Will Immigration Revive a Christian Nation?

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host, John Harris, with a special guest today, first time on the

CTM podcast, William Wolfe, who is or was a senior official in the

Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a director of legislative affairs at the

Department of State. And prior to that work, he's been a staffer for three different members of Congress.

He worked at Heritage Action for America. He holds a BA in history from Covenant College and a

Master's of Divinity at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. And because of William's background in politics and policy,

I thought he would be a good guy to pick his brain about a recent Gospel Coalition article on immigration.

And so we're going to get into some immigration policy and the politics of immigration and also what the

Bible says about this. We're going to try to exercise a Christian understanding of this to rightly evaluate some of the things being said out there.

So with that, William, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it, John. Thanks for having me on. I feel like I'm compelled to use the longtime listener, first time caller line here.

It's good to be on your show. Oh, well, that's very kind. Yes. And I've also I think from afar, though I'm not on Twitter, I see your tweets every now and then.

And I've admired a lot of the courage that you have. And on this issue in particular, the reason

I reached out to you is because lately, and it's not just this issue, it's a number of issues

I have sensed in institutional evangelicalism. In other words, people who are affiliated with an institution, every take has been bad.

And then you're like the one exception generally. And I know you don't have a lot of power, perhaps, at your institution, but just being affiliated with an evangelical institution and then saying some of the things that you say,

I'm like, I got to have William Wolff on to talk about this. And you're good on the issue. So anyway, I do appreciate it.

Is there anywhere before we get started, you want to send people a website or just your Twitter profile or where can they go to follow you?

Yeah, Twitter is great. It's definitely a place where I'm regularly active. You can follow me on there, message me on there.

Yeah, you can also find me on Facebook, on Instagram and on YouTube.

I have aspirations to follow in your footsteps and do some video content. I haven't quite got around to that just with the time and the setup it takes.

And I hope to sort of develop that into sort of a full spectrum, sort of suite of content production with a sub stack.

But on YouTube, it's called Dissident Theology. So that's where you can find me. Okay. On Twitter, it's at William underscore

E underscore Wolff with an E on the end. Gotcha. All right. Awesome. So if you're on Twitter, go follow

William Wolff. So I want to start, William, I just kind of teased that there's this

Gospel Coalition article out there. I know I sent that to you last week and then I think you posted it and some other people posted it.

And I want to get into that, into the details of that. But before we do, I thought it would be helpful to play a clip from Lincoln Duncan, who is in the

PCA. So he's and he's considered, believe it or not, more of a conservative in the PCA, if you can believe it.

But he says some of the same things or similar sounding things to what we're going to be reading in this TGC article.

So I want to play this and this is from woke preacher clips. It's mostly Lincoln Duncan, but Tim Keller makes an appearance and some other evangelical leaders.

And so it's painting a narrative here. And this is a narrative that we in the church need to be ready for in the

Western church and in America specifically, because you're going to hear this if you haven't heard it already. So here we go.

In conservative evangelical circles, oftentimes there'll be a real concern about immigration and especially what illegal immigration, right?

There are all sorts of legitimate things to be concerned about that. But here's the thing. What if that is

God's plan to reverse secularization in the United States? America has an enemy and immigrants are bringing a tremendous revival of Christianity to the country and their churches.

I don't think the enemy likes it. Let me just say something encouraging. I believe that the de -churching thing will bottom out in about 20 or 30 years because number one, immigration means non -white people are a lot less secular, a lot less individualistic than white people.

Our evangelical world, especially in the Southeastern United States, tends to be whiter than other parts of the evangelical world.

And in that context, there can be a fear about immigration. Again, Bob and I were talking beforehand.

I was at a conference, oh, it would have been less than 10 years ago.

And I was simply quoting some of the immigration statistics. So Teresa and I were talking about two members of her family who are

Hispanic. And they are going to be in the plurality.

They're going to be in the largest ethnic group probably in the next 10 years or so in the

United States. There'll be more Hispanic people than there will be, I'm a person of Scottish and English descent mostly, although there's some

Cherokee, Indian, and some other stuff in there too. There are going to be more Hispanic people than there are people like me in the

United States in just a decade or a decade and a half. And then 20 years beyond that, anybody know what the largest ethnic group is going to be in the

United States? Asian. This country in 2055 is going to be majority

Asian. Now, a lot of folks are scared by that.

You know, in conservative evangelical circles, oftentimes there'll be a real concern about immigration and especially what?

Illegal immigration, right? That'll be one of our big concerns. But here's the thing, and look,

I understand there are all sorts of legitimate things to be concerned about that, but here's the thing. What if that is

God's plan to reverse secularization in the United States? You know, all of us here, because we're

Bible -believing Christians, are concerned about a culture that's growing farther away from God, more opposed to the

Bible, more opposed to Jesus, more opposed to the gospel. What if immigration is part of God's strategy to reverse that in the

United States? And that people that don't look like me, actually because they believe like me, are much closer to me than people who do look like me and who don't believe the

Bible and don't believe in Jesus and don't believe the gospel. Oh, that gets me excited. You see, because by and large, the

Asians who have immigrated to the United States and are now part of the culture and are a growing part of the population do not share the secular assumptions of many people that look like me in the

Pacific Northwest and in the northeast of the United States and the Ivy League schools and such.

So, and it certainly, it gives us a great gospel opportunity. When government changes certain law codes, it can have a huge cultural effect, and the civil rights legislation definitely had that.

Alongside of that, there's something that happened that I think a lot of people miss, and that was the Immigration Reform Act that was passed about the same time.

That is why our country has diversified the way it has diversified over the last 50 years, and it has put us in a very, very different world.

William, that was Lincoln Duncan, Tim Keller, others. I just don't even know what to say about that.

That's so crazy to me. But there is this divide in evangelicalism over things like immigration and how a market economy works.

