The New Founding

Conversations That Matter

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We are live for the Conversations That Matter podcast. I feel like I owe it to you a little bit.

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I've been gone for a week. Some of you have wondered, where did John go? He hasn't posted anything for a week.

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And I am alive, so that's the good news. The bad news is I can't really tell you exactly why

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I was gone on YouTube, not specifically. You have to read between the lines. It has something to do with a certain video that I put out on Brazil, and I'll leave it there.

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I requested an appeal from YouTube, and they denied the appeal immediately.

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And so here we are. I have a strike on my account, and I think that lasts until April sometime.

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And the rules are, I think three strikes are out. I think the second strike, you're banned for longer.

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But the first strike, you're banned for a week. So here we are. You can go check out that episode on Rumble, by the way, if you really wanna see what we got in trouble for.

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And I have tried to be careful. In fact, even in that episode, I was trying to be careful. But there are certain episodes that I've chopped up.

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Not many, but there are some that I've put information in them that's only for Rumble, or is only for the audio podcast.

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And I have to leave it off of YouTube. It's unfortunate, because this is, when I started, this is the platform that was just obvious to me.

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Everyone seemed to watch YouTube. And at the time, there really, maybe there were, and I didn't realize it. But I didn't know of, and it wasn't popular to know that there were all these various mechanisms for suppressing conservative content.

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So anyway, here we are. And I'm just glad to be back, though.

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How's that sound? And there's a lot coming up for you, by the way. While I was gone, man, what did

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I do? I feel like I did a bunch of things. I've, just a quick update for those who do support me and wanna know kind of what

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I'm up to. I've been doing a lot of coordinating for the 1607 Project. In fact, I did an interview the other night on a

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Memphis radio station with Brian McClanahan, and we talked about what we're doing.

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And so that's exciting. And it's gonna be, pray for me, because it's gonna be hard to coordinate all the various moving parts of this.

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There's people all over the country that I need to interview, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it on a shoestring here. But that's something, if you wanna support it, 1607project .com,

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we'd really appreciate it. There's a little trailer there that explains more, and I'll talk about it more in the coming months, I'm sure.

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But got to do a little bit of coordinating with that, and got to, I know more now about concupiscence than I, like a word that I hadn't even heard.

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At least I couldn't recall hearing about it. Like two weeks ago, when Jared Moore came on the podcast, I was like, what, concupa, what?

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And now I feel like I know way more about it than I ever planned in my entire life to know about concupiscence.

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So we may talk a little bit more about that. I did, for those who have asked me about this,

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I did record a podcast a few days ago with Dr. Moore and Pastor Doug Wilson, and that is gonna be airing,

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I believe, tomorrow. I'm gonna put that out there. And so you can check out all of that, and just see for yourself what position, well, figure out,

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I guess, first, what positions are being advocated, and then apply the test of scripture and Orthodox theology.

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So anyway, that's going on. And I'm gonna just open myself up to questions to this podcast.

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So I'll do that at the end, Moore. I do have some material I wanna get through. And it's important to me, just,

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I think I'm a niche here, because not a lot of conservative Christians talk about this issue.

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And I think it's an important one, because it's so intrinsic to our identity as a people. But we're gonna talk a little bit more about the monument issue, because several things have come up in the last few weeks.

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Kevin D. Young with John Witherspoon, and getting attacked for defending John Witherspoon, because Princeton wants to take his statue down.

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We have the issue with Beth Moore and Jonathan Edwards. Beth Moore went after Jonathan Edwards. And you may not have seen it in articles, if you read the articles, but if you looked on Twitter, most of the reactions that Beth Moore was commenting on to her post, were people trying to say that Edwards is disqualified from any kind of recognition, because he was a slave owner.

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He had racially insensitive views. And this is the common drumbeat. So we have to be ready for it.

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And I'm not gonna say I have all the answers on everything, but at least I think I've tried to approach this question.

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And I don't see that attempt being made by hardly anyone else, at least on a serious level.

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And so it's one of the things that I sometimes will focus on, and this is one of those episodes. So we have the

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MLK statue that's been unveiled. I wanna talk a little bit about that. I didn't know what it was at first.

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So I know what it is now. I know what they're trying to depict, but at first I was like, what are these hands, just kind of these giant hands?

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And let's see, what else? There was another thing. Oh, Jay Gresham -Machen. I'm gonna show you a little clip from Reformation Bible College's conference,

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I guess it is, on Jay Gresham -Machen, or at least a seminar on Jay Gresham -Machen. And we're gonna examine a little bit what's being said there.

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So that gives you a preview to at least the main topic for this particular podcast.

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But I wanna let you know about this actually. So I'll tell you what the relationship is.

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I'm very transparent on this, but I wanna tell you about a potential sponsor. The reason

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I say potential is because what I told the individual behind this website is that I would just, for one time,

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I would just talk about it on the podcast because I believe in what she's doing. She's a mom that wants kids to have access to good books.

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And so she's curated a list of books. And this is, I think, good for homeschoolers. It's good for Christian schools.

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I mean, it'd be good for public schools too. And I'm not saying, I haven't looked at every book. So I don't know if every single book is exactly what is gonna suit your needs.

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But the fact that she's thinking outside the box and recognizing there's a big problem here, and she wants to address it by curating a list and saying there's all these big publishing companies, they're publishing a lot of bad stuff, but here's a few good things they have.

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That's what she's doing. And so you can go to mudhenmama, it's mudhenmama, how's that for a name, .com,

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mudhenmama .com. And if you go there, I'm just showing you the website right now.

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You can go to books, for instance, right here, it gives you a curated list of books at different grade levels, including adults.

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And so if you go to, let's say you have a third grader, you click on the tab here and oh, there's all these children's books for third grade at the third grade level.

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And they've been vetted by someone who shares at least a similar outlook to probably the understanding that you have.

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And she's a Christian, she's conservative. And so she's looking for books that, and look, there's a lot of them here.

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I mean, it just goes on and on and on. So if you're trying to shop and narrow down from all the bad choices that are out there, this would be a great option for you,

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I think. And that's why I wanted to give her at least one plug to just let you know, because I think it's a helpful resource.

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But we're gonna, she is a sort of a sponsor because we're gonna do another plug, hopefully next week, and I'll talk about it some more, maybe go into a little more detail on the website and show you kind of what kind of service is offered here and what potential exists for you, especially if you're a

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Christian school principal or something. But we'll leave that for next week. And hey, if you guys, if this is something that interests you guys, let her know that I sent you.

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So she knows that you heard it from this podcast. So anyway, I just wanna let you know about that.

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And I love this. I love people thinking outside the box and trying to address the real problems that lie before us, because we have a lot of challenges and barriers, and we need people who are willing to think outside the box.

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We have to be able to go around big tech. We have to be able to figure out ways to network with each other.

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And this is what so many Christian innovators on a lower level are starting to do. They're starting to think locally.

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They're starting to think in terms of platforms that aren't tied in with Google and big banks.

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And so I love this kind of thing. We definitely need a lot more of it. And in that spirit, I wanna briefly address before we get into the main topic, something that is going on right now.

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If you're aware of what's happening in conservative media, this is what everyone's talking about, Steven Crowder and The Daily Wire.

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And so Steven Crowder, for those who don't know, made a video a few days ago. He didn't specifically name

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The Daily Wire, but people figured out, it sounds like The Daily Wire. He held up a, it wasn't technically a contract, but it was a, it could have been if he had signed it,

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I suppose, or if he had negotiated further. And his issue with it, his main issue, was that there seems to be in The Daily Wire, because for those who don't know also,

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Steven Crowder was at The Blaze. He's now, he's a free man. So he's got a lot of subscribers.

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And if a conservative company like The Daily Wire wanted him, it would be to their advantage to some extent to have him on their team.

