A MeToo Moment the SBC Ignored, Ken Burn’s Take on CRT, & Is Matt 20 Against Political Power?

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host John Harris. We have a number of topics today, hopefully a little bit of everything for everyone.

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We're going to talk about history, we're going to talk about the Bible, we're going to talk about the Me Too movement and the

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Southern Baptist Convention, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my trip to Mexico, too, because someone in the comment section yesterday said they wanted to hear more.

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So we'll start with that. I wanted to just share with you something. I thought maybe this is an observation that you'll find interesting.

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I enjoyed my time there. And just for those who don't know, I didn't know this, it is more doable than you realize because of the exchange rate and how cheap things can be.

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Now, if you're in a resort area, they're not as cheap, but if you plan it well, if you go to an area that's more not resorty, you can actually do fairly well.

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You can get a decent price for an Airbnb, you can rent a car, that might be a little more expensive, but it's probably better than the all -inclusive resorts where you're going to have to pay for transportation and everyone else's alcohol and that kind of thing.

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So anyway, we had the freedom to go wherever we wanted, and one of the places we went was Chichen Itza, which is where you see those iconic pictures of pyramids.

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We went to Tulum, where there's also some Mayan ruins. And in Chichen Itza, one thing that struck me that I thought was interesting and I'll share with you now, is how many of the buildings there, not just that major pyramid, but how many of the buildings there were religious in their significance.

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Even down to the sports they played. The winners of a game they played would sacrifice themselves.

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I mean, this is a people that believed without human sacrifice, the sun wouldn't come up. And I was amazed at how many buildings were related to sacrifice, religious rituals, temples.

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It permeated their civilization. And some of it was gruesome. If you think things are getting bad today and more sensual and more violent and grotesque, you should look at some of the depictions in the art, the sculptures and things, the skeletons and so forth that were on these

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Mayan ruins. And you realize, I mean, you can go back to other ancient civilizations and see the same thing. You realize man doesn't need technology to be evil, because evil's within us.

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And I don't remember the fellow's name, but I know one of the major sources for understanding the

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Mayans, because we don't understand a whole lot about them. But from what we do understand, one of the major sources was a,

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I don't want to say conquistador, because I'm not sure if he was a conquistador, but I think it was a priest or a monk or something.

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Anyway, whoever the fellow was, I forgot the name. See, I'm not as well versed on Mayan history as I am American. I was listening to a podcast though, on the way to the pyramids, and anyway, they were telling the story of this priest.

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We'll just say it's a priest. And he had obtained all these sources, these records of Mayan history, and most of it related to religious rituals.

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And he destroyed them. And he wrote his own for posterity, and really for missionary efforts to understand what the

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Mayans believed so that they could convert them. But he destroyed them because they were so demonic, because it was so dark, because it was recipes for spells and things like this.

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And I just found that interesting. I didn't know that before going into it. And Christian civilization, though we were returning to a pagan understanding in real time,

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Christian civilization really changed a lot of things. A lot of things I think we take for granted that we don't even realize.

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Can you imagine living in a society like the Mayans, where someone's dying every day just to make sure the sun rises?

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It's a totally different existence. And there's even atheists and secularists out there who have a little bit of knowledge of history, enough at least to realize that, you know what?

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Christianity did something. It did something really good and positive. And if we step away from it, we do so at our own peril.

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So, figured I'd share that with you. I thought it was interesting. Sponsor for this podcast,

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So, check it out. Thestandardbeardcare .com, promo code CONVO. Okay. Well, let's start, if we may, with...

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Let's see. Which issue do I want to start with? I think we're going to start with the abuse stuff in the SBC, if that's okay.

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There's two things I want to talk about. The first is this. This is Rachel Denhollander, who, as many of you know, is probably the main figure promoting the

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Me Too agenda in the Southern Baptist Convention, and in other denominations as well.

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And she made a post, this is from today, March 7th, and she's going after John MacArthur.

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And it's related to what we talked about yesterday with this Joshua Butler article that TGC, Gospel Coalition, took down.

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And she says, in light of the recent outcry over the Gospel Coalition article, perhaps it is time to look with open eyes at what has been taught for a very long time.

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What is new is not what Butler wrote, only that people cared this time. Now, I pointed it out with Butler, the main issue with him is that he went farther than the text in taking an image and then reading all kinds of specific interpretations into that image.

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And it was eisegetical. Well, she says, MacArthur, she's comparing, she's saying

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MacArthur does a parallel thing here to what Joshua Butler did. Well, what does MacArthur do? This is from, and I don't know the full context,

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I just have this excerpt. It is from an October 31st, 2022

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Q &A. I don't know what the question was, but MacArthur, in part of an answer to a question, says you have to look at yourself in the way that Paul described marriage in Ephesians 5.

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He basically says that a husband is like a savior to his wife. That's essentially what it says. I think the burden really lies with men to see themselves as those who rescue women from loneliness, who rescue women from being in unfulfilled, being in a place where they aren't protected, they aren't provided for, they aren't cared for, they aren't loved, they aren't given the opportunity to have children.

