Phil Vischer's Voting Video & Kevin McGary on Every BLM

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna do, hopefully, a short episode. We're gonna talk about a Phil Vischer video that I haven't seen, that a few people have asked me to comment on.

For those who don't know, Phil Vischer was the creator of the children's show Veggie Tales, and then I'm gonna have Kevin McGarry explain his organization, Every Black Life Matters, which is meant to be a counter movement to the Black Lives Matter movement.

He's gonna weigh in on the election as well. And so, let's get started. Number one, Phil Vischer. Phil Vischer is someone I normally, I don't find his content overly interesting or needing a reply, but what's really happened with Phil Vischer, it seems to me at least, is he's gone leftist this year for some reason.

Something has caused him to veer towards the left, and so he's producing content. And of course, he's a guy that has, he's got money, he's got equipment, he's got a studio. He's able to do this. And do it well.

At least his presentation. His arguments, though, in my opinion, just aren't that great. And I'll give you an example of that real quick. I thought this was actually a worthwhile thread to look at as sort of, even to learn from.

So, Phil Vischer's recently basically made the case that, hey, overturning Roe v. Wade is, that's basically the pro-life movement. And even if we do it, it won't really save a lot of lives, so why bother?

Why put so much capital into doing that? If we vote for Biden, we'll get so many other good things. I suspect if he hasn't said it, he's at least given the argument for voting for Joe Biden. And so here's the thread that I thought was interesting.

Phil Vischer tries to ask someone who challenged him on this, what do we do if a pro-life candidate is promoting an anti-immigrant or anti-refugee worldview? Okay, so Trump's secure on borders, and that would be, I mean, look at the way he's twisting it.

Or an ethno-nationalist worldview. I mean, what's an ethno-nationalist worldview? Like a Nazi? What are you talking about? Does abortion still trump all other concerns, even if the candidate would have little actual positive impact on the unborn?

And he said, so if Jesus asks us to defend the least of these, which includes the poor, immigrants, refugees, the incarcerated, the sick, as well as the unborn, do we still favor the pro-life candidate if we fear their policies and worldview will hurt the rest of the list?

So this is an argument that's saying, hey, this is one pro-life issue amidst many pro-life issues, and that's where he's coming down on this. So Capstone Report kind of got into him. Let's see if I can find it.

All right, he said, Capstone Report says, yeah, people like him are doing the work of antichrist. He should just own it. Phil Fisher says, you know, 90 of African-American Christians voted Democrat in 2016, right?

Is the entire black church doing the work of antichrist in your book? Now, this is kind of sick, to be honest, but I've seen, he's not the only one. David Platt kind of did this in his book. Like, well, who am I to tell the black church they're wrong?

How about the law of God? How about, like, I mean, like, you know, this is kind of like using, I'm gonna just say it, it's almost like using the black Christians as human shields to be like, well, look, a majority of them voted for the Democrat, so therefore, it's, you know, you're kind of like, you're racist if you question this.

So we're gonna use them as human shields to support our Democrat vote. So here's Capstan Report. Anyone, regardless of race, that votes for a pro-baby-murdering candidate is, stop trying to race bait, that's demonic too.

Excellent response. Phil Fisher, got it. Black church is antichrist. What if I vote for separating children from their parents, antichrist or pro-christ? Of course, this is an issue that, again, the issue is you have criminals taking kids into the country, using them to try to claim asylum.

We don't know if those are their parents. You have to separate them to find out and, you know, to simplify that into we're the ones separating children from their parents. No, we're trying to vet people.

We're trying to make sure that kidnapping isn't going on, Phil. But Capstan Report says, oh, you mean separating criminals from their children, like we do when we put people in jail for domestic crimes.

Try harder. Phil Fisher says, what if I cut off funding for eradication of polio, bad or good? Well, that's not in the federal government's, you know, that's not, it shouldn't be, at least, according to the Constitution.

That's not in their jurisdiction. But Capstan Report, I wasn't aware the Bible mandated spending on polio. It does ban baby murder, excellent. And then Phil Fisher says the Bible mandates alleviating human suffering, which comes in many forms.

