Willy Rice on Social Justice

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My name is John Harris. We're going to talk today a little bit more about Willie Rice, who is the pastor nominated to be president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention. I was pretty clear. I said the first time we've talked about Willie Rice, this will be the third video, so the first time

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I said, I think he's coming from the more progressive side. I think the progressives are rallying around him. Now it's possible the closer we get to the convention, maybe another more progressive candidate will emerge.

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I don't think Willie Rice thinks of himself as a progressive, but I think for the context in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, if you understand SBC politics to some extent, and the way that this needle is being moved, this kind of in the name of moderation, this third way that is being pushed to conservative churches,

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I think you'd have to conclude Willie Rice is definitely in that vein, in that stream. I want to be fair as much as I possibly can, and I want to show you some more clips.

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So far we've talked about the, really it's a woke panel, but the panel he did on race and the gospel.

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And then we did yesterday, hopefully this is fresh in everyone's mind, and I hope people go watch this.

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If they're listening to me in this podcast, please go watch the one that I put out yesterday on Willie Rice and whether or not he's against critical race theory, because the talk that he gave on this,

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I think was woefully inadequate and really showed that he, well,

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I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I already did the podcast. Just go watch it. Just go watch it. It's a third way to really summarize.

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I think it's a third way that, so he can say he's against it. He's not in favor of critical race theory.

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He denounced critical race theory, but at the same time, leave room open for those in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. And he mentioned specifically Dottie Lewis, who are promoting critical race theory.

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And they might not be doing it by name, but they're promoting the concepts attached to it. What do you mean,

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John? What concepts? Well, some of the things you're going to see in the clip that I'm about to play for you. White privilege, systemic racism, and race being a normative thing, race or standpoint epistemology.

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And you have to humble yourself and listen to these perspectives because you have blinders in your eyes if you're white, you don't have the same social location, you can't understand things the same way, you're in need of that.

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These are the kinds of things that are being pushed, and in this context today, the last few years, from people who are influenced by critical race theory.

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That's just, these are the times in which we live. And so I would say that what's going on right now in the

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Southern Baptist Convention is an attempt to distance oneself from the label critical race theory, and it's not just Southern Baptist, it's evangelicals in general, to say that that's wrong, we shouldn't have that, but at the same time to promote many of the ideas that stream from it and come up with this middle way.

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And I see that very much, I think, in Willie Rice, disparities must mean injustice somewhere, right?

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Those kinds of things. And so I want to play for you some more stuff from Willie Rice. Willie Rice is so, what he said on this topic, in my opinion, is so confusing, because it's so all over the place, and there's inherent contradictions in so much of what he said, that it's very hard to figure out, well, what does he actually believe?

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I read for you the blog that he wrote, he doesn't write political blogs much, but he did after the January 6th incident in 2021, and man was it lopsided, you know, saying

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I'm not going to bash the Trump supporters, but then the rest of the blog was pretty much doing just that.

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And people who would idolize the nation and tie politics too close to religion, and Trumpism is dead, and repeating that kind of CNN mantra narrative.

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And really the core of it, and I made the argument in the first video I did about Willie Rice, I said the core of this is in the first paragraph.

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He talks about the fact that he is concerned that church will have a bad reputation in the world.

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And if that's motivating you, this is the argument I want to make, and what

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I want to reveal really. The argument's already kind of set in stone in my mind, but this is what I want to reveal.

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I think it's a given that in the coming days, you need someone who is, has a, just as solid as can be, like more solid than any other president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention maybe. Just a heart of grace, but of grit.

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Of willing to be mocked, if need be, willing to suffer.

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Shouldn't surprise us as Christians, Christ suffered. Christ was actually portrayed as a rebel against, you know, we have no king but Caesar, against the authorities.

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Willing to be portrayed that way, willing to make the hard calls, willing to navigate what's going to come in the next few years, which is going to be, and already is, a minefield of threats from the government, from the narratives coming in from the greater society.

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We're going to need someone with a backbone made of steel, okay? That's a given in my mind.

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I think Votie Bauckham is like that, by the way. I think that that kind of a guy is what you need in this position.

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It's not normal times, right? In times of peace, you may have a different leader than times of war.

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This is a time of war. So my whole thing is, do you want really

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Willie Rice, who's Mr. Third Way, Mr. Moderate, Mr. just, can't we all just get along and let's portray some kind of, in my opinion, fake unity?

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And I honestly think in a biblical, not just my opinion, I think biblically, it's a fake unity that he's, in some ways, arguing for.

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Do you want that kind of a guy in the position of President of the Southern Baptist Convention with the challenges that lie ahead?

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That's the question. And that's what I want people to think about. If you get caught up in, well, is Willie Rice pro or anti -CRT, you're not going to come up with a very definitive answer, because he's all over the place on stuff.

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That's part of the problem. So, I think we need to, I need to show you kind of what, a little bit of review.

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And then I'm going to talk about some new material, new sermons that I've listened to from Willie Rice, trying to pin down where is he at, what does he believe?

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And I think the conclusion, I'm giving it away at the beginning, is going to be, this is not the kind of guy you want in leadership.

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You need a bugle that makes a firm, clear sound. You don't need mixed sounds coming, where the army doesn't know what they're doing, because retreat and charge are both being played at the same time.

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All right? So, let's start with this. I want to play for you some, these are just clips from the

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Woke montage, the Woke discussion, I should say, about race and the gospel, race, social justice, the gospel.

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Willie Rice put this on, this is in 2020, June, and it's a few minutes, and if you want to get the link for it, go to the info section here.

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We're calling this, and I love the title of this, Help Me Understand. That's the title,

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Help Me Understand. And the subtitle is an authentic conversation about race, social justice, and the gospel.

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From the very founding of our nation, this has been a problem.

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That bitter root was planted in the ground from the beginning, and we're still struggling with it.

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We're still battling the fruit of that. I think sometimes, you know, growing up in a comfortable, white setting, there is the tendency maybe for some, not all, but some to say, isn't racism, isn't that a past?

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We read about that. We read about that. But now, hey, you know, LeBron James has plenty of money.

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We had a black president. Isn't everything fine now? Does that really still exist?

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And what I'm hearing from so many of my black brothers is, more than you know.

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I've asked him to share this story. That was this white guy that walks up, you know, has a nice, seemingly friendly smile and says, wow, that's a lot of stuff you got there.

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Where'd you get that from? I get home, and I'm watching on the cable news the mother of this young lady in Louisville that had been shot eight times, getting up out of her sleep.

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And just listening to that mother speak, it reminded me of so many mothers that have talked about what has happened to their black children.

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And I'm feeling the pain, because I can so not just empathize, sympathize with her.

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Because I've lost a relative to police brutality myself. Anyway, the phone rings, and the gentleman says, are you

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John Matthews? Do you have anyone that can verify, anyone that can give us the chain of custody for those items as to how you got them?

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Because I'm black. I was born suspicious. And after 63 years,

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I'm still suspicious. And until I die, unless something radically changes in America, I will be suspicious.

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If you'd been carrying that in your truck, you and I aren't going to get stopped. We're not getting stopped.

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Yeah. That idea of privilege started to come, and this white privilege, that's one of the questions

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I have for my black friends on the stage right now, is how do we do better?

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Help me understand. And how can I convey that to my white friends who say, no, that doesn't exist?

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Shane, you've talked a lot. You and I have talked about some of those definitions, those terms, and again, how people use the same words, but they're not meaning the same thing, race, prejudice, discrimination.

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Talk a little bit about what those words mean to you. It is in the very fabric of how America was created.

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It's woven into it. It's in the foundation that was laid. And as we start to pull on that thread of trying to remove racism, or we start to pull out the rocks of racism, we are going to start to unravel what people know as America.

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And that's going to scare the crap out of people. That is where we've been called as the church to step in. These different things that have been structurally set up, whether it's gerrymandering, whether it's redlining, whether it's incarceration, minimum sentencing, all of those different things, they might have been pulled out of law and no longer codified, but the structure has set up a culture that continues to perpetuate itself when people don't speak up about it.

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When people hear the word racist, they always feel like, well, I don't say those things. I don't do those things, so I'm not racist.

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We're not talking about that. I know that the majority of people, especially those who claim faith, don't do that.

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The issue is when you see all these things, when you hear his story, if we were to share the different things that have happened while driving while black, there are structures in there that are designed to subjugate one race for the benefit of another.

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And I hear you saying that can be happening then unconsciously. Most definitely. In other words, people who are better than that and want to be better than that, nevertheless, we're in a world in which that very real pronounced brokenness manifests itself.

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Zelvis, you speak into that just from your experience. Again, for those who say, is this real?

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Is this a real thing? And helping, because I've heard many, many in the white community say over the last several days, help me, title of our panel, help me understand, is this a real thing?

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It is a very real thing. And let me say this, if you go back to the image of Officer Chauvin with his knee on the neck of George Floyd, it's one of the most grotesque things you'll ever see outside of Emmett Till.

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But when you look at that image, all you have to do is look at it as a black person in America. And what you hear is all that needs to be said from that image.

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What that image says to me when I see that, and many of my black brothers and sisters agree with me on this, is that this is the condition that we pulled you out of West Africa from.

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This is the condition that you were in when you arrived on the shores of America. This is the condition that you've been in, that your ancestors were in, in slavery.

