The Gender Anarchy Downgrade

Conversations That Matter

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The Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a lot to get to today, and it's a beautiful day outside where I am.

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It's just wonderful weather. It's, the turn happened last night. For those who don't know, if you live in, probably anywhere on the latitude that I live, but in upstate

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New York, you feel the turn. I didn't feel this as much when I was in Virginia, North Carolina.

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It was more gradual, but in New York, when fall comes, it's still summer, like during the day, it's still summer, but you can tell it's different.

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The air is crisper, it's clear, it's cooler at night. The leaves are starting to change.

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It's a wonderful time of year, and I felt the turn last night, and I get excited when I see that, because,

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I mean, the fall is just, there's so many good things that happen in the fall. This is hunting season. I think it's the best hiking season to some extent.

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It is, it's absolutely gorgeous when the leaves start turning colors, which reminds me, we have an

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Adirondack Men's Retreat. Link is in the info section, October 28th through 30th. If you wanna come, I would encourage you to come on out to that.

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Information is on that link, and you can email me questions if you have them, but we've got people coming in from all over the country, flying into Albany and New York City, and we're arranging rides, and it's great, so come on out for that, but anyway, it's great during this time of year, and I'm gonna admit to you something.

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I've taken it a little bit easier this week than I have most other weeks of the year, just a little bit. Yesterday, I went fishing, probably the first time

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I've been fishing in like five years or so, well, four years. It's been a long time since I've been fishing, and I went out with my brother and my dad, and my brother had a cabin he was renting in Massachusetts for a week for their family vacation, and so we had a good time, caught some bass, and I, of course, for those who are interested in this kind of thing,

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I have my typical setup as a Gamakatsu hook and Yamamoto worms, and I've been doing that since I was in high school.

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In high school, during the summer, I could spend four or five days fishing, and you'd spend like four or five hours fishing during those days, so I mean,

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I love fishing, and so I went to, I did a bunch of things. I tried some spinner, a spinner.

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I tried some crankbaits and stuff, and this was what ended up working, and so I threw my

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Junebug Red Yamamoto worm in the water, and it was after lunch.

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We had been out for breakfast. I didn't catch one thing. After lunch, I threw it in, and it was like, I don't know, within the first three casts or so,

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I get this bass, this big bass. Now, most of the time, people exaggerate the weight of fish that they catch, and I didn't have a scale with me, but I've measured so many fish.

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It's probably three, three and a half pounds, okay? Most people would probably look at it and say, that's gotta be six pounds, and it's not.

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It's like probably three and a half, and so, most, at most three and a half, so I thought, you know,

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I've gotten, I've had the big fish for the day, and I kind of joked about it, that we should just evaluate based on the size of the fish, because my dad and my brother were using bobbers and worms, because especially my dad likes to eat panfish more, so like pumpkin seeds and sunfish and that kind of thing, and so,

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I go for the bass, and I like the big splashes on the water and all that, and I probably caught like six of them. Well, my dad, though, towards the end of the day, with his little worm, ended up catching the largest bass.

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We compared them, and his was just slightly larger, so I didn't even quite win that one, but we fried them up last night, and that was fun, and the day before,

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I went out, and first ever time I've ever done a long ride on a road bike, and I have a, for those who care about this kind of thing,

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I felt VR, I think it's VR 60, and it was amazing.

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It was like a knife through butter going up some of these hills, and so, I did like a 65 -mile bike ride and went up into the mountains a little bit, and the elevation gain was almost 3 ,000 feet, so it was quite a grueling ride for someone who doesn't really do it much, but I've been doing enough mountain biking that, or enough cycling on a mountain bike that I've been able to work up to the point that that doesn't completely kill me, but my knee was hurting a little by the end of that, and it was great, though, and I'm looking forward to maybe once a week taking a five -hour bike ride just to kind of clear my head, and I do a lot of thinking when

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I'm on those kinds of things, and so, that brings me to something I wanted to talk about before we get to some of the topics today, because I mentioned two programs ago

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I was gonna talk about this, and then I just, it slipped my mind, and so, before it slips my mind, I wanna let you know about something

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I've taken some practical steps toward. The way that I've been running the podcast,

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I do most of the work, okay? The vast majority of stuff, well, podcast stuff is all me, but a lot of it is taking time to go through material that oftentimes people send me.

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Most stuff is listener -generated. I would say a lot of stuff, I mean, some things are things that I specifically want to talk about because I see them, and I see that this is, we need to talk about it, it's practical, it's necessary, but it's error, right?

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I've got my head in error. A lot of the time, and I know that there's dangers when it comes to that. If I was thinking about Mormonism on a consistent basis,

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I would want to make sure that I'm balancing that with other things that are positive, that are truthful, Philippians 4 .8.

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So, I've been thinking, not just for me, but just for you as well, this podcast is a supplement, it's not a multivitamin, but I've thought about what positive things can we do on this podcast that will be supplemental.