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And so he was upset that in their contract, there were these stipulations that essentially penalized content producers if they were banned or, well, if what happened to me last week happened to Steven Crowder, he would be out a lot of money.

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Because YouTube's saying for a whole week, you can't stream, you can't put videos, you can't even make posts.

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That's what I've contended with. And if you're in Steven Crowder's position and you have a large audience and they're expecting revenue from this audience on YouTube, then it would be, it's a bad, from their perspective, it's bad business.

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Well, Steven's whole point, and I'm just gonna summarize, is that not just for him, but for newer voices who might come up in the ranks of political conservatism.

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And I think this applies to those of us who have just a general biblical moral views. We are in this situation where if we have to abide by the rules big tech is setting, we are being pushed into a corner where what we talk about is becoming more narrow and more,

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I mean, things that I didn't even think are offensive now are getting people banned or getting people shadow banned or getting people canceled, all kinds of things.

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So what do we do about this? And Steven's saying there's a big problem here. And Daily Wire, obviously, if you're on Facebook, you've seen it or Twitter, but Facebook, I think especially, they spend a lot of money, right?

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Advertising their products on Facebook. In fact, I could name names on this one. I don't know if I, I don't think

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I wanna do it. I just wanna tell you, keep an eye out if you see those sponsor dads on Facebook because I've noticed a lot of supposedly conservative, right, they're not woke.

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Sometimes they say they're anti -woke. Evangelical groups spend a lot of money advertising on Facebook.

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And there was a time years ago when I gave a few hundred bucks, basically, to Facebook to advertise a few things.

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This is before the podcast. And since the podcast, there's no way, there's no way.

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I can't, and I realized, look, here's the thing. I'm not making a legalistic standard here. I'm not saying that it's a sin to do that.

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I'm not saying you can't use big tech. I'm not saying you can't order from Amazon, right? There are situations where you might need to, and I don't think you're culpable for that.

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But we have to think long -term here, and that's what Stephen's trying to say, that if we give this kind of power, if we seed this and just say, you know what?

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We'll let you be the gatekeepers and tell us what we can and can't say, then this is going to be a very dark place very soon, with especially the technology that's arising.

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I don't know if you saw this new artificial intelligence thing you can talk to that will write essays.

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And I mean, professors are concerned that students aren't even gonna write their essays. They're just gonna go to this AI app and try to get the

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AI app to write an essay. And it's very hard to figure out what you're reading, because it's grammatically correct, it's coherent.

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There's glitches, but that technology is gonna get much better. And just the way that the government and big tech tend to already be in bed and the way that they can monitor what we're doing is a concerning thought.

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And I don't wanna freak out and be chicken little here at all. These are exciting times to live in. It's exciting though for the innovators and for the people who are figuring out creative ways around this.

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And I think that's what Crowder is trying to say. We need that. Not the model that says we rely on big tech in order to make a profit.

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And so I don't really have anything to say about Steven Crowder as far as the business end, whether or not the potential contract that Daily Wire gave him was fair or not.

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For me, that's not the issue. And it's not whether Steven's even a good guy or if he's just using this to try to get more subscribers, that none of that is the issue.

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The issue, the central issue that Steven brings up, I think though, is a fair one, that we do need to be thinking outside the box on this.

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And so I just wanted to weigh in on that because I've watched his video. I watched the Daily Wire, at least part of the

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Daily Wire's response. And then I watched his second follow -up and I've seen other commentators on it.

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And those are my two cents on it. Okay, we have 65 people streaming right now.

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And the number is growing. And we're going to now jump into what

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I wanna talk about today. And I wanna say that I'm going to, for the patrons, give you access to a slideshow that I made maybe two years ago on this whole issue.

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And I'm not gonna go over all of it again, but I tried to think very deeply about this issue of monuments.

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And this is during 2020 when everything is being ripped down, it seemed like. And that train kind of slowed down, right?

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We're not seeing it maybe every week, but we are still seeing it. And I think there's a few reasons for this.

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I think one reason is a lot of the monuments are already down, right? In some places, what else are they gonna tear down, right?

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So that's part of it. And probably a bigger part of it is that people have to work now and we aren't in this

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COVID situation where people are sitting at home getting restless and going out and doing vandalism and so forth.

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So that's another aspect. I think though we are still seeing this movement continue and it's getting into areas that make political conservatives who didn't wanna defend monuments that had any attachment to anything

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Confederate, whether it was a Confederate soldier or even someone who made a contribution in science but happened to be part of the

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Confederacy or something. Conservatives, I'm saying on a national level, were pretty, even though I remember this, the polls at the time in 2015, the majority of the population,

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I'm saying all the whole population, was overwhelmingly in support of keeping statues around. But the political conservatives, you can attribute any motive you want, but for some reason they saw writing on the wall and they said, we're not gonna defend this.

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But now it's getting into these areas where it's like they're even getting very uncomfortable. And I think because they've seeded the argument to the left, they don't know what to do.

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Man, we're taking down monuments to founders of our country now. How do we defend these?

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Because they're using the same logic. They're saying, well, this person, this is what they thought about women or this is what they thought about minorities or this is their economic situation.

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They own slaves. These are the kinds of things that are continuing to take down people from the past.

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And it's getting into every area. It's not just political. It's getting into, and it's not just statues, right?

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It's getting into other areas, which I'll show you today. And the central question or the central issue in my mind in this whole thing is one of identity.

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That's what's going on here. We're changing our identity. And this happens during Chinese Cultural Revolution, right?

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It happened during the rise of the Bolsheviks. And when the

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USSR fell, it happened again in a different way, right? The symbols that were there previously had to come down that challenged the prevailing narrative.

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And then when the USSR fell, some of those symbols, Soviet symbols came down.

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And some of these I pointed out before were almost godlike, right? They weren't, they were more idle than statue.

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They were idles to, and you can tell that by the human scale, right? Human scale is a very important,

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I think, part of this. It's one of the reasons I've said, I think the Lincoln Memorial says, it communicates something different than the

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Jefferson Memorial communicates if you go to Washington, DC. The Jefferson Memorial communicates, if you go into the little rotunda there, it's more on a human scale, that this is someone to be elevated, to be looked to, to be admired, who had great accomplishments.

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But a man. The Lincoln Monument is much bigger, right? This isn't a man anymore.

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This is someone who's enthroned in, like in a Roman pantheon or a coliseum or not a coliseum.

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I'm blanking on the word for that particular architecture. Someone put it in the chat here. Anyway, Lincoln's seated in this classical

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Roman setting in which he looks like a god, right? Because the human scale is so big.

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And so there's all these different ways art affects us that we don't think about, that you feel it, right?

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You feel the grandeur of it when you're there. You're in awe. And sometimes you don't know exactly why.

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You just know, well, it's big, it's looming. But it's because in relationship to you, it's big and looming.

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And it's in a setting that's meant to make you feel a certain way about it.

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There's all kinds of things that factor into what's being communicated by a piece of art.

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And I don't pretend to know all of them, but when it comes to art that's in public, these are some of the things that we have to think about.

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And as Christians, I think we have to think about that. How do you determine a difference between an idol and a monument? I mean, scripture has monuments in the

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Old Testament. Now they're not statues, but they're piles of rocks.

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They're things that will, they'll show the boundaries between land.

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They have these important qualities to them. They have a social identity they confer.

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They give us an interpret, or at least they help us remember things about our past that are significant.

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And so I think in the current situation, when we're looking at statues, it's no different.

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These things are conferring an identity to the people that live in the regions in which they were erected, whether that's local or national or just regional.

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These are the figures. These are achievements. These are significant things.

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They're significant things. And of course, every person that's honored, it doesn't matter who they are, by a holiday or a statue or their names on a building, every person is going to be a flawed person on some level, right?

