Why Do Conservative Organizations Go Liberal?

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Very quick episode today. I wanna talk to you about a video someone sent me. So this is actually two messages I got in a row from different patrons on Patreon.

One sent me this link to a video that Founders Ministries put out. It's very short by a guy named Graham Gundin, who works for Founders or with Founders Ministries. And he articulates the argument for staying in the Southern Baptist Convention.

And he does it well, and it's the argument that I've heard over and over and over from a lot of people. Many who aren't now articulating that same argument, but it is the main one you'll hear. This could apply though beyond Southern Baptist.

This is any denomination that's going in a bad direction and perhaps too far gone, but there's this rally to try to stay there because conservatives way too often let organizations go bad. And what happens?

We built up this beautiful organization. We put lots of money into it. It's well-endowed. We have great buildings. And then we don't get to stay around for any of it. We have to go and start and build a new one.

And this is what the fundamentalists did. This was the whole idea behind Westminster Seminary. And denominations just keep splitting. They just keep splitting into smaller and smaller segments until you're so fractured.

It's ridiculous. And of course, this is what Catholics berate Protestants for too. I don't know that they're doing that so much these days, but this is the trend for at least the last century, really more than that, the last two centuries, at least you see this trend.

And so the question is why this trend? What brings this about? I wanna take a 30 ,000 foot view and just share with you some possibilities because a second patron sent me a message right after, a different person that was just tailor fit to this.

I just couldn't believe how they went together. And I thought that's a podcast right there. So let's watch the video first from Graham Gundon. And this is Graham Gundon and Tom Askell. And they're trying to make the pitch for staying in the Southern Baptist Convention.

And this is what he says. Conservatives in whatever institution, organization, or context you're thinking of, we're known for taking our ball and going home. Things aren't going the way that I want it to go here and now, so I'm gonna take my ball and go home.

I'm gonna go start my own institution or organization and do this because this organization isn't what I want it to be.

He's absolutely right, but he is using the language of preference here. And it's not just for people, and he may not even mean this in his own mind. He may be thinking of it in the terms I'm thinking of it.

But just for those who are listening, to be very clear, this isn't just a preference thing. They're using the blue colored carpet and I wanted the red colored carpet. We're not talking about that. We're talking about fundamental differences.

We're talking about apostasy, downgrade, false teaching. That's what's going on. It's not just a personal thing. This organization is not going the way God wants it to go. This organization is doing the opposite of what it is supposed to be doing.

It is taking the money that is given to the Lord and it is using it for purposes other than that that are actually against that.

That's the issue. Just always, always on the retreat. We're never on the offensive. We're never trying to take ground. We're always ceding more and more territory, either to the enemy or towards brothers and sisters who are not doing things the way that they should be doing things.

Now this happened to some extent during the window that I've talked about from 2017, 18 to 2020, 21, really 20, when there was this window where I think you probably could have rallied the troops, got the SBC back on a little bit of a better track.

You could have tried a second conservative insurgence, but a lot of the conservatives were calling the false teachers brothers, trying to make complementarian the hill to die on, trying to be really nice, read charitably, not go too far, not the same spirit that was in Adrian Rogers and Paige Patterson, to say the least.

And so I see what he's saying reflected in what I've noticed in the last two years is conservatives don't generally go on the offensive much. There was a little bit of that. I'm not saying there wasn't any of it, but it wasn't that effective and it wasn't that aggressive.

It was very, I mean, look, you had the conservative running saying, hey, there's no liberals running. Everyone's a good Christian brother, good conservative. That doesn't rally anyone to come out to the convention and vote for you.

I mean, it doesn't sound like the alarm's going off. Like it's not the hugest thing in the world. It's more of a preference thing. And unless you're pounding your fist on the table and you're saying, thus sayeth the Lord, this is evil.

We have a false gospel cranking out of our seminaries. We have unbiblical ethics that are being promoted by institutions and entities in our denomination. We have corruption going on. Like, unless you're willing to really rally the troops, give a rallying cry, then you're not, people aren't gonna think that there's an emergency.

So it hasn't been the Starship Enterprise with the red alert going off. We'll put it that way. It's been, oh, there's a little turbulence. Oh, you know, we don't like that. But that's what I've seen in the last two years.

I'm obviously overgeneralizing, and I'm not saying there weren't people who didn't fight, but there wasn't a concerted effort, okay? And so I think I see what he's saying here. Now, I don't know if he thinks that or means that, but their argument is to keep staying in the convention.

