Roasting the Social Justice Inquisitors at the #MLK50 Conference ERLC (Part 7)

All right, well, let's get back to it. We left off on a cliffhanger last time. It sounded like what he was gonna say was gonna be really good.

So let's see how it goes. This is the ERLC Gospel Coalition Conference on NLK 50.

And this is the most important panel discussion of that conference. And it's called

How Not to Talk About Racism. And boy, is that true. As we've been talking about these issues, one thing that I'm beginning to try to wrap my mind around is that there's a lot of teaching going on amongst believers.

There's, we're always instructing each other, admonishing each other, doing so from scripture.

Dr. Mullins, as you. That's true, we should be doing that, but I don't really see a whole lot of that coming from the social justice crowd.

I see a lot of people saying things like, well, we'll let roast justice roll down like waters. And that's all they say.

And it's like, well, yeah, yeah, I agree with that. But you know, we gotta exegete that. We gotta figure out what Amos was talking about.

And I will be doing that on a video, by the way. So we'll see how that goes. But yeah, I don't really see a lot of what he's saying, but let him continue here.

You have, as you think about the teaching task or even the discipleship task, how do you begin to do that with race and racial reconciliation in mind?

Because if this is going to be something that we're after, bringing God's people together, then it has to even influence how we're beginning to teach.

So how do you teach with this in mind? So as a people.

I thought we de -platformed him last time. Should we listen to this? He's a white male, and I would assume he's cisgender.

I think he's straight too. I don't know if we should be listening to this. I think it depends on who you ask.

We'll listen to him. That believe we should go. I know especially my

Southern Baptist brothers and sisters, this is our battle plan, right? That we should go to the nations.

We seem as a convention of churches to be extremely committed to the idea of contextualizing the gospel so that we can go anywhere around the world and speak the language of and become a part of the culture of another group of people who needs to hear the message of the gospel.

And so it always kind of bewilders me when I see how little contextualization that majority culture folks in the

United States are willing to do in order to have not only a brotherhood, sisterhood with fellow believers who don't look like us, but maybe who can't even fathom beyond that sharing the gospel with someone for whom the political or social concerns might be completely different.

And I think what's really, really important for us as Christians, especially in the United States context is history.

So, I mean, I teach American literature and culture. And - History is very important.

But what I find is that the social justice people like to live in historical ideas and kind of transport them to the present as if that they're all still the same.

That's not what we do. We have to consider today as today. In the course of any survey class, we run across texts and voices that are gonna help my students understand why things are the way they are in the

United States today. And so an example of this, and I'll try to connect it to the church here.

An example of this is, because my students have read Phyllis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs and Charles Chestnut and Martin Luther King Jr.

and so on down the line, when they hear something like Black Lives Matter, what they hear is the first three lines of Frederick Douglass' slave narrative, which,

I was born. And Douglass has to say, I was born, right? Because he has to make a case that he's a human person in 1845.

Right, in 1964, we've seen the images so often the last couple of days. I'm a man, right?

A black man carrying those signs and having to tell the world that they are human. And so when my students hear

Black Lives Matter, they hear, I was born. I'm a man. Right, do our churches have this kind of historical consciousness?

Pastors, study school teachers, when you're teaching the Bible and your parishioners, your congregants, your students, your kids ask questions about something like Black Lives Matter, do your people hear,

I was born? I'm a man in black lives. You know what's interesting about this too?

This is a very cultural Marxist type of strategy. A lot of this, if you notice how this man is talking in particular, he is setting the children against the parents.

That is something that is intentionally being done. In fact, he mentioned before how his students will come to him, hey,

I had an argument with my mom. What do I say to her? And he's giving them advice on how to argue with the person's mom.

And here he's like, well, my students, these young kids, they know how to think about things the right way, but their teachers don't, their

Sunday school teachers don't, their parents don't. This is a very insidious type of thing. It assumes that the older generation is more sinful or worse off or stupider or more evil or something like that.

And the younger generation is the smart one. That is a recipe for the end of civilization.

That is a recipe for the end of civilization. That's not what the Bible teaches at all. The Bible does not teach that that's how it goes at all.

That's topsy -turvy. That's turning things upside down. Now, I'm not saying that a younger person might not know more about a certain subject or something or be more wise in certain areas than an older person.

I'm not saying that. But this whole idea of kind of subverting things, and this is very common in this kind of mentality.

They want to cause a revolution in the church against the elders, essentially.

This is poison, man. This is dangerous stuff. I don't even want to make a joke about this. This is not even funny at all.

It's matter. We don't have to agree with every bit of the Black Lives Matter platform. Just matter. It doesn't.

See, that's another rhetorical trick, right? You don't have to agree with the whole Black Lives Matter platform.

Just support it. No. No. I will never support

Black Lives Matter. What you gonna do about it? I don't like what this guy's saying.

I'm gonna stop there. It doesn't seem like that much to ask, but the reason it's so contentious, it seems to me, amongst evangelical

Christians especially, is because we don't know anything about history. This guy's got a lot of Matt Chandler in him.

He's got this sort of arrogance, this smugness, and assuming. Hey, man, if you don't support

Black Lives Matter, you're just a stupid idiot. You don't know anything about history, but I know about history.

I teach my students, and I teach your kids about history, and I'm gonna send them home and have an argument with you because they know about history, and you're just a buffoon.

Brother, I've studied history. I'm not gonna treat you like a jerk. I'm not gonna do that. I've studied history, and I don't agree with you, and I don't think you're an idiot, and I don't think you're a buffoon, and I don't think that you're ignorant.

I just think that you have a completely wrong methodology of how you evaluate these types of things.

I think you have learned this, and I don't know if you know that you're doing it, but you're doing it, and that's it.

I think you're a brother. I have no reason to believe that you have malintent, but what you are doing is sinful.

If we knew anything about history, then when we hear Black Lives Matter, we would hear, I was born. We'd hear it. Yeah, if only you were smart as me, you would think exactly like me.

If only you knew everything that I knew, then you would be exactly the same as me because I am the standard, of course.

I mean, man, we would hear a recurring cry, the need to establish and assert one's personhood, which is a thing that we've created in the

United States of America, that need. And so I think that there is just an important call for us as Christians in our churches.

I mean, I do it in a classroom. It's formal, right? That's my job. But I think that if your people in your churches don't have a sense of historical consciousness,

I mean, where else are they gonna get it from? They're gonna get it from the secular culture, and it's gonna sound exactly like what you're saying.

Sorry, this one's getting serious. I didn't mean for it to be like this.

This guy's microaggressed me, triggered me. It's not microaggression, it's a trigger. And more importantly, who else do you want shaping that historical consciousness?

Shouldn't it be shaped by the church? Don't you want to be able to shape it?

What's so interesting is that he's basically making the argument that the secular culture is already here, but don't you want the church shaping your young ones instead of the secular culture, but shape them the exact same way the secular culture would?

And so I think that there's no way that we can really understand and talk about contemporary issues like that if we don't have some larger sense of our context, our history.

That is true, he's right about that. We do need to understand history to understand our context, that is very true.

But you can't let it determine how you understand everything about our context, just because we were racist in the past doesn't mean we're racist now.

Just because there was systemic injustice in the past doesn't mean there's systemic injustice now. It doesn't. You have to demonstrate that, you have to prove that.

And it takes a little bit more than storytelling, no matter what your cultural Marxist teachers tell you. I'm gonna stop this one, this one got too serious.