Matthew 25 is a pretty good place to start. Matthew 25 is not about government policy, though. That's the point. And so Phil Fisher, this is just, it's laughable. But this guy, you know, he's selling this kind of argumentation to Christians, dulling their conscience, in my opinion, to do something like vote for a Biden.

So let's play the video and see what Phil Fisher has to say here. It's a little over 15 minutes. I don't think we'll get through all of it, but let's see.

Phil Vischer’s Voting Argument and the Problem of Political Human Shields

Why do white Christians vote Republican and black Christians vote Democrat?

Let me comment real quick. This is irrelevant if you're trying to find out what the right thing to do is with your vote. I've seen this used as, like I said, a human shield, that David Platt's used it.

Well, who are we to judge whether someone votes for a Democrat if they're a Christian? Because black Christians vote Democrat. That's not an argument. That's not an argument. It doesn't matter if all the white Christians were right or wrong.

That has no bearing on truth. So I just want to make that point real quick.

Everyone knows conservative Christians vote Republican. It's like one of the rules of nature. The sun comes up in the east and conservative Christians vote Republican.

Yeah, not true anymore. Someone was telling me the other day, I think it was a Rasmussen poll they were citing, where it was like over 20 of evangelicals, self-proclaimed evangelicals, were voting for Biden.

Things are shifting. Things are changing. I don't know that this is a hard and fast rule, not like it was.

Unless they're black. Oh, right. Most African-Americans self-identify as Christian.

Okay, so he says conservative Christian here. This is kind of important. Think about this for a minute with me. We got to find out if later in the video he delineates. Does he delineate between conservative Christians in a theological orthodox sense and cultural Christians?

Now that might be a hard thing to do. It might be in some ways an impossible thing to do if someone hasn't asked those questions in a poll, but here's the point. He says conservative Christians vote Republican unless they're black.

Then they vote Democrat. Well, he's talking about conservatism in the orthodox theological sense, not in the political sense because black conservative Christians vote Democrats. So obviously he's not.

So if that's true, then he's talking about people who must believe in the virgin birth, the Trinity, the salvation by grace through faith, final destination of hell or heaven, the sufficiency and errancy of scripture.

I mean, that's what we're talking about then if he's talking about theological conservatives. I happen to know though, and I don't know all the numbers on this, but there are a lot of people, and it's not just black people.

It's all kinds of people. It's white people. It's even, it's Hispanics. In certain areas, in certain regions, in certain classes, if you will, socioeconomic brackets, essentially, there are denominations that are popular in certain areas of the country that, I'll give you an example, like T .D. Jakes and oneness Pentecostalism.

That's very popular in the black community. Oneness Pentecostalism, but it's not just the black community. I mean, there's, I think a lot of Hispanics are also involved in oneness Pentecostalism. I wouldn't consider someone who's a oneness Pentecostal to be an Orthodox Christian.

They're not a conservative Christian in my mind. So are we including them in this? That's a good question, I think, to ask. I know people, even in my family, people in the Deep South who, it's a cultural thing for them.

They're not Christians by conviction necessarily, but some of them are, they claim it and they go to church maybe even, but do they really believe all the things that the Bible teaches about these things?

Not necessarily, and so that's a really important distinction to make. Is he talking about theologically Orthodox believers who are voting for Democrats, or is he just talking about people who identify as Christian in a generic sense?

So,.

Cause here's one more other point I need to make. White Christians who are just Protestant, who aren't evangelical, I believe, I know for sure the percentage is much higher voting for Democrats. I believe it's majority.

So if you're going to a mainline denomination and you're a white Christian, especially if you're in the Northeast, let's say, look at this regionally and you claim to be a Christian, you're voting for the Democrat, most likely.

So you can slice this pie in all sorts of different ways. He just wants to slice it white and black, conservative Christians white, conservative Christians black. I'm saying right off the top, this could be getting the foot started in the wrong direction because it's oversimplifying something that actually has a lot more complexities to it.

Oh, right. Most African-Americans self-identify as Christian and most African-Americans vote Democrat. Look at the numbers. In 2016, 81 of white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump. For many Christians, it's just assumed the Republican party is the party for Christians.

