Why is Wokeness Winning?

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. For those who've listened to this program for any length of time, you know that every once in a while,

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I reel it back, I step back, and I want to take a look at the whole enchilada.

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I like to get a bird's eye view of the cultural moment we're in and why things are the way they are.

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I wanna see how the sausage is made. And that's what drives the academic pursuit of people.

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They wanna find answers to questions. That's what drives me in having conversations, whether it's the monologues or the interviews that I do.

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I wanna figure out what's going on. I wanna answer questions. And so today is no different.

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We're gonna be doing some investigation. I'm gonna give you some of my own thoughts. Some of them

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I've given before. Some of them I'm giving in a different way. Some of them might be new. But the goal is to take a step back and look at everything that's going on in front of us and ask yourself, why is everything playing out the way it is?

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I know there's a lot of different streams that you can look at to try to explain what's going on. Marxism, liberation theology, which is

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Christianized Marxism. Feminism, the utopianism of like a

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Fabian socialist like H .G. Wells, and globalism being part of that.

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You can look at the critical theories. You can go back to the original Frankfurt School critical theory. You can look at Foucault and Derrida and Heidegger and some of the postmodernists.

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There's just a lot of different ways that you can look at what's going on. You can look at, go all the way back to Jean -Jacques

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Rousseau and the French Revolution. And you can certainly trace the line. That's really kind of where I trace it from, a lot of it.

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But Solomon said it best. He said, there are no new ideas under the sun.

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There's nothing new. There's the fancy packaging. There's complicated packaging. But the ideas before us are nothing new.

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And we're seeing a social justice movement, broadly speaking which encapsulates a lot of the things

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I just talked about, getting married to the great reset and globalism and this totalitarianism that's coming.

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And there's examples of this throughout history not just the communist regimes but you could look at fascist regimes. I've called the cancel culture and the speed at which it moves a cultural blitzkrieg because that's what it seems like, that's what it feels like.

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Everyone has a different way of explaining this and different terms are used. You know, if you listen to me long enough, I like to say the social justice religion.

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That's what I call this whole thing where we're dealing with a religion. And I think that accounts for the behavior more than any other way to look at it.

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But other people have other ways of looking at it. And so I wanna take a step back and I wanna just analyze kind of where are we at?

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And I'll use maybe some representative examples so it won't get boring.

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It won't, trust me. But I want to go,

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I'll just tell you where the plane's gonna land. There's an article at the end of this whole thing which is called, if I can find it here,

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Why is Wokeness Winning by Andrew Sullivan? Why is Wokeness Winning by Andrew Sullivan? And this was published in October of 2020.

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So it's not new in that sense. But I want to go over that at the end and answer that question.

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Why is Wokeness Winning? Why does it seem that way? So let's start with this.

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This is something that's interesting, a little trend. Jordan Peterson tweeted this out from the

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American National Election Studies. And it's a series of graphs from 2016 and then some from 2020 with different political categories from very liberal to very conservative.

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And in this graph, this is what I want to point out more than anything else.

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Look at the very liberal, which is right here. I'm gonna blow this up for you.

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From 2016, 86 .9 % thought it would be wrong.

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It would not be justified for people to use violence to pursue their political goals. Wasn't a good thing. 86 .9%.

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We're in 2020, 66 .5. So among those who describe themselves as very liberal, only 66 .5

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% think it's wrong to use violence. You can see this trend also with the liberal.

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It changed slightly. I think very liberal is where you see the most significant change. Some of the others, interestingly enough, for conservatives, it seems to go up.

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They're more against using violence now than they were in 2016. 94 .2 % of somewhat conservative, actually, it cut off.

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I'm not sure where very conservative is, but they're all in the 90s. They're all very high. So there seems to be a trend here where violence is more acceptable, at least to the left.

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And that is significant. Why is that significant? I think because it's a holy war. It's a crusade that they're on right now.

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This is not political in the traditional sense that you might think of political. This is bleeding over into religion, and I've talked about this before.

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So Jordan Peterson talks about this. There's a famous, now famous, popular little meme going around, and it changes all the time, but it's the cancel culture heaven.