I mean, what do you make of this? Why this divide? Because it seems obvious to me we wouldn't want people coming and breaking and entering into our homes or leaving our doors open for people to just come in and use that as a way of evangelism, saying, well, 10 strange people we don't know were able to come in our home and eat our food, but at least they saw the

Bible sitting out or heard me doing family devotions. That would be insane. But when it comes to something broader like the

United States or the nation of Great Britain, somehow that's acceptable.

What do you make of this? Right. Well, I think that this is a conversation that really comes back to a really simple statement that's been lost by evangelicals.

And it's been resurrected in many ways through the conversation about Stephen Wolf's book on Christian nationalism.

And it's this, that grace does not destroy nature, but it helps perfect nature.

And what Ligdunken and others are doing is they're essentially eradicating natural distinctions, natural relations, natural things that God has built into the creation order of the world for the sake of the message of grace.

And that's not how we are called to live as Christians. We are called to live as Christians to respect the natural order and to sort of work in the warp and woof of it that God has put into our lives, family, citizen, neighbors, and nations, and then share the gospel with those people in an appropriate way.

So a desire for evangelism and mission should never be predicated upon bad and arguably harmful public policy.

Now, certainly there are cases where if you're in a country that's a closed country, you contravene public policy to share the gospel.

Well, that's because that's bad public policy that says you're not allowed to be a Christian. You're not allowed to share the gospel. That's not what we have here in the

United States of America. But closing a border, protecting our citizens first and foremost over and above and beyond the global population, that's good public policy.

That's the only way you can have a nation. And the gospel, as wonderful as a message as it is, is not something that we should pit against something like sovereign nations, closed borders, secure and safe neighborhoods and communities.

And so to see Lig, Duncan, and others making this argument, what it makes me think is, has

Lig ever studied the economics, the public policy, the actual data pertaining to immigration policy, or is he just latching onto a talking point that sounds winsome and it sounds brave, right?

He's like, I don't care if we're the declining demographic in the United States of America, bring on my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I mean, that sounds brave to a certain crowd, but to another crowd, I think with the ears to hear, that just sounds foolish because that's not how we're supposed to position ourselves in this world.

Again, like you said, if I told you that my method for personal evangelism was to leave my home unlocked and my family uncared for, and anybody who came into the house could take whatever they want with no sort of paperwork or invitation,

I would hope the members and elders of my church would rebuke me. Well, now if you extrapolate that to a national level, that's essentially what you have

Lig, Duncan, and many other evangelicals arguing for. And it's just, it's nonsensical. Yeah.

And it comes across to me as a bit, I don't know, selfish isn't the word. I don't even know what word to use because it's so outside of the way that I think,

I suppose. But it's not, I don't, I don't want to say they hate their own, but there's like, if you use the example you just gave about your family, you'd be like, do you even love your family?

You'd have to question that. And so I know it's not popular to question someone's patriotism, right? But that's kind of where I'm going with this.

I'm, I'm wondering, I'm like, what do you think of your nation? Do you, do you love your nation?

And I think maybe their response would be like, well, we love the church more or something. And it's, it's just so far greater than our love for their church is so far greater than our love for our nation.

But it's like, you know, these loves can be, they don't conflict with one another.

We can, God expects us, you know, to in our own personal lives, to love our children, but also to love our wife and also to love our church.

Right. And those things aren't conflicting with one another. They compliment one another. We can do all three, right.

Just like we can love our nation, our community, our region, and whatever, you know, whatever our place of employment and all those things.

Yeah. It's a disordered love. That's fundamentally what it is. Right. Exactly. Lig and these other brothers are, have their loves out of order because they're prioritizing a, they're prioritizing sort of like an immaterial idea, you know, evangelism and, you know, the spread of the gospel, or they're even arguing that, that these, um, these illegal immigrants are going to bring the gospel to us, which fundamentally there's just literally there's, there's no, uh, basic, there's no basis in immigration data for that.

The reality is that the vast majority of immigrants coming to the United States, particularly from South American States countries are

Catholics. And, and quite frankly, their Catholicism is often mixed with quite a bit of mysticism.

Uh, they're, they're, they're not bringing what we would understand to be like the, you know, they're not bringing the five souls of the reformation across the

Southern border when they're coming here. And look, that's not a knock on them. Those people need the gospel. Right. Um, but, you know, just welcoming an influx of sort of mystical

Catholics into a historically Protestant nation is not bringing the gospel to us.

I mean, at this point, I'd much rather be evangelized by a bunch of Ugandans, you know, can they come over and can they call us with their, you know, um,

I'd welcome that a little bit more, but again, see, that's not the point of it. We have, we have an obligation to the people that we share a citizenry with a contract with.

We have a societal contract with our fellow citizens from the United States of America, whatever their creed or religion is.

And if we put, you know, mass unchecked immigration above that social contract, then we're not doing our duty to our citizens.

It's disordered love. Yeah. And I, I couldn't agree more. And I mean, it begs so many questions, like why, if their

Christianity is so robust, are their nations, uh, nation States falling apart in many of these areas in South America, you'd think that if they were, if they had a robust gospel that they were living out, that wouldn't be the case.

And why is it that I I've wondered this too? Why some of the, the

Boers and the English settlers in South Africa who are under tremendous amounts of pressure right now, some even call it a genocide going on.

They're kind of like cousins in a way, at least the British, uh, uh, ones would be cousins as far as there there's a common lineage, a common, uh, shared values and culture and even religion.

And, um, but yeah, you know, they're barred access. They're not allowed to seek asylum, uh, like people from South America, which is just, it's interesting to me because it's like, we don't function that way.

Like we just talked about on a personal level, we tend to reach out or minister to the people that we share things in common with.

And it doesn't mean you can't do that with people that you don't share something in common with, but it, God does uniquely,

I think, equip people to, if you, if you like fishing, you're probably going to be better at ministering to fishermen, right?

