Where are Evangelicals on Abortion?

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00:12

Welcome once again, everyone to the conversations that matter podcast and your host is always John Harris here with a first time guest on the program,

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Seth Gruber. Seth actually has been, um, I don't know how we got connected, but he's been sending me encouraging texts for quite some time.

00:26

And, uh, I appreciate his ministry as a speaker. His podcast is unaborted and he has a new organization called the white rose resistance.

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You can find out more about that at the white rose dot life, the white rose dot life, or you can go to Seth Gruber .com

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that's Gruber with an E R at the end. And, uh, and you can check out some of his work there and it's mostly on the pro -life movement.

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So, uh, thank you very much, Seth, for joining me. I appreciate it. Yeah, John. Thank you, brother.

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I I've been a long time fan. I think you are the Ezekiel Watchman, son of Issa car, um, for the fault lines in the church today.

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And I only hope and pray that your podcast and channel, uh, quadruples its impact and reach because I haven't found anywhere quite the level of moral, spiritual, and historical clarity on these culture wars, which are really just spiritual wars.

01:23

Um, then your voice and so grateful for you, brother. So thank you for the invitation. Yeah, that's very nice of you to say,

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Seth, I didn't pay him to say that either. So it's very, very kind when it's freely given like that.

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Um, well, I want to talk to you a little bit about what's going on, uh, with the church right now and the evangelical church in particular.

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Um, and we can see where this goes, maybe we'll get into other arenas, but as it relates to this overturn of Roe v.

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Wade, because, um, even I was surprised I've been tracking evangelicalism for the last few years and written now, you know, two books trying to track kind of where evangelicalism is at.

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And even I was thinking as compromised as I've seen evangelical elites be,

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I thought, man, they're going to celebrate when Roe v. Wade's overturned, like that's going to be a really big moment for everyone.

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And I was shocked, um, to see how, uh, many evangelical elites were very quick to jump on Nicholas Sandman.

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They're very quick to jump on the whole George Floyd issue, very quick to jump on Kyle Rittenhouse.

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We all remember that Roe v. Wade's overturned and it's almost crickets out there.

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Um, explain this to me, what, what's going on? Why do you think it was a lackluster kind of response?

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Uh, not everyone, but a lot of people and what's hampering evangelicals on the pro -life issue?

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Yeah. Yeah. That's good, John. There's so many ways we could take that question, but I appreciate your, you blowing the trumpet.

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You know, when you were, when you were asking those questions, John, the first thing I thought of was this line attributed to Martin Luther. Uh, so I'll have to say attributed and you may be familiar with it, but it is become more and more true in today's culture wars and in the fall length in the church.

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And so I just want to sort of open up the conversation, sharing it. Uh, attributedly, he once said, if I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God, except precisely that point at which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking,

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I am not confessing Christ. However, boldly, I may be professing Christianity where the battle rages there.

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The loyalty of the soldier is proven. And to be steady on every other battlefield is mere flight and disgrace.

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If he flinches at that one point. And there's been a lot of flinching happening in American pulpits and from pastors and Christian institutions and well, really since you and I would probably say since the sexual revolution, but particularly in the last 10 years or so, and nowhere has that flinching, or let's say that abdication been more disgraceful and more disappointing than on what is the historical equivalent of the emancipation proclamation.

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Now it's not a perfect analogy, emancipation, freeze all the slaves, but I'm talking about just the cultural significance of Roe v.

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Wade getting overturned is up there with something like that. 2022 is going to go down as one of the most historically, culturally significant years in American political history.

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And you had not just a little bit more attention to BLM incorporated summer of love, the mostly peaceful protests, but like a hundred fold to incidents that oftentimes, as you know,

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John later showed to be completely the wrong take from the get go smearing people like Nicholas Sandman as a racist smearing people like Kyle Rittenhouse, it's all white supremacists.

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Remember the gospel coalition hit piece on that or the tweet or the Facebook post and all this attention to what?

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To systemic racism. Okay, that's fine. We can talk about systemic racism.

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The greatest example of systemic racism is abortion. Planned Parenthood lynches more unarmed black lives in the womb every two weeks than the

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KKK lynched in a century. You want to talk about black lives mattering? Okay. All right. If you're a

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Christian, then you believe that human beings are created in the image of God and that Christ, the prenatal deity, the greatest former fetus to have ever existed was fully

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God and fully human, not at the moment of birth, but at the moment of conception. And so to treat unborn children, therefore unborn

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Christ as anything less than full persons is actually a Christological heresy, John, because it would maintain that Christ was at some point fully

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God, but not fully human and therefore not deserving of the protections there in when he was in his mother's womb.

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And therefore every other baby, it's also created in the image of that prenatal Christ from the moment of conception. And yet it's virtual silence from the

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American pulpit. It's maybe one little tweet and wink to the pro -life movement from Rick Warren or Russell Moore or Ed Stetzer.

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And then they're on with their attention show.

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Alleged cases of systemic racism, a literal example, systemic racism with abortion is disgraceful.

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Yeah, well, I agree with you, it's baffling because abortion, and I thought this was the common evangelical opinion of abortion, it's the greatest moral travesty to ever have taken place in the

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United States, the Roe v. Wade decision, which enshrined it. I mean, if you want to compare body count, there is no comparison between that and anything else that's taken place in our country.

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And you can combine all the wars that have been fought and it still doesn't compare. And yet,

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I don't know, I just thought, I mean, I was watching some reactions from some big evangelical leaders at church.

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I actually put out a little montage or just clips of some of these guys. Yes, that was well done.

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And it's not even as bad as it, I mean, the clips show a part of it, but I'll give you one example. I was looking at a church in Memphis, Tennessee, a big mega church there, and the pastor gets up and he has this moment of praise for how great the choir sung, and this moment of praise.

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That's right, I saw that. Did you see that? Okay. Yes. And then he gets to Roe v. Wade and his whole countenance change, and he's like doom and gloom.

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It's like, yeah, we're all depressed. Right. Which was just weird to me.

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And there were similar things, and I was just going to websites, just seeing what big pastors were doing.

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And I thought it would be a big celebration. Yeah, JD's was absolutely disappointing. Oh, yeah,

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JD Greer's, yeah. Yeah, that was unusual, too. In the same breath, he had to talk about these other issues of poverty.

