Judd Saul Answers Questions About His New Documentary

Reception of *Enemies Within the Church* and Early Viewer Reactions

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is Jon Harris. We have a special guest with us today, Judd Saul, from the Enemies Within the Church movie. How are you doing, Judd?

Wonderful, sir. Thank you for having me on, and it's good to see you.

So I want to talk to you a little bit about the movie, Enemies Within the Church, because it is out, as I understand it. People can go and get it. You just had a premiere a few weeks ago in Sioux City.

Yeah, just kind of

I just want to say, Jon, it's actually out.

Yeah, it's actually, it's been a few years.

Actually, yeah, we're done.

Yeah.

It's up.

People can see it now.

Yeah, thank God for that. I think a lot of people have been wanting to get to that finish line, and you're there. Okay, first tell us about some of the reaction, then, of people who have actually seen it.

We'll start with them, right? Not the people who haven't seen it, but people who have actually seen the movie. What do they think?

Wow, we are getting overwhelming support, and let me start over again. Some lady walked in my office, so hold on a second.

Okay.

We are getting overwhelming support. It is absolutely amazing, the response we're getting from all over the country, and, in fact, the world. People are being able to access this internationally, and one of the reviews we got, and I don't know if I should advertise it like this, but one of the persons saw the film.

They sent me a message. They said, this film was like a brick to my face, and I was like, I don't know if I could really quote that, but I said, what do you mean it was a brick to your face? And they said, it's a very heavy film, and it's a lot to digest.

It's like drinking from a fire hose, but the way, they say, the way we put it all together and gave them a clear picture of the current state of what is happening with Christianity in America as a whole, where it's at, how bad things actually have gotten, and how far away from the scriptures we've become, and he said it was a brick to the face because he had to do some soul-searching and realized the error in his own life, in his own worldview, in his own walk through Christianity, how much world and liberalism he let slip in in his worldview and in his walk through Christ.

And we're getting, we're really getting that same response from everybody that sees the film. It's not just exposing enemies within the church and naming names, which we do a lot of, but we attack theologically where we went wrong, and I think that message is reflecting with everybody that's seen the film.

And we've had pastors say, some pastors that have seen the film, different denominations, and I've had four pastors say the same thing who don't know each other. They said, there are many weeks and times we just wanna give up.

We wanna give up because the culture, our congregants are just, they're just going along with the world. We don't see people repenting. And they said that this movie actually gave them hope, gave them hope and gives them strength knowing that there's other people out there, other pastors out there that are really ready to take the fight to Satan and attack the enemy at their gates.

Premiere in Sioux City and a Classy Film Event

Yeah, excellent. So you had a premiere, I know, in Sioux City a few weeks ago. How'd that go?

Well, it was very sad and lonely because John Harris wasn't there.

Sorry I couldn't make it.

No, the premiere was wonderful because it was a chance for several people who were in the film came across the country to come see it. We had supporters from all over the country come see the film. And it ended with clapping and cheering throughout the whole film and a big standing ovation and people in tears.

Wow.

Because finally somebody said what needed to be said and compiled it all in a form. That is, I'm not gonna say it's easy to digest, but it's palatable.

Yeah.

So you had this event, which by the way, for people who didn't see pictures of this, it would look like 1930s Hollywood if you just made it black and white. Everyone had tuxedos. It was like an old school film premiere before actors showed up looking like hobos.

It was done, it was very classy. You had it in this very kind of Gilded Age themed theater. And some people don't care about those little details, but I thought that was quite interesting. That all it says is that you're taking this very seriously.

You think this is a big deal and you're treating it like a big deal. And the false teaching entering the church is a very big deal. And the film deals with that. So good reactions, good events. Now, fast forward to while we're having this conversation, there's currently on social media, on Twitter specifically, some pushback you're getting from people that I'm assuming have not seen the film.

You wanna just address that?

Pushback from Southern Baptist Leaders and the Charge of Slander

Yeah, right off the get-go, we have Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary going off and attacking another seminary, which is a Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary. So we have Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the flagship seminaries of Southern Baptist Convention, attacking a smaller Baptist Theological Seminary in Tennessee because a group is using their space to show our film.

And instead of making phone calls, instead of Adam Greenway from Southwestern calling a Mid-American Baptist Theological Seminary and saying, hey, maybe we have a concern, they just put it out on social media, slamming the film.