If you live in a certain area or share certain values or cultural commonalities, you're going to be, especially language, you're going to be better at ministering to people that share those things as well.

So, um, right. And I mean, that's just a question of our, our, our natural affections, uh, appropriate sort of guiding, guiding, you know, intuitions in our, in our life.

And they are in many ways, cause God gives them. And again, it's, it's, it's humble, man. I think like, I think it's very humble to accept the limitations that God has given us.

The Psalms say, I think, I think it's Psalm 16 says the boundary lines have fallen for us in pleasant places, right?

Like, and when you think about that, you know, you could think of even just the boundaries of nations are good things to uphold because of finite resources, finite ability to love and serve, you know, a limited number of people and, you know, a guarantee the border towns in across the

United States are not feeling a lot of neighbor love from the New York and Nashville class of Christians who are telling them just to keep getting overrun by illegal immigrants, by the cartels, by fentanyl trafficking, by human traffickers, by drug smugglers.

I mean, there's real crime that's associated with open borders and mass unchecked immigration on top of all the cultural issues.

And so across the board, this position that's been adopted by Lake Duncan, by the gospel coalition, by Tim Keller, by Russell Moore, David French, you name it.

It is an unloving unbiblical position wrapped in pietistic emotional language that passes for quote unquote, a biblical perspective on immigration.

Couldn't agree more. Well, let's get into this article from the gospel coalition here. This is called how immigration can revive a

Christian nation by John Stevens. I'll just read it slowly and get your reaction,

William. It says the last 80 years have seen a radical transformation of the United Kingdom. Although the

British Empire once ruled 23 percent of the world's population in 1951, only point one percent of the nation's population was nonwhite.

Today, of the 65 million U .K. residents, 12 .9 percent are from an ethnic minority.

In the last 20 years, many migrants have come from Europe. More than a sixth of the current population was born outside the

UK. Despite Brexit and public concern about asylum seekers, migration continues apace.

In 2022, net migration was five hundred and four thousand people. As would be expected, mass migration has changed the life of the nation.

The UK is now a multiracial and multifaith country. This has generated tensions over the years as the reality of racism has been revealed and the understanding of national identity has had to evolve.

Some, especially those of an older generation, have found this difficult. Today, many

Christians fear the growth of other religions, especially Islam. However, despite the many social challenges, mass migration has benefited the evangelical church in at least four ways.

So I'm going to stop there. This is the intro. Any thoughts on that? I have a bunch, but I want you to tell me what you think.

It's a masterclass in sophistry because this guy, this author, is saying so much with so little.

He's making moral judgments with just his mere statement of the facts.

And if you can't catch that, you're going to be thoroughly duped by this article, right? So those first couple sentences where he just lists the way that the demographics of the

UK has changed, the point there is it's good. It's good that those demographics have changed, that the native population of the

UK has declined. And then scroll back up just a little bit there. And then you get this very subtle denunciation of those who would in any way be concerned about it as racists.

I mean, already he is setting up this whole article with the counter -argument being, if you disagree with me, it's probably because you're a closet racist.

Especially those of an older generation have found this difficult. This man is essentially saying UK boomers are racist.

And it's just, it's so ungracious. It's so uncharitable. It's not even serious.

You can know from this opening, John, that this is not a serious article trying to have a serious conversation about how just how nations should function.

And then Christians should function inside of nations for the national benefit. And then even just that throwaway line about today, many

Christians fear the growth of other religions, especially Islam, as if Christians have nothing to fear from Islam.

One of my immediate reactions to this was how tone deaf it is to the reality that there are widespread large networks of what are called grooming gangs that are operating in the

UK, particularly in predominantly Islamic pockets of the community, including Rotterdam, where over I think 700 counts of rape and sexual abuse were eventually unfolded and investigated.

And many men were arrested there. But there are many other pockets in the UK where this exists. And the local authorities, due to multiculturalism and political correctness, are scared to confront and actually arrest the predominantly

Islamic Muslim abusers. And so heinous abuses are happening in the

UK that would arguably be illegal under UK law. But in many cases under Islamic law are not illegal because of mass unchecked immigration.

So the fact that he leads off of this just shows me how tone deaf he is to the complex and difficult realities of the subject he's dealing with.

And there's the other thing was it's different than Lincoln Duncan's approach in that he's saying the spring is bringing Islam.

Right. Lincoln Duncan's trying to say that we justify it based upon the fact that the people coming are bringing

Christianity and they're not as secular. But he's saying here that actually and you could say they're not a secular, they're

Islamic, but they're not helping Christianity out by showing up. And I would point out to where they're concentrating themselves in places like London.

It's not like it's 12 .9 percent. That minimizes it. If you lived in London your whole life,

I've seen some documentaries on YouTube from people who like their house has gone back sometimes centuries that they've lived in this one area with their family and with other families.

And it's only in the last like 30 years that now they're in the complete minority.

Like like in other words, they can't even speak the languages of the people that are living around them.

And so for them, it's not 12 .9 percent of the people they interact with. It's like 90 percent of the people they interact with are that don't share their culture.

So that I don't know, is it loving to them to just come into their neighborhood, into their house, to in some places?

I know that in Wales, for example, I saw there was a video of these folks out in the country area like and there was there's a big hotel and the

UK government is paying to house migrants

I guess. I don't know if they were asylum seekers or what, but in these hotels right in the middle of farmland.

Right. And those people are are they're looking at the area. And as can be expected that when they leave those hotels, that's where they're spreading out to.

And it's creating problems with crime. And it's not loving to those people, just like you said, on the border towns in our country, it's not loving.

And and he's setting up this this this dichotomy where if you don't accept this mass immigration, you must be a racist.

And his that's a good point on his thesis is scroll back up to the tablet there. This is his thesis that mass migration has benefited the evangelical church at least four ways.