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So, I'm sure if, probably if we saw the broader context, we would see

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MacArthur talking about the role of the wife, and if not, in this particular Q &A, we know in other places.

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So, I don't have any illusion that MacArthur is one -sided on this, but the only objection

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I can think of to a quote like this is men aren't, they don't save women from these things.

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They don't function in that way. And, I just thought this was interesting because if you look at the passage from Ephesians 5, in fact, why don't we just go there?

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We go to Ephesians 5. I'll show everyone on the screen here.

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We'll read verse 22, "...wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, he himself being the savior of the body.

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But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything."

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And then it goes on to, "...husbands, love your wives." So, you know, here's, there's a comparison here of the role of Christ to the role of the husband.

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And, you know, this is not accidental. This is not, there perhaps is a mystery to some extent.

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We don't know maybe fully how that works, but we know that we're supposed to know that that is how

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God has arranged things, because we are to fulfill that role in our own lives. As a husband myself,

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I have to think about it, my role to, my responsibility, my duty, my affection for my wife in the same way that I would conceive of Christ's affection and duty and responsibility for the church that God has given to Christ.

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And so, you know, this is something that is, I think, fundamental for marriage. It's something we have to understand.

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And really, all MacArthur is saying is there's a complementary role here, that one of the functions of the husband is to be a savior to the wife.

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Well, a savior in what sense? It would be heresy if he just left it there, and, or I guess not if he left it there, but if he meant that they took away the wife's sins, because he doesn't mean that.

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No, in the sense that there's certain things that wives are designed to need, or women in general.

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They have a maternal instinct, they are supposed to, under normal circumstances, bear children and have a life of being led by a man, and so this is where the husband comes in.

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And that must be the thing that's controversial about this. I mean, I can't think of anything else that would be controversial about this.

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And I don't see how this is really that comparable to what Joshua Butler said. Joshua Butler was saying that Christ, well,

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I don't even want to repeat it, Christ's physically, what a man does, very specifically in a physical union, that Christ does that, and he was attributing things like, making parallels between things like seed and the

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Word of God, and saying that those concepts are parallel, and it was just beyond what the text really gives us.

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The text here though does give us a comparison, and I think that's all MacArthur's doing, is he's commenting on this comparison, or this parallel between the function of the husband and the function of Christ.

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You're not allowed to have that anymore, you're not allowed to say that anymore though. And she goes on, and I don't want to go over all of this, but she tries to knock

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J. Adams, and Euthetic Counseling, and the ACBC, she's still on the warpath.

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That's why I said the other day, I mean, the ACBC statement didn't help them. It's not going to, not that they were under the illusion it would, maybe they weren't, but it's not going to make the critics go away.

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Rachel Denholland are still on the warpath against them, posting things that J. Adams has said, and basically the long and short of it is this is a passage where J.

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Adams, in the 70s, I believe it's a book from that period, he says that, or the 80s, that in a situation where there's some kind of,

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I guess a story or a situation where the husband has imposed himself on the wife, that there's sin in both directions.

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If there's a scenario where a wife is rejecting the husband's advances to the point that the husband is frustrated and he does something wrong, there's sin, and he doesn't say they're equal necessarily, but he says there's sin in both parties, there's repentance for both.

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And I mean, this is simple stuff, the husbands and the wife are not supposed to deprive each other, but you can't say that anymore.

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And you know, you have all the reactions here of people, there's Anthony Bradley, oh my, I mean, people are just, this is awful, this is horrible, and you just wonder, like, what kind of Christianity did they grow up with?

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Or how did they grapple with biblical teaching in these areas? I don't understand it.

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And there's such a backlash though, and I'm telling you, and I've said from the beginning, and it's,

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I hate seeing what I've said from even years ago come to pass in the

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SPC, but I'm doing it again now. So for those who were, you know, 2019, listening to what

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I said and seeing, oh, it's taken place the way that I said it, because I was seeing where the sausage was made in the seminaries,

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I guess, and I could see what CRT was going to do, I could see the lack of leadership on the conservative side to some extent.

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Listen to me now, limb in your ear. This is going to, and it already is, destroy complementarianism.

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It is going to destroy the, it'll set us as evangelicals, or Southern Baptists, if you're a

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Southern Baptist, it'll set you up to adopt the concepts of the

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PCUSA. You're going to have women pastors, you're going to have all these things if you cannot even talk about some basic complementary aspects of a marriage.

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If that is forbidden, then that means that egalitarianism has already taken hold.

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It may not be, you may have people saying, well, the Bible's very clear, you can't have a woman who's fulfilling the role of a pastor or something.

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Well, that may be, that may be true. But if those people are saying that on the one hand, but yet on the other hand, they're undermining the very basis for why we don't have, in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, female pastors, then you're going to eventually erode that foundation and you're going to have female pastors.

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And it'll go way past that. This has implications beyond just female pastors.

