there. And we're drawing the lines, which is what you have to do in a situation like that.

Okay. The difference now, I suppose, is as you look at this, now you've got non -Christians, you've got more actual

Roman Catholics, you've got people who have major character defects that are not certainly in line with following Christ.

You even, I mean, even guys like Dale Partridge, I made a video about him last year just because he was a serial plagiarizer.

And he just, some of the worst takes, some of the most sloppy takes, if I see them, you know,

I'm not surprised if it's Dale Partridge, you know? And I look at this list and I'm like, what's

Josh Hames doing there? Like, so Josh is someone, I mean, I've been on his podcast. Josh, I haven't talked to Josh about this, but, and I'm not going to represent him, but Josh is like the odd one out.

And I think it sticks out. And I think people on social media even know it sticks out. They're like, which does not belong?

Josh Hames does not belong. So what's the bottom line? Why, what brings this motley crew together?

What binds these people together? If it's, it's presumed to be Christ as King.

If you really want to know about the kingship of Christ, you come to these people. They're going to tell you about it. I don't think that's what it is though, for obvious reasons that I've already stated.

What do these people all have in common? Maybe with the exception of Josh Hames, and I don't know where he's at now on this, they are all big critics of Israel.

That's the only thing I can think of. Now, maybe there's other things that I'm not aware of that they have in common, but being really, really advancing in ways that are deeper than a slogan, theologically rich, actually understanding who

Christ is. I don't, I don't see it here. You have, I think, okay,

I guess four who might be, I don't know where Calvin's at right now. Actually, no, you have three who might be pastors.

And I'm not sure if Calvin's a pastor now or not. He keeps going in and out of denominations, but you have Joel and you have Dale. Those are your two pastors.

It's, this is a different movement. I will say, I think there's a transition.

It's not so much a pastor -led thing, pastors in the forefront thing, Protestants even in the forefront thing, theologically rich stuff in the forefront.

I mean, it is, the lines now, and this is where I want to contrast with the

Francis Chan stuff. The lines on this seem to be more sociopolitical. Christ is king because look, we can agree on the sociopolitical thing here.

Whereas in the Francis Chan thing, it's like Christ, they don't say Christ is king presumably, but we can have oneness because look at this

Holy Spirit experience that we share. And neither of those are the basis for fellowship.

Neither of those are the basis for fellowship. What do you mean, John? What's the basis for fellowship? What is true

Christian unity? If you go through John 14, through John, I think, what, 17, 18, read through the high priestly prayer, read through what

Jesus says in that passage makes Christians one. You'll find a few things. He says, it's the truth that I give to you.

That truth will be, you'll be reminded of that truth by the Holy Spirit. So there is a shared spirit, but that spirit tells you, teaches you, illuminates what

Jesus has told you. It's the teachings of Jesus. It's doctrine. That's part of the truth.

It is also the fact that you have the Holy Spirit. That must also be present.

And you know what else it is? Keeping his commandments. It's a life of following Jesus.

Those are the elements you find in the unity that God, that Christ prays for when he says, may they be as one as we are one.

That's what he's talking about. And if you look at other passages in scripture, because there are a number of them, you find warnings to not have a false unity.

Second Corinthians six, right? Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers for what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness or what fellowship has light with darkness?

What accord has Christ with Belial or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?

Does that mean you can't go to the grocery store because there's unbelievers there? No, it means you can't give the impression, you can't have fellowship, meaning share in common or say you share in common

Christ with people that don't have Christ. Romans 16,

I appeal to you brothers to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught.

What's the basis for unity? Hey, the doctrine that you've been taught. A political belief, a political posture of movement?

No, the doctrine that you've been taught. Galatians one, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to what?

A different gospel. If you got people that say, man, God's in you.

You just can't you feel the Holy Spirit in you? Oh, I'm sorry, the Holy Spirit doesn't come without the gospel first in a conversion.

John chapter three, go read it. You have to have a born again experience. Holy Spirit is the one that prompts this but there are those who are born again and those who aren't.

And what's the difference? Well, even as the son of man was lifted up or the serpent was lifted up in the times of Moses, can't avoid

Old Testament stuff guys. So the son of man must be lifted up and all who look upon him in faith, they're the ones that are born again.

So I don't, for those who grew up in a church that's even somewhat orthodox, this isn't, I'm preaching to the choir, this isn't new.

But you need to understand what the basis for the unity is. And it's not political beliefs.

That's not the basis for spiritual unity. And it's certainly not a alleged

Holy Spirit experience. There must be doctrine. There must be a life of repentance and following Christ.

These are non -negotiables. Christ is King is a deeply theological term that shouldn't be used in a shallow manner.

It should be used. And when someone says it in a shallow manner, it's still true. But if you're gonna use it,

I'm telling you it has a profound theological meaning and God is gonna judge every careless word. I'd be careful of using it if you don't know what it actually means.