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This is what y 'all were in in Jim Crow. This is what y 'all were in even after the civil rights, and this is where you will continue to be, under my knee.

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Here's a sad reality. Is there racism? Yes. And it's all over America, but here's the sad reality.

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It's in the church. And I believe that's why you want this dialogue tonight. Jason, you're another leader here.

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Like Jeff, you have a black son that you've adopted. Your family's raising, and a beautiful family.

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You have to think about this as you raise your son. Jeff said, hey, I didn't think about these issues until.

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Is that kind of your story? How do you think about it? I've spent the last two weeks talking to colleagues, as many people as I know and can respect that have a different experience and perspective than I do.

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Kevin, what do white people need to know in a different culture that they sometimes don't know?

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And there's blind spots on this whole idea of race that, as a black man, you say,

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I wish you understood this. I got pulled over, literally just driving down the street. I had a doctor with me, we just got done doing a talk, and driving the speed limit, and then

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I got pulled over, and this is a white doctor, then I get pulled over, and I'm like, why'd you pull me over? And he said, well, because I couldn't read your tag.

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I'm like, why would you read my tag? You were on the side of the road. I was driving by the speed limit. Well, you know,

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I just, my system couldn't pull it up. I'm like, okay. And then the doctor broke his iPad, he's like, sir, what happened to your iPad?

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He's like, I dropped it. He's like, okay, is everything okay? Yes. Okay, you can go now. If there's, if this was

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Jeff in the car, you think he would have pulled him over? No. It just looks strange. There's a black male and a white male together. Something must be going on there.

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Every thinking, compassionate, moral person was bothered by that.

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Bothered is not even a strong enough word. You know, outraged by it. But it doesn't impact everyone exactly the same way, because it, so what do you, you know, and Shane, you can speak to this, what, when, when, when people who are in the white community are seeing the anger being expressed, and they think that's inappropriate, why are you so angry?

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How do you, how do you help them understand that anger? Yeah, so we talked about this prior to going live.

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But Robin D 'Angelo has written a book called White Fragility. And basically what it means is there's this natural tension that happens in the dialogue between black people and white people when it concerns racism.

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And what it says is that it's such a sensitive topic that can be offensive, that there is a fragile nature to the white culture when they get in dialogue with this.

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I think it was Charlie Dates, the pastor, who said, we don't have an anthropology problem.

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We have a theology problem. And that's what Shane was getting at. At the heart of this is a failure of theology, is a failure to believe what

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God has said in His Word about the importance of every single person. Because in response to that story, the question was, well, who is my neighbor?

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And the story was the Good Samaritan, which is a profoundly racial story.

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Pentecost is the answer to Babel. Babel divided mankind. Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came and made one body in Christ.

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But it hasn't always been that way. And in our culture, in our world, the church hasn't, as someone has said, we have been as impacted and sometimes perpetuated racism.

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Why? I didn't realize this implicit bias that I had and this privilege that I had.

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And that comes from, in part, the systemic things. And so you look at the church, you look at our nation.

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And I know you are a great patriot, Jason. And yet our nation was founded on, essentially, we stole the land of people who were here and then we took free labor from East Africa to make ourselves rich.

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That's not stuff you see in our history textbooks. And unfortunately, many

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Christians use the Bible to justify their actions. And so when that's the reality that we're talking about, that's a hard thing for me to face as a white man.

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I'm not going to lie to you. You need to get out of the things that make us comfortable, the things that are convenient for us, and move to a place where we're saying,

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I want to know the other, help me understand. So in our worship service, we have different music.

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When people are preaching, they preach in a different style. We bring other people in because...

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And that's one thing I loved about the Brethren Church. There was no head pastor. There was a group of elders.

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But even within that, there were itinerant speakers who would come around. So you got a different flavor, different way of people interpreting the same scripture that someone just read.

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Someone just preached on last Sunday. Someone else came and preached on it again, but they did it in a different way. You saw the breadth of who God is.

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And you realize there's another perspective to this. Because if you've only seen it one way, what you see is your reality, perception's reality.

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Kingdom of God is much bigger. We're talking about the hope of the gospel. You're a pastor, newer church, so you've got dreams of what that church ought to be.

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How can our churches live out that gospel at unity, and how can we make a difference in the world?

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We've got to be honest and say, this is going to take some time. It's not going to be solved overnight. And we might not even see it in our lifetimes, but our kids may see it.

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It's worth developing disciples, and that's what ministries are about. Pastors are called to equip the saints for the work of ministry.

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So that's a process of discipleship. And so we have got to start this conversation in our homes, in our pulpits.

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We've got to encourage our fellow co -laborers in the ministry to also have this honest dialogue.

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You cannot legislate hate. You just can't do it. Now, are there some policy reforms that need to happen?

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Should we be having some national discussions in our senate, in our house, and the president? Yes, absolutely.

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Those things should be happening. But hate can't be legislated. And so again, back to what you're saying, the gospel discipleship, and being intentional in modeling to the world, the

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Bible says this, the world will know that you belong to me by the way you love one another. And so if we can demonstrate this love that transcends color, transcends socioeconomic status, all of that stuff and junk that makes no sense in the body of Christ, if we can transcend that, then the world will begin to wonder, how can the church love each other like that?

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I wonder what's the power behind that. I'm glad you asked that question. It's the gospel because the gospel is still the power of God unto salvation for those who believe.

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That's the solution. This is not an end. It's just a beginning. You have conversations. It may be a lunch.

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It may be a coffee. It may be with the neighbors Kevin spoke about. Let this be an encouragement to you to do what you can do, where you can do it.

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Okay, so now you've seen this particular panel. And if you hadn't seen my first video on this, and you can see that the narrative, that the

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CRT, the BLM narrative is really playing out.

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It's white privilege, systemic racism, standpoint epistemology, mixing the pursuit of, we got to fight for justice with the gospel in interesting ways, very much the social justice stuff streaming in from the left and evangelicalism.

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That's what you're getting in that particular interview. Now, some may say, well, maybe he's changed his opinion.

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Maybe he corrected that. Maybe it's the people on the panel that were more radical. It's not Willie Rice. Of course, Willie Rice participated in this, nodded along, encouraged it.

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And some of those statements you heard were from him. But let's just say he had a bad day. He had some woke guys come, which

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I don't think that gets anyone off the hook. But what would be the response you'd think? Willie Rice would have to go apologize.

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He'd have to go talk to the church. He'd have to retract. He'd have to say that was a mistake. This and this and this were taught.

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This is not biblical. We don't believe that. And I'm sorry, right? That would be the normal thing.

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Now, as far as I can tell, and I've looked, a tape like that doesn't exist. I haven't seen any video of that.

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I haven't heard any audio of that. I haven't seen anything written about it. Instead, what we see is this.

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One month later. So this is also, this is in 2020. One month, and I'll show you on the website, just so people can see here.

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You have, this is the Help Me Understand an Authentic Conversation About Race, Social Justice, and the Gospel from June 3rd, 2020.

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Now, you have one month later, Willie Rice preaches again.

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And the name of the sermon is Liberty and Justice for All. This is from July 5th, 2020.

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So this is not long afterward, just a little more than a month afterward. And this would be a good opportunity, right?

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If he's gonna speak about justice to maybe correct, hey, this happened a month ago and we don't agree.

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But instead, what you find is what I'm about to play for you. So let's talk about this.

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Let me play some of these clips. I've taken this sermon that's like, I think almost 50 minutes and reduced it down to like 16.

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And giving you relevant, I wanna give you relevant clips here. And I just wanna talk about it with you, go through it because I think it's awfully confusing for a lot of people.

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And so I wanna try to make clear as much as I can. And I wanna say one more thing before I get started.

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Some may wanna know, especially if you're new to this program, well, why not just do an interview with Willie Rice? We'll get what he believes.

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And the issue has been for those who are new to this battle in the Southern Baptist, especially. This is something that you need to, if you have someone on your program, if you do an interview, if you reach out, there's two things that'll happen because I've tried this kind of thing.

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Number one, you'll get the private answer that's supposed to assure you that they're not as bad as the public clips say they are, suggest they are.

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That doesn't help. This has to be, the stuff that is said publicly needs to be, I think, corrected publicly for the purpose of the sheep.

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The sheep who are hearing this need to know their shepherd cares about them and is willing to refute lies.

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So I don't do that. Number one, that's number one. Number two is if we just did an interview and, hey, this is what really

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Willie Rice thinks, I don't know the guy. I don't know to what extent is, can

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I trust that? Can I not trust that? If, here's the thing, if he's going, if he doesn't believe in what he proclaimed in 2020 and 2021, as we saw on the video yesterday, then he would have to make a statement to the people that he preached it to or that he allowed to hear it and gave a platform to it on the stage of his church.

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He'd have to talk to them about it publicly. They're the ones that would be misled mostly by this.

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Now, of course, this is getting a wider audience because he's running for the Southern Baptist Convention presidency, but this program wouldn't be the place to do it.

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It really wouldn't. It would be, this would be wrong to do it on this program. So it would have to be there first. And that would be the evidence that Willie Rice has repented of those things and he's retracted and he doesn't believe that, okay?