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This has implications for families and the way we counsel, obviously here, we see that the way that we conceive of leadership in general, does it even matter whether it's a man or a woman or are men, do they have a duty or a responsibility to lead, to man up?

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I mean, should we even say man up? Is that sexist somehow? So this is where this is going.

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I just want to show people just a little foretaste as a foreshadowing of what's going to happen when you have someone as prominent as Rachel Denhollander going after John MacArthur for something that really is pretty innocuous.

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Well, I wanted to highlight something for you, speaking of Rachel Denhollander and speaking of SBC, Caring Well Me Too stuff.

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If I can pull it up, I don't know if I had it cued. Let me see if I can cue it here. Yep, there we go.

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So I want to share with you something that I have not shared before. I want to share with you a little bit about Bruce Ashford, who was the provost of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary when

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I was there. And I should say up front that I have no ill will towards Bruce Ashford. I'm sharing things that have been put out there publicly or on public forums, places where people had access to view them and many of them still accessible.

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And I don't do it to smear him. I want to try to be as careful as I can, but there's a point to be made that I think needs to be made.

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And I have waited to see if anyone would pick this up, whether larger blogs or smaller blogs or other podcasts or really someone who's more on that Me Too movement in that line of thinking, if they would pick it up.

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And no one has that I can see. No one's picked this up. And it's not because the information's not out there.

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I can just tell you that behind the scenes. It's not because this stuff is somehow secretive or there's something else going on that's preventing this from being a story.

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And you might ask, because I haven't told you yet, well, what's so significant about Bruce Ashford? And as I am telling you, what we know at least, what's publicly out there,

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I want you to think for yourself about the Guidepost Solutions Report on the

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Southern Baptist Convention. The Guidepost Solutions Report on the Southern Baptist Convention. Because the

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Guidepost Solutions Report has a lot of different stories of abuse,

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Me Too moments. I mean, Johnny Hunt, of course, was exposed.

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We have one of the major figures, Jennifer Lyle, even though it seems that there was something consensual or adulterous perhaps about that, it was one of the front and center examples of abuse in the

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Southern Baptist Convention. We have what happened with Paige Patterson.

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There's a lot in that. And I focused a little bit, not much, but I focused a little bit on stories that haven't made it in there.

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One of them being Joni Hannigan and her story. You can go look at the podcast I did with Joni Hannigan and how her reporting was, she was actually intimidated by Kevin Eazell.

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And that's actually, things in the Wilma Craney case, if anyone's paying attention to that, are starting to really heat up right now.

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But Joni Hannigan is one of the people that doesn't get an honorable mention.

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Why is that? Why isn't she part of this somehow? How come her reporting doesn't matter?

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How come do all victims matter or just some? That's one of the questions.

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Well, this is one of the stories that I thought, well, if they're going to have a

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Guidepost Solutions comprehensive study of abuse in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, you would think the priority would be on churches, or sorry, on seminaries and institutions more than on churches.

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Think about it this way. The seminaries are cooperative efforts between the churches.

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So funding is from the churches, goes to these institutions to train pastors.

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So if there is any kind of a joint responsibility, let's say, it would be much easier to make the case that abuse that takes place—I mean, the thing is why

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Jennifer Lyell was focused on, part of the reason, is on seminary campuses than in local churches, because local churches aren't cooperative efforts.

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No, the cooperative efforts are the things the local churches come around to fund and to forward. So seminaries are one of those things.

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Well, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary is funded by the Southern Baptist Convention, in part at least. And Bruce Ashford was a provost there when

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I was there. Now, I'm not accusing Bruce Ashford of anything in this. I don't know what he has and has not done, but ask yourself whether or not this ought to have been included in the

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Guidepost Report if we're including everything, if it's comprehensive and if we have this new standard of believe women and preponderance of evidence, as opposed to beyond a reasonable doubt, why not include this?

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So here's the story. Bruce Ashford is personal friends with J .D.

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Greer. He says himself J .D. was a longtime friend and was a college roommate of him. So J .D. Greer, former president of the

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Southern Baptist Convention, president of the Summit Church in Raleigh—or Durham, rather—of North Carolina.

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Bruce Ashford, according to the Gospel Coalition, is a senior fellow in public theology at the Kirby Lang Center for Public Theology in Cambridge.

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He is a columnist for national media outlets and author of nine books. And I think it's more than that now, if I'm not mistaken, but he's featured at the

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Gospel Coalition. He has friends. And I think right now he's writing for First Things, if I'm not mistaken, or an editor for them,

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I'm not sure. But he's been around. He's a known commodity in conservative evangelicalism.

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And, of course, even personal friends like J .D. Greer being his roommate. So at the highest levels of the SBC. Now, I've talked about him,

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I think, twice before. One was because he endorsed this evangelical call for restitution -based immigration reform, which, in my opinion, basically leads to amnesty.