That's my warning. That's my view of this. So I know that might make some of you upset, but look,

I'm an orthodox Christian. I don't really, I don't know where everyone's at. I don't know if people don't wanna share because their concerns, but have them because this is a counter signaling in their minds, the big movement and the incentive structures that are there.

I don't really care about those things. So what a lot of you who, I don't know if you're listening or not, but if you're on X and you keep saying things like,

I'm, you know, Trump's, well, I got a comment even in this at the beginning, like, I'm just like sort of like looking for some advantage

I'm gonna get from Trump or I'm gonna get from Israel or something. That's, it's laughable because the incentive structures are the exact opposite.

They're, if you go against Trump, you are actually going to receive more support. Going against turning point

USA, going against an alliance between the United States and Israel, that's what's gonna get you a lot of support these days.

I'm telling you that because I know it's true because I'm in that ecosystem. If you're not, if you're someone who's just an observer, you may not know of those pressures.

Those pressures are very real. And it is very, and I'm not saying you like, whether you go with pressure or don't go with pressure is irrelevant to me.

The pressure doesn't matter. What matters is we gotta keep our orthodoxy. I started this podcast because there were those who were blurring lines and violating orthodoxy.

And I was told over and over by them that I wasn't reaching the demographics that needed to be reached.

I was being a big meanie to women, to LGBT folks, to same -sex attracted people, to progressives, to you fill in the blank.

I was a big meanie, still am, they think that, that I'm not being compassionate. I'm hampering the church's ability to reach these people.

And all I did was call out the things that those people who are contextualizing Christianity and shaping it and morphing it and editing it to appeal to that crowd.

I was just calling them out for what they were doing. I was saying, what you're doing in some cases is heresy. And in other cases, it's muddying the waters and it's theologically irresponsible and you shouldn't be a leader.

And that's what I did. And that's what I'm still doing. Nothing's changed. All right, let's talk about this election.

Now, before we get to the election, let me get to some questions because I'm sure this probably provided some.

Where are the lines is a perfect question to ask in this context. It's absolutely a perfect question to ask.

John, Word on Fire is a Roman Catholic publication. Robert Barron, thank you for correcting me. I retract,

I believe in standards and which is why I will retract. It's not really a retraction. I just was wrong in my assumption.

I assumed that it was a Pentecostal or charismatic. It is Roman Catholic. So they're promoting it. Other questions.

Apparently the video ID is 11 digits. Now, I don't know what that means.

I'm sorry, cosmic treason. I can't read. I can't understand all the things you're saying. Cosmic treason asks, which of the 10 commandments are we now permitted to transgress?

This is a good question. Look, it's the full counsel of God. It's not the sins that are popular or not popular that you can transgress that one, because that's okay.

No, like I see this all the time with things like blasphemy, right? Or just like, or lying, right?

Lying is an evil, evil thing. It's, you know, telling someone something that's not true when you owe them the truth is evil.

And I've noticed that that is more and more being considered not a big deal. If it's in the effort of a political movement, not a big deal.

However, sometimes even the same people will say, like being fat, which, you know, it's really gluttony they're talking about.

Like that is such a sin. It's such, it's so wrong. And it's been ignored. Okay, sure. Gluttony has been a sin that hasn't been preached about perhaps enough.

True. Guess what? Lying's still bad. It's just like, you don't have to like, the gradations of the seriousness of sin, you will find in scripture.

You will find them in civil penalties. You will find them in the 10 commandments of being kind of like an arch kind of pinnacle.

You'll find them in Jesus's summary of the law. You will find them in what constitutes church discipline because, you know, obviously rejecting the confrontation, failing to repent over sin is worse in a way than the sin itself, the initial sin.

That's what gets you excommunicated or disfellowshipped. So there are these gradations, but the

Bible sets those things. The Bible sets the punishments. The culture, if we just outsource that to the culture, like, well, they don't think it's a big deal because this, well, that's, this is a universal thing.

You don't let the culture decide those things. So great point, whoever made that point. Do you have unity with Messianic Jews?

Okay, I don't know what you mean by Messianic Jews. If you mean those who are born again, so Jewish people who are keeping

Jewish customs, but they are born again and they believe everything that a

Christian believes about Christ, the Trinity, biblical doctrine, the fundamental doctrines, then the answer is yes, we have spiritual unity with them.

I am not an expert on Messianic Judaism. My impression is that organizations like Jews for Jesus are specifically targeting people who are not

Christians who are Jewish. And I've said before that if there's a lot of concern about Jewish people being evil or subversive, then the natural reaction for Christians, one of them, and the first one perhaps, is to evangelize.

So I think organizations like Jews for Jesus are doing that work. And I don't see, at least publicly, I don't see a lot of other organizations doing that.

So I think they consider themselves Messianic. So I think their point is that, look, the

Old Testament and the religion there was pointing towards Christ and Christ is the fulfillment.

And so if you want to truly practice the religion of the Jews, Old Testament, if you wanna call it

Judaism, but the true religion, then you must practice Christianity. That's the true religion.

