Kevin McGary Neil Mammen on "Remnant Rising"

Alright, hello everyone, welcome to Conversations That Matter. We have a special episode today with two special guests.

We have Neil Mamman, the Executive Vice President of Every Black Life Matters, as well as Kevin McGarry, who is the

President of that organization. And Kevin was on a few weeks ago, and we talked a little bit about the election and his organization.

But they have a new initiative called Remnant Rising, and I really wanted all of you guys to know about it.

And here's the reason. Number one, these guys are brave, and there's not a lot of people right now who are brave enough to take on the

Black Lives Matter movement, message, etc. And then the second thing is, they're unique, because they're actually doing something about it.

They want to go around the country, they want to talk to churches about liberation theology and critical race theory and the dangers of these things, and present the biblical alternative.

So I'm going to hand the floor over to them, and welcome guys, thank you so much for coming on.

Wow, thank you, John. Really appreciate the opportunity to re -engage with you.

Of course, you and I were on a couple weeks ago, and I have the privilege of having

Neil Mamman, who's our co -founder, here with me today. And Neil is really an intellectual when it comes to critical race theory and some of the other topics that we discuss at our

Remnant Rising workshops. But I just wanted to commend you. I've been really following you for a little bit now, and I just want to thank you for having the gumption, the fortitude, to be on Front Street with combating and challenging some of these folks in our church, you know, like Keller and Piper and some of the others that you've done exposés on.

So it's a real honor for Neil and I to be here with you to really further explore how we can bring the church along with understanding the dangers, the demonic dangers of CRT, liberation theology, social justice gospel.

These things are corrosive, divisive, and dangerous to our theology.

They're anti -gospel. And we need to expose it. So Neil and I have been working on this initiative that's specific to the body of Christ, and we're excited to be here to talk to you about it.

Yeah, well, I appreciate it, Kevin. It gets lonely in the foxhole sometimes, so I'm really happy to have two others with me who are going to take this on.

I want to ask Neil, if you would, just give us a little background to what made you interested in taking on the

Black Lives Matter movement as a Christian. And then give me maybe some of the problems that you have with the message that's coming from that movement.

Well, let me give you a bit of my background. My uncle was chairman of the

World Council of Churches. That's my dad's brother. The World Council of Churches, as you know, was on the forefront of liberation theology, was pushing all this thing back in the 60s.

He was actually the chairman back in the 60s. I come from a family of Marxists. In fact, at the dinner table, when

I would go home, when I went, I shouldn't go home, but when I went to India in the summers, the discussion was whether people should be joining the

Communist Party of India or the Communist Party of India Marxists. That was the argument, whether you should join the

CPI or the CPM. And this was the big discussion, the big argument, how one would lead to a better result and all that.

So I grew up in that. My dad was both a communist and an atheist until I was about five or six.

So I don't remember him being either of those, but I do know that that was a lot of steep in him growing up.

And so with all this background, when I started seeing what was happening with BLM and their foundation in Marxism, I said, well, hey,

I know this stuff. I grew up in this stuff. I was steeped in this stuff growing up. I was born in Africa and I grew up there.

And so when this whole thing started, one of the things that I noticed is that, I mean, when

I came here from Africa, I came here back in the 80s, I never felt that there was much racism in America.

I know it started back in the 70s, but with the civil rights movement and the change of the laws and everything,

I actually never experienced it directly. I did experience racists. I mean, I did run into one or two racists, but like these guys are just jerks and everybody else was wonderful to me.

So I never thought it was anything. So when this paradigm shift, well, America is a racist country.

I'm like, wait, wait, when, where, right? If anyone should have experienced that, it would be me as well as people who are the

Blacks of America, but also the colored people and all those. And I just hadn't experienced it.

So I started looking into it and starting to understand it. And that's what started me interested in this, was

BLM a valid movement? Did they have a valid right? They have a good reason.

And then as I looked more into it, I realized that one, they were Marxists and well, that immediately made me suspicious.

But the second part of it is I realized a lot of Christians want to declare that they are not, they're not racist.

They want to tell people they're not racist. But the very fact that if you tell people that you're not a racist, they think you're a racist, you know, it's the old, well,

I'm not a racist, but I have Black friends. Well, that's a sign of racism. Well, is it? You know, but that's the, that's the narrative there.