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Because if you're a Christian, you believe everyone has original sin, which means that we all commit sins.

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And so you can find sin in everyone. Now the question is, what sins are permissible?

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And what sins then, what sins can you have? And it's okay to still honor that person.

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We should still erect monuments to them. We should still try to get our kids to be like them. Or we should just, we should view that their achievements are still worthy of being recognized and celebrated or celebrated.

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That's, you know, you can have certain sins and still have those things, but other sins or other failures, they might not even be sins.

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They just challenge the prevailing narrative. Those are unacceptable. And, you know, a private letter once that showed that this person had views that aren't in keeping with today's views on race.

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Oh my goodness, right? That person, even though no one ever thought of honoring that person for those reasons, or that was not a, that wasn't even part of the achievements.

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People didn't even know about it, right? It was private. Now that's used to disqualify someone.

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And the slightest variation. So I wanna get into some examples of this and we'll talk through them as we go.

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And again, it's important for patrons. I'm gonna make available all my thinking on this, at least my comprehensive approach in a

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PowerPoint slideshow. You can actually go see the episodes from two years ago. I had some,

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I don't remember the title. Something to do with monuments. Anyway, you can find it on YouTube. Probably easy to just Google my name and monuments and it'll probably come up.

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I think it's called the monument debate, if I'm not mistaken. So, all right. So anyway, let's go there.

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Oh, I forgot to announce this, now that I'm looking at my browser here. So Richard Weaver, someone else who, by the way,

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I think is getting, probably getting the same cancellation treatment. Richard Weaver ideas have consequences discussion is gonna be this

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Monday. If you're a patron, and it's this Monday, by the way, because I couldn't, it was supposed to be last

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Saturday, but for obvious reasons, I couldn't do it. So this Monday we're doing it. I think what

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I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let patrons be part of the chat.

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They're gonna get a Zoom link. If you're a patron, you get a Zoom link and you can come on the chat and ask a question and we'll interact.

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I don't know how this is gonna go. I've never tried it. We're gonna try it. And then I'm gonna let the live stream, everyone can see the live stream.

22:20

And I think what I'll do is I'll turn off the live stream at a certain point, and then maybe for half an hour or so, it'll just be with the patrons.

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But we're gonna do a long live stream on Ideas Have Consequences, which is a book that everyone should be familiar with.

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And that's coming up. But the situations I wanna talk about start here. This is from right after Christmas.

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This is right before New Year's. Kevin DeYoung defends statue of slave -owning theologian, right? This is how we even phrase it now.

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It's not even founding father. It's not, none of the contributions that John Witherspoon made make it to the adjective on this title because slave -owning becomes the thing that he's known for now more than anything else.

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That wasn't what he was known for at all. That wasn't why he was honored. That's not why a statue was ever put up of him.

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But now that's the thing that everyone needs to know. So Kevin DeYoung defends statue of slave -owning theologian at Princeton University, resulting in social media backlash.

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And here's part of the article. It says, controversy surrounding statue on the campus of Princeton University has sparked fresh debate about how evangelicals should remember significant figures in the movement's history, their theology, and their complicity in the institution of slavery.

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Installed in the front of the East Pine Hall in November, 2021, the statue in question depicts John Witherspoon, a founding father of America and influential leader in the history of Princeton University and the

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American church. One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon played a pivotal role in establishing the philosophical and political framework for what would become the

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United States of America. Additionally, Witherspoon was a local church pastor. He served as the sixth president of Princeton for a quarter of a century.

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He has been credited with bringing the school back from the brink of financial collapse. All right, and there's much more that could be said here.

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Some of the founding fathers were under his tutelage. He is credited with bringing

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Scottish common sense realism to the United States, and that became one of the things that justified or led to the

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American Revolution. His contributions are immense, immense. We stand in his shadow, right?

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But he was also the slaveholder of two people, two people. He advocated and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey.

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He, let's see, what else does it say? Here's the language, suggested language,

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I guess, for the updated monument. So I'm not clear exactly on whether they're trying to remove this or they just want to contextualize it, but it says

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John Witherspoon, Princeton's sixth president and founding father of the United States had a complex relationship to slavery.

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It's complex. Though he advocated revolutionary ideals of liberty and personally tutored several free

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Africans and African -Americans in Princeton, he himself owned slaves and both lectured and voted against the abolitionist.

25:11

So we just talked about that. So they want at Princeton, I guess, the commemorative plaque to be replaced with a memorial that reflects on the different aspects of Witherspoon's life and legacy.

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So in response to this, and this is where it usually starts. This is the kind of thing, if you go to DC and you wanna look at our founding documents,

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I wanna see the Declaration of Independence, I wanna see the Constitution. So you go to the National Archives, you're gonna, those of you who've done this know what

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I'm talking about. You're gonna have to walk through, and by the way, any Civil War battlefield is like this too.

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And now it's almost everything, but I know the Civil War battlefields were the first ones to do this that I recall.

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You have to walk through a maze of interpretation first that by the time you get to the

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Constitution, the document, you're basically thinking, well, if you're a woman, this wasn't made for you. If you're a minority, this wasn't made for you.

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This was made for rich white landowners. And that's the only significance it has. And what a terrible document.

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And this is before you even get to the document, right? And I know every Civil War battlefield pretty much, if the

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National Park Service runs it, it's required to do something very similar.

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Like the first, you'll notice it's the initial presentation is all about, it'll be the causes of the war, but it reduces it all down to slavery.

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This is a moral debate between those who wanted to perpetuate slavery and those who wanted to ameliorate, get rid of slavery.

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And so they take actually an issue that is complex and simplify it, and then that colors your understanding of the rest of the battle.

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It didn't used to be like that. For those who don't know who are younger, it didn't used to. You'd go to a battlefield and it would be about the battle, but things are changing in every arena.

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And so John Witherspoon, this is one of the first things that happens, and I would note that if you look at the

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Civil War battlefield example I gave, that happened, I don't know, eight years, 10 years maybe before the monument started coming down.

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And that's really, that is my prediction. I think maybe it'll move faster with the internet. I think we have eight to 10 years with the founding fathers.

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And some of them have already come down in super liberal places. Murals have been destroyed, liberal churches have taken down their statues to George Washington, that kind of thing's already going on.

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But I'm telling you, I think it could be like we saw in 2020, maybe not as aggressive unless we have the same conditions with having the stay at home order.

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But we're gonna have the same spirit. And that's how much, that's my prediction.

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That's how much time I give it because we've seen this happen before. So that's what they're doing. And to Kevin DeYoung's credit, he wanted to write an article to try to show the positive contributions of John Witherspoon.

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And it's a narrative issue. It's, what you're saying about him, these aren't the things that we honor him for.

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The things that we honor him for are these things, right? That's pretty much the gist of it. This is what

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Witherspoon says, or sorry, DeYoung says, Witherspoon allowed that it was not necessary to free men already in a state of slavery because this would make them free to their own ruin.

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Still, it is very doubtful whether any original cause of servitude can be defended but as legal punishment for the commission of crime.

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So it's not the most rousing defense perhaps, but at least he's noting that John Witherspoon had possibly good motives here.

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His opposition to making slavery or to emancipate, whatever it was, did they say emancipation?

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I think they said making slavery illegal in New Jersey. His opposition to that had a good motive.

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That's what Kevin DeYoung's trying to say. And so, this is more complicated and you can't just broad brush, which

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I do agree with. So that's Kevin DeYoung. Now, here's the thing about Kevin DeYoung.

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I told this to a bunch of folks, including like some folks you might even recognize.

29:14

Like I mentioned this to AD. I said, you know, I'm having trouble having some compassion for Kevin DeYoung on this because he's being attacked brutally on Twitter.

