Is the Fundamentalist War on Wokeness a War on Christian Love?

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. We're gonna do something a little fun today. It's a short episode, but some people have sent me this article from a guy named

Michael Byrd in Australia, and they said, John, you gotta review this. And I haven't read it, but that's part of the fun. My expectations are low, because people have said it's terrible.

But I'm gonna read it, and hey, see what I think. So you're gonna get my reactions in real time. So hopefully this will be helpful to you.

And it's funny, as I was getting these messages, I thought, I've heard that name before.

And the reason for that is because I'm a Southeastern graduate, and Michael Byrd is from Australia, but he came to Southeastern.

And if some of you remember correctly, I know I played this on the podcast probably almost a year ago now, but this is part of what he said when he came.

Some of my female students have pushed me about the number of women I have in the bibliographies.

I remember I taught a course on Romans, and yeah, my top 10 Romans commentaries were all largely male.

And so I thought about what some of the voices I could bring out, and I did know of some great works on Romans, like Fleming Rutledge.

He's got a great series of sermons on Romans. And so I have been a little bit more conscious out of that deliberate prodding by students to think, well, how can

I be more inclusive, be more representative in women? It's just so important to think, is there another way of reading scripture?

What does it like to read the book of James through the eyes of the majority world? What's it like to read something like Galatians in the context of Sri Lanka, in a country that is ethnically divided between different groups?

I mean, a lot of Christians, I think, suffer from hermeneutical solipsism. They assume that their interpretation is the only one that exists or the only valid one.

But when you realize that there are insights you can get from different cultures and even just from people in general, that their own life experience will bring something to the table.

We do need to be prepared to accept that our way, the Anglican way, the

Presbyterian way, the male way, the white male way, the Northern Hemisphere way, or whatever the way is you've been ingrained is not the only way, and you can learn a lot and at least appreciate the people who are other, who are different to you.

And that's in the global church of Christ, that is what we should be doing. So at the very least, we have some good old standpoint epistemology there.

It's not enough to be an approved workman, rightly dividing the word of truth. You need to read the Bible from a certain social perspective in order to get the full range of meaning and really understand what it says on some level.

So when I made that connection, I was like, man, I don't know if this article is gonna be that great. But hey, we'll see,

I haven't read it yet. I should point this out too. This is part of the other reason. I haven't done a deep dive, but you got a bunch of big wigs.

I shouldn't say big wigs, but people in the more social justice -minded people in evangelicalism who have endorsed this on some level.

There's Karen Swallow Pryor, who's now at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary quoting it, and then you got Ken Keithley over here.

He says, acknowledging the reality of racism, discrimination, and injustice does not require adherence to a Marxist narrative or becoming woke.

Basically saying it's just biblical, which is, funny enough, if you get the book, oh, good chance for me to push the book here.

Where is it? Here we go. If you get the book, Social Justice Goes to Church, the New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism.

I'll say another word about that at the end. If you get that book, though, you'll see that this logic that Mr. Keithley is employing is a very old logic.

This was used in the 1970s to say, we're not Marxist, even though, as I show, yes, they were influenced by Marxism.

That's why they had the social justice ideas they had. The original social justice warriors in evangelicalism.

We're talking about the Richard Nows, and the Jim Wallaces, and the Ron Siders, and the West Granber Michelsons, and the

John Perkins, and the Tom Skinners, and the list goes on. Anyway, that whole crop.

They were very influenced by New Left ideas, but they're saying, no, we're just biblical. We're just biblical. I have a whole section on it.

So Ken Keithley's saying, hey, that's basically what's going on here. He's a professor also at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

If I'm not mistaken, he's the guy, I think when I was on campus, he was the guy that was a Molinist, I think, and theistic evolutionist.

So I remember that about him. I didn't have a class with him, though. So they both like this article. So we're gonna go through it.

And we can see the title here is called The Fundamentalist War on Wokeness is a War on Christian Love. Hmm, that doesn't sound good.

Fundamentalists, that's kind of like the big, that's a boogeyman, the fundamentalist today. When you hear that word generally, especially from more progressive types, there's a historic meaning that's good, the

R .A. Torrey, The Fundamentals, which was the four -volume set with essays against social gospel and liberalism, theological liberalism at the time.

There'd be higher criticism, that kind of stuff. And this was in the 19 -teens when this stuff was coming out.

But especially since Carl Henry wrote the book The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in 1947, fundamentalism has been looked at, that term is kind of a negative.

It means that you're for legalism, that you don't wanna have any fun. You're certainly retreating from the culture and not being influential in alleviating poverty and those kinds of things.

So when he says this, I'm just keeping that in mind, maybe he means that. If he's more progressive, maybe he's thinking, it seems like that from the title, that this is a war on Christian love.

