Welcome to Pride Month

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, as always, looking at some Southern Baptist -related content this morning and deciding,

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I'm not gonna talk about this today. I can't take it. I can't take the compromise and corruption.

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And for those who are sticking it out and wanna fight next year in the Southern Baptist Convention, man,

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God bless you, I'm praying for you, but man, it just seems past the point of no return in my mind reading some of the things

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I've been reading this morning. It's a denomination that has a broken immune system. They have no way really to actually oppose the evil that is surrounding them.

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And it's just sad to me to watch the downgrade continue. And I think in some ways we're at the beginning of it.

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I mean, it's gonna get, I think, a whole lot worse within our lifetimes if the Southern Baptist Convention even remains.

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I mean, they've opened themselves up to so many potential lawsuits that who knows what's gonna happen.

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But anyway, I'm gonna talk about an article that is very short, that is a listener -generated episode.

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Someone sent it to me and wanted my opinion on it early in June. And of course, we're not early in June anymore, but it's still quote -unquote

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Pride Month. In fact, this is the first year, I believe, that I had on my phone calendar.

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When I looked at my calendar, it just said Pride Month. And it just seemed, I was talking to my family yesterday about this for fathers to get together.

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I said, it just seems to me like it's more prevalent this year than it's ever been. I was at a gym recently when

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I was traveling and they had, it was a Planet Fitness, and they had behind the counter a television screen that said, check out our app and our special Pride workouts.

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I don't know what a Pride workout is. I mean, how do you link that issue to everything?

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How come when I go to the state park that's near me, I pass a booth? And this has been in effect actually for a while.

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It doesn't have to be Pride Month. It's all the time. It says Pride Outdoors with a rainbow flag sticker on it.

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I mean, this is a state park. What does that have to do with hiking? When I go to the local grocery market, there's a sticker that you pass and there's nothing else there.

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Just this one sticker. Same thing with the booth in the county or the state park. There's nothing else there.

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It's not like they have that and a bunch of other things. It's just that. But at the local grocery store, you go in and there's a sign or a sticker on the door that is approved

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LGBT friendly workspace. It's all over the place where I am. And I know that's not where everyone is, but where I am, it's definitely prevalent.

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And the only thing I will say is the community that I live in is I don't see rainbow flags.

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I don't see people personally celebrating this in where I live. Now, towns around me, yes, but not where I live.

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So when I was gone though for a week, I come back and there's a mural now painted by the local high school on a, it's a concrete base.

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Well, it's actually the bottom of a bridge. It's a bridge, really. I think I'm gonna have to write the county later today.

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I'm gotta figure out whether it's the town or the county. I think it's the county, but it's a county road that it's supporting.

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So it's a support structure made out of concrete. And they put this mural on it, painted it, and they did a good job depicting the local area, except for two things.

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There's a lesbian couple, and it's very prominent. There's no mistaking what they're trying to communicate.

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Holding hands, walking on the local rail trail we have here, hearts above them. And then you have a farmer.

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We have a lot of, we're in apple country. There's a lot of apple orchards. There's a farmer on a tractor and on his overalls is a rainbow flag.

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I kid you not. Now, that's just not reality. That's just not happening.

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If that's happening with the farmers, we're in real trouble. I didn't think that was happening with the farmers, but that's the way the high school kids wanted to, in part, depict the local area.

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And so anyway, I'm just saying it is so prevalent. It is so prevalent, and it's in your face.

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And Christians are, if you don't think Christians are being marginalized, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, it's everywhere around you.

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It's in business, it's in government, it's in your entertainment, it's in academia. And the moral values that Christians hold to are certainly not just out of style, but they're considered to be immoral.

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They're considered to be evil. And this is the world we live in. And we just got to be honest with ourselves about it,

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I think, and we have to confront it directly. We can't compromise.

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There is no compromise. And so I want to talk to you about an article Carl Truman wrote that is an attempt to,

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I think, essentially rally the Christians. You're seeing all of this around us, but let's rally the

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Christians. But before we get to that, our sponsor for this episode, and I'm grateful for them, Gold River Trading Company, Gold River Tea, you can go to goldriverco .com.

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I have to actually taste it for myself. And it has to be something that I would actually buy. And Gold River Tea is something, actually.

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I bought it before, I was drinking it before I was ever approached about sponsorship. So anyway, go get yourself some

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Gold River Tea. And let's talk about the article now from Carl Truman. Welcome to Pride Month, Christian.

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Carl Truman, June 1st. Social justice demands our opposition to its celebration and symbols.