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So I don't think it's worth it to try to, like, you know, what if he came on this show? Hypothetically, what if Willie Rice did, and not that he'd even agree to it, but he, you know, yeah,

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I'll do an interview and I ask him the questions and he gives good answers. Well, really it's not people in this audience that he needs to give those answers to.

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It's the people in his congregation. And so I think, and I don't want to put too much political pressure on this.

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I already am in making these videos, but there's an insane amount of political pressure in the SBC on both sides, really, honestly.

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And someone making a decision under, in political pressure, so you can say one thing to one audience, one thing to another audience,

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I just wanna know what the person believes. I just wanna know what the truth is. And I think you're like that. That's why this audience,

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I think, is gonna be the audience that, and it already is, changing things. You care about the truth. You're not just willing to believe a good story someone says in the moment.

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You wanna say, well, hey, you know, are you gonna correct what you said before? You repented that. You're gonna show some humility. That's very important for someone who's gonna be a leader, especially to test whether they care about the people they're leading, okay?

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So that's, I wanted to just get that out of the way for people who might ask that. That's kind of an old question for people listening, but I know there's a lot of new listeners.

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So that's the reason we're doing it this way. We're examining the public record. What has Willie Rice said when there wasn't as much political pressure applied?

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There's certainly some in his congregation, but there wasn't as much. And so I want you to notice something first before we play the clip.

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You can see he has an American flag lapel pin. This is right, this is the day after July 4th,

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I believe. That's at least the date on the website. And so this is, you know, Patriotic Sunday.

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For those who don't know, in Southern Baptist churches, that's traditionally, now I think a lot of Southern Baptist churches aren't doing this now, but traditionally, you know, since post -World

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War II, I guess, that's maybe post -World War I, there's been an emphasis during that particular week on patriotism and all that, right?

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So Willie Rice, in that tradition, has an American flag pin. So, you know, I don't want you to think that this guy is totally, thoroughly, in every way, woke.

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I'm gonna try to give you the best paradigm I know to explain this, but like a lot of Southern Baptist guys, it could be that there's a lot of political stuff going on, and the convictions on this might not be as firm as we would want.

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It may be that, well, you know, we're gonna kind of try to veer in the middle somewhere and kind of take from this, take from that, and I think you're gonna see that in the clip

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I'm gonna play. And this is very concerning to me because we need someone who's got a steel of spine on these things for what lies ahead.

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So let's play the clip. May the 25th, it wasn't all that long ago, and you saw it, you've seen the video, a black man died in police custody,

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George Floyd, in Minneapolis. The video is etched in our memory, a man with a knee on his neck, begging to breathe, crying for his mother, and then growing limp and unconscious.

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It has resulted in weeks of unrest and protest. In some places, those protests have given way to violence, causing even more deaths.

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And in some cases, those protests have become a platform for political extremism, calling for a complete reshaping of American culture and government, if not a complete repudiation of it.

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This eruption has occurred along an old fault line in America life, the issue of race.

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It is an issue so difficult, so potentially divisive, that many have just steered clear of the conversation.

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One wrong word, one poorly articulated sentiment can bring an avalanche of criticism from this side or that, and sometimes from both sides at once.

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In many cases, and through too much of our history, churches like ours, churches that may be predominantly white have either not seen the problem or made a conscious effort to avoid the issue.

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Or we've just been too fearful to say, thus saith the Lord. It's easier to talk about someone else's sins than your own.

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It's easier to talk about the speck in your brother's eye than the beam in your own. That is true enough, but it's not good enough.

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We know that at times we need to be corrected, and we must humble ourselves and ask, does the

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Lord have a word? And if he does, and we know he does, then we must be prepared for that word, which will sometimes correct us.

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It reproves us, as well as training and instructing us. And reproof is never pleasant.

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Correction is never easy, but it is necessary if we are to be conformed to the image of Christ.

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Okay, so let's stop right there. Let me summarize for you. We've played two minutes of this 15 -minute clip, series of clips.

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Willie Rice is saying, he connects what happened with George Floyd to the issue of race, and then he connects it to American history.

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Now, you're already seeing a framing issue, hopefully, in this, that it's never been proven that racism motivated

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Derek Chauvin, or what happened that day, with the other police who helped Derek Chauvin. That's just an assumption, and it's an assumption that streams from what?

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What ideology promotes this assumption that race is normative, racism is normative, that disparities mean racism, that if there's a power dynamic with police and minorities, that it must be racism?

30:53

What narrative promotes that? It's not Christianity. Christianity promotes actual justice, which means that there has to be actual evidence, witnesses, if you wanna, there really isn't even a category for hate crime in Christianity.

31:06

There's crimes. But let's, if you're gonna say that it's motivated by some kind of a hatred or something, you have to have evidence.

31:13

There isn't. There isn't evidence that that's what caused this. It's just an assumption. Now, I know there's, we've heard the narrative a million times, but Willie Rice buys into it at the beginning here.

31:22

I know that sounded really polished and everything, but that's essentially what he's saying, is that it's this old issue of race that's coming up, which, honestly, were those riots, all that happened there, was that really about race?

31:34

Or was that about something else? Was that about destroying the foundations of American values, culture, institutions?

31:48

You know, what was that really about? You know, I don't even know if I'd phrase it that way. It's not the issue of race.

31:54

Is race an issue? It's the issue of social justice. That was the issue.

32:01

And so Willie Rice then proceeds to say, Christians get it wrong.

32:06

Christians have gotten it wrong. Christians could still possibly be getting it wrong. And we need the correction of God's word on this issue.

32:13

And it's all connected. The issue of George Floyd, racism, history of America, church gets it wrong.

32:20

Today, some of us are getting it wrong. We need correction from the Bible. This is a problem in our church. That's what you're getting from the intro of this sermon.

32:28

This is a month after that woke panel you just watched. Parts of. So do I see a correction here?

32:35

Do I see, I see more of a double down. Let's keep going. A gospel movement, there is no answer.

32:43

Tony Evans recently said, the great black pastor, he said, we're in a medical pandemic.

32:51

At the same time, we're in a cultural pandemic. We're in a cultural pandemic though, because we are in a spiritual pandemic.

33:01

It is a gospel concern. How are we to live in such an age as followers of Christ?

33:08

What does the Lord have to say? Plenty. All right.

33:14

So this is further connected with the gospel. So it's not just Christian ethics.

33:20

It's not just the church goofed on an ethical thing. Apparently the church got the gospel wrong or failed to live out the gospel somehow.

33:28

So there's, I'm always uncomfortable when you start doing this, going down this path. The gospel's

33:34

Christ's work, it's not our work, but it elevates it to a level of seriousness, which goes beyond getting an ethical thing wrong.

33:43

I mean, this is like fundamental to who Christians are. We got something really bad wrong if we're failing to believe the gospel somehow or apply the gospel somehow, right?

33:53

So what verses is he gonna use? Now he uses a number of them. This is just representative, but it should be no surprise to you which ones he appeals to.

34:00

Micah 6 .8. Mankind, he has told each of you what is good and what it is the

34:09

Lord requires of you to act justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your

34:23

God. Let's pray. Father, as we read the words of the ancient prophet, as you corrected your people, then correct us now.

34:31

Some in the evening. All right, let's stop there. So this is like David Platt, let justice roll down like waters, right?

34:40

What the children of Israel were doing in Amos, it's just like what the

34:45

Christians today are doing today. The correction that the prophets gave is the same correction we need to hear today.

34:53

We're in the same level of idolatry, hypocrisy, failing to do justice, all of that, right?

35:00

So the church is, there's a problem in the church. You wouldn't say all these things if you didn't believe that. There's a problem in the church along the lines of racism somehow.

35:09

And Christians need to be corrected by the word of God. And in fact, it's so bad that it's causing them to have problems with the gospel itself, that they've lost their gospel witness, or they've lost part of the gospel or something along those lines.

35:22

So let's get into more detail here. What's the specific problem that that verse is supposed to correct?

35:28

Evangelical world are leery of discussing justice issues. Some claim any discussion about social justice is a compromise with left -wing ideologies, that it harkens back to the liberal social gospel movement of the early 20th century.

35:44

The problem with the old social gospel movement is that it was all social and no gospel.

35:51

Churches simply became political activist groups working for societal change, but they failed to give people what they needed most, the life -changing truth of how to be reconciled to God through Jesus.

36:04

All right, let's stop right there. He's wrong, okay? He's wrong about this historically. It wasn't, that's an oversimplification.

36:11

The social gospel movement actually was very similar to what we're undergoing now with the social justice movement. In fact, you will find, and if I had the time,

36:21

I'd pull them up. In fact, I think I have some of these quotations in the book, Christianity and Social Justice Religions in Conflict.

36:27

You can go get that on Amazon, you can go to Audible, you can go to my website, worldviewconversation .com and order it, and I'll give you a copy.

36:34

But essentially, the social gospel movement was just like the Galatian heresy, an attempt to wed the gospel with a social transformation of some kind and include that as part of gospel work, that there's this redemption that takes place in society as well,

36:53

Christians can work toward. So it's not like every advocate of the social gospel was, they stopped preaching salvation through Christ, salvation by faith in Christ.