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Because I think, here's how I view a lot of the people out there listening. You know where to go for good

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Bible exegesis. To understand what the Bible says, there's resources. For those listening to this podcast,

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I know there's a lot of bad stuff out there, but I think if you're attracted to this podcast, you probably, most of you at least, you have good

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Bible teaching. The thing I think that's lacking a lot in evangelicalism, I mean, there's probably more than one thing, but this is one of the things

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I've noticed, is an ability to interpret the signs and the times, and I don't mean that eschatologically,

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I mean the context in which we live, understanding it. Let me give you a quick example of this.

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I think, and I'm talking about conservative evangelicalism, not the woke stuff. Carl Truman's book, right?

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Rise and Fall of the Modern, Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. I had weird thoughts or feelings about that, and I couldn't put my finger quite on it, but as I thought about it more, and as I mulled it over in the days afterward,

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I did a whole podcast on this, so you can go back and look if you don't know what I'm talking about, but I was able to locate some things that just didn't seem to square with the world that we're living in.

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That's really how this was kind of reversed engineered from my perspective, and one of the big ones was it doesn't seem to address the issues with the

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BLM type issues. It seems like it might fit the sexual anarchy that we're in, but it doesn't seem to fit the

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BLM stuff, and why is that? What's a paradigm that makes sense of how we view ourselves with all the available information out there, not just coming from the

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LGBT lobby, and really the main thing that Truman, as I explained in that podcast, missed was the whole concept that race and sex or gender are social constructs in the mind of the ruling elites, that these are not actually rooted in objective reality.

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There's no category for them, this higher kind of form or telos or design that God's given them.

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They're just a product of society itself, and once you understand that, things start making real sense,

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I think, and it makes sense of not just the gender confusion, but also the identity when it comes to ethnicity and probably other categories, if everything's just socially constructed, and that's what

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Carl Truman seems to miss, and it's a major miss, to be honest with you. At first,

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I thought, well, it's a good book, but he meant, and the more I thought about it, I thought, you know what? This isn't really that good of a book if it's not practical for the people you're actually writing to, and that's how it's being passed off.

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This is so practical and so helpful, and so if you misdiagnose the problem, even if you identify some of the problems, but you misdiagnose them and you don't give the, it's gonna impact the solution you give.

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So anyway, without reinventing the wheel and giving a podcast or to gave you, that's just one example among,

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I think, many where I've heard, and I don't talk about it much, but I've heard non -woke, so anti -social justice sometimes, even pastors and thinkers who just miss the context we're living in for some reason.

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They attribute it to weird stuff too, in my opinion, sometimes. They attribute the woke stuff to something else that doesn't really make sense of it, and I've seen a lot of,

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I'm not saying pragmatism doesn't factor into what's going on today, but I've seen some, honestly, some unusual threads on social media from conservatives where they just attribute everything that's happening currently to it's just pragmatism, and it's an oversimplification is what it is.

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We talked, what, last week or two weeks ago about a gentleman on a conservative talk show essentially attributing transgenderism to Baptist theology, that this is the outworking of Baptist theology.

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There's a lot of examples of this kind of thing that I don't talk about, but that are out there, and I thought, well, what can be helpful?

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Not to do what I normally have done, which is to go out and you play the clips or you talk about the books.

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Here's the quotes, and then I kind of rip into them, and I show you this is what the Bible says.

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This is what just reality is. These are the times we're living in, and here's your primary sources, and rather than doing that, which is necessary to do,

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I thought I really want to help give conservative

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Christians who already know where to go for good Bible teaching, some books, some resources that I think help us apply that Bible teaching.

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So understanding the world we live in so that we can take these biblical principles, and then we know how to apply them.

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If you don't know the world you're living in or the context you're in, it makes it very difficult to apply what the Bible teaches, all right?

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So there's a number of ideas I've had. This is one of them. There's another one. I'll just let you in on a few others that I haven't taken practical steps towards, but I want to do.

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I'm probably thinking of doing this possibly in conjunction with the church I attend, but like a monthly men's kind of a hero kind of project where we talk about godly men of the past, and we especially forgotten godly men, and we do bio sketches, and that would be like a men's study kind of thing.

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I've thought about doing that, and that might be something for next year to take some practical steps using the podcast to do this.

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These are positive things. These aren't negatively approaching. Something is very positive. Here's someone to emulate.

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Here's someone who can be a role model, that kind of thing. So that's one of them.

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I thought about doing Bible studies, maybe like a weekly, like we're gonna go through a book or something, and that might be something too, but because this program is supplemental, and because I think so many of you know where to go to get good

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Bible exegesis, I've wanted to do something different, a little outside the box.

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So I have talked to my brother and my dad, and my dad's a pastor.

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He's got an MDiv, and he's preached for, he's been at the same church now for well over 30 years, but, and then my brother's in educational field and literature, and that kind of thing.

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And so I was talking to them. I was thinking, well, this could be a good thing where we could have some book discussions because we all understand each other very well because we're part of the same family, obviously, and we bring something else, different things to the table.

