John Mark Comer Meet Eddie Haskell

The real hero of Leave It to Beaver, I don't even think it was the beaver.

That wasn't the main character. It was Eddie Haskell. Eddie Haskell knew what was up.

He could see right through the 1950s ISIS North Korea gender roles, and he knew exactly what

Mrs. Cleaver needed. Mrs. Cleaver needed encouragement because she didn't get it from her husband. So Eddie Haskell had to say, that's a nice dress,

Mrs. Cleaver. Or, gee, Mrs. Cleaver, these are good cookies. Because he was trying to just fight back against these gender roles.

Hey everyone, I just wanted to read an email from a listener who found my podcast on John Mark Comer's book,

Practicing the Way, and wanted to notify me about a section in John Mark Comer's book,

Live No Lies, which came out in 2021. So this is after 2020. And I think the reason they sent it to me is because I have a history on my podcast of talking about and refuting social justice teachings that have made their way into Christianity.

And so the email says, John, here are some pages from Live No Lies by John Mark Comer that I believe you will be interested in.

The book was published in 2021. On page 140, he compares 1950s era gender roles to ISIS and North Korea and praises the

Black Lives Matter uprisings. So he sends me some shots, some screenshots from the book.

I don't know if they're screenshots. Actually, I think he has the physical book. He the shots that he sent me.

This is from page 126 in the book. In the days of the intercontinental travel by sea, when you first came to America from the

East, it was very likely that the first thing you saw was Lady Liberty. There she was rising 305 feet out of New York Harbor on tellingly

Liberty Island, an evocative symbol for the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It comes as no surprise that our founders gave us slogans like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and liberty and justice for all, or even

Patrick Henry's rousing line, give me liberty or give me death. I don't know if they would have called those slogans, but they certainly gave us lines from speeches and documents.

Nevermind the tragic irony that we're also the nation that conducted a multi -century transcontinental slave trade of over 12 million

Africans, around 2 million of whom died before they even landed on the East coast.

That as we were rebelling against the oppression of England, we were simultaneously developing a form of chattel slavery as barbaric as any the world had ever seen.

So the slavery in the United States was as barbaric as any, the worst form you can think of.

I'm trying to even think what's the worst form that you could think of. I mean gladiatorial arenas, are we talking what the

Muslims did in Africa where you don't even have a trace of it anymore because they sterilized so many of the slaves that came to the

Arabian peninsula. I mean, there's been some really, really bad forms of slavery out there.

To say that America engaged in the worst of universally all of human history and all the countries that have done slavery,

America has done it just as bad, if not worse than all the other places. That is a pretty startling claim for anyone to make, and any good historian of slavery knows that's just not true.

In fact, even in the transatlantic slave trade, if you wound up in the United States, if you're the five or 6 % that didn't go to the

West Indies, didn't go to the South American coast, you ended up in the

United States, you actually had it, your chances at least, were a lot better of being treated well than winding up in a sugar plantation somewhere.

Now, it ranged, obviously, but in the United States, there was at least a Christian paternalism that tempered the practice, which is why the slave populations grew so much.

That's why the 1850 census was so controversial, because it showed, in part, how many slaves were, and now

I think historian, or you call them historians, but activists will go back and try to discredit this, but it showed that the population was increasing at a huge rate in the

South, where slavery was most prominent at that point, and the percentages of slaves that had maladies was very low, like diseases, and handicaps, and things like that.

It doesn't make the institution, I'm not saying it makes it right, or it justifies bringing it back, or thinking that it was somehow a positive good in every sense, or a universal thing that should just be replicated, nothing of that kind.

It doesn't mean there weren't abuses, but to make the claim that, well, there's two claims really being made, that one,

American slavery is the worst. You think of the worst forms, that's the worst right there. As I often said, and I don't remember any gladiatorial arenas in Alabama, where people were just enjoying the death and destruction, the forced fighting that would lead to death of slaves.

I don't remember that, but, or psych slavery, quite honestly, being normalized, normalized in the sense that there was social approval attached to it.

Those kinds of things happen even in employee relationships today, but it was something that was approved of in Roman slavery, so that's kind of just a ludicrous claim, but the other claim is he's trying to make a jump from the kinds of liberty, which was an ordered liberty within a state of society that Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry are talking about, and then the arrangements that take place in labor.

They would have made a distinction. In fact, if you read the Declaration of Independence, you get to the end, Thomas Jefferson even talks about slavery and is upset at the king because of the royal governor of Virginia attempting to foment slave insurrections and promise freedom to slaves if they would just join the

British cause and that kind of thing. I should say that that came later, so Lord Dunmore is accused of fomenting slave insurrections, and later in the war, this was one of the policies the

British had, was if you fought for them, you would gain your freedom, and this was something that many of the founders who were fighting for their liberty, they were seceding from Great Britain, they wanted their political liberty to order things in their own unique ways.