And as we go through this, you know, it really struck me. The first thing that struck me after I finished this article was the man does not use a single

Bible verse. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't use like a single Bible verse. So it is this hodgepodge of demographic statistics and just his own personal pontification.

And he doesn't show from a biblical perspective in any way, shape or form that the church is being benefited.

But that's that's a thesis. So let's keep this in our minds. We go through is that somehow this is benefiting the evangelical church in particular.

Let's go on to the next section. His first point is migration has greatly strengthened the evangelical church.

He says for several decades, the UK has been on a period of dramatic church decline as cultural

Christianity has given way to secular liberal progressivism in 2021.

Only 46 % of British citizens describe themselves as Christian. It's estimated that no more than two or 3 % of the population are evangelical believers.

Many of the historic mainline denominations are experiencing catastrophic, potentially terminal decline.

Evangelicalism would have declined similarly if it weren't for the migration of many born again believers to the

UK. There has been an explosion in the number of black and ethnic minority churches, which are among the largest and most vibrant congregations in the country.

A recent Evangelical Alliance survey found 25 % of practicing Christians in the

UK are people of color. While white Christianity is declining in the

UK, migration has meant true gospel Christianity is not. In the last year, some 123 ,000 people migrated to the

UK from Hong Kong, including many Christians. Over 600 churches have welcomed them.

This influx of committed believers is greatly strengthening the British church. Your reaction, William Woolf. I feel like, like old old grumpy

Luke from, you know, the, the Star Wars extra movies where he goes like, amazing, every single word that you said there was wrong.

I mean, there's, there's nothing that makes an argument here. I mean, this is, this is illogical, like truly this is incoherent what this guy's arguing.

So first of all, he, he says that, that the Christian, the practicing

Christian population in Europe and in the UK has declined to two to 3%.

So he's saying the total population of evangelicals. And when we use that term evangelicals, we mean people who actually still profess the true gospel, the faith once for all delivered to the saints, believe in the resurrection, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the veracity of his miracles, the testimony of scripture, the, you know, the basics of sort of like Nicene and apostolic orthodoxy, along with a trust in the inerrancy of scripture, you know, and probably by and large belief in traditional gender roles in the church, et cetera.

So he's talking about evangelicals are two to 3%. And then he says that if it wasn't for this influx of migrants, it would have declined even more, even more to what we're at two to 3%.

He said, we've declined similarly. I mean, that comparison he makes there. So he's saying that we're down to two to 3%.

And if it wasn't for this mass influx of immigration, what would we be at?

I mean, it doesn't get much lower than that. So his argument actually doesn't make sense on the face of it.

But then if you look at what he's actually saying, there's nothing in here that shows us that these immigrants, I'm sure many of them wonderful people are genuine

Christians, right? Like, look at that, look at that language he uses there. There's been explosion in the number of black and ethnic minority churches, which are among the largest and most vibrant.

Last I checked, most vibrant is not a standard of evangelical orthodoxy. Neither is the size of your church.

What does he mean by that? And then the survey from the Evangelical Alliance, which I think could be interpreted in a number of different ways.

Again, so now we're back to people who just sort of say they're Christians. This makes no sense here.

Are we talking about people who say they're Christians? If that's the case, then go look at his 46 % number of the whole population.

So he's piecing together stats that have no logical flow to them. And then he finishes with this absolute banger of a conclusion that white

Christianity is declining, but that doesn't mean they've lost a true gospel. So is that an indictment on white

Christians in the UK? Is he saying white Christians in the UK never had the true gospel? I mean, what is he saying?

On what basis does he make that claim? And then he slaps on some other stat about immigration from Hong Kong, which again, maybe there are

Christians in that. But the fact that churches have welcomed, you know, churches have welcomed immigrants from Hong Kong, again, tells me nothing about the nature of the faith that we're talking about here.

So I don't know, John, help me find a point in this convoluted mess, because it seems like the main point of these three paragraphs is white

Christians bad. And I'm glad to see they're declining. Yeah, I get the same kind of impression from it.

You could actually make the reverse case and say, this is really bad for all these really vibrant Christians who are coming to the

UK because now they're going to be corrupted by this horrible white culture that exists there. Right, right. They had this strong Christianity when they were in Hong Kong and other parts of the world.

But now they're going to come to the UK. And what's going to happen to their children? We should all worry about their children who are going to be influenced in the

UK school system. Right. So, I mean, you can make the opposite argument and say that immigration isn't good because we don't we want to preserve these

Christian communities that are so vibrant in Hong Kong or other places. Anyway, so that last line there, just that last line, his conclusion in no way flows from his premise or is substantiated by his hodgepodge of statistics masquerading as an argument.

The influx of committed believers is greatly strengthening the British church. Well, I'm sorry, you've not shown me that this is an influx of true believers in any demonstrable sense.

So I guess we're just celebrating demographic decline. Yeah. Number two, he says migration is undermining the assumptions of secular liberal progressivism.

Ethnic minorities in the UK tend to be more religious than their majority culture neighbors. In 2021, 46 percent of the

London population was non -white. A Thaos report from 2020 Religious London Faith in a

Global City revealed the effects of mass migration on our capital city. Among Londoners, 62 percent identified as religious compared to 53 percent nationally.

Meanwhile, 38 percent of Christians in London said they attended a religious service at least monthly compared to a mere 17 percent elsewhere.

Londoners values were also more conservative. Same -sex marriage is regarded as at least sometimes wrong by 29 percent of Londoners compared to 23 percent nationally and 24 percent regarded same -sex sex outside of marriage as at least sometimes wrong compared to 13 percent nationally.

The effect of mass migration is that London is home to populations that are highly progressive and populations that are highly conservative.

This challenges the dominant intersectional narrative, which presupposes that allegedly oppressed minority groups will stand together to support the extension of the liberal progressive agenda.

The values of ethnic minority groups cannot be written off as white prejudice that needs to be overcome.