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And we can talk about some books that I really want conservative

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Christians to be familiar with. So here's one of them, and there's a number of these on my list, but here's one

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I thought we would possibly start with. It's by Richard Weaver. It's called Ideas Have Consequences. Some of you have heard of this, but it's one of those books that I just wish everyone would read.

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I just do. It's impacted me so much, and the way I analyze things, I think, has been greatly affected by this book.

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And I mean, if you read it, it's written, I think, in the late 40s. I think it's just post -World

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War II, 1948. But it reads like, it's so applicable to our time.

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And so I'm gonna do a series or at least one podcast.

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I don't know how we're gonna do it yet. It might be a long podcast, or it might just be a few podcasts, but we'll just film ourselves talking about it, and it'll be kind of like a book club thing.

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So that's one thing I wanted to let you guys know about, in case anyone else wants to go get that book and read it.

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But there's a number of books I have on this list, and I think the vast majority are gonna be books. Even if you go to a

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Bible -preaching, believing church, you're not gonna know about this, because these are more, these aren't about the

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Bible. These are about understanding the times in which we live. But it's helped me so much to be able to take biblical principles and apply them.

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So I hope that makes sense to everyone. I hope that's something that excites you all. Not gonna stop doing some of the analyses of other social justice errors, but I think doing something positive, the building stage, okay?

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That's what I'm thinking about. We have to, the dust is settling. There's still a lot of people that don't know about the errors of their denomination, organization, evangelical group they're in.

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We'll still expose, but I think it's time for some rebuilding. It's time for some real analyzing, serious analyzing the situation that's before us.

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Serious analysis, not surface -level stuff. So that's one of the things that I hope, and none of that was meant to be critical against other conservative

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Christians who don't read some of the same books I read, by the way. It's not my intention at all. It's just, if anything, it's the opposite.

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It's let's introduce, and maybe along the way, you'll introduce things to me.

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It won't just be me introducing things to you. Maybe I'll get some recommendations from you for, this is a really important book, but we're gonna stick to some classics, and I wanted to start off with some,

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I don't mean classical literature. I mean like conservative classics, so paleo -conservative classic analyses of Western civilization, and this is gonna be the first one.

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There's a number of others. Maybe we'll do some Russell Kirk stuff and some Roger Scruton stuff and some, I don't know where we'll take it completely, but there's a lot.

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So I just wanna let you know about that. Let's start the program off with this. I'm gonna play for you a clip, and I'll tell you who these people are afterward, but there's an interviewer, of course, and then there's the interviewee, and the interviewee, let's just say, has some confusion on gender, okay?

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And so I want you to hear this, and then I'm going to let you in on where this person is speaking and what it says about the direction of the

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PCA and evangelicalism or the implications for the direction of the PCA and evangelicalism in particular.

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Here is the clip. For me, why I say I'm non -binary, and I hate to keep beating a dead horse on this, but I specifically say this for me.

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I'm not trying to prescribe it on anybody else. If I were to say what came completely naturally to me, and when

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I say natural, I mean as natural as picking up a pencil with my right hand, kind of natural, I would have transitioned to male by this point in my life.

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I feel like God is telling me not to transition, that that's just not part of my story right now, but when

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I hear she and her pronouns or if I'm dressing super effeminately, that causes me to want to self -harm, and so for me, being non -binary is my way of following God to the best of my ability, albeit imperfectly, which all of us are following Christ imperfectly, if we're really honest with ourselves.

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It's me following Christ to the best of my ability with my gender identity. Okay, yeah. So your pronouns, they, them, it's taken me a while.

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I feel like for the most part, I'm getting them. So when we look at between she and he, there's one letter difference in S, right?

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So forget, I understand they is complex, and we can talk about that again in a minute, but if you're just looking about between she and he, that's the difference of one letter, and you're telling somebody that their life is not worth dropping one letter.

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I don't know how we can missiologically look at how Christ stood and say your life is not worth that one letter.

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Wow. Is there anything that does minimize it, relieves it, that you've found?

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And again, just your personal story. I mean, I've heard other people describe certain things. Yeah, so for me, it's short hair, short purple hair right now.

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I typically am wearing guys' clothes, and that helps me. I wouldn't say you're wearing guys' clothes, because there's a lot of clothing's gender neutral, largely, right?

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I mean, I don't. From men's stores. Oh, okay. Let's just say that. I mean, yeah, literally the only female thing on my body right now is my bra.

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I mean, everything else is male. And it's TMI, probably, but I just don't realize that.

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That's the algenda raw. There's no such thing as TMI on this show. But here's another thing where I just wanna call how we are societally biased.

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If I were to walk down the street right now, just because this is kind of a teal shirt, people aren't gonna look at which way the buttons are to figure out that this is a guy's shirt.

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For the most part, people aren't gonna figure that out. But if I were a trans woman, and I were walking down the shirt in a blouse, you better believe people are gonna call me on it.

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And there are even pastors who would call a trans woman on that who wouldn't call me on what I'm wearing.

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And so there isn't consistency, there isn't equity. Back in April, there was a trans man that was stabbed to death.

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And these are just horrific, horrific stories of how people were treated. There was one in California.