29:23

And he was, especially a guy named Dwight McKissick. I mean, it was amazing to me that on Twitter, Kevin DeYoung, if you're just going by Twitter analytics,

29:31

Kevin DeYoung lost, right? And I realized Twitter's left -leaning, but Kevin DeYoung's argument here was not accepted by the majority, we'll say.

29:41

They accepted Dwight McKissick's, at least when I looked last. There was a lot more likes and the interaction on Kevin DeYoung's was, a lot of it was opposition to what he was saying.

29:52

And basically, it's that the narrative is that because he owns slaves, end of story.

29:59

You can't discuss anymore, that's it. He was sinful. If some people are even saying things like he didn't have the right gospel or denied the gospel or inadequate gospel.

30:09

I mean, his whole Orthodox theology is called into question because of this, which is amazing to me because in the

30:16

Roman world, which by the way, Roman slavery, there weren't gladiatorial arenas in Alabama, right?

30:22

Roman slavery was attached to much more evil. The normalization of sexual slavery and those kinds of things.

30:33

I mean, you had instances of that in American slavery. You have instances of that today in employer -employee relationships, right?

30:40

But in the Roman world, it was accepted. It was accepted that you could do whatever you wanted with your slave.

30:46

I mean, there's a lot more to say there and I've written about it in this book, a section on that issue.

30:54

But the point being that we would have to get rid of a great many

31:00

Bible characters, if this is true, right? We would have to call into question. I mean, we'd really have to call into question

31:06

Jesus that he didn't take a proper stand and use this analogy of slavery in his parables.

31:12

And that Paul continued to give instructions to slaves and he never really overtly challenged the practice.

31:21

Now people will say, because he said, that if you can be free, that that is preferable, that that's what he was doing.

31:26

But if you look at the context, he's not making an egalitarian argument that slavery in and of itself is sin, which is what people are trying to make him say.

31:35

He was, you could say today, I guess, that Paul was just a man of his times.

31:41

But here's the thing though, Paul also wrote scripture and these instructions on slave and master relationships are in scripture.

31:46

And so what do you do with Paul? What do you do with Philemon? What do you do with even some of the patriarchs like Abraham and, you know?

31:52

And so anyway, there's people have all these answers and apologists have tried to approach this by getting the

32:00

Bible off the hook by saying, well, everything in American slavery was horrible. And in the Bible, that wasn't really slavery, it was something else.

32:07

And it's like, that's not true, that's not true. In fact, I have a whole study, I've done presentations on this.

32:13

I haven't put any of it on YouTube, maybe I should, but I've done presentations on this, just going through all the biblical passages on the subject.

32:20

And this is, you know, long and short of it, the conclusion that I've come to is that you can't say that it is a sin in and of itself, at least from a biblical standpoint, you can't make that argument.

32:34

And if you want to say that these men were in sin and that's, okay, you know, I can understand where you're coming from and you're connecting it to things that are sinful legitimately because what we had here in the

32:46

United States did fall outside of the biblical parameters in many ways. We had, you know, the man capture elements and prohibition from teaching to read in certain regions and things like this.

33:00

You could clearly see, okay, this isn't biblical, this is wrong, right? So you can critique it for sure. And then we should, right?

33:07

There's no doubt about it. And we can do that with all kinds of issues in history in all kinds of eras, there's no doubt. But at the end of the day, you can't condemn a person in and of themselves just for that one thing, just because in this situation here, just because Witherspoon happened to have two slaves, that's not enough to cancel all the achievements that he's contributed.

33:28

That's not enough to say that he was not just in sin because they're going the extra step of saying he is definitionally in sin.

33:37

That's it colors everything about him. That's it's in the title. He's not the founding father anymore.

33:43

He's the slave owning theologian. Changes the entire identity of John Witherspoon.

33:49

And I would suggest that that is the key thing going on here. It's an effort to change the identity of the founders in general.

33:57

And that in turn changes your whole perception of the United States, the identity of the country, and that streams right down to you and your children.

34:06

Are they proud to be Americans? Do they think that there's worthwhile, true and valuable things about this country or is it all colored and irredeemably connected to some kind of heinous practice that no achievement is able to balance out.

34:31

This is the kind of thing that, this is the narrative that we're being fed.

34:37

And it's this attack on Witherspoon and that it is an attack, is an attack on all of it.

34:44

And I've made this point so many times, but I'm just hoping some people who listen who might be in positions of authority and have a chance to speak to this issue, see this because this is gonna come to a college near you,

34:57

Christian colleges included. This is going to affect missionaries. I wrote a whole article about Lottie Moon, right?

35:05

And all her politically incorrect things she said about the Chinese. And what are we gonna do about that, right?

35:12

So anyway, that's, what's going on here. And yeah, for those who, you know, the typical responses.

35:20

So you say slavery is okay. It's like, no, I never said that. Connected to much evil, good riddance to it.

35:25

We shouldn't have had it. It caused a great many problems. Certainly the transatlantic slave trade was connected to much, much evil.

35:34

It was an iniquitous traffic. And, you know, I'm very glad that it's over with.

35:40

I'm not glad that now we're entering civil slavery where the state is making us all slaves on some level, but I'm very glad that chattel slavery is done away with.

35:50

The way it was done away with, that's another question, whether that was right or wrong. But typically if you even try, this is the other thing tactic is, and why

35:59

I think people don't wanna touch this issue is because if you even try to defend John Witherspoon like Kevin DeYoung did, you're immediately, you must be a slavery apologist.

36:09

You must think it's okay. Because anything short of immediate cancellation of that person is suspect.

36:16

So anyway, I don't even know if I mentioned it. I started and I didn't finish. The reason I mentioned I didn't have a lot of sympathy though is because Kevin DeYoung had

36:23

Alan Gelso on his show maybe a year or two ago to talk about Robert E. Lee. And this is one of the questions

36:29

Kevin DeYoung brings up is, you know, what about Robert E. Lee monuments? Should we take them down? And Kevin DeYoung seems open to this and Gelso seems open to this.

36:37

Well, Gelso, I believe is at Princeton. And this is the tendency that I told you about. It's like, well, okay, we could let those monuments go.

36:45

Yeah, we could let that go. And then it's like, yeah, but don't take the founders. Wait, my land of lakes butter?

36:50

What's going on here? I can't get the Aunt Jemima syrup? One thing leads to another and that's what

36:56

I'm trying to tell you. You give a moose a muffin, they'll keep using that logic. All right, we're gonna, in a more quick fashion, get through some of these other examples, but the live stream is buzzing.

37:06

We have 83 streamers and let's see. We have, yeah, well, there's some truth.

37:16

Someone said slavery as it existed in the US was rather benevolent. You see, that's one of the things you're not allowed to say today, but it is something that's actually true in general.

37:24

It doesn't mean that all circumstances were. Someone, I read something recently. Someone was saying they were reading the autobiography.

37:30

I think it's called the Frederick Douglass, right? And I've read this and they're just appalled. Usually the quotation that's taken from it.

37:37

And so all social justice warriors, it seems like when they bring up anything concerning abolitionism, they love this quote, where Frederick Douglass, I'm summarizing, essentially says the slavery of this country is not true

37:49

Christianity. The Christianity of the slave masters is false.

37:55

They're not real Christians. And so we can, it gives them a pretext to question anyone's salvation if they were connected to our own slaves.

38:02

John Witherspoon included, that's what they're doing, right? And I've tried to make this point, but I'm like, look, if you read broadly, read broadly, don't just read what the people tell you to read.

38:12

And don't, and read history, read, I would encourage you to go read Frederick Douglass's. You're actually gonna find things that don't even fit the narrative in Frederick Douglass's autobiography.

38:21

And those things aren't mentioned. It's just the quotes they like. But read from that, read the slave narratives though.

