Joseph Spurgeon on the Temptation of Ideology

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. So we have an interesting discussion for you today. I think a helpful discussion and a necessary discussion for the times in which we live.

A little bit about where I'm coming from in this podcast. My work has been primarily on social justice and 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 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. I give you little biographies of them in the book. And 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.

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

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

And 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. 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.

Pragmatic concerns and the immediate replaces faith in timeless ideals. We have a subjective sentimentality that characterizes our culture. We leap from one ideology to another reductionistic ideology and we try to find the meaning of life through these things.

And we reject the harmonized vision that our ancestors would have been, our Christian ancestors would have been living with. Now, when I talk about ideology, I'm talking about a rationalistic closed system of thought designed to explain all of human behavior through simple precepts.

I think it was David Hume who said that ideologues were essentially enemies of mankind, that they didn't like people, they liked their ideas and they wanted to force them on people regardless of the consequences of those ideas.

And ideology explains human nature and activity in totals. They have a total critique by reducing it to a singular impulse. And so let me give you some examples of modern ideologies. In this world of modernity, we have these ideologies.

Marxism, right? Class conflict is what everything reduces to in Marxism. It motivates human action in total. Feminists reduce everything to patriarchal domination for critical race theorists, it's whiteness for liberals.

It's the constraints on choice, that's the problem. And everything reduces to this. For Nazis, it was Jewish influence. And in each case, the particulars in reality share one essential nature. 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. There's a rigid universal application.

So advocates for immediate forceful fixes to social issues often do so with outweighing alternatives and the outcomes. 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. 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, everything becomes about that one thing.

And I see parallels between this, and idolatry in the 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.

They require sacrifices. They cannot deliver on their promises. They lie to their followers. There are some parallels here. Not saying that every person on the outskirts of an ideological movement is an idolater, but you can at least see that that tendency and danger exists there.

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 them on the podcast before, a pastor named Joseph Spurgeon. He is the pastor actually in Jefferson.

I was just in your hometown, Jeffersonville, Indiana. And he pastors a Presbyterian church there. And Joseph has, we've known each other for what? 2021, 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. I think that you're approaching these things in a very similar way to the way I think about them.

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

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. 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, yeah. Again, I'm a pastor at Sovereign King Church, Jeffersonville, Indiana. So you can go to sovereignkingchurch .com. And I have a podcast called the Patriarchy Podcast. And I think we'll put this material up.

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. And my handle is basically the same as just Joseph Spurgeon.

And so look for a bald bearded dude in a suit probably. And that'll get you to the right location.

Will you bring a pastoral heart to this whole discussion, which I don't see a lot, especially on social media. So I want to shoot some ideologies at you and just get your reaction. I think we're going to spend most of our time talking about some of the Nazi-ish, I don't know even what term to use, but Nazi enthusiasm, Nazi frameworks that are being employed by some young men.

Cause I know you're concerned about that in ways that I think are appropriate that, you know, and you differ 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.

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. 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.

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

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

Social Justice as a Counterfeit Gospel

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.

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. And they're constantly trying to push us a false kingdom, a false Messiah, a false Christ.

And I think ideologies often are a replacement for Christianity and the gospel. And so they have a lot of very similarities of the Christian worldview, right? 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. And the problem is they're always Christless and don't follow the word of God. And I think you go back even into the Bible with the Jews there when Christ was there, they wanted a different kingdom than the kingdom that Christ was bringing and rejected the Messiah.

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, okay, the Messiah is not coming, we've got to be the Messiah.

And so there's very utopian type views from the 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. And that's the woke thing, right?

It's Christless. What's the problem? 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.

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

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

Scripture is replete with God's justice against those who oppress others, those who unjustly act unjust in their laws, their actions, their behaviors. And God is with the poor, often the reformed theologians call it the moral poor, the spiritual poor, because Jesus said, blessed are those who are poor in heart.

But the woke thing just, I think it takes these out of moral categories and puts them merely in racial categories or ethnic categories. And salvation is not through Christ, it's now through all kinds of other means, confessing your white guilt.

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. 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.