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And I talked about it, I think, on the podcast. The other thing is, when I was at seminary, he gave a lecture where he did a moral equivocation between basically these alt -right kind of groups and mainstream

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Democrats. And I kind of called him out for, this is the third way type, thinking this is what you'd expect from Tim Keller.

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So you might have heard his name before on this podcast, but you haven't heard this. Bruce Ashford happens to be one of the people who's very much against, or was against, and I'm sure he still is, abuse within the church.

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He says this, and this was during the whole Paige Patterson dust -up. He said lots of social media convo this afternoon about spousal abuse.

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As the provost of an SBC seminary and pastor at an SBC church, now that church must be Summit.

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I don't know. I think that's where he attended. So I'm assuming he was an elder pastor there.

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Let me be clear. A physically abused woman should separate from her husband and have him put in jail.

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A physically abused woman should separate from her husband and have him put in jail. And there's no mistaking who he was talking about.

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There's almost 3 ,000 likes on this tweet. This was during the time, I remember it well, when

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Paige Patterson was being canceled. I remember Danny Akin, the president of Southeastern, put a whole thing out there to all the students, basically assuming the guilt of Paige Patterson on something that was in dispute.

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And it was something along the lines of giving advice to a woman to stay with her abusive husband years before.

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And he denied it, to my recollection. And anyway, there was a posturing going on.

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There was virtue signaling, I think, going on in this as well. And this is when Bruce Ashford puts this out there.

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And Beth Moore even responded, thank you, Bruce. So, and first name basis, again, someone who's well connected in the

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SBC. Bruce Ashford, in 2018, also put out on the heels of that post, eight ways

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SBC churches can strengthen our response to domestic abuse. And in this particular article, among other things, and this was written with Lauren Ashford, who is his wife, and Joy Forrest.

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It says, in light of the ongoing national conversation about Christian responses to domestic violence, and the sad reality that abuse statistics are no better among church attenders than among society at large, it is incumbent upon us,

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SBC churches and pastors, to do everything we can to respond appropriately when victims come forward to address domestic abuse.

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More effectively, we must, and he has a list of like, I think, eight different things.

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One of them is this, we must reject the temptation to dismiss the victim's claims.

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Reject the temptation to dismiss the victim's claims. When an abused woman steps forward to speak, it is a really critical moment, because most of these women have lived in isolation and fear for years.

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In spite of that, and even though false allegations are relatively rare, domestic abuse counselors report that pastors often side with the abusive husband, either by believing his denial or by minimizing the severity of the abuse.

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As pastors, we should remember that abusers learn to be charming in public, even while violent and controlling in the privacy of the home.

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Similarly, abusers often discredit their wives by claiming or insinuating that their wives are mentally unstable, unfaithful, or otherwise untrustworthy.

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And then it goes on, it says, at the end, we believe Southern Baptist churches wish to protect, support, and counsel survivors of abuse, and if we as Southern Baptists will take these eight steps, and I just read you one of them, we will go a long way towards glorifying

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God, protecting women and children, and bringing justice to an unjust situation. So part of bringing justice is rejecting the temptation to dismiss the victim's claims.

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In other words, you have to accept the victim's claims, or don't just dismiss them.

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So maybe you could say, I guess that doesn't mean you have to accept them, but you, I don't know, keep them in, or open to them at least.

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But then it goes on, and it says that it indicts pastors that, and it says it's rare to have false allegations, and then it indicts pastors that because they often side with abusive husbands by believing his denial.

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So, you know, this is one of the things that you can, you can tell the posturing here, and it's one -sided too.

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It's not like wives don't abuse their husbands, because that does happen too, by the way. Wives do abuse husbands, so I don't know why it's one -sided.

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But in this particular situation, they're talking only about husbands against wives. And in that particular situation, the point that they're trying to make is, you need to be open to, perhaps even accepting of, they don't have any warning against accepting, the victim, who is the wife's, claims.

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But you need to be skeptical of, and not accepting of, the husband's claims.

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And so, and this is the situation we've been living in for years, since the

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Me Too movement at least, but to some extent before that. It's now getting ramped up more and more and more though.

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So this is Bruce Ashford, this is what he believes on this particular subject, or at least he did.

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Well then, fast forward a few years, and July, or June rather, of 2020,

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Biblical Reporter says, Ashford resigns as SCBTS provost, returns to teaching. So at this point, he is teaching at the seminary, but he has resigned from provost.

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He says in his own, his own resume says that it was the summer of 2020 when he completed his term as the, or his position as the provost, or the dean of the faculty at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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You have a student comment on Rate My Professor from April 20th, 2021, saying he was an interesting lecturer who knew his stuff and had so much personal experience to add to the textbook's material.

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I want to see him go, I want to, it was sad to see him go last semester. I hope he'll be back.

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So he, in the summer, resigns as provost, and then the next semester, that fall semester, in the middle of it, or some, some point in that semester, he left teaching altogether at Southeastern.

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And in the resignation as provost, it says that the faculty and staff of Southeastern were informed that he resigned.

