Joseph Spurgeon on the Temptation of Ideology

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome, once again, to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have an interesting discussion for you today,

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I think a helpful discussion and a necessary discussion for the times in which we live.

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A little bit about where I'm coming from in this podcast. My work has been primarily on social justice.

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In the book, Social Justice Goes to Church, I found that the founding fathers of the movement that we've been encountering in the last few years were all raised in conservative evangelical or conservative

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Christian households, and they were rebelling against it. You could talk about Ron Sider or Jim Wallace or any number of founding father type figures in the evangelical leftist movement.

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I give you little biographies of them in the book. One of the things that I talk about, there's a chapter on this, is that a lot of these guys retained the attitudes that their parents held.

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They wanted to get away from this strict, fundamental, black and white way of looking at the world, but they kept viewing the world that way and they just flipped the heroes and villains.

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They rebelled against their parents, but they did so in a way that looked an awful lot like their parents.

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They were fundamentalists in spirit, at least in the cultural things associated with that.

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They had that spirit about them, but they had a different law they had swapped out. They never actually broke from the ideological way their parents viewed the world.

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I think this is an important first thing to observe. This is human nature. We actually tend to retain a lot of the ways that our parents think and the way our parents do things.

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Now, in modernity, we have a situation that we all swim in, we all live in, but it is unique in the history of the world where we are in a fractured time.

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Pragmatic concerns and the immediate replaces faith in timeless ideals. We have a subjective sentimentality that characterizes our culture.

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We leap from one ideology to another, a reductionistic ideology, and we try to find the meaning of life through these things.

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And we reject the harmonized vision that our ancestors would have been, our

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Christian ancestors would have been living with. Now, when I talk about ideology,

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I'm talking about a rationalistic closed system of thought designed to explain all of human behavior through simple precepts.

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I think it was David Hume who said that ideologues were essentially enemies of mankind, that they didn't like people.

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They liked their ideas and they wanted to force them on people regardless of the consequences of those ideas.

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And ideology explains human nature and activity in total. So you have a total critique by reducing it to a singular impulse.

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And so let me give you some examples of modern ideologies. In this world of modernity, we have these ideologies,

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Marxism, right? Class conflict is what everything reduces to in Marxism. It motivates human action in total.

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Feminists reduce everything to patriarchal domination for critical race theorists. It's whiteness for liberals.

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It's the constraints on choice. That's the problem. And everything reduces to this. For Nazis, it was

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Jewish influence. And in each case, the particulars in reality share one essential nature.

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And I think this is dangerous, actually. I think ideology can be very dangerous. It's legalistic. Anything not promoting the ideology is viewed suspiciously, labeling even neutral activities as oppressive.

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There's a rigid universal application. So advocates for immediate forceful fixes to social issues often do so with outweighing alternatives and the outcomes.

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And you see this with cancel culture. You see this with COVID mandates. It doesn't matter who it hurts. We just need to apply.

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And then it narrows life's purpose down. Life's purpose is directed towards activism for an egalitarian utopia in the social justice scheme and these other schemes, these other ideologies.

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Everything becomes about that one thing. And I see parallels between this and idolatry in the

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Bible. There's actually, I think in some ways you could maybe make a connection and say this is almost a modern form of idolatry in some ways, because idols are man -made, just like ideologies.

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They require sacrifices. They cannot deliver on their promises. They lie to their followers. There are some parallels here.

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Not saying that every person on the outskirts of an ideological movement is an idolatry, but you can at least see that that tendency and danger exists there.

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So with that in mind, as I've given you a long intro, I want to introduce to you, I think we've actually had him on the podcast before, a pastor named

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Joseph Spurgeon. He is the pastor actually in Jefferson. I was just in your hometown,

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Jeffersonville, Indiana. And he pastors a Presbyterian church there. And Joseph has, we've known each other for what, 2021,

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I think, so a few years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've really respected your interaction on social media when it comes to this problem of ideology, especially with young people.

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I think that you're approaching these things in a very similar way to the way I think about them.

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You're not, I don't see you offering competing ideologies. I see you offering the word of God and you're very much a traditional conservative.

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So I want to get your take on some of these ideologies and also some of the dangers you see with men in particular and reacting against feminism and some of these ideologies and trading out one for another.

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So with that, I want to give you the opportunity up front before you start speaking to plug anything you want, where you want people to go.

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I don't know if you have a podcast. I know a website. So where can people go if they want to hear more about you? Sure.

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Yeah. Again, I'm a pastor of Sovereign King Church, Jeffersonville, Indiana. So you can go to SovereignKingChurch .com

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and I have a podcast called the Patriarchy Podcast. And I think we'll put this material up.

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We're recording here today on that podcast for you as well. And if you really want to get connected with me, just the easiest way is either on Facebook or Twitter.

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And my handle is basically the same as just Joseph Spurgeon. And so look for a bald bearded dude in a suit probably.

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And that'll get you to the right location. Well, you bring a pastoral heart to this whole discussion, which

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I don't see a lot, especially on social media. So I want to shoot some ideologies at you and just get your reaction.

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I think we're going to spend most of our time talking about some of the Nazi -ish,

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I don't know even what term to use, but Nazi enthusiasm, Nazi frameworks that are being employed by some young men, because I know you're concerned about that in ways that I think are appropriate that, you know, and you differ.

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And we will talk about that. You differ from some of the other concerns, people who are concerned that I think approach it from a very ideological standpoint.

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But I want to start with social justice, because we've lived through this. And this is, I think, still controlling many of our institutions.

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But I have a quote from Howard Zinn. He said that the historian's job was to promulgate equality and change the culture by siding with victims and imagining new possibilities.

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So he was a historian, but he saw the work he did as less history and observation than it was activism and promoting this equal society.

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And I know that during the woke wars, you were critical of the social justice movement.

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So I don't know if you have a few pastoral thoughts on people attracted to that who are Christians.

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Yeah, sure. Maybe I'd like to just start broadly with the whole concept of the ideology. And I think where it stems from, there's this book, and I don't agree with everything in the book, but the title is good.

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It's called The False Presence of the Kingdom. And as we know, we have a war that we fight and we're fighting against not just flesh and blood, but spiritual forces.

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And they're constantly trying to push us a false kingdom, a false messiah, a false

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Christ. And I think ideologies often are a replacement for Christianity and the gospel.

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And so they have a lot of very similarities of the Christian worldview, right?

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They have the problem of evil. Where does that come from? They have the solution to the evil, and they even have an eschatology that they're headed somewhere.

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And the problem is they're always Christless and don't follow the word of God.

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And I think you go back even into the Bible with the

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Jews there when Christ was there, they wanted a different kingdom than the kingdom that Christ was bringing and rejected the messiah.

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And from then on out, they became a people that had rejected the messiah and yet still had a messiah complex, if you will, still had like,

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OK, the messiah is not coming. We've got to be the messiah. And so there's very utopian type views from the

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Jews. But that's not just the Jews that do that. I think this is just human nature for us to we see problems and we want solutions.

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And that's the woke thing, right? It's Christless. What's the problem?

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The problem is your inherited nature from your race, your family, your fathers and all the maybe oppression and things that have happened so that you become like an oppressed class of people or which are like God's chosen people in this sense.

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And then the oppressor, which are the enemies. And you really can't escape that that election, if you will, if you want to call it that that sense, you can't escape what you've been in this woke system other than you can try to ally with the oppressed.

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And so I guess the first thing I would just say, it's simply a counterfeit gospel.

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It's simply a counterfeit to what scripture tells us. And the insidious nature of most ideologies is that they mock and mimic different elements of the true gospel.

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So, you know, scripture is replete with God's justice against those who oppress others, those who unjustly act unjust in their laws, their their actions, their behaviors.

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And God is with the poor, often the reformed theologians called the moral poor, the spiritual poor, because Jesus said, you know, blessed are those who are poor in heart.

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But the woke thing, just I think it it it takes these out of moral categories and puts them merely in racial categories or ethnic categories.

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And it's a salvation is not through Christ. It's now through all kinds of other means, you know, confessing your white guilt.

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And and and then the crazy thing about it is rather than lifting up Christ as king, it begins to lift up whoever holds the ideology as king.

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It's all about gaining power in that kind of sense. Like they become the ones who get to reign and rule in this special kingdom.

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And they do so by their victimhood status. They're they're. You know, however many degrees you can get in your intersectionality and really then this is distortion and sadly that was brought into the church and it confuses the gospel and it destroys the the peace and purity of the church and destroys the union that we have.

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You know, the gospel doesn't come in destroying our ethnicities. And destroying who we are as a people, like we we have

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God made us human beings. But it does in the church unite people of all backgrounds and classes and ethnicities in such a way that these things are,

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I don't want to say of no importance because they're still male and female and male headship and those things, but of lesser importance in that you look at church history for it.