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It's kind of like they immediately, even the ones that are most ardently pro -life, had to make a jump immediately from, and now who's going to care for these women?

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Ha, ha, ha, church. Yeah, that's right. I understand that. That's why we have crisis pregnancies.

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It's why we adopt. Why wasn't there a moment of celebration? I mean, murder has been now.

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That's right. How many states is it? So a lot of this, John, yeah, a lot of this, John, I think gets down to the fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be pro -life.

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And you understand this. You understand this conflict and disagreement very well. The left wing, or the apolitical neither left nor right, however, you have a lot to bash in your right wing and hardly anything to say about bashing your left wing.

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Anyways, you know the kind of people I'm talking about. They always try to lump in these other issues into pro -life, that you're not really pro -life unless you're what?

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Unless you're doing something about poverty. Unless you're doing something about the orphans. Unless you're doing something about fighting sex trafficking.

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Unless you're doing something about Medicare for all or making healthcare a human right. And they begin to lump in all these other issues.

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And so it kind of gives away the game, doesn't it, John? It kind of shows that these people, to quote Hadley Arcus, phenomenal natural law scholar who helped craft legislation in regards to the

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Born Alive Infant Protection Act under Bush, when he realized that so many of those Republicans that he thought were on his side for protecting the unborn, when they all disappeared and all of his allies were gone, he had this powerful line,

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John, and I think it applies perfectly to this. He says, we could not help but wonder if our friends, quote unquote, weren't truly possessed of a lively sense that there were real human beings getting killed in these surgeries.

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Because if you were possessed of that lively sense, John, and you're like me, and you actually, you have to look at the photos of mutilated children every day, and you actually have to contend with exposing the deeds of darkness, to quote

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Ephesians 511, I think they would live a little differently. So for them, pro -life is so out there, and they have never hardly in their personal life done anything to stand against the genocide of baby image bearers.

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And so they just see the term pro -life, and they go, well, we can't exclude that term to one class of human beings.

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I mean, the phrase is pro -life, John. It's not pro -unborn life. So therefore, you have to be for all lives.

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And then they use that to sort of inject their social justice agenda. And so the way that you can expose this,

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John, and hat off to my mentor, Scott Klusendorf, who asks great questions like, so is the

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American Cancer Society not truly anti -cancer because they're not seeking to solve every other form of disease?

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Actually, let's use BLM as the perfect example, John. Remember J .D. Greer during BLM? He didn't like people saying all lives matter.

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And he went out of his way to make the point that it is specifically Black lives right now that are being targeted.

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John, come on, stop saying all lives matter. We need to show a disproportionate amount of time and interest on the class of human beings whose lives are at risk, whose lives are being threatened.

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And I had debated Michael Austin. You may have heard of him. He's a professor somewhere. I forget the university.

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But big Karen Swallow Pryor fan, big anti -gun guy. But he says he's pro -life.

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And we had a debate over at Hank Hanegraaff's Christian research publication journal.

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And we did a debate on the podcast versus whole life versus pro -life. And I exposed him for the same thing that J .D.

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Greer does. He wrote an article during the

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BLM times. This was June 11th in Psychology Today. And he far from criticizing

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Black lives matter for only focusing on Black lives that are allegedly being systemically discriminated against in our criminal justice system.

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He defended them by saying, quote, when someone says Black lives matter, that in no way logically implies that other lives don't also matter.

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So him and J .D. Greer both making these arguments that, hey, hey, we don't mean that other issues don't matter.

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We're just saying if this class of victims that are currently being discriminated against, to which you and I would go, uh -huh, yeah, now do unborn children.

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Now do unborn children. So they're not truly with us. I can't come away with any other hot take on that,

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John, than that. That they're not possessed of a lively sense that there are real human beings getting killed in these surgeries.

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You have 3 .5 % of the American public are Black women of childbearing age.

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And they obtain between 37 % and 40 % of the annual abortions, fulfilling Margaret Sanger's dream when she wrote in The Negro Project, the goal of the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds, which threaten the blossoming of the finest flowers of American civilization, which fulfilled the dream of her board member,

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Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote a book called The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, who spoke at Sanger's Population Conference in New York after having already run a concentration camp in German -controlled

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Southwest Africa, where he starved, experimented on, and murdered Native Africans. This is Margaret Sanger's legacy.

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So if we want to talk about focusing on the specific victim class that is currently being targeted, let's talk about Black unborn children, and let's talk about all unborn children.

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But their hypocritical, different treatment of these issues, to me,

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John, gives away the game. Yeah, it is fascinating to think that the police are just, and I think it's a historically kind of tenuous, it's not even tenuous, it's just false, but it's a bad argument, but they try to trace the police back to these slave patrols, and that's why it's still ingrained in the policing of the

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United States or something. And yet they can't see with Planned Parenthood a much more clear line coming from the founder to even the work that they're doing in present day.

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One of the things, though, that I just thought of, and it stems back to a sort of an impromptu debate

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I was having two weeks ago, right after this ruling came down. I was at a

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Bible study. I do some campus ministry. We have culinary institutes near us, and there was a gentleman who came who claims to be a

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Christian, goes to a church in a local area. It's a Black church.

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He actually drives his pastor, apparently. He was telling us every morning to work and stuff. And he, and this is something, he's just one example, but I've seen,

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I've gotten this flavor from other kind of ethnic churches like that, or Black churches, where he thought, you know, he was totally against the ruling, thought this is a woman's body.

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I mean, just all the liberal arguments, but yet then, I mean, he believes the Bible. He believes that Jesus is the only way.

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I mean, so many things that we could probably say we share in common. How widespread is that in the

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Black community? And why is that? Why is it that what you just said about Margaret Sanger and about the disproportionate amount of Black mothers that are going to these clinics, why is it that the churches in those communities don't seem to understand?

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Maybe some of them do, but a lot of them don't. Yeah, well, a lot of Black, these

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Black charismatic churches, John, as you know, many of them, if not the majority, are pretty left -wing, are pretty in bed with the

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Democrat Party. You've got some rare churches like Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Check them out sometime. My friend, Pastor John Amanchukwu is a ministry partner and the youth pastor over there, and him and his father -in -law, fiery, charismatic, conservative preachers over there, blasting

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Sanger and abortion from the pulpit, informing their people, you know, because our people suffer for lack of knowledge, and they're making sure that that's not a reality in their congregation.