I mean, so he's not talking about theological fundamentalists because certainly the law of God reflects his love.

That's actually how we know we love God, is if we keep his commandments. The whole law of God is summarized in loving

God and loving your neighbor. Law and love go together. He's saying fundamentalists, though. They're making a war on Christian love, which would mean, if true, that they would also need to be making a war on the law.

You would think the law of God. Let's see if that fleshes out in this article. October 13th is when he first put this out.

It's been making the rounds. My daughter, he said, I'm gonna read it. Recently came to me late one night, rather upset.

She showed me a video that her Bible study had been watching and it was rather staggering. In the video, a certain

Jeff Durbin, I don't know, maybe in Australia they write, a certain Jeff Durbin, it sounds negative, who

I've never heard of, but looks like he's trying to do a 2005 Mark Driscoll impersonation. It's actually a little funny.

Said, the woke evangelical whore is a slut who lies down in the middle of, note to parents, by the way,

I have not read this article. Just keep that in mind. If you have children in the car, I don't know what's coming next, so just FYI.

All right, I'm gonna continue here and I'm gonna say what he says. The woke evangelical whore is a slut who lies down in the middle of a burning city, spreading her legs to the rioters and looters, spreading her legs to Mark's angles.

Alinsky and Soros, okay. I have not heard this entire speech. I've seen some clips from it.

I don't think I would have communicated things in the same way Jeff Durbin did, but this particular section, I think he's trying to say, he's using the language the prophets used and trying to say, this is what's going on.

They're prostituting themselves out to the world. They're being used by the world. This is George Soros' Renton Evangelical.

So, continues, in addition, Owen Strand, who

I have cordially met, has delivered a series of talks decrying wokeness and its influence on evangelical churches.

This has met with much commentary. Now, I just did a video two days ago on Owen Strand and what he said in that whole analysis of how people are taking what he said, so you can go check that out, but he's commenting on it.

He has an update here. He says, update one, I should have pointed out that if you watch Strand's lectures, he does offer some caveats about what wokeness is and is not, and he's clear that it is not opposing racism per se.

It's true. I mentioned Strand's lectures more as an FYI as one of the other conversations going on at the moment about wokeness.

I was not trying to insinuate that he and Durbin are of one mind on this subject. I should have distinguished that those two are different seminar rooms.

I do remain concerned that the CRT phobia okay, is being used to attack people of color in certain conservative theological environments.

Let's see if he actually provides evidence for this. Let the reader understand if they try to undertake conversations about race and justice.

Others have raised concerns about his call for an anti -woke purge in the

SBC. Number two, I should have added that Durbin's descriptive references to female promiscuity is a symbol of compromise is misogynistic in its expression and unedifying in its content.

Yes, adultery is a biblical symbol for betrayal and disobedience, but it is not exclusively attributed to women.

Wait, what? Reference to female promiscuity as a symbol for compromise is misogynistic.

Okay, let's go back up to Durbin's comment because this is confusing. So he uses a female pronoun.

He says spreading her legs. I think this is what Bird's taking issue with. He's saying, well, that's misogynistic. A man can be a prostitute, but look at his

Ezekiel 16 where I think Durbin is getting his inspiration. All right, look at, we'll just read the first few verses of Ezekiel 16.

Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, son of man, make known to Jerusalem her abominations. Not even two verses in, her abominations.

If you go through the passage, you're gonna find the same kind of thing. It's a lot of female imagery. Israel is, you adulterous wife, verse 32.

Again, female imagery there. The whole thing is female imagery if you read it.

And we don't need to take the time to read the whole thing, but multiple times this comes up. So here's the thing.

If you're going to suggest that Durbin is in the wrong because, wow, he used a female pronoun, then you're going to have to also say

Bible is wrong. God is wrong. Ezekiel is wrong. They use female imagery as well. So I don't understand this.

Someone who's supposed to be a hero to people at Southeastern, I don't get it. I don't get it. This is just juvenile.

I mean, if I'm reading this right, this is like juvenile level errors. Okay, he continues.

Let me try to be a rare voice of reason in this asylum of politics and religion. Well, that sounds kind of prideful.

I know Wokeness. Believe me, I live in Melbourne, comically known as Melvingrad, one of the wokest cities in the world. Government's very progressive.

So he's talking about how progressive the government is. I have written for political magazines that defend people who are for Brexit and Trump.

So he's saying, basically, I'm a conservative politically. I've defended conservatives at least. Goes through this, says he's aware of the problems with critical race theory.

But here's the meat. The whole anti -woken, anti -critical race theory trope strikes me as not so much interested in opposing progressive authoritarianism.

Okay, now I don't think this is all about progressive authoritarianism, this whole issue.

I mean, those who are in the church critiquing this will note that, but usually they're opposing the destruction of the communion table unity, the flatlining of people and reducing them down into power relationships, which is against biblical anthropology.