This suggests white Christians will be able to make common cause with ethnic minority communities on many issues.

So William, if you're truly a conservative, you got to understand that all the people immigrating are a bunch of conservatives.

They're not just Christians. They're conservatives. So they just don't. The only difference is they don't share the same color pigmentation in their skin as the old white men.

But other than that, they just they must think the same. That's right. And again, we've gone we've gone completely like we've taken 180 degree turn here from the start of the article and quite frankly, from the reality of the facts on the ground, which is that the vast majority of immigration that is flowing to Western nations, whether that's the

UK or America or across Europe, is predominantly Muslim immigration. They're not

Christians. Right. The dominant ethnic group, religious group that is coming are our

Middle Eastern Muslims. So I don't know where they're getting like I don't know how he's doing this pivot, but you got to watch out for it here.

So which again, which one is it? And here he's trying to say that all the immigrants are conservative

Christians. And so that's awesome. But the reality is, first of all, that's not true. And and second, again, like these stats, they don't tell us anything other than there are more people in London than in the rest of the

UK. And so if there are going to be if there's going to be increased sort of population center of anybody who would hold to traditional conservative

Christian values. Well, yes, I'm not surprised that you would find them in London, you know, on the whole on the aggregate.

But again, I wonder, I've not clicked into all these links on these surveys, but even just when it says religious London, faith and global city, when they say among London are 62 percent identified as religious.

Well, how many of those are are Muslims? You know, I don't think we can just assume that all the people identifying as religious are

Christians. And again, if he's trying to sort of argue that this is a evangelistic gospel opportunity, that's one thing.

But that's actually not what he's arguing. He's trying to use these statistics to argue in some way, shape or form.

This is bolstering the Christianity of the UK in light of all the facts that point to the opposite.

Yeah, I thought Muslims, too, when we were reading this, that it's entirely possible.

I mean, I've seen even some of the debates in the streets of London that people have filmed on their cameras for YouTube of people,

Muslims debating with secular progressives. And like, obviously, there's a disagreement there, but it doesn't mean that the

Muslims are more conservative on every issue or something just because they hold to what everyone held to until five seconds ago on issues like gender and sexuality doesn't mean that they're also going to hold beliefs on markets and on other social issues.

So, yeah. And I mean, on this point, we're kind of we're kind of getting into this. But, you know, if people are just airdropping in like, look,

I don't I don't have any prejudice, of course, against, you know, Muslims other. But the reality is that Islam is a fundamentally different worldview.

It's a competing vision for society, for faith. It is truly theocratic.

Christian nationalists get all this like, you know, stuff thrown at them for wanting a theocracy.

Well, guess what? You know, the Muslims, they have a theocracy, right? Like they are they are some of the most illiberal and intolerant people in the world because of their sincerely held beliefs about how a society should be structured around Sharia law with worship of Allah at the center of it.

And so, you know, even if they do hold some sort of analogous conservative beliefs, which even that you could argue, even though they

Muslims are typically against homosexuality, but practice all sorts of other sexual morality in terms of abuse of young women and young girls and, you know, the taking of multiple wives.

Like there's not a lot of political common cause to be found with devout practitioners of Sharia law who are still living and operating in a

Muslim mindset. Now, there are some there are some anomalies, right? I know of a of a woman who's a

Muslim who was run for Congress in Minnesota, not not Ilyan Omar, but another woman who is staunchly pro -American, pro -conservative.

You know, there are there are exceptions to the rule, but those are exceptions, not the rule. Right. And they're standing on the shoulders of traditions that would not be part of or at least wouldn't be part of the places they came from or their faith tradition there.

They're they're gleaning from an American conservative tradition when they do that. OK, let's go to the next one.

Number three, migration has forced the British church to confront its racism. Growing ethnic diversity has exposed underlying assumptions of racial and cultural superiority.

The failure of the church to welcome the first immigrants from the Caribbean in the 40s and 50s showed attitudes that were essentially segregationist.

The church has had to recognize and repent of its sin. Increasingly, the church has purged racist views and rendered them unacceptable.

Imperialist models of world mission have had to give way to a humbler attitude, which recognized the

UK needs reverse mission. That is missionary work from the majority world to the West. The presence of large ethnic minority

Christian community has opened our eyes to the reality that Christianity isn't a white or Western religion, and the

UK is no longer a major leader of world Christianity. We've seen that many of our church practices and traditions weren't as biblical as we might have thought they were merely cultural.

I'm wondering, William, if the people coming here, he says that are going to be reverse evangelizing, not here, but in the

UK, reverse evangelizing the citizens there. Are they fanning out as missionaries would into the population to convert, or are they staying in cloistered communities where they have some, if it's

Muslims in that case, like Sharia law, and they're kind of separate from the rest, because he talks about segregation here, but my understanding is a lot of the people coming into the

UK now are segregating themselves into these communities, which is normal. You tend to settle around the people like you, but it would seem to challenge the idea that they're there to evangelize the population.

Well, right. I mean, they're certainly not. I mean, when you bring that up, John, I mean, the question of assimilation in Western nations is essentially been taken off the board, and we have facilitated in the

United States and in the UK. I mean, France is very, very much dealing with similar issues.

Western nations, I don't know, 50 years ago or something like that, decided that they were no longer going to have any sort of substantial pressuring demands of foreign immigrants who are moving there permanently to assimilate into their cultures and customs, to adopt the language, to be integrated into the communities.

You're right. They cloister together in pockets where they replicate their ways of life and their cultures and customs and even their language use as much as possible.

It's just, again, he's imagining something that doesn't exist, which is this idea that there are just streams of Christians from non -Western nations coming to the

UK or elsewhere for the sake of bringing the gospel. Brother, that's just not true. If people are seeking to come live in the

UK or in France or in Germany or in Belgium or the Netherlands or the United States, they're seeking primarily a better life.