They had a problem with the king, and George Washington even writes a letter when the

British evacuate New York and says, I think you are bringing with you property that belongs to us, and it's slaves.

So they obviously didn't see the contradiction that so often is being highlighted today, that these men were just a bunch of hypocrites.

I mean, why would you respect any of them? I guess that's the case, they're just a bunch of hypocrites. Well, when they were talking about liberty, they're talking about their local arrangements, their local governments that they have loyalty to, and arranging themselves in a hierarchy underneath that, as opposed to Great Britain, and what

Great Britain wanted to impose on them, which was violating their rights as British citizens, essentially.

So it wasn't that there weren't different vocations and strata within society, there certainly were, there were hierarchies, even when it came to the way children were treated, and the way women were treated, and the way, you know, even people who were members of denominations that weren't the official denomination of certain colonies, they were treated in different ways, or didn't have access the same way that those who were, let's say, congregational in New England had access to certain, you know, tax benefits and that kind of thing.

So this is, you could nitpick all day all kinds of different things that, well, that's not the liberty we think of today.

Well, they weren't thinking in those terms. These are people that are coming out of, frankly, a medieval context, and they are forging something new, but it is still with the attachments of that medieval context.

Many of them Christians, many of them not seeing slavery as intrinsically a sin in and of itself, many of them not having a mechanism to deal with that kind of thing anyway, even if they were against it, like Patrick Henry was against it, even though he had slaves, he was against expanding this, he didn't want the slave trade to continue, so did

Thomas Jefferson, didn't want the slave trade to continue either, even though he owned slaves or held slaves,

I should say. He had a diffusion theory by which he wanted to gradually get rid of slavery in a responsible way, but these people recognized that they had been handed down something that gradually organically developed over time when there were no governments to be able to put a stop to it anyway.

So it's like if you impose these modern state assumptions that like, oh, look today, there's Liberty Island, and we just process all the people who come here, can you believe under those conditions where you have a big, more centralized government, they didn't stop slavery?

Well, it's because that government didn't exist. It didn't exist. It was under the British that you even had slavery developing in this country, right?

So it's just, it's an ignorant comment, but it is a comment that is meant to undermine the pride that we take, the identity that we form with, attached to the founders of our country.

That's really what that is. Hypocrisy aside, we Americans vaunt freedom as the ultimate good.

In a wide ranging study of our nation, a group of sociologists led by Robert Bella discovered that for Americans, freedom was perhaps the most important value.

Now, if that's your question, what kind of freedom are we talking about? The founders would have seen freedom as attached to responsibilities.

You have the freedom to be, take care of the obligations God's given you in an ordered society that he's made.

It's not the freedom to go live it up in sinful ways. I mean, they had laws against profanity and blasphemy.

They obviously had the laws, some of which we still have on the books today, like again, obvious things against stealing and murder and those kinds of things.

So it wasn't like ultimate freedom to do anything you wanted, as long as it didn't hurt anyone or hurt, you know, whatever the case may be.

It was a freedom that was rooted in an order that they believed in. That's not the libertarian freedom you see today.

And yet something about this freedom seems to have gone awry. Systemic racism is the most evocative example, really the most of all the things you could think of.

That's the most evocative example. But there are so many more. Addiction in our nation is widespread, as is compulsive shopping, debt, financial fraud, obesity, alcoholism, and environmental damage.

Anything that requires long -term fidelity is currently in decline. Well, he's right about that. Marriage, two parent families, and so on.

Add to that nationalistic xenophobia of the far right and the anarchist impulse of the far left.

I mean, he doesn't define exactly what he's talking. It doesn't like paint you a picture. This is 2021.

He's talking about January 6th. What's he talking about? At that time, I can't think of any serious political operation in America that has any like influence, power, won any elections that would represent what he's talking about.

Nationalistic xenophobia. Is this just Donald Trump? Is it just MAGA? Like, I don't know. We often scratch our heads at such realities and think, how could this happen in the land of the free?

The constitutional law professor Patrick Dineen from Notre Dame in his book, Why Liberalism Failed, a conservative book yet recommended by no less than President Obama, made the point that the trouble with freedom didn't start in the 1960s with Foucault, Woodstock, and sexual revolution.

It started in the 1760s with the Enlightenment, the founding fathers, and the U .S. Constitution, which he called an attempt to make a whole new kind of human based on a new definition of freedom.

This new definition of freedom is both crude and common. Freedom is the ability to do whatever you want. I don't know if Patrick Dineen would endorse that completely.