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I'll repeat that subtitle. Social justice demands our opposition to its celebration and symbols. It's interesting to me, this is the same

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Carl Truman that's run so much cover for Grove City College when they've imported social justice thinking.

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And they've imported some LGBT stuff too. It's not just BLM. But this is

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Carl Truman's take on Pride Month. It's pretty short. And let's just read it. And I want you to think through his arguments here because I think there's a problem with this.

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This is what Carl Truman says. He says, if anyone wants to understand what is happening to the public square in America, indeed, if anyone wants to know how

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America, at least a ruling class, wishes to understand itself, they need to look no further than Pride Month.

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If the arrival of the Pilgrims, the founding of the nation, and even the contribution of Martin Luther King Jr. receive no more than 24 hours on the national calendar, the

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LGBT Alliance has an entire month to party in the streets. And this street party is enabled by the countless commercial ventures that post rainbow flags in their windows and on their websites.

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For anyone not completely hoodwinked by the erotic obsessions of our day, taking pride in one's sexual identity, indeed, even considering sexual identity to be an identity, would seem at best pitiful, and at worst, a deep perversion of what it means to be human.

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Yet here we are, and we should not underestimate the power of what it signifies. It is a basic fact of history that if you control time and space, you also control the culture.

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The early Christian of the fourth century knew that as they slowly but surely claimed space and pagan

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Roman culture for churches and marked the rhythm of time with the development of the liturgical calendar. And all sides in our current political divisions know this as well.

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It is why debates about the naming of Columbus Day and the status of Confederate statues and flag of the

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Confederacy are such contentious topics. These arguments are not just about the things themselves.

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They are about who owns time and space. In short, they are about who owns the culture's memory and imagination.

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Now, let's stop right here. I don't find really anything significant to quibble about here. I would probably phrase things differently about identity.

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I mean, I do think that part of your identity is who God created you to be, and that in part is, he created men, men and women, women, and the sexual components that are attached to those things.

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And I don't know that Karl Truman would quibble with me saying that either. I would just make that stronger point. But I don't think we have anything to quibble with here.

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He's right in his analysis of this. And this is where I think the wheels start coming off.

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So you read this and you think that it's gonna be a rallying cry for Christians, that we need to hold the line, that maybe even we need return to liturgical calendars, or at least we need to ignore the celebrations that are being imposed upon us that conflict with our moral teachings, and focus more emphasis on celebrations that are in accord with our moral teachings.

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I've made the point many times that the current, the holidays that are being forced upon us at breakneck speed, the months and the days, are really, they're really meant to remind everyone of oppression, of an

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America, specifically in our country, that has failed certain oppressed groups.

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And how those failings, in order to rectify those failings, we need to emphasize those failings, and remember them, and consider them, and meditate upon them, and that will produce,

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I think many say healing, but really ultimately what happens is that it produces more strife, more controversy, a really lack of reconciliation.

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These aren't holidays that necessarily everyone can come around. Now, they advertise these holidays that way, that everyone should be able to come and celebrate.

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In fact, I think in future years, it's going to be kind of like pinching your incense to Caesar for the early church.

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If you do not participate in a favorable way, and if you are not making merry to the extent you should, and that which is expected of you, then you will be in big trouble for failing to participate in the religious observance that is

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LGBT or Pride Month. And this would go for Black History Month, and Juneteenth, and whatever else is being imposed upon us.

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There's, I think Columbus is now what, Indigenous Persons Day. The, there's, and none of, a lot of this stuff, not all of it, but some of this stuff,

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I should say, isn't necessarily wrong in itself, in itself. When you look at what they want to emphasize or talk about, on the front end, it seems okay, but then it's the people behind, the engineers behind these holidays are bringing in with this a lot of resentment, a lot of just a critique of the very foundation in their minds of what the

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United States is. And Christianity is certainly attached to this, that we were at one time a more

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Christian -influenced country. And so Christianity failed, the United States failed, and here we are to rectify these things years later.

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That's, I think that's kind of what's going on. And so I think Carl Truman's correct in his observation here that this is about who is going to define the, well, control the memory and imagination, he says, but I think it's about defining who we are.

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Who are we as Americans and as Christians as well when this stuff gets into the church?

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Who are we? Are we the descendants of horrible, oppressive people that were just evil, and we are finally wise enough today in 2022 to realize these things.

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And this is an opportunity for us once again to let everyone know about how much we repent of our parents and grandparents and great -grandparents, and we can now finally transcend the bigotry that we were immersed in at one time in order to celebrate, in this case, perversions, in the case of Pride Month, that it is not enough to just welcome or tolerate.