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They don't even know, they can't put a specific date on it because of it being in the water and the decomposition of the body.

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It's just, surely we can get behind protecting people from being brutally murdered.

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What's the solution? Like what's not happening that's allowing this, would you say?

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Like how would a Christian get behind reducing? Reducing that, so here's the thing.

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It's going to take a huge societal shift. And that starts with using pronouns, using chosen names.

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So when we start to normalize these experiences, so by leading with, hi, my name is blah, blah, blah, and my pronouns are, if you as a cis person say that, then you're normalizing it in society so that it's not making the trans person seem quite so over there and quite so different and so othered.

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You know, and as trans people, we are a marginalized people group, a marginalization of a marginalization of a marginalization.

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Now for those of you who were watching, you know who these people are because I put, when

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I chopped up the video and made clips, I put their names on the video reel there.

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So Preston Sprinkle is the one doing the interview and his organization has frankly pushed a lot of the sexual anarchy into Christian circles.

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And then more importantly for our purposes, Leslie Hudson Reynolds is the one who is the interviewee.

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Now, why is that important? Well, Leslie Hudson Reynolds is going to be speaking at a conference soon.

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And I will show you, here's Leslie Hudson Reynolds. Here's her bio on the conference website.

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Says she's the director of donor relations as well as a posture shifts, posture shifts. That's her organization.

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A resident at the gender identity and a gender identity expert. They also assist the president in managing guiding families direct care for transgender young people and their families.

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So posture shift is the organization she's with and they uses the preferred pronouns on this conference website.

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They recently began pursuing their MDiv. Well, it's obviously talking about, it's talking about a her, it's not about she.

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It's not about Leslie Hudson Reynolds, but it says they recently began pursuing their MDiv. And Leslie lives in Tennessee and is a huge New England's Patriots fan.

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I don't know how that works out, but. So this is

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Leslie Hudson Reynolds. The conference is Revoice, Revoice 22.

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This is coming up October 6th through 8th and it's being hosted at Chase Oaks Church in Plano, Texas.

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Now, of course, Revoice started in the Missouri Presbytery, I believe, in the PCA. Greg Johnson, of course, the big name behind Revoice, hosting it and everything.

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And of course, here's some of the other participants. You got Nate Collins here, who we've talked about before.

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Went to Southern Seminary and worked at Southern Seminary for a bit. And then some of these people,

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Greg Johnson right here, we've talked about. Some of them we haven't. I know Greg Coles is on this list. We've definitely talked about Greg Coles' book,

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Single Gay Christian. Wesley Hill, I think I've mentioned before. So some of these we recognize, but I did not recognize.

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I did not know who Leslie Hudson Reynolds was. But I believe, I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is the first time

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Revoice, their conference, has used these preferred pronouns in the bio sketch of one of their speakers and had someone who's pushing the envelope as far as Leslie Hudson Reynolds is.

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This, and Revoice has been a mess, I think, from the beginning, but it's becoming more of a mess.

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And that's the point that I wanted to make. It's becoming worse. There is a slope downward.

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And some say that, they'll call if you sound the alarm and say, this leads to sexual anarchy, right?

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Classic is gay marriage is going to lead to the whole concept of marriage is going to be devalued and we're going to have all kinds of other arrangements eventually that are going to pass for marriage.

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And the argument was that's just a slippery slope. That's a fallacy. Well, it's actually not, not that particular argument at least because the whole idea was if you, the basis on which people were arguing for gay marriage was the complete destruction of the definition of marriage.

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That was the whole basis of it. The whole logic behind same -sex marriage was we're going to throw out the definition with nothing to replace it except our arbitrary whim.

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So when people would say, well, why can't it be three people? Why does it have to be two people? Just because, right? There really isn't anything rooted in an objective reality.

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It's just our whim because guess what? It's all a social construct anyway. It's what serves our social purposes.

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Churches have gone this direction too. I was talking to my dad about this the other day. And I think for a lot of the people who say, oh, it's just pragmatism out there.

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There's some truth to it, but they're missing something. And one of the things I think that's being missed here is that when the seeker -sensitive kind of era, the 90s seeker -sensitive church or early 2000s, it is different in this sense.

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That was very focused on individuals. Now, I'm not saying there isn't a focus on individuals, but it was very whatever you want.

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It was appealing to you as an individual. Nowadays, and I saw this when I was at Southeastern, the new emphasis that churches are supposed to have that are hip and trendy and all that is they are supposed to be, they're community organizations.

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They're supposed to be, the programs aren't just for you, it's to benefit the community. And so it's become more and more, our society has become more and more focused on the social benefits, the social implications of decisions and organizations and actions.

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So have gone the churches, that the churches exist as their function is to assist in the evolution of society, to make society better, to make the world a better place, for the corporate body, the community, whatever it is, the global community now they're saying, which is like kind of an oxymoron.

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They're trying to show that the church fits into this, this new hierarchy that's emerging.

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And it has a place because it's gonna be to assist in greater equality and diversity and inclusion, and it's going to be an asset to one's local and global community, right?