They're generally upset about people taking these issues, like Jarvis Williams, adding them to the gospel, saying that they're gospel issues to take down white

Jesus, to have some kind of affirmative action or of some kind where you're promoting or quotas where you're putting minority voices on stages and taking down white voices because of the color of their skin, not because of their ability.

I mean, the list goes on, but these are the things that cause division and are the concerns.

And of course, underneath all this standpoint epistemology, which completely rejects the idea of absolute truth.

So we got a read from, as we heard Michael Byrd saying, womanist perspectives. I mean, that's part and parcel to intersectionality.

So those are the issues, Mr. Byrd. It's not just about progressive authoritarianism. So I sense a false dichotomy coming.

He says, this whole effort, this trope, it strikes me as not so much interested in opposing progressive authoritarianism and its divisive racial politics, as much as it serves to deny ethnic minorities have any grievances and white churches have any responsibility to do anything about it.

Now here's the deal, guys. Here's the deal. I don't know anyone, including myself. I don't know anyone who doesn't think that actual old -fashioned kind of racism, the kind that your grandpa and your father would have thought of as racism.

In other words, ethnic superiority, thinking you're better than someone else because of some genetic feature, you have more self -worth than someone else, should be treated as if you have more self -worth.

That kind of thing. I don't know of anyone who supports that. Anyone, not one person that I know personally that's on the conservative side of this that is against it.

So I don't know of anyone who's denying ethnic minorities the fact that they have grievances or had grievances or could have grievances.

Certainly there are situations, and I think everyone is open to it, but we want, there needs to be proof that this is actually the case.

You can't just have a police shooting or some, I'll give you a little story that I've told,

I know I told this at a conference, but I had, it was, I was down at a conference and someone came to me and said there was a family that came to their church who happened to be black and they were so offended that hymns were being played and said basically that this is oppressing them, you need to get rid of hymns, you need to do different styles of music.

And this is somehow, that's not oppression, guys. Obviously that's not oppression. The fact that you're gonna come into a church and then try to change the entire flavor of that church, not based on, because of oppression, but based on preference and style and calling it oppression.

That's the kind of thing that I've seen, those kinds of examples are used as, well, that church is white supremacist.

Think of what happened in Naples. They disagreed with a guy who came in. They said he doesn't meet the qualifications.

Marcus Hayes does not have the qualifications to be the pastor here according to our constitution. He also doesn't believe the theology that we believe.

We think he undercuts orthodoxy. He wants to change the way that the church is gonna run. Few of us don't wanna vote for him, enough to make sure that he's not gonna take that position.

And of course they're called racist. That's the kind of thing, guys, that I see happening.

And if you have an example of an actual church that's really saying you're a different skin color or something, so you don't belong here, that's absolutely wrong.

We would all stand against it. That's evil. And of course it could still happen. And it could also happen in a setting in which there are black or Hispanic or Asian, or it doesn't matter, because any kind of race can have that kind of attitude, any kind of ethnicity.

So, I mean, this is just on its face, in my opinion.

This is just, I haven't even gotten into where he's gonna outline this. We'll see what examples he gives, but if he doesn't give actual hard and fast examples, then this is just semi slanderous, really.

If he doesn't have examples to point to or some kind of a rationale here. All right, so let's wait, let's see.

Let's see if he's got the rationale. In my mind, he says, acknowledging the reality of racism, discrimination and injustice, whether historical, cultural, institutional, and determining to change it does not require adherence to a

Marxist narrative or becoming woke. Okay, no. But if you're going to treat it like it's invisible, like, well, we can't point you to the racist because we don't have an example and we can't point you to the law that's making it so that there is a de facto racism being implemented.

So we don't have the law. We don't have that's specifically racist, that's partial to certain ethnicities.

I mean, I can think of a law that would be affirmative action stuff, but that doesn't seem to be a problem to these guys.

But if you can't point to a law that's white supremacy in the law, if you can't point to those who are racist that are making those statements and then motivated by the rationale in those statements trying to oppress, then you can't say it's systemically racist, which means racist is from top to bottom, completely flooded with racism.

It's all characterized by racism. That would be wrong. That's what the pushback is. That's what critical race theory gives us, all right?

Rather, it is the outworking of the liberal political tradition rooted in a Christian worldview where everyone should have the same rights, freedom, and opportunities.

Where to quote George Washington, quoting scripture, "'Everyone will sit under their own fig tree "'and no one will make them afraid.'"

Washington, of course, though, came from a world of hierarchies, and I don't mean ethnic hierarchy specifically.

I'm saying that he came from a world that was almost medieval. You had those who were the lords, in a sense, those who owned the land, worked the land, those who were, in his context, they were slaves, but it wasn't just slaves.