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Ashford will remain with the seminary, returning to the classroom, of course, that stopped the following fall semester.

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And Keith Whitfield says, who's the current provost,

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I am thankful for Dr. Ashford's love for SCBTS and his eight years serving in the role of provost. Actually, President Danny Akin said that, the president of the institution.

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He has served us well, and I know that service will continue in the days ahead. So you have the president of the seminary still giving him a good recommendation in the summer of 2020, even though he's not provost anymore.

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But then, he's all of a sudden not even teaching anymore that following semester. What's up with that? Why is that?

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Now, I don't know fully everything, and I don't want anyone to get the impression that I do. While this is going on, though, his wife,

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Lauren Ashford, is publicly posting, this is public, this is still out there, publicly posting things like this,

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August 4th, 2020, she said, me too, on her Twitter account,

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July 14th, 2020, Rachel Denhollander, I need your help, abuse, neglect, and the list goes on, all within the church, private message me if you have a minute.

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July 14th, 2020, the same day, Beth Moore, can we talk, abuse, neglect, and the list goes on, all within the church, please.

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Sounds like a woman crying out for help. She says this, August 1st, 2020,

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J .D. Greer posts, you'll only commit yourself to selfishness in this world if you have the next world in mind. And Lauren Ashford replies, selfishness includes thinking of others first, sacrifice,

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SBC has a hard time with this, we first protect ourselves, and the run, I think she meant then run, after the abused person, this is not biblical.

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She, as an insider, is accusing the SBC, in general, of thinking of themselves first, and not the victims, even though they pretend to do that, and she's applying it specifically to J .D.

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Greer, but she's saying, there's a me too moment going on here, at the same, concurrent with when

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Bruce Ashford is resigning as provost. Well, she posted this also on her

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Facebook, and Bruce Ashford makes a post, basically thanking people for their support of his wife, she had an injury, and he just thanks them, and she screenshots it, and then posts, this is what he says about appreciating her, essentially, this is what he says, but behind closed doors, it is very different,

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God spared me, he is now taking me out of this hell, Bruce is divorcing me. Now, I don't know that they're divorced, but this is what was posted, this was at the time, this was going on, and I think one of the things that had me, to be honest with you a little bit, just not wanting to even share this,

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I thought, this is like, this is stuff I don't, I don't want to wade through this stuff, this seems personal, right, but it's out there in public, it's been out there for a while, and I think the thing that made me share this, the thing that made me take you through this, isn't just the fact that it's public, and that I'm not revealing anything that hasn't been revealed, even though I am,

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I suppose, letting a wider audience know about it, is the fact that the

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Southern Baptist Convention, and these folks were, you know, Bruce Ashford was at the top of this,

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Southern Baptist Convention seems to really want to steamroll people, and use abuse situations to change the denomination, but they're very picky about which ones they use, aren't they?

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Bruce Ashford, and his wife, who wrote that article, have been involved in this, they're not, their hands aren't clean, is what

31:53

I'm saying, their hands are dirty, they were, both of them, involved in forwarding this

31:59

Me Too agenda in the denomination, and now, if we were to apply their own logic, their own message, to their own situation, what would we be forced to conclude about Bruce Ashford, and about Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary?

32:17

That's right, we would be forced to conclude that we need to believe at face value, or at least be very open to the story that his wife told about him, and be very skeptical of the story he tells about himself, whatever story that may be.

32:38

Now, we find that Bruce Ashford posted, he said this, these are both on public forums, he said, he wrote an article, this first one,

32:49

I believe, is from 2021, and the summer,

32:54

I believe, of 2021, and he says, and I'm not going to read this whole thing, but basically, personal update, he says, I want to thank many of you for reaching out,

33:00

I haven't posted much, this summer I was diagnosed with PTSD and depression, I had begun abusing alcohol,

33:07

I also had begun abusing alcohol as a foolish way of trying to medicate, so this summer I checked into a therapy facility in New Mexico for six weeks, and it shows all the things he was doing, and learning jujitsu, and swimming, and this is what he's doing, and he's working, driving for Lyft, and he's doing things, but he's in a recovery, he's getting detoxed from alcohol, and you know, this is what he puts out there, and then he writes an article,

33:38

PTSD and alcohol abuse, a Christian reflection, and in that article, from 2022, he says, during the summer of 2021,

33:45

I was diagnosed with co -occurring PTSD and alcohol abuse, I underwent inpatient trauma therapy during the summer, and am now experiencing recovery, thus

33:53

I have written this article based not only on research, but personal experience, and if you read the article, which I won't do here, there's a lot of treating it like it's a disease, treating it not, it wouldn't be the way

34:06

I would say to approach it biblically, like I've sinned against a holy god, because I've broken his law, by being influenced by alcohol, no, it's instead,

34:16

I have a disease of alcoholism, or I have a disease of PTSD, really, and alcohol abuse is just this way of self -medicating, and posturing oneself in the victim status, that's what he puts out there, now,