They're fleeing from the political structures that have failed them, and they're coming seeking an opportunity for their family.

If they bring their faith with them, that's great, but that's not what's driving these people.

This brother clearly knows next to nothing about what's actually going on with immigration around the world.

This is the last one. This is the fourth point he tries to make. His migration has enabled the church to manifest the reconciling power of the gospel.

The glory of the gospel is that it reconciles the divisions among humanity resulting from the fall.

The church community is meant to display to the world of the power of the gospel and the saving plan of God.

Of course, reconciliation can be demonstrated within a monoethnic community, for example, between those of different classes, ages, or genders.

However, ethnic reconciliation between those who are historically hostile to each other is even more obvious.

In the early church, Jews and Gentiles united in Christ. The Roman Empire was immensely multiethnic and multicultural in a way that wasn't true of the

UK until recent decades. The diverse context of the contemporary UK brought about by mass migration has opened an unprecedented opportunity to showcase

Christ. By contrast, conflation of the gospel with any form of race -based nationalism tragically prevents the church from modeling the gospel as it should be.

I'm assuming this author would probably accuse you, William Wolfe, of some kind of a race -based nationalism and opposing something as good as reconciliation.

That's the term he's using, as if there was, I guess, a big problem because of segregationist views that now people need to reconcile with other parts of the world.

What do you say to that charge? Well, I'm all for some reconciliation in the immigration context.

It's called assimilation. Reconcile yourself to the nation that you're moving to and don't continue to hold on and demand your ways of life and your customs and your language that you left.

There's no other situation that this works in the world. Obviously, at least in our present day, colonialism has such a terrible rap because one of the arguments against colonialism is all these imperial

Western whites went around and enforced our views on everyone else. Now the reverse is happening and now we're cheering it on.

Yeah, let's reconcile. Let's reconcile the fact that you have moved your family to a new country and you need to assimilate into it.

But in a more serious fashion, again, this article is just loaded with accusations of racism that have absolutely no basis in it whatsoever.

Not to mention, he has a very sloppy use of the word church. Which church is he talking about here in Britain?

Is he talking about in the UK? Is he talking about a particular church? Is he talking about UK Baptists?

Is he talking about UK Presbyterians? If we're going to think of actual evangelical Orthodox congregations that are left in the

UK, those are pretty much the two that you've got, or maybe some faithful Anglicans. He's just using this term like willy nilly.

And so what is the ethnic reconciliation that needs to happen? He already said the ethnic churches were large and vibrant.

So again, John, I'm at a loss. This is truly one of the worst articles

I've ever read from TGC and that's saying a lot. That is saying a lot because there's a lot of bad articles.

Well, let's land the plane here. This is the last two paragraphs. There are still immense challenges to face.

Individual UK churches remain overwhelmingly mono -ethnic, and we need to overcome this functional segregation and foster genuine multi -ethnic congregations.

Slow progress is being made on this front. We need to overcome prejudices, misunderstandings, and sensitivities, recognize our past injustices and failings, and share power with our minority brothers and sisters.

Mass migration makes this both necessary and possible. Migration has irrevocably changed the nature of the

UK. Some still hanker for a past era of greater homo... I can't say that word.

Homogeneity. Thank you. Homogeneity. However, in my view, mass migration has been a providential blessing of God, both for the nation and the church.

The UK church is richer as a result, and my prayer is that God will use our growing ethnic diversity both to conform it more closely to the likeness of Christ and to bring gospel growth, even revival, to the nation.

Make it stop, John. Yeah, I don't even... I don't know where to go from here.

He just seems to be saying... When he says we, because at the beginning, I thought the we was we

Christians are... Now it's like we white people are bad. So it's like he's switching the we.

Well, I think one of the... If we're going to try to be sort of useful to your listeners, really what we can do with an article like this is just continue to pull up and expose the horrific assumptions that underline his rhetoric here, right?

Let's take this on for a second. He says that UK churches remain overwhelmingly monoethnic, although keep in mind that some of those churches that would be overwhelmingly monoethnic are the large and vibrant ethnic churches he was praising just earlier in the article.

So again, remember the only monoethnic churches that are ever bad are white monoethnic churches. Everyone else is free to have a monoethnic church, and that's no problem.

And why, though? So seriously, we need to ask ourselves, what is wrong with a monoethnic church if it's in primarily sort of a monoethnic population setting?

Obviously, London isn't necessarily going to be that. But if we're talking about somewhere in the country out in the

UK, that's still largely what you would call white English individuals.

That's just who's going to be able to gather there for church. And then where he says mass might...

He says slow progress is being made on this front. He says we need to overcome prejudices. What prejudices? What misunderstandings?

What is he talking about? Past injustices? What past injustices? The past injustices of having an immigration system that largely benefited the native born population?

Is that what he's implying? Honestly, don't know. But that's not an injustice. That's a good way to run a nation.

Right now, the UK has a disastrous immigration system that is only hurting the native population.

And that's not a wise way to do immigration at all. And when he says mass migration makes this both necessary and possible, that brings us full circle back to the

Lig -Duncan argument, which is essentially that for some reason, the mass movements of people across our globe matters more just because it does than having safe, secure nations with governments that care for their citizens.

So, I mean, the assumptions that underline this article are what I would call non -cognitive ethics.

It's not a biblical ethics that's based on examining what God's word says about things and reasoning through it the way

God has called us to, to conclusions that are proper and benefiting of those who adopt them.

But rather, it's emotional based argumentation based off of decades of progressive assumptions with really no statistics to back it up.

Question for you. What other things, if you were writing an article on the immigration issue in the

UK, what kind of stats would you bring up or issues? Because I'm wondering if things like crime would, like if he were to force to talk about that, you know, what kinds of things have these immigrants brought that is negative?

