A Christian March Through the Institutions

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

He charged me with creating a suicidal environment simply because I gave an education rather than indoctrination.

00:05

The textbook was anti -Christian, anti -Bible, pro -gay, and so forth. I'm giving a biomedical argument from harm, a natural law argument, and the two students in my class who were atheists defended me, took the flash drive that they had recorded my lectures on, and they went to the university and said, if you punish him without ever listening to his lectures, and we have them right here, we are leaving this university because it is not a free -thinking university.

00:44

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, and we have a special guest today.

00:49

We're going to be talking about a book that you all should know about. It's called The Progressive Miseducation of America, Confronting the

00:56

Cultural Revolution from the Classroom to Your Community by Dr. Corey Miller. He is with Ratio Christie.

01:03

You can go to ratiochristie .org to find out more about Ratio Christie. Just a quick note before I say more about Dr.

01:10

Corey Miller, Ratio Christie is one of these organizations that did not bend to the woke, cancel culture, progressive, whatever you want to call it, mob that took place in 2020.

01:21

They were actually ahead of the curve already critiquing social justice theory. They have been on my radar for a little while, mostly because of Crew and because of staff members who have come over from Crew to Ratio Christie.

01:35

They're obviously different organizations. Ratio Christie is more of an apologetics ministry, but they do have a mind to focus on college campuses and reach intellectuals who are going for higher degrees.

01:49

In that spirit, Dr. Corey Miller, who's the director of Ratio Christie, is a philosopher.

01:55

He's a former Mormon, seventh generation actually, and he taught at Indiana University philosophy.

02:01

Now he's going to talk to us a little bit about his book. Welcome to the show, Dr. Corey Miller. I appreciate having you.

02:07

Thanks so much, John, for having me on. Love your program and love the opportunity here. Well, tell me a little bit about this book.

02:14

You've written a number of books. How many books have you written? I've got six books, three on Mormonism, given my background, and two on philosophy compared to religions.

02:25

I'll sell all but maybe two or three copies because they're interested for philosophers.

02:31

This is the first one that's on a popular level, a cultural level, and a must understand level for American Christianity.

02:40

Good. Well, so it's called The Miseducation of America. You think we've been miseducated, huh? I do for a good, good long time.

02:48

Yeah, and so I'm a student of the universities. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the history of the universities.

02:56

So are you doing more of a history, more of a philosophy, more of an apologet?

03:03

I mean, is it all of the above? How would you classify this, and how will it help Christians is really my question.

03:12

I look at myself here like John the Baptist or Paul Revere. I'm a herald. Something has just happened.

03:18

Everybody knows it. This is no longer Grandma's America. We have lost our country, and everybody can feel it.

03:26

Even atheist classical liberals who are now, let's say, part of the

03:32

Trump team, fully on.

03:37

Things have gone really weird. We're in a really weird political situation like we've never been in, and everybody knows it.

03:44

Politics is downstream from culture, culture from education, and at the top of education is the university.

03:50

So basically, the book is what happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens in the university does not stay in the university.

03:58

As goes the campus, so goes the culture. As goes the U .S. campus, so goes the world. You want to know why we're in the position we are in in America?

04:07

Look to the universities. And so basically, I tell the story of what's happening everywhere from the university to media to politics to the church to campus ministries to Christian academic societies and seminaries to K -12 schools, and I say, everyone knows we're not in Kansas anymore,

04:29

Toto. Look to the universities, and then I give a history of the university because Christians are the ones who started these universities, not just here but also before in Europe and then in Southeast Asia and Africa, and it's well known.

04:44

Well, how did we lose them? That's a clue to how to regain them, which we must do. And so I tell the story of the two ideological revolutions that have happened, and my book is a clarion call for a third revolution.

04:57

And I basically write 100 pages near the end giving solutions, how we can progress forward.

05:04

Some of it's more long term, some short term, but I'm addressing pastors, parents, parachurches, philanthropists, donors, professors, educators, prayers, and political allies, all hands on deck.

05:17

It's the university. And of course, the book is The Progressive Miseducation of America, and if you want to find out more, you can go to ratio .link

05:25

forward slash, is it PMA? PMA, I think. PMA. Acronym for the book,

05:31

Progressive Miseducation of America, PMA, and you can order it there. It looks like you can also pre -order on Amazon.

05:37

I don't know if you want people doing that, but - October 14th on Amazon. Helps get to the beginning.

05:43

Yeah. So here's a question I have. There's been a lot of change, obviously, post -2020, and I do hear,

05:52

I don't know if they're saying it directly, but the sentiment is certainly in the water that the universities don't really matter anymore.

05:59

The traditional institutions that used to guide us can't be trusted. And Pandora's box is open.

06:05

I don't know if you've noticed that, but it seems like online especially, there's a lot of novel ideas, even on the right.

06:12

You have a lot of pagan right ideas that are gaining ascendancy with young men. I see even neo -Nazi stuff starting to become somewhat popular.

06:21

I don't know if it's faddish, but it's - My perception is that a lot of that is probably people who are not in universities.

06:30

I could be wrong. Maybe you have a better idea of that than I do. But these are people who are not listening to the traditional institutions.

06:39

They're trying to find something that's going to give them an understanding, a

06:45

Rosetta Stone to understand because they've lost their footing everywhere else. And so they need something.

06:51

And so they'll follow online podcasters, gurus of different varieties to try to break through and to find truth finally, because they feel like they've been lied to.