And they do so by their victimhood status, however many degrees you can get in your intersectionality and really then just a distortion. And sadly that was brought into the church and it confuses the gospel and it destroys the peace and purity of the church.

It destroys the union that we have. The gospel doesn't come in destroying our ethnicities and destroying who we are as a people. Like we have 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, I don't wanna 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. 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.

And it didn't destroy that, but in the church, it put them on a status that's different. So anyways

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

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

There's certain prophetic figures that have a deity about them almost like they are angels from on high. 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 and then they end up having their woke born again experience their utopia is their heaven alternative is a DEI state on this earth that doesn't come with a Messiah.

So yeah, there's so many parallels and I agree with you on that. That's one, and I feel like with that issue, that's something that not just because of my work, but now because of so many others, 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. They've realized, oh wow, that I was being deceived and they're seeing now that this was wrong, which 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, but this is a big one in my mind is liberalism. I think libertarianism would be one of the like iterations of this.

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.

And I wanna read, this is a quote from Ayn Rand. Now she's libertarian, so very aggressively free market liberal and big on the autonomy of man. 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 and so my body, my choice, right? You can be anything that you wanna be. Even the idea that we're a nation of immigrants and diversities are strength comes down to this idea that like cultures don't matter, only the individual.

It's just individual centric and expanding the choice of that individual becomes the most important thing. And some liberals want big government programs to help the individual expand their choices and take from you.

So they have resources to promote themselves and live out their dreams. And then other liberals like more like Ayn Rand would say that, no, no one can ever reach into your pocket. 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. But I mean, do you go after this in the pulpit? Do you see that this problem as well?

Liberalism, Individualism, and the Demystifying of the Bible

Yeah, and the same kind of, it's the same concept of replacing the kingdom. If you trace it back, liberalism itself comes from, well, several sources, but you start with the Christian liberalism is a jettisoning the truths of scripture that are really, what do I wanna say?

Earthy, manly, and on one hand, because they reject the very nature that Jesus is fully man, fully God. And he really just becomes a mythical being in Christian liberalism. And so you're rejecting both the supernatural of like the virgin birth, but also like who he is as a man, because he's a mythical thing.

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 humanity.

But like you said earlier, it's a quote about you love humanity, but not a single person. That's like a GK Chesterton, I think that they had that, right? So it becomes a progress and we gotta progress all of mankind, but not any individual man.

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

Yeah, go ahead.

The secular ideologies, regardless of what they are, have this tendency because they are, 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.

And then they want, they use that as the key to the whole. So that becomes the door. It's a sacred thing. It's the door everyone must walk through. And if you hold it, then you have insight into every situation.

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

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

They wanna take away God's throne and his role and use it as this helpful guide for individuals for their lives. 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, instead man is, man becomes the transcendent figure or a certain principle about man becomes the transcendent thing if there is any transcendence. And now the Bible serves that purpose. So you have to root out all the things that conflict with that in the Bible.

And I think like this is, some people call it moralistic therapeutic deism, but like liberalism is not just a political movement. It has this metaphysical component that's religious that it gets into everything.

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

And I think we're breaking, so here's the encouraging thing. The encouraging thing with social justice is I think people are starting to see in the church, but with this one, I think younger people, especially Gen Zers, either they're going so woke that they're starting to realize the liberalism is wrong and that's not good, or what they're doing is they are, they're starting to question these assumptions they've been raised with.

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

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

You'll go ahead, Yodith.

I was gonna say the liberal mindset is often been at war with the woke mindset and back and forth, like you just mentioned. And often, I'm gonna say conservatives, older conservatives are battling the woke with the liberalism.

That's exactly right.

And so like one extreme or one example of this is what I'm gonna call like the extreme colorblindness. That is, well, if the woke people say race is everything, then we have to say race is nothing. And ethnicity is nothing, nation's nothing.

It's all about an idea, the idea of America. And that kind of liberalism, I think of America as an idea is another, again, replacing the kingdom with something else. 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.

Nations are people with specific characteristics and qualities and shared histories and shared other things. It's not necessarily just race or ethnicity, but it's concrete people. Whereas the church is over all those things.

The church brings in people from all nationalities.

The universal church, yeah.