37:03

And that's the way that it's cartoonized today. Like, oh, they all just rejected salvation by faith alone in Christ alone, and they adopted just this social gospel that applied those

37:15

Christians working to make society better. That's not true. These things kind of live side by side, and then one took over the other, because like the

37:24

Galatian heresy, you can't mix works with the gospel, and that's what they tried to do. And that's what the social justice activists are trying to do.

37:31

In fact, you're already getting hints of it almost in this particular video of Christians have failed to do something ethically.

37:38

And that means, well, as you know, they're not, they're failing to be a gospel people somehow. What does that mean?

37:43

That really has to be fleshed out and fine tuned or else you get in dangerous waters quick. And I'm gonna show you at the end of this, a clip from this very pulpit, where that is advocated, actual false teaching is advocated.

37:54

And so we'll keep going with this particular clip though. That's just not accurate.

38:00

The social gospel was a threat because it merged this societal transformation where Christians were supposed to do with the gospel of grace.

38:09

And that's why Christians, you know, so easily bought into it. It sounded really good. It sounds just like today, the social justice move sounds really good.

38:16

You know, you're not saying anything against salvation by faith. You're not saying that you're against the doctrines or the confessions of the church or any of that.

38:24

You're just saying we gotta go help feed the poor more or something like that, right? That sounds really good. But when you include it as part of the gospel, not so good.

38:32

And so Willie Rice is, I've heard this so many times, it buys into this, well, that's the problem with the social gospel.

38:39

So the assumption is, I guess, as long as you still have salvation by grace alone through faith alone, and you can add in this element of doing works to help society be better in some gospel way, that's not wrong.

38:55

That's not wrong. The only thing that's wrong is denying the individual salvation, right?

39:02

As they'll call it sometimes. And so this goes back to even like the 60s and 70s. Tom Skinner said this kind of stuff.

39:11

And it's something that it might sound nitpicky, but it's something that is important to make sure that we understand that the gospel can't be combined with works of any kind on man's part.

39:23

It's solely a work of Christ, all right? The whole thing. 1619 to 1865, there was legalized slavery in America.

39:36

For at least 346 years, racism was reflected in the laws and the culture of our country.

39:48

And even though civil rights legislation began to shift the change in the 1960s, that doesn't mean it automatically changed hearts.

39:59

Now look, we ought to celebrate the progress that has been made and progress has been made.

40:05

But if you're wondering why there's still such a problem, it's because we had 350 years of legalized racism where black people were treated as property and their rights were denied.

40:25

And we've had 55 years trying to fix it. The average black family in America today has 60 % of the income of the average white family, but only 10 % of the household wealth.

40:42

That has to do with generations. The number one source, for instance, of intergenerational wealth is home ownership.

40:51

Yet in the 1930s, the federal housing system instituted a coding practice that is today called redlining, where they would only issue housing loans in certain areas.

41:04

They were defined by red lines. Red lines were drawn to identify the areas where blacks were allowed to live.

41:13

After World War II, most of the suburban homes were only open to whites.

41:20

In the 1950s, for example, 40 % of new housing in Minneapolis was illegal for blacks to buy.

41:29

In the 1950s, realtor codes forbade selling houses in white neighborhoods to African Americans.

41:37

If you helped a black family find a home in a white neighborhood, you could lose your real estate license.

41:45

The Federal Housing Association, in effect, subsidized suburban housing developments that were for whites only.

41:56

The GI Bill subsidized mortgages, but left out more than a million black veterans.

42:02

In New York and New Jersey, of the 67 ,000 mortgages that were granted, less than 100 were for blacks.

42:10

In 1970, only 20 % of black fathers had access to a car, which was important, because as suburbs were built, the jobs followed the money, and they left the inner cities.

42:22

If you didn't have access to a job or a car, you didn't have access to a job. In 1970, 70 % of African American men had good blue -collar jobs.

42:33

By 1987, only 28 % did. And then when you add to that a drug epidemic that affected poor communities, a sexual revolution that decoupled sex.

42:50

I'm gonna stop right there for a moment. This might sound familiar to some of you. The reason it sounds familiar to you is because this is the pretty much exact sequence that Phil Vischer goes over in his video,

43:03

Race in America. Now, can I prove it 100 %? No, but where do you think

43:09

Willie Rice got all that information? He's citing the exact statistics in the exact order that Phil Vischer does in his video,

43:16

Race in America. And I just so happen to have responded to Phil Vischer's video in Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict.

43:23

So let's jump in the middle here. And I talk about a bunch of things that Phil Vischer gets wrong, and so it's hard to know kind of exactly where to start, and I don't wanna spend the whole video on this, but we can start here.

43:37

Vischer incorrectly states that, actually, let's skip ahead, because Willie Rice kind of jumps in the middle of Vischer's whole thing.

43:46

So when it comes to disparities in homeownership, Vischer overlooks the historical correlation between income, education, and homeownership.

43:54

He also fails to mention how the FHA, underwriting manuals, guidelines, and racial restrictive covenants apply to more than just black people.

44:02

And why is that important, John? Well, because you don't see these same disparities emerging today with other groups that had the same exact barriers.

44:12

In addition, Vischer completely ignores laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and lending, as well as studies within the last 30 years that show racial discrimination does not prevent minorities from obtaining loans.

44:23

Vischer's oversimplifications cause him to make greater errors in evaluating the criminal justice system.

44:29

He insinuates that white people's fear of black people created disparities in policing and cites a poll known to be compromised, which falsely alleges that the majority of Americans blamed black people for the crime in 1968.

44:40

However, he overlooks the fact that many urban black people requested additional law enforcement themselves. Vischer also points to higher incarceration rates as evidence that harsher penalties for drug -related crimes, especially for crack cocaine violations, singled out black people.

44:54

Yet again, he fails to mention that most of the Congressional Black Caucus supported these harsher measures. Penalties for possessing crystal meth, which is associated with white people, were the same as the penalties for possessing crack cocaine until 2010, at which point they became even more severe.

45:10

And I go through more on incarceration or at least violent crime and the disparities there, disparities in education and driving.

45:21

And I take to task that poll that he cites about black people in 1970.

45:29

I think he said it was that didn't have access to jobs and all that kind of stuff.

45:37

So anyway, if you wanna know more, Christian and social justice, religions and conflict, I'm not stating it outright.

45:44

I'm not saying I know for sure, but it really sounds awfully a lot like the Phil Vischer Race in America video.

45:50

And it sounds like he didn't actually do his homework on this, that he just repeated what Phil Vischer was saying and maybe looked at some of those stats, but he didn't look at the other side of this.

45:59

So he says all that. Now, what's the dangerous thing about this? All he's doing is he's citing disparities.

46:06

He's connecting these disparities to discrimination and saying that this is caused by discrimination.

46:12

And then he's connecting the discrimination to the church needs to be corrected. These disparities, how in the world could you escape the logic from social justice that the church is somehow now in part responsible for these disparities?

46:26

How? So wouldn't we bear responsibility if that's the case? We cause this, right?

46:31

As Christians, I mean, reparations, right? Or something like that. I mean, he can slide off into that so easily.

46:37

And so he mixes that though. This is where it gets confusing to people with this.

46:43

Check this out. From responsibility and fidelity to the family. And then you added misguided government policies that tried to correct problems they had themselves created that only made the problems worse.

46:58

What you see is a disproportionate impact upon poor communities, specifically black communities.

47:06

Now, why do I tell you all this? I'm reminded of what a black pastor, Clifford Loritz said when he was speaking at a largely white church pastored by well -known author,

47:18

Chip Ingram. Some of you know Chip Ingram. And in Chip Ingram's church, he gave a message. I heard it.

47:23

It was an incredible message. And he said a line that I never forgot. So here was this black pastor, and he went through a number of some of the stuff

47:31

I just shared with you. And then he said to the largely white congregation, he said this, it's not your fault.

47:39

He said, it's not your fault. You didn't cause this. He said, but it is your problem.

47:48

It's our problem. Racism can be difficult to define. The word is today overused in Michigan.

47:55

Let's stop right there. It's as clear as mud. Making the whole case that Christians need correction, that this is on level 10, because it's somehow a failure to appreciate the gospel fully in some way.

48:06

And there's also the language of the prophets. I didn't even show you all of it. Correcting Israel for idolatry and injustice and the way they treated others.

48:15

And that this is what the church needs to be corrected by in the here and now today. So this is the whole point of the sermon.

48:21

And then, hey, it's not your fault, but it's your problem. Where are these lines? If it's our problem, then what does that mean?

48:30

How does that differ from it being in part the fault of the church somehow? Because the argument he's weaving, I mean, that's the conclusion you draw.

48:38

These disparities, the church did this somehow. But then at the end, it's, well, it's not your fault.

48:45

And he also mentions that the federal government, great society programs, he doesn't call it that, but that's what he's talking about, contributed to this somehow and had a disproportionate effect on black communities.

48:56

And so this is, I think, the thing that would make conservatives like, oh, at least he said that. At least he kind of bashed the great society stuff without naming names or calling it that.

49:07

And so there seems to be a mixture here of, you know, he, and I've actually,

49:13

I've warned about this. I think I've even done it on this podcast. So like, look, if your only thing is like, hey, the result, the reason that we have the problems we have today with crime in the inner city and some of these disparities, if your reason is, well, it's just the great society programs, it's just welfare programs.