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There were churches in the early church where the slave was a pastor and the slave owner was a member of the church, and yet they still had the natural relationship of working out being a slave and a slave master that didn't destroy that.

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But in the church, it it it put them on a status that's different. Yeah. So anyway,

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I think Robert Lee was the one who said the ground is level at the end of the cross and he wasn't talking about social leveling and like in an egalitarian sense.

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I know as I studied this issue, I have come to agree with the premise of your thoughts, where like it seems to me that the people who promulgated this movement from the beginning were taking an off ramp from Christianity and they were really forming or in this case, they were wedding themselves to a different religion.

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They didn't think of it as that. They wanted to Christianize it. But that's really the problem, ultimately, is social justice really does end up becoming an alternative religion.

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Even if you're an atheist, you're still involved in these canons of books that can't be questioned.

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There's certain prophetic figures that have a deity about them almost like they are angels from on high,

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MLK Jr., for example, you can't and we should have heroes. But there is this extra layer of religious significance that they put on some of these things.

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And then they end up having their woke born again experience. Their, you know, utopia is their heaven.

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Alternative is a DEI state on this earth that doesn't come with a messiah.

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So, yeah, there's so many parallels. And and I agree with you on that. That's one.

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And I feel like with that issue, that's that's something that not just because of my work, but now because of so many others.

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I know Megan Basham just wrote a book that's somewhat been exposed. So Christians are now figuring out not all of them, perhaps some of them who have even started to get swept away into this and didn't go fully on board.

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They've realized, oh, wow, that I was being deceived. And they're seeing now that this was wrong, which

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I'm very encouraged to see. There's also another one I wanted to talk to you about because there's a lot of different ideologies.

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But this is a big one in my mind is liberalism. I think libertarianism would be one of the like iterations of this.

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There's different forms of it. But liberalism seems to be the default setting that whether you're on the right politically or on the left politically, most people in the establishment are by nature liberal.

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And I want to read this as a quote from Ayn Rand. Now, she's libertarian, so very aggressively free market liberal.

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And big on the autonomy of man.

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But she says, all that which proceeds from man's dependence upon man is evil. All that which proceeds from man's dependence on man is evil.

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And so my body, my choice, right? You can be anything that you want to be. Even the idea that we're a nation of immigrants and, you know, diversities are strength comes down to this idea that like cultures don't matter.

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Only the individual, it's just individual centric and expanding the choice of that individual becomes the most important thing.

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And some liberals want big government programs to help the individual expand their choices and take from you.

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So they have resources to promote themselves and live out their dreams. And then other liberals like the more like Ayn Rand would have would say that, no, no one can ever reach into your pocket.

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No one should force you to do anything. And so maybe just a reaction to this. I know this is harder to get at because we all to some extent have been used to these liberal assumptions.

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But I mean, do you go after this in the pulpit? Do you do you see that this problem as well? Yeah. And the same kind of it's the same concept of replacing the kingdom.

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If you trace it back, liberalism itself comes from several sources. But you start with Christian liberalism is a jettisoning the truths of scripture that are really.

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I want to say earthy, manly and on one hand, because they they reject the very nature that Jesus is fully man, fully

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God, and he really just becomes a mythical being in Christian liberalism.

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And so you're you're you're rejecting both the supernatural of like the virgin birth, but also like the who he is as a man, because he's a mythical thing.

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All the things in scripture then are myths meant to teach things. And once you start getting chucking out these truths, you are left with merely a religion that is about progress, about the progress of of humanity.

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But I like you said earlier, it's a quote about you love humanity, but not a single person. That's like a

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G .K. Chesterton. I think that. Oh, yeah, they had that. Right. So it becomes a progress that we got to progress all of mankind, but not any individual men.

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And strangely, as it does all mankind, it it's not collectivist in the way that you would think.

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It's hyper individualistic because it it by focusing on not any individual and all mankind, it also gets rid of distinctions such as nations and ethnicities, male and female, and really just hyper focuses on individualism.

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Yeah. And go ahead. The secular ideologies, regardless of what they are, have this tendency because they are,

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I think they're taking this one aspect of creation or this one principle or this one thing, and then they're making it everything.

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And then they want they use that as the key to the whole. So that becomes the door. It's a sacred thing.

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It's the door everyone must walk through. And if you hold it, then you have insight into every situation.

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You know what the answer is. And that's just not true. But there is this sort of demystifying of things in that where or the enchantment, because you are kind of reducing everything to a scientific functionality.

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Like you're saying there's this principle or there's this mechanism that this is this is the way society runs.

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This is how it works. And this explains the whole this explains all of it. And so it's no wonder that liberals in the church would want to demystify the

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Bible. They want to take away God's throne and his role and use it as this helpful guide for individuals, for their lives.

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So they make like instead of the individual conforming themselves to this transcendent standard, because there's really not transcendence in these ideologies right now.

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Instead, man is man becomes the transcendent figure or a certain principle about man becomes the transcendent thing if there is any transcendence.

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And now the Bible serves that purpose. So, you know, you have to root out all the things that conflict with that in the

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Bible. And and I think like this is some people call it moralistic, therapeutic deism.

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But like liberalism is not just a political movement. It is it has these this metaphysical component that's religious that it gets into everything.

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It's a it's a very holistic type system and people appeal to it for everything.

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This is why you can't talk about religion and politics at the table. Right. That's a liberal, neutralist framework to say we can have a multicultural, pluralist society and no one should be about their own thing because that's offensive.

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And I think we're breaking. So here's the encouraging thing. Encouraging the social justice is

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I think people are starting to see in the church. But with this one, I think younger people, especially

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Gen Z years, either they're going so woke that they're starting to realize liberalism is wrong and that's not good.

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But or what they're doing is they are they're starting to question these assumptions they've been raised with.

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And they're saying, why not talk about religion and politics? Why not have a Christian nation? Right. That's a little Christian nationalism thing.

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Why why can't we conceive of ourselves as Christian? Why does it have to be this blank, neutralist, hyper individualistic state?

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So I see some encouragement in both those areas. There's reason to be encouraged, I suppose. You'll go ahead.

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I was going to say the liberal mindset is often been at war with the woke mindset and back and forth, like you just mentioned.

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And often. I must say, conservatives, older conservatives are battling the woke with the liberalism.

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That's exactly right. And so like one extreme or one example of this is what

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I'm going to call the extreme colorblindness. That is, well, if the woke people say race is everything, then we have to say race is nothing.

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And and ethnicity is nothing. Nation's nothing. It's all about an idea, the idea of America.

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And we and and and that kind of liberalism, I think of America as an idea is another again, replacing the kingdom with something else.

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And in this sense, the idea of a nation as the idea or built around a creed, as many argue liberally, is that that's a replacement for the church.

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Nations are people with specific characteristics and qualities and shared histories and shared other things.

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It's not necessarily just race or ethnicity, but it it's concrete people. Whereas the church, the church is over all those things.

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The church brings in people from all nationalities, the universal church, and it is built on a creed.

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And that's why I think the liberal like mindset can can lead to.

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Same things about America that are actually I want to call them blasphemous because they're actually true about the church.

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So what do we call America? It's a city on a hill. That's not what Jesus said. Jesus said you are a city on the hill talking about the church, not talking about America.

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We talk about as a light to the world, the last great hope on Earth and things like that, that those are, in my opinion, blasphemous because they've replaced

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America with the church or sorry, reverse that replaced the church with America. Well, you saw it on January 6th because we the unwashed masses enter the temple of democracy.

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That's what Nancy Pelosi called it. And yeah, it was kind of like the summer of love where everything burned down in these state regions and local like that didn't matter that they weren't challenging the sacred temple of democracy.

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And once there's people in that, then the game changes and this is terrible. So so, yeah,

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I totally see what you're saying there. And some of these ideologies have they share certain features because their ideology in common with each other.

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So not only are they reductionistic, but they tend to erode hierarchies. And I think that's what you're seeing there with the proposition

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Nathan Nation thing. The woke will appeal to that. So they make everything about race, but then they say race is a social construct.

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It's power dynamics. Right. So they think race is something, but it's a it's not it's not the rooted creation order thing.

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It's this abstract thing. And then the liberals say, well, no, it doesn't doesn't really exist.

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There isn't you know, they go for this like it shouldn't even be a factor. We shouldn't even consider.

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And that gives us gets us to open borders. And but in either case, they're just eroding hierarchies and stabilizing elements in order.

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And we have to have those things because we're humans. That's our nature. God made us to exist in families and nations and peoples and responsibilities within those things.

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And I see those things as big threats. So that's actually what liberalism is saving you from.