34:32

I want to remind everyone that SEBTS, not only the Ashford's, but SEBTS itself, very much on the

34:38

Me Too train, when I was there, they had this safe space incorporated, I don't know if it's still there, flyers in the student center, if you felt threatened, they held workshops and things, like recognizing and responding to abuse in the church, for the

34:56

Intersect Project, they began to remove the names of any association with Johnny Hunter Page Patterson, canceling them, removing their names from buildings, that kind of thing, because of abuse concerns, they launched a mandatory sexual abuse prevention and response training for their employees, actually,

35:21

I think it's for students, to ensure that students are equipped to prevent and respond to abuse in their ministry context, SEBTS announces the launch of a mandatory sexual abuse prevention and response course that they're starting, so if you go to Southeastern as a student, you are mandated, you have to take a course in preventing sexual abuse, here's an article from 2019, abuse is not new,

35:41

Me Too confessions of a middle -aged Baptist woman, that's for the Center of Faith and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, their hands aren't clean either, their hands are dirty in this, they have imported the

35:52

Me Too agenda into the Southern Baptist Convention and into their school, they're removing the names of people like Page Patterson, and yet their own provost, their own provost has been accused, there's a

36:06

Me Too moment, literally, the phrase Me Too has been used by his own wife, crying out to Rachel Denhollander and Beth Moore on Twitter publicly, finding out later that there was an alcohol problem of some kind, all of this you haven't heard a word about, it didn't make it into the

36:23

Guidepost Report, there is no public anything about it at the school, even though he was the provost for 8 years there, but we'll sure go after Page Patterson, now

36:34

I tell you all this to just get you to think about something, I want you to consider this, how corrupt is the

36:42

SBC, how corrupt is the Southern Baptist Convention, I think you need to ask that question, because equal weights and measures are not being applied to situations here, you have a situation, and I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong,

36:57

I don't know all the details, and I don't need to, I'm not saying it's wrong to go about things the way they have with quietly putting,

37:04

I mean this is what Joseph did with Mary, quietly putting her away, not wanting to cause shame, now of course this stuff is now posted publicly on social media, so it's not like, it's different in that case, but if Southeastern, if none of this stuff had been posted on social media, and Southeastern just wanted to quietly let this thing go,

37:22

I'm not saying that's even a wrong thing, go get some help, we don't need to bring damage or shame to your reputation, however, that's not the posture

37:32

Southeastern has taken, they've been loud and public with naming names, and removing associations, and importing me too, and Bruce Ashford was very much a part of that, so was his wife, and there's an exception made though, there's an exception made, they're not going to be loud, they're not going to be, they're not going to talk about the provost who was recently there for eight years, whom was endorsed, and who is friends with the current leadership at the seminary, and if that's the case, there's a phrase that often gets used, and maybe it applies here, fraternity over orthodoxy, or in other words, friendships matter more than truth, because if you really have the conviction that this is a level 10 threat that needs to be exposed at every turn, and that's why we have the guidepost report, and that's why we're welcoming the

38:33

Biden administration to investigate our denomination, and you have to be honest about all of it, so that was a hard, to me, one of the harder things

38:42

I've done lately on this podcast, because I just, I feel horrible, I would just ask you to pray, I don't know what's going on with this couple, if they're,

38:48

I don't even know what the circumstances are, I would ask you to pray for them, because it's a horrible situation, it sounds like, or it was, and it might, maybe it still is, but I have no ill will for them, and I, but I want them, and I hope

39:02

Southeastern too, to think about the kind of graceless logic that they're employing, and they wouldn't want it put upon themselves, they wouldn't want it applied to them,

39:13

I don't think, none of us would want that applied to ourselves, and yet it's okay to throw others under the bus when it doesn't cost, when it's not a risk.

39:25

Alright, so, I wanted to bring that to you, now, other stuff, I don't have a lot of time now,

39:31

I've spent a lot of time on that, alright, we're gonna, I'm gonna try to be quick here if I can, I wanna play a clip from you, briefly if I can, from Ken Burns, Ken Burns, who is on CNN, Ken Burns who did the famous documentary about the

39:45

Civil War, and others, National Parks, here's what he says. Enough to write about this bill, and what's going on with the whole idea of critical race theory, and not teaching the full history of this country, why?

39:58

You know, what makes America great is not the suppression of ideas, or the pursuit of every corner of those ideas may lead us, or the facts, it's, it's about who we are, and how we investigate who we are, and celebrate the diversity of who we are.

40:16

All of these bills, that DeSantis and others are doing, limit our ability to understand who we are, and are not inclusive, they're exclusive, they're narrowing the focus of what is and isn't

40:29

American history. It's terrifying, it feels like a Soviet system, or, you know, the way the

40:34

Nazis would build a Potemkin village, Tucker Carlson's doing the same thing with the footage from 1 -6, it's just a kind of rewriting of history at the most dangerous level, it's a huge threat to our republic.