49:28

And if we, you know, and that created the fatherlessness, encouraged fatherlessness, you know, I'm not saying that doesn't contribute in some way, but if that's, if you hang your hat on that, so that you can just blame the

49:39

Democrats and it's all the Democrats. And I'm saying very clearly, Democrat policies contribute to this stuff. I'm not saying it doesn't, hear me clearly on that.

49:46

But if that's all you got, then I think the social justice warriors can easily put that into their, if they want, they could easily use that as, you know, and even these kinds of programs disproportionately affected black people.

49:58

Now, the reason they won't do that most of the time is because of this, they want more of those programs.

50:04

That's the point, they want more government. So if they can say, well, the government's trying to solve this disproportionately affected certain minority communities, then it would undercut their whole call for more government action.

50:16

And that's why they won't really do it. But, you know, I've made the case before, this could easily be put in that category.

50:22

And it's not, that can't be the only factor either. That could be a very large part of it.

50:27

That could certainly be a contributing factor. At the end of the day for the Christian, it's sin. It's sin.

50:34

And it's not a problem to say that certain regions or certain areas where conditions might be a certain way or certain people groups, certain cultures in the way that cultures, you know, think about things and what's been passed down, it's not a surprise that there would be perhaps certain sins that would be more common.

50:57

In fact, I hear that from friends of mine in all kinds of different cultures. You know, I'm sorry,

51:02

I'm German. That's why I was so angry. Or well, usually that's like Irish or something. Or I'm sorry,

51:08

I'm whatever ethnicity, that's why. Well, you know, they're not saying that that causes sin. They're just saying that there's certain sins that have become more acceptable in certain cultures.

51:18

And that's true. And we can see in our own culture, there's now sexual sins that would have been unacceptable 50 years ago are now very acceptable compared 50 years ago to now.

51:29

So all I'm saying is this is a more complicated, I think, issue than even some of the conservatives wanna make it out to be.

51:39

Like, if you just blame it all on, that was just the great society causes. I mean, that certainly didn't help. And I'm glad Willie Rice said this, that he mentioned that.

51:49

But what's not happening in this? What's not happening? Well, you know, why is there crime? Why does

51:54

James say about this? Why are there problems among you and fights and quarrels?

52:01

Well, is it not your flesh? Is it not you want and you can't have to obtain?

52:06

So you covet, you steal. I mean, these are the reasons, the ultimate reasons, the spiritual reasons that these things happen.

52:13

And so, okay, so I don't wanna beat that horse, but it'd be nice if there was more talk about that, that sin is the real problem here, that there's sin out there and people need

52:28

Christ, need to be converted, their hearts need to be converted. Husbands need to then love their wives in response to the love

52:34

Christ has given them. And that's not a work for salvation. That's not part of the gospel. That's just a part of Christian living and practicing

52:41

Christian ethics before God as part of discipleship to train people in that, right? All right, let's keep going with this.

52:49

I would say that the narrative so far, not good, but there's a few things he's thrown, I think, to political conservatives that might pacify or they might think, oh, at least he said that.

52:58

And I think we're gonna see more of that as we continue. And you gotta figure out, what does that mean? Does that mean

53:03

Willie Rice transcends these political categories? Does that mean that Willie Rice is trying to appeal to both sides?

53:10

What does Willie Rice actually believe? Because there's gonna be things that come out that you can't hold them at the same time.

53:17

Either one's true or the other's true. It's politicized and weaponized, which does not help serious people understand the sin and repent of it, nor does it help a society identify injustice and fix it.

53:30

As I've noted, this is a human problem. It is a global problem. It's bigger than race. It's bigger than one country.

53:36

It has to do with ethnicities and nationalities. One tribe wars against another. One people group subjugates another.

53:42

Slavery was common in the Roman Empire. It was written about in the Bible. It was practiced in Africa. And in some form, it has been practiced in almost every era of human history, including our own, where today some estimates are that as many as 20 million people are still engaged in human trafficking, largely for sexual reasons.

54:04

Look, whenever we act contrary to the character of God in treating other people, it is unjust.

54:14

And when that injustice is defended on grounds of racial superiority, where you believe one race of people is inherently more superior than another, you have racism at work.

54:26

And the tragic but undeniable fact is that racism has impacted our nation from its founding and Western civilization since before that.

54:35

We need to recognize racism for the sin it is. Call it out where it lingers still and work for a more just society in all matters, including matters of race.

54:46

This is just more confusing because given the narrative he's already woven here, the church is complicit.

54:53

These disparities are part of racism that still exists. And then you're not really responsible, but it's your problem, which doesn't really seem to make a lot of sense.

55:04

And then he gets to this point he just made here, which is that you gotta confront racism.

55:10

And racism is this, and he defines it as, it's this belief that one ethnic group is superior to another ethnic group, and that's what you gotta confront.

55:18

But that's not what he's really been talking about. He's been talking about disparities that exist. He's been talking about how he thinks that this is related to historical feelings or laws and policies and a culture that promoted the thinking that one race or ethnicity was superior to another.

55:44

But then to bring it into the present and to say, well, you just gotta confront this. This is the problem, right?

55:50

Because the whole thing is liberty and justice for all. The whole sermon is that there's a problem in the church.

55:58

That's why we gotta address this. So if that's the root problem, if the root issue is that there's some kind of belief that one ethnicity is superior, and he doesn't really define out what that all means, but if one ethnicity is superior to another in worth,

56:15

I'm assuming that's what he means by this, then where does that exist in his church? That's what I'd like to know.

56:21

How is this a big problem in Willie Rice's church? This goes back to the

56:26

Matt Hall thing of like, oh, I'm a racist, I benefit from a system. Hold on, like, no, you're not.

56:32

What makes you a racist? What makes you hating other people? And you see this kind of, you could totally take it this way.

56:41

This is the assumption behind a lot of this. This is a problem here. It's so huge, we gotta preach on it, and it's affecting the gospel, and we gotta use the language of the prophets against it, and what is it?

56:54

What is it? Where's the beef? Well, it's thinking that one ethnicity is superior to another in worth.

56:59

Okay, who believes that here, right? So the assumption that it's so prevalent, like that would be what

57:06

I'd expect a critical race theorist to say. There's racism all going on here, we gotta confront it. We gotta, well, where?

57:13

Well, of course, it's everywhere. Can't you see it in the disparities? Can't you see it? It's the culture that's been passed down.

57:22

That's kind of what really Willie Rice is riffing off of here, and that's the spirit in which this is given.

57:30

It makes really no sense, and there's an internal contradiction, and you can sense the tension in all this, like you're not responsible, but it's your problem, but there's a pervasive issue here because I'm preaching about it, and it's systemic, but then actually it's not.

57:50

It's this attitude that people have internally, and like, what a mess.

57:57

Look, people may mean different things when they talk about social justice, I get that, but we should be very clear by what we mean when we talk about biblical justice.

58:06

Here's what we mean. We mean all people are made in the image of God, every race.

58:12

There is no race, no ethnicity, that by virtue of skin color is inherently superior to another.

58:21

There are ideas and beliefs that are superior to other ideas and beliefs, and by such some cultures have advanced well beyond others, but to see advancement as inherently racial or ethnic is racism.

58:37

All right, let's stop right there. So he's talking about scientific racism. He's talking about genetic determinism. That's what he's talking about.

58:42

He's not talking about civilizationism. He's not talking about even people during the age of exploration that would have thought, well, this society, this culture, and they would have said race, this race, and that's what they meant by it was this people group, is they're not as technologically advanced, perhaps not as advanced when it comes to the way civil society runs.

59:07

They may have things like cannibalism and polygamy and other things. That kind of an attitude that he's saying, that's not what

59:15

I'm talking about. I'm talking about the genetic determinism, the Darwin -type stuff, the thinking that one race reducing everything down to what's determinative about them is their genetics, and that's what causes them to be either morally inferior or superior, and so if that's what he's talking about, and if that's the problem he's trying to confront, then where is that in the church?

59:40

Where? In the Southern Baptist, how is this such a big issue out there, right?

59:47

He's crusading against it, but the categories that are just smashing into each other, it makes it so confusing.

59:59

So what exactly is racism to you? If that's what you're talking about, then why are you preaching a sermon on it?

01:00:05

There's probably one or two dudes maybe in your church that go talk to him. You're acting like this is this horrible thing that's just so pervasive, and the church needs to hear this prophetic word.

01:00:16

If that's what the prophetic word is about, then it doesn't seem to conform to reality, unless Willie Rice is at a super racist church, and if he is, truly in the classical sense,

01:00:28

I guess, I don't know what to call this now, the sense in which we used to think racism 20 years ago was, you hate someone because they're from a different ethnicity or something like that.

01:00:37

If that's a huge problem in Willie Rice's church, then under his leadership, how did it become that way? And do you want him as president of the

01:00:44

Southern Baptist Convention? And it does injustice, both to the ideas that are at stake and to the people who have been impacted for better or worse by the adoption or rejection of those ideas.

01:00:57

God made us all one human race. We should -

01:01:02

Okay, who disagrees with any of this? Honestly, if there's people in that church that are really like, you know, oh man,

01:01:08

I was so convicted by that sermon. I didn't know that. I really thought certain races were so superior, and I didn't realize we were all part of one human race and one in Adam and all.