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So if they're right there, their view of what the problem is, is that you have all these things that hold you back from the freedom that you could have sexually or and so you have to be set free from.

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I want to say loyalties and allegiances and things so that you can be an individual, make your own thing and do your own thing.

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And that's the progress. We're always moving towards progress with somewhere we're going.

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Now, it's a lot of ill -defined and there's versions of liberalism, conservative and liberal that both hold that.

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And they're both going somewhere. But the whole idea is we're leaving behind. The policy, the guys who are liberal and don't seem to realize it, who think they're conservative or whatever, they will criticize the woke and they'll criticize, quote unquote,

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Christian nationalists and anyone they'll criticize, you know, neo -Nazi types with the same brush that they'll criticize

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Christian nationalists and traditional conservatives. And because if it's not liberal, if it's not about the individual and expanding the choice of the individual, then it's just all woke to them or it's all it's all this nefarious collectivist scheme.

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They don't see themselves as born into communities with attachments. They they only want attachments that are chosen, not unchosen ones.

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How dare someone choose for me what I'm going to be like? And I'm sorry, you know,

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I was born you were born into families that spoke English. I didn't get to choose what language we were born into families that were, you know, had certain features that things that they did in their pastimes that I didn't get to choose what hobby.

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That's just what my parents did. Right. So there's a fire departments and all kinds of services that I benefited from that I didn't choose to have an obligation to my community, but I do.

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And so that's that's what they want to get away from, it seems like. And so anything that would say there's an obligation or would say that people actually do existing groups, they hate it.

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They hate that. And so and they call it woke. Right. And it's the most ridiculous thing, in my opinion, especially, you know, the woke people are all egalitarian and they want to get rid of social hierarchies.

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And the guys that are actually conservative are on the right. They want to they want hierarchies.

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Right. They don't they're not egalitarian. Even on that point alone, it's ridiculous to start throwing this term out there.

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But that's the liberal mindset. And I think we're going to camp out and spend most of our time because I think you've just been so good at navigating this in ways

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I haven't seen others be good at navigating this. I want to talk about this and I don't know what word to use.

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I don't know if you have a better word, Nazi enthusiasm or this kind of like revival of certain aspects, because it's not a pure revival of Nazism at all.

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But this revival of certain aspects of Hitler's writings and this

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Nazi ideology being now the explanation for the problems that beset the

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West. And I want to read for you. This is from Mein Kampf. I was reading it the other day, not for inspiration, but for study.

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And I read it when I was a teenager. I read it and I thought it was it was fascinating. I actually encourage people, hey, read the

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Communist Manifesto, read Mein Kampf, read all these books that have been so influential, even books that are bad.

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If they they've moved people and they've been influential because you want to understand history. I think that gives us a context for the world that we live in.

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And so anyway, I came across this quote, though. This is in I think it's chapter

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I want to say 11 or so. But Hitler says that nature has he makes this argument.

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Nature had achieved superior races. I mean, it's thoroughly evolutionary. He goes. The way nature did this is through, quote, establishing an evolutionary higher stage of being.

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And every historical event in the world is nothing more nor less than a manifestation of the instinct of racial self -preservation.

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So right there, ideology, I think, jumps out at you because this is taking one motivating factor and it's making it every motivating factor.

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It's saying that the whole world just reduces to this thing, this one impulse when I guess when you're brushing your teeth, when you're doing anything, it's all about racial self -preservation.

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So it's not woke, right, because they're not he's not he's thinking in terms of groups, but he believes in a certain set of hierarchies and stuff.

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I think he's wrong, but he he is ideological, though.

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And so you have been I've seen some of the stuff that you posted that I think is very helpful from a pastoral standpoint in.

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Helping mostly, I think it's guys, but helping people who are going down this path and and you do it in such a good way and not you don't you're not trying to beat people up because they're out of step with the liberal or woke consensus you are or the post -World

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War Two consensus or whatever you are, you know, you and I very much both because we talked about this.

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We question the post -war consensus very strongly. I think more than even some of those guys, to be quite honest, but you're gentle in your approach.

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You're also firm. So I'm going to give you the floor and I want you to, you know, tell us what you think and maybe give some advice to the young guys in this audience.

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Sure. You know, there is always a tendency to react and overreact to ideologies and to other and that's kind of what creates

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Nazism in one sense is an overreaction to communism and other things that happen in history.

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But I think that there is we the whole idea of the post -war consensus comes from this.

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Well, the term existed for quite a while. I want to say our use that we're going to go with today comes from a guy that wrote a book,

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Reno is his name. It's called the shoot. Was it called Return of the Strong Gods?

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Yeah. Return of the Strong Gods. And interestingly enough, the whole point of it is is not so much about the war itself other than to see what happened in the first half of the 20th century.

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These ideologies seeing a reaction to that. So a reaction to World War One, World War Two, the

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Nazis, the communists. And so there's a reaction in the West to this. And actually, these reactions have been building.

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They were actually if we were. Look, historically, their reactions from not even reactions, they are the effects of Christian liberalism that began in Germany in the 1800s.

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Feminism, egalitarian things that were happening already in the West. But they are really coming to full bud at maybe the conclusion as America steps onto the stage as a world empire after World War Two.

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But the point of the book is not to go back and relitigate World War Two, but to talk about the ideologies that arise from it, the ones that kind of disconnect us from place, from people that that some of the things we've already been talking about, the things that led to the woke stuff that lead.

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And they also lead to the fact that if you are any ways conservative or any ways pushing back on any mainstream liberal thing, what is the insult?

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Well, you're Hitler, you're a Nazi, you're a KKK and all that. And there's the whole you know, the whole thing is, well, if you can't beat them, join them kind of deal like, well, if they're going to call us that, well, maybe, you know, well,

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Hitler has some of the same bad guys fighting him that we have fighting us.

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You know, you think of the the the Weimar Republic and the communists, kind of the

33:41

Bolsheviks, the homosexuals, you know, you find out you don't find it out in public school, but you do find out doing

33:51

Google searches and stuff that the book burns, the book burning, they are burning. Oh, they were burning trans books, books that were teaching about transsexual stuff.

34:01

And they were dealing with some of that there. And so you start to think they call me

34:07

Hitler. That he had the same enemies.

34:13

Maybe Hitler's a good guy. And before you know it, you're rethinking all this and you become susceptible to,

34:22

I think, his ideology, which is not Christianity, as you just quoted from.

34:27

It's a natural evolutionary worldview that makes the

34:34

Aryan race the highest form of human race. And it leads to,

34:41

I think, a hyper focus on race that is akin to the woke stuff.

34:49

I don't want to call it woke right. Other than that, there is an over focus on race.

34:55

And you also start looking for enemies and you have an over focus on the

35:02

Jews as enemies as well. What I what I want to say, what

35:07

I where I come from in this is like I'm not coming from this as a liberal or woke.

35:15

I'm coming from this from a biblical perspective. And I'm actually coming from a from a Christian nationalist perspective myself.

35:21

Like, I believe there are nations. I believe ethnicity is a real thing. Race is a real thing. I believe that Jews have done a lot of wicked stuff.

35:29

And when I say Jews, I mainly mean secular Jews, because you will see people that get caught up in the

35:38

Nazi stuff. When they talk about Jews, they will say, oh, no, we're just talking about Talmudic Judaism.

35:43

But actually, most Jews are not Talmudic Talmudic and Talmudic Judaism is bad.

35:49

It's wicked. The the the religion, because it is a denial of Christ.

35:55

In fact, it's blasphemous towards Christ. But most most Jews are not even that.

36:01

And even most Talmudic Jews have no power, like the Orthodox Jews, the Hasidic Jews, like in in Israel, for example, they are.

36:12

They're hated by the rest of the Jews, they're right, they're seen as leeches on the on on the the they're seen the same way liberals would think of Amish or.

36:23

Well, see, quick aside, I live in New York about an hour and a half from or two hours north of the city.

36:29

So there's there's Jewish people who from New York City have migrated up and they'll commute and things.

36:34

So anyway, I know a guy, he's a secular Jew, and he he one time told me or he said that he did not want to go to Israel on a with like on a

36:48

Jewish airline or something because he doesn't want to be stuck next to all those, as you call them,

36:54

Talmudic, but Hasidic Jews. And like people do not understand if they don't live in an area that has higher concentrations of Jewish people, how much disdain exists between these communities.

37:07

I mean, he thinks they're smelly. They're this like and he's Jewish himself. That ethically, I just wanted to back up what you were saying, because I I think that's 100 percent true.

37:15

And I do see these broad sweeps that ignore that. But anyway, sorry, keep going. So anyways,

37:20

I was kind of getting thank you. You kind of saved me from a rabbit trail a little bit, too. So we'll come maybe back to that some other time. But the point being is we've all seen the early life on Wikipedia.