07:01

And in this environment where the internet and now AI is really giving you the opportunity to be with people and talk to people who share whatever your point of view is, it could be flat earth.

07:14

You could find them and you can reinforce this in group thing and stuff. Do the universities still hold a place of importance?

07:23

Insofar as education holds a place and will always hold a place, it absolutely does.

07:30

Now, there are different models, right? You got the Jordan Peterson model, the online university, you have the

07:36

Peter Boghossian and what were the new atheists who decided to start the University of Austin?

07:41

They want something a bit more like Grove City or Hillsdale or Patrick Henry College that can't be touched by federal dollars, but they want what they had in the last hundred years.

07:51

They were the final byproduct of the first ideological revolution to sweep our universities, scientific naturalism, which gave us

08:00

Protestant liberal theology and the social gospel. They've been taken over by the second revolution.

08:07

And that's why you get people like Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland all wanting to call themselves cultural or existential

08:17

Christians now, because for the first time, they've been able to compare something to the whipping boy, which is

08:23

Christianity. And they're comparing a different entire culture, not just Islamicism, which is a bit farther away from us, though they've seen it.

08:34

It's cultural Marxism, postmodern cultural Marxism in particular. And there is a nuance there.

08:39

They've seen what that does and can do, and they don't like it. It's a rival to their worldview.

08:46

And it has taken the universities and taken culture. So the universities still matter.

08:53

And we can't just keep starting over. Right. We started Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and I tell the history of that whole thing.

09:01

And then when we got ousted, that is conservatives, Christians, the founders of the educational institutes and not by accident, because our worldview begins with mind and not matter.

09:12

But when we got ousted, we went and started our new schools, Wheaton and Calvin and Biola.

09:18

And now those have cracks in the fissures. And so we're talking now, let's go start yet new ones that are two months old with 50 cents in their endowment.

09:29

We're never going to do anything significant if we keep going on the retreat.

09:36

The New York Times is still the paper of record, John, even though there are more subscribers to the

09:43

USA Today. You might think that Harvard is a lost cause or Yale is a lost cause and for good reason, but they have 15 ,000 students, 20 ,000 students.

09:55

We can recapture R1 schools like Purdue or Florida State or Texas A &M that have 70 ,000 students and are pumping out for more professors.

10:07

And we can't just leave these institutes that are the most influential institutions shaping civilization for a couple of reasons.

10:17

One, one third of all world leaders, presidents, prime ministers, dictators, whatever, they got one of their academic degrees from a

10:26

U .S. university. What happens in our universities, it changes the culture, changes civilization.

10:35

And second, you think about really who is impacting the culture today. A lot of people want to say, oh, it's the church.

10:42

The church is the biggest influence. It's not. Those people who go to church weekly in America is 30%.

10:47

If you add 9%, you'll accommodate those who go almost weekly. But exactly 39 % of 18 to 24 year olds are enrolled in the university.

10:58

If you go to church every week, you get 52 sermons a year. The average freshman starting next week gets 52.

11:05

They get 60 actually sermons in the first month. That's why we could look at the generation like Z and then millennials and so forth going further outside the epicenter.

11:17

And we can track the wokeness, the liberalness, the socialistic inclinations, the closer you are to the university because that's what you've just consumed.

11:31

We need to have an influence on these universities, and we have to stop running. Now we can't go anywhere.

11:37

You can't escape this. It's coming into your homes. It's coming into your churches. It's coming into your closet.

11:43

You can't even go to your closet anymore. So I get into solutions near the end of the book. But I want people to see how severe this problem is and why people need to start waking up.

11:55

Yeah, I think I'm curious about solutions because I think it sounds insurmountable, especially if you go to an

12:02

Ivy League school and you see how taken over these places are. And I don't know of any,

12:08

I mean, I'm sure there are some professors, but they're usually in hiding if they represent a very traditional Christian belief.

12:14

They have to be very careful. And so I guess the question that's in the news right now is what's the best way to keep them in line, right?

12:24

Because you have the Trump solution, or I don't know if it's a full solution, but at least the next step in his agenda, which is to try to go after enrollment and punish them by,

12:37

I mean, I don't know if he's actually done this yet. I've heard a lot of talk about people wanting him to go after the endowments and really crush these universities.

12:46

But I don't know how much of that is more, but I'm a little skeptical that that's going to do anything lasting,

12:51

I suppose. And then you could, of course, do what Christians, I've heard Christians talking about for a long time, which is sort of get into these places by either doing evangelism or try to pursue an academic career as a

13:06

Christian. But you've got to be careful. You've got to keep your head down. You've got to. And that just seems to sometimes promote compromise.

13:12

You get people who that's what they get used to is, well, I've got to keep my head down. So maybe talk to us about that.

13:17

Is there a strategy that you're proposing that hasn't been thought of yet? Yeah, I first want

13:24

I want to bring the audience's attention to two things, the church and the university and the statistics and the situation that we're in, please.

13:31

Your audience is bright enough. They've probably heard stats like this before. I think it was in 2022 that the

13:38

Arizona Christian University puts out a worldview inventory annually. And they said that I'm just going to look at the stats to make sure

13:47

I get them right, that how many people in the US hold a biblical worldview? Very small.

13:54

And what does it mean to hold a biblical worldview? Right. A belief in God's existence and God's nature.