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So you see all these different characters. There's Aunt Jemima, right? You can't buy that in the store.

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Land of Lakes, can't get that anymore. All these different characters. Sports teams, Mr. Potato Head.

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And there's Dr. Seuss answering cancel culture heaven. And it just goes to show you, you look at these different figures here and characters, and brands, you think, what's so offensive about some of this?

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You know, why? And of course, Cat in the Hat I don't think is canceled. This is symbolic, but it's other Dr. Seuss books.

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But you know, why? Why, you know, this actress over here was canceled because I believe the straw that broke the camel's back was questioning the integrity of the election, if I'm not mistaken.

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You have, you know, portrayals of Native Americans. You know, you shouldn't portray them,

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I guess, in a positive light. I'm not sure why that's, it's so offensive, though. You know,

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Mr. Potato Head. I don't even remember why Mr. Potato Head, why was it, was it because of the transgender stuff?

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I don't even remember now. It's just, it's gotten,

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I mean, this is obviously a little sliver of the pie. There's so much more. But here's a headline, Whoopi Goldberg Rips Cancel Culture.

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I mean, Whoopi Goldberg of all people, right? Very liberal. I mean, she's been on the other end of the cancel culture, but now she's ripping it because it's targeting

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Pepe Le Pew, the Warner Brothers cartoon character. And she says,

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I don't know why you've got to erase everything. Why do you have to, you can't put Pepe Le Pew in Space Jam 2 because of, I guess, rape culture or something like that.

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So this is what you have. You have, the left is canceling all these things. I mean, they're stripping the landscape.

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And at the same time, they are more, more supportive of the use of violence.

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Now, Michael Youssef is a pastor in Georgia, I believe. And he has some words recently, some warning.

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And it was very refreshing to hear him do this, hear that he did do it because so many pastors are caving to the woke mob.

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And Michael Youssef isn't one of them. And I think, it's just interesting. There's some other clergymen who have done similar,

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I think of like Rodney Howard Brown, who grew up in South Africa. Well, Michael Youssef grew up, and by the way, that's not a statement that I endorse all.

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I know some people think if I mentioned someone positively, I endorse everything about them. And I don't with Rodney Howard Brown.

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I'm just saying, someone who grew up in a Marxist context and is so against what they're seeing.

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Michael Youssef is similar. He grew up, I believe, in Lebanon, born in Egypt, raised in Australia to some extent.

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But here's what he says. And he compares what's going on now to some of the battles that he saw growing up in the

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Anglican, I guess, denomination, I think he was part of, over like homosexuality and this kind of thing.

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And this is what he says. Those same battles that I fought in the mainline denominations are now invading the evangelical churches.

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It's the same arguments, the same lingo, and the same words repeating themselves with such precision, I am deeply, deeply concerned.

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He says, bowing to woke culture allows you to avoid rejection by culture and society. It's a very, very popular message that is now being preached from many evangelical pulpits, traditionally

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Bible -believing, gospel -preaching churches. We have gone so far that it just grieves me to the point that I literally sometimes just weep tears.

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He says, critical race theory is a very Marxist ideology that people are taking very seriously. The idea of the oppressed and the oppressors is not that simple.

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Now, we have private Christian schools here in Atlanta where white children are apologizing to black kids. Apologizing for what?

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They are innocent. They haven't done anything. It's crazy. It's just going insane.

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And it is, and he's right. And he feels like he's living in the Twilight Zone, which I think many of you also feel.

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I feel that way sometimes. And I find it interesting he's comparing this to some of the battles that took place during really the crisis over modernity, or the modernist controversy,

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I should call it that. That's more accurate, the modernist controversy. He's saying it's very similar. And I mean, in the mainline denominations, this wasn't a hard jump to go from, well, you can't really,

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Bible's not really true, ultimately, objectively. It's got truth in it.

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It's true in that sense, but it doesn't, it's not like really true in an objective sense.

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Like, you know, the flood didn't really happen, that kind of thing. And it wasn't a big jump to go from that to, well, you know, homosexuality is okay.