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We must celebrate. And so I think Carl Truman's right about this.

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I'm just adding some meat to the bones here. Here's where the wheels fall off, though, in my opinion. Here's where the wheels fall off.

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And this is the emphasized quote, by the way. This tells you where we're going. The Christian cause of this month should be opposing Pride Month and its flag in as public and strident a way as many have opposed racism and its symbols.

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This is where I think, and I think many of you would wonder what's wrong with this. This is where I think, though, there's an issue here. And let me read it for you.

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90 % of this article, by the way, I would agree with, but there's an Achilles heel in this. He says this, this makes

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Pride Month something with which no Christian should have any sympathy whatsoever. It marks the beginning of summer with a dramatic assertion of human autonomy and the sovereignty of individual desire.

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And by the way, I would say more than this. It's not, I think this comes from, I think, his rise and fall of the modern self and his thesis in that.

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It's not just an assertion of human autonomy and sovereignty of individual desire. Like I said before, this is really a, it's a negative celebration.

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It's a recognition of how evil the whole entire country was.

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And how we're still struggling to kind of get out of this horrible anti -LGBT narrative that used to exist because of Christianity.

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And so this is specifically anti -Christian. Carl Truman understands this, but it's, I think it's just so much bigger.

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It's not just an assertion of human autonomy and the sovereignty of individual desire. I think this is, it's actually more basic than that.

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It's just a celebration of perversion. That's what it is. You don't see, if it was truly a celebration of human autonomy, if that's truly what it was, okay?

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It would be for straight people as well. It would be for married people as well.

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It would be for everyone, right? It would be inclusive for every single person of every identity. And they could be part of this celebration as well.

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You have straight pride people. But that's not what it is because it's really not ultimately consistently about human autonomy.

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It is about perverting the institution of marriage and the moral foundation that this country once rested on.

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That's all it is. And it's just evil. He says, the rebels take over and with their flags and their parades, they assert ownership over space, public, commercial, virtual, and even by yard signs and symbols on social media posts, personal and private.

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It is not about what the state allows consenting adults to do in the privacy of their bedrooms. Far from it, rather June witnesses as comprehensive an attempt at cultural revolution as one is ever likely to see.

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And anyone who doubts this only needs to walk down M street in Georgetown or visit amazon .com and ask themselves what message the commercial signs in the shop windows or the rainbow banners on the website send to their children or why the assistant at the cash register at some bland clothing store still asks them if they would like to supplement their purchase with a donation to the human rights campaign.

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Now, recently I was in Boulder, Colorado and Boulder is, they have to have a rainbow flag on every business in the famous shopping area there.

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Or, and I was talking to a family that we were being hosted by and they said that if that doesn't happen, there were businesses that would just be destroyed if they failed to put that flag out there.

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Now, last week I was in Wisconsin and in Wisconsin, I think the entire trip,

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I saw one house of the rainbow flag, very different. I mean, it just doesn't seem to be there as much but it is there, it is under the surface, it is at the high school, it's starting, but it's nothing like Boulder.

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And so it's different depending on what part of the country you're in. So in some places, I think it is still more hidden. There is some, it is taboo, but in many places it is not taboo anymore.

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And I think that's the point is to try to normalize it, to make it so it's not taboo, so it's normalized. And guess what?

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You're the freak for being a monogamous married couple with children and many children.

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I mean, the more of a freak you are, the more of a freak you are if you have a lot of children. And that's, I think, the play that's going on right now.

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It is to normalize perversion and to cast dispersion on what really is natural and normal.

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And it's ultimately attack on God. It's the attack on the way he set things up, his morality, his design. We are going to create the world in our own way.

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And we're going to do it through collective human action, which is why, again, I don't think Karl Truman's 100 % correct about this human autonomy thing.

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I don't think it's just about human autonomy. I think it's about humans, but it's a Tower of Babel going on.

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That's why you see in the communities surrounding me, many of these communities, they come together and they have celebrations and parades.

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And you have the mayor out, you have the town supervisor or the county commissioner out, and they're all taking part in these festivities.

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This is a, it is a collective action. He says this, but there is a silver lining here.

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Pride Month does offer those Christians who are passionate about social justice, a chance to reassure those of us who fear their commitment to such is always tailored to appeal to the broader tastes of the day.

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Let me read this for you again. It is the Achilles heel. This is the significant sentence. There's a silver lining here in Karl Truman's mind.

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There's a silver lining. There's a good, there's a positive thing about this opportunity that presents itself during Pride Month.