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But, I mean, it's the exception, right? A Black charismatic church that's pro -life and fired up for things, the righteous policies that God would actually, that Jesus would actually support is pretty rare.

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And so I think this gets down to a lot of the success of the Democrat Party and the left -wing agenda in smearing their political opponents as racist and redefining their policy pursuits as the, you know, we're the party of the little guy, right?

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That's what the Democrat Party always said, that we want to help those who are impoverished and are having a hard time. Just give them a little lift up, you know, help them pull themselves up a little bit.

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But, of course, it usually just ends up, well, if it's the Great Society Act, it just incentivized fatherlessness to get people in the government to eat, and then they actually get comfortable with not working hard enough, you know, all these conversations.

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But I will piggyback up what you said, the amount of ignorance, not just in the American public, but in Black churches regarding Sanger's legacy is astounding.

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She wrote a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble as a part of her Negro Project. And part of the goal,

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John, was to get Black ministers involved, to use Black faces to represent the agenda of the

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American Birth Control League before it was renamed Planned Parenthood so that other Black people would feel more comfortable with the agenda.

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And she said in her letter, we do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And that's like the most fiery line from that letter.

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But then she says to Dr. Clarence Gamble, she says, and the Black minister is the one who can straighten that idea out if it occurs to any more of his rebellious members.

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And Sanger once said regarding birth control, John, she said, eugenics without birth control seems to us a house built upon the sands.

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It is at the mercy of the rising streams of the unfit. So even before the

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American Birth Control League was pushing abortion, John, birth control was not an end in and of itself.

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It was central to eugenic goals. And of course, Sanger hobnobbed with all the founders of the American Eugenic Society, who influenced

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Nazi legislation in Germany. Conversation for another time. But when I say that from pulpits,

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John, you should see people's faces. They're like, oh, like deer in the headlights never heard it before. And so this goes back to, of course, the pulpits, right?

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I think we can't appropriately lay much of the moral rot and loss in the culture wars in America at the feet of the pulpit.

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That great line to Tocqueville when he visited America, he looked for the greatness of America at all these places. Where was it?

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Where was it? It wasn't in her Congress. It wasn't in her beautiful rivers. It wasn't here. It wasn't here. It was in her pulpits ablaze with righteousness.

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And America is great because she is good. And if she ceases to be good, she'll cease to be great.

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And what made us good? A Judeo -Christian worldview, the image of God, Imago Dei, natural rights of man.

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And so if you don't have the right to life for all human beings, then you actually don't have the right to life for any human beings.

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It's in the small things that the rot grows. And that's why the left has moved so slowly in their culture and political warfare.

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Lest the good people recognize the agenda and wake up too soon. So you've got to move slowly. And now we're starting to experience life bankruptcy.

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Things happen gradually, then suddenly. Yeah, that's good. Let me throw something out there. I haven't said on the podcast, but I want to get your take on it.

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And I've just had this suspicion. Like it used to be years ago, someone told me when an evangelical leader starts getting soft on homosexuality, look up who their kids are because they might have a gay kid, right?

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There might be or a grandkid or something. And there's a reason that there's personal motives.

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Well, I had this thought, especially after Roe v. Wade was overturned. I wondered how many evangelicals or Christians, just broadly speaking, are getting abortions.

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I was shocked when I lived in Lynchburg, Liberty University, right? It was right there. Right. And there's not a

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Planned Parenthood in Lynchburg, but there is in Roanoke and Charlottesville, I believe, which are only like an hour, hour and 15 minutes drives.

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And the local crisis pregnancy representative did a whole presentation to my wife's

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Bible study and told them essentially that the most the people they counsel are students at Liberty University that and sometimes people who have had abortions and oftentimes at the bequest of their mother who doesn't want them to ruin their lives.

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And I'm just thinking this is a student at Liberty, like their parents are paying for them to go to Christian school. And yet the mother's coming in and so make sense of this for me.

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I mean, is this a how big of a problem is this? Does that possibly is that a motivating factor for why some

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Christian leaders seem to be kind of compromised on this or sheepish about approaching it? Yeah.

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Yeah. That's a good question. Writing some down here because you made me think of something, too. I think there may be two answers.

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I think one of them could be that you have a history of abortion. You have post -abortion trauma in that individual's life or someone in their family.

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And the Guttmacher Institute Planned Parenthood's statistical research branch named after Alan Guttmacher, the former president of Planned Parenthood 70s, who, by the way, in his book,

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Life in the Making on page three, John, just as a point of interest, admitted that everyone knows that human life begins at conception.

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He says on page three, he says this all seems so regarding when human life begins. He says this all seems so simple and evident that it's hard to picture a time when it wasn't part of the common knowledge.

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And that was from the 70s. Anyways, Alan Guttmacher, Guttmacher Institute Planned Parenthood's research arm. They have done a lot of the data.

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And of course, I always try to cite the other side's data when I can. And it's over 30 percent of women who obtain abortions identify as being

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Protestant or Catholic. Actually, if you combine both Protestant and Catholic, you're upwards of 40 percent. And so and then what is it?

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Barna has done some as well. And I think it's like about one in one in four women, even in your church.

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And so women move silently from the pews to the abortion center and the shepherds have nothing to say. When I was starting out my pro -life speaking career,

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John, here was the number one response I got from most local pastors when I tried to get speaking opportunities, not not because, oh, you know,

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I just want to grow my platform and you do a good job, Pastor. No, because these weren't talking about the Pope, but they weren't preaching on it.

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And here was the first pushback I got in my early 20s when I started speaking. Seth, we're pro -life, of course, but so now they're going to disqualify everything.

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But, you know, we don't want to shame or condemn women in our congregations who have had abortions. You know, we want to show them the love of Christ.

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As my colleague Mike Spencer says, pastor's silence on abortion does not spare his men and women hurt.

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It spares them healing. In fact, the very reality that you post abortive men and women in your congregation is actually reason you should use that as a soapbox opportunity to not just speak truth, but to put the gospel on blast in a way that maybe they've never heard it before, that their heart has to be reminded of the evil act they participated in.

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But like King David, who arranged the death of an innocent human being to hide and cover up his sexual sin, there's also grace for you and you can be called a man or woman after God's own heart.