And then following in Southern Baptist Pravda fashion, the Baptist Press writes an article, and then we're starting to see tweets from other Big Eva Southern Baptist leaders attacking our film. Thing is, to my knowledge, they haven't seen the actual film, and so they're calling it slanderous and full of lies when all they saw was a two-and-a-half-minute trailer.

And they call it full of lies. Well, they haven't even seen the film yet. And all I can say is this, these guys are acting just like the leftists do in trying to shut down free speech and silence opposing views, and trying to bully other people into silencing opposing views.

Well, let me ask you this. Did Adam Greenway, did he reach out to you?

No, Adam Greenway never reached out to me.

What about the people he's attacking in CBN or Mid-America? Did he reach out to them?

He never called them.

And you've talked to them to find out if he did?

I've spoken to them on a few occasions, and Adam Greenway has never called them.

Okay, so that's interesting, because usually in the SBC, you're supposed to go in private and get things right. And that's the accusation that I often get is, John, why did you go out and accuse these people of false teaching or something?

And you should have talked to them and worked it out first, right? And I've dealt with that objection, but it's interesting.

But you know as well as I do that only applies to conservatives.

That seems to be the case. Well, they call themselves conservatives, but I don't know what they're conserving exactly. So there's a double standard, it seems like to me at least, that he did not reach out to you about his issue.

And the trailer's been, how long has the trailer even been out there?

Oh man, the trailer's been out for a long time. We've had it out for several months.

Okay, so when's the event? It's on the 20th?

Yeah, it's on Saturday.

So waiting until a few days before the event to attack three different institutions, well, three different organizations, enemies within the church, Mid-America, and CBN.

It's a total cheap shot. It's a total cheap shot by them. And frankly, I'm just gonna say this publicly. I said, these guys have made the stupidest decision to try to address this as possible. I mean, they went about this completely the wrong way.

Because what they've done is, they have, thank you, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for drawing more attention to the movie. And I maybe call this part of God's plan because now more people are gonna find out what's actually going on at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary because you've drawn more attention to the film.

Controversy, Attention, and Increased Streaming

Yeah, and I, well, I encourage you, the way that I look at this is, Twitter's kind of a leftist echo chamber at this point. And if you get, let's say you get 1 ,500 likes on a tweet or something, and all a bunch of leftists, rah, rah, rah, against people who sometimes they don't think they're leftists, but they're acting that way, against CBN and against you and against Mid-America.

And these are people that never would have probably watched your film anyway. They never would have paid the money. And we'll talk about that later, how people can go see the film, but they never would have paid to watch this thing.

But now that they've started a controversy, controversy just automatically, in my experience, draws attention. People, for whatever reason, especially now in the way things are, people love a controversy.

They love seeing who said what and who's made to look a certain way and what the response was. I mean, it's just, it's like drama. It's soap opera stuff. It's just, people love it. And I'm not accusing anyone of anything necessarily into, you know, in particular, I'm just saying like, that's just a trend I've seen.

You can say all kinds of really truthful things, but until there's a controversy, people aren't gonna listen to it. So now that there's a controversy over it, that can spill outside of Twitter. That can go into actually places where there might be people who would see your film, who are now drawn to it and they never would have heard of it, except for the fact that there's controversy and people are talking about it now in other places.

So, and without all those negative Twitter comments, necessarily, they're not seeing all those. So it's just, I think you're right. I think this probably is gonna actually make you some more or raise more money for the film and bring more attention to it and more people are gonna be interested.

So

Well, ever since they've done this, our pay-per-view streamings are going through the roof right now.

Oh, are you serious?

Yeah, yeah.

We're seeing a huge result and a result of them bringing this up. And we're seeing a lot of people stream the film now. And the funny thing is, I'm just saying Southwestern, if you haven't seen the film and you go out and attack the film, you might want to be able to know what's in it before you start attacking it because it's shedding a lot of light what's going on in your university.

Yeah, yeah.

And guys

Well, they know, Judd, they know. They know what's going on at the university.

They know what's going on.

They know what they're hiding from. And this is all they have. This is all they have is ad hominem attacks.

Yeah, I know.

Oh, it's slanderous. There's false accusations. Okay, first tell me what are the false accusations? How are we slandering? And please refute what we're saying. If you have any, if you call yourself an educational institution, please tell us where we are wrong other than just calling us names.

I would love it.

Well, one of the interesting things I noticed, there's a hit piece in another publication that doesn't even bear mentioning because I don't know if hardly anyone reads it, but they went ad hominem on all the producers, right?