And so the second part of that was they couldn't really join up with BLM because of Marxism and everything that BLM was teaching.

And the more that you study about BLM, you realize the very things that they prescribe as a solution is the very things that cause the plight of the

African American community. It's the very thing that caused what we consider systemic racism in America.

So Christians couldn't embrace that. And yet they couldn't say they were not a racist. So they need a venue, they need an avenue, and we need real solutions out there.

So that's where all this happened and where we started talking to Kevin about it, the Frederick Douglass Foundation.

Yeah, well, that's good. And Every Black Lives Matters is, I mean, you even pick the name to be kind of an alternative.

People searching for Black Lives Matter might even come up with your website and, hey, hold on, what's this?

It's the opposite of everything on the Black Lives Matter website, which is, it is kind of humorous.

Kevin, I want to ask you something. You, you know, last time we were talking on the show, we're explaining a little bit about the origin of this organization, what your intention was, but now you want to get more directly into churches with this new initiative, this

Remnant Rising. What can people expect? Ideally, if you and Neil were to come to their church and maybe do a seminar on these issues, what would happen?

Yeah. So let me talk a little bit about the premise. You know, why would we even think Remnants Rising is needed or, you know, whether it's something that the body of Christ should even engage us in.

The reason why we're starting this initiative is because our last election told us a lot.

Essentially, there's a lot of statistics now that talk about, you know, evangelicals actually voted for President Trump and his policies and initiatives 5 % less than in 2016.

In general, Christians voted for Trump 54 % and 46 % voted for Biden.

So we see virtually a 50 -50 split with people who self -profess to be Christians.

What that means is that we have a divided body of Christ. In other words, this is not the beautiful Remnant bride that Jesus is coming back for.

This is not the bride without a spot or a wrinkle. Right now, we have a divided bride.

Now, a lot of it may not be purposeful. In other words, people vote the way they vote and believe the way they believe about culture.

A lot of it may be, you know, out of ignorance.

And I don't mean that derogatory. I mean ignorant. They just don't know. They haven't connected the dots with culture.

They haven't connected the dots with some of these major movements in new theological ideas.

And so they don't know, you know, and they just vote how they vote. They've done what they've done out of tradition.

And we are where we are. So what Neil and I really want to address is to go into our church body, our church communities, and begin to have conversations and help them to connect the dots with culture.

Because right now, we have pastors that actually, a lot of them, as you've been exposing for months here, nor for the past year or so, a lot of them actually embrace this sort of demonic theology and infuse it in the gospel.

So we have people within the body of Christ that are a little confused. Like, well, it seems like some of the tenets of CRT are okay because my pastor may even be preaching about some of these things.

It seems like liberation theology is harmless because I've heard my pastor talk about some of these things in these ways.

It seems like social justice as part of our gospel is part of the gospel.

These are all misnomers. These are all demonic, you know, plots to sort of, you know, change our theology and our understanding of the gospel.

And Neil and I want to be able to go into churches, talk specifically about these items, social justice, critical race theory, liberation theology, and really do a full exposition about these, you know, sort of reprobate ideas and do a juxtaposition with the gospel.

So, and what we want to do is not have, we don't call them conferences because conferences, we think, have been, have not really served us well.

You have great speakers come in, say what they say, and then you're expecting that people in the parishioners and the pews would get what they get and go home changed.

Well, by and large, it hasn't served us well. That's not happening. What we want to do is get the conversation up on the table, explain what we're talking about, and then take any and all questions fully interactive with the pews, people in the pews, church leadership, whoever.

And so we can reason together in a public forum, very specifically challenging one another on these issues.

Right now, we don't have forums that really fully do that. And so the only way that we're going to get the remnant body to really be on one accord and to unify around the things that are important in the gospel is we've got to go in and have these sort of engaging conversations.

And so that's what we're, these things are, these workshops are designed to do. And you're right, we are ready, willing, and able starting in 2021 to go anywhere and everywhere in the country and for, you know, on Saturdays and have this lively dialogue and actually work these things out publicly.

Yeah, that's inspiring to me just to see that the willingness to go do something like this. There's a lot of talk, but action is another thing.

And you guys have, I mean, I saw you guys in Washington, D .C. from California, you flew there. So I see you're willing to put in the work, which is really important to me.