01:01:17

Like, man, dude, you got some big problems if that's the case. But I've never met anyone.

01:01:23

I think maybe one person in my life. I met this skinhead guy in Michigan once.

01:01:29

Not on purpose, obviously. He just came up to me once and started talking to me and started saying things that I was like, whoa.

01:01:36

And it was at, it was at a conservative meeting, politically conservative. I don't think anyone else in that room would have felt the way this guy did.

01:01:43

But at first I was like, this guy's gotta be, there's a problem here somewhere. I think he's the only guy in my life. There's one other guy

01:01:49

I can think of that I met that maybe veered towards some of this thinking a little bit. But like, this is not, this is anything but common.

01:01:58

And so to like, you know, get up on your, get really adamant that we're gonna be prophetic here and like, there is only one race.

01:02:08

And who are you shouting to? Who are the people that are guilty of this?

01:02:14

Work for justice in our own lives, in our church, in our community, and in our country.

01:02:21

Step across the line and build relationships. Listen to others and confront racism where it still exists.

01:02:31

It is wrong. It is sinful to believe one group of people are superior to any other.

01:02:39

So we got from the beginning, the George Floyd shooting related to racism. It's a problem in America. Christians somehow complicit.

01:02:46

This comes forward to today and is represented in disparities. That's somehow racism. But also this is actually what racism is.

01:02:53

This belief that one group is superior to another. How can these, are these two definitions, the ones implied, one stated, and then they merge together somehow?

01:03:03

What does it mean to fight racism? What does it mean to do this anti -racist work he wants Christians to do? Is it to fight those disparities?

01:03:10

Or I mean, you would think that listening to the first half of the sermon, or is it just to find that skinhead that might live in your town maybe, and then go confront them and find the, you know,

01:03:21

I don't even know how big that group is. It's like, what does that mean? Infiltrate the

01:03:26

Klan, go to a Klan meeting and try to convert them? Like, what is he talking about here? Revolutions seldom make things better.

01:03:35

The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, to name just two in fairly recent history, showed what happened when angry revolutionaries seized control, often in the name of justice.

01:03:47

They replaced one form of tyranny with something much worse. The revolutionaries devour anyone who stands in their way, and in the end, they end up devouring themselves, but not before reigns of terror make a mockery of justice.

01:04:01

And those revolutions, French, Russian, they have one thing in common. They were rooted in godless philosophies.

01:04:09

The American Revolution we celebrate this weekend was fundamentally different.

01:04:16

The men who revolted against the tyrannies of Europe's monarchies weren't just trying to replace one set of rulers for another.

01:04:25

They were motivated by ideals and principles. Those ideals that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights created a government that has brought more freedom, more prosperity, more justice to more people than any in the history of humanity.

01:04:51

Okay, we're gonna stop right here for just one moment. He's gonna go on a whole thing against the statue removal, which is interesting.

01:04:57

This is, remember, this is patriotic time. This is July 5th. He's got his American flag lapel.

01:05:04

And this is what I think a lot of conservatives would hear and be like, yeah, you know, amen. This is, you know,

01:05:09

America is really not, there's such a disjointedness between the beginning of his sermon and then the middle of the sermon where he starts down this path, where this is

01:05:18

America's problem that's pernicious. It's affects Western civilization. It's shown us up in the disparities today.

01:05:24

It's this huge problem. And then, but America is also this beacon of freedom and our founding fathers who were fighting for all men being made equal.

01:05:32

Yeah, right, and then enslaving them and segregation, but right, I mean, during a time when they were enslaved, right, when certain people were, and not even just black people, by the way.

01:05:42

You know, this is, I don't even, there's so many things I wanna say now.

01:05:47

My mind's just being so flooded. I'm gonna show myself here. So here's, this is what

01:05:54

I hear from, I'm gonna just call it the neoconservative side today. The way that they defend the founding generation, because they really wanna defend

01:06:01

America and the founding generation, is to say, well, they're ideals. And you hear Willie Rice say that. It's their ideals. That's what makes them moral.

01:06:07

That's what makes them heroes. That's what makes them great. It's the ideals. It's not the actions as much, you know, the actions that supported the ideals are important, but it's the ideals that are emphasized.

01:06:19

The ideals that what? That equality, that ideal. This is a total neoconservative way of looking at the founding of the country.

01:06:27

There is, it actually, if someone wants to do some digging, it really shows up in the debate between Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford.

01:06:35

And there are different conceptions of what the founding actually was. And I would be with Mel Bradford and not Harry Jaffa.

01:06:40

Harry Jaffa's influence has, you could probably see it today in places most notably, and I'm not saying

01:06:47

I disagree with anything, everything people say from this institute, but like the Claremont Institute. And it's really taken over conservatism.

01:06:54

It's the Dinesh D'Souza way of viewing this too. And it doesn't work. It won't work over time.

01:06:59

And it's a half -baked historical narrative, unfortunately. It makes us feel good. It retains the, sort of, the mythos of America being this really exceptional, great place, but it doesn't root it completely in the right things.

01:07:13

So you have men who are going to break off, secede from Great Britain.

01:07:19

They wouldn't have seen themselves as rebels. They weren't rebelling. They would have seen the King of England, and most notably, Parliament, as the rebels.

01:07:25

And the King didn't protect them from Parliament and what Parliament was doing. And taxes were certainly part of that. There was other threats they faced.

01:07:31

They thought that maybe Canada would become Roman Catholic. They didn't want a state church. They were always afraid of that. And then they had the issue of, read the

01:07:38

Declaration of Independence. Their own legislatures being abolished, being legislators being jailed, called to inconvenient places at inconvenient times, disrespected, and the root of it all comes down to,

01:07:50

King George has made war on us. We didn't start this war. King George has made war on us. And so we are going to acknowledge what's already there.

01:07:58

Have you ever had a friend, and the friend doesn't treat you the way you ought to be treated? And eventually, it just winds up, you're realizing this friend's not treating you like a friend anymore.

01:08:07

And it's not that you've broken off the relationship, but you're just acknowledging, well, I guess we're not friends. And you're not the one who started that.

01:08:14

It's your friend, but they're not treating you like a friend. So you just call a spade a spade. And that's really a good way to look at,

01:08:20

I think, in John's simplified, very short understanding here of the American War for Independence, which is really what it is.

01:08:26

It wasn't a revolution. It was a war for independence. And the line in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal, endowed by the creator with certain alienable rights among these life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

01:08:37

That's all you ever hear quoted. Read the rest of the document. Read the specifics of what Thomas Jefferson was getting into, and the complaints they had against Great Britain.

01:08:48

It's that they weren't being treated like citizens of Great Britain. We're not being treated like Englishmen.

01:08:53

What kind of equality was Thomas Jefferson talking about there? He couldn't have been talking about slaves and their desire to be equal.

01:09:02

There was a spirit of that at the time, in the Enlightenment, but that's in the document, in the context, right?

01:09:07

We believe we should interpret the Bible this way. We should interpret historical documents this way. He's saying that King George is making it impossible for the own citizens of the

01:09:16

British Empire to engage in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as property, engage in owning the property, living at peace, and that this is being denied to them.

01:09:27

And this is part of who they are as members of Britain. And so here's the itemized list.

01:09:35

I don't remember how many in the Declaration of Independence, but here's all the different reasons that prove that this is how the king's treating us.

01:09:42

And now we are going to call a spade a spade, acknowledge that we are not, in fact, being protected, which is the basic rule of government, by our king or our parliament, and we are going to set out on our own.

01:09:55

And it wasn't rebellion because there were committees of correspondence, local governments, that were actually acting as the lesser magistrates here.

01:10:03

They were obeying their local government against the, if you want to call it the national government.

01:10:11

That's, there's more that could be said, but that's what's going on there. So you have a bunch of people that, by today's standards, of course, white supremacists, chauvinists, in favor of slavery, most of them, and if not in favor of it,

01:10:26

I shouldn't say most of them in favor, but most of them tolerant of slavery or owning slaves. And those who wouldn't have been as tolerant certainly had some level of tolerance where they were able to form an alliance with other places and people who were slave owners.

01:10:42

So, I mean, George Washington writes the command, I forget the commander's name, the British commander who leaves

01:10:48

New York and says, hey, return those slaves. In the region I live in, in New York, in the Hudson Valley, that was one of the issues that motivated people in this area to side against the

01:10:56

British because the British wanted to emancipate the slaves. I'm sorry, this is also part of history. And I know just because 1619

01:11:02

Project says some of this stuff doesn't mean it's not true. They get a lot of stuff wrong, but there's a few things that they get right.

01:11:08

And the neoconservative line is to try to protect the founders by saying, well, their ideals somehow give them an absolution from these other things.

01:11:18

And then it reads into these ideals an egalitarianism of some kind and say, America hasn't always lived up to them, but we're getting there, or we've gotten there.

01:11:27

Says no. The left says we have about 10 other things that need to happen before America lives up to this ideal.

01:11:35

The right just today, the neoconservative right just wants to stop the revolution at a certain point and conserve a previous stage of the revolution from a later stage of the revolution.

01:11:47

And so I'm not in that vein. I'm more of a paleoconservative. I don't believe this is a right way to frame it, but this is a very popular way to do it today.

01:11:54

And I realize many in the audience, probably this is what you're used to. And it's what I was used to for many years as well.