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So I think that's part of it. I think part of it is that there could be abortion stories in the families of the still silent shepherds.

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But here, and this got to your question earlier, John, about help us make sense of this stuff. Like, why is there so much silence? What's with the hypocrisy?

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I think the other reason is this. I think it's to quote my friend, Dr. Owen Strand, it's the idol of cultural respectability.

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The idol of cultural respectability. And I think, unfortunately, John, that that is more of an answer than post -abortion trauma in the lives of these people that we would expect to be more vocal.

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They want a place at the table, John. They want Christianity to look hip and cool and attractive.

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But rather than preaching the full counsel of God and leaving the results to God, they need to contrive the situation in the context in which

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Christianity is presented. And so, hey, that's why we couldn't get on board with Trump, John, because he was a meanie.

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And if I voted for him, I would actually harm my Christian witness. Boy, did we hear a lot of that in 2020.

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I had a friend text me that on the day of the election, I was preaching at my home church, Godspeed Calvary Chapel, November 1st, two days before the national election on live.

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And I was trying to get my friends to make sure they voted for who I was proven right was the most pro -life president in American history.

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And my friend said, I can't, Seth, because I care so much about my witness, the idol of cultural respectability.

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You want a place at the table. And here's how you expose this, John. I asked them, I said, hey, buddy, you know that there's a lot of pagans, secularists, and deists who are not believers who are pro -life.

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A lot of the church doesn't understand this. There are a whole bunch of fired up pro -life people who are not

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Christians, who are not born again. So guess what? By not voting for the most pro -life president in American history, you're harming your

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Christian witness to those groups of people who don't see you as putting flesh on your

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Christian faith and ideas. Because if you believed what you said you believed, that your savior was fully

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God and fully human at the moment of conception, and every other baby is as well, then you'd be more politically involved than anyone else

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I know if you thought that this was a genocide. And so your political abdication is harming your

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Christian witness, quote unquote, with those groups of people. It's almost as if, John, we shouldn't be concerned about contriving our witness, but being faithful to preach grace and truth and leave the results to God.

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And so I think this idol of cultural respectability is actually more of an answer to your question than merely post -abortion trauma in the lives of Christians.

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And we can get into people like, you know, Tim Keller, who I think is actually, I think is the central example of this rot and evangelicalism.

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More than Stetzer, more than Greer, more than Rick Warren. I'm happy to dive into that. But I think that is more of an answer is to their silence.

25:41

Yeah. Well, why don't we dive into that? And that's good. I mean, I think that's one of the things that seems to mainstay to me in evangelicalism is the leaders want a seat at the table and they don't realize it's not a table, it's a gun pointing at them.

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It's just like they're the last to be eaten. Yeah. We let's put the ram's blood on our door.

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So the angel of death passes over, but it's too late. So you have guys like now they're painting the rainbow on their door.

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And hoping that the spirit of the age will pass over. Yeah, it's weird. Or they have to do this thing.

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I saw Carl Truman kind of did this where it's like, let's stand against the LGBT movement.

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By the way, we hate racism. It's like, what? Like, they have to say it in the same breath so that yeah, like you can, you know, remember that time when we were with you on BLM?

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You know, please don't come for us now. But yeah, it's a mass moving away from orthodoxy.

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And you mentioned Tim Keller. I know there's a number or maybe you can just go through a list. I mean, who are some of the people that are undermining pro -life thinking and evangelicalism?

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And then and what I mean, I'm kind of intrigued. What is Tim Keller doing that's so dangerous as opposed to Stetzer or?

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Well, I think I think he's the fountainhead from which the rot flows. That's what I think, John. And I and I'll say

27:02

I'm not nearly the watchman on SJW as you are. I mean, you're like in a higher echelon that's untouchable,

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John. And that's why I love your podcast so much. But but I've done a decent enough research. I did an episode called

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The Shepherd Who Became Wolves. So I guess trans speciesism. And we went through some of these people.

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And I've done full treatments of Tim Keller, not to toot my own horn, but just to mention probably a friend of both of ours,

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Dr. Owen Strand. When we were at a Vodibachum conference we hosted at our home church, Godspeed Calvary Chapel. And I did my takedown on Keller.

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Dr. Owen said, I've never heard a takedown like Keller like that before. And so I've really done my research.

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And then Vodi actually, to his benefit, defended me. He said, some of you were uncomfortable later when you heard someone going after Keller.

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And then he said, but these are actually the people we need to call out and do it right. And so awesome to hear. Yeah, that was that was really sweet to me, because Vodi is such a hero of mine.

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But so anyway, so here's the here's the take on Keller. I mean, I mean, the guy started the TTC, right?

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I mean, here was right after Roe, right? Now isn't the time for the church to beat its chest in celebration of a victory in the culture war.

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This is a moment for us to step up and love. Right. And as soon as I read that, Jen, I was thinking, like, you know, the prophets of Elijah, you know, who are like saying, where's your where's your

28:12

God? Is he taking a dump? Like, is he constipated? Like, is he not feeling like? Yeah. And so it's like providentially, it seems that God chose to use mean tweets over winsomeness to overturn

28:23

Roe versus Wade. That's actually a good line. Yeah. I know that makes the Ed Stetsers and the

28:29

Michael Austen's and the Karen Swallow Pryors and the Rick Warren's and the Brian Broderson's and the

28:35

J .D. Greer's and the David Plath. I know that makes them very uncomfortable. They don't really know where to place that within their sort of historical theology.

28:41

But he did. God chose to use mean tweets over winsomeness. Remember, Dobbs gets upheld with 6 -3,

28:47

John, but Roe gets overturned with 5 -4, which means without one of Trump's three

28:53

Supreme Court justices, Roe doesn't get overturned. And the high places don't begin to crumble. And we can't laugh at these pagan deities and say,

29:00

I guess they're taking a dump. I'm sorry, if you have a problem with that kind of funny, like theological, like, like discourse, then take it up with Elijah and the prophets.