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What's the silver lining? Is it that we can go to these events? Like some of my friends on social media, well, personal people

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I've met actually, people that are going and doing street preaching. And I think of like a

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Jerry Doris who has been posting a lot of stuff on Facebook about going to these events with his church.

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And he's got a lot of men with him and they are just preaching the gospel. They are condemning sin and preaching

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Christ. And it's salvific. It's not Westboro Baptist stuff at all. It's just, here is the gospel.

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Here's the love of God. But if you want the love of God, you must forsake your sin. They're doing this.

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That's not what Karl, here's what Karl Truman says. This is the silver lining for Karl Truman. Pride Month offers those

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Christians who are passionate about social justice a chance.

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To reassure those of us who fear their commitment to such is always tailored to appeal to the broader tastes of the day.

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Let me translate this for you. Christians who are social justice activists within the church, pushing the needle left, who have done so with BLM and with Me Too and whatever else.

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Those two being probably the primary issues, let's say. They've been doing this and they exist at high numbers in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, apparently. Those Christians, they have an opportunity now to be absolved.

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We've been suspicious, let's say. We've seen them doing these things and we thought to ourselves, well, they seem to just want the world's approval.

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That must be what's motivating this. In fact, in the SBC, you hear the word pragmatism a lot. They're just pragmatists. And I think that's an oversimplification.

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I think there's much more going on, but there is certainly a pragmatic element to this. In fact,

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I'm recalling now someone at Southeastern years ago, a provost saying that basically in order to save the institution and the

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Southern Baptist Convention, we need this kingdom diversity initiative. In fact, Al Mohler said much the same thing. And I think it was 2010 or 11 in the

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Great Commission Resurgence book that was published. He said, hey, if the Southern Baptist Convention doesn't diversify, we're going to lose.

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Because we just don't have enough people that are white in the convention. We have to do something, right? And this of course has now been justified, has justified the critical race theory and critical race theory,

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I guess, because I'm trying to think of the word for it. Adjacent, I guess, critical race theory, adjacent thinking in the convention.

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This has really prompted that. Well, if we look at those people that have promoted these things, they have an opportunity now to regain our trust so that we can take our suspicious eye off of them and put it somewhere else because, oh, they're okay.

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They're opposing Pride Month. And this is a colossal failure in my mind, a colossal failure.

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Let me read for you more and then I'll tell you why I think that. He says, for if Confederate flags and statues are deemed social justice issues by many, a point with which

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I am sympathetic, how much more so is the rainbow flag? This is, it's laughable to me.

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I'll tell you why in a second. The use of the rainbow symbol should be particularly egregious to Christians. It is the primary instrument by which the

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LGBTQ plus movement asserts its ownership of the culture. And it is the means of telling those of us who dare to dissent that we should have no place in the public square anymore.

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He's right about this. It tears at God's creation order and designed for family relations and social stability. And it is also a blasphemous desecration of a sacred symbol, taking that which was intended as a sign of God's love and faithfulness and of our dependence upon him and turning it into aggressive symbol of human autonomy and sexual decadence.

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And so purely the Christian cause of this month should be opposing Pride Month and its flag in a public and strident way, as many have stopped racism and its symbols.

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Let us have many blog posts and tweets on the topic. And may we even have pointed op -eds and major attacks slamming pride by those

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Christians privileged enough to have access to the pages of the Atlantic and the New York Times. Social justice surely demands it.

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And I for one, I'm looking forward to reading them all. And so he's, there's a strategy I think going on here.

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The Russell Moores of the world, the Ed Stetzer of the world, people can write for the New York Times and the Atlantic. Why don't you have some op -eds against Pride Month?

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And of course we're not gonna see that, but I think it's Carl Truman's way of, hey, you guys were against the

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Confederate stuff. I'm against that. You were somewhat in line with the

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BLM narrative. I'm kind of sympathetic to that to some extent. So why don't we be consistent?

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And consistency means let's take a stand against the Pride Month. This is very similar to what Lincoln Duncan said at the

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Shepherds Conference Q &A back in 2019, when he talked about how he was worried about his grandchildren rushing into the arms of the

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LGBTQ lobby. And so in order to prevent that from happening, he needed to show them that he could get kind of woke on a race.

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And of course he wrote the forward to woke church. He's been consistent with this. And that was a way of, hey, look, kids and grandkids, we're not hypocrites.

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We're not bad. We see the errors of our ways and of our generation's ways, and we're rectifying those things.

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And so we're gonna get kind of woke on the race thing, but hopefully you see that, and that'll inspire you to trust us when we tell you that LGBT stuff is bad.

