Puerto Rican Listens to Tim Keller Speech - You Won't Believe What Happens Next

I had a sermon sent to me. Actually, it's not a sermon, it's more of a speech. It was sent to me on Facebook, so I do appreciate the person who sent it to me.

And it is a speech from Pastor Tim Keller. And I decided to respond to a piece of it.

The first section of it is pretty good in general. He actually does a pretty good job in 10 minutes pulling out a few examples from the scripture that talk about collective or group guilt, which is a real biblical concept.

I think that social justice warriors take it way too far and to the point where it's no longer biblical, but it is an interesting topic to understand, especially for people in the

United States who have more of an individualistic mindset. And so I do recommend that you watch the first 10 minutes of this speech.

It's pretty good and pretty interesting. It might challenge how you think about some things. But then he kind of goes off the rails a little bit.

And I wanna make sure to make this clear upfront. This video is a response to Tim Keller's ideas.

I do not think his ideas are very good in the section that I'm gonna show you. This is not a personal attack on Tim Keller.

This is not a personal attack on anyone who likes Tim Keller or who is associated with Tim Keller. If you know anything about me,

I'll tell you that Tim Keller wrote a book that was instrumental into my understanding and accepting of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So to him, I owe a lot. The Holy Spirit worked through his book and the biblical scriptural aspects of that book to change my life completely.

And so without that book, God would have done it another way, obviously, but God chose to work through this book.

And so anyway, the point is, this is not trying to throw shade his way. I wanna make sure that that's very clear at the outset.

But what Tim Keller does after the first 10 minutes or so, he starts to talk about systemic evil and Nazi Germany.

And by the way, I'm guilty of this sometimes, but anytime you want to kind of shut your opposition's brains off, compare their positions to Nazi Germany.

That's the easiest way to sort of make sure people don't listen to you. I have been guilty of this myself. And so I'm trying never to use the

Nazi comparison ever again, because it's so done to death and people just shut their brains off.

So he decides to do that. He talks about the systemic evil of Nazi Germany, which of course it was systemically evil.

And then he makes a few other kind of weird examples of what he calls systemic evil.

And so I'll just play it and we'll get into it.

Oh, by the way, this is from, as you can see, it's from March 18th, 2012. This is six years ago.

And so the person who sent it to me was saying, well, I didn't realize this was going on for so long. And to be honest,

I did not either. I know that people have noticed it and have been calling this out for years. And so I'm grateful for them.

In fact, the book that I'm reading that I keep recommending is from 1982. So this is nothing new, but it's definitely ramping up and becoming more popular.

And so Tim Keller has been kind of interestingly silent in this latest sort of stream of social justice warrior stuff, but he is definitely a social justice warrior.

Anyway, here is the snippet that I want to play. It starts right around minute 15. So for example, let me give you a mini system.

I knew a man who was the head of a car dealerships, a set of car dealerships in the

South. So he's gonna talk about a mini system of systematic evil.

And he's an example of this guy that he knows who ran a car dealership. And this is so interesting what he says.

Our dealerships, the way in which things were done was you could come in and negotiate and the salesman had a pretty big window of what they could give you the car for.

So they would negotiate and you would negotiate. And it was a way of, it was a lot of horse trading going on, except it was car trading,

I guess. And the salesmen couldn't go lower than this, but they could get this high.

And so it was partly, it was a tradition. Somebody did some research and found out that, A, men always were better negotiators with the salesmen than women.

And white men were, white men and white black men were better negotiators than African -American women.

And so. So he says that negotiating your price when you buy something is a tradition.

I don't wanna call him a Marxist. I'm not going to call him a Marxist. I don't know that Tim Keller is a

Marxist, but these are the reasons why people say your ideas are Marxist.

Negotiating a price is not a tradition. Negotiating a price is basic economics, basic.

Supply and demand, trying to get the best deal you can, not trying to overpay on things. This is basic, basic economics.

And so what he's gonna say here is that the fact that women were always, were not getting the same price that men were is an idea, is sort of a proof of systemic oppression of women, but also black people, because black men didn't get as low a price as white men.

Okay, that's the idea he's gonna present. Let's go forward. When somebody actually looked at what was going on,

African -American women were regularly paying far more for their cars, and were actually subsidizing, the price of what white men were paying for cars in that particular town.