I do think he does buy into, he's a Catholic, I think, so he may buy into a poison pill theory that the

United States Constitution itself, and I don't even know if he'd say the Constitution, it probably was the

Declaration of Independence. I doubt it was the Constitution, but that maybe the

Declaration of Independence somehow represents a more egalitarian kind of freedom, an equality.

I don't, I can't, I've read that book. I don't remember that from the book, but I'm pretty sure that he wouldn't, he certainly wouldn't have said that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want in the founding era, because they had, like I said, blasphemy laws, they had state churches, laws against profanity.

They certainly didn't think you could do whatever you wanted. There were limits, and even the things that the king was preventing them from doing, or foisting upon them in their minds, or letting parliament foist upon them without standing up to parliament, like the tax laws, like the

Quartering Act, like disbanding legislatures. It was really, they were not given the same treatment that they had been given previously, to order their own affairs according to their local assemblies, and that was the big issue that they had.

They were not being treated the way that people in England were being treated. They were being treated as second -class citizens, essentially, and this was a change.

This was something that hadn't happened before, not at that scale, at least. So anyway, the idea that, you know, the 1760s, it was the

Enlightenment. Okay, I mean, I can go with that to an extent, but the U .S. Constitution is a representation of this.

I don't know about that, whether Patrick Deneen says that or not. Again, though, it's like ripping on America, that America, the

U .S. Constitution certainly doesn't say you have the freedom and ability to do whatever you want. It does not say that.

So the next section, this, so that was on 126, 137, page 137.

Freedom in this take is the liberation to do whatever the bleep we want, and my word choice is deliberate here.

Okay, so he uses the word for, he says hell. To define the good for ourselves, to pursue and enjoy and buy and sell and sleep and do what we, okay, so this is not what the founders would have envisioned.

It's personal freedom, not a freedom of the body politic, not a freedom of local governments over an overarching empire to arrange themselves.

He's talking about personal, egalitarian, social kind of freedom, which the funny thing is, he was just talking about slavery.

So I don't, like freedom is the main problem now, but you know, it was like really bad.

It was worse than any other form of slavery, just as bad at least as the worst form you can think of was that was what

America did. So like America's very against freedom, but now we're like really for freedom.

I don't know. That's where it's, America's just bad. That's the common thread I'm getting here. To define the good for ourselves, okay, to pursue and enjoy what we want, blah, blah, blah.

This has become the dominant view. This was not Paul's view of freedom or Jesus's. Okay, so for them, freedom isn't about autonomy from authority, but about liberating, loving relationships from sin.

So now we are talking about spiritual freedom from sin. This one word freedom is being used in so many different ways.

Now let's talk about slavery. Okay, we're back to slavery. I hear the word slavery and cringe as an

American. It draws to mind the horror of chattel slavery and the open wound of a nation that 400 years later has still never had a moment of national repentance, much less reparations.

And to be clear, despite empty attempts by a select few to use the

Bible to justify slavery, scripture teaches the exact opposite, racial discrimination, dehumanizing, and oppression are wrong, full stop.

We've never had reparation. I don't know. There's never, like, did, is the practice still going on?

Like, are there still slaves out there? I mean, I've made the case that there's things like, you know, sweatshop labor and sex slavery and debt slavery and prison system and, you know, all kinds of other things that exist that you could say are equivalents, you know, dependency on welfare for generations, those kinds of things.

But I don't think he would say that. I mean, are there, is chattel slavery still around?

I mean, you get that impression reading this. We just, we've never had, there's never been a moment of national repentance, much less reparations.

What is he seeking that I'm wondering? I guess this is pro -reparations. Like, we just need to have a national project of, we got to find what that dollar bill amount is.

I guess all the, you know, affirmative action and welfare and the civil rights regime hasn't been able to rectify,

I guess, any of this. The DEI stuff, we're just, we're still needing some reparations, apparently. He said this in 2021.

Honestly, sometimes I hesitate to even use the word slavery in my writing and teaching, but Jesus and the New Testament writers used it constantly as the descendants of...

He's like, none of this. To be clear, despite empty attempts by a select few to use the

Bible to justify slavery, scripture teaches the exact opposite. Next paragraph. Jesus in the

New Testament lived in a time when there was slavery and they had instruction on how slaves and masters should interact and treat each other.

And maybe they were drawing upon the Old Testament laws concerning equitable treatment in a slave system.

I mean, just maybe, I don't know. Could be, could be that that was going on. Slavery to our flesh is the more pressing danger, maybe even more than the devil.

More than the devil. And the saying goes, if the devil died today, you'd still sin tomorrow.

The devil can only trick and tempt us, not coerce or control us. Of course, many Westerners have recently started to use the word oppression in a much broader sense.