01:12:00

And I think that's what really, Willie Rice is really tapping into this. So what this allows someone to do, the convenience of it is they can retain a patriotism.

01:12:08

And also they can kind of converge these narratives in a way, retain this patriotism and mark out the heroes that were good because of their ideals.

01:12:17

Say America is a great place, greatest country, but at the same time, you know, there's this, there's these problems in America and that there's this, it's characterized by oppression and hundreds of years of oppression, which you also heard

01:12:32

Willie Rice talk about. And that's just them not living up to their ideals. That's all that is. Which the founders would have been like, what?

01:12:38

It has no historical, like that dog don't hunt, but that's, there's so much tension in it.

01:12:45

And the difference between the social justice warriors and the neoconservatives, one of them would be the social justice warriors see it as part and parcel to America.

01:12:52

It's in their DNA. America was intended to be a place of oppression and colonization, and that's just what

01:12:57

America is. And it's still that way. And neoconservatives would say, no, because of these ideals, America was never intended to be that way.

01:13:04

And we're just, over the years, the arch of history has bent towards freedom. And now we are becoming more and more living up to those ideals and breaking away, emancipating ourselves from the shackles of the

01:13:19

European colonialism that we were formed in. So that's kind of like the difference between the two in a way, but they both agree on equality being this driving force and that, or it should be a driving force.

01:13:32

And so it makes it hard when you have a guy like Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln, right?

01:13:40

When you're like, okay, these guys own slaves. This guy was a total white supremacist. How in the world do you defend those guys?

01:13:47

Because the first part of Willie writes a sermon, these would have been the villains. The second part, well, no, but they had ideals, or at least we attribute to them ideals that would have overcame these bigotries, right?

01:13:57

So it really creates, it's clear as mud confusion. And like I said, we need a guy who's going to just stick with the

01:14:05

Bible. And if they're gonna delve into history, they really need to know what they're talking about, but they need to be able to apply biblical truth with a spine that's as stiff as steel.

01:14:16

And here's what the Bible says. And just, if you don't know something, by the way, it's fine to say,

01:14:22

I don't know, and not talk about it. And so Willie Rice, I think what's going on here, even though he wants to transcend political categories in like the sermon

01:14:30

I showed you from yesterday, and the church shouldn't be involved in politics really on a level that they were on January 6th or in being too close to Trump and all that.

01:14:40

He does want to like, it seems like want to make both sides happy politically. And I don't,

01:14:47

I can't like prove that 100%. I'm just trying to figure out what's the paradigm for this? Why be this unclear and engage in this amount of contradicting narratives, contradictory narratives?

01:14:59

Okay, so let's just keep going with this. He's gonna talk about the monuments and just keep in mind what

01:15:04

I just said. Being toppled, why? Because they need to be canceled too in the eyes of some, some persons are unworthy of honor.

01:15:12

Often this is because they own slaves at some point or made statements that are considered offensive.

01:15:18

So what is the answer of this newly enlightened mob? Tear them down. So down have come statues of some of America's giants,

01:15:27

Lincoln, Jefferson, this week, the New York Times even called for the statues of George Washington himself to be taken down.

01:15:34

One mob tore down the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. Ironic since he led the union forces that defeated the

01:15:42

Confederacy and freed the slaves. Why? Because Grant owned one slave in his life for less than a year.

01:15:50

He received that slave when a relative died and it was left to him as an inheritance. Within a year, he freed the slave.

01:15:59

Grant had other problems. He drank too much, but he won the Civil War. And for that, they built a statue to it.

01:16:07

All right, I want you, let's stop right here. Real, everything I just said, look at it play out. Hey, Grant had some flaws.

01:16:13

And by the way, there's, he's not, he's really painting Grant way too, putting such a halo around him, honestly, like way too positively.

01:16:22

Grant, look at, look up Grant's, look up anti -Semitism. You probably just Google anti -Semitism

01:16:27

Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was forced to free that slave.

01:16:32

If it wasn't like, this wasn't like Grant out of the goodness of his heart. Like, I don't believe in this. I'm gonna, no, Grant was forced into it.

01:16:39

And Grant, it's not just that he drank too much. It's that he expended the lives of men through basically war strategies that were just about overwhelming force.

01:16:53

And hey, I have more men than you. And there is sort of the way he viewed human life and the approval of what

01:17:00

General Sherman was doing. It was just an incredible, I'm just telling you, this guy is not the way that the neoconservatives are trying to make him today.

01:17:09

But the reason that there's a halo around Grant is because what did he do? Well, he was part of the effort that eventually freed the slaves.

01:17:15

That's the part of the mythology, the American mythology that's been adopted today. And, you know, he obviously, missing from this is, well, you know, what about statues to like Robert E.

01:17:25

Lee and Stonewall Jackson, right? Well, they don't. Even though Robert E. Lee was a man of character, even though he willfully freed his slaves, even though he was against slavery, even though he was a

01:17:38

Christian man of character, high character, even though Stonewall Jackson taught a black Sunday school class, there's still stained glass windows, or it's kind of like a shrine to Stonewall Jackson at a black church down in Roanoke, Virginia.

01:17:51

Even though Stonewall Jackson was totally for getting rid of slavery in a progressive way, as was

01:17:56

Robert E. Lee, these guys, you know, they're not mentioned, they're, why?

01:18:02

Because the issue is ideals. It's not character, it's not people, it's not who they were, it's ideals.

01:18:09

As long as you're for that ideal of equality, well, you know, all the things you did against equality make up, you know, it's

01:18:15

Abraham Lincoln, right? He freed the slaves. Therefore, all the white supremacist things he said, which were a lot, it's made up for.

01:18:21

Now, I'm not saying, I'm totally against ripping down statues of Grant and Lincoln and Washington and Jefferson and Robert E.

01:18:27

Lee and Stonewall Jackson, all these guys, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc. I'm totally against ripping down any of these statues.

01:18:33

In fact, go watch American Monument, the documentary, an hour and 50 minutes. I mean, I basically did a lot of work towards that to try to support the monuments.

01:18:41

It's probably one of the best things out on YouTube, if not the best, is to support monuments. And so I'm totally against that, but it's not, that's not the argument that we make in that documentary.

01:18:51

You should go check it out. We don't, we're not saying, well, because they all stood for equality. No, because the historical record doesn't bear that out.

01:18:59

That totally isn't the case. Grant would have been a racist by standards today.

01:19:06

But there's, we tell ourselves, and I'm saying we in the, I'm not saying in this audience.

01:19:12

I'm just saying we as an American society and the people who wanna be, to fight critical race theory, those who are on the anti -CRT side, many of us tell ourselves that the 1619

01:19:26

Project is all wrong because all these people believed in this ideal, in their abstract ideal, in their heads. They didn't really implement it consistently in their life.

01:19:34

They didn't really believe in it totally, but there was some kind of tip of the hat to it, some kind of something they did to help that.

01:19:43

And so Willie Rice is adopting this narrative at the end. And it's just, it's weird in my mind because the first half of this sounds like 1619

01:19:52

Project. The second half of it sounds like 1776 Project. And you're kind of like, well, which one is it?

01:19:57

Which one are we landing on? And I think maybe he's trying to find the commonality between the two as much as he possibly can.

01:20:05

But all it does is it creates this really muddled way of looking at this whole issue.

01:20:13

Others have called, even for the tearing down of statues to Lincoln. Lincoln, who freed the slaves.

01:20:21

He is of course considered one of the greatest political leaders in history. A man who rose from utter poverty, self -taught to lead a nation.

01:20:28

He spoke with profound eloquence and opposed the evil of slavery. He led our nation through its darkest time, signed the proclamation that freed the slaves, but in the eyes of certain leftist mobs, he too was unenlightened.

01:20:40

Newsflash, every single statue of a human being is a statue to a person who is imperfect.

01:20:49

I stand for the American flag. I stand for it, not because I believe our nation is perfect.

01:20:56

I know it is not. There are many things I grieve over. And if the truth be told, there are things I'm deeply ashamed of.

01:21:02

But I stand because I believe in what it represents. I stand because so many have given us so much.

01:21:11

I stand because it is worth defending. It is worth praying for. It is worth contending for.

01:21:17

And I stand opposed to those who would burn it to the ground. Yes, churches have failed and come up short.

01:21:25

But look at the scriptures and see what the church ought to be. People from all races and all backgrounds and all languages and all nations finding one home and one hope in Jesus.

01:21:35

And if we, listen, if we could live that out, our world would see a little bit of heaven right here on a broken earth.

01:21:44

Gospel renewal is our only hope. All right, let's stop there. I really do believe that Willie Rice, on some level, has a patriotic bone in his body.

01:21:54

That's a strong bone. He's got somewhere, he's gonna stand for that flag. He grieves him to see what these mobs are doing.

01:22:00

And he's against the radical elements of BLM, despite what you just saw in the beginning, despite what you saw at the first half of the sermon.

01:22:09

You have to ask yourself why does it seem like there's so much tension in this?

01:22:14

Why first half of the sermon different than the second half? What is he trying to accomplish in this?

01:22:20

He says at the end, he kind of gives that we have so far to go type thing. If we could only, we're not there yet.