There were those who, almost in a serfdom type of relationship, worked the land.

You had those who were not the planting class, who were in other classes, who were viewed differently.

Hey, if you don't have land, you shouldn't vote. A lot of people thought that. Women certainly did not have the right to vote, these kinds of things.

So Washington was not an egalitarian. I just wanna point that out. And of course, Washington, when he's quoting scripture, he's not quoting from an egalitarian book either.

And you can watch my last episode where I'm quoting from Leviticus, and I'm like, hey, this stuff would be canceled immediately by the social justice crowd for nationalism, for the regulation of slavery.

All right. Churches and Christian leaders, he says, who are concerned with racism, police brutality, affordable healthcare, protecting refugees, acting on poverty, ending sex trafficking, urging sustainable environmental policy, ensuring

LGBTI people have the right to work. It's interesting. Not sure in the

United States where they didn't have that, but as well as defending the unborn, promoting end of life care as an alternative to euthanasia, safeguarding religious freedom, opposing the gambling and pornographic industries, they are not whoring or compromised.

Now, this sounds like the Ron Sider holistic pro -life. We're gonna add in the pro -life movement and then attach it to all these things.

And what do these things actually mean? Protecting refugees. Okay, and we're all for that. I don't know of anyone who's not.

I mean, maybe there are some, but no one I know in the conservative movement would say we're not for protecting refugees. We are.

But we don't believe it's the responsibility of the United States or a Western country specifically to take on every person that claims to be a refugee within their borders and provide for them free health care and that kind of thing.

So what do you mean by protecting refugees? Affordable health care. Well, what does that mean? Does that mean free health care for all?

Affordable health care would be free market health care. That's what in the conservative mind, that's the mechanism for driving down the cost.

And sure, this is just sustainable development, environmental policy. That's usually used by people who are environmentalists who want to bring in cap and trade and that kind of stuff.

So what does he mean by all this? Well, the liberal stuff is vague enough to kind of, if that's what he means, if he means the progressive understandings of these things, then we would have probably problems with some of that.

But if he means a conservative sort of understanding, which he wouldn't have probably used some of those terms, but of, let's see, conservation in the environment, then we would agree.

So this is vague. He says, they are simply doing what Christians have been doing for 2 ,000 years, which is loving their neighbor, remembering the poor, being a good

Samaritan, imitating Jesus, hating evil, loving good, and establishing justice in the gate of the city. Well, not if they're promoting socialism.

If they're promoting socialism, that is not what Christians have been doing for 2 ,000 years. If they're eroding the rights of private property, that is not what

Christians have been doing for 2 ,000 years. Ensuring LGBTI people. Look, Christians up until very recently didn't even know what that even meant.

So for 2 ,000 years, that's not something Christians have been doing. If you want to talk about evangelical whoring, it applies just as easily to churches who have tethered themselves to white supremacy, who have fattened their hearts in the days of slaughter, who messianize politicians and Caesarize Jesus, who crave war like a baby craves its mother's milk.

What in the world is he talking about? Who engage in a form of civil religion, there we go, the

David Moberg, civil religion, that combines the worst of racial prejudices with myths of national infallibility.

Oh, look, there's guys, I'm sure, out there. They got an American flag in church. They think this is a great place. They're very patriotic.

And they just think well of their country. They don't realize that, hey, every country has got its blind spots,

I guess. But you're not giving any example. I don't know who you're talking about. That evangelical is the false prophet who leads others to bow down and worship the beast, wow, with feet made of Darwinian economics.

So that's, I think, his free market economics is Darwinian. Legs comprised of corporations and colonies.

And stomach of moral indifference to the suffering of others. Arms made of confederacy, ooh, and misogyny, ooh.

And a head made of military industrial complex. This is, I think he probably thinks he's being prophetic.

But it's just so out of touch. Maybe in Australia they have a problem with this, more so, I don't know.

It's staggering, I don't even know what to say to this. Because I can't even come up with an example in my mind that fits any of this.

I mean, does he think someone who believes in complimentary roles for men and women is a misogynist? Does he think that someone who believes in defending our country is for the military industrial complex?

Does he think someone who believes in leaving Confederate monuments up and honoring the sacrifices made by men who were defending their homes is somehow racist?

And I mean, is that what he thinks? Is that the problem he's talking about? Corporations are, you know, you go shop at Walmart, you're for corporations.

Colonies, I don't even know, what does that mean? Are colonies from the Spanish -American

War, Alaska and Hawaii, Puerto Rico, I mean, are these places? I don't even know what he means by that.

A moral indifference to the suffering of others. I mean, look, the most conservative state in the country, also one of the most churched, just about,

Mississippi. I mean, they give more in charity. I think they're second to Utah now, but they give more than any other state.