13:59

All humans are sinners. They need a savior. Jesus is the only way the Bible is God's word and historically reliable in all it affirms.

14:07

It's absolute truth exists. It's grounded in God. Purpose for life is to know, love and serve God. And success is understood through faithful obedience to God.

14:14

OK, sounds common sense. If you're, if you're a believer, that's a biblical worldview.

14:20

Not a lot of controversy there. 6 % of Americans hold a biblical worldview.

14:26

Wow. That's in 2022. A year later, 4 % hold a biblical worldview.

14:33

And in terms of pastors, 37 % of American pastors hold a biblical worldview. Now we can start seeing where the problem is.

14:39

But we say, aha, those aren't evangelical or non -denominational pastors. That's where 51 to 57%.

14:47

Wow. It's now party time. Just over half hold a biblical worldview. Wow. You can't trust the universities.

14:54

Can you trust your churches? This is where parents ought to be saying, you know what? We are literally paying for the apostasy of our own children when we send them off to these secular baptismal fonts, but they're not getting equipped at the churches.

15:09

And that's why 50 to 80 % of them are falling when they go off to the universities, which is why our campus ministry,

15:17

Roscio Christie began and is on a hundred college campuses. We do with undergrad, but we also have a professor's ministry and we are funding covertly

15:27

PhD students getting into top 100 schools. It's a 40 or 50 year project we're doing. Now think about that for the churches.

15:35

When they get to the universities, you just mentioned that one Christian professor or a conservative or a libertarian or whatever,

15:43

Yale statistics last month are 78 to one for social sciences and the humanities.

15:51

Well, the reality is in the nineties, the ratio is 2 .3 to one liberal to conservative, right?

16:00

2 .3 to one that's still severe, but it's, there are checks and balances there. It's not an echo chamber.

16:06

You've got some accountability, 2 .3 to one. Now it's 12 to one for those who are retiring 23 to one for those who just got tenure and have 30 years ahead of them, 27 to one in the

16:20

New England area where the Ivy league throughout. And anytime I tell this story, you know, the mother usually elbows the father and says, you know what?

16:29

If Johnny's going to go to university of X, he needs to at least take a religious studies class. And that's where I say, no, it's 70 to one there.

16:38

We are getting our butts kicked in terms of the numbers were outnumbered, but not outgunned.

16:44

And yet, and yet there is hope just as we see in the biblical model.

16:50

It was always a remnant. Look, the fact that the first revolution ever happened after 200 years, beginning with Harvard, and, you know, these universities for the first 200 years, almost every president was also a member of the clergy.

17:06

Hebrew was required. Church and chapel attendance were still required up until 1880.

17:11

I mean, you know, for 250 years, but between 1880 and 1930, something happened.

17:17

The battle was on. We didn't have any graduate schools. So we would send our students over the Atlantic, mostly to Germany.

17:23

And since the reformation has anything good come out of Germany, someone might ask. That's where you get

17:29

Kant, the culmination of the enlightenment. You can't know ultimate reality. That's where you have Schleiermacher, the father of modern liberal theology.

17:36

It's where you have Marx and Engels and Freud and Nietzsche. God is dead and Freudian sexuality, which has been mixed with Marxism in this new, which is brew here.

17:48

They started graduating, coming over to the U .S. And now the higher degrees are all coming from German ideology.

17:55

The battle was on from 1880 to 1930. They won. They took over the universities.

18:00

They lasted 100 years. And in the last 20, it was sort of the apex of that because of the new atheist movement chaired by Richard Dawkins, who now wants to be our friend.

18:12

He was like the Robespierre of the French Revolution. He created the guillotine and wanted to guillotine all Christianity.

18:18

And he got guillotined by his own guillotine. They took away the humanist of the year award that was given to him 25 years ago by the woke mob.

18:27

And so now he wants to be our friend and likes Christianity a whole lot more. He says he's on team Christian, right? That shows that the minority can come in and upend the majority, not just once.

18:40

But now that reign of terror has come to an end. And the second revolution at the end of the 1930s was just beginning in Germany.

18:50

Most of the leaders were Jewish and they were globalist socialists, not national socialists.

18:55

They were Marxists, not Nazis. Commies and Nazis are both preoccupied with race.

19:01

They're both authoritarian, totalitarian, anti -Christian in their subversive methods and so forth.

19:09

Well, when the Nazis raised power, they got to get out of town. Where did they go? Columbia University, Brandeis University, UCLA and so forth.

19:16

And down south from them in the Axis powers was Antonio Gramsci. And he's considered to be one of the most dangerous of cultural

19:23

Marxists. He never got out of prison. Mussolini imprisoned him. How is he so dangerous?

19:30

His writings got mediated to the English -speaking world through right here in my state of Indiana at Notre Dame by a

19:39

Marxist professor named Joseph Buttigieg, father of Mayor Pete. So what you're seeing there is a good dose of critical queer theory, critical race theory, critical gender theory, critical pedagogy, critical anything.

19:53

If it's not critical thinking, it's Marxism plus something else. So it happened twice and we're watching it right now.

19:59

And then I interviewed Al Mohler, how he came in and took over what was a liberal

20:06

Southern Baptist seminary and recaptured an institution. And Alvin Plantinga of Reformed Epistemology, probably the most famous Christian philosopher alive today.

20:20

He established a Normandy -like beachhead in philosophy departments in America. Christians have recaptured a beachhead.