But what about black Christians? Pew Research interviewed validated voters after the 2016 election. People they could verify actually voted. When they looked at black Protestant Christians, there is no official category for black evangelicals because most pollsters have decided evangelical is a white term, but

Okay, all right, that verifies what I was just saying. He's not making these delineations at all. He is telling us that there are black Christians, conservative Christians voting this way, white conservative Christians voting this way, but in actuality, he doesn't know whether these are black conservative Christians in the orthodox sense, in a theological orthodox sense.

70 of black people claim to be Protestant, 80 claim to be Christian. If we just looked at, let's say, Protestant mainline denominations who are white, we would find them voting for liberals. So he doesn't adjust or try to, all right, we're gonna add them to this category of evangelical, or we're going to compare, try our best to compare apples with apples.

He's just looking at black Christians, people who claim to be Protestant, and then white evangelicals, and then comparing them. So it's not the best way to make this comparison, but okay, we'll keep going here.

See what else he says.

Video.

When we look at black Protestant Christians, 96 voted for Hillary Clinton, the Democrat, 96%. So 81 of white evangelical Christians voted for Trump, and 96 of black Protestant Christians voted for Clinton.

And it's pretty much like that in every election. White evangelicals vote Republican, and black Protestants vote Democrat. Why is that? Don't they read the same Bible, pray to the same God? Which group doesn't understand that they're voting for the wrong party?

Well, here's the question, and let's see if he answers this, but is it more for cultural reasons, or is it more because they're trying to apply the Word of God and the principles in the Word of God? And I understand there's cultural reasons for doing things, and you grew up in a culture, but look, hopefully, this is an evangelical guy here, hopefully the emphasis is on trying to figure out, okay, how would the Bible guide us on this?

Because the differences that he's describing then, if it's truly they're both worshiping the same God, then there's two different options here. One's being more consistent, right, with the way that they're applying the Bible to this situation, and the way that they're trying to faithfully execute their Christian duties.

And then the other possibility is, well, basically, I mean, there's actually three. One of them is neither of them care about what the Bible says, they're just doing this for other motives, maybe cultural motives, right?

And then the third possibility is that the cultural issues are just, and the place you come from, your social location is just so powerful that it overwhelms any attempt to be objective and apply the Bible to a situation like voting.

Those are really the three possibilities. So let's see where he comes down on this.

To make things even more confusing, if we go back to 1890, these guys were Republicans, and these guys were Democrats. What happened? How did we end up where we are today? Well, let's go back and find out.

In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave African-American men the right to vote. Since they had this guy to thank for it, and the brand new Republican Party, and since most Southern slave owners at the time were Democrats, almost all African

I mean, technically, it wasn't Abraham, Abraham Lincoln was dead by then, but anyway.

African-Americans voted Republican. In fact, the first 23 black congressmen were all Republicans.

And don't forget as well, he's not mentioning this, but at the time, I mean, he had almost anarchy in the South. The Freedmen's Bureau was even paying for votes. This is a documented thing. So it's not just as simple as, they're looking at Abraham Lincoln, they wanna thank him.

I'm sure that factored into it. It certainly did. But there's other things going on there as well.

Not all Southern Democrats were these guys, but enough of them were that newly enfranchised African-Americans were not likely to vote Democrat anytime soon. Most Southern Democrats considered themselves conservatives.

That sounds weird to hear. Everyone knows Republicans are conservative and Democrats are liberal, but the two parties didn't shake out so clearly on conservative and liberal until the 1970s and 80s. Conservative Southern Democrats look back in history to happier days, the glory days of the South before Abe Lincoln and those

All right, this is melodrama right here. Conservatives, even Democrats, and remember, there were a lot of Democrats in the North who were conservative as well. Andrew Johnson, I mean, he essentially ended up being a more conservative Democrat.

He was against the radical Republicans. Even if you asked conservative Democrats in the South, what makes you conservative or what is conservatism to you, it wouldn't have been, well, we just missed the days of slavery.