I mean, what is he talking about here? What is he talking about? All right, so he says, so don't buy into the lie that acknowledges, acknowledging a history of racial injustice and prioritizing the pursuit of racial justice is wokeness.

Don't buy into the lie that all social justice is driven by Marxist ideology. It is not. Now, I did a whole presentation on the roots of social justice, what it means, and I delineated all that.

Look, there are some people that used to use, especially in Catholic tradition, social justice, and they didn't necessarily mean Marxism, but that is the term that's being used now.

And even Catholics use it that way. The Pope uses it that way. And I'm not talking about Pope Francis, before him.

So it's come to mean redistributive justice. And that is not what

Christians have been practicing for 2000 years. You can acknowledge, I acknowledge the history of racial injustice in the sense that there were actual laws in this country that separated people in certain areas based on race in the

North and the South. There were certainly, there was certainly thinking in this country at various times that certain ethnicities were superior to other ethnicities in various ways.

I think that's, any responsible student of history knows that. I don't know of anyone who doesn't.

But that's not the key issue with critical race theory. Key issue with critical race theory is that this is, this just motivates everything.

That you can't even look at someone like a George Washington without seeing that he is a racist because he owns slaves.

Therefore, everything he did was motivated by that. Impugning his motives based on that. Because it's all about a power relationship.

That's the problem with CRT. All right, let's keep going. Let me be clear. Love of neighbors requires you to be concerned for the first, for the just treatment of your neighbor, whether they are black,

Hispanic, first peoples, LGBT, migrant. I don't know what happened to the I. Where'd the I go in the

LGBT? Anyway, Muslim, working class, or even Baptist. Any derogation of a

Christian's duty to be concerned about the welfare and just treatment of their neighbors is an attack on the biblical love command itself.

Okay, so he started off the headline, the fundamentalist war on wokeness is a war on Christian love. And then it ends up being, if you're attacking, you're racist.

That's the bottom line of this article. You're racist, fundamentalist. If you're attacking CRT, you're racist. That's kind of what

I'm gaining from this article. Doesn't really give examples. Lots of accusations, prejudicial conjecture, vagueness, not well -written, in my opinion.

Doesn't really prove his point. What would be the law? Let me ask you this. If the law of God is love, right?

And I just said, hey, Jesus said, you love me, you keep my commandments. He summed up the law of God with love your neighbor as yourself.

If the law of God is love, what does that mean for LGBT people? What does the law of God say about them?

I'm not answering the question. You can answer the question. What does it say about Muslims? What does it say even about, what were the laws in the

Old Testament about those who are sojourning and the rules that apply to them? What about,

I mean, what does LCA, he has ethnic minorities here. First peoples, I guess that would be like indigenous peoples.

We use that term in the United States more now in academic parlance. What does it say about their beliefs and their religions, some of them?

If we bring the law to God to bear on some of this stuff, then, meaning the law of God, the love of God, there would be a lot of correction going on, would there not?

So I don't even, this whole article is terrible. Actually, it really is. It's just, it's a lashing out.

Now, so this is kind of funny. Michael Byrd put out a tweet. He said, I gotta ask my SBC friends, what do you think is a bigger threat in your denomination, critical race theory or neo -confederate networks?

And I think because he's more of the left, he's also in Australia, I don't know. Right now, when

I took this screenshot, neo -confederate networks was losing, but hey, a lot of people thought neo -confederate networks.

So he says, who made the video, by what standard? That even the people appearing in it eventually denounced it as a distortion of their views.

So it looks like he might be talking about founders, Tom Askell, those guys. He says,

I wonder how black SBCers would rank these two potential threats. So, I mean, he's a standpoint epistemology guy. Maybe he thinks that minority perspectives hold more weight.

I don't know, but I'm not a standpoint epistemology guy. I'm an authorial intent guy. And I believe that we should interpret things according to their authorial intent in their historical context.

And one person said, Johnny, I think he's talking about you. And I was, a lot of other people are getting shellacked in this.

I was probably the least of the shellacked people, but yeah, one person, hey, he's talking about John Harris, I think.

Now, the funny thing is I'm not in the SBC. Also, the logic being used, and I'm gonna point out how this is actually, this is the logic of critical theory.

And a lot of people who say they're against critical theory use this kind of logic all the time. So just realize this.

I defend the Confederate monuments and memorials. I think they should stay up. Now, if you show me one that, hey, this is actually racist, it says, it's put here for racism and white supremacy to intimidate people that are minorities.

I would say, yeah, that's really bad. That's terrible. Let's consider the motives behind this and whether we should have it up.

But that's not what we have. We have, and I've seen hundreds of these monuments. They're erected for honor, for bravery, for these kinds of things that are in short supply today.

And I've read a lot of accounts from soldiers. Most of them fought because they thought they were defending their home from an invasion, their hearth, their home and hearth, their local area, their family.