29:08

So, so Tim Keller, I think it was so much of the fountainhead where this rock comes from, John, and I, I rewrote the intro to my talk at Jack Hibb, my, my, one of my earthly heroes church in September of 2020 for his

29:21

Comeback California conference. It was my first speaking gig since the shutdowns, right? Because I'm sure you had all your speaking canceled from March through at least

29:29

August or September. So that was my first one back on the stage. And I rewrote the intro to my talk the night before, because the night before this

29:36

September Comeback California conference at Calvary Chapel, Chino Hills, John Keller put his, his now infamous

29:43

Facebook post up, which I know you know about. And here's what he said. He said that when it comes to voting, taking, he said, the

29:52

Bible does not tell me the best way to decrease abortions, to end abortion or decrease abortions in this country.

29:58

The various political parties offer a potpourri of positions on these and many, many other issues, most of which the

30:05

Bible does not speak to directly. This means when it comes to voting, taking political positions and determining alliances, the

30:11

Christian has liberty of conscience. Christians cannot say to other Christians, every

30:16

Christian must vote for X or no Christian can vote for X. Yes. I memorized the stupid

30:21

Facebook post. You gotta, I was going to ask if you had a photographic memory. You seem to have a lot committed.

30:27

No, I, I just, I just exercise my memory. Like, like we exercise our muscles. Okay. I wish, I wish

30:32

I had photographic memory. So that was Keller's hot take, right? So when it comes to voting, voting, taking political positions and determining alliances, the

30:40

Christian has liberty of conscience. In other words, John, God does not care how you vote.

30:45

And so no one had been quite so clear as Keller, I think on this question of political engagement, specifically on the issue of abortion.

30:52

And here's where the hypocrisy rears its ugly head. And here's what I'm going to actually call John's soft bigotry, because hard bigotry would be the full blown denial of the personhood of unborn children, right?

31:02

Full blown hard bigotry would be the pro -abortion position. They're untermensch. They're lebens und wertenslebens.

31:07

They're life unworthy of life. They're not persons. What would be a soft bigotry? Tim freaking Keller. I'm sorry, that Tim Keller represents the soft bigotry towards the unborn.

31:16

That they're human beings, but you see, they're not intrinsically valuable enough to warrant political protection.

31:23

And, and the way that Keller exposes himself is in a New York Times opinion editorial that you're probably familiar with called, how do

31:30

Christians fit into a two -party system? They don't. That's the title of it. Now you and I would say, of course, of course,

31:37

Christians don't fit perfectly because we're of another kingdom. We're aliens. We're passing through like, of course, Jesus is not a

31:43

Republican or a Democrat. However, he is political because he's the king. He's ruling and reigning. And oh, and by the way, he's coming back.

31:48

So he is political in that sense. But of course, he's not a Republican or a Democrat anyway. So he begins with this inarguable premise that he knows he can get everyone to get on board with.

31:56

And then he begins to shift in this article. And I encourage your listeners to go read this, John, how do Christians fit into a two -party system?

32:03

They don't. It is incredibly telling about the, the moral depravity from which Keller speaks in this piece.

32:09

He says here, I'm going to quote to you. He says, Christians cannot pretend that they can transcend politics and simply preach the gospel.

32:18

Those who avoid all political discussions and engagement are essentially casting a vote for the social status quo.

32:25

And now here, John, he's going to start blasting apolitical Christians during slavery. He says

32:31

American churches in the early 19th century that did not speak out against slavery, because that was what we would now call getting political.

32:39

We're actually supporting slavery by doing so. And listen to this line, John, to not be political is to be political.

32:48

That sounds like Bonhoeffer. Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.

32:55

God will not hold us guiltless. It sounds like the Bonhoeffer coming out in him, except he doesn't believe unborn children have the same intrinsic dignity as the born black man from the 1850s.

33:08

Because according to him, if you were apolitical, if you just didn't speak out against slavery, he says that was supporting slavery by doing so.

33:17

And so my question, John, would be this. Hey, Mr. Keller, quick question for you. Here's a historical question.

33:22

Wouldn't that then mean that Christians who were full -blown in bed with the Democrat party in 1850, if being apolitical in the 1850s made you supporting the social status quo, wouldn't voting for Democrats in the 1850s make you significantly more involved in injustice by promoting the very party committed to lynching and enslaving

33:43

African -Americans? Of course it would. But then, now bait and switch, abortion, far from saying that being apolitical makes you involved in injustice, he says you have liberty of conscience to vote for the same party today,

33:58

John, that believes the same thing that that party believed in 1850, that not all humans are persons.

34:05

And they get to decide which humans are persons and which aren't, ironically or not ironically,

34:10

John, by using basically the same arguments to dehumanize the unborn that they did to dehumanize the black man.

34:16

And then he wraps up in this piece here. He says, racism is a sin, violating the second of the two greatest commandments of Jesus, to love your neighbor.

34:24

The biblical commands to lift up the poor and defend the rights of the oppressed are moral imperatives for believers.

34:30

For individual Christians to speak out against egregious violations of these four requirements is not optional.

34:37

So what's the difference then between unborn children that Tim Keller says you can vote to lynch, because I guess your whole life, quote unquote, and the black man and woman for whom apathy and apoliticalness was itself sin.

34:55

So this, now you're getting down to the soft bigotry here, John. He doesn't view the unborn child as intrinsically valuable enough to warrant political protection, or else he would never say you can vote for the party and politicians sworn to uphold today's lynchings, today's genocide, and today's slavery.

35:17

And people say, Seth, you can't compare the two, really? With slavery, you had an industry that profited in the billions by severing children from their parents.

35:24

With abortion, you have an industry that profits in the billions by severing children from their parents. And they use the same arguments.

35:31

And I just talked about this at the church in Bakersfield the other day. And I think we need to say this so the church is very clear that we're actually facing the same leviathan, the same beast, the same spirit of the age who's just found a new victim class,

35:44

John, that they've denied personhood to. So there's the argument from ownership. This slave -slash -baby is my property -slash -body.

35:51

There's the argument from privacy. No one is forcing you to have slaves -slash -abortions, John. There's the argument from superseding rights.

35:58

My property -slash -bodily autonomy rights come before the slave -slash -fetuses.

36:05

There's the argument from inevitability. Slavery -slash -abortion has been around for thousands of years. It's never going away.

36:10

Might as well keep it safe and legal. There's the argument from pseudoscience. Well, you know, John, slaves -slash -fetuses aren't real people.

36:17

They're not like us. Just look at them. They're so different. Therefore, we are human and they are not. But we can say, that's not science.