And I couldn't agree more with that sentiment. So are they brothers and sisters? If everything I said is true, if those qualifications are met, then yeah, they're brothers and sisters in Christ.

Now, if you're going to church and your church is doing a lot of these

Jewish practices and they're leaving Gentiles out of it, then I think you have a problem.

But I also think that I can have fellowship with Pentecostals and Charismatics and Presbyterians and Anglicans and Methodists, et cetera, who

I have strong disagreements with on secondary issues as well. If you become a

Judaizer and start saying you must follow the law, well, then we're not talking about what my understanding of what a

Messianic Jew is. Because I think a Messianic Jew isn't making a requirement. They're not doing the

Galatian heresy, which I have been foremost for years in trying to fight against, especially as it relates to woke evangelicalism and how they try to add to the gospel.

So hopefully that answers the question. Was JP shilling

Erika Kirkslop? You bet he was. JP Sears? Yeah, absolutely. He was exceptionally cruel to Erika Kirk.

And I don't think Christ has any, there's no enforcement coming from Christ on the way he treated her.

What about the Black God Conference? I gotta plead the - All right,

I'm back. I'm sorry, guys. I don't know what happened there, but I had a internet problem of some kind, and I will either re -upload this or I will cut out that section if YouTube allows me to edit it.

But we're gonna keep going here, and hopefully you can pray that whoever nuked my podcast, whatever nefarious forces are out there trying to shut up what

I'm saying, that they are, I'm kidding. I think it's probably just that we had a new modem, and I don't know if the modem's actually working.

All right, so I don't know about the Bless God Conference. I'll try to take a few more questions, and then we're gonna get to the second part of the podcast, which will be shorter.

Stream got raptured. He's gone. All right, you win the day, Cosmic Trees, and that is a great comment.

That's a great comment. Yes, the live stream did get raptured, and now it's back, though.

So let's talk about Thomas Massie and the election last night. Oh, I guess now

I have to put my stream back up. Everything's gone. Okay, stream is back up.

Thomas Massie's Dead End Libertarianism by Daniel McCarthy. I listen to Daniel McCarthy every chance because Daniel McCarthy has a lot of good things to say.

So I wanna make some points others have made, and then I'll give you my impressions. And I do have a correction

I need to make from the podcast I made a few days ago. But Daniel McCarthy says this. He says, the

Republican Party of the future may become less supportive of Israel if present trends among younger voters continue.

But anti -Zionism already has a home in the Democrat primaries, where it fits perfectly with anti -colonialist and anti -Western principles of the left.

Although it troubles many friends as well as foes of Israel's to say so, Israel itself is part of a much larger question about people's homelands and historical justice in the globalized conditions of the 21st century.

Americans have to take a side on that question, which has the greatest bearing on domestic as well as foreign policy.

MAGA knows where it stands, as does the left. Full -on open borders libertarians and neoliberal globalists know where they stand too.

The likes of Massey are a lot less certain. The young right, its views on Israel notwithstanding, doesn't seem to be in much doubt unless it's anti -Zionism overrides it's anti -globalism.

So Massey was basically on this line. Like he didn't know who he was and that's Daniel McCarthy's analysis.

You can go read his piece. He actually traces a lot of Republican history. And it looks like a party that needs a vision.

So they had one from Reagan, Bush tried to appropriate it, but failures of Bush foreign policy defeated it.

And then it was, you had Ron Paul, but Ron Paul, he never was able to make his vision workable.

It wasn't practical for the Republicans. And then Trump comes along and Trump has this

America first vision that seems to work kind of in the global world that we live in now.

And it's a peace through strength vision. And so this is what a lot of various strands of the Republican party resonate with.

And that's still kind of where it is, but there's been this undercurrent of, and it's not simply anti -Israel.

It seems to become, I'm talking about foreign policy here. It seems to more and more be framed that way, but it's not simply just that.

Daniel McCarthy is right about this point. It is a question of how involved we are in the affairs of the world, military bases, global trade, alliances.

And it's not just the question of Israel. It's the question of Ukraine. It's the question of the entire

Middle East and our bases there. It's the question of NATO. It's the question of China and our defense agreement with places like Japan and Taiwan.

And it's what happened in South America recently with Maduro. It's Greenland.

It's all of these things. And it's whether or not America projects a domineering kind of economically superior position on the world stage, which is what

Trump wants. See, Trump, this is the difference. It's an important distinction. Trump is against the

Bush era forever war stuff, the nation building stuff. That's the neocon stuff. The neocon stuff is we can go to plan

America anywhere and make them honorary Americans and proposition nation. Trump doesn't agree with that.

So when he's called the neocon, it's people just don't know what they're talking about, but they just think like any kind of war is neocon.

And because neocons might support a war or some neocons do, then it must be neocon. That's what neocon is.

Trump is, and has been, I think his entire time in office, he looks at the cost benefit analysis on two metrics.

The first is financial. And the second is national security, not necessarily in that order.