And so they went bravely into battle, all right? That kind of thing should be honored. That doesn't mean you have to agree with every political thing the

Confederacy ever did or the Union for that matter. Republican Party was started in large part because they wanted to keep the

Western territories for white labor. Doesn't mean, you've registered a Republican, doesn't mean you have to, oh,

I must be racist because of that or something. No, you actually are able to take good things in a tradition and those things that are true and valuable and value those things.

And you don't have to accept every mistake or every erroneous idea that might've been within that tradition at some point or people within that lineage might've thought.

It doesn't mean it's fundamental. Racism, is racism fundamental to a monument to honor soldiers?

No, no, but this is the critical race theory logic. You can get someone to be a racist in two or three steps or less.

Doesn't take long. You just attach them to something. They're a racist. So this is the popular one now, attach someone to the

Confederacy, well, they must be racist. And so people are asking, well, what is he talking about?

In the SBC, there's this, no one calls themselves Neo -Confederate Network. I mean, it's what? Conservative Baptist Network has been called that.

Here's two examples. Here's a guy who took Rod Martin's, a statement from Rod Martin back in 2002, where he says,

I'm a Southerner. I'm proud of my heritage. I'm glad we celebrate Robert E. Lee's birthday. And I think secession is, should be allowed.

We wouldn't have had the United States had that not been allowed. All right, well, Rod Martin's a proud Southerner. Guess he's a

Confederate, which means that he's part of Conservative Baptist Network. It must be Confederate Baptist Network.

Well, that's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. Rod Martin is certainly able to believe that secession is a viable constitutional right.

He's certainly allowed to believe that Robert E. Lee is an upstanding man and his birthday should be celebrated. He's allowed to be proud of his

Southern heritage. And it doesn't mean he's accepting the idea that minorities of some kind are inferior or should be enslaved or any of that.

In fact, you can be a Republican and you don't have to accept all of Lincoln's views on marriage, interracial marriage, and getting his

Union soldiers, generals together to say, how can we ship the slaves back to Africa? Those kinds of things.

You don't have to accept all of that. And you can still honor things about Lincoln. This is something that Americans used to be able to understand.

Just even maybe 10, 15 years ago, we understood. We can make these delineations and distinctions.

Not anymore. You will be tarred and feathered in three steps or less if you are Conservative. They'll attach you to something.

Talk about fundamentalism. Michael Byrd saying fundamentalism is the problem. This is the associationalism that fundamentalists used to have, which, hey, you're attached to someone who's attached to someone who's attached to someone who's a heretic.

Therefore, we gotta cancel you. They didn't use the word cancel. They disassociate. Here's Dwight McKissick.

Founders Ministry has been featuring some guy. And this probably explains why they wanna remove three

African -American professors, the affinity that ASCLE. Okay, here it is, Founders. Longshore and Founders Ministry have with lovers of the

Confederacy is astounding. Confederate Baptist theology. Yeah, Confederate Baptist theology.

Wow. There's no actual thought behind any of this. There is no definition save you're a racist.

That's what they're trying to do. And one of the things I wanted to bring out in some commentary here, because I think this is an important point, in the, let's see here if I can.

The 19, I'm trying to remember when the study came out. I presented on it last week. I think it was in the 60s or something.

But anyway, there was a study that a guy by the name of Adorno researched, came out with.

It influenced the University of the United States quite a bit. And he came up with this scale called the F -scale. You can go Google it, the

F -scale. And this was basically a way that we could categorize whether someone had, and to what extent they had, fascist thinking.

And if they were in danger of becoming a fascist, like a Nazi. And things like loving your family or country too much, right, those, hey, they give you a higher percentage on the

F -scale. And this has been something that in Europe especially, this is what the left uses. Anyone who's on the right is a fascist.

Now, this is what Antifa is, anti -fascist. Now, Antifa's here and Tisha's calling people Nazis and fascists who are just conservatives.

But in America, it doesn't apply as well. It's hard to call someone a fascist. We don't have the history of fascism that in Europe, many of them have.

What do we have that they can try to use to then tar and feather someone? Well, nationalism, colonialism, nativism, neo -confederacy, that's where the term comes from.

Hey, you're a confederate, even though confederacy ceased to exist a long time ago.

And no one that I know of, I mean, there might be some people in the South somewhere who really wanna reinstitute the confederacy.

No one I know of is trying to reinstitute the confederacy. If anything, there are people who think that there was looking at the confederate constitution, looking at some of the limited government states rights positions, line item veto, six -year terms for the presidency, although I don't hear anyone advocating that anymore.

There are political ideas that some people think, hey, these are good ideas, actually. These are good ideas because there's a very strong, centralized, authoritarian government forming.

And look, the constitution allows for secession, nullification, these kinds of things. There are people that are saying that, but are there people out there, like, is there a significant voice?