36:23

That sounds like Gnostic body self -dualism that you're slapping the label of science onto. There's the argument from socioeconomics.

36:29

If slavery -slash -abortion ends, most of these slaves -slash -babies will end up on the street without a job. So it's better to kill them.

36:35

There's the argument from faux compassion, which says the same thing. The world can be a cruel place. It's better to keep them enslaved -slash -kill them.

36:42

And then lastly, there's the argument from the assumed hypocrisy of the other side, right? You say you want to live with freed

36:47

Blacks -slash -unborn babies, but you're not.

36:53

You don't want to. Or you say you want to end slavery -slash -abortion, but you don't want to live with freed Blacks -slash -adopt the babies yourself.

36:59

The other side just become hypocrites because they're not living sort of as your opponents think that they should be.

37:06

And so I could go on and on and on. But my point is this. It's the same beast. It's the same agenda.

37:11

And not ironically, it's also wiping out more Black people than slavery and the racists could have ever dreamed of doing.

37:18

Well, yeah. And that's interesting. I haven't heard an extensive tit -for -tat like that comparing the two.

37:23

But in the case of abortion, it's actually much worse, really, if you think about it. Because it's worse to be murdered than enslaved.

37:29

Yeah. I mean, murder is such a... I mean, biblically speaking, of course. I mean, if you're enslaved, you have your life still.

37:36

If you're murdered, it's done. It's game over. And for Keller to take such a cavalier approach to today's more heinous injustice is very telling.

37:50

And that's a very good observation. I hadn't really made it. And on top of that, John, you've read about his public defense of his registration as a

37:57

Democrat, right? You can go read a piece on Tim Keller defending why he's registered as a Democrat. And in short, his argument is this,

38:03

John. I'm just being winsome. I'm just being winsome. It's more effective this way.

38:09

Because basically, New York is so blue, it's gone to the dogs. There's no hope. So I'm just going to try to kind of manage the decline of Western civilization by being somewhat of a

38:17

Democrat moderate. Of course, then we would then say, so you would have done the same thing in 1850, huh?

38:22

And he'd be like, oh, no, no, no. I wouldn't care how blue a state was. I wouldn't care how Democrat a state was. I would have been blasting the

38:28

Republican Party from the pulpit because I would have understood that that was the only political party that presented us a viable opportunity to protect our

38:35

Black image bearers. Now do unborn children, Tim. Now do unborn children. And then lastly, to finally put the lid on Keller, John, he's done this whole, he once publicly defended his, and this is interesting.

38:47

Most people haven't found this. If you've ever done research on Tim Keller preaching on abortion, you probably find that there is nothing.

38:54

I've tried it. Tim Keller abortion sermons, unborn children, that you cannot find it. There is no sermon on how abortion is child sacrifice, that Satan doesn't care the name of the

39:03

God you call him. So it was Bullock then and it's self -education money and career wealth being today.

39:09

No, there's no theological, biblical treatment of abortion in a full -length sermon from Keller from the pulpit. I would love to be proved wrong.

39:16

Please someone go do the research and prove me wrong. But Keller once finally, finally defended his still silent shepherd approach to the slaughter of the lambs.

39:26

And this was covered by someone in a piece in Christianity today, 1999 called religionless spirituality.

39:33

And Keller essentially explains why it's good to not preach on abortion from the pulpit, John. And so I'll go to my conclusion and then

39:41

I'll give you the bulk of it. According to Keller, clerical silence or political neutrality in the face of child sacrifice is an acceptable means of evangelism.

39:52

That's what Keller believes that clerical silence or political neutrality in the face of child sacrifice is an acceptable and beautiful means of evangelism.

40:00

That's the only conclusion takeaway you can get from what I'm about to tell you, John. So from this piece, this is what

40:06

Keller says. And so the writer's quoting him, Keller says, we will be careful with the order in which we communicate the parts of the face, pushing moral behaviors before we lift up Christ is religion.

40:19

The church today is calling people to God with the tone of voice that seems to confirm their worst fears.

40:24

Religion has always been outside in. If I behave out here in all these ways, then I will have God's blessing and love inside.

40:30

But the gospel is inside out. If I know the blessing and grace of God inside, then I can behave out here in all these ways.

40:35

A woman who had been attending our church for several months came to see me. This is Keller writing. Do you think abortion is wrong?

40:41

She asked. I said that I did. I'm coming to see now that maybe there is something wrong with it. This woman replied now that I've become a

40:47

Christian here and have started studying the faith in the classes back to Keller. As we spoke, I discovered that she was an

40:53

Ivy League graduate, a lawyer, a longtime Manhattan resident and an active member of the ACLU.

40:59

She volunteered that she had experienced three abortions. Pause. Notice the way that Keller describes the dismemberment of a person.

41:06

She had experienced three abortions. John, women don't experience abortions. Babies experience abortions.

41:11

Abortions are not performed on women. They're performed on babies and the vaginal canal is in the way she said.

41:17

She said, I want you to know. She said that if I had seen this is the key. If I had seen any literature or reference to the pro -life movement,

41:25

I would not have stayed through the first service. But I did stay and I found faith in Christ.

41:32

If abortion is wrong, she says, John, you should certainly speak out against it. But I'm glad about the order in which you did it.

41:40

And then Keller says this woman had her faith incubated into birth. Interesting analogy in our

41:46

Sunday in worship. We center on the question, what is truth? And the one who had the audacity to say,

41:52

I am the truth. This is the big issue for postmodern people. And it's hard to swallow. Nothing is more subversive and prophetic than to say truth has become a real person to which

42:01

I would say Keller. And when did truth become a real person? Oh, right. At the moment of conception, Jesus calls both younger brothers and elder brothers to come into the father's arms.

42:09

He calls the church to grasp the gospel for ourselves and share it with those who did desperately seeking true spirituality. OK, so so Keller goes on.

42:15

But basically, according to Keller, that's why it's really good to not preach against child sacrifice from the pulpit, John.

42:20

Because if he does, and I actually had pastors tell me this back to my early speaking career, John, they said, oh, no, what if what if we have a nonbeliever who's visiting church for the first time?

42:32

And it happens that they visit when you I've had this said verbatim, John, and it happens that they visit when you preach and they hear you preaching on abortion.