So if he senses national security threat, he acts and he acts swiftly, powerfully, decisively. And he may make mistakes at times, but that's what

I think is underlying his philosophy. He doesn't have a problem acting as a strong executive.

When it comes to economics, same thing. He wants more territory, more dominance.

That's Trump. Now I'm uncomfortable with that, I'll be honest. There's part of me that like,

I am a rah, rah, rah America guy, but I'm also like, I don't want to be, like we have problems at home.

We got our own expenses. I don't wanna be tied up in these things. And I agree with what George Washington said about foreign policy and really foreign entanglements is what he's talking about.

I don't like them. And there's some overlap with Trump. Like he doesn't like NATO, right? Because why? Again, financial, we're not getting a good deal.

Trump is the art of the deal guy. And I am amazed that some people still don't understand this but he's a deal guy. So this is,

I think what governs his foreign policy. And this is what has governed the GOP. And Daniel McCarthy points this out and points out like Massey didn't sort of went along with it but didn't really agree with it.

And just like never had, he was sort of looking for a philosophy in a way. And he certainly wasn't a leader on this in a way that you would need in the

GOP to make your philosophy palatable, right? Ron Paul did this to a lesser extent where like Ron Paul came in.

Ron Paul was kind of shut out. I even remember when there was a debate that he didn't get to go to and he was so mad. And Ron Paul though was still kind of gracious.

Like I remember when he got third place in the Iowa caucus, he was still gracious but he had a specific philosophy. Thomas Massey isn't as bullish or I should say defined as even

Ron Paul. And he's less attractive. He's less diplomatic.

He's more willing than Ron Paul to contrast himself with the very people that he should be persuading, right?

And that's basically what Daniel McCarthy's make, the point he's making. Daniel McCarthy wrote another piece where Thomas Matthew went wrong.

And in this piece, he says Massey's defeat may be the beginning of something, a birth pang of a new coalition. His campaign shows that neocons, libertarians and the establishment center -left can put aside their differences in a grand anti -MAGA alliance.

That alliance was soundly beaten by the Republicans within the Republican party but it may have better prospects in the

Democrat primaries where hating Trump and or Israel is already a requirement. This is fascinating stuff.

And it's similar to things I've said. I've said, look, the political alliance, I said this last year with Tucker and Nick Fuentes, like it looks like they're kind of playing footsie with the left on certain things.

They're saying we should have a broad coalition. We should give up on capitalism or the free market and adopt even some forms of socialism might be okay.

And we're not gonna, I mean, Tucker has all but stopped talking about many of the front and center issues that Republicans care about, like the

Save America Act. When was the last time he even talked about immigration policies and stuff?

I mean, he's very much about Israel now. And this is something that resonates with people on the left.

Now I'm stating a fact, I'm not stating an opinion. I'm just saying that's where it's going and that you can see a lot of the cooperation. So when

Massey was getting all these glowing approving articles and endorsements and platforming by the

New York Times and Joy Behar and they give you down the list, all these leftists, I was saying, pay attention to this.

And it seems like it's a question no one really wants to ask, but Daniel McCarthy is to his credit, at least engaging this and saying like, if there's anything that's gonna form, it's probably like this anger over Massey losing, that energy couldn't be picked up by the

Democrat party more easily than the Republican party. I think he's probably right about that to be quite honest with you.

And again, if the issues, if foreign policy or Israel become now, these are the chief issues and they matter more than issues of even immigration, then yeah, you're going to see a new alliance form and the left is kind of open to that kind of alliance forming.

Remember, because Thomas Massey, where he got on Trump's bad side, initially was the big, beautiful bill and it was over immigration specifically.

And then since then, a lot of stuff was added to that, the way he handled the Epstein stuff, which

I think was, it's sad to me because I actually kind of like Thomas Massey, even though last night when

I was watching his defeat, he didn't seem that likable, but I was like, for years, I've liked the fact that he seems to have some conviction as far as like, he's not just gonna go with the party.

You need someone like that who's going to, I mean, I'm like that, right? Like I just don't go with what people tell me,

I go with what's right. And I thought, and I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but I thought Thomas Massey was that kind of a guy, but he became more and more anti -Trump to the point he just wanted to highlight the differences and it didn't matter what platform it was, right?

He'd talk on various platforms about this that were leftist and start throwing stuff out there that just wasn't even true.

Like the whole, remember that screenshot that wasn't true, some people still think it was, that the

Department of Homeland Security was based in Tel Aviv and it was a edited screenshot that people were passing around.

And Thomas Massey just goes out there and says, it legitimizes it and legitimizes, I'm telling you, this

Marco Rubio quote that we knew Israel was going to attack, that's become like the very fine people hoax.

It is like, people I know who are otherwise very clear thinking individuals think it's like they didn't watch the rest of the press conference, they didn't watch what

Marco Rubio said the next day or Donald Trump said the next day. And it just is now Israel got us into the war with Iran, it's only

Israel. It's, and Massey went out there and trotted that out there. And Matt, like you go down the line, the

Epstein stuff, like he was part of the effort to unmask people in the

Epstein files who were innocent or already investigated. Some of them were part of a lineup. They weren't even part, they had nothing to do with Epstein at all.