And it is built on a creed. And that's why I think the liberal mindset can lead to same things about America that are actually, I don't wanna call them blasphemous, because they're actually true about the church.

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. We're talking about the church, not talking about America. We talk about it as a light to the world, the last great hope on earth and things like that.

Those are, in my opinion, blasphemous because they've replaced America with the church, or sorry, reverse that, replaced the church with America.

Well, you saw it on January 6th because the unwashed masses entered the temple of democracy. That's what Nancy Pelosi called it. And it was kind of like the summer of love where everything burned down in these state regions and local, like that didn't matter.

They weren't challenging the sacred temple of democracy. And once there's people in that, then the game changes and this is terrible. So yeah, I totally see what you're saying there. And some of these ideologies have, they share certain features because they're ideology in common with each other.

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

It's power dynamics, right? So they think race is something, but it's not the rooted creation order thing. It's this abstract thing. And then the liberals say, well, no, it doesn't really exist. There isn't, you know, they go for this, like it shouldn't even be a factor.

We shouldn't even consider. And that gets us to open borders. But in either case, they're just eroding hierarchies and stabilizing elements in order. 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. And I see those things as big threats. So

Well, that's actually what liberalism is saving you from.

So if they're

Their view of what the problem is, is that you have all these things that hold you back from the freedom that you can have, you know, sexually or, and so you have to be set free from, I don't know what to say, loyalties and allegiances and things so that you can be an individual and make your own thing and do your own thing.

And that's the progress. We're always moving towards progress with somewhere we're going, though it's a lot of ill-defined and, you know, there's versions of liberalism, conservative and liberal that both hold that.

And they're both going somewhere, but the whole idea is we're leaving behind the past.

Well, I see 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, Christian nationalists and anyone.

They'll criticize, you know, neo-Nazi types with the same brush that they'll criticize 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 this nefarious collectivist scheme.

They don't see themselves as born into communities with attachments. They only want attachments that are chosen, not unchosen ones. How dare someone choose for me what I'm going to be like. And I'm sorry, you know, 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. I didn't get to choose what hobby. 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. And so that's what they wanna 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. 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. And the guys that are actually conservative or on the right, they want to, they want hierarchies, right?

They don't, they're not egalitarians. Even on that point alone, it's ridiculous to start throwing this term out there, but that's the liberal mindset. And I think we're gonna camp out and spend most of our time because I think you've just been so good at navigating this in ways I haven't seen others be good at navigating this.

I wanna talk about this, and I don't know what word to use. I don't know if you have a better word, Nazi enthusiasm or this kind of like revival of certain aspects, cause it's not a pure revival of Nazism at all, but this revival of certain aspects of Hitler's writings and this Nazi ideology being now the explanation for the problems that beset the West.

And I wanna read for you, this is from Mein Kampf. I was reading it the other day, not for inspiration, but for a study. 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 Communist Manifesto, read Mein Kampf, read all these books that have been so influential, even books that are bad, if they've moved people and they've been influential because you wanna understand history.

I think that gives us a context for the world that we live in. And so anyway, I came across this quote though. This is in, I think it's chapter, I wanna say 11 or so, but Hitler says that nature has, he makes this argument, 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. And every historical event in the world is nothing more, nor less than a manifestation of the instinct of racial self-preservation.

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. It's saying that the whole world just reduces to this thing, this one impulse.

I guess when you're brushing your teeth, when you're doing anything, it's all about racial self-preservation. So it's not woke right because they're not, he's thinking in terms of groups, but he believes in a certain set of hierarchies and stuff.

I think he's wrong, but he is ideological though. And so you have been, I've seen some of the stuff that you've posted that I think is very helpful from a pastoral standpoint in helping, mostly I think it's guys, but helping people who are going down this path and you do it in such a good way.

And 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 War II consensus or whatever. You are, you and I very much both, because we talked about this, we questioned 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, you're also firm. So I'm gonna give you the floor and I want you to tell us what you think and maybe give some advice to the young guys in this audience.

Sure.

There is always a tendency to react and overreact to ideologies and to other, and that's kind of what creates Nazism in one sense is an overreaction to communism and other things that happen in history.