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And this, I would agree, makes you feel good. If you're a young progressive, especially, it makes you feel like you're part of something bigger, and I got it.

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So there is a tie between the two, but they're not the same. It's not all about you. In fact, you'll hear more progressive -minded social justice activists,

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Christians, and evangelical circles say that kind of thing. Like, it's not all about you. You need to think about your world, and of course, it's all the leftist analyses and solutions.

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But where was I going with that? So with this particular organization,

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Revoice, they are taking a step downward. As the culture moves in this direction, or as society has moved in this direction, and the elites in society have decided that greater sexual anarchy actually means more equality, and that's the telos, that's the goal, that's the purpose of society itself.

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Because society, that's the classic progressive mindset is society has this function, it has this purpose.

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We're going somewhere, right? It's not just, it's a stagecoach, not a farm. We're not just trying to live and get by in a broken, sinful world, and do the best we can, and yeah, it's gonna get a little dirty, but we're on the farm, we can enjoy life here.

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It's the stagecoach, it's we have a goal, we're going there as fast as we can, and the progressive churches wanna be horses on the stagecoach.

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Like, we're gonna help pull with you, right? We're gonna make it easier for you to accomplish a goal, and equality, or equity is the word they use now, this is, social equity is one of these big goals.

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And in order to do that, the people driving the stagecoach, the elites have decided, it's gotta be sexual anarchy, though.

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We gotta throw out definitions, we have to make sure that gender is fluid, it's not rooted in anything objective, because if you start rooting it into objective realities, then we are creating lines and distinctions that are oppressive, and that doesn't promote equality, that actually is the opposite of that.

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So, churches have to figure out, how do we keep the Bible on the one hand, which assumes all these creative norms, and these limitations, and then in the same way, how can we be a horse on that stagecoach?

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Hopefully that analogy makes sense. And, Revoice, I think, is one of the big proponents, one of the trailblazers for these progressive

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Christians, on how they can do it. And Revoice started, it was in error from the beginning, but it started more as a way of, we're gonna be biblical, that's how they promoted it, we're gonna try to approach sexuality by detaching ourselves from cultural bigotries, and just being biblical.

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So, untether ourselves from the tradition of the past, and how the Bible's always been interpreted, and how, what even the

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Bible assumes, we just, we don't deal with that, we now are, it's year one, it's

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French Revolution year zero, and we are going to start with fresh eyes, looking at the

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Bible. But, of course, it's not fresh eyes, because Revoice always brought in this baggage, these assumptions, from psychology, and from really postmodern theory that gender is this fluid thing.

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Now, they wouldn't have said that at the beginning, I'm pretty sure there weren't sessions saying that gender is a fluid thing. But once you start saying that gender norms don't really exist, that these are cultural things that we can just kind of play with, and we can change, we can, you know, it's not to say that there aren't certain cultural things associated with gender, for instance, certain clothing styles, like I'm wearing a men's shirt right now, right?

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That kind of thing. It's not to say, but those are supposed to be pointing to something deeper, something objective, that's the whole point, right?

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And these are signals about that deeper reality. And so, Revoice started out with the logical premise that would have led to Leslie Hudson Reynolds.

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It would have led to where, there was no stopping it, there was nothing to deter it from going in that direction.

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When you start off with sessions on redeeming queer culture, as if queer culture is this wonderful thing, it needs to be celebrated, and Christians should get around it.

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Well, no, there's actually not, it's not even a culture. You're creating categories that not only aren't biblical, but they don't exist in the real world.

31:16

It's not a culture. It's just, it's a group of, it's a sinful lifestyle that people have now coalesced around, and if sure, they have their art, they have, you know, the things that would, but it's an artificial imitation of a culture.

31:33

It's not a real culture. Culture, as the word designates, it's to cultivate. It's not something, it's nurturing, and when we think of cultures, we're thinking of nurturing in the sense of raising children, of having children, raising children, passing on traditions to them.

31:51

This whole queer culture thing is something that has developed artificially around a sinful lifestyle, and so I understand sometimes when you use the word culture about, you know, the fly fishing culture, or, you know, the culture of this church, or the,

32:04

I get that, but it's not a substitute family, which is how, you know, when you look at even

32:11

LGBT, or queer in the broad range of things that that encompasses, how is that even a uniting principle?

32:18

What do each of these letters have in common with the others? They're just not straight cis, you know, people.

32:25

That's, they're not, the only thing they have in common is they deviate from the obvious standard we all know deep down exists, that God made two genders, and he made them, male and female, to have, and he made them to function in certain ways, and to have certain, broadly speaking, traits that are associated with them.

32:45

That's creative, that's the creative norm. That's what God created, and the LGBT, the whole idea of that is to exclude that, because that's not part of it.

32:56

You can't be straight and part of that, right? So it's to, everything but the norm, the standard we all know, it's to exclude it, and then we keep adding to that, because we've let go of the standard, the objective reality, and we've said everything's a social construct.

33:13

And that's what leads to logic like Leslie Hudson Reynolds, where she says, and the clip you just heard, that being non -binary is following God.