If we're going to have a balanced approach, even if we accept all his premises, right? We have to also look at the full picture, which would include crime and I don't know other social maladies maybe you'd be familiar with.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think just like I mentioned, I've mentioned earlier the issue of sort of mass, the proliferation of mass grooming gangs in the

UK, which is a real issue. But then also you have in the

UK, you have the development of what people call like no go zones, which are areas where the population is so predominantly

Muslim. And they, the men there, you know, behave as if they were in a

Middle Eastern nation operating under some sort of Sharia law so that, you know, white

Westerners, particularly white Western women aren't safe to go there anymore. So that would be something that I would look at would be the proliferation of no go zones in London.

And now London in the UK, they have, you know, very serious restrictions on, you know, personal firearm ownership.

I don't even think you're allowed to have a personal, you know, a personal, you know, concealed carrier, open carry, you know, weapon over there.

But there's been a rise in stabbing, serious stabbing. This is something that the mayor of London has had to deal with, which is, you know, a rise in violent crime, particularly related to knife attacks.

And again, the vast majority of those fur traders are Muslim individuals. So I think that it's not, there's really no evidence to point to to say that mass unchecked, unassimilated, unassimilated migration from non -Western nations is making

Western nations more prosperous, more free, and more safe. And there's certainly no evidence we could point to that shows us that this is also somehow, even if, you know, even if we're losing prosperity, losing security, you know, losing a sense of cultural cohesion, the gospel is flourishing.

Well, I don't know how, at least in terms of worldly analytics, we can point to that being the case either.

Yeah. And I haven't done a lot of research on the crime stats in the UK. I mean, just a little, like Google searches coming up with knife stabbings have gone up.

But a few websites are telling me that overall crime is going down. My question, I suppose, would be, and again,

I haven't looked into this, and this wasn't necessarily in the scope of what we were addressing in this article. But is whether or not in the areas specifically in which migrants are moving to if crime is increased?

Because that's really the key question. It's not about the nation overall. It's about those areas where you actually have brought people in from other places.

Are people safe in those areas? Can a woman walk at night in those areas where she was able to walk before?

Those kinds of things. So, yeah, I mean, so crime is one thing.

I mean, as far as social implications, I don't know what implications this has for education, like if this is going to change the curriculum in the schools.

And you have people that don't know the language well, if standards are going to fall as a result of that. I mean, these are the things we see happening in our country.

I see right in my backyard, near where I live, there has been a massive migration of people from different parts of South America.

And they have mostly, I think, Dominicans and El Salvadorans and so places in the

Caribbean as well. But they're going into the public schools. And the result has been chaos in the schools.

At certain times, like the whole police department has to go to like the middle school to stop a riot or something.

There's a lot of violence. And there's a lot of when it comes to the education itself, the standards have just been so dumbed down because now you have kids that can't even speak the language well, and you have to pass them, right?

No child can be left behind. And so this short changes all the local kids who are going to the same schools and they won't have an education.

And so I'm not saying the same thing's happening in Great Britain. I'm just unaware of the fact, but it wouldn't surprise me. I don't know if you know anything about that.

Yeah, I don't know if I have specifics, but I do know that specifically in Birmingham in particular in the

UK, that this is a serious problem and has been for a while. There's a 2017 article even from National Review that is exposing sort of the

Islamic takeover of Birmingham in the UK and it becoming a place where native

UK residents that are non -Islamic don't feel welcome. And I've been using to just sort of parse my terminology here.

Really, the question at hand is with mass migration in the UK, which is funny, we can't get away from this if you're going to operate in reality and not just sort of like emotional aphorisms like we saw in the

TGC article, which is that Islam is a fundamentally anti -Western mindset.

It's an anti -Western worldview. It's an anti -Western totalitizing metaphysical and physical way of viewing the world and political ideology.

And so where Islam takes root, whether that's in a Somali population or in a

Middle Eastern population, it is going to breed anti -Western values in many ways.

And that will be ultimately reflected in the education system. In fact, Jon, speaking of this, in Texas right now,

I don't know if you've tracked any of this, but in the Texas state house, they have now elected for the first time a couple of Muslim state reps.

And these Muslim state reps are already doing things like trying to pass resolutions praising

Pakistan. Like they had like a Pakistani appreciation day. And Pakistan is one of the most notable harbors of terrorists out there, right?

Like one of our biggest issues as we work through negotiating the attempted peace deal with Afghanistan and with the

Taliban was that Pakistan would stop providing safe harbor to Al -Qaeda and to Al -Qaeda terrorists.

And so this is not just overseas. This is coming home to a Texas state capital near you right now.

Samuel Huntington covers all of this in Clash of Civilizations. And he actually want to bring him in on some of these other issues too, particularly more on American immigration if we get to that on a couple of things.

But yeah, education system, neighborhoods. But again, at the root of all of it is there is a

Western worldview that is built on Christianity. And then there is a non -Western worldview that is antithetical to so much of that that is encapsulated in Islam.

And that's what the UK and all of Europe, quite frankly, is wrestling with right now. Well, William, since we don't have a lot of time left, why don't you just share some of the things that you wanted to share and didn't get an opportunity to and give some advice to the

Christians listening if they hear this from their pastor or other respected leaders? Yeah, well,

Huntington in his book, I've got it right here. I'll put it on the screen. I don't know if it is called

Who Are We by Samuel Huntington, the challenges to America's national identity.

He has just such like if you're trying to understand what's happening to our country right now vis -a -vis unchecked mass immigration, both legal and illegal, right, because that's it's happening.

We have an acute focus on the wide open, porous southern border, which we should.

And there are some real issues there. Of course, we need border security. We need to reform asylum. But at the same time, the

United States has a host of legal immigration programs and opportunities that are also harmful to our native born population here.

And I'm not there's nothing wrong with desiring the good of your fellow citizen, your native fellow citizen.