20:28

So not only is it possible because it's shown that it can happen and has happened, but it must happen.

20:35

Otherwise, they're coming into our closets, they're coming into our churches, they're coming into our campus ministries.

20:42

You can't escape this stuff. We have cell phones now. You can't even go into your closets. Parents need to start upping their game and equipping their students, not trusting in the youth pastor or if they're in a bad church, like the statistics

20:56

I gave, go to a different church. And I get it. Being a parent is super hard. You're busy, and because of maybe political decisions we've made or whatever, economically, if you feel forced, both parents have to be working.

21:09

So you're exhausted when you get home. But you're going to send your students off ill -equipped to go to a secular baptismal font where you train them up in the way they should go, and when they get older, they get conscripted to work for the other side like Bart Ehrman.

21:24

That's what's happening. Mm -hmm. Yeah, and that's, I think, a very good description of how we got here, where we are, and maybe a little bit of what can be done, because obviously there have been multiple infiltrations that have led to where we are now.

21:43

In fact, I was reading an article yesterday, and it's actually a substack. I don't usually read substacks, but this one, someone shared it with me.

21:51

I don't know if you've ever heard this name. Hussein Abubakar Mansour. So he's not,

21:57

I don't even know if he's American, but the Arabic meta -critique, it's a philosophy substack.

22:03

Anyway, it was about the anti -Judaism, sort of anti -Jewish, anti -Judaism, both were together in a critique in the early

22:15

German philosophers. And when I mean early, I don't mean, I mean actually modern. I mean, like some of the guys you were just talking about, like Hegel, and I think, is it

22:24

Feuerbach? How do you say that guy's name? Feuerbach. Feuerbach? Yeah. And Nietzsche, I think was mentioned in there.

22:32

I think the main guy he talks about is a guy named Wilhelm Marr. But anyway, these guys were all, and Marx, he talks about Marx.

22:40

These guys were all very critical of Christianity, but it came out of this critique of the Old Testament.

22:45

Even Jewish people themselves were critiquing what they consider to be

22:50

Jewishness or whatever. So I was reading this and I'm like, it's jumping out at me. And I'm thinking, I recognize this today.

22:57

This is what is happening both on the left and the right, in some respects, at least, what we see on the university campuses now.

23:04

And I'm like, these guys wrote over 100 years ago and are talking about this. And anyway, it seems, I guess the point

23:10

I'm trying to make is that it does seem like whatever battles are existing, whether they're on a right -left fault line or another fault line, it's like we're swimming within the framework of these guys, these

23:22

German philosophers. We don't step outside of modernity. It's like these competing modern ideologies that start with the same premises.

23:31

And to break free, in my mind, would require a complete destruction of that whole project.

23:36

We'd have to just reject the whole thing. And there would have to be some really stalwart

23:41

Christians who are going to come in with a view that Christ is

23:48

Lord, he's King. The Bible is the word of God. Revelation is not just possible.

23:54

No, it's real. This is the truth. It's kind of like early church times, dialogue with trifle or against heresies.

24:04

I mean, we need guys who can argue like that, who come in. I just haven't, I don't know what that looks like in 2025.

24:10

I don't know if I've seen it or not. I mean, I think you're tracking what I'm saying. Where do you see this happening?

24:16

I know you mentioned some positive things, but we would need like a landslide.

24:23

You know what I mean? Yeah, these things also take time, right?

24:28

Like I can see and I developed the history of where it began in Germany and they came over.

24:34

And let me just finish that part from the Axis powers, Germany and Italy of Marxism, who all came to the

24:42

US and got their stuff mediated in the US and realized in the cultural

24:47

Marxist zeitgeist, the West was not prepped for a frontal revolution like Russia or China was.

24:53

They realized that the West was sort of like a moat and castle. Every time you'd lob shells at it, it would just regenerate like a living cell.

25:01

And so what they saw was that they needed to instead go into the soft tissue of culture, i .e.

25:07

cultural Marxism, into academia, media, and ecclesia. This was Gramsci.

25:13

This was neo -Marxism. And that's what they've done. And once you esconce yourself to a sufficient degree there in the soft tissue, then the political society, which is made up of law enforcement, military and government, those will just topple in the

25:29

West. So that's what they've been at, is this long march through the institutions. This has been their methodical approach from way back when.

25:37

You can track it. You can see it in their writings. It's not conspiratorial at all. And you can see when it happened and how the second revolution took over the first.

25:49

My contention, though, is that this Friday night, I'm giving a talk in Chicago on the third revolution and the scandal of the evangelical mind.

26:00

30 years ago, Mark Knoll, the historian, wrote a book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which is to say there isn't much of an evangelical mind, which is really sad because we don't have to go back to the first century.

26:12

We go for the first 1900 years. This last century has been about anti -intellectualism and Christianity.

26:19

It's been that we have excommunicated the head of Christ and embraced only the heart and the hands of Christ.

26:24

If we want to be like Jesus, be more like Jesus and love God with your mind. Jesus commanded. Or 1

26:30

Peter 3, 15 and 16 says, be prepared to give an answer with a reason for the hope that's in you and do it with gentleness and respect.

26:39

So we have the head, the heart and the hands there. This is consistently biblical Christianity for thousands of years.

26:46

It's why the universities came from the Christian West and why in America, why we started it.