We're pining for that. It would have been their view of the Constitution, strict construction, that kind of thing. So this is kind of just an unnecessary little aside that Phil Bisher makes to impugn them.

And I mean, look, we don't agree with most people in the past on a variety of issues. There's ways to impugn them if you want, but at least let's be accurate about it if we're gonna do it. That wasn't what made them conservative.

Those darn Yankees messed up everything. Those darn Yankees. I think that's a Disney film. But Honest Abe didn't last forever, as you may have heard, and things got messy for black Americans pretty quick.

Republican presidents kept federal troops in the South to ensure African-Americans could vote. But when the 1876 election was in a deadlock with both parties claiming victory, America was in danger of falling into civil war again.

A group of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats met in secret and made a deal. Rutherford Hayes, the Republican candidate, would become president. In exchange, all federal troops, the ones protecting black rights, would be removed from the South.

Yep, Northern Republicans sort of threw Southern black people under the bus.

Okay, so this is actually kind of mythological right here. Because he's trying to make this out like, you know, this was somehow a betrayal of black people, and that's what the Republicans did, this dirty deal with the Democrats in the South.

It wasn't about betraying black interests. In fact, the Redeemer governments that took charge after the Reconstruction was ended were actually more lenient. That's not when, primarily when the Jim Crow laws started.

It was actually with the defeat of Redeemer governments that you started seeing more of that kind of thing. So, kind of an oversimplification here.

When the federal troops were gone, the guys in the pointy hats clamped down hard, and most African Americans now had a hard time voting for anyone. New Jim Crow laws stripped away many of the rights they had just won.

So for many black people, the Compromise of 1877 felt like a betrayal at the hands of the Republican Party. Then comes the Great Migration. Living with these guys in charge wasn't much fun, to put it mildly, so.

I will say this. Phil Vischer has stayed true to the cartooning. When he tells a story, he very much goes into the cartoon, kind of, and it's hard to do that with history, I'll be honest. It's kind of dangerous to do that with history.

But the great, so this is interesting. So, if Phil Vischer's narrative is true, right, and it's just, Republicans betrayed them, sold them out, well, they're moving to live in urban cities where there's Republicans.

A more, I'll be honest with you guys, a more, a better explanation for a lot of this is that the South was completely defeated. There was a lot of, it was very hard, a lot of starvation. The North had actually kept blacks out, in large part, and those laws were starting to loosen up by this time.

And they were, they went, like most people go to another region to seek better opportunity, economically.

Millions of African Americans abandoned the South for jobs in new factories.

Yeah, he's right about that, it's jobs in new factories.

Cleveland and Philadelphia. And guess what? In the North, you could vote. Many transplanted African Americans still felt a loyalty to the party of Lincoln. But given the fact that no one in Washington was paying much attention to the.

Depending on where you were in the North.

Needs of black families, the NAACP in 1926 argued that blacks should be loyal to neither party. Between 1868 and 1898, 22 African American representatives were sent to Congress from the South. After federal troops.

All right, we're gonna skip ahead a little bit for the sake of time. I don't know what his point is here exactly. Let's go to the middle here.

Political parties over the last 80 years. Strom Thurmond was a Southern Democrat and governor of South Carolina in the late 1940s. He hadn't had a huge problem with Roosevelt's New Deal since Roosevelt.

Okay, just so you know, and I'm skipping some of this. Black people statistically, okay, and I haven't looked into the methodology behind the statistics, but a lot of them came out for Woodrow Wilson, who was, by the way, very white supremacist and stuff, but they came out for him.

But Franklin Roosevelt is the guy that usually is pointed to to say that's when black people started really voting Democrat. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt did something that hasn't been, I mean, he had Southern whites voting for him, he had Southern blacks voting for him, he had a lot of people.

He had a landslide victory. You know, he did very well for himself politically. But that's when people usually say, okay, that's when you see a trend. And that trend has continued until this day. So that's really the source.

And Franklin Roosevelt promised a lot of things to a lot of people. He was gonna be a miracle worker, essentially, with all his government programs, and a lot of people bought into it. Let's see where he's going here.