01:22:26

If we could only get to this point where we could represent heaven on earth, which really shouldn't be what we're after. We should just faithfully obey the commands of Christ.

01:22:33

He hasn't commanded us to diversify our church. He's commanded us just to preach the gospel, make disciples. And whoever he has to bring and whoever he puts in our path, those are the people we talk to.

01:22:44

But he has to kind of, he's tipping the hat to all these different, the patriotic people over here.

01:22:50

And he's 100 % right about, by the way, what he said. I'm with him on that. I support the flag. And one of the reasons is because of it.

01:22:57

And he didn't go the abstract idealism thing. He said, it's the sacrifices, the men who died, flying that flag, that's what it represents to him.

01:23:07

And I'm totally with him on that. It's there, it's there in him, but then we're not there yet.

01:23:18

We got to do something, we got to confront the racism. And what is the racism? Well, it's systemic, it's disparities, but it's also, actually it's genetic determinism.

01:23:30

And it's so convoluted. America's characterized by this. No, actually

01:23:35

America's this. America, you know, America's complicated. There's a mixed, there's all sorts of things and it's a nation of sinners, right?

01:23:47

But America, the thing that makes America special to people, I think Willie Rice, I think him and I both, we would agree on this.

01:23:56

On an emotional level, we definitely do. You heard what he said about the flag. And a lot of the baby boomer types, this is what they're, they're fighting this, especially in the

01:24:05

Southern Baptist Convention. They're fighting their own hearts in this because this is how they were raised. It's the possessive pronoun, we.

01:24:16

It's our, this land is our land. It's we, the people.

01:24:22

It's because it's stories and traditions and heroes and all the smells and tastes and it's, that's

01:24:31

America. It's the barbecue on the 4th of July. It's, you know, I'm not gonna get all

01:24:36

Gorman Rockwell on you, but that's what people, especially baby boomers have this, my generation and those, especially younger than me, they don't have this ingrained in them, just so you know.

01:24:45

But the baby boomers especially have this sentimentality. This, and it's a normal, it's actually an appropriate thing to love your country, to love your people.

01:24:56

It's a very appropriate thing. And so you can, so I think I agree with him in principle. You can admit there's flaws and you can love your people.

01:25:04

Those two things shouldn't be in contradiction. There's really no need to try to get everyone off the hook with, well, they had ideals, even though they had flaws, they had ideals.

01:25:15

I mean, everyone's a sinner. And the reason why do we look up to George Washington? He's the most significant person in probably

01:25:20

American history. It's what gained us our independence, that whole experience of going through a revolutionary war and coming out the other side.

01:25:28

And he actually, he had strong character. He forsook those who wanted him to be king and he said no to power like that.

01:25:35

And he was a sort of a, probably the best kind of leader because he was a disinterested leader.

01:25:40

He was not in it for the power or for his own platform or anything like that. And he became president.

01:25:47

And so our first president under the Constitution, that's very significant. And so it's his significant achievements and his significant character.

01:25:58

These are the things that make men from the past, that monuments were built to, and women, people worthy of respect and admiration.

01:26:07

It's I want that person, I see attributes in that person, I want my kid to look like. It's a role model. Or they had a significant achievement.

01:26:14

I want my children to be able to gain inspiration from that. It's also part of what haunts the landscape in a way.

01:26:21

It gives character and definition and you confer identity through that to a people group.

01:26:28

And it's a glue that holds them together. Yeah, we all know the story of Washington. We all know who he is.

01:26:33

We all look to that. It's something we can hold in common. And there's very few things we can today. I think Willie Rice feels that.

01:26:39

I think that's a very legitimate thing. But man, is he bringing in a narrative to fight that.

01:26:46

Man, is he bringing in the panel you saw, the first half of that sermon?

01:26:52

Man, is he undermining that? And he's probably, his own heart, who knows?

01:26:57

I don't know. Maybe he's grieved by it, I don't know. But here's the thing. If you watch more, and I did,

01:27:07

I'm gonna show you. So this is, I'm not gonna play it for you. This is a mega edition already. But if you look at like other sermons, like you could listen to this one.

01:27:15

Discover the power that brings us together. The hard work of unity. That's the name of the sermon. The hard work of unity, February 21st, 2021.

01:27:21

He's very concerned about unity. You saw in the sermon I talked about yesterday, very concerned about unity.

01:27:28

And this is something we hear from the Southern Baptists a lot. In fact, I was, if you look up in the book of Jeremiah, chapter six, and I often quote this on the podcast, peace, peace, when there is no peace.

01:27:43

But if we look at the context here of that particular section, he says, from the least of them to the greatest, all are greedy for gain, from the prophet to priest, all practice deceit, they dress the wound of my people with very little care, saying peace, peace, when there is no peace at all.

01:27:58

Are they ashamed of the abomination they've committed? No, they have no shame at all. They do not even blush, so they will fall among the fallen.

01:28:05

All right, so here's, I see this, guys. I see this in the SBC. I see this in evangelicalism in general. Won't apologize, won't retract.

01:28:13

They don't have the shame. They call for peace, a superficial peace, and there is no peace.

01:28:18

You have two sides, and it's not just political sides. These are theological sides. One says there's objective truth. Other side says no, standpoint epistemology.

01:28:26

One says, we believe in the full spectrum of what God's created, including the hierarchies that exist in the natural order.

01:28:33

The other side says, no, we don't believe in that. We want egalitarian equality, and we reduce everything down to oppressed oppression levels.

01:28:43

One side says they want equality before the law, biblical justice.

01:28:48

The other side says we want redistributive justice. We want Lady Justice to take off her blindfold.

01:28:55

These are all biblical issues. These are all ethical issues, moral issues. One side says there's a gospel connection to doing works of righteousness that makes society somehow more equal.

01:29:06

The other side says, no, the gospel's a work of God that he does in the heart of individuals.

01:29:12

It's different, it's different. I mean, yes, there's a good news that there's a kingdom coming, and there's laws that will govern this kingdom and principles, and Christ is the head there.

01:29:23

It's great to understand that that's where we're going, but the gospel itself, the good news to sinners that Christ forgives them and brings them into a relationship with God, that we can be justified before him, that needs to be contained and defended and defined very clearly, so you don't get into a

01:29:45

Galatian situation where you're mixing it with circumcision, or for that matter, social justice. There aren't, you can't mix the works of God with the works of man, okay?

01:29:56

And then say, well, that's the gospel. So he preaches a sermon,

01:30:04

Willie Rice, on unity. And you can listen to it, The Hard Worker of Unity, February 21st, 2021.

01:30:10

And then the very next week, this happens. February 28th, 2021, he has a guest preacher,

01:30:16

Dr. Jeffrey Singletary preaches at the church.

01:30:22

And here is what he had to say. There is tension, friction, misunderstanding, misunderstanding, anger, hatred that exists along racial lines.

01:30:34

One of the reasons for this is that too many in the American church who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ have preached and taught a fragmented gospel.

01:30:50

They've preached and taught a cultural gospel rather than the authentic gospel of the

01:30:57

Lord Jesus Christ. They perpetuated a colonial narrative of white supremacy.

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The colonial gospel served to justify the further enslavement of Africans and further enslaved their mind, their body, soul, and spirit.

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They intentionally withheld biblical truths from the slaves and distorted truth they taught themselves.

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Some were blind and ignorant while others were cruel and deliberate.

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They were theologically dishonest, culturally deceptive, physically abusive, and spiritually demonic.

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As a result, brothers and sisters, this morning, we are currently living and dealing with the legacy of biblical hypocrisy of slavery and racism.

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Now, my grandmother would say it this way. My grandmother would say that the rooster has come home to roost today.

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Beloved, listen to me. The seeds of biblical dishonesty and deception that were sown in slavery has produced an unhealthy spiritual harvest in the soul and the soul of America.

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This is one of the reasons many millennials and Gen Xs have rejected the organized church.

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They have not left because of what we say we believe, but because they are convinced we do not really believe what we say we believe this morning.

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So I'll ask you this. Is this the person you want running the Southern Baptist Convention? Clear as mud, peace, peace when there is no peace, superficial unity, doesn't really know how to navigate these issues, it seems very clear.

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Says out of one side of his mouth, social justice stuff, and tries to also satisfy the more patriotic crowd.

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Doesn't ever get into the deep theological issues, not really, and then people like this at his pulpit.

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And where's the correction? Where's, I mean, that was false teaching, which you just heard. Partial gospel, half gospel, not an incomplete gospel.

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Well, what's the complete gospel? Oh, you gotta do some social justice, gotta believe in some kind of equality, gotta do some work, gotta, you know, you have a crusade against slavery.

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Well, what is it? That's the kind of language you hear from the social justice crowd all the time. And did

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Willie Rice go up and confront this? And did he apologize and retract and say we shouldn't have done that?

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I should, that was wrong what you just heard? No, this is not someone you want as president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention, in my opinion. What seems to motivate him is a false sense of unity.

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I'm not saying it's the only thing, but it does seem to motivate him too much. And there's a moderating influence here somehow, a third way,

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Hegelian dialectic synthesis going on that just is concerning.

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We don't need that. We need someone who's gonna be strong with a spine of steel. So God bless. Hopefully that was helpful for you.

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That's just, that's my take on it. And I would suggest go to the info section. If you want to research this yourself, I'll put the links there.