Oppression has been redefined from its original rendering, things like chattel slavery, codified misogyny, and legal discrimination against gay people.

What's legal discrimination against gay people? Like they couldn't get married because it's not a marriage according to the

Bible and according to nature? All right. So, oppression has been redefined from its original rendering to mean any and all forms of external authority or constraint, be it a law or doctrine or social norm or parent or even

God, anything that keeps us from doing what we want. Now, just to be crystal clear, much external authority is oppressive, toxic, and cruel.

North Korea comes to mind, or ISIS, or closer to home systemic racism, police brutality, or stifling 1950s era gender roles.

North Korea, ISIS, fast forward 1950s era gender roles. Okay. You know, that's the first thing

I think of. I think of, you know, North Korea, the people eating grass, starving to death, that if they say anything against the government, they could die.

Maniac who threatens the world with nuclear weapons, has his own religion that pretty much everyone is forced to follow.

He's God essentially in that setup. I mean, and I think of that, and the next thing

I think is like, you know what, that's a lot like, it's a lot like 1950s gender roles, right?

Where you have Mrs. Cleaver at home making dinner while Mr. Cleaver puts on his suit, goes out, and he comes back, and he doesn't help her make dinner.

He sits there reading the newspaper, and then Beaver and Wally come in, and, you know, mom is making them lemonade and snacks before dinner, and dad is just selfishly reading the newspaper and ignoring them, and I think that is a lot like North Korea.

It's very similar to that, or ISIS, really. I mean, ISIS, you think about what they do, and they take these young kids, and they train them to blow themselves up, and that's kind of like what

Mr. Cleaver was doing to Beaver. He was trying to tell him that if you want to be successful in this world, you have to wear a suit, you have to read a newspaper just like me, you have to listen to your teacher, and it stifled

Beaver's creativity. I mean, the real hero of Leave It to Beaver, I don't even think it was the

Beaver. That wasn't the main character. It was Eddie Haskell. Eddie Haskell knew what was up.

He could see right through the 1950s ISIS, North Korea gender roles, and he knew exactly what

Mrs. Cleaver needed. Mrs. Cleaver needed encouragement because she didn't get it from her husband, so Eddie Haskell had to say, that's a nice dress,

Mrs. Cleaver, or gee, Mrs. Cleaver, these are good cookies, because he was trying to just fight back against these gender roles.

He's kind of like the U .S. military when they go in to liberate a region from ISIS, right?

That was basically Eddie Haskell. There is a time and a place to oppose external authority.

The uprisings of Black Lives Matter in 2020 was a great example. He just got done telling you that the left has an anarchist side.

Where is that anarchist side in the United States? I think it was Black Lives Matter 2020, but now he's praising

Black Lives Matter 2020, so I guess that wasn't it. Anyway, he goes on.

I'm just going to read the last paragraph on this page of 140. Those who follow Jesus, we choose of our own free will to place ourselves under external authority that of God himself.

All right. We do this because we believe authority is not inherently oppressive, but similar to parenting for children, a training ground for us to learn how to master our flesh.

I mean, I'm not disagreeing with some of the spiritual things he's trying to draw out of this, but the examples he uses, every single one of them, it seems like, is just bashing

America stuff. We just live in this terrible place. Worst forms of slavery. Never had reparations.

BLM is necessary. You got to have an uprising, man. This is 2021. This is after the buildings were burning. After the largest insurance payout in the history of our country.

Bigger than any hurricane. BLM. At least it was a few years ago when

I looked it up. It's the traditional gender roles, apparently.

What else does he mention? Gay rights. We didn't respect those. I mean, this is just a terrible place that America is.

We're all a bunch of hypocrites. We all say we care about freedom, and then look at these horrible things that we're doing. We're just all hypocrites.

We should just bash America. America's a horrible place. All right. Well, there you go. John Mark Coomer.

That's an excerpt from Live No Lies with, of course, lies in it and half -truths and misrepresentations.

Certainly, I mean, it'd be hard for me to consider John Mark Coomer patriotic at all.

I just don't even see how you would make the case that he is. America's this terrible, terrible place.

Well, I don't know if this was helpful to anyone. I think my audience already knows how I feel about John Mark Coomer, but in case there's anyone out there who doesn't, since I was doing more of a theological critique, and I said, hey, you know, it seems like he leans left in his book,

Practicing the Way. Sure enough, you read some of his other stuff. Oh, yeah, he leans way left. So John Mark Coomer, not just a bad theology, which

I'll say it, he's a heretic when it comes to things like sin, hell, the gospel, and I know substitutionary atonement.

He denies that, apparently. I know a lot of other people have done work on that, but he is also, no surprise, very much not just left, but hard left in the way that he analyzes

America's past and what America stands for and some of these things.