40:47

I'm doing, Don, a film right now, working on a major series on the history of the American Revolution, and I can tell you that Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, and George Washington, and John Adams, and James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, are rolling over in their graves, if they think that this person is carrying the mantle of what it is to be

41:07

American. Alright, I'm going to just briefly say, he's talking about DeSantis here, Governor DeSantis, and his argument is that DeSantis is rewriting history, and this is someone who makes documentaries that are historical in nature, many of them, and I think maybe all of them, he's a historical documentary filmmaker.

41:26

He should know of all people that in every story, you can't, you have to come up with a paradigm for understanding the facts before you.

41:35

You can't show, it can't be comprehensive with every fact. You have to make a choice, you only have a limited amount of time, and in a classroom, that's the same thing, you only have a limited amount of time.

41:45

So what do you teach, what do you emphasize, what do you tell the students who are in there, and what's your purpose? And critical race theory touches all of these things.

41:54

And so, there's a different story that is told when critical race theory is running in the background, influencing the narrative.

42:01

And there's a different story told, let's say, if a Christian is telling the story, or if someone who is proud of this country is telling the story, or if someone, there is going to be a different take.

42:14

Now, that doesn't mean that history is subjective. There is an objective element to history, in other words, there's things that objectively happen in real time, but the retelling of those things, the communication of those things, really, it's the interpretation of those things, there's going to be an element of subjectivity to that, or at least an element of narrowing down, whittling down, the facts before us, and emphasizing the things that create a desired narrative.

42:43

And so, the question is, what narrative do you want your kids being told in school? And the

42:50

CRT, I mean, we like to go after CRT -inspired history, sometimes it's called memory studies, but we like to go after that stuff when they subvert the record so much that they just run over objective history, they run over primary sources, they ignore primary sources, they say things that are objectively not true.

43:08

But there's also, more than that, just a general, you can have all good facts, but if you, let's say there's six facts that you cite, but there's 16 about a particular event, and you only cite the facts that support a certain narrative, and ignore the ones, you throw out the ones that don't support it.

43:28

That would be, that's what critical race theory does, or people who support critical race theory for the most part, and that's the objection.

43:33

And Ken Burns doesn't seem to even grasp this. He wants to compare it to, like, this is what the Nazis did, apparently.

43:39

No, the concern here is that you're teaching inaccurate history, or you're teaching lopsided history, you're not giving a full spectrum for what history actually is, and you're doing it with an axe to grind.

43:52

We don't want that motivation. We don't want our kids learning that. So it's very much the reverse of what

44:01

Ken Burns is saying, because what other state, other than Florida, is really even tackling this stuff in any kind of aggressive manner?

44:08

Hardly any. I mean, Virginia's not even doing that, hardly. I mean, Virginia's made some headlines, but what's actually happened on the ground level to stop what's the incursions that have been going on for years?

44:19

Well, let's just play this last clip, because I don't have much time. You'll see other playfulness, you'll see the beauty of this continent, but you'll see all of the things that we also are.

44:29

And, you know, what that New Republic thing is, I think it may be the best review I've ever gotten in my life, they said this is an anti -fascist book, right?

44:36

And so what we see is this narrowing and saying only you can treat one thing, is right out of the authoritarian playbook.

44:44

If a company, Disney, disagrees with me, I change their tax status. If somebody, you know, a state employee disagrees with me,

44:52

I fire them. This is not a democracy. That's an authoritarian...

44:57

There's a reason you put a child on the front, right? So he's talking about a book he wrote, or a book of photographs that he's published, and so he's saying it's not democracy,

45:07

I guess, to fire an employee. Well, if someone's going against the laws of your state, or they're subverting the agenda of your, excuse me, administration, what are you supposed to do?

45:19

Are you not the democratically elected governor? So how does that conflict with democracy?

45:25

Democracy is a word now that's just used for anything the left doesn't like. They'll say it's anti -democracy.

45:32

And that's what he's doing here. Not only is a photo 1949, right? Yeah. By your mentor,

45:37

Jerome Liebling. But it's also about what are we creating for our kids? That's right. I wanted to say this is all of us.

45:44

So you'll see photographs in here from very famous people, and from anonymous people, and from sort of what we'd call snapshots.

45:50

There's ordinary folks, or so -called ordinary folks, and there's great people. There's a picture of Abraham Lincoln in there.

45:56

But he's not on the cover. This kid is as important as Abraham Lincoln. That's the heart of a democracy.

46:02

It says that we value every individual life, and this kid with his improbable hockey shirt, with his coat.

46:08

What about Ron DeSantis? What about his life? Is his life valued, too? Is he important? Is he just as important?

46:14

Or is he just, is he othered, as you'll hear Ken Burns say in a moment?

46:19

Is he someone who, is there us in them? Is there a division between those who are true

46:25

Americans, whether great or small, and then those who are like DeSantis, who are totalitarian

46:31

Nazi Soviet types who want to rain on everyone's parade? Rakish had his attitude.

46:37

He's looking at my mentor, Jerome Liebling, and they're seeing each other as equals, and there's no communication in this world except among equals.