Strom Thurmond, okay, Strom Thurmond was a segregationist, at least in his early life. I think he renounced that later. You got Kennedy. I'm sure he's probably saying that Kennedy was more lenient.

Let's see. And promised a major civil rights bill to end discrimination against African Americans. Five months later, Kennedy was assassinated. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, vowed to finish the fight for civil rights in honor of Kennedy.

And propelled by goodwill toward Kennedy and aided by progressive Republicans, Johnson was able to pass the raft of

Progressive Republicans? That's interesting to me. I don't, why progressive Republicans? I don't know that it was Republicans. It wasn't progressive Republicans that helped with the civil rights legislation.

Of legislation that would end

And furthermore, if we're gonna talk about Lyndon B. Johnson, are we gonna talk about all his racial comments and why he thought setting up, basically a system of welfare, was going to ensure Democratic victories because they get the black vote?

Let's see if he talks about it.

Segregation in America. For segregationists like Strom Thurmond, the fact that Johnson, a Southern Democrat, had led the charge was the last straw. In 1964, Thurmond announced that going forward, he was a Republican.

Ah, the great switch. I knew this was coming. So this is talked about a lot in more progressive circles, the idea that, well, the Republicans were, they became the racists because all the Democrats in the South who were the real racists ended up becoming Republican.

But the reality is, Herbert Hoover won, I think, most if not all of the Southern states. He was a Republican. You had a lot of Republicans starting to go over after kind of being disillusioned with Truman and FDR.

A lot of Republicans, or Democrats in the South, started voting Republican for Eisenhower. And his second term, he picked up, I think, what, Florida, Virginia, I think Tennessee. There's a few, he got a bunch of Southern states.

And this was after he had sent in troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to make sure that it was integrated. So this is kind of a simplified trope that gets put out there. The Senators, I think there were, what, a little over 20 Senators who were Democrats who opposed integration, or I should say, opposed the Civil Rights Act.

And there was only like one, two, there was a handful. I think it was one who ended up becoming Republicans. I mean, the Democrats who supported that basically stayed Democrat, even afterwards. So this is kind of, I mean, and using Strom Thurmond, I don't know exactly when he changed his position, but he definitely changed his position.

And if I'm not mistaken, I think Strom Thurmond was the one who actually became a Christian, like a real Christian, not a cultural Christian, like most people in the United States at that time were. Became a Christian, and he actually renounced his support for segregation and those kinds of things.

But we digress. Let's see more of what Phil Bisher has to say. I know where this is going.

Democrats like Thurmond jumped to the Republican Party in droves, and the South

And did Thurmond say that's why he did it? You know, and is it, what about all the majority of the Democrats who stayed in their party, like the vast majority?

And shifting from blue to red. The identity of the Democratic Party as progressive was settling in, and a new wave of conservative Republicans was about to shift the brand.

The identity of the Democratic Party has been progressive at least since Woodrow Wilson, okay? This wasn't settling in.

There as well. The Republican candidate for president that year represented a new conservative turn for the party.

Oh, we're gonna vilify Goldwater, aren't we?

Barry Goldwater was definitely not a Rockefeller Republican. He hoped to pick up disenfranchised Southern Democrats by opposing the Civil Rights Bill.

No, no, Barry Goldwater had principled objections, constitutional objections to the Civil Rights Bill, not, oh, I'm just hoping to pick up the Southern Democrats because I'm a racist. That's the insinuation, it's false.

And his message of states' rights and limited federal government sounded a lot like what segregationists had been saying for years. As a result, Goldwater won the Deep South, but failed in every other, is legal, and school prayer isn't.

But when black Christians look at the Supreme Court, they see the reason they can vote and pursue housing and employment without blatant discrimination. That difference in perspective has a huge impact on whether you see the federal government as part of the problem or part of the solution.

All right, he does have, there is sort of a point here to be made. If you believe, like most people in the area that I even grew up in the Northeast, who are white, believe that the government is responsible for securing rights, but also for enacting social change and giving out benefits and stuff, you're going to be more likely to vote for them because you don't see the government, centralized authority, as a threat.