And Massey never apologized for that. So this became more and more, these sort of surface issues became more and more the real issues or the main, not real, but the main issues.

But it started, the genesis was the immigration stuff. And then of course, in all of that, in the

Epstein stuff, in the being so critical of Israel, he made the

Israel lobby, the people who are APAC being the chief one, but they're,

I have to phrase this accurately because I saw so many comments that were totally inaccurate. It's not

Israel paying for stuff, guys. The country of Israel is not in these, in APAC, we'll give

APAC as an example. Israel isn't giving APAC all the money or like paying directly candidates to do their bidding.

APAC doesn't have to abide by FARA rules, just like other, and there are other foreign policy advocacy groups that don't have to abide by FARA because they're domestic.

APAC's technically domestic. It's people within the United States, it's citizens, who have an organization that values a

United States -Israel alliance. That's specifically what it is. And that's even what they posted yesterday against Massey.

Massey wasn't in favor of this alliance, they are. Massey really wants to stick the needle in the eye over and over.

Okay, that's fine, but you are gonna make those enemies. I just think it was foolish of Massey to do it. Like he didn't, but that was his conviction.

He wanted that to be one of the big things. So yeah, he did attract a lot of money. I do need to make a correction on this.

Yesterday or two days ago, I said in the podcast that Massey had a lot more money than the person he was running against.

That's true when it comes to their campaigns. It is not true when it comes to all the money that was pouring in for super PACs and all of that.

So I'm making a correction slash retraction here. Massey raised or had, if you take into account the support for Massey and the ads attacking

Galrain, there was approximately almost $14 million.

Whereas Ed Galrain had around, what, $19 million.

So there was a couple million there that Ed Galrain had on Massey in the attack ads.

So yeah, that did play a factor. It's not the only factor though.

And not all that money was from Israel groups. There's MAGA, one of the biggest ones was the

MAGA Kentucky group that gave to Galrain. What was the real deciding factor here?

What was the real thing? What was it that made Massey lose? Was it all that money? At the end of the day, you have to convince one of the most conservative leaning counties in the country.

You have to convince them to dump the Senator that they've had for years. You have to convince them that someone else is going to be better.

That's a tremendously difficult thing to do given the fact that Massey had home field advantage and should have built up trust with his people.

I caught it in his speech and in Galrain's speech last night, and it all made sense to me. And I think there's some truth to this.

So the Federalist said this, and this is, who wrote this? This is, I think this is

Davis, the guy, the CEO, Sean Davis. Massey lost because he went from being perceived as a quirky, but lovable nerd who seemed to genuinely believe everything he said to looking like a clout chasing influencer who cared more about getting

TV time with Democrats on an issue he clearly never cared about until five minutes ago than he did about representing his voters.

That's it, that's it. Because look, you could, all the money in the world from, and it's not from a foreign government technically, guys, it's from people who believe in a strong Israel -American alliance if they're pro -Israel, and then it's people who are big on Trump's policies, including immigration, all those people, they can only show the voters why they think

Massey's bad. And Massey did have some of his own foreign adjacent, if you want to call them that, or people who are in favor of Muslims and all that kind of stuff, supporting him and giving to him, and I think he even got an award from CARE recently, if I'm not mistaken.

So there is some of that with Massey, but I'd say take the foreign stuff out of it for a minute. On voting day, you have to convince a

Republican voter who's tremendously conservative not to vote for Massey and to vote for Gallerine.

What would convince them of that? Is it just that they just love Donald Trump so much, love

Israel so much? What is it? Is it philosophical? Is it just style? I don't have exit polls, unfortunately, that give you the priority.

So this is coming from the gut a bit, but this is my sense in just knowing what those people are like.

Immigration's a big issue for them. They want the Republican Party to actually do things. They do support

Donald Trump. They do think that he is getting wins for them, and they haven't been used to winning in years at all.

You may think Trump hasn't done enough. You take the long view of it. Trump's gotten more done than Republicans in a long time, and they don't like someone who's sour on Trump.

I do think that factors into it. I do think immigration factors more into it than anything else, because that was the genesis of this.

And I do think, and I spotted it last night, the issue with someone like Massey is, go watch his speech, his, not resignation, what do they call it, his defeat speech, his concession speech, that's what they call it.

He is irreverent. Now, you could say he's like Trump in that way, sure, but Trump, I think it's wrong when

Trump does it, but he's irreverent. He is passive -aggressive with the comments he makes, not very masculine, in my opinion, unfortunately.

I hate to say this, but that's, I didn't want this to be Massey. I was hoping Massey would actually have a good political future in the

Republican Party, because I think there's things he says that, like fiscal responsibility is actually important. Like, you know,

I was hoping he could work with people while emphasizing that. Unfortunately, and this gets into a whole thing, but Massey was the deciding vote on whatever committee he was in to approve a

Biden -era omnibus bill that was much worse than the big, beautiful bill. And so it's like,

Massey just didn't have the credibility, I think, with a lot of people, even on the fiscal stuff by the time he was gonna do protests against Trump.