42:38

And then their worst fears are confirmed that this is just another GOP church that's prostituted their evangelistic duties to the

42:48

Republican Party or to a political ideology. Oh, screw these Christians. I knew they were just Republican old men who wanted to control women's bodies.

42:56

And so the possibility of offense becomes the the reason for why they won't address it from the pulpit.

43:03

That's exactly what Keller's saying here, John. He's saying he's lifting this woman up as an example.

43:09

He's saying, isn't this beautiful? The order in which we communicated the parts of the faith, because, you know, she told me,

43:16

John, she told me that if I had preached abortion from the pulpit or it was in our literature, she wouldn't have come back.

43:21

So so unborn children become an acceptable sacrifice on the altar of our Great Commission responsibilities, to which

43:27

I would say, yeah, Keller, and what's the second commandment in the Great Commission and teach them to obey all that I have commanded you?

43:35

Namely, love your neighbor. And the unborn is the only neighbor it's legal to kill. So anyway, I'll get off my soapbox.

43:40

But I get I get very fired up with Keller because I think that most of the rot and evangelicalism and the cultural and political cowardice on the issue of abortion,

43:48

I think he represents sort of the centerpiece of that rot. Yeah, I can see why.

43:54

And that's a very well articulated. I hadn't thought of Keller's treatment of slavery, which really, by implication, what he's talking about isn't slavery of the 1850s.

44:05

It's more the social justice movement now and how Christians should be involved with that and then comparing that to to abortion.

44:14

I know when he was outed as being a Democrat, Mark Dever was to actually in the same the same person had kind of like looked them both up and found that.

44:26

Yeah, his response was very disappointing. And but it's so after he did that, though, you had a string of evangelicals make similar arguments.

44:36

I know David Platt did in his book Before You Vote. And he had this whole section as you've read that book.

44:41

But he talks about how there's a Democrat who stewards their vote well in a

44:46

Christian manner by realizing Republicans really aren't going to do anything about abortion anyway.

44:52

So we might as well deal with all these other life issues like social justice type issues, poverty, more government funding for welfare.

45:00

And that and that will be that's a moral decision. And of course, he writes this two years before Roe v.

45:05

Wade is overturned. So that's the thing that's interesting. It is fascinating because that's what

45:11

I keep I've heard for years is that, you know, and I hear it from the establishment evangelicals to some extent, you know, what are the

45:17

Republicans done for the unborn anyway? We might as well vote Democrat. But obviously, there's more than just that.

45:24

There's Mexico City policy. I mean, there's all sorts of things Republicans have tried to do to stem abortion, not saying they're perfect, and they've certainly could have done a lot more when they had power and didn't.

45:35

But but this result has happened. And I want to ask you on the other side, if you were looking at evangelicalism, you'd have establishment evangelicals over here with 50 million different issues or life issues.

45:46

On the other side, you have and this is kind of its own wide group of people, but you have abolitionists who they actually in some ways say similar things about like the

45:57

GOP is never going to or we can't count on them. At least I've heard some of that rhetoric. I'm not as familiar.

46:02

But what do you think about that, their position when it comes to abortion?

46:09

Because as I understand it, a lot of abolitionists see I mean, I don't even maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong.

46:15

I don't even know how they feel about the Roe v. Wade thing, because it's not what's acceptable. Some of them is just that it must abolish all abortion immediately.

46:24

And if it doesn't, if it's a kind of halfway measure, like it doesn't ban it in all the states or something, then it's not or on a state level, it doesn't ban it immediately at all levels of development, then it's a compromise.

46:37

It's evil. People are in sin. So, I mean, how strong of a force is that in evangelicalism right now?

46:48

So, let me I'll try to I'll try to give myself a little bit of authority to speak on this just because I believe

46:59

I've spoken in more pulpits in evangelical churches since the fall of 2020 on abortion than any pro -life speaker in the world, because I know all the pro -life speakers and I was in a pulpit every week for on a three or four month stretch and my wife said, you need to stop.

47:17

And that's not because of me. That's because of people like Rob McCoy and Jack Hibbs who put their entire endorsements and introductions and it helped me get into churches to wake up the church in California at such a decisive moment.

47:31

And so speaking from having spoken in so many churches, John, I don't think that immediatism is the primary dominant authority.

47:43

I still think that most people would say it's better to support pro -life legislation that stops short of a total ban than refuse to get that pro -life legislation and wait until you have all the votes for an abortion ban.

47:59

Therefore, in my opinion, sacrificing savable children now so that you can feel very good about your conscience that you didn't quote unquote conform or that you didn't cave that you were consistent.

48:11

And so now there is a growing movement of immediatists who refuse to vote for even

48:19

Trump who put those three Supreme Court justices in place that ended up overturning versus way.

48:25

Most immediatists I know would say and did not vote for Trump and would say that it would have been wrong to do so because they had no reason to believe that he was actually going to pursue banning abortion.

48:35

And so it's kind of interesting. Douglas Wilson had an interesting take a few a couple of months before Rogan overturned when we thought it would right through Dobbs.

48:44

And and he had a great line. He said that if it gets overturned, he said,

48:49

I hope it would be nice if the immediatist would thank the incrementalists for giving them the opportunity to very quickly secure their goals, which is to ban abortion in Oklahoma or Arkansas or wherever it is, because hey, now you can do it.

49:06

Now you can do it faster than you would have been able to do otherwise. But I haven't heard any thank yous from the immediatist whose job is now easier, which

49:12

I think is very interesting. So I don't want to spend too much time on that. And let me just tell you, John, you're going to get nasty messages for having me on because I've I've been criticized.

49:23

I have blog posts on me and podcasts that T. Russell Hunter's done. And and and T. Russell will deny this now.

49:29

But, you know, Jonathan von Maren and other pro -life activists who have who have worked with him for a long time. We've been we've been told by him and his followers for a long time on Facebook comments that I guess

49:39

I should have screenshot it because T. Russell denies it now. He said, show me the evidence. I'm like, I'm sorry, I didn't screenshot it all.

49:45

But we all remember it that I want to keep abortion legal, John, because if I don't, if it ends too soon,

49:50

I'm not going to have a job and then I won't have those speaking requests. Like, what a disgusting thing to say to someone like I left a successful career in sales to do this full time.