You think it's a good thing. So there's, on a level, on a certain level, this actually makes sense. Now, interestingly to me, most of the older people I've met, including minorities, tend to be more conservative.

Now, I haven't seen polls on this. I don't know exactly what that means, but it could mean that those who actually suffered through or were in danger, possibly, if they went to certain areas where there was segregation, where there could have been violence, et cetera, they had those deprivations.

They seem to me, at least, this is just, again, this is just John's opinion. I haven't done a lot of research on this, but they seem to be more likely to actually go for the Republican. Now, if that's true, that would be interesting.

Someone probably should look that up and just see if that is true. One of the things, though, that I wanted to say is that I realized something as I was taking a class, ironically, on pulp culture, and it was that before the civil rights legislation ever happened, there was already a cultural change taking place, kind of organically, to be honest with you.

It wasn't being forced by anyone. And you can see this with the guys, the Rockabilly guys from the South, you know, the white rock and rollers, but they were Southerners. They grew up in rubbing shoulders with guys who were black, and they took a lot of that kind of that style.

I mean, even Elvis kind of imitates a black preacher. He grew up in a Pentecostal church that was integrated, and in Memphis, he dressed like a lot of the black singers, you know, would dress and stuff.

I mean, he barred a lot, and he didn't think about it as stealing. Some people today, oh, he's a racist. He was stealing their stuff. No, it was just, it was the creative environment of Memphis, and a lot of the Rockabilly guys were like that.

Well, here's the thing, in their concerts, early concerts, they would have been segregated, and by the end of the concert, it was integrated and no one cared. This was a change that was happening in the culture, and I'm sure if, you know, I don't know if there's been studies done on this.

I'd be curious, but I'm sure there were other ways, other indicators, other barometers that could be used to see that. If you don't know that, if you don't know that a cultural change was happening, then it seems like the federal government just came in and smashed through a racist system that would have perpetuated itself indefinitely.

I'm not convinced that's the case, and I think most people who live through it, because I've asked a number of older folks about this, just, hey, what was it like? What was it worse, was it better as far as quote-unquote race relations, and everyone I've ever asked has said, you know what, it was actually, where I was at least, it was better than it is now, and, you know, this is not scientific.

This is just people I've talked to about it, but I wonder, you know, whether or not the belief, in fact, this is really not something I have to wonder about, it's a fact, the belief that the federal government came in as the savior will certainly influence your view of the federal government, and whether it's dangerous or not, whether consolidating that power is a good or a bad thing, if that's the only thing you're looking at.

So I think actually Phil Fisher has sort of a point to be made here, but it could also be that there's a conditioning going on that people, because people today haven't lived through those deprivations who have been born, but they're conditioned into thinking that it was the federal government who solved all the problems, always the federal government who's the solution to these things, and I'm not so sure that's the case with segregation, and would we still have it with us if the federal government hadn't stepped in?

I doubt we would, I don't, there's actually, I can pretty, I'm pretty confident in saying that no, no, it would not have lasted, it was already, I mean, those laws would not have even been able to be passed if there was not social pressure to do so, there was not already a change taking place, and I know Fisher likes to throw out the word progressive, but it was progressives who were also very, very behind this idea that there were different races and this was a scientific thing and sort of this ethnic determinism, and progressives changed their views on racial separation, et cetera, so I'm not so convinced that this is just something that is in this consciousness that just has existed and still exists and it's within, it's being passed down by tradition, that could be part of it, but there's also a conditioning going on, there's a retelling of the story that just gives all credit to the federal government, and if that happens, whether you're white, black, doesn't matter who you are, then if you think that that's the savior, that's the one that also is gonna secure your goodies, then hey, more support for that centralized authority is a good thing, that's the conclusion that you would probably draw from that, more support so that they can not just secure my rights, but also my benefits, those are the goodies, by the way, when I say that, so let's keep going here.

Having the right to hear a Christian prayer in your local public school doesn't mean much if you're not allowed to attend your local public school, and think about the words progressive and conservative.

A progressive believes things should be improved by making progress, by moving forward, by progressing. A conservative believes the good things we present.