26:53

We begin with mind and not matter. And the Jesus movement didn't just start hospitals in the fourth century, but Jesus is called the

27:01

Logos of God in John 1 in the Greek. He is the logic of God. Anarchy and how logos in the beginning was the logic and the logic was with God and was

27:10

God and became flesh and dwelt among us. It's not an accident that the hospitals have Christian names on them or that the universities, despite their website scrubbing their history,

27:20

I can go there. I've been to all of the colonial schools and you can see their buildings and the scripture verses etched into their buildings.

27:28

It's still there. That stuff didn't come out of Islam, that stuff. The golden years had some, but nothing compared to what we did.

27:37

It didn't come out of the enlightenment. And so what people like Peter Boghossian or Dawkins or even

27:42

James Lindsay and others who get the woke left and are fighting against it alongside us and libertarians is in the sense that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

27:54

We chose Stalin to get rid of Hitler, kept one eye open at night though, and knew we'd have to deal with him later.

28:00

That's what's going on right now. This is a, this, this new ideology is foreign to America.

28:06

It's not Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. It is

28:11

Marxist, postmodern Marxist, because within a decade or two after the

28:16

Axis powers came over here, the Marxist Axis powers, postmodernism began with Foucault and Derrida and deconstructionism and Lyotard and those people.

28:29

If postmodernism is like skepticism of metanarrative and it's, you know, relativism, you would expect these people to be all across the spectrum, ethically and politically, right?

28:41

From right to left or left to right. No, they're all for the first two generations, hard new leftist.

28:49

Why? They were also all members of the French Communist Party. So all of those people called that the

28:56

Vichy government version, they all came over to our top universities and that's what's been happening.

29:01

And they sowed their wild seeds primarily in the humanities this time rather than the hard sciences.

29:07

And the way that they jumped tracks and took over engineering and mathematics and medicine was through DEI or what

29:15

I would say, DIE programs that sound good using postmodern language to deceive.

29:23

That's what they did. And that's the same way that then they flew out into the corporate world, into the churches where the

29:30

Christians have this sympathetic heart. We believe in original sin. We believe

29:36

God hates oppression. God is love. Love is love. What would Jesus do? And we're off to the races.

29:42

It's because Christians in the scandal of the evangelical mind have not fixed that. It's no wonder they've taken over even

29:50

Christian seminaries and things like that. We need to, and this is part of the solution to the third revolution, we need to once again be consistent 1900 -year

30:03

Christians and redeem, revive, resurrect, follow

30:08

Jesus, love God with our mind. We need to be able to show people that Christianity is good for the world.

30:13

It's not oppressive or wicked or evil, that it's reasonable and that it's true. So there's the revival of Christian thought, apologetics, my ministry and many others.

30:24

But we also need to think strategically about the most influential institution shaping civilization.

30:32

And right now it's not the American church. They're being shaped by that other institution. We need to be doing both.

30:39

And so I call to pastors to stop focusing on skinny jeans and fog machines and instead focus again on Christian thought, on scripture, on equipping the saints the way that we were all taught to through the

30:54

Bible, not through sociology and culture. And then to parents, I know it's hard out there, but these children are your children and this is your frontline responsibility.

31:05

And looking at the statistics, there is no way you are going to preserve them going into that if they're not equipped.

31:11

They can be adequately equipped. In high school, we have a high school ministry as well. And we have booklets for parents and pastors that are very busy that are all written by some of the top

31:22

PhDs in the country as Christians from Wayne Grudem and Church State to Steve Meyer and Intelligent Design to William Lane Craig.

31:32

One of his doctoral dissertations, we have these guys write these 25 page booklets, bring it down to the 11th grade reading level, digital and printable so that from everything from race, class, sex, gender, ethnicity, to the problem of evil science, reliability of scripture and so forth.

31:50

People aren't going to read a 500 page book. Fine. Read a 25 pager. Do something. Do something.

31:56

Do something. There is no other silver bullet to this. If you love your child, you need to equip your child.

32:04

You have no idea what we're sending them into. And you can't. Moreover, you can't avoid these universities, the ideology coming down from them.

32:14

Not everyone's going to be called to go in there like we are. But everyone must prepare for the ideology, the poison coming out of it, because you cannot escape it.

32:23

This is why I have such a hard time with Rod Dreher. I call him Rod Dreher. I love his writings. But he's a defeatist.

32:30

Not everyone can get dual citizenship in Hungary and try to flee the country. The culture war is over.

32:36

We lost. And so we should go down underneath the bunkers and let the nuclear fall out, do what it does.

32:42

And then we'll train our cell groups and come back and restart civilization. No, no, no, no.

32:49

If you want to change the culture, change the universities. And be equipping our own people at the same time like we always should have been doing.

32:58

That's good. I want to get practical, because we do have parents listening and younger—I'm assuming we have some younger teenagers as well who are resonating with what you're saying.

33:07

In my study of just fundamentalism and evangelicalism, it seems to me what happened was the fundamentalists were more—they did not want to go along with the cultural flow, which is the mainline denominations' alliance with the progressive hegemony.

33:25

They wanted to curry favor with them. And so they went along and started changing their doctrine to accommodate. And the fundamentalists said, no, hard stop.

33:33

They started some Bible schools, but they were ministry -focused. And they did not really get into—at least on an institutional level—they weren't encouraging getting involved in the humanities, the arts, and these other influential sectors.

33:46

And then new evangelicals come along, and they say, well, we need basically—we've lost all this ground. Society doesn't even respect pastors anymore.