You mentioned three things, Kevin. You mentioned liberation theology, sort of this idea that Jesus is a revolutionary figure who came to start a revolution.

That's the purpose of his coming. And I'm oversimplifying here a little bit for sake of time.

But you mentioned critical race theory, that there's systemic racism embedded in all these institutions. And we need these minority perspectives to find solutions to it.

You mentioned social justice, which is kind of now an umbrella term that can include feminism and all sorts of other things.

But the thing that really pervades all of this at the root is Marxism.

And Neil, you talked about that growing up as a Marxist. You recognize this CRT stuff, this

Black Lives Matter message as a Marxist message. I want to play devil's advocate with you for a moment, if you don't mind.

You're at one of these, and I know you're not calling them conferences, but these events that you want to do to really get people to think, get people to be biblical.

And someone asked you in the audience, all right, I'm seeing all the things you're seeing. What's wrong with Marxism, though?

Why can't I have Marxism and Christianity at the same time? What do you say,

Neil? Now, we answered this question in the framework of Christianity.

So I'm assuming that when I'm talking to a person, I'm going to be talking and drawing from the Bible as the source of our agreement here.

Because otherwise, I have to set the foundation of morality, objective truth, objective morality as a bachelor.

So this is an easier audience. Well, the reality is quite simply this. If you believe the Bible, then Marxism will not work.

Because Marxism claims that we are going to work as hard as we can and only take what we need.

Basically, everybody will participate as hard as they can and only take the minimum they require.

But as a minute you believe in the Bible, you realize that we have a sin nature, that all men are totally depraved, if you will.

We are inherently evil. And it takes the Holy Spirit for us to come away from that.

So now if you take the whole population of people and you say, hey, you're going to work as hard as you can and only take what you need.

Well, what about greed? What about the seven deadly sins? What about laziness?

What about pride and avarice and all that? You go through all that. Well, guess what? We're not going to work as hard as we can.

We're going to work as little as we need. And instead of taking only as little as we want, we will take as much as we can.

So you end up with working as little as you need and taking as much as you can. And what happens? Well, you end up with what?

Starvation. You end up with less goods, less productivity. Who wants to work on that?

And then guess what happens when that happens? The government that you've given all this power says, hey, people aren't working as hard.

We have to bring some draconian measures to force them to work harder. You know, like the saying goes, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

You know, so they get in there and they try to bring all these dictatorial things. You know, you can't do this, you can't do this.

We need to control the people more. And guess what? Marxism fails completely because it violates all the basic principles.

One, that people who have power will not want more power. So it violates the separation of power. It violates the idea that people are not lazy, that people are not greedy.

It just falls apart. In reality, yes, Marxism will work in only two places, in a family, right?

Where they're all working together and it's small and maybe in heaven. And I don't know about that either, but you know, when we're all perfected, but it's not gonna work on earth.

And as a result, we get the, and just look at the history of it. Of course, every Marxist I've met says, well, it hasn't worked because we've not done it right.

Well, guess what? We'll never do it right, so. And I'd love to hear more about your story.

I mean, that's fascinating to me that you grew up Marxist, you're a Christian, you see the error in it.

I mean, is this a personal thing for you that when you see people being drawn to this Marxist message, does it just kind of bother you more because you realize that,

I mean, almost maybe it's a false religion. I don't wanna put those words in your mouth, but is that how you see it? Not really, because it was never, you know, it was one of those things where, when

I came to America, I was more of a socialist, not really a Marxist, more socialistic in thinking.

And over the years, I was disabused by it because I would get in these horrendous debates and discussions and I would lose every one of them.

And I actually, I write about this in my book and over the years, I'm like, I'm losing all these discussions because there's so much

I know that's not so, right? Ronald Reagan says. And so it was a gradual changing until one day,

I woke up and I guess I am a conservative, but you know, I didn't realize that. So it wasn't such an emotional, but I'll tell you where the emotional part comes in.

The emotional part comes in is when our kids think the system will work, right?

I mean, when I go to India to argue, to my, you know, to family reunions and stuff,

I'm the black sheep because they're all still Marxists, right? They're all holding on, which is funny because they're all businessmen, they all have successful businesses, but they still hold on to this idea of Marxism.