That's not racist. That's not xenophobic. If you don't do that, arguably, I wonder about the basis of your

Christian faith. But here's what Huntington says that people need to realize coming out of in the post

World War II era. As we embrace this idea of the open society, what happened to the elites and those who led countries, including

America? He says this. He says until the late 20th century, American political and government leaders acted similarly.

And what he meant by that is that they attempted to promote the unity of their people, development of national consciousness, the suppression of subnational, regional and ethnic loyalties, the universal use of national language and the allocation of benefits to those who conform to the national norm.

So until the late 20th century, American leaders were all for that. And then he says this.

Then in the 1960s and 1970s, they began to promote measures consciously designed to weaken

America's cultural and creedal identity and to strengthen racial, ethnic, cultural and other subnational identities.

These efforts by a nation's leaders to deconstruct the nation they governed were quite possibly without precedent in human history.

And so this is from page 143. And who are we? And I think this is really the banner that needs to hang over all the conversations we have about American, about immigration, and particularly from a

Christian standpoint, is we need to recognize that there's an ongoing project that's been undertaken by the leaders of our country in many ways on both sides of the aisle.

I think George H .W. Bush is a good example. Even Reagan with his amnesty. H .W.

Bush, I mean, W. Bush. There's this quest for this multicultural society here in America that completely undermines and erodes what we spent hundreds of years developing here.

And so to bring that all the way back around and to address it briefly from a biblical perspective, again, it's a kind of joke.

It's all in Augustine. C .S. Lewis once said, it's all in,

I can't remember. There's some quote. He's like, it's all in Lewis. And for me, it's like all in Augustine, right?

Like if you look at what Augustine has to say about ordered loves and rightly, and even where we get something like a just war theory from,

Augustine says that to love something rightly is not just to love the right thing, but to love it in the right order.

And that includes loving your nation and your neighbor's citizens. And we live in a day and age where we've been told that our national citizenship means nothing in light of our heavenly citizenship.

And the Bible just knows nothing of that. Paul used his national, his Roman citizenship to his benefit in scriptures.

God created nations and boundaries. There's the idea of a sovereign nation state is in many ways a gift of the reformation to the world as we came out of the

Holy Roman Empire that sought to sort of totalitize all people under one central authority in Western Europe.

And to disregard this inheritance is foolish and counterproductive, and it's having serious negative impacts on our nation.

And so we need to reject this sort of non -cognitive ethic that's put forward by Keller and by Lig and by the immigration, the immigration,

Evangelical Immigration Table, EIT. That group has great ties to the ERLC and others.

And what they do is they prioritize immigration policies that benefit the non -native migrants over national citizens.

There's a different approach that's out there. That's called Wise Welcome. That's proposed by some people, including

Kelly Kohlberg and Professor James K. Hoffmeier. You can find that you can find that those resources online where they just they walk through from a biblical perspective how immigration should be approached from sort of that basic rubric of loving

God and loving others, loving your neighbor as yourself. And that's how we formulate our immigration policy.

It's not loving the world as whatever that is. It's loving your nation and your neighbor as yourself.

Lots more could be said. That was quite a monologue. Thanks for listening, John. No, that was great. I think that'll help a lot of the listeners who are out there and hearing this.

And TGC influences so many pastors, and it's unfortunate, but I don't know how many times

I've had people message me and say, my church is solid, or at least I thought it was.

Then all of a sudden my pastor takes this left turn somewhere because of something Keller said or something they read on TGC or some popular figure they're following said it.

And so they want to copy it. And so I think it's important we tackle this. And I appreciate your work on this,

William. I know it probably doesn't give you a lot of brownie points with people in institutional evangelicalism, but it's the only unfortunately.

I'll just say this in closing that the evangelicals who want to have a seat at the table, who really want to influence things, who want to be cultural leaders and speak prophetically to the culture and engage it and so forth before a watching world, as we often hear, they are shooting themselves in the foot with articles like this because it's like this is what regular, ordinary, decent

Americans who care about their country, just like they care about their homes. They see this and they get the impression you don't like us very much.

And it comes across as ignorant. It comes across as just unaware of the work that's being done by those who are in the more conservative camp.

It's really a one size fits all approach for people who read the

Wall Street Journal or not the Wall Street Journal, sorry, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Wall Street Journal is pretty bad on this too.

Are they? Okay. I didn't want to unfairly. I mean, the problem is that, look,

America is more than an economy, right? There's so much we haven't even touched on here in terms of like, well, they're doing jobs or it helps drive

GDP and stuff like that. Well, look, our country is not just the sum of our GDP, right?

And even if there may be a potential downtick in some economic benefits for sort of revamping our immigration policy to benefit citizens, that's a price that's worthy to be paid.

I mean, look, a way I put this recently is I'm not anti -immigrant at all. I'm just pro -citizen.

I'm pro -citizen. I'm pro -American citizens, whoever they may be. When I worked in Washington, DC, I took cabs all the time, right?

I took cabs back and forth from State Department to Congress. Vast majority of my cab drivers were Ethiopian Eritrean immigrants.

And now these people, they loved America, like the idea of America more than these progressive white liberals, right?

Like they actually want America to exist. They want immigrants who come here to have to assimilate, right?

These guys speak English. They get a job. They pay taxes, right? Like, look, again, I think we need to have reasonable legal immigration, but they don't want the mass unchecked illegal immigration either.

So we need to embrace immigration that allows for migration while limiting the impact on Americans, the legal immigrants who are already here, and also harm on foreign guest workers.

There's a lot of exploitation, John. I mean, so much to get into. The way we run our immigration system actually hurts some of the most vulnerable in society as opposed to helping them.

And so just more of that is not going to be more justice. It will be less. Yeah. William, thank you once again.

Great points. If you want to follow William on Twitter, it's at William underscore E underscore Wolf. You can go to the

Freedom Center at Liberty University where I know you write a lot. God bless you, brother. And looking forward to hearing more soon.