Some guy, it's not some guy who just has two followers on Twitter who's a racist, but in the old -fashioned sense of the term racist, ethnic partiality, but no,

I'm talking about someone who actually has a real following. Is there someone like that out there who is advocating that we need to have some kind of racialized power structure implemented by the force of law in this country?

I mean, I think that's what they're thinking. That's what they wanna try to pigeonhole people into accepting as their identity, and everyone else needs to make fun of them and cancel them and marginalize them.

Really, it's a bully tactic. This is bully tactics. No, that's not a significant thing.

I mean, that's why people are straining to even find out what is Byrd talking about here. I'm telling you what he's talking about, though.

I'm telling you, this is what's going on, because I've seen it go on in academia now since really the 90s, this started happening, this neo -Confederate pejorative, and it attaches itself, anyone who's advocating the loss of cosmetology from Disney to NASCAR.

It's like anyone who thinks, hey, I'm a Dukes of Hazzard fan, I'm neo -Confederate. I mean, I'm telling you, that's how the thinking goes.

So you can think it's ridiculous, but it's having its way in academic circles. Now, what does Michael Byrd mean by this?

I found this humorous, guys. I really enjoyed the Wake Forest Christmas Parade, he says in 2017, great community event, but as a tourist, the

Confederate flags on one marching group weirded me out. Of course,

Michael, you're in the Southern United States, or what once was the Southern United States, I don't think

Wake Forest, Woke Forest, as we call it, some people call it, I shouldn't say I call it that, is still the

United States in every single sense of the word, it's now a, it's becoming a

Marxist colony. Raleigh is, I mean, a lot of people are moving there, it's changing quite a bit in many ways.

But yeah, hey, there's still some proud Southerners in Wake Forest, and look, especially in 2017, three years ago, there would have been more, proportionally, there would have been more proud

Southerners there, proud of their heritage, proud of their family sacrifice, and this would have been something that would have been going on there for years in the

Christmas parade, and no one bat an eye, no one thought anything of it, people, in fact, probably cheered it. And a guy from Australia comes and says, hey, the local traditions of this community where I'm a guest in are weird.

And I don't think Southerners generally would do that going to Australia, but I could be wrong, but this is, I don't know, it's funny to me.

It's like, what did you expect? You know, there are people who are proud of their heritage, and it doesn't mean they're racist, and that's,

I think, what Michael Byrd's just assuming, they must be racist. He says, I know, both

Dr. Jarvis Williams and Walter Strickland have no idea why anyone would consider them unsound, unless the benchmark is some kind of Confederate Baptist theology.

So Confederate Baptist theology, so Jarvis Williams, who teaches critical race theory, and he's admitted this, he's influenced by this, he's even changed his reading of race relations in the

New Testament, he adds to the gospel, he adds works to the gospel because of his reading of CRT. Walter Strickland, a guy who also influenced by a gentleman named

James Cone, who's a liberation theologian, to basically have a works -based gospel as well.

Both of these guys, and this is documented, and I've documented it before, you know, someone who's just conservative orthodox, not even from the

United States, can see that this is a problem, but he wants to say, no, it's a Confederate Baptist theology. This is a way of shutting you up.

It's shutting people up. This is a bully tactic. This is not rational thinking. This is not argument. This is name calling.

It's mudslinging. It's the recognition that, hey, in elite circles, the Confederate is a bad thing, therefore

I'm just gonna attach this negative pejorative onto anyone who would be against Jarvis Williams and Walter Strickland.

Here's Michael Byrd again, and if you haven't caught it yet, I'm giving you the information you need to basically dismiss this guy when he makes these arguments.

Say, this is ridiculous. This is beneath you. You know, by your logic, the Bible's misogynistic.

He says, thesis, the antidote to the neo -Confederate surge in the SBC. What's he talking about? Anyway, is a healthy dose of the new perspective on Paul.

I think that's what he said. Oh man, I didn't even catch that when I was putting this in there.

You need a healthy dose of the new perspective on Paul. Justification by faith means fellowship by faith. Dividing wall between the races is broken down in Christ.

There is no equal but separate. The spirit makes us all children of Abraham. Right, and we all believe that the spirit makes us all, that there is a unity in the communion on the communion table when we're taking communion, but that fabric of that communion is ripped asunder by CRT.

That's what we think. You don't have to be a neo -Confederate. Anyway, a neo -Confederate way of life defined by racism.

A neo -Confederate, I guess he's defining, is a way of life defined by racism. Okay, well, if that's true, then are there black neo -Confederates and Asian neo -Confederates and German neo -Confederates and Russian neo -Confederates?

I mean, if that's just all it means. I mean, terms don't mean anything anymore. That's what this means.

Terms don't mean anything. Here's a little tweet thread here from the recent poll that Michael Bird made.