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And he's saying that, hey, I saw this, and now I'm seeing something very similar, at least the social element, and through the

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Black Lives Matter stuff. I mean, that's the critical race theory. So he's creating, there's a connection here.

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And I've said this for a while, you can't separate the homosexual or the LGBTQ plus stuff from the

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BLM stuff. It's the same stuff. It's just, it's going to look a little different, but it's changing the labels around, and it's going to subvert using the same exact tactic.

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And I don't think we're prepared, because evangelicals, for the most part, caved on Black Lives Matter.

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And, you know, some of them want to try to cave on that, and they don't see it as caving. They want to join with BLM, but then they think they can somehow also reject the

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LGBTQ stuff coming into their church. You can't. You have to make your stand now.

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And Michael Yousef, I think, somewhat, is bringing these things together. Now, I want to show you something else that also brings this together as well.

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This is interesting to me. Reverend Brandon Robertson. I don't know where he's a reverend.

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He's got his collar. I think he claims to be a homosexual,

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I believe. He's got a blue check mark on Twitter, and 17 ,000 followers. Here's what he said recently.

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Check this out. Where Jesus uses a racial slur. In Mark chapter seven, there's the account of the

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Seraphim woman, a woman who is Syrian and Greek, both of which there were strong biases against within the

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Jewish community. And she comes to ask Jesus to heal her daughter who's possessed by a demon. And what is

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Jesus' response? He says, it's not good for me to give the children's food, meaning the children of Israel's food, to dogs.

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He calls her a dog. What's amazing about this account is that the woman doesn't back down. She speaks truth to power.

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She confronts Jesus and says, well, you can think that about me, but even dogs deserve the crumbs from the table.

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Her boldness and bravery to speak truth to power actually changes Jesus' mind. Jesus repents of his racism and extends healing to this woman's daughter.

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I love this story because it's a reminder that Jesus is human. He had prejudices and bias, and when confronted with it, he was willing to do his work.

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And this woman was willing to stand up and speak truth. This individual, I mean, that should be absolutely reprehensible.

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I mean, offensive in the strongest possible terms to suggest that Jesus, I mean, first of all, he's wiping away

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Jesus' divinity there. Jesus sinned in that case. He was wrong. And you have this woman confronting him and speaking truth to power.

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Power, I know that a few of us did say when this whole

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BLM stuff got started that ultimately you start talking about power being such a bad thing and racism requires you to have power, and Tim Keller, for years, vilifying, or it was wrong to try to hold on to power, and you start vilifying power, that it was gonna end up here.

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The most powerful being in the universe is God himself. And here you have it consistently now being applied to Jesus that it was somehow, it was wrong,

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I guess. It was somehow, it's like a moral blight to have power, and he has all these, this

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Jewish privilege or male privilege or something, and he uses a racial slur.

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He's saying Jesus is racist. That's what he's saying. Jesus is racist. But Jesus corrected and learned from that.

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And that's the good thing. That's what we have to do. This is someone who calls himself a pastor. And here's the shocking part.

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If you thought that was the shocking part, wait till you see this. This is the person who mentored him or taught him these things, apparently.

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Miguel de la Torre, Associate Professor of Social Ethics at Florida International University. Well, guess where he got his

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MDiv from? The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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That's right, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. That's where Al Mohler is the president. And I'm not saying

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Al Mohler's responsible for this. I'm not being ridiculous like that. But I'm saying this is someone who came from an evangelical institution.

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And I mean, he specializes in postmodern and post -colonial social theoretical approach to the

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US marginalized spaces, to construct a theological and biblical ethic that challenges structures of oppression.

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I mean, he's a liberation theologian and a postmodernist. And he taught at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

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He was an ordained Southern Baptist minister at Goshen Baptist Church in Glendene, Kentucky.

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He did a commentary on Genesis. He's got a bunch of stuff that he's taught here.

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Liberating Jonah. I mean, I'm wondering, you know, Tim Keller likes to talk about Jonah in a social justice way.

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Wonder if that's what that's about. He's got a bunch of publications here. But he's a liberation theologian.