37:32

We all know that there are there are secular Jews that are lockstep with Roman Catholics and that are wicked liberal

37:40

Roman Catholics that are lockstep with gay trans Protestant people pushing wicked stuff in our in our day.

37:51

And so we all see that. I see that. So I'm not coming at it from like we can't actually acknowledge that some ethnicity, some people have sinful proclivities.

38:02

We can't come out from that. But we have to come at this as Christians. And God's word teaches us not to have a bitter hatred.

38:12

It tells us to put away all hatred and malice and envy and greed tells us to put away the characteristics of an angry, bitter man and rather to live by faith and walk in faith.

38:27

And we have battles to face. And so what I'm seeing is,

38:32

I think, a reaction to being called Hitler, being called Nazis and a discovering and finding out some information that you didn't know.

38:43

But I'm also seeing a lot of young guys. That's the end of the depth of it.

38:48

Oh, they will say they did a lot of research. But what that means, they read some memes.

38:54

They maybe saw a few websites and probably listened to Corey Maller and Stone Choirs.

39:03

Yeah, I found that to be the case. I mean, I'm not an expert and I don't claim to be and I don't focus on this area much.

39:10

But I mean, I did a grad course on World War Two and I did a graduate course on the Holocaust.

39:15

So there's six credits. And and of course, you know, and it was at a

39:21

Christian conservative university. Even there, I saw anti -Christian men actually did my project in the

39:26

Holocaust class on Martin Luther and his views. And most of the guys

39:32

I see today out there talking about this issue from the standpoint of the sort of Nazi enthusiastic view, they are circulating a lot of Volk material, a lot of like Nazi propaganda material on Luther and what

39:48

Luther's views were, because I had to study that in depth for the project. And and I'm just seeing it.

39:54

I'm seeing guys. There was a guy the other day who was very concerned. My this is how crazy ideological it gets that my wife is somehow

40:02

Jewish. And I had mentioned a year ago, Ancestry .com. I don't have you ever done that.

40:07

You're sending your DNA and they probably are wiser. You're wiser. See, I'm curious.

40:13

And I thought, well, they probably already got my DNA somewhere, you know, whatever. They know everything.

40:18

Let me just find this out. So I I sent mine and I sent we sent my wife's in. And so we didn't know this about her.

40:25

But it said, I think at the time, like eight percent Jewish. Now they've reduced it since then. That's the thing about Ancestry.

40:30

I don't trust it anymore because certain like they gave like half of her Scottish to Germany. And like it was

40:37

I don't know like where they're getting all their stuff. Like some of the things you could see that, you know, maybe that's right.

40:42

But anyway, I'm not even convinced my wife is has any Jewish in her. But I had mentioned on the podcast that Ancestry had said eight percent years ago.

40:50

And this guy was going after me for it. You know, you can't trust John. You can't trust anything he says because he's got a

40:56

Jewish wife. And I noticed this guy also had on his profile. He had that he was, you know, a colonialist.

41:05

And I thought, well, that's really curious because the Nazis were super against colonialism. You know, anyone who studied them knows this.

41:11

But I don't know, like some of these guys. I just don't get the like they might have watched like one

41:18

David Irving video, you know, and that's and that becomes what we question this one aspect of was one of the concentration camps like this.

41:27

And then let's question the whole thing or let's and I don't see the depth of thought. You know,

41:32

I'm not saying there aren't deep thinkers that are attracted to that stuff because in Nazi Germany, they had their intellectual class.

41:38

But a lot of what we're talking about online, I think you're absolutely right. I think it is coming from this place of like you want this sort of simple answer for everything we just lived through, which was terrible in 2020, all the vilification white people are receiving, et cetera.

41:54

And so they they grab this explanation that without really,

42:00

I think, thinking wholly about it, they haven't done maybe the research that you would need to to do to really come to a conviction on it.

42:09

That's a good conviction. So I think there's this perception that, like you said, today's enemies are the same as Germany's.

42:16

Hitler was the last world leader to stand up to them. A lot of guys in our generation are rootless. They're looking for belonging.

42:22

They don't have it in their homes. Not saying that describes all of them, but I've noticed this tendency on the woke side to without your own story to find identity with, you're going to find other people's you're going to find ideologies, you're going to find something to belong to.

42:37

And so they take this sort of like reductionistic approach to the postwar consensus. And, you know, we would have had the postwar consensus whether or not we had

42:45

World War two as far as like the the general tenants of what Reno talks about, I think would have been there.

42:50

It's just that accelerated it and gave us a mythology to justify it. And so these guys,

42:56

I think, think it's just it's like World War two. You just relitigate that. And it's just not true.

43:02

Posing the postwar consensus doesn't fundamentally it's not just about switching heroes and villains.

43:08

It's about not really, I think if you want to challenge the postwar consensus, you shouldn't make a regime that died out 80 years ago in a foreign country, the hinge on which all your political thinking turns like that's probably, you know, they're doing the kind of the same thing.

43:26

Right. Like that. It's like the fundamentalist woke guys who are rejecting the fundamentalism of their

43:32

Christian parents. It's like the same thing. It's like we're going to keep that spirit. We're going to kind of have the same stories.

43:37

We're just going to flip heroes, villains, you know, and then pushback, of course, is confirmation that they're right.

43:44

So, yeah, everything we've said means they're right now. Everything. Yeah. Just the fact that we're saying we're acknowledging that this is exists in certain quarters of the online world means they're right.

43:56

Facts don't seem to matter quite as much in these discussions. But, you know, truth does matter, though.

44:01

And I think for me, I know this is your motivating thing. Like I care about the young men and that's that's the thing.

44:09

Like I recognize there's no political power in this. I recognize guys are disqualifying themselves at early stages from actually getting political power because they're going down this path.

44:19

It's a dark path, I think, when you go down it further. And that's my concern is guys who, especially

44:28

Christian guys who are starting to grab hold of this as an explanation, I've I'm seeing certain tendencies that other strong ideologues have.

44:37

Like you develop a bunker mentality. Ideas matter more to you than relationships. Someone's like one click off from you and like you just you go to war.

44:46

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, my concerns are pastoral.

44:52

They're not I don't give a rip about like if you're actually just questioning how many people were killed in the

44:59

Holocaust. I don't care about that. You know, was it six million, two million? If it was two people, it's still wicked if two people were intentionally murdered.

45:07

Right. Obviously, that's a great number, but it's a million people. A million people being intentionally murdered is not a hero and not a

45:16

Christian prince. What I what but I don't care if you're rethinking through history.

45:21

I want people to be able to have conversations. I actually think what plays a part in the people going this route is the way that we talk about Hitler.

45:30

And it's very mythical. It's very he's he's he's he's like a couple runs lower than Satan on the evil scale.

45:39

I mean, he's like worse than Satan. He is. If you're going to insult anybody for being evil, you know, you're going to say he's

45:47

Hitler. And so we don't act. And that leads to people looking in and saying, well, actually, there were some things he said that were decent.

45:54

There was things he said he he he did good things for his nation for a few years.

46:00

And people will look and say, see, he's fought them and he was the last person to fight the woke stuff.

46:06

And the problem is he didn't fight it with Christ. And there's so much evil wrapped up in what he was doing.

46:17

It was it was still a false kingdom and it still is not our hope.

46:28

And so as a pastor, my concern is, again, it's not about somebody sharing a meme or whatever. I know that was a big deal lately.

46:34

I probably would have laughed at the meme and then told the person, don't be stupid. In fact, I don't want to excommunicate him for sharing the meme.

46:42

Because it's a meme, I do want to excommunicate him for sharing a meme with somebody that doesn't have a sense of humor and made us all have to talk about it.

46:49

But but I I'm kidding, but I I don't want to see.

46:55

Here's my problem. I think historical revisionism can be

47:01

OK, but there's a temptation and the temptation is bitterness and anger ultimately at the providence of God.

47:10

Everything that happens in history is by God's providence, God's care. One of the sins of the third commandment, the

47:16

Westminster Confession of Faith says or the catechism says is to mock at or be bitter and angry or question the providence of God.

47:26

And so when I look at what happened in World War Two as a

47:32

Christian, I have to give thanks. I give thanks that God was working there. It doesn't mean that I think everybody was a hero or all that America did.

47:40

All the allies did were good. No, there was there was wickedness all around. But I give thanks for his work there and bringing us to this point.

47:49

Even though I opposed a lot of the stuff of the postwar consensus stuff, I still give thanks that actually there are a lot of benefits that we've gotten from that that you and I just enjoy.

47:59

Like, look, we're sitting here talking on the Internet and maybe that would have occurred. But like there was a lot of technological advances and things that have come our way since the war and and probably because of immigration and other things that have been allowed because of the consensus.