That's, here we go, progressive is just progressing, like that's something like I guess everyone just agrees on, we're progressing, how about it's more of like a Fabian socialist idea, we're going to slowly, instead of through revolution, enact our socialism, that's more what progressivism is, and conservative.

Presently have are at risk of being lost and need to be conserved, or even revive from the past.

Okay, conservative's not just about reviving things from the past, there's a recognition within conservatism that things can change, actually that's the idea behind common law in some ways, that principles are applied, it builds on itself, but as principles are applied to new unique situations and so forth, you can have changes.

I mean, it's not, it's actually concerned with making sure that we secure eternal things, eternal truths, eternal principles, kind of platonic to be honest in a way. This is the Burkean conservative, I'm going back to English common law here, and that mindset of Edmund Burke, and kind of if you read Russell Kirk conservative mind, that's what you find, this is, they're not just against change, and we just got to secure the past.

It's that there's true and valuable things in the past, it's Chesterton's fence. So, Yves Vichers oversimplifying this.

So the best way to explain why white Christians vote for conservative candidates, and black Christians vote for progressive candidates, may simply be this, what do we see when we look in the rear view mirror?

White Christians see a simpler time, when everyone went to church, when we prayed in school, when abortion was illegal, and gender roles were clear.

White Christians may, look, here's the thing, I don't know of any white Christian who doesn't also see flaws in the United States, and we don't compare, this is one of the differences between conservatives and liberals.

Conservatives don't compare the United States to perfection, conservatives generally compare the United States to the alternative. There's a big difference, when you realize that people are actually trying to get into this country, the people who think it's such a crummy place for their social group don't seem to wanna leave, they still stay here, for the most part, this has been a good place, it's been provided a lot of opportunities, yeah, there's been deprivations, yeah, there's been hardship, yeah, there's been barriers, but despite all those things, it's been actually better than the alternative.

I mean, look, I've said this before, compare, go look at the country that an immigrant group has come from, compare that country socioeconomically, use whatever factor, whatever barometer you wanna use, and compare it to the United States, where you can have more opportunity, freedom, economic mobility, et cetera.

And usually, the case is, there's no way that you would have that in the country that you would have come from. So the United States has been a great place, despite flaws, that's the way conservatives look at this place, it's not just a rose-colored-glasses kind of thing, which Phil Fisher is insinuating that, it's a realism, it's looking at, yep, and you know what, there's a lot of things that have been corrected, there's a lot of problems today, frankly, worse problems in many ways, that need to be corrected, the profaning of marriage, the normalization of sexual deviancies, the murder of millions of unborn, and sometimes born children, these are horrible things.

That have taken place, the sexual desensitization of our culture is terrible, the abandonment of fathers, the fact that there's even some communities where they don't even have fathers hardly. I mean, there's a lot of really terrible things happening right now, and we're moving in the wrong direction on those things.

And so conservatives can look at that and say, okay, there were some things we got right, or better, in the past, you know, the 1950s, that's the era that the liberals wanna beat up on, in the 1950s, there was more stability in the home.

And right now, that's what we're losing, stability in the home, that's kind of a core building block, that's kind of something really important. Yeah, there was other things in the 1950s that weren't the best, but that's pretty fundamental.

So it's not, the rose-colored glasses thing, I don't buy that, I've never met conservatives who are like that, but that's what he's insinuating here. All right, let's keep going. Oh, and by the way, this isn't evidence-based, by the way, I'm offering my opinion, but Phil Butcher's, it should be noted, he's offering his opinion here.

This isn't, he doesn't have like a study he's citing, this is just, this is what he thinks.

Black Christians look in the rearview mirror, the view is very different. They see fire hoses, and church bombings, and lynchings. They see Strom Thurmond saying, we will never let Negroes into our theaters, swimming pools, homes, or churches.

Okay, do they know that Strom Thurmond got saved, that he rejected that view, that he, you know, renounced it, and I don't even remember what year, I think, I wanna say, probably in the 70s, he did that, if I'm not mistaken, but, or is it just that that clip is played over, and over, and over, and over, and that, you know, hey, this is America.