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And I mean, he contributed the handbook on US theology as a liberation, there it is. Anyway, without getting into his whole pedigree, here's what he said.

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And this is with Robertson, the gentleman you just watched in the video saying

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Jesus was a racist. Here are they together talking. Is that the Canaanites would despise people.

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These were the half -breeds. These were, you know, Jews who stayed behind after the

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Assyrian occupation. And then they intermingled with other people.

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And they were looked down upon for being a mixed group, a mixed race, kind of like the way

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Latinos are looked down upon now. So there are some connections there that make the story come alive for those of us who can truly understand what it means to be the

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Canaanite woman, to have Jesus say, I'm sorry, but you're a dog.

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And I'm not gonna give you this. Now, of course, not only a dog, but a female dog.

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So I mean, even the word may have been a little stronger than the cleaner version that we're using.

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All right, so the suggestion there is that Jesus is using, not only is he a racist, but he's also using dirty language.

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And of course, they're missing the whole point of the story and the whole prophetic significance of Jesus, why he came to earth, why the nation of Israel was chosen from among the nations of the world, and Jesus is the

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Jewish Messiah. He actually showed an incredible amount of mercy to this woman.

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And it's, they don't even get into the interplay of the different words for dog that are even used there.

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It's, they have a pre, a preconceived notion about what

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Jesus was doing. And they, I mean, they end up challenging his divinity, suggesting that he's morally, you know, did something wrong and had to repent somehow of it,

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I guess. And this is where the woke church stuff is going. This is a guy who's, I don't know if he still is, but he was at least an ordained

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Southern Baptist minister. The video that was currently posted, which is not too long ago, says that it makes it sound like it's current, like he is a

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Southern Baptist minister. So that's shocking for some of us.

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Why even be a minister if that's what you believe? Like reject it all or find a different religion or something, right?

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Of course, they're misinterpreting this all to fit their social justice mindset. But why did

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I bring you through that? I'm gonna bring you, I'm gonna take us through this wisewokenness winning thing, but why did I bring you through that?

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Really, it's to make this point. And I could have probably brought in a lot of other things. The LGBT stuff and the

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BLM stuff, it's all part of the same soup. And it's gonna be used in the same way.

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The feminist stuff too, it's all being used too. The thing that these movements have in common is what they're trying to rip down.

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Western, male dominated, Christian dominated, patriarchal society, et cetera.

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It's Western civilization ultimately that they're going after. Christian civilization. And they think it's the source of so many of the problems and the evils in the world.

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And they're not putting the shoe on the other foot. They're not looking at what does the world look like without that?

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I mean, it's only in that context that you can even come up with people who wanna rip it down and have the freedom to pursue those ends.

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But I think that the mistake that a lot of evangelicals who are joining with the social justice movement are making is they're not ready for when this wheel turns.

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And when it's not BLM and it's the same sex attracted stuff, it's the LGBTQ plus stuff.

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I don't think they're ready for that. And to those who have bought in, who understand where this is going,

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I mean, to them, they've thought through this and they've already created the kind of religion they want.

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And it's not biblical Christianity. It's not New Testament Christianity. And it does eat away everything else.

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I mean, you're deconstructing Jesus at some point. And yes, as Michael Youssef says,

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Marxism's part of this, but the Marxism is using as its way, it's not using obviously the traditional class conflict.

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It's a cultural Marxism, but it's burrowing in so deep into organizations and religions, et cetera, that in Christianity, it's getting into these narrative stories about Jesus, fundamental to the

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Christian faith and flipping the whole thing, changing the whole thing, attributing new meaning to it that was never conceived of before, at least not until very recently.

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And so it's using this postmodern kind of engine. It's using all sorts of other identity markers.

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And really it's anything that will rip down what was there before, what will rip down the hegemony, the patriarchal culture that was so oppressive apparently, anything, any tool that will be used to rip that down is acceptable.

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And this is the kind of world, I just don't know that most evangelicals are thinking through it. They're so focused on a narrative that's a lie, that, oh, the police are hunting down black people, et cetera.

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They're so focused though on that emotional kind of, what that does to them, on that emotional reaction of how horrible it is to watch someone like George Floyd die, and it is horrible.