48:18

And so we have to be careful that we do not be consumed with second guessing everything that comes in history to such a point that we become bitter and we lose focus actually on what what

48:33

God's doing now instead of thinking about what could have should have been. And I say this, dude, as like a dude that would fly the

48:40

Confederate flag. So like, you know, I think the South probably should have won. But I'm not

48:48

I don't want to spend my life rehashing that either. Like God's providence gave us the

48:53

Union victory. God's providence gives us the allies. We have to instead of spending our lives focused on trying to relitigate everything in history, we need to trust

49:07

God's work and and keep ourselves from bitterness. So that's one problem.

49:13

Another problem I see is that it actually and this is the interesting thing,

49:19

I think by putting all of our attention, putting so much attention on Hitler and you and you can say, well, who's doing that?

49:24

Just go on Twitter or X. But putting all that attention on it actually reinforces the postwar consensus.

49:31

You know what I'm saying, John? Like. Again, in the book,

49:36

The Return of the Strong Gods, Reno doesn't spend time relitigating the war, rather he's focusing on philosophies that use it as a mythological thing to to as a it's the myth that empowers the philosophies.

49:53

But by focusing so much on revisionism there and talking about Hitler, we're actually still reinforcing that narrative by making that theme central like we will get to a point where we can be talking less about World War Two.

50:09

Yeah, it's like an opposite F scale, like the critical theory F scale that.

50:18

Tries to like through a few steps route everything back into there's a fascistic tendency.

50:26

You obey your parents. That's fascism. You you love your country.

50:32

That's fascism, right? Like this gains sway in universities throughout the 60s, 70s.

50:38

And then, of course, then it went to the streets in 2020. But I think everything's been routed into this framework.

50:46

And the solution isn't to like build an opposite framework where you have your own

50:52

F scale, but now the negatives and positives are reversed. So the more of a fascist you are, you know, in a

51:01

Nazi sense, the better. But that's what I do see happening somewhat. And it's a curious thing to me.

51:06

I was talking to a guy the other day about it because actually it was at a chat group. So I was like, hey, does this make sense to anyone like 2020 happened?

51:15

We have literally hundreds of Confederate monuments were ripped down, streets, names changed. We had some founders stuff got ripped down.

51:24

We had Lincoln even erased in some places. The Christopher Columbus went away. I mean, these are the people that were targeted in the

51:30

United States because we don't live in Germany. We live in the United States and we don't live in other countries. So, you know, mainly the

51:36

Anglo -American world experiences. England had some of that, you know, tarnishing Winston Churchill statue and so forth.

51:43

And so that's the attack that happens. But for some of these these guys

51:49

I've noticed online, many of them, I don't know their names because they operate pseudonymous pseudonymously like the reaction is like to champion this foreign thing, this government,

52:01

Hitler and stuff. And I'm like, how does that make any sense? And what I was told that I thought, OK, well, this I can sort of see it like they're looking for something that was the last kind of iteration that they thought pushed back against this stuff.

52:16

And they're also like even with those heroes, what are the Confederates called? Like they're called

52:21

Nazis, right? They're called they're like proto Nazis. I noticed there was a switch in even slavery literature like 10 years ago.

52:29

Well, not not in like academic literature, but like in the way that like popular accounts of slavery like they're compared to concentration camps and stuff like that never used to happen.

52:41

But like that's the most evil thing. So like if we can just sort of like like as like a vortex, suck everything else we don't like into that evil thing,

52:49

Trump, every like that becomes our justification for canceling it, destroying it, that kind of thing.

52:57

And and so that's why there's the reaction. That's why there are guys who just say, well, I'll just go to like let's track it back to whatever the source is, like what's the source of what they hate?

53:06

Oh, it's Hitler. Then let's be like him. You know, like, yeah, that's that's the worst you can be in their minds.

53:14

So that must be the best in ours. And yeah, it's a curious thing because the conservative instincts are not that like Richard Weaver wrote an essay where he explained why the

53:25

South was the most opposed to fascism of any region in the United States. Hitler, even in Mein Kampf, he relies on Lincoln at one point to justify his consolidation of Germany.

53:38

You know, the militarism, I can I can draw more parallels to the Union Army if I wanted to. Like, it's very different than a traditional

53:44

Southern culture. The same thing. And I forget who wrote the book, but I wrote an article a few months back for American Reformer called

53:52

Conservative Nazi Hunters, where I make the argument that basically these conservatives that are obsessed with Nazis and see them behind every bush and try to out people and hammer them and all this like this is this is a leftist tactic, mostly to try to route everything back to Nazis.

54:07

And conservatives shouldn't be about that. But there was a conservative critique of Nazis that was different.

54:13

And and I pointed out there was a book written, I think it was in the 60s, but it was it was by someone who was studying the traditional

54:24

Catholic people in Bavaria. They were the most opposed to Hitler's plans, and they would have been the closest thing.

54:31

And they were Catholic, but they would have been the closest thing to a, quote, unquote, Christian nationalism in that country.

54:37

And they were the big enemies. And so I'm thinking like what conservative instincts should be against ideology should be, you know, against the modern state and everything that comes with that.

54:50

I mean, this is a Hitler's Germany is a product of modernity in many ways, but instead it's an embracement of ideology.

54:58

It's swapping out one ideology for another. And I see the bitterness that the woke stuff gives you.

55:03

I see the bitterness, the deeper you get into liberalism, where it gets you. I see the bitterness, though, in the bunker mentality that this has to.

55:12

And that's why I guess my main concern is, will this.

55:18

Help you grow in holiness and godliness and the things that are teaching not to be centered around.

55:28

Right. First Timothy, a love from a pure heart, a clean conscience, sincere faith. And I'm not seeing that.

55:34

I see young men who get into this and then they get attached to some dudes that, you know, there's the whole stone choir guys and other guys like that, that they are so ate up with it that they have now not only can they point out simple proclivities of people of different ethnicities and races have, but they begin to treat them as a subhuman.

56:03

I saw comments back and forth online treating a Christian brother who is of Jewish ethnicity with contempt and as if he had like a handicapped.

56:14

And it was very similar to how the woke people will treat a white

56:22

Christian like they have a handicap for being white. It was this handicap for being Jewish. And while we want to not follow the woke stuff at all, and I also don't want to follow in the colorblind kind of liberalistic stuff, we have to be careful that we don't fall in this other ditch of just becoming what they think we are, which is and I don't even like to use the word racist.

56:48

We don't want to become and we have unjust hatred towards people of other ethnicity and how we treat brothers in Christ.

56:56

The Bible condemns unjust hatred towards people. We're to love even our enemies.

57:02

And you think how Peter confronted, no, sorry, Paul confronted Peter when he wouldn't eat with the

57:08

Jewish, sorry, the Gentile Christians, confronted him to his face, rebuked him to his face.

57:14

I can't help but think that if it was on the other foot, that instead he was not eating with the

57:22

Jewish Christians, that Paul still would have confronted him because that all the letters that Paul writes is to a church that's mixed of Gentiles and Jews trying to get them just to be able to eat, to fellowship together because they have the same

57:36

Savior. They have the same sins and they have the same hope together.

57:44

And when we get into this ideology and it creeps into the church, it brings division, bitterness and.

57:53

Hatred and it's. It is sinful and wicked. And we have to guard ourselves from it, and it's not that we need to go on.

58:06

Hunts, I'm not on a Nazi hunt thing looking to root out every person that questions everything, but as a pastor,

58:14

I have pastoral concerns. Let me just tell you a story. We had a guy come to our church and.

58:25

He he was not a Christian, he had grown up, his father had committed suicide and and just, you know, father hunger, but grew up kind of wandering around, then became,

58:42

I want to call right wing, extreme right wing. I mean, he loved Hitler. He loved he hated

58:48

Jews and listened to all the the the farthest right stuff you could, but came to believe in a

58:58

God but didn't know what to do about Jesus. So I had him over to my house.

59:03

We talked for hours and hours. I mentioned something about John Calvin Institutes because that's one of the things

59:10

God used. This guy goes home and he listens to it over the weekend. He has this job where he can listen to stuff, comes to church.

59:17

He brings his kids and comes forward during the Lord's Supper because we usually pray for people.

59:23

But the way he came, it was like, is he trying to get the Lord's Supper? Because I'm not giving the Lord's Supper to somebody just told me they don't believe in Jesus. And I said, dude, you believe in Jesus?

59:32

And he said, I think I do. And from there we started talking, we baptized his children, they professed faith and he came and he was a productive member of our church for some years.

59:45

And let me just tell you, we did not. There was never a point in which we sat down. We're going to excommunicate this guy for his extreme views on these things.