And so they realized that even though nobody thought they were doing something, if the result was unjust, and it was unjust, then even though there was nobody in there who originally had said, let's do it this way, because that way, we will really hurt

African -American women, but they were hurting African -American women. There's two things you can do. On the one hand, you could say, because we're not deliberately trying to hurt

African -American women, and we make better profits this way, we have no responsibility. But the owner, a

Christian man, said, we do. And he changed the model. He changed the whole approach. His own profits have gone down, but he says it's the only way to be just.

Okay, so again, I'm not going, I'm not gonna call him a

Marxist. I'm not gonna say that. This is why we call your ideas

Marxist, because this is classic, very classic. The only way it's just, according to Pastor Tim Keller, is if everyone pays the exact same price.

Okay, that's the only way it's just. And here's the, this is the thing that, this is why I stand against this stuff.

This is why I do these videos, because he is saying how much of a win this is for justice and equality and for blacks and women.

So now they're paying the same price, and that's a win. Well, the reality is that he has a wrong assumption, that there was some kind of systemic injustice between the different ways that people were able to negotiate prices.

And that's not correct. And so because that his idea is not correct at the outset, the solution is not correct.

And actually, what he says helps minorities and women actually hurts them, because here's what's going on here.

Jordan Peterson has a thing about this when it comes to salary negotiations. And he says that women don't do as well in salary negotiations, because they tend to be more agreeable than men.

That's just a trait of women. Females in general have a trait where they're more agreeable than men.

So if the same person, same skillset, everything like that, walked into an office and was gonna negotiate their salary for the same exact job, the same exact work, and basically the company was gonna start with, let's say 50K is your offer.

It's more likely, even if the woman and the men are both worth 55K, it's more likely for the woman to say, okay,

I'll accept 50 than the man. The man is more likely to just walk away. And so they'll end up getting more money.

And so he says, well, what we gotta do is make sure everything's the same. That's just classic economic Marxism, right?

This is not cultural Marxism, it's just Marxism. But no, what we should do instead, and this is what

Jordan Peterson says he does, he trains women to be less agreeable when they're trying to negotiate. And so if a woman goes into the car dealership and says,

I'm not gonna pay a dime over 10K, they'll probably sell her the car for 10K.

But without that training, without that knowledge, women in general are just more agreeable to pay 12K or more 13K, whereas a man will say,

I'll walk out of this dealership right now unless you give it to me for 10K and we'll get the car for 10K. And so what you do is you basically put women and then minorities in a position where you never train them to be better negotiators.

You never train them to understand maybe where can I potentially step my game up here?

Where can I be less agreeable in order to accomplish what I want to accomplish? And that's to get things for the lowest price I possibly can.

So because his assumption is wrong, he has a Marxist assumption about the justness of that situation, then his solution is wrong and it ends up hurting the very people he claims to help.

This is why we call your ideas Marxist because this is a Marxist idea. There was nothing unjust about the situation he described.

The only way it would be unjust is if they were saying, okay, well, we're not gonna sell a black person or a lady a car for under 12K, but we'll sell men a car for 10K.

If they're saying that, then that's unjust partiality. And by the way, you have private property rights.

So even that wouldn't be biblically something that you could adjudicate in criminal court. I mean, biblically, it might be wrong, immoral to God, but it wouldn't be something you could take someone to court for, biblically speaking, of course.

But you see how, this is why I stand against it because this actually hurts minorities. If Latinos like me are poor negotiators in comparison to whites, let's just say, let's just say that,

I don't know that that's the case, but let's just say that it is, then what we need is not for you to say, oh, everyone pays the same.

No, no, no, what you need is to tell us that and teach us how to be better negotiators. We're just as capable at negotiating as anybody else.

Women are just as capable as negotiating as everyone else. You know, if you train a woman that sometimes she needs to be less agreeable, she'll probably end up getting more money than she would have if she was as agreeable as she naturally is.

By the way, the agreeableness of women is a beautiful thing. You know what I mean? Like this is not, this is how God created people.

But anyway, I'm not gonna call Tim Keller a Marxist. I'm not gonna do it.

But that idea, this presentation that he just gave is classic Marxism.

And there is a couple of other things I wanna mention in this sermon, but that was the first one. I hope this was helpful.