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They're so focused on that, they become used by the social justice side.

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And when they're that compromised, they can almost get into a position where they'll do anything the social justice side wants them to do.

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And I don't know that they've really realized how far that's going to take them. And I think we're getting little glimpses of it right now.

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And so I just wanted to show you those things for that reason. Now, let's talk about this. This is the big question.

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Why is this working? Why hasn't this stopped? You know, you hear conservatives, whether it's,

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I don't know, you even hear like talk radio hosts say things like, well, once they find out what it's like to live in this

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Democrat -dominated culture, you know, they'll wake up, they'll see. And it's almost like with glee.

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They, you know, let the left hang themselves by their own rope and show what kind of totalitarian jerks they are.

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And then everyone will turn on them. And it doesn't ever work like that. It doesn't. You have some people that get red pilled, but ultimately the left marches on and they gain more converts than they lose, it seems like, for the most part.

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And they're, you know, the more power they gain, the more power they gain. That's how it works until they control everything.

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That's how this works, guys. And so the conservatives who think that, you know, let the left win.

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This was our election to lose because now everyone's gonna really, they're gonna know what it's like to live in a dominated, you know, by the left world.

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And they're not gonna like it. And it doesn't work that way. And I'm just telling you,

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I mean, I've heard this my entire life just about, and it's never slowed down the left. So people don't seem, some wake up, but it doesn't seem to slow down the movement.

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Why does it work? Why is the left winning? Well, here's a guy named Andrew Sullivan, and here's what he says about this.

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He says, why this powerful, seemingly inevitable shift, especially among white elites? The first, it seems to me, is emotional.

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First reason that people are going this way. Cancel culture and all that. The critical race theory advocates have brilliantly managed to construct a crude moral binary to pressure liberals into submission.

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And he's right. So that's true. You know, you're looking at, you don't wanna be a jerk. You don't, you know, you look at some victim or some victim group and, man, you wanna help them, right?

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Well, here's the only acceptable way to help them. And so you grab onto it, you latch onto it. The second reason for critical race theory's triumph is that it's super easy.

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Social inequalities are extremely complicated things when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite structural racism as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you're home free.

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And he's right about that. Absolutely true. It's when we're a culture that does not think critically anymore.

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I mean, how many people are even required to take things like logic or rhetoric in school? They're not. Then this becomes just an easy, it's a simplified explanation.

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Then there's the deep relationship between critical race theory and one of the most powerful human drives, tribalism. So he's basically saying that, you know, people identify with people that are like them.

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And here's something, I think I could say a lot more about this, but I think the critical theorists understand something about culture that generally conservatives don't.

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I should say neo -conservatives today do not. And that goes for most libertarians as well. Conservatives have left culture behind, the conservative movement, if you wanna call it that.

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They don't think through things. They think social issues aren't even winning issues most of the time. They wanna fight fiscal policy or foreign policy or trade policy or something.

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They don't like getting involved in social conflicts. That's why the monument issue, marriage, the marriage issue.

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I mean, they just capitulated on those two things because they don't like those fights. They think they're losing fights. The gun issue is one that they'll kind of fight.

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But you know, a lot of them don't even quite like that. You know, I'm talking about the real elites in like the

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Republican Party. They don't like the abortion issue. They kind of have to go along with that to keep the

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Christian evangelical vote. I'm speaking in broad terms.

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Obviously, there's exceptions to all of this. But in general, culture's not something, they don't think in terms of culture.

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And what really motivates people? People are ignited to vote and to get involved because of social things, because we are wired to identify with heroes, with symbols of our past, where we are wired to,

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I mean, this is just how, when God divided everyone up at Babel, right? And then he assigned the boundaries and the demarcations where people would live, as Acts 17 says, people have things in common, language, region, attachment to the land.

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Those are very strong. And of course, then family connection. And these things are strong. And that's, it's the design of God to do things through families.

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He's the one that designed the family. And from the family, you have tribe and people, culture, et cetera.

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And so to not, you have to take that into account. If you're gonna have a political strategy, you have to take those things into account.