59:54

But we loved him. We taught him the scriptures and and there were things that we disciplined about foul mouth and other stuff.

01:00:02

And eventually we did discipline him and excommunicate him. But it had nothing to do with this.

01:00:08

It was he had a ton of other issues in his life that we had to deal with. And in my opinion, the

01:00:15

Nazi stuff was a. A symptom of actually deeper issues, and and I, the

01:00:25

Ben that I know that gets sucked down this hole are often very similar, their home, their father hunger, their their family life is terrible.

01:00:35

I mean, there's issues with their marriage. There's issues how they treat their children.

01:00:42

And the Nazi thing gives them something to hold on to, some kind of hero thing. I mean, some kind of dude that they can lift up and look at.

01:00:51

It's it's it's because of. In their own lives, things are falling apart, and that's why

01:00:59

I guess I have a heart for talking about this now, when I see a lot of people starting to latch on to it and I see a podcast and a group of men build up a following and they're trying to,

01:01:10

I think, weave themselves into the Christian nationalist movement as like one of us.

01:01:18

And yet they are pulling people astray. And as a pastor,

01:01:24

I have a duty as a pastor to these things. I have a duty to call out false teaching.

01:01:31

I mean, it's I we can't be quiet. You know, I know. Some people might say, well, by mentioning people by name like Corey Maller and stuff, you're drawing attention to them.

01:01:44

No, they got an attention. They're got a fine. They're sneaking in. And the apostle Paul doesn't refrain from using names in scripture to he doesn't.

01:01:53

He he you look at First Timothy, Titus. He he he's telling them there as elders and pastors to stop people from teaching things that disrupt families, that destroy the gospel, that teach vain speculations and things that don't produce godliness.

01:02:11

You're to stop them and shut them up. And I want to see men that are tempted to gravitate towards this to be warned and those who are teaching it to be shut up.

01:02:26

But I want Christian nationalists, leaders, pastors, not just them.

01:02:32

I want them to be able to to speak up and and and do so not with like a harsh or we're better and we're proud, proud, but with like, guys, that's not the path.

01:02:43

That's not the kingdom. Let's get back to where the kingdom is with Christ following his way.

01:02:49

And then that's how we get a Christian nation by following Christianity, not Hitler, not ideologies like wokeness or liberalism, following God's word, being faithful in the day to day things.

01:03:01

So that's that's that's my main concern. Yeah, sure. I think maybe at this point, we maybe it would be good to just say why there's less speaking about this than some would like to see, because I remember this was earlier in the year.

01:03:20

I think it was with Phil Johnson. I had a back and forth with him and he was talking about these evangelical groupers and he had a whole list of things and he was concerned with which it didn't make sense to me because groupers are

01:03:34

Roman Catholic by nature. But I like I think our conversation, if you could boil it down, was basically whether over this was a stage 10 threat or not.

01:03:45

And I was kind of like minimizing that because because on a political level, this is these guys don't have political power.

01:03:53

Like, you know, name any authority figure in the country who has a political office or socially social institution that's controlled by someone who has bought into actual

01:04:07

Nazi ideology. I can't think of one. And this is more I think it's probably a passing thing.

01:04:14

I don't know how long it may go for. And there's always going to be people who lionized certain historical figures.

01:04:23

So but the online kind of avatar movement that you're seeing with a lot of young guys.

01:04:31

And I think we say young, but I think a lot of these guys are actually middle aged. They're not even young. They're not young guys.

01:04:36

They're a lot of them are young guys. But, you know, these guys that are involved with this,

01:04:42

I think the concern you're bringing and I want to separate these two things is you're not saying like you're not politically concerned that like we're going to have a

01:04:52

Hitler rise to power. You're not. And you're also not saying anyone who loves their people in place is a

01:04:59

Nazi. Like those are two things I see that keep coming from more liberal minded Christians.

01:05:05

They also will they'll they'll try to, like, fuse these spiritual and political categories.

01:05:12

And what you're doing is you're saying, actually, this is being brought into the church, though. That's what you I hear you saying you're concerned about that.

01:05:18

There's like a spiritual dimension that is affecting men's souls.

01:05:25

And you don't like seeing the disharmony that this is bringing to the body of Christ in.

01:05:32

And I don't know exactly where that's happening. We just like I can't point to it in my own church, but I know I know

01:05:37

I recognize what you've talked about with like viewing someone who's Jewish ethnically as a handicap or, you know, you know,

01:05:45

OK, so like Jewish people vote for Kamala Harris at higher numbers and they have strong in -group preference and they I don't know, like they high achievers.

01:05:53

Right. So and the porn industry and this and that, like, I know all the things. Right. But you look at that and then you see someone who's ethnically

01:06:01

Jewish. That like that doesn't mean like you shouldn't put that all on them and then treat them different spiritually as a brother, which and that's that seems basic to me, like if they're a brother in Christ, they're a brother in Christ.

01:06:14

There's there's not like some shadow over them because they're Jewish somehow.

01:06:20

Yeah, they may have sinful proclivities that are unique to Jews. Right. So same thing with black people or white people.

01:06:26

We have sinful proclivities of our people, of our place. West Virginia. Right. Yeah.

01:06:32

You know, Appalachian men can be pretty bitter and proud of stuff. And so it's good to know that.

01:06:41

Right. And so and so a pastor can deal with that. But we don't hold it over their heads either. You think about this when

01:06:47

Paul tells Titus, you know, about the Cretans are always lazy beast and liars.

01:06:53

The point was not then. Therefore, they can't be saved. The point.

01:07:00

Yeah. Don't even go witness to him. Yeah. The point is, you're witnessing that you need to know that rebuke them so they grow in holiness and they leave that behind.

01:07:08

That that sinful proclivity can be left behind in Christ when you know about it.

01:07:14

And then so it's like, OK, how we treat each other of different ethnicities in the church is vital that we treat each other with love and kindness.

01:07:24

And listen, my point today is not to say, oh, you know, different guys that aren't speaking about it the same way

01:07:32

I am are somehow compromised. And we have to go on a hunt. We have to be careful.

01:07:37

We don't want to unjustly accuse people or to think I secretly know what's in your heart because we can't know what's in people's hearts.

01:07:46

But we as a pastor, you also have to make judgments. And as a pastor,

01:07:53

I see what's happening on Twitter and making judgments about what's happening, about seeing how people respond and treat others.

01:08:04

And and so it can get messy thinking through this.

01:08:10

We always have to we want to abide by God's commands, his law in order to do that. But I will say just to let

01:08:17

I think this is I can't name names. Right. But I will say that many of the guys who you describe as Christian nationalists are just on the sort of dissident

01:08:28

Christian right. I don't know of any with any influence that maybe

01:08:33

I'm yeah, I could say that that, you everyone that I've talked to or conversations

01:08:43

I've even seen in chat groups are pretty much that there is a concern over that, that I think there's a struggle to know what to do because of some of the dynamics we already talked about, like they don't have political power.

01:08:55

The left is the threat to our lives, our way of life. Like these guys, like many of them thrive on the little attention they get and, you know, they don't want to make them stronger.

01:09:09

And so like there's this whole dynamic that's working against guys wanting to mention it. And that's more on a political level,

01:09:15

I think, than anything else. You do have the Nutter principle as well. And I think or in the odor in the odor now and no enemies on the right.

01:09:24

I actually subscribe to that. I think, though, it's been kind of twisted and like so.

01:09:30

So Charles Haywood came up with that principle and his whole thing was doesn't mean you can't criticize people on the right.

01:09:36

It means you don't justify the left's framing and bring the left's hammer down on them. So the left hates anyone who has attachments and hierarchies and people in place and natural relations and all like the left hates

01:09:48

Christians. The left hates anything that reminds them of God. And they call it all Nazi. And you don't reinforce that framing.

01:09:55

You don't like make Nazi, you know, you don't just like carelessly throw that out.

01:10:01

You don't try to expose people like the Thomas Accord thing. If you remember that, like that could have been handled so privately.

01:10:08

And, you know, there was a young man who needed some help. And instead, though, what they did, and that's where this actually term was birth, was you had some

01:10:16

Christians who are more liberal, I think, in their thinking, who just thought, let's expose them. Let's just ruin this guy's life, which is what happened.

01:10:23

Yeah. He can't get a job and all this kind of thing because he said some things on an exit count he shouldn't have said.

01:10:29

And the enemy to our way of life is the left, like that's the political enemy.

01:10:35

That doesn't mean the pastors like Pastor Spurgeon here can't have a spiritual concern about what it does to young men's souls when they adopt ideologies like this.

01:10:44

And that's that is a different thing. And so and there might be a fear of losing some young men to like some of these guys who are against it, like just don't like they they see this as winnable, like guys who were in attracted to Nazi Nazi ideology.