33:53

We're going to get that respect back by training up world leaders at places like Fuller, which is not liberal, but we're going to create institutions and organizations that will eventually get us our place back.

34:08

And so we're going to—like, if you look at Fuller's curriculum, I'm sure you probably know some of this history, but they expand into social justice, into psychology, and all these other fields.

34:18

But what happens in the process, obviously, is it does the same thing to the evangelicals who go that direction that it did to the mainlines.

34:25

They start compromising to get their place at the table, and they're on the same track.

34:31

It's just slower in getting there. And it seems like the working -class, more kind of low -church evangelicals have been able to retain their doctrine, partially because they didn't accept what the university was telling them.

34:46

They were just sort of separate from it. And that's sort of the—that biblical worldview stat, I would wonder whether or not most of the people that have a biblical worldview are the people that are in that group, that they're probably good, hardworking people, but they're carpenters, and they're working -class.

35:04

They're not going to be at a university teaching ethics. So how do you get really—because the only way

35:10

I see this happening is, how do you get the children that are growing up in these stable environments in middle America somewhere to then go into a secular university where it's a minefield of not just philosophy, but you have temptation when it comes to sexual immorality?

35:28

I think that's where a lot of these guys honestly get tripped up. It's drugs. It's alcohol. It's sexual morality. And then they want a justification for what they just did, right?

35:36

So you have that. Do they—so there's a few options I see. Do they go to Liberty University?

35:41

And I love Liberty. I was actually just in Lynchburg yesterday. I love Liberty. I went there myself. But is that the solution?

35:47

Because I know that's not a bulletproof solution. People come out of there that are atheists, right?

35:53

Do they go into a secular, influential university? Do they try to get into Harvard, but then they just find the

35:59

Ratio Christi club? What do you see as the best approach for a parent listening to this who wants to get involved?

36:08

First of all, they don't need to go to college. Our culture has said they need to. And now what you brought up earlier,

36:15

I've heard also Trump at least threatening, talking about Harvard's $52 billion endowment.

36:22

That is more than half the country's in the world's GDP individually. That's just their endowment, right?

36:28

Taking some of that and putting it into trade schools. So they don't need to go to the university.

36:35

And I'm not saying we should take one for the team and sacrifice your kids ill -prepared and send them to the university.

36:43

The university was there to shape one's calling, right? You don't need to go to the university for your calling.

36:49

You need to go to the university if it has the training there to help you with your calling.

36:55

And that's what's called a vocation. Vocos, Latin, calling, not a job or occupation. The New Testament knows nothing about occupation and jobs anyway.

37:04

It's all vocation. It's calling, right? So it's higher education. You don't need to go that route.

37:10

But if you do, sure, Liberty is friendly. Their president endorsed my book.

37:16

Okay. Yeah, and I'm speaking at Liberty next semester. And I'm also speaking at Princeton next semester.

37:21

We have a chapter at Princeton as well. We have launched these PhD student ministries at the higher level as well at places like Rutgers, UCLA, Texas A &M,

37:32

Oxford, and many more. And in the next 40 or 50 years, we're hoping to have those chapters training missional professors on every

37:41

R1 campus, high -level research campus in the country. It's a long -term goal, but we're following the cultural

37:47

Marxist in this, a long march through the institutions. The parents don't have to do that.

37:53

They don't have to sacrifice their kids. They have to equip their kids. If they fail to do so, they are failing as parents.

38:01

Don't feel like you need to do it on your own. Use ministries like Rosh Yochristi. We have a high school division,

38:07

Rosh Yochristi College Prep that works in tandem with churches and Christian schools and homeschools.

38:12

We have a press division with those 25 pagers. Don't feel like you have to do it yourself.

38:18

If your kid likes the skinny jeans and fog machines on Wednesday night, that's fine. Make sure that's not his diet.

38:25

You can't live well on cotton candy. You still need your broccoli. You need your vegetables. It's our job as parents to cultivate their palate with broccoli, not cotton candy, even if we want to give them cotton candy here and there.

38:39

But those that are called, yes, we do need to think strategically about the most influential institution shaping civilization because out of it come our doctors, our lawyers, our media, which are highly corrupt,

38:52

K -12 educators. My daughter is an elementary ed major right now at Purdue University, and I see

39:00

Purdue. That's science engineering. That's more of a conservative school compared to IU that's humanities or Berkeley or whatever.

39:09

But I see the curriculum that they're feeding her. And Paulo Freire, who is a

39:16

Brazilian Marxist and the fourth most cited author in all the social sciences in the humanities, his views are the views of the

39:25

College of Education. If we don't take back the College of Education, or at least, and I'm not saying torches and pitchforks take back,

39:34

I'm talking salt and light. We may have to storm the beaches of Normandy, Jesus -style revolution.

39:42

If we do not become salt and light and reclaim these colleges of education, even the

39:48

Christians who want to go on and get credentialed, not just at a Bob Jones University, which is going to make you have two or three jobs available, and those are only like church jobs.

40:01

You can get more. I have friends teaching at Bob Jones. But credibility matters.

40:07

Public cash value credibility matters. I went to a secular university to get a

40:12

PhD, having already had several master's degrees, because I was thinking about it like the

40:17

Trojan horse entering the city of Troy. They've tried to broach the walls for a decade unsuccessfully.