And so it must be that we haven't really fought yet. I don't know. We're going to fight. This is gonna happen. I don't know. I don't know, but his desire is that there would be a real fight, okay? And I, look, I get it.

I can't, I'm not trying to fault him for saying this. I'm sure we would probably get along on a lot of things, and I admire even the, but you're coming onto the battlefield after the battle's been mostly fought.

That's kind of been my critique of this. But the trends he's identifying is absolutely true. Conservatives, for whatever reason, the last 200 years or so, especially as the nominations divide, you don't see the fighting spirit.

Now, why is that? Why has it been so limp wristed the last four years in the SBC with conservatives? What's going on?

And so we're gonna go start another organization. We're gonna go start another institution, which in 50, 60 years, our descendants are gonna do the same exact thing. And so what we do is we keep using our resources to build institutions for the enemy.

Okay, so we keep using our resources to build institutions for the enemy. This is what I want to show you, or talk to you about. I'll read it more. I had someone reach out to me and send me a speech by, it's called The Legacy of James Burnham.

Foxes, Lions, and the Conservative Movement by a guy named Daniel McCarthy. And I listened to it actually twice on double speed. So if I listened to it once on single speed, I probably wouldn't have had to listen to it twice, but I really wanted to understand what he was saying.

And so I'm not familiar with these guys. I wasn't familiar with James Burnham, really, and some of the other guys that he mentions. And so James Burnham was like the, he was an expert on Trotsky, but he was one of the founding members, I guess, of National Review, and William F. Buckley considered him a father figure, really influenced William F. Buckley.

So on the right, right, and what he had, so he talked about, he had a fancier word for it, but the layman's term is, he talked about foxes and lions. And these two different, how do you say it? Personalities, tendencies, people that operate in different ways.

Some operate as foxes, some operate as lions. And the lions, like Donald Trump, right, would probably be in this, but like the lions are, there's a divide. You have, in political conservatism, the people that are the voters, and the voters tend to be more, it's populism, he doesn't use that term, but they like Richard Nixon's silent majority.

They like Donald Trump's Make America Great Again, but those didn't fit into what was happening in the intellectual conservative circles. In fact, a lot of intellectual conservatives were very much against Donald Trump.

So how does that make sense? Why are the voters, why is there this disconnect between the voters and the people that run the think tanks and conservatism incorporated? And he says, well, you have to understand, there's this personality of your foxes and your lions, and the foxes are the ones that end up getting into the positions of leadership.

They're very cunning. They have, they're very innovative. They like innovation. They, in fact, one of the things he identifies them as is he says, if you hear someone say, America is founded on these ideals that of equality or something like that, and that America's an idea, it's not a country, that's a good indication that you're talking to someone who's more of a fox.

They're more innovative. They're not necessarily loyal, and they don't have a high sense of honor and duty that a lion has where they're loyal to what they tangibly experience and defending that. They're not open as much to just from our minds, imagining a different world and trying to create that.

They wanna go with what they know and with tradition, right? So there's a tradition kind of versus innovation thing happening here. And that's what's happening in conservatism. And so the same thing, this particular patron was saying, yeah, the same thing's happening in the evangelical movement.

I think he's absolutely right. I think it's a very astute observation. Absolutely right. And one of the things he talks about is this, it's called the revolving door. Well, I guess that's all it is, the revolving door.

And I'll read for you. This is what the patron sent me. In politics, a revolving door is a situation which personnel moves between roles as legislatures and regulators, on the one hand and members of the industries affected by the legislation and regulation on the other, analogous to the movement of people in a physical revolving door.

It has been used to refer to the constant switching and ousting of political leaders from offices, such as the prime minister of Australia and Japan. In some cases, the roles are performed in sequence, but in certain circumstances, they may be performed at the same time.

Political analysts claim that an unhealthy relationship can develop between the private sector and the government based on the granting of reciprocated privileges to the detriment of the nation and can lead to the regulatory capture.

Okay, so this fits into this in this way. Think about it politically first. You have the way they call it the deep state, but you have people that work in government and then they go to the private sector and they marry people from the private sector who work in the government too.

And they go to the same cocktail parties, that kind of thing. There's this culture of the media, the big business, government, they're all operating in the same social networks. And so there's social capital.

They have to have good relationships. And I know a lot of people in the conservative world that are like this. I mean, like everything, they must be so just, it's very hard, I think, to operate in that world because they must be so stressed with trying to maintain all these relationships, make sure they're on good terms with everyone.