50:00

And so the bummer is that I never doubt the the intentions or motivations of a media test,

50:05

John, I never do. But they do doubt the motivations and intentions of people who do support banning abortion and do support states to find the courts.

50:14

We just have to talk about what that looks like and where and if that's wise. And that's because abortion is the sacrament of secular progressivism,

50:21

John. And so it had a state completely banned it and you had a governor do it. My belief is that federal troops would have been sent in by Biden and Kamala Harris to arrest the governor and to arrest any state troopers who tried to shut down abortion clinics.

50:32

And now you're looking at civil war. Now, maybe the immediate test would say, yes, that's exactly right. We need civil war.

50:38

OK, but again, you have to stop and pause and say, is that the wise decision? And are the rest of pro -lifers ready to take up arms against other

50:47

Americans and murder and kill them because they're not the federal government's not allowing our state to ban abortion?

50:52

So in principle, I've got a problem with states to find the courts. Lincoln did it. I like the Santas when he was defying the federal government with vaccine stuff.

51:00

But we need to be a little bit more winsome. We need a little bit more strategical. And I'm still waiting for that. Thank you for overturning

51:06

Roe and allowing T. Russell Hunter and free the states to ban abortion in Oklahoma. But I don't think it's coming. Well, yeah.

51:12

And the reason I ask is, I mean, I've been for the last few years been introduced more and more to different aspects of the anti -abortion movement and evangelicalism and notice differences.

51:24

And I'd say within the last probably year and a half, I've been thinking through more the abolitionist position.

51:31

And it's really positions because there's different camps within abolitionism and then the pro -life.

51:38

And then what I knew I always knew I didn't like was this like what was what you described

51:43

Tim Keller advocating. And and that just seemed to me like that's not even a pro -life position.

51:49

I'm not really sure how that fits into a pro -life position. But the the landscape out there is there's because we're identifying fake pro -lifers.

51:58

There's I just know that there is a fairly vocal group of people who are they see almost everyone as a fake pro -lifer.

52:05

If if there's ever if you vote for a Republican candidate who isn't committed to ending abortion on day one through executive action or that kind of thing.

52:18

And so I just think Christians need to be aware just to think through that for themselves. I think everyone needs to think through this.

52:23

And whatever you're doing, you need to be involved somehow, I think, even if that's just voting. But but somehow that's right.

52:30

You know, do something. Pray. You know, everyone can do that. Yeah. One, I think people are starting to wake up to this.

52:38

John, I think people are starting to realize the wolves in sheep's clothing in our midst. And having spoken in so many churches in the last season and seeing a lot of those churches

52:46

I've preached in, John, start a pro -life ministry immediate after me leaving some of those people in those churches, start sidewalk counseling within days and start saving and more children outside their local abortion center where they had never gone before.

52:58

Now, now, you know, absolutely praise God, because I don't know what I'm just riding this wave of speaking where I'm I've never had this many opportunities and God's using it and people are waking up.

53:09

And so I think we're starting to hit this breaking point. Right. I think the fault lines are more clear than they've ever been before.

53:15

And people are starting to realize that they've been called to something greater, that they've been called to an uncomfortable Christianity.

53:21

We need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. We need to abandon this Tim Keller, soft bigotry of the unborn.

53:26

And people are starting to get God's heart for unborn children. And so I think the question that we have to ask ourselves about these fake pro -lifers is this.

53:36

And actually, we should ask this question of ourselves, John. Do we really believe the unborn child is just as morally and intrinsically valuable as the toddler and the adult?

53:46

Do we really believe that? Because we all tell ourselves, don't we, John, that we would have been abolitionists.

53:52

Robert P. George, Robbie George, great natural law scholar over at Princeton University. He always shares this story.

53:57

He says, every semester, I ask my law students for years, he's been doing this job. By a raise of hands, if you had lived in 1850, how many of you would have been abolitionists?

54:05

And he says, he's like, it's the funniest thing. For years, every student in every class always raises their hand.

54:10

And of course, we chuckle because we realize that wouldn't have been the case. And this is because of what C .S.

54:16

Lewis calls chronological snobbery, right? We look down our noses at the Christians in the 1850s who allowed these injustices.

54:23

We look down our noses at the silent pastors in Germany that Bonhoeffer correctly labeled as having absorbed a cheap grace, creating a

54:33

Christ and gospel in their own image to justify their apathy, to keep a place at the table, to keep their cultural respectability.

54:40

And we look down our noses at these Christians, John, and we go, how could those cheap grace Christians have allowed slavery, have allowed the

54:46

Holocaust? We allow our own Holocaust. We allow our own lynchings. They're called womb lynchings. And they happen at the tune of a million a year.

54:53

So do you really believe that it's a baby and that the value is the same?

54:59

Because I'll tell you what, John, the value is the same to God. And I'll prove it to you right now. In Luke, in Luke 1, is it

55:05

Luke 1 and 2? The word for baby, when John the Baptist leaps, leaps in Elizabeth's womb, you know what the word is?

55:13

Bereifos. Okay. Bereifos, using the term to describe the baby in Elizabeth's womb.

55:20

Next chapter, Mary lays what? Baby Jesus in the manger.

55:26

Want to know what word the writers of scripture chose to use? Bereifos. The same term for the child in the womb and the child outside the womb, therefore teaching us that God sees no distinction.

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The only question is, does Tim Keller and Ed Stetzer and Russell Moore see a distinction? And they do see a distinction because their treatment of these issues is incredibly hypocritical and incredibly different.

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And it tells us that had they lived in 1850s, had they lived in 1940s, far from being part of the confessing church or far from palling around with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, they would have been the silent shepherds then.

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Well, Seth, that's powerful. Everything that you've said, and I'm assuming that, you know, in your ministry, you help people organize, give them direction on a pro -life ministry.

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So people can go find you at, where would you like them to go? Thewhiterose .life? Yeah, if you want to join sort of the new movement that we're building,

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The White Rose Resistance, thewhiterose .life, and then to connect with me, sethgruber .com. And then the podcast is where we talk about everything, just like you talk about everything,

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John. We talk about everything regarding pro -life. I bring in other issues because all these issues kind of connect. But the focus is abortion, equipping the

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Christians and the good people to actually use their voice and speak out and do something, and contending against the culture of death and their arguments and exposing it.

56:47

Well, I appreciate it, brother. Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us. Yeah, thank you,