01:11:01

Maybe we can kind of gradually they'll listen to me and we can get them out of that. But my experience has been like I'll just tell the story like I don't need to give all the details because it's not even that long of a story.

01:11:15

But you mentioned the Stone Choir guys. One time I had said that I wouldn't talk about them and I probably won't.

01:11:22

Like this might be they're all going to be listening now. Like, oh, my goodness. He mentioned us. That's how they they are.

01:11:30

You see their interaction online like they just I think I think there there is a humorous aspect to some of the ways that I see the interaction, but how people take themselves so seriously and so forth.

01:11:43

But there's a sadness there. There's a profound sadness in my mind. And those guys, I had not listened to anything of theirs.

01:11:50

I had seen a tweet from Corey that was ridiculous, in my opinion. And I think I said it was ridiculous, you know, and there had been like two occasions on my podcast where one time

01:12:00

I laughed about the Lutherans thinking there's like some Nazi bunker, you know, Corey Muller's the more or less the symptom of and 80 and I were laughing at that idea.

01:12:12

And then I think another time I had mentioned or no, I don't even know if I mentioned that. I think I think William Wolfe just in passing in a comment said, oh,

01:12:20

Corey Muller's a nut job or something. And then it was in had nothing to do with what we were talking about, or at least it wasn't it wasn't a point to camp out on.

01:12:28

And I didn't say anything. And so they were upset at me for this, I guess. I didn't know this, but apparently they they knew very much who

01:12:34

I was, even though I wasn't familiar with them. And so a friend who

01:12:39

I appreciate wanted to have like a conversation.

01:12:45

And so I get into this this very we didn't go on very long, but this conversation with these guys, never having listened to their podcast,

01:12:54

I listened, I think, one episode since then. I wasn't I didn't find it particularly interesting, but that's another story.

01:13:01

So I was with them. And basically we came to this mutual understanding of like, OK, look,

01:13:06

I'm not going to talk about you. You guys don't talk about me. Within a few months, both of them are slamming me.

01:13:15

And it's for really ridiculous, petty things, mostly just in things speaking like they have knowledge of things that they don't and laughable stuff.

01:13:25

But this is what I'm talking about a little when I talk about like bunker mentality, not really being able to work with other people if they're like one click away from you.

01:13:36

And I'm more than one click away from them. But like just like it's a constant like I don't know what it would be like to live in that mindset, like constantly just sensitive, attacking, bitter like that's that's the spirit that I don't see the fruit of the spirit with that.

01:13:55

I see like a a very closed off, unhealthy attitude that I don't want to see seem replicated in other men that I care about.

01:14:03

And and I know that's where you're coming from, too, with this. Yeah. You know, scripture tells us about not many should be teachers.

01:14:09

Right. And so they're not official offices in the church. For one, they got excommunicated from the church, but they are becoming teachers.

01:14:16

And we have young men that are giving themselves to teachers. There are a lot like I think of those guys as Absalom, like, well, if only

01:14:24

I was king for a day, then you would find justice. You would find justice. If somebody gave me the authority, if I was a pastor, because I've listened to them to know enough that they say most of the time they're constantly telling you we're saying stuff.

01:14:37

The other pastors aren't going to tell you that. All right. Right. They are. He's like, we're the only ones. You got to come to us. Yeah. Yeah. And that's very much

01:14:43

Absalom. That's very much if a pastor is constantly saying that, then you should be very leery.

01:14:51

If he's the only one saying it, then then we have we have a massive problem in the church.

01:14:58

Martin Luther wasn't the only one saying justification by faith, like he might have been the one that stood up at the time, but he wasn't the only one saying it.

01:15:04

We have the whole Reformation about it. So it's like you're the only one. And it's again.

01:15:13

There is the political battle, and I believe Christianity impacts the politics. That's why

01:15:18

I go to the Jesus and Politics Conference. I believe that. And yet the political battle is actually not our primary battle.

01:15:27

And the left is not our primary enemy as Christians, our primary enemy.

01:15:33

I mean, the scripture tells us our battle is not against flesh and blood, and we have to weigh those things heavily.

01:15:39

What it's telling us that our battle is spiritual. It manifests itself in the political realm.

01:15:46

It manifests itself in our families and manifests itself on the Internet and everywhere else.

01:15:52

But it's primarily spiritual. And that also means that the enemy is not always the one that we can just nice and tidy point to.

01:16:03

It's not always Joel Osteen easy to see. It rises up from among us, which is what the

01:16:08

Apostle Paul warned the church in Ephesus. When I leave, some among you are going to rise up.

01:16:15

I mean, what a warning that is. And so pastors, even on social media, engaged in teaching political truths and that thing, can never set aside their calling as pastors.

01:16:29

And when you see something happening, especially in your tribe, your camp,

01:16:34

I think you have a duty to speak out. And, you know, yeah, we don't want to give influence to people.

01:16:40

And we don't want I don't want to be in the constant kind of performatory denunciations where every time you say something, they find some random tweet somewhere from some dude.

01:16:51

What do you think about this? And you're just constantly doing that. But on the other hand, we

01:16:58

I think I've heard from all the guys and I would say I hopefully

01:17:03

I'm friends with most of them and they would see me as a friend that they know that this is an issue.

01:17:09

It's a problem. Well, how big we may disagree, but we I think have a duty to speak and to teach and to love

01:17:20

God's people. Ken, I don't know how much longer you're wanting to go, but maybe just some advice for people that are maybe going down there or whatever you think.

01:17:30

OK, well, again, let me just say I do share the concern for young men.

01:17:37

I want to see the souls of young men thrive in the church, thrive with the with the gospel.

01:17:44

And I'm very excited about young men actually waking up to all the filth around us, the the trash world type stuff.

01:17:54

I'm excited about that. But. Young men, you have to be careful, they're not everybody who claims to be your enemy is you're not everybody you think is your enemy is your enemy and not everybody claims to be your friend is your friend and not everybody that tickles your ears is good for you.

01:18:13

You the scriptures warn us about people that will tickle your ears or and that you will the people will be susceptible to that.

01:18:21

And we all think those are warnings for other people. That's not us. That's the stupid people. That's the sheep.

01:18:27

That's the the the the people that out there that need to hear those warnings. But scriptures warnings are for us.

01:18:34

And so I need to be mindful that I am just as likely to try to gather up teachers and things that scratch my itch, that that teach that tell me exactly what

01:18:44

I want to hear and never speak opposite of that. And so if you never get mad at the teachers that you have because they confront your sins, you need to be very, very careful that you're not falling on that path.

01:18:59

So my encouragement is for young men. And again, most of these aren't young. They are young in the sense

01:19:06

I think they haven't accomplished a lot. Those men, we need to make sure we're in a church loving God's people, listening to the counsel of our pastors, even if we disagree, even when they may not be as based or they don't know what time it is and all that stuff.

01:19:22

God put them there, God's sovereign, he knows what you need and you want to see if you like me, you want to see our nation be

01:19:32

Christian. It starts not with following off into ideologies that are not

01:19:37

Christian, like woke stuff isn't going to get us a Christian nation. Liberalism isn't,

01:19:42

Nazism isn't, and whatever else you come up with, what will is following the word of God, being faithful in all the ways that God calls us.

01:19:54

So again, we need political power, but like so many of the things that we can do are just they're right there, get married and have kids and love them.

01:20:04

And I mean, that's so big. Just if we did that, you know. And yeah, that's the funny thing about like I made this meme,

01:20:11

I hate to try to turn your I'm not trying to turn this in just a stone choir thing, but I made this thing like, you know,

01:20:19

Doug Wilson. I guess he's somewhat Jewish. I know Michael Foster is Jewish and I just throw those names out because they're somewhat

01:20:26

Jewish. And then he has family that's Jewish. Oh, right, right.

01:20:31

Yeah, but he talks about I forgot how it works. Yeah, I don't know how much it is. But Michael Foster is and and I'm in an interracial marriage, but I want to argue that all three of us have done far more to advance the cause of the white race than Corey Miller, because we've had children.

01:20:49

We've had my church is teeming with little children that are growing up in the fear and admonition of the

01:20:55

Lord. And 90 percent of them are white. And, you know, so and it's not like I'm that's my main goal.

01:21:00

But you live in you need if you want to see your people protected, love them, love others.

01:21:11

Right. That's what we're called to do. That's the purpose of the apostle

01:21:17

Paul's instruction is pure love. So Jesus is it's the fulfillment of the law.

01:21:23

And from there, man, that's how we get a Christian nation. That's how the nations are one starting back in the early church.

01:21:30

It was by the love that Christians showed for each other, their willingness to face death rather than to compromise on God's word like that.