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And don't think that that's part of the same soup. So here's what I wanna say about all this and why

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I think this is kind of ridiculous. And also to be honest with you, in some ways this is actually, if taken to its logical conclusion,

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I think dangerous. What Carl Truman is doing here is he is taking another issue that the world, let's say, would find to be a righteous issue today, because good is evil, evil is good, and they think

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BLM is great. So he's taking that issue and he's saying, we can lock arms with those guys to some extent.

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We can find common cause with them. Columbus Day, Confederate monuments, we can find common cause with them on that.

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And so in order to oppose Pride Month in the same breath, there seems to be this necessity out there that we have to reach for something that the world finds admirable and that they associate with social justice in order to gain the credibility of the world that look world, we are not bigots, because look, we're with you on BLM, we're not bigots.

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We, look, didn't you remember we marched with you? We helped you pull down that Confederate statue. Remember that world?

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We're this, and I don't know how many of us have predicted this and said this on, I know

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I've said it on my podcast many times, Aidy Robles has been saying it for a long time as well, from years ago, been saying this, that this is a move to try to hedge against what they know is coming.

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There's an apocalypse coming for true Orthodox believers in this country, because our morality is so out of step with the

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LGBT lobby, and as aggressive as the LGBT lobby is pushing things, that how do we survive?

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How do we try to put the proverbial blood of the ram on our doorposts?

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So the angel of death, i .e. the government, or the social ostracization from the local businesses, they passed around us and they don't target us.

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And I've said for years, you can't do that. There is no way to do that. You just have to be honest about it.

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You just have to, with no qualifications, you don't need any qualifications, you shouldn't have to say any qualifications, and honestly, you shouldn't be given qualifications.

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With no qualifications, you should be able to declare what the word of God says unapologetically.

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And you know what? If the angel of death comes, that's when you trust the Lord. And look, we've undergone this to some extent at the church that I'm at, last month, actually, with some local elections and the issues of these perverted books in the local schools being on the ballot, really, or at least being issues that debated among the school board candidates.

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And one of those school board candidates attending my church, and look, the church was doxed as far, like there was a

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Facebook group that came after the church. It was mild, but I saw it. And we had to have an event, actually, at the church.

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We had to up the security, it was, you know, people were, nothing like this had ever quite happened before.

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But there was no message from the church that, hey, remember, guys, that time when we were with you on this or that, or I'm so glad we invested in BLM years ago and look, we had masks on as well.

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And we, I don't know, we also supported the Me Too movement and just remember that, guys, because honestly, it makes no difference.

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It makes absolutely no difference to the social justice crowd. And this is one of the things that I think is just so foolish on a pragmatic, in a pragmatic way.

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These people show they have zero understanding of how this actually works. It doesn't matter if you did 10 things that they liked.

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They're gonna focus on the one thing you did that they didn't like, and they will come after you.

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And there is no shades of more, there's no sense of proportion in their minds.

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They see LGBT and BLM and they just see it's oppression. It's the same soup to them.

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If you try to convince them that this is so different, it's not gonna make sense.

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And it doesn't matter if you went with them on one of them, if you fail to go with them on the other.

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And this is a trap if we fall into this. If we try, all we do is we compromise and we prepare, grooming's the big word right now.

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Well, we actually prepare people in our church, especially young people to walk into the arms of the

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LGBT lobby when we get woke in these other areas. Lincoln Duncan's logic and Carl Truman's logic here, honestly, it's just the opposite.

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You actually, and tell me whether this isn't true in your own lives. Think about the people you know who are social justice and who have gone down that path.

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Did it not start with one in particular issue and then branch out to a bunch of others? I mean,

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I'm thinking of people who have pretty much left the faith at this point and started with the me too, but then now they're pro -LGBT.

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And it's, because here's the thing, they are connected. They are connected. This is one of the reasons

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I wrote the book I did, the Christianity and Social Justice Religions and Conflict. This is a whole, this is part of a whole religion.

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And so you can plug in, if you want to talk about original sin in their worldview, you can plug in heterosexuality the same way you can plug in whiteness.

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They're both equally the stains of original sin upon us. They're both equally the sources of oppression in society.

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They both equally come from the same, in their minds, worldview or the same religion, the same civilization,

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Western civilization, Christianity. They come from the same well. And guess what? The idea that heterosexual marriage is the normal way to go is a unique idea in some ways.

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Not it's a normal idea, it's a natural idea, but it's not, there are cultures across this world that don't have a family structure.

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They have a more of a tribal structure and polygamy exists and it's normalized. I mean,

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Western civilization, one of the reasons that it has been so successful in other areas is because of the family, the strong family structure.