38:27

Read broadly. And if you read broadly, then what you're gonna find is, yeah, in general, there was a benevolence there that did not exist.

38:34

And we're comparing apples with apples in other contemporary or ancient slave societies.

38:41

And a contemporary example would be the Muslim slave trade in Africa. There's a reason that you don't,

38:48

Muslims estimates are that they actually, over a longer period of time, transported more slaves from the interior of Africa to the

38:56

Middle East. At least I've read these estimates. I'm open to it being challenged, but Thomas Sowell also would back this up with his research.

39:06

You don't find examples of them living and thriving though today in the Middle East. Why is that? Well, because they didn't want them to.

39:13

They wanted them as slaves. They didn't want them to actually flourish and live beside them.

39:18

And so anyway, that's a good point that someone put in the info section or the live chat there.

39:24

Let's watch this. This is, we're gonna move on now. This is four days ago. This is at Reformation Bible College, 2023

39:31

Winter Conference. And who is this that's talking here? Because I don't recognize this person.

39:37

John Tweedale. Tweedale, I hope I'm pronouncing his name right. All right, here's what he says.

39:44

Now, it's important to realize at this time in Princeton, Machen is a man of his time.

39:52

It's during this season he has some controversy with his beloved mentor,

39:59

Benjamin Warfield. In 1913, he wrote a letter to his mother complaining about Warfield, who was then acting principal, who wanted to integrate the dormitory at Princeton Seminary with colored people.

40:16

Now here, Machen's Southern roots do show, and as a

40:22

Southern Democrat, he supported segregation and was disappointed in Warfield's desire to integrate

40:31

Princeton. Now, dear friends, I think it's important at this point we have to acknowledge the faults of our heroes.

40:41

And we have to acknowledge that racism is sin. And while we're grateful to God for the insights of Machen in defending the core principles of Christianity, we also acknowledge that he was a man blinded by his own upbringing culture.

41:03

And that's why we take time in a setting like this a hundred years after with some critical distance, and we evaluate with appreciation the life and ministry of our heroes.

41:17

I'm just gonna stop it there. So there's a lot to agree with actually in what,

41:23

I don't know if he's a doctor, but we'll say John Twedell. What he says here, like I said, there's a lot to agree with.

41:31

Here's the thing that I'm noticing though, because there's a subtle shift and it's happened, it's happened with other heroes that are being destroyed.

41:38

And now it's happening with Machen, where this is a letter that he wrote to his mother.

41:44

I think it was in 1913, right? So we have one letter and it's a private letter, right? And this now becomes a very significant thing.

41:55

And what I'm predicting is this will become more and more and more significant. This will become the more determinative of who

42:04

Machen is, his character, his contributions will be colored by this. And it will be expected that if you ever talk about Machen, it's like when the

42:15

Muslims refer to Muhammad, right? They say, peace be upon him. If you ever mentioned Machen, will it be, this is my question, that you have to immediately acknowledge this letter he wrote, right?

42:25

Because it's like that with others. It's like that with other American, former heroes of American history or Western Civ who had politically incorrect leanings or something.

42:36

Now it's expected, if you ever bring them up, you have to go through this whole exercise of talking about whatever flaw.

42:43

And sometimes it's just something that doesn't comport with our modern egalitarian understanding or the way our society is arranged today.

42:51

And so with this question, I'll try to be brief with it, but at the time that Machen lived, and then

42:56

I don't know what was going through his mind. And this is part of the problem with history is we have limitations.

43:01

We have a letter. If we don't have anything else, we have to guess. And there's a lot of assumptions,

43:08

I think, going on that. So one of the things you heard the speaker here say is that racism is a sin, right?

43:15

That, see, that's not precise language, I would say. It's imprecise language. And you have to define out what you mean.

43:21

You have to be crystal clear on this. Show me the Bible verse, right? What's the Bible verse that says racism is a sin?

43:27

Well, it says, well, man is made in the image of God. It was like, okay. So what do you mean then by, how does this, show me where your understanding of racism conflicts with that.

43:36

And then we're gonna get closer to what the actual sin is. Because if we start calling things sin that God doesn't call our sin, or we give very vague definitions of sin that BLM could come in and say, well, you're racist, then we're opening

43:51

Pandora's box. And so I don't think that's, you know, the good speaker's intentions here, but that's the danger

43:58

I see with this. And what he's doing is he's implying, Machen was a racist, right?

44:04

Now, in a modern understanding, that's what people would say of Machen. I think if you're gonna bring it up though, in a context like this, where you're making a presentation on the biography or the life of Machen, right?

44:19

You would have to give a little historical context to some of these things that have been lost, that have been reduced down to oversimplifications.

44:27

This is one of them. And so this is my attempt to tell you how

44:33

I would approach this maybe, if I had to bring this up, if this was a situation, I would say, look, in Machen's era,

44:41

I'll probably start with this. You've heard about this letter that Machen wrote to his mother in 1913, a private letter, but it reflected some things he did to try to dissuade

44:54

B .B. Warfield, who was also a Southerner, by the way. I don't know what party, maybe he was Republican. I don't know.

45:00

But he tried to dissuade B .B. Warfield from integrating the dormitory.

45:06

And so you may have heard of this. Here's what I wanna tell you about that.

45:13

I wanna give you the context of the times that you might not have heard and show

45:20

Machen within that. And then I only wanna go as far as the historical record lets us go.

45:25

So we all, we can start off, we all disagree with Machen's stand, right? I disagree with it. But you have to understand something.

45:32

At the time Machen lived, this would not have been inconsistent with the current assumptions that he lived under with the character that we honor him for now.

45:44

He would not have had the same thoughts or experiences that we have today in this multicultural society.

45:51

And say, well, Warfield disagreed. Well, sure, there were some people who did. But this is a process that happened over the course of centuries.

46:01

And I have said this before, but during colonial times, when Europeans are first interacting with different peoples, they'll say things like savage.

46:08

They'll look at some of the practices. They know that there's an inferiority to some of these civilizations.

46:14

And most of them thought it had something to do with Christianity. We need to convert the pagans, right? These are kinds of things now that are so racist, but it was centuries before you get to the point we are now where you're working with someone who might be very different than you genetically, may even come from a different part of the world and you're able to interact together and you have at least somewhat of a similar moral framework because you're able to cooperate.

46:37

That didn't exist for a long time. And it was, it took years to get to where we are and people didn't understand that.

46:44

But here's the view that existed at the time, in general, okay? This isn't comprehensive. Integration to those who were pro -segregation meant the death of civilization in their minds.

46:54

And they did, you might think that's crazy. That's what they thought though. And they thought that it was a threat to civilization because you could use, and they had seen this happen after the civil war, but you could use minority populations who are in need.

47:12

You could use them as political pawns for your harmful policies. And that was a big fear, that if you gave someone social equality and political mobility and all these things that they would become political pawns.

47:27

And it would be weaponized against, it would be used by really one faction of the country against another faction.

47:37

The concern was also that European peoples would lose their identity and their heritage.

47:44

If this goes as far as they would think that any kind of integration would immediately lead to interracial marriages and these kinds of things.

47:55

And they feared that if that happened, there would be no identity, no heritage left.

48:01

And it would actually be harmful for both people groups. This is, and I'm just the messenger. I'm not telling you

48:06

I agree with any of this. I'm just telling you, this is what was commonly thought at the time. So social academic standards would be lower to accommodate.

48:16

They thought working together was healthier when it was done separately. Some thought maybe mutual trust over time would have to be built.

48:24

And by the way, this wasn't something unique to white people. This was something Booker T. Washington talked about in his famous hand speech.

48:32

That's famous now. That like a hand, these different groups can be part of the same hand, but they're different fingers on this hand and so forth.