46:45

And the kind of hierarchies that Tucker Carlson and a Ron DeSantis are trying to superimpose over us are extraordinarily dangerous to this experiment.

46:55

You call it a narrowing, and we have to run, but is it, what is it? It's racism, right? Well, I think it's right now, it's just white supremacy.

47:03

There's a kind of fear of the other. And so what you're seeing, we saw it in our film on the Holocaust. You know, it's easy to make a person other.

47:11

Let me just put it simply, Don, this way. I've been making films for almost 50 years about the

47:17

U .S., capital U, capital S. But I've also been making films about us, the two -letter lowercase plural pronoun.

47:24

And any time anybody tells you that it's anything else other than us, there's only us.

47:30

And when somebody tells you there's a them, move away, move away. There's no them. There's only us.

47:36

So here's the clencher, guys. So who are the people that are saying that there's a them?

47:46

Ken Burns is making two categories. He's saying there's people who believe there's an us, and then there's people who believe there's a them.

47:51

And the people who believe that there's a them, you should run away from them. Don't give them the time of day. Don't listen to them.

47:56

They're enemies. And he's othering them, is he not? Because he's saying that you shouldn't make that distinction, but then he makes that very distinction.

48:06

And the people at CNN, I guess, aren't sharp enough to catch this, but it's pretty obvious.

48:12

He's saying no binary, and then he creates a binary. There's people who believe in the binary and people who don't.

48:18

And so there's two different groups of people. So Ken Burns is doing the exact thing that he's saying not to do.

48:24

Now, last but not least, I wanted to... Man, I only have like a minute left. Let me do this quick, if I can.

48:32

I want to read for you. We could do either Matthew 20. These are parallel passages.

48:37

Let's just do Matthew real quick here. I wanted to just follow up on the discussion yesterday about political power and whether Christians should invest in that, pursue that.

48:48

There's a passage that's often brought up to pour cold water on that. Say, no, Christians shouldn't do that.

48:54

And it's this passage. It's when the sons of Zebedee came to Jesus, their mother came to Jesus, and she said to him,

49:04

Command that in your kingdom these two sons of mine may sit on your right and on your left. Jesus says, You do not know what you're asking.

49:10

Are you able to drink the cup that I'm about to drink? They said to him, We are able. He said to them, My cup you shall drink, but to sit on my right and my left is not mine to give, but it is for those to whom it has been prepared by my

49:19

Father. So first we see here there has to be a sacrifice. There has to be proving oneself to some extent.

49:27

There has to be something that's done before you can attain that position at the very least.

49:34

But it's the fathers to give. And then it says, and this is the main passage, In hearing this, the ten became indignant with the two brothers, but Jesus called them to himself and said,

49:43

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them.

49:49

It is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.

49:56

Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life a ransom for many. Now, some are trying to use this to destroy hierarchy or to say that Christians should not pursue power.

50:06

Power is icky. Here's the thing you need to realize immediately though. In verse 26, it says,

50:13

Whoever wishes to become great among you. Okay. Whoever wishes to become great among you.

50:20

He's saying this is how it's done. You shall be your servant. Whoever wishes to be first among you, you shall be your slave.

50:28

So, if you want leadership, if you want honor, if you want power, if you want status, if you want acclaim, then the way to do that is to become the servant.

50:39

And in fact, this is the way that many who are in great positions of authority within Christian history sign their names even in letters.

50:48

Your servant. Yours truly. That's a communication of possession, of I am at your service.

50:57

This is where we get the concept of servant leadership, which I think has been somewhat abused, but that idea that in order to lead, you must care about the people you're leading.

51:08

You must sacrifice for them. You must be willing to suffer deprivation on their behalf. This is what husbands do for their wives.

51:15

It's what parents do for their children. Even though they're in hierarchies, they're still, they have authority over maybe the other party, but they are trying to serve.

51:27

They exist to serve that party. And we've lost a sense of this in our society, and that's part of the reason I think passages like this can be so misused.

51:34

Because the point Jesus is making is not power's bad or leadership's bad. He's saying, he's making a contrast.

51:41

He said, you know how the rulers of the Gentiles do it? They lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. If you go to Luke, it says that the kings of the

51:52

Gentiles lord it over them, and those who have authority over them are called benefactors. Benefactors.

51:57

So they're benefiting from, that's the opposite of what we're supposed to be doing.

52:02

So benefiting from those under you, the plebs who exist under you, who taxes are paid, and then they squander those taxes on their own lavish lifestyle, and their own status.

52:15

That's not how we're supposed to be. We're supposed to be benefiting the people that we serve. That's why we should be public servants, not politicians.

52:24

And, well, we're not, you know, public servants should be what a politician or a statesman aspires to be.

52:31

Calvin's commentary backs up what I just said, but I don't have time to read it. So go check out Calvin's commentary on this.

52:37

He basically says the same thing. Well, that's the podcast for today. I hope that was helpful for everyone out there.