But I was hoping that we could have a fiscal hawk in there somewhere, because, yeah, debt's like, what poison's gonna kill us, right?

Like, I think the immigration one is like up there, but, you know, debt's also a problem. So when

I watched his speech, though, I was like, man, he's passive -aggressive. He's talking all about himself and the movement that he's formed.

And it was almost like a victory speech, which was super weird. Like, he was smiling, he was happy, people were like, we're a part of a movement now.

Like, he senses that there's a lot of support. A lot of people look to him as the anti -Trump. So he's gotten a lot, he's been a media darling.

The New York Times loves him. I mean, when was the last time Joy Behar said she liked a

Republican? I mean, he is just getting the accolades of liberal institutions, and he, according to his own words, he said that it was the younger

Republicans who liked him. I mean, he lost by 10%. So I'd have to see the polling on that, but he's acting like he just lost, but he's acting like he won.

It's like the wrong look you want. In fact, in that kind of a thing, what you wanna do is you wanna wish your opponent, you wanna hope for the best and say, man,

I wanna offer any support I can because I care about what the people of my district in Kentucky.

And you talk about them. You talk about how much you love that district. That's why you got into it. You're a public servant.

Massey was totally playing to a national audience the entire time. And that must be a big thing for a guy in a little congressional district to get all that attention and stuff.

That's what I saw last night. You know what I saw from Galrain? It's a short, sweet, and I don't even know much about Galrain.

All he talked about was the people of Kentucky, how much he loved them, how much he's gonna fight for them, his elementary school teachers, the farmers who make things grow, just everything about the people of his region and how much he loves them.

And he's gonna go fight for them. Massey was totally not that. And that, it all clicked for me at that point.

I'm like, that's what it is. If you can, you have a choice, I think, in politics. And if any politician is listening to this, you can advocate for the people of your area.

You can like them. You can want them to succeed. You can talk about how much you love them and what policies would be good for them.

Or you can try to attract an international audience and go for institutional credibility and all that kind of stuff.

And you can try to be the media darling and the online algorithm king and satisfy yourself with I ratioed someone on X.

Now, if you do that latter part, you may become the king of rumble, but you're not going to be the congressman from Kentucky.

It's that first part. It's the approach that says, I love the people around me. And that's obvious.

That's going to win the heart of the people. That's going to win the hearts of the people in your district. And if you lose, you do it honorably.

And it's just a disappointment because I actually kind of like the guy. And some of the things he says need to be heard, but he's kind of quartering himself off now.

And if he becomes more and more anti -Trump and more and more everything's about Israel, he'll have a place on this sort of emerging,

I don't even know what to call it yet, but emerging podcast influencer stage.

But he's not going to have the political future, I don't think is going to be in the

Republican party as much as it will be with the Democrats. And they're not going to want his fiscal stuff. So, which is the stuff

I thought he had the best contributions on. All right, I will take questions and cries of outrage and comments, but a few other things

I just wanted to focus on news items here. San Diego ma shooting leaves three victims and two teen suspects dead, police say.

This is sad. This happened just recently. Three adults were killed, teenage suspects at an

Islamic center in San Diego. The shooters were 17 and 19.

And they killed themselves. They were found dead in their truck. Here's a picture.

So, there's still new stories today about it and the investigation and the motivations, but you have to ask yourself, what would cause a 17 and 19 year old to do this?

I found the manifesto online and it is somewhat disturbing.

And I want to highlight it just briefly. The new crusade sons of Tarrant and you have the black sun symbol, which is sort of a, it's not just a neo -Nazi symbol.

It is a, it's kind of a neo Bolshevik symbol too. Trevor Loudon talks a lot about this, but here's the second page, accelerate your hate.

And there's a guy with a gun and he's got swastikas in his eyes and the black sun behind him.

There's sort of a gamer vibe to it. You know, it's kind of like the white boy summer vibe. I don't know,

I don't know where they got it exactly, but starts off. I want to start off with some words from a very few of my heroes.

Why won't somebody do something? Why won't somebody do something? Why won't somebody do something? It goes on.

We have no skinheads, no real KKK. All right, so no one's doing anything about the forces that oppress us.

Who are those? It's the Jews, it's the Jews, it's the Jews, it's the Jews. Jews have an extremely disproportionate amount of the world's problems, whether that be war, famine, exploitation of children, rising degeneracy, infighting of peoples, political killings.

It goes on, separation of family, the departure from the church, the white race's replacement, mass immigration.

It's everything is the Jews. Now, the interesting thing about this, they killed Muslims, but the first part of this manifesto is all about the

Jews. And so if you look up, let's look up Muslim. Let's go to the first time it's mentioned.

Let me preface this by saying, I don't hate Muslims. Well, that's interesting, you killed three of them. At least not really. What I do hate is the religion of Islam itself.