48:41

So it's a sort of pro -segregation -ish argument. At least that's how it's portrayed now. Now, those who wanted integration into social integration believe that it was very bad for those who were prevented from being part of the general society, we'll say.

49:03

And that disparate outcomes would result. This would be a harmful thing. And it wasn't fair. Just wasn't fair.

49:09

Now, looking back, I know that a lot of studies have been done on this, that actually before integration, there was, you can look at metrics like the marriage rate or delinquency.

49:22

You can look at crime stats. You can see, even in institution building metrics, you can see that actually they're interested.

49:31

And I didn't know this until very recently, there was during segregation times, black communities in the

49:38

United States built a lot actually. And some of that started coming, it took a blow.

49:44

We'll say, we'll put it that way, during the time of the great society. I find that interesting.

49:49

I don't know what to make of that completely, but they didn't have the benefit of having the information that we have now and trying to examine it and figure out what is best, what is best for everyone.

50:05

Now, obviously, I go to a very multicultural church.

50:11

I have friends who, even in my family, we have interracial marriages and I don't have a problem with any of that.

50:17

And I'm actually very positive about, in some circumstances, I think you should marry that person, right?

50:24

So I don't agree with Machen's view on this. But at the same time,

50:30

I can also look back at Machen in the time period in which he lives. And I can say, look, any inclination that Machen might've had to potentially see minority peoples as less than human would be wrong.

50:47

I don't have evidence of it though. I have a letter. I can't draw from the letter, at least so far.

50:54

And I've only seen quotes from this letter because I don't know where the, I can't find, it's in an archive somewhere, but I have no evidence, at least, that that's what

51:00

Machen thought, right? That would be wrong though. That would be sin if he did. If he took that scientific racist approach as well, they're less than us, they're animalistic or whatever.

51:09

Obviously, completely out of step. No question, right? Would that be enough to overturn some of his other things?

51:16

I don't think so. Machen was actually very critical, I believe, of Darwinism. So I don't think Machen believed that.

51:22

I'm sure he believed that every person was made in the image of God. If Machen, I could look back and apply a biblical standard and say, if he believed that, let's say, we shouldn't even look out for the welfare of our neighbor, okay, that we don't, minority people, that we don't care about what they are going through.

51:42

We only need to look after our own interests. If that's what he said, that would be wrong. And I could show you Bible passages to prove it, right?

51:48

Now, you might say that, well, just him opposing integration means that he believed that. Well, I don't know. I don't know exactly what his motive was in all respects on this.

51:57

But if you were able to show me where he made a statement like that, I would say, yeah, well, he was sinful in that, but I don't know.

52:05

If he suggested that minority peoples were incapable of following God, they have a sinful inclination that we don't have, right?

52:13

This is what the white people are doing today. White people are more sinful than us. They have white privilege and they get away with things.

52:20

And there's a sort of righteousness that minorities have, it's flipped. But if he had the opposite of that, if he thought, well, minority peoples, they're just bad.

52:29

They just, they have a weakness that they're more sinful and not capable of following God's law.

52:35

I can show you Bible passages that would condemn that as sinful and not in keeping with biblical teaching, right?

52:41

These are all clear things in scripture. And we can be open to the possibility that Machen may have fallen into one of these categories, or maybe a category

52:49

I'm not thinking of that's sinful. But what we can't do is start saying, racism is a sin,

52:55

Machen was a racist, therefore, Machen's legacy is tainted because of this.

53:02

If we start off that first premise with racism is a sin, I'm guaranteeing you, this isn't going to just be

53:08

Machen. This is going to be anyone who lived before 1975. This is going to be, the net is going to be spread so wide, you wouldn't believe it, because that is a very expanding definition.

53:25

And the generation Z, I'm amazed at what they think is racist, and therefore worthy of cancellation, things that are innocuous.

53:34

Now, this isn't innocuous, but this is where that logic leads. And so to put a cap on it,

53:42

I would just say that Machen has a personal letter to his mother at this time.

53:48

This isn't what we honor him for. If you have to address it, this isn't what we've honored him for. These aren't the significant achievements that he's made.

53:56

And we don't fully know his motivations for this. He may have thought that he was doing the best thing.

54:01

That was the best outlook or social arrangement for both parties at the time in which he lived, because many people thought that.

54:08

And he may have been mistaken about that, but being mistaken about something isn't the same as sinning. And I hope everyone can see the difference here and interpret things charitably where, interpret things accurately, right?

54:22

But interpret them charitably where we don't have all the information. All right. So I wanted to say that about this particular situation and just kind of warn you that as we're treading on these minefields, we have to try as best we can to be very careful because one blows up and it signals, there's a chain reaction.

54:43

Are we gonna start changing Machen's name? I mean, that's already happened to people like Dabney, I know, and I don't even know who else, taking his name off of things.

54:50

Are we gonna do that with Machen now? I remember, was it a year ago? I think, I wanna say it must've been.

54:56

See, I don't wanna slander anyone here. This is just my recollection. I don't know if this is true. Someone can go

55:01

Google it. But it was, I think it was Westminster Escondido, if I'm not mistaken.

55:08

They had like a, they took down a Machen thing or they contextualized a plaque to Machen or something happened.

55:16

I don't remember what it was. Maybe someone had tried to cover a plaque to Machen because of this issue.

55:23

So anyway, let's see, what else? For those who don't know

55:28

Machen, go read Christianity and Liberalism, by the way. It just occurred to me. And some of you might not have read it. That's a significant contribution.

55:34

He also made contributions on just a number of areas. I mean, he has his own denomination, right?

55:40

The OPC, he's started, helped start Westminster Theological Seminary.

55:48

I mean, his thinking on education is phenomenal. Go read his thinking on Christian education. It's amazing.

55:54

He testified before Congress. So anyway. All right, let's go to Beth Moore now. Beth Moore and Jonathan Edwards, right?

56:01

This has all happened, by the way, within a few weeks of each other. So I'm just giving you all of it straight.

56:07

So Beth Moore writes a long thread. I really don't wanna read this long thread. Can I just summarize it for you? Let's read the first one.

56:13

For the life of me, I don't get the appeal of Jonathan Edwards to many. After my Bible reading this morning, I read a bit out of an old book

56:18

I pulled off the shelf. And so it was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, right? And so she reads this and she had underlined,

56:27

I have Jesus. I'd underlined the word Jesus. Now that right there is vintage Beth.

56:33

I've got nothing if I don't have strong feelings. I've got nothing if I don't have Jesus. I grinned, curious what

56:38

I'd felt, the need to say so many years ago. All right, so she goes on and on about like, why do people like Jonathan Edwards?

56:44

He's such a meanie. He calls us names and says we're so depraved. That's basically what it is.

56:50

And here are the reactions to this. This is what I found more interesting. So it's not, for Beth Moore, it's not slavery.

56:59

It's not being pro -segregation. It's not mistreating women. It's not some of these social views.

57:05

It's something else, which I would tell, I would just suggest goes along with, it's the spirit of our age now.

57:11

This is very offensive. Jonathan Edwards believe we're sinners. And not just sinners, but we're depraved.

57:17

We're hanging over hell and we have only one hope and that's Jesus Christ. And we have to flee to Jesus Christ, right?

57:25

And we're bad people, right? That's offensive today. To call someone a bad person is offensive.

57:30

We can do it in the past. We can do it to people of antiquity. Maybe one of the most important points

57:36

I make in this video is this. What matters more, incorrect social or theological views?

57:45

And I don't mean heresy here, right? I mean, out of step with our current zeitgeist. So views that are out of step with our current zeitgeist on social things or theological things, or it's personal integrity.

57:59

That used to be the measuring rod we used was personal integrity. What accomplishments are worth celebrating?