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I think what, you know, critical theorists, they don't understand it quite either because they reduce everything down to power.

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But they still think culture holds a place in their conception of reality.

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Culture is very important to them because it symbolizes power in their minds. Of course, culture doesn't just symbolize power.

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That's where they're wrong. And it's very reductionistic. But culture does hold a place. Culture is important.

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It's not just, let me see if I can explain this better. It's not just like abstract principles that you believe, no matter where you are, who you are, that, you know, motivate people to do what they do.

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You know, they're just, I'm gonna fight because I'm just for the free market. You know, people don't go to war for that kind of stuff, right?

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Even if free trade is underlying a struggle of some kind, it's because I want the freedom for my family and to grow my own business, for my folks to grow their own business, to be able to provide the things that we value because that's the mechanism that is used to provide the things that we value, to take care of our kids, to pass something down to them.

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That's what motivates people. It's not the free market because of the free market. It's a means to an end.

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It's not an end in and of itself, if that makes sense. And the left understands this. That's why when they market socialism to you, they market it in such a way that it's not like, we're for socialism.

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It's no, we're for affordable healthcare so you can take care of your mom. Oh, goodness, man,

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I want that. Well, what do I have to do? Well, socialism. Oh, okay, that's the mechanism to get there. And the other side's just not good at this.

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You know, it's the free market, it's more efficient. Now, how about marketing it like, you know, you wanna take care of your mom and dad, you want those health costs to go down so you can do it.

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Free market, right? But that's not how the right argues. I could give a lot more examples of this, but I think this is, you know, it just spurred my thinking when

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I read this tribalism. Critical race theory takes advantage of that. It puts people into all these different categories.

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Now, it does it for artificial reasons, power relationships. I mean, someone in the Appalachian Mountains is white. They don't have power.

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They're poor, usually. So it misdiagnoses some things, but it still breaks the pie up into people.

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It acknowledges that people have differences in different ways of thinking, in different things they value, in different religions, et cetera.

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And that's true. Social aspirations, he says, also play a part. The adequate of wokery is increasingly indispensable for high society.

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And he's right about this too. This is a great point. What he's saying, this is one of the things that I've actually had to think about because, let me give you an example.

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The Columbus Monument in Philadelphia was protected by the Italian American community there. So the social justice warriors couldn't topple it.

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In many Southern areas, monuments to Robert E. Lee and those kinds of people are coming down because the local population, there are people who wanna fight it, but not enough.

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And they're ostracized and they just won't stick up for that kind of thing as much, at least that's how it seems so far.

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And one of the things I've thought, because what explains this in my mind? What explains this? I grew up in upstate New York.

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I grew up around a lot of Italian people. I've lived in the South now for a few years. I have a lot of family from the

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Deep South, from Mississippi. And I've thought, why is it? Why is there such a difference in the way these, it's the same issue, but why are

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Southerners not as willing to fight as the Italians in Philadelphia? And I think the reason for it is this. There is an honor code.

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I'm not saying Italians don't have any kind of honor code. It's different, but in the South, there's an honor code that really, if you trace it back, goes back to England.

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And it is a, it's the cavalier. It's the knight, if you wanna think about it that way.

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The code, I mean, this kind of got transposed into the code of the West, or the cowboy's code and that kind of thing.

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But it's this, basically rules for etiquette, for being gracious, for treating other people as more important.

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And that's why there's more, yes sir, yes ma 'am, yes, please, thank you in the South. There's more opening doors and that kind of thing.

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And I think what the critical race theory paradigm does is it hijacks that and it uses it against the people who have those sensibilities.

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So you're a jerk, you're evil, you're wrong, but you're also, you have bad manners.

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If someone's offended, you don't wanna cause an offense. I mean, that's a lot of what manners are about, trying to stop an offense, a social offense from happening.

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And critical race theory is a cancer on that because it's a parasite. It uses that inclination to defeat people that have that inclination.

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It uses it against them. So, hey, you have bad manners. How dare you keep us from ripping down your heritage?

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What bad manners do you have? And then someone's, oh, well, that's part of who I am. I don't wanna have bad manners.