And there's this big incentive because if things go down at the ship you're on, you can jump to another ship in the private sector or in the government or your buddy over here. And that's why even when politicians lose elections, it doesn't mean that they lose their jobs.

They go, unless they're MAGA people probably, but they go to, they just land softly at another job in someone else's administration or in the party leadership or something. It's a whole industry and the connections are so tight between them.

And it's occupied mainly by foxes. But these, it attracts a certain kind of people, a cunning kind of person, a ladder climber, someone who, now if we're thinking like biblical categories, right? This all sounds very negative.

And I think in the lecture on James Burnham, Daniel McCarthy wants to say, well, it's not necessarily negative, it's just different personalities. I can't help but thinking though, the fox thing though, there's a negativity to this.

There's, this is people pleasing, right? This is fearing man instead of God. I mean, that tendency at least seems to be there. This is looking out for number one and making sure that you're safe no matter what else is happening.

And instead of applying, it's not wisdom that they have, it's cunningness that they have. It's an ability and an art of manipulating things, of deceiving people even at times. And these are the kinds of people that end up making this establishment.

They naturally, I mean, I met guys like this even in seminary where the guys who know how to flatter and create a situation where they can get platformed by the professor or something like that. And they're good at it and they just know how to do it.

So these are the foxes, if you will. The lions though, are the people who are very, very loyal. Not, they're not just after their own, themselves. They're not, and they're not innovative. They're much more loyal to tradition, to their families, to the situation that they grew up in.

They don't wanna try to create utopia. They're not, what they're not trying to do is get a group of people together for a higher purpose. They don't see that we should just be creating this higher purpose of this telos for a political society, that they need to accomplish something.

There's nothing to accomplish. Like some great feat or something. It's just, it's trying to just, in this fallen world, maintain the true and valuable good things that we have. Doesn't mean there's not room for reform or improvement.

It just means it's not this grand goal that we're trying to accomplish somehow. And things are good in and of themselves. The life that you live is an end in and of itself. It's not a means to equality or liberty or something like that.

That's what I'm trying to say. So I thought that was an astute observation. I thought, yeah, that's true. And then there's another gentleman that was mentioned in the talk called Robert Michaels. And if you go to the Wikipedia page for him, the guy who sent me this, let me just read this to you.

He theorized that all organizations eventually come to be run by a leadership class, who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons of political strategists. In the case of churches, many persons who derive their incomes primarily from para-church entities, like the blob out on Brown Road in Duluth, various seminaries, colleges, missions, et cetera, for the organization.

Far from being servants of the masses or of the church, Mitchell's argues that this leadership class, rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power and structure by controlling who has, and listen to if this makes sense in your para-church organization or your mega-church.

Listen to this. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability. Due to the apathy, indifference, and non-participation, most rank and file members and officers have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes, because no one has time for that, right?

They're busy feeding their kids and stuff. They don't, they just want to give to the church or something, take care of it, right? They're not getting involved. Mitchell's argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions.

All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made democratically by members. So this is fascinating to me, because this describes exactly what's happening. Mitchell's stated that the official goal of representative democracy, of eliminating elite rule, was impossible.

That representative democracy is a facade legitimizing the role of a particular elite, and the elite rule, which he refers to as an oligarchy, is inevitable. And I think he's absolutely right about that.

I think democracy, look at every medieval movie. There's two themes, right? I want to marry for love, because arranged marriages are oppressive, and duty to your family and your country. No, that's bad.

And then number two is let the people decide. We shouldn't have divine right of kings. It should be the people. Democracy is good. And that is so drilled down from when you're a little kid, that democracy is so important.

Equality, democracy, when we go into the Middle East, it's all about democracy. We just got to establish democracy. You're not going to find that in scripture. A republic, which is what we have, or should have, I don't even know anymore after the last year, a representative government, it's preferable to a monarchy when you have a population that is self-governing.

If you don't have a population that's self-governing, which by the way, means they are religious. Founders knew that. Then there's no point. Why even have, why have a republic? And why especially have a democracy?

The founders didn't want democracy. That was mob rule. But today you just hear democracy, democracy, democracy. Democratic socialism, right? That like washes socialism in the waters of democracy. And what Robert Michaels is saying is there is no, inevitably what's going to happen is a hierarchy always emerges.

It always does. It always does. It's inevitable. You will have the people who are the foxes, the cunning, the self-serving, the innovative, the less principled, the less concerned with honors, less moral scruples.

They end up rising to the top. They just do. They end up, and then once they get there, they figure out how to work the mechanisms to control the people that put them there and that they're supposed to be serving, but they're actually usually taking resources from.