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And this comes from a Christian civilization. It really does. And so, yes, and those people, guess what?

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Where this took for the firmest root over the last few hundred years has been Western Europe, primarily, or Europe in general, it's been

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Christian nations affected by some form of Christendom. That's where this has taken root.

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And so if you want to oppose whiteness or quote unquote Western civilization, and you wanna oppose heterosexual bigoted thinking,

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I mean, you're talking about the same history, same civilization, this is what, and the social justice warriors know this.

30:45

And Carl Truman, though, thinks we can somehow separate ourselves from, we can take one aspect of the social justice movement and go with them and then another aspect and we can reject it and we're gonna have credibility because of this somehow, or we'll be able to have op -eds in the

31:03

New York Times and the Atlantic somehow to be able to share our views on pride because, well, we shared things that were pro

31:11

BLM. That's not gonna happen. I mean, how naive is this? I don't understand. Carl Truman seems like a smart guy.

31:18

I just don't understand. Like, I'm like, are we living in the same world? Is there a bubble at Grove City College? It doesn't make any sense to me.

31:25

The whole reason that people like Russell Moore are able to write their op -eds is because they're tools of the mainstream media.

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And I think they wanna be, they wanna be in the good graces of the mainstream media. So they're not gonna be writing something that challenged the narrative, of course not.

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Only when they feel they can write something that won't get them in too much trouble in Christian circles but will be in support of the narrative that the mainstream media is pushing will they be able to have an op -ed.

31:50

That's just the fact of the matter. And so I think Carl Truman is just, he's super naive on how this whole thing works.

31:58

You have to oppose it unapologetically without qualification. Just say the truth.

32:05

Don't say, I mean, this is just trying to put the, look over here when they're looking straight at you for lack of participation in Pride Month.

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Oh, look over there. No, I did that. They're not gonna look over there. It doesn't matter. In fact, they're gonna look at that and that's gonna be more evidence to condemn you because they're gonna say, well, how could you go with the

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BLM movement and not see that you're now supporting the same oppressors you once opposed? That's how they're gonna see it.

32:28

And just the facts of the matter here, just the, either the naivete or the, just the clear foolishness of thinking that Columbus Day and Confederate statues, that, you know, maybe there's some, there's a way to oppose these that doesn't touch other areas that are directly related to Christianity.

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To me, it's just, how can you not see this? Yes, of course, it starts with a low -hanging fruit.

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It starts with Columbus. It starts with Confederate monuments. It starts with figures and movement, civilization symbols that have been under attack for decades.

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And the dam breaks and the water comes in. And if you think that that's going to be contained, you got another thing coming.

33:16

That water rushes right down the canyon and it creates flash floods everywhere. And some of those flash floods have taken out statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Rose, or Teddy, yeah,

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Teddy Roosevelt. And they've taken out statues, General War Memorial statues, and threatening statues of the

33:35

Texas Rangers. In fact, I was just in Wisconsin and they showed me there, one of the northernmost

33:40

Confederate cemeteries. It's a cemetery, guys. It's a cemetery. They had a little bitty monument in this cemetery.

33:47

It wasn't even much of a monument. It was more of like a headstone just describing this. This is where there's a big Confederate prisoner of war camp and you had a lot of Confederate soldiers who died.

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It's one of the northernmost. And there was a lady there for years who would manage it. And she just had respect for soldiers.

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Well, they've sanitized it. You wouldn't know that there's any Confederate soldiers there now. The whole, the head, the main little,

34:13

I guess, monument, for lack of a better term, has been upended. It's gone. And anything that would signify what the significance of what's there, anything that would tell you, it's gone.

34:23

The same state, Wisconsin, I was told by a guy there that a local high school took down there. They had a theme,

34:29

I guess, or a mascot of Christopher Columbus, Columbus High School or something like that. Well, they took it down. No more Columbus. This is happening all over the place, even in places that you wouldn't expect for it to happen.

34:41

And in fact, just recently, was it last week or the week before, I heard, this is the first year, and this is related to stuff attached to Confederate stuff, but you had

34:50

Robert E. Lee's portrait. I don't know if they've taken it down yet, but it's being reviewed to be taken down at West Point.

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Now, Robert E. Lee was the only West Point graduate to never receive a demerit, which is incredible.

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In all of West Point's history, he's the only one. And, I mean, he's a legend at West Point. I mean, he's, that's, that alone should give him some kind of recognition.

35:14

Well, they're gonna take down his portrait. I mean, he's a military genius, too. That would give him some recognition.