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Okay, okay, sure, good manners. And so they use this to neutralize opposition.

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And so he's absolutely right about this. And then he says, there's a little doubt either, it seems to me, that there is a religious component to wokeness.

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Bingo, this is where I wanted to get to. A generation of nuns can feel bereft of transcendence and meaning and become woke, like being born again fills that spiritual hole.

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And here's the last paragraph. The truth is that liberal democracy is hard, counterintuitive, complicated, and requires self -restraint, reason, and toleration at levels most humans are incapable of.

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That's why it is such a rare and fleeting exception in the world today and all but nonexistent for the vast majority of human history.

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Critical race theory is much more attuned to human nature. It gives you the simplest template for understanding the world.

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It assigns you virtue if you assent. It gives you instant power over others purely because of your and their identity.

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And it requires nothing more than tribal instinct to thrive. That's why it is here to stay. And why the fight for liberalism is going to be long and hard and require as much courage, steel, and rigor as we can muster.

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And he's right about that. Let me comment on that. Here you can see it.

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He's right that this is a religion, absolutely. And it is filling the spiritual hole that is left by Christianity and Protestantism, in the

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United States at least. It really is. I mean, as the numbers for Christianity go down, you see the rise of this.

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And in some ways, it's a return, I think, to paganism. But the, so the counterpoint has been liberal democracy.

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That's been, we gotta fight back for a liberal democracy. And here's the question I wanna ask.

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I don't know if I necessarily have the full answer to it. But liberal democracy, however you conceive of that, but what's given us civil liberties, free markets, et cetera, that existed in a

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Protestant society more than anything else. I mean, that's what gave rise to it. In fact, I have a book on my shelf.

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Probably should have grabbed it by, about John Calvin. And anyway, how it kind of traces how liberal democracies,

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I don't even like that word, but the representative republics that guaranteed civil liberties, how they came from this

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Calvinist or Protestant conception of reality. And I don't know, how do you get back those things that liberal democracy has without the religious underpinning that gave rise to it in the first place?

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That's the question I have. How do you combat this wokeness? Now in the church,

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I can give, we open our Bibles and we combat it. But in general, the only way to defeat a true, or a false religion, the only way to defeat a false religion is with a true religion.

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I believe that. And right now, I think one of the mistakes that's being made is that how much are we actually fighting for Christian civilization?

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Versus liberal democracy. I think that's important. And I think it's important for even those who might not be

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Christians, but want to fight for liberal democracy. If they're going to do it, they have to fight for Christian civilization too.

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Even if they don't believe it, that's what they would have to fight for in order to keep Western liberal democracy.

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It doesn't exist in a, I mean, why? Why should we have civil liberties? Why should we have free markets?

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Why should we value any of the things that are part of a tradition, which has been,

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Greco -Roman thinking is in this tradition, but Christianity plays a pivotal role in it. And there is no answer,

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I think, apart from a Christian foundation. So lots more you could say about it, but I just wanted to share that thought, kind of give you the bird's eye view, because I don't see these issues as separate.

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LGBTQ, the BLM stuff, feminism, it's all part of kind of, it's the same thing, and it's trying to rip down Christian civilization.

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I think we just gotta be honest about this. And the only way to challenge it is to support Christian civilization.

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Some kind of a neutral liberal democracy, where it's just based on reason. There's nothing that's ultimately, reason's a very important tool.

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We need reason, obviously. Part of natural revelation gives us the laws of logic, et cetera, that God has given us.

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But you can't, if man is the measure of all things, man's reason, right?

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Reason ultimately has to come from God, has to be transcendent. If it's gonna be man's reason, and through our reason, we're just going to somehow combat this,

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I think we're in a failing, losing attempt there. The allegiance has to be to something greater than that.

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It has to be to something transcendent that applies to everyone. Some, a moral code that goes beyond something that's pragmatic.

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So I've gone almost 40 minutes now, so I'm gonna cut the episode off here. I hope that was helpful.

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And at least it probably spurred a lot of questions in your mind, but I think these are good questions to ask yourself.