Well, in that case, why are you a capitalist? Why are you making money through business?

You know, there's this whole dilemma that they have. It's a dichotomy. So, but it, where it does hit me emotionally is that I see the impact on young people who have never studied history, who have an idealized version of the world and who don't realize that you can vote yourself into communism or socialism, but you got to shoot your way out of it.

And they don't understand that. Well said, definitely well said. I'd like to just add a little bit more to that.

Neil is, he's a wealth of knowledge on this subject and he's a renowned apologist as well.

So he has, you know, decades of work as an apologist. And if we had more time, we would go into more detail, but I just like to summarily say that in addition to that, most of the questions that we get within the body of Christ about Marxism, socialism, kind of being okay, relate to Acts 2, where they had all things in common.

What we have to do is go back to the scriptures, understand the context of what that was, and help our brothers and sisters in the

Lord understand what they're reading. What they're reading is they had all things in common.

And then if you ask a simple question, so who had all things in common? It was the church.

And so what I tell pastors is, so what it would look like to you, Mr. Pastor, if you were sincere, if you're sincere about socialism,

Marxism is okay, what that means for you is that you need to go to everybody in your church and say, hey, does everybody have a job?

Does everybody have transportation? Does everybody have means of taking care of their families and themselves?

And for those that don't, you, pastor, put yourself on the line and make sure that all of those needs are met.

That's the context. It is not government. It is the church that is supposed to, in that regard, help make sure that all the church members have at least all of their basic needs met because they're a family.

So first of all, pastors would need to hold themselves accountable to a new standard because the churches

I go to, they don't, they just bring people in and gather. They don't check to see how people are doing necessarily.

If you, you know, if something, if you run into hardship or somebody dies, there's different churches that have benevolent funds, but this is not something that's talked about or mentioned as a ministry.

This is something that's opportunistically there for those who are in the know. But the reality is, if we're sincere about that notion, first of all, we would completely forget government being involved.

And second of all, we would say, we're going to use this model to, within our church body, so we could make sure that we are reflecting, you know, the acts to church.

And from what I understand, no churches do that. So that's the real one. Number two, real quick, real quick. Number two is the other thing that people need to remember is that Marxism is not a new notion.

It started in the 1500s with Plato and then Thomas Hope Moore, Thomas Hobbes, and then

Hegel. So it had multiple iterations before Marx and Engels got it in the late 1800s.

One thing that all of these men had in common, one fundamental common denominator, they were all virulent atheists.

They hated God and they hated the notion of God. So the question then for the church, if you were going to say, well,

Marxism, okay, this is a demonic thing. Are you really sure that you want to say this is okay?

I mean, look at who, look at all of the authors of it and who popularized it. They hated

God and hated the notion of God. They were all virulent atheists. They were all, they practiced demonism in that regard.

So how could you say that this is somehow acceptable? Do you understand what I'm saying? So there's a lot that are unpacked, but Neil and I go through these iterations with the church body.

So we could begin to be on the same playing field. So we can reason and rationally walk through this together.

And that's the point. I wanted to ask you, and this is for either of you, really quick,

I know you could probably say a lot about it, but the thing you mentioned, Neil, the emotional kind of barrier that especially children have when they're sucked into the narrative that's currently going on.

And I know we play spin the wheel. It's Black Lives Matter right now. We might go back to the Me Too thing next year, who knows?

And then there's always a new victim group that we need to all care about and the world stops for that.

Right now, racism is the big word, right? And a young person who just genuinely cares, right?

Sincere, and I don't want to see racism. I don't want people to be treated poorly because of the tone of their skin.

And so they get sucked into Black Lives Matter. Either one of you, what would you say to that parent or that child who's attracted to that to kind of quickly point out the errors and tell them, look, you don't want to go down that path?

Well, I think the danger that we think, and this is something that kids have to learn, is that if you give someone everything they want, does not mean that you're helping them.

So that's the first thing. So one of the reasons that people call, like for instance, one party racist and the other party not, is because one party says, no, we want you to be self -dependent.

We're going to encourage you to go out and get things done. And the other party says, oh, you're trying to starve them, right?

So as I always say, it's very hard to convince the chicken in the hen house that the father, sorry, that the farmer is not there for her benefit when he feeds her, clothes her, provides food and healthcare and everything for free, right?