You're, you know, conspiracy theorists and racists and, you know, all the typical names that I think conservatives now just yawn when they see them because they don't mean anything anymore. They're just negative, you know, the worst thing you can possibly call someone, but it's utterly meaningless at this point.

And so what was my point? I was gonna say when they do this, I think what it does is it shows the emperor has no clothes. They have to go on the offensive because they don't have anything else, but it's vacuous.

There's actually not really communicating anything other than disapproval. And then everyone comes and piles on with their disapproval. But the one thing they won't do is actually have an adult conversation about truth.

They've given up truth. And it seems, it feels very Romans one to me. It feels very like exchanging truth. Truth does not matter anymore, really. It's all about optics and fashion and image and trying to make someone look a certain way by saying things about them and hoping it'll stick and hoping enough people from a mob will also repeat it.

That's kind of, those are the tactics being used. And that should concern people when you have supposed conservatives running your seminary. And these are the tactics that they employ. They're not about adult conversations and about truth anymore.

There's no place for it. I quote David Wells, there's no place for truth anymore. And that's what this is pointing out. And one last thing before, and then I want to get your comment. When you say that you are not a critical race theory driven school, or you don't believe in critical race theory, I'm not a critical race theorist, right?

But then the first thing out of your mouth is to accuse other people of racism. And you don't have any evidence that they've gone and they've hurt any, you know, I'm talking about actually hurt anyone because of some motivation of hatred against ethnic minorities or something like that.

You don't have any evidence of that. It's all optics. It's all, well, they said this, or they said that. And it can be interpreted as offensive by people who are offended by everything. That's critical race theory.

It's proving the point of the film. That's one of the things that struck me in some of these comments that I saw is like, they're a racist. It's like, how do you get to that point without employing critical race theory to make your case?

You're proving what they're saying. So I'd like to hear your reaction now. Sorry, that was long.

No, the best evidence we have is themselves. It's not like we're going out saying, these guys are doing this, these guys are doing this,.

These guys are doing this.

Half the time it's, okay, here we're showing pictures of what they've said, we're showing tweets, we're showing video, audio recordings, class syllabuses, everything. So we're just showing you what they're doing.

That's it.

You can look at the evidence for yourself and determine, are they teaching critical race theory? Are they teaching post-modernism? Are they teaching social justice? And this is with any institution that we've named in our film.

The evidence speaks for itself, and it doesn't take a very high IQ person to figure that out. And that's all they have. That's all they have is to make fun of us, is to ridicule us with ad hominem attacks.

And I'm just gonna say we stand by our evidence and it's gonna make them look real foolish once our next week, the evidence documents, all kinds of stuff is going up in regards to our film. And it's irrefutable.

We've had attorneys look at our evidence. We've had attorneys go through the whole film. We showed them the evidence of things that we were saying. They said, yeah, you guys are clear. If you went into a court of law, you would win.

Wow, wow.

So what I'm just saying is, guys,.

If you call us racist and you say it's slanderous, you tell us we're lying, please show us where we're lying and where we're wrong. Refute the evidence coming from your own institutions.

I dare you.

Why the Film Resonates and What It Exposes in the Church

Yeah, yeah.

No, that's very good. And I think the ground is shifting. I get the sense that, so those accusations that are made, the one thing that will still kind of do is the elites who want to pretend to lead conservatism run for the hills.

They don't wanna be associated with anything that could get them called names too. But I sense a shift on the ground level, at least, the conservatives in these denominations. And most of the people that are actually paying the bills for these institutions are conservatives.

They are impervious to this. It's just these attacks mean nothing to them. They can see right through it. And in fact, it motivates them to oppose these evil people. Frankly, I'll just say it. I'm not putting the word in your mouth, but evil people even harder because they've seen now for a few years how the game is played.

They've seen how Donald Trump was treated. They've seen how anyone who takes a stand, a public stand for truth is treated. And they are sick of this flimsy, limp-wristed kind of, you know, oh yeah, I'm against CRT.

By the way, you know, you're a racist, right? You know, I'm afraid of being called a racist. They're just sick of it. They want someone with guts. That, I'm sensing this from a groundswell level. Are you sensing that as well?

That's why our film is just over the weekend and the short time it's been around been an overwhelming success is that people want someone to tell it like it is and to show what is really happening on the ground.

It's, look, when you see critical race theory, when you see social justice and you see a pastor going Marxist and you say, hey, that guy's going Marxist. Those are all Marxist talking points. And then you get from the leadership and the deacons and the elders of the church, that's not happening here.