What I hate more than that is seeing them here invading my country. I recognize that with the Middle East, immigrants invading our white countries is typically their worst, they have to offer from the worst of the worst

Middle Eastern countries. Okay, so this is, there's Muslim invaders.

They say that, let's see.

Well, the focus of this manifesto is placed on the word for Jews. That's not nice.

And Muslims, we do have to talk about another problem. So they have a list of enemies, right?

And Muslims are in that list. They're not the chief villains in the list, but they are on the list.

Now, what about Christians? This is interesting. The only thing

I hold against pagans is what they hold against Christians. Stop hating Christians. Okay, the reason they say that, check this out.

Is this the one? There's a part in this where they say that they consider themselves

Christian. Okay, here it is. The only good religion is Christianity. The worst and most deplorable religions are

Judaism and Satanism, which are the same thing. I am a Christian eco -fascist accelerationist.

I believe that the only way to liberation of the white race is through violence, sabotage and revolution. I believe we need the white masses to realize we are not at fault for the failure of other races.

I believe we need to accelerate the collapse of modern society so that we can rebuild it into something better. So they're accelerationists.

I've met these guys, even in the Christian circles. Not guys, I should specify, not guys who are out there with weapons saying we should accelerate using weapons.

But I've met guys who have the philosophy of we need modern society to crumble. Usually that's through political defeat.

The Democrats need to win. And in so doing, we will then, people will realize how bad it is and we'll take control.

I don't know who they're fooling. You look at Europe, who's taking control in Europe? Europe is crumbling. Europe has these problems.

People should have woken up by now and there should be all this backlash. But who remains in control?

Globalists. So remember anyone who claims to be Judeo -Christian is either a bad word for Jewish people or some retort, goy slave.

You're a slave. Who doesn't understand that Jewish values are anti -Christian and that any

Jewish person claims to be a Christian is a lying, another word. I'm not too good.

If you have kids in the car, I'm just not gonna say these words. Real Christians are the soldiers who stood up to fight against the

Jews. All right. So I don't have to quote Hitler favorably. It is everything that you would expect.

One of the shooters does have some Hispanic heritage. I don't know because his last, what were their names? I guess their names aren't,

I don't think the media wants, some of the media elements want them to be known. So maybe that's why their names aren't printed.

But 17 and 19, what are they listening to? What is getting them to this point of believing all this trash?

Because it's trash. Whatever kernels of truth are in there, that, oh, look, secular Jewish people, they contribute to liberal policies.

Like you can have these adult conversations with people and obviously not go to this direction where, and this is what

I was talking about in my lecture on anti -Jewish ideology. Jews become a stand -in for original sin in this.

Like it's all them. And every problem traces back to them. There's a revival of neo -Nazi ideology in this as a result, which means heroes who did commit massively evil things are now lionized as the good guys, misunderstood.

I mean, that's, I don't know, every, seems like cartoon for kids in the last like 20 years has been like, oh, the villain's misunderstood.

I mean, it's just sort of a continuation of, the villains were really misunderstood. And look, some villains are, but you have to be honest with the historical record.

They did very evil things. And now this is being, no, this is the solution actually, what they did. They're using all the symbolism from it.

And then they commit a horribly horrific evil thing. Are some of the things they're saying true as it pertains to, is

Muslim immigration a problem? Yeah, it is. Is this the way to solve and handle it?

No. And unfortunately, any kind of way that they would have to handle it would, for example, any kind of civic leadership they could have pursued in another life, if they weren't poisoned by whatever stuff they were marinating in, pretend probably online.

In fact, I think they met online. That's how this whole thing came together. They could easily have, if they avoided all that, probably pursued success and leadership at a civic or social level.

And they could have led efforts in policy to curb Muslim immigration, to recenter

Christianity as normalized and that kind of thing. They'll never be able to do that now, obviously. Also, this whole thing's gonna backfire because now

Muslims are going to be viewed with crimes like this, as people who are to be sympathized with.

I mean, look, they're the targets of violence. This is generally what happens. So, you get your message out, but this is the effect of something like this.

My prayers are for the families of these individuals who died and also those who committed this horrible act.

And we need more actual Christ. That's not real Christianity, guys. They can claim they're

Christians all day. That's not what real Christianity. This is anarchy, it's revolutionary, it's ideology.

I've been warning about this stuff for years. I've been saying that there's a road that can take you here if you are not careful.

I'm not saying everyone who's critical of Jewish people or critical of Muslims is there. I am critical of the influence of secular

Jewish people that push progressive policies. I am critical of the influence of Muslims that also push progressive policies.

I'm critical of all progressives. I'm critical of the social threat that non -Christian religions pose to America's identity.

So, this has always been where I stand, but I also know that if you start buying into rigid ideologies that are black -pilling you and giving you no hope, that are telling you that this group just controls the world and no one's doing anything and you can't do anything and you're powerless, that is the point at which you pick up a gun.