33:25

It's following God to be non -binary. Well, how, where do you get this from the

33:30

Bible? You don't. You don't get it from the scripture. Well, I don't see a

33:36

Bible verse that says you can't, yeah, right, because the Bible is like, it's like the gluten -free cookbook, right?

33:42

I don't see anything that says you can't have a gluten recipe. Right, because it's the gluten -free cookbook. The assumption from the beginning is that it's male and female, husband, wife, mother, father.

33:52

That's the assumption of the whole book. It doesn't have to come out and explicitly say, so this is so devious, so undermining, so subversive, but so obvious to someone,

34:04

I think, who's rooted in the Bible and the assumptions that the authors of scripture would have had, and namely

34:11

God himself, the author of scripture, that this is actually the acid that eats into biblical sexual ethics.

34:22

Non -binary means following God. No, it doesn't. And of course, she puts this caveat in, imperfectly, imperfectly following God.

34:29

No, no, and then tries to sort of spread the blame around in a way that, well, if you criticize me by saying that what

34:40

I'm doing isn't biblical, then, well, how you're following God isn't biblical because everyone follows God imperfectly.

34:46

You see how devious this is, how subversive? It's hard, for some people, this is hard to catch, but what she's doing is she's trying to take advantage of the inadequacies everyone has in their relationship with the

35:01

Lord, because we're all sinners, and then say that she's justified in her sin. But the thing is, the difference is, these other imperfections that people have are things that they repent of.

35:13

They don't go and they make it their label and advocate for it.

35:19

She is advocating for it. For instance, if someone follows the Lord in general and then they sin, they slip up in an area, and let's say they steal, they cheat on something, okay?

35:32

They, you know, a classic, you know, they cheat on, they go to the

35:40

DMV and they say they paid $100 for a car that they really paid thousands of dollars for, something like that, right?

35:47

They're not being honest. And then they confess, they repent, you know, this is, okay, this is something that is, we could say this is wrong, this is breaking a commandment, but who goes and says, this is what

36:04

I have to do to follow God. I have to cheat on my title at the

36:09

DMV. That's part of following God. And I think I wanna advocate it for others to do. And guess what?

36:14

If they criticize me, well, they have inadequacies. See, that would, that doesn't make sense in that scenario, but we're willing more to accept it today in this scenario, because there's so much pressure to accept transgenderism.

36:26

Preferred pronouns is now incumbent upon the church. And she has this whole section

36:32

I didn't put in there, but on how preferred pronouns are essentially what prevents trans people from committing suicide.

36:41

It's the same logic you get out in the world, that they're committing suicide because they're not accepted. And society, since this stuff is all a social construct anyway, society just needs to really come around and use these preferred pronouns.

36:56

And if they're not, it's because of their bigotries. See how this works? She wears men's clothing and she says, her quote, not mine, we need a huge societal shift, a huge societal shift.

37:10

And she uses the postmodern language of othered, so that we're not othered. So if you don't use preferred pronouns, if you don't accept her way of following God, if you don't introduce yourself with your preferred pronouns, even if you are a straight person, straight male, then you are othering.

37:30

In other words, you are marginalizing. You are pretending as though these people don't have a place in the society that you feel should exist.

37:42

And that is bigotry. And so she's giving the same exact logic of the world. And yet, and yet, this is someone who would probably,

37:51

I would say, there was a point, I didn't include it in the montage, where she says something along the lines of more conservative sounding, like that transgenderism is a sin or something, but it's literally like getting as close to the line and the cliff as possible, and then

38:07

I'm not gonna jump off. Or no, what she says, now I remember, what she said was that she's not saying that you aren't biologically man or woman, that you're one of those things.

38:16

So she has to kind of acknowledge that in Christian circles, that, okay, biologically, yeah,

38:23

I'm not saying that there aren't, that you can be biologically a man, and even though you're biologically a woman.

38:32

She's like, I'm not saying that, but what's she gonna do? What are the stopping points at this point?

38:41

In other words, what's the logic that you could employ to prevent someone from going to that conclusion somehow?

38:48

Why can't she slip into the same thing the rest of the secular world around her is saying, that you just get a surgery, and biologically now, you're comported to what you actually are, what society, the experiences that you have that society has determined you are.

39:06

Why not? So there's nothing to, of course, prevent that. And so revoice in the matter of five years from now, or three years, when did they start?

39:17

Four years ago, something like that. So another four years, what is it gonna look like? That's the question, because this is just a slope downward, and it's not a logical fallacy.

39:26

When you give up the definitions, you end up becoming untethered. Now, I want to,

39:32

I just wanted to highlight that, because this is a fight in the PCA, and the fact that people like Greg Johnson are still in the

39:41

PCA, that Missouri Presbytery is still in, as far as I know, good standing, and that the

39:48

PCA, either they take a million years to act on these issues, or they're incapable of that.

39:53

It's just, I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. Now, I'm not Presbyterian, so I don't want to, as an outsider who doesn't understand all the inner workings, be too harsh, but it's like, guys, how long do you have to go?