Right. And this is the danger. So when you talk to the youth, you're saying, look,

I understand that you want equity. I understand that you want fairness, but you have to understand that you're not going to get it by making people dependent on the state.

In fact, studies have shown, there's so many studies that have shown that one, the state is inefficient in how it provides the welfare.

In other words, for every dollar you give the state, maybe 15 cents actually gets to the poor person. And you ask people, wouldn't you like it to be more?

Secondly, we found that for every year a child is on welfare, their IQ goes down by a certain percentage.

Why? Because it's the way the state handles this. But that doesn't happen when you go through a charity. So we're not saying that people shouldn't be taken care of.

We're saying, look, we agree people should be taken care of, but it's not the government's role, it's the church's role.

Jesus said, you take care of the poor, not force your neighbor to. As I say, advocating taxes for charity is nothing more than you going to your neighbor with a gun and forcing him to donate to your favorite charity, right?

You don't have the right to do that. You don't have the wherewithal to, and you don't have the wisdom to decide which are the best charities.

You don't have that amazing intellect, nor does the government. I mean, who are these amazing, intelligent agents of change that know exactly where money should go and exactly who should be helped and exactly, you know, and every time you help one group of people, you're actually hurting another group of people because you're taking money that somebody else would have sent.

Right. And then I finally say, look, if you really think about it, it is never safe to give the government more power if you're a minority.

If you look throughout the history of the world, yeah, there are times when some minorities have had power in the government, but eventually the majority takes power back and guess what?

The minority suffers. You want the government to have less power always so that this can happen.

Yeah, that's good, because you're talking about getting into kind of the fundamental assumptions that are just behind that, that many of us are unaware of, but Black Lives Matter and other organizations that are

Marxist prey upon that. They take that into account, that we're just gonna assume the government should be the arbiter of these things.

I wanna ask either one of you again, kind of in closing here, if someone wants to have you, host you at their church, who should they go to?

How should they get in touch with you? And then any final words that you have? Yeah, so again, this initiative is called

Remnant Rising, and we'd love to engage any and all churches across America. And because we have a complete curriculum and we actually deconstruct all of these very challenging topics and help bring some reality to it.

And so they could reach us on our website, everyblm .com.

So everyblm .com, and they can go there and message us or provide comments or ask for additional information directly from the website.

And we'll get back to them and we'll do whatever we have to do to make sure that we can accommodate them.

And I was noticing, because I was just on the website, it's very user -friendly. So if you go there immediately, a chat bar comes up, if you wanna get in touch with,

I guess that's gonna go to you, Kevin or Neil, and then you can schedule a time to come out to a church.

Is it just churches for this Remnant Rising where if someone's listening, maybe they're part of the homeschool group or something, would they be able to invite you to come?

Absolutely, but it's primarily for faith communities. And there's a very, very good reason why.

At the end of the day, we're addressing these challenging topics, but we're addressing them based on a fundamental principle that supposedly we all agree on, the word of God.

And so Neil and I could talk about these weighty subjects because our final authority is this, and we have all confidence in this, right?

So, but a lot of us don't connect the dots of this with life or with culture.

And so that's why the Lord is using Neil and I to really help bridge that gap, connect those dots, and help people, bring people along.

So we can be unified. Within the body of Christ, statistics tell us we're not. And so we need to do better.

We need to be that beautiful bride that Jesus is coming back for. And so as long as these communities are faith communities, that's fine, homeschooling, whatever.

We're glad to do those as well. Perfect. So if you're in a parachurch or an organization, a

Christian organization, and you want someone to come out and address the topics of critical race theory, liberation theology, social justice,

Marxism, from a biblical standpoint, then you need to talk to Neil. You need to talk to Kevin.

You need to go to everyblacklifematters .com and chat with them there. Guys, I really appreciate you coming on and being willing to stick your neck out, because I know this is not popular in every quarter.

So thank you so much once again, and God bless. Thank you again for having us,

John. There's a lot of churches being torn apart. Leadership, the leadership within churches, because they can't agree on these weighty issues.

So we want to help, and this is our way that we could bring leadership and parishioners together and have everyone on one accord.

So that's our goal. And thank you again for having us. Really appreciate it. Well, my pleasure, guys. Have a good one. Bye now.