But I think that there is, the whole idea of the post-war consensus comes from this. Well, the term existed for quite a while. I wanna say our use that we're gonna go with today comes from a guy that wrote a book, Reno is his name.

It's called the, shoot, what's it called?

Return of the Strong Gods?

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

So a reaction to World War I, World War II, the Nazis, the communists. And so there's a reaction in the West to this. And actually these reactions have been building. They were actually, if we look historically, their reactions from, not even reactions, they are the effects of Christian liberalism that began in Germany in the 1800s, 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 II. But the point of the book is not to go back and re-litigate World War II, but to talk about the ideologies that arise from it, the ones that kind of disconnect us from place, from people, some of the things we've already been talking about, the things that led to the woke stuff that lead.

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? Well, you're Hitler. You're a Nazi. You're KKK and all that.

And there's the whole thing. Well, if you can't beat them, join them, kind of deal. Like, well, if they're gonna call us that, well, maybe, well, Hitler has some of the same bad guys fighting him that we have fighting us.

Do you think of the Weimar Republic and the communist kind of the Bolsheviks, the homosexuals? You find out, you don't find it out in public school, but you do find out doing 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. And they were dealing with some of that there. And so you start to think, they call me Hitler, that he had the same enemies, maybe Hitler's a good guy.

And before you know it, you're rethinking all this and you become susceptible to, I think, his ideology, which is not Christianity. As you just quoted from, it's a natural evolutionary worldview that makes the Aryan race the highest form of Christianity.

The highest form of human race. And it leads to, I think, a hyper-focus on race that is akin to the woke stuff. I don't wanna call it woke right, other than that there is an over-focus on race. And you also start looking for enemies and you have an over-focus on the Jews as enemies as well.

What I wanna say, where I come from in this is like, I'm not coming from this as a liberal or a woke. I'm coming from this from a biblical perspective. And I'm actually coming from a Christian nationalist perspective myself.

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. And when I say Jews, I mainly mean secular Jews because you will see people that get caught up in the Nazi stuff, when they talk about Jews, they will say, oh no, we're just talking about Talmudic Judaism.

But actually most Jews are not Talmudic. And Talmudic Judaism is bad, it's wicked, the religion, because it is a denial of Christ. In fact, it's blasphemous towards Christ. But most Jews are not even that.

And even most Talmudic Jews have no power. Like the Orthodox Jews, the Hasidic Jews, like in Israel, for example, they're hated by the rest of the Jews there. They're seen as leeches. They're seen the same way liberals would think of Amish.

Well, quick aside, I've lived in New York about an hour and a half or two hours north of the city. So there's Jewish people who from New York City have migrated up and they'll commute and things. So anyway, I know a guy, he's a secular Jew.

And he one time told me, or he said that he did not wanna go to Israel on a Jewish airline or something, because he doesn't wanna be stuck next to all those, as you call them Talmudic, but Hasidic Jews.

And 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. I mean, he thinks they're smelly, they're this, and he's Jewish himself, ethically.

I just wanted to back up what you were saying, because I think that's 100 true. And I do see these broad sweeps that ignore that. But anyway, sorry, keep going.

So anyways, 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.

We all know that there are secular Jews that are lockstep with Roman Catholics, and that are wicked liberal Roman Catholics that are lockstep with gay trans Protestant people pushing wicked stuff in our day.

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. 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.

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 to walk in faith, and we have battles to face.

And so what I'm seeing is, I think a reaction to being called Hitler, being called Nazis, and discovering and finding out some information that you didn't know. But I'm also seeing a lot of young guys, that's the end of the depth of it.

Oh, they will say they did a lot of research, but what that means, they read some memes, they maybe saw a few websites, and probably listened to Corey Maller and Stone Choirs.

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, but I mean, I did a grad course on World War II, and I did a graduate course on the Holocaust.

So there's six credits. And of course, and it was at a Christian conservative university. Even there, I saw anti-Christian men, actually did my project in the Holocaust class on Martin Luther and his views.

And most of the guys 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 Luther's views were. Because I had to study that in depth for the project, and I'm just seeing it. I'm seeing guys, there was a guy the other day who was very concerned, this is how crazy ideological it gets, that my wife is somehow Jewish.