40:07

Like, if the PCA is unable to discipline someone like a Greg Johnson, who hosts these conferences, then

40:15

I don't know what good being an organization like that is. It has to happen, like, now.

40:22

This stuff is a cancer. Now, I wanted to share with you this, as well.

40:27

This is interesting to me, and it's along the same lines, and making, really, the same point that I'm trying to make about Revoice, and how far that they've fallen.

40:36

I want you to check out this particular tweet. Now, this was sent to me recently, and I had to go back, and look, and do some refreshing, but here is the tweet.

40:51

Grant Hartley, the person who tweeted it out, says this. Losing myself dancing at a couple gay bars in the

40:57

Castro last night, with friends and strangers until 3 a .m., was about as close to an experience of heaven as I can imagine.

41:05

Hart, July 9th, 2022. This was last, or over two, now it's two months ago,

41:11

I guess, almost, but that's what he was doing, and the response is interesting to me.

41:18

Hey, you in San Francisco? Matt Michelotis, and Grant Hartley says,

41:24

I am, and then Matt Michelotis says, nice, I grew up in the East Bay, one of the greatest cities in the world.

41:33

Now, would it surprise you to learn that these individuals,

41:39

Matt Michelotis and Grant Hartley, once had positions, even prominent positions, to some extent, in evangelical organizations?

41:48

It might, but hopefully it doesn't, because this is what we've been talking about for a few years.

41:55

In fact, Grant Hartley and Matt Michelotis have been mentioned on this podcast before. It's been a few years, but I wanna show you some things from the podcast, if I may.

42:07

I'm gonna cover myself up here. Let me show this to you. This is Grant Hartley when he worked at Crew, Crew, and I'm assuming he's not there anymore, but he had on his profile while he was at Crew that he was

42:24

LGBTQ in Christ, and this was one of the things he did for ministry in working at Crew, formerly

42:34

Campus Crusade. It has an unimaginative title, it's called Coming Out, so I hope you guys enjoy it.

42:49

We are all born gemstones, but fatally fractured. Our skin, bleeding rubies, brokenness and beauty and tension.

43:02

And I have heard it said that it is our decision whether we see these cracks as channels for rivers of light to run through, or wounds to be bound and healed.

43:12

Well, if I tear off these bandages and stretch these arms wide enough, will it prove to you that these gashes cut all the way through, and that I'm willing to bleed my life and all its secrets out for you, ever since I was 13.

43:28

13, when that gold rush of blood chose my attractions for me, I've been hiding because I've been afraid.

43:35

Okay, we're gonna stop there. I've played the whole thing on the podcast before, but it's been like three years.

43:41

Now, Grant Hartley, there's this whole, there's no gospel in this. It's a whole poem that he wrote about coming out, and how, and look, he didn't choose his attractions, they were chosen for him, and he's remembering even the blood rush he had, and just, this is what passes,

44:02

I guess, for ministry, at least at one point, and in crew. Well, now, this wasn't just Grant Hartley.

44:10

Grant Hartley wasn't just doing stuff for crew, he was, guess what? I mentioned this earlier on purpose.

44:18

He did the lecture for ReVoice on redeeming queer culture, queer culture. So, Grant Hartley, crew, association with ReVoice, at that time,

44:31

I don't think he's speaking this year, I didn't see him on the list, but he did have this association in evangelical circles to some extent.

44:40

Now, people do change their mind, right? There are, I can even think of people that go to the church that I attend that at one time would have professed to be

44:48

Christians, and now don't. I don't know where Grant Hartley's at, but he did have the director of the organization that he was at at the time he was at it,

44:58

Matt Michelotis, responding to him, responding to that tweet. There's no correction, there's no, and not that,

45:07

I'm not saying that everything you post on Twitter has to be a correction, but nice, encouragement, encouragement with, hey, nice that you're doing this, that you're dancing at all these, that would be someone who is a ministry director.

45:23

Now, here's, let me show you what was posted at Enemies Within the

45:28

Church back in the day. It's not there now, I had to go back on the Wayback Machine to find it, but this is

45:36

Enemies Within the Church website, and this is from, I don't see the date on it, actually.

45:43

This would have been, I guess, this must have been 2019, but, and it's about Crew 19, and so the issue being discussed here was someone who was invited to speak at Crew 19 named

46:00

Caitlin Curtis, who was, described herself as probably a pagan and a Native American Christian mystic, and she was invited, and so Matt Michelotis defends this decision, essentially, or talks about the decision, and then says, hey, we were gonna invite

46:15

Catholic speakers, a Catholic priest to come, and we're broad, basically, very broad, apparently.

46:21

Caitlin Curtis is the one who rejected the invitation to come and speak at Crew at that time. Christianity Today then interviews

46:29

Matt Michelotis, and this is 2021, this is June 3rd, 2021, a little over a year ago, after this is the

46:39

Seeking Clarity and Unity document comes out, if you remember that. There was some more conservative -minded people in Crew who were concerned,

46:47

Orthodox Christians, concerned about the infiltration of CRT social justice, including the queer theory stuff, and they find

46:57

Matt Michelotis to comment on it, and what does Matt say about this? We've talked about this document. Matt says, it's a piece of propaganda.