40:24

Finally, they figured out a stealth plan from the inside out. I thought if I could get a PhD from a secular university,

40:30

I could get back into the classroom and defend the cause of Christ, advance Christian thought, do well in my discipline.

40:37

I'm not saying replace Physics 101 or Ethics 101 with John 316 every day and every way, but integrate faith and reason, faith and life, faith and vocation, teach your field and do well at it.

40:48

But if enough of us do this, we can reclaim the universities over time.

40:55

Is it hard? Yeah, I lost my first PhD. I had to go on for a second one.

41:01

Normandy required casualties of war. But if you're not willing to do that, if we as the church are not willing to do that, and right now we're partnering with the

41:13

Peter Boghossians and Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk's and Donald Trump's, right? And they're helping keep the lights on for us.

41:21

Elon Musk keeps Twitter and keeps free speech. Donald Trump pushes back on DEI and shines the spotlight on.

41:28

We need to take this as a window of opportunity right now in these kind of political alliances and look at a 40 or 50 year game plan.

41:38

So there's two kinds of answers here. Some want to go re -infiltrate and think strategically about re -institutional recapture.

41:49

It has been done multiple times, so it can be done again. We need to do this. Not everyone's called to go into the universities, but there is not a soul in America who is going to escape the scalpel of the poisonous ideologies coming down from the universities.

42:05

We can't keep, John, we can't keep putting chlorine downstream, right, in politics or something like that.

42:13

Politics comes from culture, it comes from education, and the apex is at the university right now.

42:19

And so my final chapter in the book is MAGA and the morning after. Can America be made great again if America is not first made good again?

42:28

And I say, no, we can't think the Enlightenment thinkers are going to build for us what the

42:36

Jesus movement built. The Jesus revolution built the

42:41

West, not the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment values, many of them, they say they helped build it.

42:47

They got those same values, even including equality, that the French Revolution liked to boast about, and the

42:54

Marxists liked to boast about. That comes from the scriptures, Genesis 1, 26 and 27.

43:01

We have the life of the mind, the metaphysical resources on bottom to support this big edifice.

43:08

The other worldviews just don't. And this is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Richard Dawkins' protege, his little

43:16

Padawan, his mentee, when she converted first from Islam to new atheism and may have been one of the five new atheists at the top in these

43:26

Reason Conferences, she had a conversion to Christianity. And I think so far it's a true conversion.

43:32

And she first saw the meaning and the morality in life that was not given by scientific naturalism.

43:41

That's certainly not given by Islamicism, and it's not given by cultural Marxism. And she said that Christianity also has the resources to fight back against these hostilities in these culture wars that are subversive, not just to biblical

43:57

Christianity, but to human flourishing. She gets it. We need more of her.

44:04

We need more Riley Gaines that are gonna be bold, that are not gonna be silent and speak out on these issues.

44:11

We're not trying to solve this politically. We're not trying to politically reclaim

44:17

America in that way. Politics is downstream. We need to start doing something that is upstream.

44:25

DL Moody said, don't polish the brass on a sinking ship. In other words, the Titanic's going down, just get the souls off.

44:33

We've paid an exorbitant price for that kind of defeatist thinking. We pulled out of all the influential areas of high culture, thinking only about soul -saving, soul -saving.

44:44

Harvest Crusade after Harvest Crusade after Harvest Crusade. Being in Indiana, I know the farming metaphor.

44:50

You sow a seed, you reap a harvest. If you're not sowing seeds, you won't have a harvest.

45:00

Yeah, so what I'm hearing from you is get involved in cultural things and the things that affect you.

45:08

I'm assuming that would also include politics. And also as you're doing that, bring the light of the gospel with you into these places.

45:17

And so pursue academic excellence. These are the things that I know in my life,

45:23

I feel like as a fallen human being and now a redeemed human being, but still someone who has sin and so forth.

45:30

I've struggled, but this has been my goal, I suppose. I've tried to do this wherever I've been.

45:38

And not being afraid of new ideas, I think is also, in my mind, part of this.

45:43

Like you're gonna have to go into arenas where everyone might disagree with you and be the one person that says, actually, abortion's murder.

45:52

And I've been that guy many times in college. Quick aside,

45:58

I'm just curious how many times you've heard this kind of thing. But I remember in my ethics, in undergrad, my ethics class, well,

46:06

I actually sort of, I had a speech class and I had, it was ethics, but they called it social problems. Anyway, both classes,

46:13

I had Marxist professors. One of them very much an avowed

46:18

Marxist, just told everyone, Marx was right, I'm a Marxist. And told every, homosexuality is great and abortion is, all that stuff.

46:29

And I remember there's this one time I took a standing class. I don't, I'm trying to remember what the issue was, but it might've been abortion or something.

46:35

And I had some Christians afterward come up to me and say, hey, basically look to the left, look to the right,

46:43

I'm a Christian too. I just wanna say, thank you for saying something. And I remember my response, I looked at him and I said, where were you?

46:52

Where were you, man? You're sitting here with me. And that sort of colored, I think the rest of my life, those experiences of seeing

46:59

Christians who might come to a Bible study or maybe not, but some of them did. But then in class, it's like, where were you, man?

47:06

When that happened. And I'm hearing from you, don't be absent from the battlefield.

47:13

Say something. If she marks you down in your grade, take the marking down. You did that for Jesus, right?

47:19

So, yeah. And there are other people coming behind us in our wake. You know, I went legal at IU, Indiana University.