That is the point at which you start adopting some real satanic beliefs. And they say, you know,

Satanism is this bad religion. I think they were controlled by him. I'm not saying directly, I don't know, but demons.

I mean, these are horribly evil, evil things. And we do need to have lines.

We do need to be clear on these kinds of things. And I suspect that we're gonna see more of this in the coming years.

Violence from the left, the left is full of violence. I don't know if I consider these guys on the right, but they probably consider themselves part of the right.

They probably consider themselves, you know, they're white nationalist types of some variety and it's the white race they're concerned about and that's in their own words.

So I am no fool on this. I think that as Christians, we are the only ones that can bring salt and light and temper this kind of thing and help young people that are 17 and 19.

They may be even sitting in your churches. Wasn't the guy who tried to kill Trump recently sitting at a, was an OPC church or is, or no, it was a, it was a

Presbyterian church. I forget which variety, but it was conservative. Yeah, we need to reach them while they're young like this and give them a solid foundation in biblical ethics and understanding who

Christ is, what he expects, and most of all providence, that you're not an accident, that you're put here for such a time as this and your efforts are gonna be within the boundaries of his law and the responsibilities he's given you and those are meaningful.

And where you be a good cheer, he's overcome the world. So fight and keep fighting, but don't disqualify yourself at early stages and fight the wrong battles and listening, and listen to the devil on your shoulder and start doing wicked evil things, which you just basically become a liability for the very causes you think you're advocating.

I do think that, look, if someone's concerned about descendants of Europeans and actual

European heritage and cultures, heritages, I should say, and how they've been discriminated against in the previous years and still are in many places.

And they want to forward their people and their way of life and all of that.

I think that's a noble thing, but guess who's not gonna do that? The 17 and 19 year old, they're dead.

They're not having children. They're not gonna do anything towards that end. They need to be rooted in actual culture and actual healthy identities.

It's not gonna be the chat groups online that root them. That's probably the most unhealthy place to go to.

So just be careful of that. Okay, well, we are basically done with the podcast.

I had, oh, you know what? I have to talk about this because it was part of the screenshot. Al Mohler to propose an amendment to the

SBC constitution to confirm ban on female pastors. This would be an article three paragraph one of the constitution of the

Southern Baptist Convention if it passes. And it says a cooperating Southern Baptist church does not act to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor, elder, overseer such as preaching to the assembled congregation.

Two thoughts. Number one, good for Al Mohler. In 2019, he said this wasn't a problem. It is a problem now.

Glad to see him support not just the law amendment but also do this. So that's a step in the right direction.

Number two, will this be enough if it passes? I don't believe so, but I am gonna support its passage.

And the reason I say that is because while this will enhance the credentials committee ability in the Southern Baptist Convention to disassociate with a church, this mark them as not in friendly cooperation, a church that has female pastors.

I think this is gonna be interpreted because personnel's policy, it's gonna be interpreted if you have the wrong people on the board.

They're going to look at it and they'll say such as preaching to an assembled congregation. Well, as long as they're not technically preaching because now you just redefine what preaching is, right?

Like, so if you redefine pastor, you can redefine preaching. I can already spot the games that progressives are gonna play.

What you have to do is elect Willie Rice. Willie Rice has to be the president of the Southern Baptist Convention because he'll replace the personnel.

Once you replace the personnel, then you can actually enforce policies. And this will give extra teeth to the credentials committee but it is not enough.

So I will say, look, I know Al Mohler is a bit of a weather vane and some of you don't like him. I myself am skeptical about him in many ways, but in the last few years, he's been pretty consistent on this issue.

And I think you can certainly support his efforts without having to wholly endorse

Al Mohler on every level. Because I've heard a few people like, oh, Al Mohler, I can't support. No, you better support this. Like, it's good.

You support things because they're good, not because of who advocates them and what necessarily previous baggage you might have.

Another, oh, I didn't mention this. I should have, just wanted to let you know. Conservatives really did well in the Georgia Supreme Court elections.

So that's a piece of good news. And Truth Strip has a great article out there, trends in AI, how should Christians respond?

Go look that up. Go read Truth Strip, truthstrip .com. Great analysis of AI and how should

Christians think about this? This is a hot button issue now with all the data centers that are being built. And if you like what you hear on this podcast, you can support me at John Harris.

No, where would you go? Patreon .com forward slash John Harris podcast. If you like what Truth Strip is putting out there, go to truthstrip .com

and then navigate to, go to the bottom. It's actually a little tab, but it's the donate tab.

And one of the things that Truth Strip is doing, and I wanna point this out to you, is the

Virtue Conference. We have not finalized all the speakers, but the Virtue Conference is coming up and we wanted people with actual virtue to be the ones speaking at it.

It is gonna be September 26th and 27th. So if you are in the Wappingers Falls area of New York during that time, come on out.

We're gonna have a culinary meal that night. It is technically free. A $30 donation at the door is suggested, but there's no reason to have to do that online.

There is a sign up, but that's it. It's pretty standard.