35:20

That doesn't matter. We're in 2022. And we don't need men of good character and courage to look up to, of which

35:26

Robert E. Lee was. Just the fact, though, that he sided with his home state of Virginia, which even in their, even their motivation for secession had more to do with Lincoln invading.

35:36

It hadn't, it wasn't, that was the primary motivation. They don't mention slavery in their, in their, or the motive being preserving slavery or anything like that in their ordinance, but it doesn't matter.

35:50

It doesn't matter. Robert E. Lee sided with his home state. And this was someone formerly, I mean, who was considered a great

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Christian man by, universally, pretty much, North and South. Doesn't matter anymore.

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That's being scrubbed. You don't think that that's also a veiled attack on the civilization, a

36:10

Christian civilization that once existed? It's a way to smear anyone, even if they were post -slavery, like Robert E.

36:17

Lee did. It's a way to smear them, to just paint them with the same color and say that it was all bad.

36:23

I noticed, too, the Country Music Awards, first time ever banned any display of Confederate symbolism on T -shirts, a flag, whatever.

36:32

Well, that's pretty unique. I mean, this is country music, right? This is, up until even 10 years ago, you had a lot of mainstream country artists still using

36:39

Confederate symbolism in some of their concerts and stuff. And that is gone. I mean,

36:44

I'm not that old, and I remember going to country music concerts and seeing a lot of Confederate symbolism at some of them, even in New York.

36:53

Like, this was kind of part of the culture. It's being, at breakneck speed, it's being scrubbed.

37:00

And no one, I would be shocked. I never saw anything racist.

37:05

I never saw anything against certain groups. It was just, it was a Southern pride thing, and most country music artists come from the

37:11

South. But it can't mean that anymore. It must mean slavery and racism. It has to mean.

37:17

So if you go with them on this, and you say, we're just gonna take these symbols, and by the way, now, just general mainstream

37:24

American symbols, because the American flag isn't an exception to this. We've seen the kneeling issue. I've seen areas where have gone left, and the

37:31

American flags start disappearing, okay? And they become replaced with rainbow flags or now Ukrainian flags.

37:37

I've seen this in my area. You see the attack on just general

37:43

American founding fathers, generals, McKinley, Thomas Jefferson is really on the ropes right now.

37:50

I mean, there's, this stuff is getting into everything. And so if you give them, if you give a moose a muffin, he's gonna want more.

37:56

And that's exactly what's happening here. We, and not me, but we as evangelicals, many, like Carl Truman, caved on this and said, well, yeah, yeah,

38:07

I guess we can go with you on the Columbus Confederate thing. Yeah, let's start this road.

38:13

And you, what partnership is light with darkness? I mean, we made, there was a partnership there for the wrong reasons.

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That should never have happened. And now we, what do we do with it?

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And Carl, and I think the appropriate thing to do is to look back and say, that was a mistake. And we can see clearly now this is emboldened the other side and their ultimate goal, which we should have seen from the beginning was to rip down everything about our country,

38:42

Western civilization and Christianity being in that mix. And we realize now that was a bad thing that we did there and we should never have sided with them.

38:51

And we now see their end goal. And we now are not going to side with them.

38:57

We're gonna oppose them full stop. No looking back to recollect the great days we had a few years ago, marching in the streets against police or something like, we're not gonna do that.

39:09

We're just gonna say the word of God has spoken on the LGBT issue.

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And he made them male and female. The word of God assumes heterosexuality is his design.

39:21

There are different stations and responsibility attached to being a male and a female, a mother and father, a husband and wife.

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And we will support that without trying to remind you of how much we were in favor of your innovations and your revolutionary activity a few years ago.

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In fact, we oppose all of it now. And we see what you're up to.

39:46

We see that you're trying to connect everything to some form of oppression in your minds in order to justify ridding society of it completely, erasing memory, erasing history.

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And now inserting, because nature reports a vacuum, your own new heroes, your own new founding of this country and these regions that we live in.

40:10

And we're rejecting it. We have the good sense to be able to look back and identify people of great achievement, of great character, those who even might be role models.

40:21

But we can look back and see the significant things that happened with fallible men, by the way. And we can celebrate those things.

40:30

And we can look to those things as warnings even without having to somehow attach them to this larger narrative of it's just part of oppression and therefore should be opposed.

40:41

You can look at, to take the example of someone that I've been talking about, Robert E. Lee. And because he's a human, you can find things that are flaws in his character.

40:50

And I'm sure he would tell you that, even though he's a great Christian hero and I've read, I don't know, probably more biographies of Lee than I have anyone else.

40:57

He is an amazing man once you actually start studying him. And you don't read the nonsense books that have come out in the last few years.