So this happened in parachurch ministry to some extent. This definitely happened in the government. And I think it relates to what Graham was saying in the video that I played at the beginning. This is why this happens over and over and over again.

Conservatives create an organization. Over time, the foxes end up climbing the ranks and they're cunning. They're able to deceive people. Look, I can tell you story after story. It's very hard to vet, but a lot of people are, especially with Marxists, they're so subversive.

They just don't see it. This has been a problem in the SBC for the last like four years. I remember calling and talking to some of these conservatives in the SBC and being like, this is what's happening at my seminary.

This is, and it was, the way it was treated was like, well, I have to see that quote. I have to confirm this. And it's like, and that's very legitimate, okay. But then even if I get the information, it's like, well, you know, I don't know.

It's still a good brother. I just can't, I think he's still on our side. I think Akin, I think he's still on our side. I think Al Muller, he's still there. He's still, even when the evidence was in, it was still, there was such a, the lions get taken advantage by the foxes.

They're outfoxed. And this is what's happened over and over and over. Now, one of the questions is, is this partially the result of industrialization? Which I don't have the ability right at this point to even probably comment on, but it is a thought I have.

Did this get worse? Not because human nature doesn't change, but did it get worse after the Industrial Revolution when there was, everything was so specialized and things were operating on a bigger scale than they were before.

And there was less accountability, more trust in someone who had a specific set of skills that was not shared by others. And did this create a class of priests almost, who were the scientists, the career politicians, the career theologians, the academics in certain fields, where they were just, they were above almost the lions, but just the population in general.

They were looked to in certain ways, ascribed honor to them, and they were untouchable in some ways. Is it connected to that? And that's an open question. I don't know exactly, but it does seem like it's been a problem in the last 200 years more than ever.

Now, you could go back and say like, the nominations have been splitting off throughout the whole history of the church. There's always been schism. There's always even in the New Testament, right? That's very true, but it seems to be much more amplified in the last 200 years.

And so I wonder about that. And a lot of it does have to do with people from the left taking over the organizations. Conservatives tend not to be foxes. Their principles prevent them from doing that. And they're not onto what foxes do.

They tend to be naive. They tend to think the best about people. They tend to think others are as principled as they are, whereas the foxes tend to look at the lions and think of them as cunning and deceptive as they are.

So they project all the time and ascribe motives that aren't there. And so this is why this happens, I think. This is a big part of it. And the question is how do you break that cycle, right? So let's say the Southern Baptists start, like the conservatives say, we're gonna start our own organization.

Boy Scouts, right? They have now Trail Life, or I think it's called Trail Life. This is our own organization. How do you keep that organization from getting corrupt? How do you make it so it's accountable to the actual members?

How do you make sure that you get lions in charge instead of foxes? I don't have the answer to that. I don't know. I don't know. There needs to be a healthy dose of suspicion. There needs to be more vetting and more discernment.

I know that. I know that there needs to be less fear of man. I know that. Those are the starting points for me. On a 30 ,000 foot view though, and you're looking at this as a pernicious problem and you want to create a solution that will carry through and ensure that a conservative organization remains conservative, only thing I can think of is you gotta tighten it up quite a bit.

What the left does is they take over an organization and they lock the door behind them. Conservatives leave the door wide open. Yeah, we believe in this common ground that we all have, that we can, a neutral territory that, like I'll give you an example, like at a Christian university, let's say, they are, I've just seen this, they're much more likely to hire someone that doesn't even, even when they have faith statements, which are good, which do tighten things up, but even with that, the people that work at those places are much more likely to hire based on relationships than they are principal.

They want their buddies to come in and work with them. And if their buddies start shifting, they don't wanna kick their buddies out. Conservatives are just, they're more personable on that level, I guess, in that way, they're more, they're not looking at their political goals all the time, they're looking at people and the people they like, they wanna help, and so they end up, they have to keep their principles more in the front of their minds and call attention to things.

So I don't, this is a more of a podcast with questions more than answers. So maybe you can put your thoughts in the comment section. What do you think about all this? What do you think? Why do you think conservative organizations do this over and over?

And why do you think religious denominations and organizations go apostate and leave orthodoxy over and over and over? What's the reason for that? And what can stop that cycle? What can stop it? So, God bless.

Hope that was a good episode to get you thinking today. And I would love to see you this weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Tuesday, I'll be in Kentucky, I'll be in Nashville. Check it out at worldbeeconversation .com.

See you then, bye now.