That's not happening. What are you talking about? That's not happening. It's the same play with all the Southern Baptist seminaries and entities. We show people actually advocating for liberation theology straight out of James Cone, communist theology.

And they say, oh, that's not happening here. Well, we have the guy saying, this is liberation theology. I like James Cone.

Right, right. I know, I know. It's like, look, guys. It's gaslighting everyone. They're gaslighting everyone.

And the people are seeing that from the mainstream media. They see people burning buildings, tearing cities to the ground. And the media says, these are peaceful protesters. I think people are kind of waking up and going, no, we want people who speak the truth, have nothing to hide, and are willing to take all the shots to tell that truth.

And that is where people are gonna decide, at least the truth-seeking Christian remnant are gonna care enough about the truth, wanna know truth, and stand for truth.

Well, how many, oh, sorry.

The rest of it's counterfeit fake Christianity. And that's what we're dealing with.

Distribution, Pricing, and Promotion for the Film

How many people have seen the film?

Oh, my word.

I can't give you official people. I can tell you, I don't wanna give specific figures, but thousands have purchased the film, thousands.

Okay.

Not just 1 ,000, thousands have purchased the film over the weekend, and we're getting feedback flooding in, and the more people watch it, the more people are sharing it, and more and more people are watching the film.

Where can people go? Just give us kind of the directions that people wanna go watch this film. What can they do?

They can go right to enemieswithinthechurch .com, www .enemieswithinthechurch .com, all one word. And you can pay to stream it right through our website, or you can order your DVD.

Okay, and how much is it to stream it and get a DVD?

To stream it is $12 .95. To purchase a DVD is $14 .95. And all the DVDs are being shipped out first week of December.

Any promo codes or anything people should know about?

We're working on one right now. It's a little secret, but we'll be dropping that a little bit later today.

Okay, all right. So, we'll wait with anticipation for that. And they can see where the promo code is by going where? Just to the website?

Go on our Facebook page, facebook .com slash enemieswithinthechurch. Or you can join our Facebook group, which is enemieswithinthechurch launch team, and we'll be putting it up out there as well. And then I think we have a lot of friends who have blogs and who have a social media presence that will be advertising it as well.

But we're working on a little special something.

Future Tour Plans, Calls to Repentance, and Prayer Requests

Okay, awesome, yeah. All right, well, tell us anything else you want to add to this. I mean, it sounds like the movie's successful. Sounds like the efforts to stop it are just backfiring. So, what other good news can you give us?

The good news is that next year, we have been contacted by over 150 venues, churches, groups that want to have us come show the film personally in their area next year. And so we are working on building a tour starting in January, which will be having a whole tour schedule up, announcing dates.

We're just kind of going through all this stuff because everything's just flooding in right now. We're trying to handle it. But the support has been overwhelming. People that were kind of skeptical after seeing the film were like, we can't deny it.

We can't deny what's been going on. And I just pray, and our prayer is that, one, the people in the film, we pray they come to repentance.

Absolutely.

We don't want to see lives destroyed. We don't want to see ministries destroyed. We don't want them to come to repentance and go in the right direction of following the scriptures and leading people to Christ and pushing a real gospel.

Then the other thing is, is that if they don't, if they double down on their lives, like we've seen some certain Southern Baptist entities doing they need to be removed from ministry and people need to stop funding this source.

They need to stop giving their money to these institutions. They need to call them to task immediately. And they need to quit sending their money where kids and people are being led astray into a false gospel.

Amen. Amen.

Yeah, and your heart's in the right place. I mean, I can tell you, you actually care about this. You wouldn't have made the movie if you didn't and the people that even are attacking you you want to see them in heaven with you and you're not desiring any ill upon them.

And so, you know, I appreciate it. I appreciate you taking a stand. I know it's rough sitting where I sit. I understand to some extent, at least how rough it can be to say things about popular leaders or even not popular ones, but ones that have a lot of people that have a lot of money and institutions and you were willing to do it because you love people and you don't want them following a false gospel and false teaching.

So, hey, just appreciate that. How can people be praying for you and the movie?

Just pray for strength, resolve, and pray for our wisdom because we know this isn't the first attack. We're going to get many, many along the way. Pray that we handle it in the most wise way possible.

It's real easy to just kind of step back and get angry and get defensive and lash out on the first shot. But we know that other people are watching how we behave. And I just pray that this makes a difference with everyone who gets touched by this and pray that we can handle it properly.

Awesome, all right. Enemieswithinthechurch .com. Thank you, Judd, appreciate it.

Thank you, John.