58:06

What people are worth honoring? What people are worth recognizing? Even if they had bad things, they did some good things or they did some achievements that are amazing.

58:12

I mean, flying across the Atlantic's an amazing achievement, discovering the new world's an amazing achievement, right? So we look at these things, these amazing feats, some of them very worthy of admiration.

58:25

And when we look at our sons and our daughters and we say, here's a hero I'm gonna set before you. Paul said, follow me as I follow

58:32

Christ. Paul wasn't sinless. Here's another hero I'm gonna set before you. This is, these are real life heroes.

58:37

This is your dad. This is your pastor. Here's some other heroes from our past.

58:44

Here's some godly men and women of antiquity. Are you concerned when you set those heroes before them, the social arrangement they lived in and were okay with more than you are the personal character they had?

58:59

There is a difference here. Now I'm not saying the two can't ever relate, but it used to be, and I was reading a book on this.

59:07

Actually, I was reading a book on Richard Weaver the other day, preparing a little bit for what we're gonna do on Monday night. And one of the things

59:14

Richard Weaver talks about is this older religiousness that existed in the South in particular. And it was a religion of experience.

59:22

It was much different than the New England religion, right? And one of the things that jumped out to me was the emphasis on personal experience and character and piety and just, it was less on the abstract, right?

59:42

Theology, which we like reading the Puritans for their theology. A little bit less on that and a little bit more on the experience, on the practical daily living.

59:53

And it occurred to me as I thought this, I thought, you know, when I was even a kid, so we're not talking that long ago.

59:59

I go back 25 years, 20 years. I remember there was more emphasis in evangelicalism in general on, like even the sins that would be named.

01:00:11

You know, what kinds of sins were you guilty of? Like the problems that people in the church thought threatened their flock were things like drug addiction, pornography, you know, tendencies towards suicidal thoughts, depression, even curse words at that time in modest clothing.

01:00:29

I mean, there are a whole host of things. Worldliness though, right? And we didn't want worldliness. And today

01:00:35

I was thinking, I don't think I hear that rhetoric as much now. It's very interesting to me. The issues that we are focused on today that are so problematic and challenging the church and challenging our souls are social arrangements.

01:00:50

There are disparities. There, someone may have said something that was politically incorrect. These are now becoming the big deals, the things that we need to shame people for, the things we need to, if there is any repentance, it needs to be for those.

01:01:04

It's a shift. I'm just telling you, I've seen it. I don't know if you've seen it. Put in the live chat if you've seen what

01:01:10

I'm talking about here because I've seen it. And I think what Beth Moore's writing here connects to this a bit.

01:01:15

Like, you know, calling people bad personally, you know, saying inside the guys, you know, that's kind of out there.

01:01:23

And here's the interesting thing. Immediately what gets coupled onto this? The responses are fascinating.

01:01:29

Here's the first one. And this has, you know, this has a lot of likes. The thing that always confuses me is the part about us dangling spiders over fires.

01:01:37

Like, I don't care for spiders. Oh no, this isn't the one. Oh yes, it is, okay. I don't care for spiders, but I'm not torturing them either.

01:01:43

Jonathan Edwards, ready? Slave owner and sadist. Yeah, that's right. The slave owner thing has to be thrown in there.

01:01:50

That this is, you know, what do you expect of a guy who owns slaves? Of course he thinks that we're totally depraved.

01:01:55

I mean, he's a terrible, he's just a bad guy. That's how it came out. That's, and Beth Moore, of course, you know, favorable to this.

01:02:04

You know, this is, you know, the kind of thing that though you see throughout. Here's another one. I used to admire him and feel guilty that I wasn't as productive as he was.

01:02:12

But then I realized he never helped his wife with the dishes or mowed the lawn. I could write so much more if I were a chauvinist slave holder.

01:02:24

And Beth Moore says, Bob, yes. Yes, Bob. So wise, so wise. I mean, if it makes you feel good to rip down genius men from the past who made contributions you will never come close to and benefited people in ways that you probably just, you'll never be able to benefit them.

01:02:46

Such form, I mean, he's a giant. Okay, let's just get Jonathan Edwards. He's a giant. And, you know, this is the kind of thing

01:02:54

I think that makes, this is the key. This is so much of what I think is going on with this whole monument issue.

01:03:01

It makes us feel good to rip down men from the past with these great achievements.

01:03:07

Cause it makes us, it makes us feel like Bob here. Man, I don't feel so bad about myself because you know, despite all those great achievements, they were terrible people.

01:03:14

They didn't help their wives with the dishes. I'm a good person because I helped my wife with the dishes, even though I don't produce great theological works.

01:03:22

Now, how do we know Edwards didn't do that? Well, he probably, he had slaves. It's, you know, he had people probably helping him do some of these house management tasks, but we don't know to what extent he participated in those tasks.

01:03:33

He had a hard life, way harder than ours. I mean, you had to, he had to chop wood, which meant you had to cut down a tree and you didn't have chainsaws to get fire to heat yourself in the

01:03:44

New England winter. We have a truck that comes and puts gasoline into our furnace.

01:03:51

I mean, that alone, look at the time that you're saving with that. So, well, I don't have slaves doing my work.

01:03:58

Yeah, you know what? Your life is a whole lot easier than someone that even had slaves 200, 300 years ago.

01:04:04

You have mechanized things that do all this work for you that used to, I just, it blows my mind, but it makes

01:04:11

Bob feel better that he's not as productive. And this is where we're at.

01:04:18

This is why I think it makes men, lesser men feel good about themselves to rip down greater men. That might be all the really that there is to this.

01:04:26

That might be what's going on. And under the new paradigm of virtue signaling where you can just show your virtue online with a

01:04:34

Twitter post, but you don't really have to do anything. And you can be a good person because of that. Man, that's really appeals to our ego, doesn't it?

01:04:42

So easy to be good, so easy to be good. And so easy to rip people down who deviate and feel good about yourself and bad about them.

01:04:52

All right, well, let's, oh, I have more. Oh, that's right. Wouldn't be complete without this.

01:04:59

So what kinds of heroes are being elevated now? Well, here's one. Boston's new

01:05:04

MLK statue. And the controversy now, this came out today, is it raunchy? And I have to be delicate.

01:05:11

Kids might be in the car, but some people are saying that this is the statue, depending on what angle you look at it from, it might look like an inappropriate thing.

01:05:20

And I'll leave it there. And I can see why someone might think that. And the reason

01:05:26

I can see it isn't because I have a, I mean, it's been suggested to me. I didn't think that at first, but it's not because I have a perverted mind.

01:05:31

It's because it's a weird statue, guys. It's a really, really weird statue.

01:05:37

Let's see if there's any other. These are the only two pictures in this. You can go look it up. And it's supposed to be

01:05:42

Martin Luther King Jr. hugging his wife. And it's based on a picture, but the only thing is the shoulders and the hands in this, on the statue.

01:05:53

And again, human scale is way off, right? This is, one of the things I've told you to look for in these statues and stuff, are we talking about a god?

01:06:01

Are we talking about a symbol that represents something bigger? Are we talking about a human though, who is like us and we can attain where they are and it encourages us to do better?

01:06:12

So human scale, in my mind, way off on this. But it's like those

01:06:17

Soviet statues, except it's so weird. It's so weird. And I was thinking about it.

01:06:23

What does this communicate? When you look at this, what do you think? I'd be curious what people are saying in the live chat here.

01:06:30

What do you guys think when you look at this? How does it make you feel, et cetera? When I look at it, this is what

01:06:38

I see, I'll just tell you. I see confusion, I see chaos.

01:06:44

I see something that actually isn't so much about MLK as much as it is about, it's like the love.

01:06:54

I don't know if you've seen those, you know, L -O -V -E things that are in public parks and stuff. It's symbolizing something more.