41:04

Don't read Gulzo and Robert E. Lee. Go read a real book. Go read Douglas Southwell Freeman's biography of Robert E.

41:11

Lee or something. But these are real men of character that have flaws, but we can look back and we can honor them for the things that originally the intention was to honor them for.

41:23

Loyalty, bravery, genius. I mean, exploration and all these things.

41:30

Columbus, I mean, has some deep flaws, but you can look at Columbus and say, you know what? He kind of paved the way for what's taken place here.

41:37

The exploration led to colonization and we're here. And I mean, whether you agree with it or not, that's a pretty big feat.

41:45

The bravery that that would take, the adventurous attitude. I mean, that's pretty incredible.

41:51

It's the achievement that he made that is so significant that we have some commemorations to him.

41:58

And it would be foolish and just weird, honestly, to ignore him or to just destroy any kind of public symbol that references him.

42:11

It would create and then emphasize other people that really don't have the same significance, but they were part of the revolution for equality.

42:20

Therefore, we need to look at them. This is the total deconstruction of American identity, of Christian identity, and it just needs to be called out as such.

42:30

And so LGBT, I think is in part, is part of the same soup. And they both want immediate drastic action now and everyone must support it.

42:39

There is no waiting. There is no thinking through things. There's no reasoning. It is a full revolution to change what was into what will be.

42:49

A society of equity, inclusion, and diversity. And Carl Truman of all people should be able to see this, but instead he wants to keep playing the same game

42:56

Christians have played for the last few years at the higher levels. We'll go with you on the COVID stuff.

43:02

So please don't come knocking on our door when we disagree with you on the pride stuff.

43:08

I got news for you. The Christians who thought this was a good idea are either gonna do one of two things.

43:14

Well, there's the third possibility too. The third possibility is they wake up and they realize what they've been doing and how they've been incentivizing evil.

43:21

But there's two other things that I think are more likely. You're gonna find many of them start to cave on this issue.

43:27

And I mean, look, you've seen the rumblings of it. The whole same -sex attracted orientation is okay, but just don't act on it, right?

43:32

So we see this already. This is happening in many places. The other thing they'll do, some of them who don't go that direction, and maybe

43:42

Carl Truman's in this category, I don't know, but who see this as so evil and so wrong, the pride stuff, they are just going to be, they themselves are gonna find themselves in the next decade marginalized more and more and more.

43:55

They're not gonna have a seat at the table more and more and more with the new emerging consensus among the elites because no one's gonna care that much that they were there for BLM in 2020 if we're in 2028, and they're not there for the transgenders who have been so oppressed by the church.

44:15

So it's just, it will be forgotten, and those people will, they just, their voices won't be heard.

44:20

They were useful for the time in which they operated, now no longer useful, and they're not gonna be getting op -eds in the

44:27

New York Times. They're just not. They're gonna have to keep compromising in order to get those op -eds.

44:33

So I think now, because there's still a fight to some extent, there's, you know, of course,

44:38

I think if someone wanted to write an article supporting the way that churches ought to help welcome

44:48

LGBT people. So if you had someone who wrote an article, let's say, and maybe there are articles like this,

44:54

I'm just not aware, but someone wanted to write an article and say, you know, let's bash the conservatives because they're just way too extreme on this.

45:01

I think that, you know, yeah, of course homosexuality is a sin, but we've been too mean to homosexuals.

45:06

Yeah, you'll probably get an opportunity to write about that, but don't you dare come out with guns blazing that this is evil, this is wrong, this is wicked, and this is opposing

45:18

God's law. And by the way, there's a place for those who do that. And it's not just for people who violate

45:24

God's law in this area, but other areas, and it's called hell. I mean, if you do that, yeah, you're not getting the op -ed. So that's kind of my take on this whole thing.

45:33

And I know many conservatives really were happy that Carl Truman said something finally about this, but yeah, what he said though, to me, has a big

45:41

Achilles heel. He said 90 % true things, and then the 10 % is just, it's a death knell for evangelicalism if they keep going down this path.

45:49

All right, well, I hope that was helpful for some of you. More SBC related stuff and other things coming later in the week.

45:55

I just had to take a break from it. I couldn't do it today. So, but it is coming. So anyway, shout out to those in Croy Falls, Wisconsin.

46:04

I'm wearing the hat that I was given. I really like this hat, by the way. And I just, yeah, had a good time there and looking forward to traveling some more later this year, doing some speaking engagements as well.

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You can go to worldviewconversation .com if you wanna check that out and check out Gold River Tea if you want some good iced tea this summer.