47:27

I usually assigned all and only atheist texts because I felt like I had to, to cover myself, right?

47:33

My atheist counterparts don't assign Christian texts, but I assigned the classical texts in the field.

47:41

But I had this one time where a former pastor who turned gay and he was in my class.

47:47

He charged me with creating a suicidal environment simply because I gave an education rather than indoctrination.

47:53

The textbook was anti -Christian, anti -Bible, pro -gay and so forth. I'm giving a biomedical argument from harm, a natural law argument to just showcase how another side might offer an explanation of this situation.

48:08

And I ended up having to go with Alliance Defending Freedom, have them take my case pro bono.

48:14

And the two students in my class who were atheists defended me, took the flash drive that they had recorded my lectures on.

48:22

And they went to the university and said, if you punish him without ever listening to his lectures, and we have them right here, we are leaving this university because it is not a free thinking university.

48:32

We disagree with his views about God and sexuality, but he did nothing wrong. And this is wrong what you're doing.

48:39

So brethren, I'm on trial for the resurrection, right? I had two atheist students come to my defense. I had

48:44

Alliance Defending Freedom. I had this experience in undergrad. And as a president of this organization, we have had 150 legal inquiries last

48:55

August, no less than a dozen in August. I'm expecting that to happen in the next week or two.

49:01

Wow. At any one time, we've got three to six cases going on. We've got four federal victories, five appellate court victories, two

49:08

SCOTUS assists. And in December, we gave Joe Biden a going away present with winning after a four -year litigation with the

49:16

Department of Education. So we have a theology of litigation with our partners like Alliance Defending Freedom.

49:23

That's not our modus operandi, but we are gonna follow Paul and fight for our

49:30

Roman citizenship. Why? Because it gives us an opportunity to proclaim the gospel. You can't proclaim the gospel if you're kicked off the institution.

49:39

If the universities want your kids and they want your money, but they don't want your ideas.

49:45

No, they're going to get our ideas. And so we are happy to give these university officials continuing education we've never lost because we've got this little piece of parchment called the

49:54

US Constitution that our founders were very bright in putting down there. It's not bulletproof, but it is durable.

50:01

And so, yeah, we do need to be in the fight. John the Baptist took on Herod. Jesus had some things to say.

50:09

Paul appealed to the governing authorities and so forth. We don't mix the gospel with politics, but we also don't divorce ethics from politics because ethics is grounded in God and politics is nothing more than ethics for the public good.

50:27

So we're not trying to confuse the gospel and politics or the gospel and culture.

50:36

We want to change lives. And so Roscio Christie's vision is thoughtful Christianity, right?

50:43

The heart and the mind, thoughtful Christianity, transforming lives on campus, changing culture tomorrow.

50:49

Chuck Colson used to say that change lives, change cultures, not quite. As the scholar of sociology at University of Virginia has written in his book to change the culture, he said that thesis is not quite right.

51:07

It might begin with individuals. It might begin at the grassroots level. But if you're ever going to change cultures, this is how it always happens.

51:16

You have got to have the ideas or the movement baptized by the elite.

51:22

And this is why recapturing the institutions is non -negotiable.

51:28

These aren't going away and they are the biggest affront to the gospel. The gospel is never heard in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of the cultural milieu and ideologies behind it.

51:39

So that when Paul would go to the Jews, he would bring the Bible. They believed in the

51:45

Bible. It was an epistemic authority. Prove that Jesus is the Messiah. This is what

51:50

Campus Crusade has done. These people believed in the Bible. They believed in God, Judeo -ethic.

51:56

Campus Crusade started in the 50s. And for spiritual laws, they reap, reap, reap a harvest.

52:02

The seed was already sown. We don't exist in that world anymore. That land does not have that seeding anymore.

52:10

So Paul showed us another model, Mars Hill, where he said he came with the

52:15

Bible here and here, but he came with them with reason because that comes from God too.

52:23

And he brought a biblically informed worldview and he saw fruit there as well.

52:29

So I become all things to all people that by all means I might save some. To the Jew, I become a Jew. To the Greek, I become a

52:35

Greek. So we have two ears and one mouth so that we listen more. If someone needs a hug, we give them a hug.

52:41

If they need an argument, we're the ministry on campus to give them an argument. Not everybody or in every encounter needs

52:46

Christian apologetics, but some do. And if you're going to send your kids off to the secular baptismal font without being prepared, you're paying for the apostasy of your own child.

52:59

There are ways to do this and there are organizations to fund that can help you do this. One final thing, John, if I may, prayer.

53:07

Look, all the great revolutions, Christian revolutions, revivals have been associated with college campuses from Azusa to Asbury to Yale and to Wittenberg, Martin Luther, Dr.

53:22

Martin Luther and the Reformation. They're almost always connected to young people and the college campus.

53:31

Why would today be any different? If we want revival, if we want reformation, if we want revolution,

53:36

Jesus style, we can't solve that by MAGA. MAGA can help, but you're not going to make

53:42

America great again unless America first becomes good again, and that requires a Jesus revolution.

53:48

And it means all hands on deck. Yeah, well, thank you, Dr. Corey Miller.

53:53

If you want to find out more about the book, ratio .link forward slash PMA, or you can also go to Amazon.

54:01

It's called Progressive Miseducation of America. And if you want to find out more about Ratio Christi, it's ratiochristi .org.