I didn't know the second one was even a thing, a Confederate Baptist network or whatever. Sorry, neo -Confederate networks in the

Southern Baptist Convention. So someone says, that's interesting considering the many Christians who have complained of the removal of Confederate statues and flags.

Okay, so this guy thinks if you complain about, if you are against the removal of Confederate statues and flags, usually by mobs who are breaking the law, then that makes you somehow a neo -Confederate.

And of course, we know a neo -Confederate, according to Michael Bird, is a way of life defined by racism. Do you see how this works?

It's not argument, it's definition. It's persuasion by bullying.

It's persuasion by prejudicial conjecture, defining the terms and repeating them.

It's repetition and definition. Let me say that again. This is how the left works.

It's argument, it's not argument. It's not rational argument. It is persuasion by means of repetition and definition.

That's it. You say something and you repeat it. And that's what you do. And that's how you advance your cause.

It is not through trying to appeal to people's rational senses. It is by appealing to their emotions, getting them to associate symbols and figures and movements and terms with something very negative by repetition and definition.

And of course, here's the end of it. Michael Bird says, here's who he says. This is what he's talking about.

Founders Fellowship, so I think he meant Founders Network, Conservative Baptist Network, and Paige Patterson, Acolytes, and those are who he's describing here.

So I thought some of you would get some humor out of that. Here's the part though that you should be concerned about.

And you say, oh, John, you're someone who does defend monuments, not just to Vietnam, World War II.

By the way, World War II, real quick. I mean, if you thought, think about it. You have a bunch of guys, especially in the

Pacific theater using many times racial slurs, dropping the first atomic bomb in world history on a ethnic minority population by United States standards.

You have them in the United States. You have internment camps for Japanese. I mean, you have a segregated army going into these areas.

Do you think that the World War II monuments are gonna escape this? Or will they be racist in about 0 .2

seconds after the last World War II that dies? It's something to think about. I don't defend

Confederate monuments just because it's just all about Confederate monuments. No, the logic used to take those down will be used to cancel everything you care about as an

American just about. It will be. This is the CRT acid. This is the critical race theory acid.

Racism is systemic. That doesn't mean that we're looking for laws and people who are racist. It means that it's in the fabric.

It's woven into the fabric of the traditions and institutions in the culture, which means that something like a

World War II monument, that's fair game, guys. It's fair game. Anyone who would support that in the future, they could be fair game for cancellation.

If you don't stand up now, if you don't stand up and say, I'm gonna hold the line right here, then that acid works its way into other places.

I'm just telling you. That's how this works. I can see down the road. I can see where this is going. And hopefully you can too.

That's the scary part, that there are actually people in the Southern Baptist Convention who have been, I don't know what it is, but indoctrinated in some way, and they can't see this yet.

Train's gonna hit them, and it's their time to get canceled, because let's face it. I read a passage for you last episode.

You can go watch it from this book that is way past politically correct in ways that Michael Byrd doesn't even,

I mean, that he's not complaining about. I mean, it's so politically incorrect, that book. When it's time for that to get canceled, and anyone who teaches that to get canceled, it'll be too late because of the compromises that have been going on for a long time.

So that article, yeah, I hadn't read it before. Now I've read it, terrible. This is, again, if there's any moral to this, it is that the left proceeds by, again, it is not argument, it's not rational argument.

It is instead repetition and definition. If you can remember that, then you'll understand a big tactic that the left uses.

They don't have to appeal to examples. They can hide behind vagueness for their own views. But then when it comes to lashing out against you, it will be repetition and definition.

And that's unfortunately the world we're living in, and for someone who's academic, who's supposedly a really great academic, too, to be engaging in that, well, let's just say academics aren't what they used to be.

Hope you enjoyed that. And, oh yes, I said at the end, I was just going to plug this again.

Social Justice Goes to Church, The New Left in Modern American Evangelicalism. Get your copy, go to Amazon if you like it, review it there, give it a good old five stars if you liked it, and this is a history.

This is how we got here in evangelicalism, how new left ideas in the 1970s, neo -Marxist ideas came into evangelicalism, and they didn't have the impact they are having now then, but they are now.

And the guys who are bringing it now, many of them, like the Tim Kellers and the David Platts and the

Russell Moores, they've been trained. They've been trained by, they've been mentored by, they've read the books by people who were from the 1970s who were engaged in the neo -Marxist movement, new left movement on some level.

So hopefully this will help you at least understand where we're going, where we came from, and you can get it on Amazon.

I'll put the link in the description. You can also go to socialjusticegoestochurch .com, get an autographed copy, though it will take you some time.

I'm getting shipments in, but they're sporadic because of COVID. That's what I'm told, COVID. So maybe three or four weeks before you get it, but you will get it if you go there, and God bless you.