01:21:40

That's invincible in one sense. Can't be defeated. The only thing that people can do is be like,

01:21:45

OK, you can't beat them. We'll join them. And you get Constantine. You get others. And that's what we want, man.

01:21:51

So be careful. And I know we're laying in the plane, but, you know, I just I couldn't help but think with Hitler as as a figure and some people even saying he's a

01:22:03

Christian prince. I think I think one of those guys might have said it. But, you know, you think of just his personal life.

01:22:09

That's not a man you want to emulate. That's not Christian. This is a man who is, I mean, a fornicator.

01:22:14

And I mean, he had some severe problems with, like, just reliance on drugs.

01:22:23

And I mean, he committed suicide. I know I had a bunch of guys questioning that. But you do historical research and follow primary sources.

01:22:31

We have his will. We have he intended that. I mean, read. I actually encourage people who want to read primary read

01:22:36

Hitler's last will and testament. Like, just look at what he said and look at the pettiness. And, you know,

01:22:42

I've got to throw this person out of the party. Like all this stuff when, you know, and he's going to kill himself and he's. Oh, man, this is not the guy you want to emulate.

01:22:51

Let me let me let me go even further and say this. So I'm going with what you're saying, right?

01:22:59

He I've done more. You've done more, John Harris, to propagate the white race than Hitler did, because, again, let's go to the postwar consensus, all the stuff that they push and they use

01:23:11

Hitler as the thing is big and they're able to do that because of all the foolishness that he did, which has harmed white people from there.

01:23:20

Right. All the stuff he did with hating and he broke his word. How many times he made peace treaties and then launched wars with people that he was supposed to be at peace with?

01:23:31

How many how many children did Hitler actually have of his own? Zero. He slept with a woman for many, many years, refused to get married because he knew that he wanted the other women of Germany to lust after him because he thought he was he thought he was that they were attracted to him and that's what would gain him power.

01:23:51

And and I haven't heard that one. Yes. He didn't want to get married. And so he had this woman and finally

01:23:57

I get married and and this is me being a little hyper hyperbolic. But then she kills herself after she's married to him.

01:24:03

Maybe she woke up, realized she was married to Hitler and killed herself. Well, Hitler was much more friendly.

01:24:08

He was much more friendly to communists than I will ever be. You know,

01:24:13

I mean, he was he was in his own alliance with Stalin. And then, of course, we were in alliance with Stalin after.

01:24:19

But, you know, people often forget that that for the early part of the war, the Nazis and the

01:24:25

Bolsheviks were in it together. It's it was a complicated thing.

01:24:30

You know, it really is. But you want to choose your heroes wisely. And what did

01:24:35

Paul say? Like, follow me as I follow Christ. When I find I mean, that's why I think you and I have talked about, you know, some of these guys that I know are on the cancel list today.

01:24:45

But like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are such great men. Not, you know, put the political stuff aside.

01:24:52

They're just exemplary. They're they're Christians when it was hard to be

01:24:59

Christian. They kept their composure even on the battlefield and that kind of thing. And and so, you know,

01:25:05

Eric Little is another hero of mine. I mean, there's so many good heroes out there to choose from. You don't need to be choosing.

01:25:11

You know, there's a good American heroes, too, by the way. Yeah, yeah. In fact, I want to part of like being a

01:25:18

Christian nationalist is honoring your fathers, right? My fathers did not fight to defend

01:25:23

Hitler. They fought to destroy him. They fought to destroy the

01:25:31

Axis, right? They went and fought in our great grandfathers. And and they they they suffered, they sacrificed to do that work.

01:25:44

And, you know, not that's not saying that every one of them was a godly person, that they did all godly things, firebombing and dropping the nukes and all that stuff,

01:25:54

I believe, is very wicked. But there were a lot of good, honorable men that went and laid down their lives.

01:26:02

And and I certainly honor them. Well, I think you're you're on a there's a good point to be made about our own.

01:26:10

Again, coming back to place and people, our own national or, you know, regional identities and even family identities.

01:26:20

That was a major struggle that, yeah, my grandfather, my great uncles, you know, they were serving in both theaters.

01:26:28

And one of my great uncles was a tail gunner on a B, B -24, you know, going up through Italy and the

01:26:37

I was at the 15th Army Air Corps. And I mean, guys that liberated the camps and stuff.

01:26:44

I mean, like this is part of family history. So, yeah, I mean, I've read like books like The Bitter Road to Freedom.

01:26:51

I know some of the wicked things ally people did. I know there are some horrible stuff that I mean, and stuff does happen in war that is horrible.

01:26:59

I'm not trying to justify all that. But what I am saying is like this is if you want to get to people in place, this is part of the people in place is like these are our ancestors.

01:27:09

We're part of the struggle and they and they fought valiantly and we honor that.

01:27:15

And it's it's fine to honor that. And it's a good thing. And I think it's it's going to be a hard sell to try to get people to, you know, side with the enemies or whatever.

01:27:24

Even in our American Civil War, it's brother against brother. Right. That's what they say. There's this mutual kind of like connection.

01:27:31

And that doesn't you don't have that with in World War two. It's not anything like that.

01:27:36

So so, yeah, I just I just wanted to say that to say like there it reinforces this idea that there's,

01:27:43

I think, a rootlessness that as a pastor, I know you're probably trying to figure out how to navigate with young people where they're disconnected from their past.

01:27:52

They don't have heroes, perhaps in World War two heroes in their past. I guess I'm privileged to have known them.

01:27:58

And I'm old enough to remember when I mean, when I was a kid, I don't know how old you are,

01:28:04

Joseph, but I remember Gold Star mothers in like the late 90s laying wreaths.

01:28:09

So like their kids died in World War two. And I got to see them. That blows my mind now that I'm old enough to see that.

01:28:16

But, you know, and I and I remember the swelling with pride and all that stuff. For, you know, hey, look at these men and how great they were.

01:28:23

And I mean, that's that's an important part of who we are as a people, too, is those sacrifices.

01:28:30

And so there's some good heroes in there. Who's your people ended on this?

01:28:36

Who's your favorite World War two hero? I don't know if you have one, but Audie Murphy or.

01:28:45

Yeah, I like Patton. Oh, Patton. OK, well, there you go. Well, see, he wasn't a

01:28:52

Christian, I don't think. Well, no, no, I don't. I don't think so. But he's a bit of a Trump ish. Yeah, he was kind of Trump ish.

01:28:58

That's kind of like I liked about him. You know, I kind of like MacArthur. I was about to say

01:29:04

MacArthur. Yeah. Everyone hates him, but. I yeah, we we like him.

01:29:09

I'll tell you why. It's because my wife is Filipino. Oh, yeah. And he promised the Filipino people that he was coming back.

01:29:16

And he kept his promise. So when the Japanese came, they they forced the

01:29:23

Americans off the Philippines. That's right. You know, we all think of Pearl Harbor, but they also attacked all the other places.

01:29:28

Oh, yeah. They're brutal. And so they forced America out of the Philippines. But they promised we're coming back.

01:29:33

And he came back. The Pacific Theater was so much worse, in my opinion, like what the the Japanese were barbarous in the

01:29:40

I mean, they were raping of Nanking, Baton Death March. I mean, it's like it's crazy.

01:29:46

They didn't have that Western Christian value system that even that even affected the Nazis, even though Christianity had kind of waned.

01:29:54

But yeah, most Asians can't stand Japanese. I mean, unless they're Japanese, they still can't.

01:30:00

Like they still they still have to go to the MacArthur Library, which is in,

01:30:05

I think, Virginia Beach. You walk in and there's this really prompt. So they have his his tomb is right there next to his wife.

01:30:12

I think they both in there. They have this big prominent quote on like in this like circular kind of rotunda.

01:30:19

And I can't remember exactly what it says, but like I remember like it's very overtly Christian. He basically says, like, our goal is to Christianize Japan.

01:30:27

Like it's like right there in right over his grave. And I just thought, oh, my goodness, like they're allowed to put that there.

01:30:35

That's he said that. And he did. He did. That's you.

01:30:40

You wouldn't get that from a general today. Hopefully, maybe soon. Maybe soon. That's right.

01:30:45

We got what this was that CREC guy who's going to be the. Yeah, dude, I don't even know what position they're putting him in.

01:30:53

Secretary of Defense. Oh, Secretary of Defense. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And Fox News analyst. Yeah.

01:30:59

But he looks like he's a good guy. Yeah. Well, on that note, Pastor Joseph Spurgeon, thank you for joining us.

01:31:04

Where can people again find your work? SovereignKingsChurch .com or the Patriarchy podcast all year.

01:31:12

Favorite podcast placed. And or you can just go to Twitter and Facebook and look me up.

01:31:17

All right. Joseph Spurgeon, the Presbyterian Spurgeon. Check him out. All right. God bless.