01:07:01

It's trying to, it's like hugs are good. Like we all like hugs. It's, this is something that makes, it's the warm fuzzies, feeling good about a hug.

01:07:10

But it's confused because it's trying to reduce this picture, this tangible thing that MLK had with his wife down to something that's more symbolic, like a general category of some kind of the warm fuzzies.

01:07:25

We can all have a hug, right? So this, there's no head attached to this. So it could be anyone, but it is supposed to be

01:07:31

MLK. So that's number one. The second thought I had though is, which means

01:07:37

I should just give you my conclusion. That means it's almost a monument to nothing. It's not really that significant.

01:07:43

So its significance really isn't like there. It doesn't really point you towards an achievement. It doesn't, so, all right.

01:07:50

Second thing is I find it ironic, extremely ironic because MLK, and this is one of the things that characterized his life.

01:08:00

And it was known at the time he was alive. It's been known since, and it's been suppressed somewhat, but it was very known to the people who are around him is that he was very unfaithful to his wife.

01:08:13

And it goes way past that, but here's the thing. And I've said this before about MLK.

01:08:19

If you're gonna try to honor MLK, then you pretty much, you're limited in what you can choose.

01:08:25

You can pretty much go back to the I have a dream. If you're a conservative Christian, you can probably take aspects of the I have a dream speech and say, let's honor that, right?

01:08:35

Once you step outside of that and you look at King's connections to communists, you look at his, really his, he had radical views.

01:08:47

I would say Marxist views. He's a Marxist. I don't know how you get around that. He wanted, before he died, the last thing he wanted to do was this poor person's march because it really wasn't about race.

01:08:56

It was about the haves and the have -nots for him. There's, I mean, there's a lot of things about MLK that get, that his views on certain, like I think his views on like Jewish people, some of the things he said, you don't bring those up because that would cancel anyone who's conservative, but you don't bring those up.

01:09:15

You don't bring his infidelity and his me too moments. You do not bring those up. His plagiarism, which is well -documented, you don't bring that up.

01:09:23

If you're a Christian, you don't bring up his heresy, and there's a lot of it. And yes, it goes to late in his life.

01:09:29

It's not just his dissertation, right? There's all these things that you're, so here's the question, right?

01:09:35

Again, his views on social arrangements we find acceptable today.

01:09:42

His character though, stunk. Whereas with someone like a

01:09:47

Machen or the other characters that I just, you know, Witherspoon, Edwards, their views on social arrangements, we don't like today, but their character was good.

01:09:59

Do you see what's devalued now? Character isn't the thing that determines whether someone is honored.

01:10:08

It's their view on social arrangements. And that's been elevated to such a point that it actually is now a substitute for having character.

01:10:16

Do you see this? This must be articulated in very understandable ways, and hopefully in ways that are better than even

01:10:25

I'm articulating it now. And Christians should be working on articulating this because I'm telling you, this revolution progresses.

01:10:33

And I think eventually it'll probably touch MLK. Now that's gonna be hard though, because his legend is so built up.

01:10:40

You see where it is now, but I don't see how it can't eventually. But it'll touch more than him.

01:10:47

And before it gets to MLK, the revolution will eat our scriptures.

01:10:53

And the hard part for the social justice warriors now is the Bible has been revered for so long, even by people who aren't

01:10:58

Christians. There will become a time when it's not. Our Bible characters will all be suspect,

01:11:04

Paul especially. They'll try to redefine Jesus for a while, but eventually you have to contend with Jesus's politically incorrect statements.

01:11:13

So, I mean, if you think Edwards was really, you know, judgmental when it came to what he said about hell look at what

01:11:20

Jesus said about hell. Look what Jesus said about social, the social arrangements of his day. I mean, he used them as examples in his parables.

01:11:27

The labor relationships, you know. So we are, this is an attack that it,

01:11:36

I should say it's a campaign that will eventually attack and probably already has in some arenas the core heroes of our own faith.

01:11:46

So, and in addition to that missionaries, reformers, the Puritans as we've seen today, et cetera.

01:11:53

That's what's going on. That's my explanation for it. And my concern is that I don't see anyone.

01:11:59

Kevin DeYoung's, you know, attempt here is, it needs, we need better guys. We need better. And I know that's some of you, that's why you support this podcast.

01:12:07

I'm willing to talk about these things and I don't care what names I'm called. And I'm open to criticism.

01:12:13

Hey, you have an objection. You think I was off on something. Tell me and I'll reevaluate. But I'm not going to just ignore these kinds of things because these are cultural shaping things.

01:12:23

These are things that we need to take stands on and there's so few people doing it.

01:12:30

That's the live stream today. Now, I wanna remind everyone, please, if you are a patron,

01:12:36

I would love for you to participate. I'm gonna make an announcement later today or tomorrow and we'll have some information for you on how to join the

01:12:42

Zoom meeting. So you can interact now. I'm actually excited about this. I'd like to do more of this. And if it works out, we're gonna do other books.

01:12:49

But if you haven't read the book and you don't have to read the book to be part of this. Maybe some of you, that's why you wanna be part of it because I don't wanna read the book.

01:12:57

But ideas have consequences. If you, I'm gonna make a post, but if you're on Facebook, this is where I'm looking at this.

01:13:04

You can just go and there's a post there. And if you click on it, it'll take you to the

01:13:10

Patreon post that will give you access if you are a patron to the

01:13:16

Zoom chat. And I will have on all social media the link to the live stream tomorrow or sorry, on Monday rather.

01:13:26

So, but if you can read the book and that especially if you wanna comment on it and interact because it'll make for a much more educated interaction.

01:13:34

Well, God bless everyone. I'm gonna just look at your questions real quick. I said that I would do a

01:13:40

Q &A at the end a little bit. And so we'll just look through that. Man, a lot of comments on here.

01:13:50

Yeah, Mason was bold and brilliant as Jimmy Starfish says, that is very true.

01:13:58

Every, this is a good quote. Jeffrey Prado says, everyone in history was a product of his time except us.

01:14:04

We know everything certainly more than those silly dead people. Yeah, that's pretty much the, there's actually a quote.

01:14:10

Can I read it for you? That's very similar. You made an observation. It's very similar to Richard Weaver. Richard Weaver said amnesia as a goal is a social emergent of unique significance.

01:14:19

I do not find any other period in which men have felt to an equal degree that the past is either uninteresting or is a reproach to them.

01:14:26

When we realize the extent to which one's memory is oneself, we are made to wonder whether there is not some element of suicidal impulse in this mood or at least an impulse of self -hatred.

01:14:39

Richard Weaver. Yeah, the presentism. It shows the difficulty of presentism.

01:14:45

Viewing the past through today's filters. It is a difficulty. It's actually a fallacy technically in historical discipline, in historiography.

01:14:56

Let's see. Someone wants me to, I'm not sure what the point is. Someone wants me to talk about Christian colleges more than Ivy League.

01:15:04

I mean, I don't mind doing that. If you have examples of where Christian colleges are taking down their past,

01:15:10

I'm sure it's happening. Well, most of these comments are just very positive.

01:15:31

Yeah, Weaver for the win. Well, I hope you, hey, join me. Join me Monday night. And someone's advertising.

01:15:39

I haven't seen it, but they're advertising 80 Robles. Apparently he had a good video on this. It's 10 million, really?

01:15:46

That's what I put in the chat. It's this $10 million bronze atrocity. So this statue of MLK's arm was $10 million.

01:15:57

Wow. Yeah, that's pretty amazing to me that they're willing to spend.

01:16:02

The city of Boston was willing to spend that. But during economic hard times, nonetheless.

01:16:08

All right, well, God bless. More coming. Hopefully that was helpful to you all. Bye now.