47:04

That's right, it's a piece of propaganda, and it's very well -documented. I would encourage you to look it up, look it up.

47:10

It's a piece of propaganda, he said, a former program director who helped organize Crew's staff conference.

47:15

It's not reporting, it's not designed to share two sides of a picture, it's designed to push a very specific agenda.

47:24

Michelotis said organizers wanted to ensure the conference would be meaningful and transformative for all attendees, the 2015 staff conference, which was woke, rather than programming for the majority.

47:34

That means that majority that's used to have everyone programmed for them would still have something that they would love, but someone else from a different spectrum of theology would also feel represented, and of course,

47:43

Matt's spectrum's pretty wide. Inviting people who describe themselves as pagans to speak, positively reinforcing a former employee,

47:54

Grant Hartley, with dancing until 3 a .m. at gay clubs, because that's as close to heaven as,

48:01

I mean, this is just incredible. So, I'm gonna just stop it there.

48:08

The reason that I brought this up is for, I've had this for a few weeks, but I wanted to bring it up now, because it dovetailed with what

48:16

I was talking about in regards to revoice. And the point here is that it's a slide.

48:24

Once you make the compromise, it's easier to make the next compromise, make the next compromise, make the next compromise.

48:29

We see this in the biographies of men in Scripture, and women, we see this in the teaching of Scripture, this general, once you forsake, once you forsake

48:41

God, and really forsaking his creative norms, forsaking who he actually is as a creator is part of this, and you trade in the truth for a lie, you start worshiping the creature, whether that's individual people, or the society, a group of people, or it's nature, it's animals, whatever it is, but it's something in creation, it's not the creator.

49:03

Once you start that, you start a slide, you start descending, and that's what we're seeing here.

49:09

This is a descent, and we see it with people that at one time were defending their

49:15

Christian bona fides, claimed to be Christians, and had influence in these evangelical organizations.

49:24

You see now where revoice is gone, and now you can see where some of these people, now look, there are people who realize this error, where they repent, they turn.

49:35

As Christians, we need to accept when people do that. We need to receive them joyfully back when they truly repent.

49:41

They don't repent though, and they still try to maintain some kind of Christianity. It's the off -ramp from Christianity.

49:46

It is the off -ramp from anything biblical or orthodox, and that's what we see going on. And so we have that with former staff members of Crew.

49:54

We're seeing that with the Revoice Conference, and if they are continuing on this channel without opposition, really, significant opposition from the denomination, the

50:04

PCA, then I just don't know what to say. I really don't. This is incredible to me.

50:12

So there you have it. Revoice endorsing, to some extent, the preferred pronouns. Now there's a lot more to get to, and since we're running short on time,

50:23

I'm probably gonna have to, again, save some things. There's so much, it's frankly, it's overwhelming, the amount of things.

50:32

We do have Will McCraney on tomorrow on the podcast to talk about some developments in his situation with the

50:41

North American Mission Board and the SBC. I think you're gonna want to see that. And there's just so much more that I need to get to that I simply haven't had all the time that I want to get to, but we're gonna talk about a number of other things regarding critical race theory, regarding social justice in general, and just regarding the place that we're at in 2022 in the

51:06

United States, and I know many of you listen outside the United States, so the Western world in general, but the United States in particular.

51:12

Yeah, we live in some interesting times, and I'll leave, I'll end with this comment. I don't always talk about things going on in national politics, but I have never seen a speech like Biden's, the one he gave earlier this week, where,

51:28

I mean, I hear a lot of complaints, or I used to at least among progressives about how they don't like conservatives because conservatives are reactionary, divisive, and believe in us versus them.

51:38

Hillary Clinton used to complain about this a lot. I've never heard a more us versus them speech than what Biden did earlier this week, where he took a speech, and the whole attempt of the entire speech was just to marginalize a group of MAGA Republicans, essentially, just to make them feel like they're in the minority, they're not truly

52:01

American, and that's really the bottom line. You're not truly American if you don't go along with the agenda, and I see the same thing in the church, and I should say what calls itself the church.

52:13

You're not truly a Christian unless you go along with us, and you're not truly behaving like Jesus would unless you use preferred pronouns or things like this.

52:23

This is what's happening, that it is a dictionary battle. The definitions are changing, and when you change the definitions, you control the language, you control the debate, you control the battle, you control the outcome.

52:35

That's just how it works. It's worked that way for a long time, and we can't accept it.

52:41

We have to take the language back. We have to make sure that we don't accept these faulty definitions, and then argue from a place of disadvantage.

52:48

No, there's two genders, sorry. God made it that way. He created the world. We're not accepting your premise.

52:54

Sorry, Biden, I'm not accepting the premise that you're not an American because you don't comport to some ideological framework.

53:04

It's funny, because I was watching this documentary, or I was listening to it the other day.

53:10

It was a conservative documentary. I won't say what it was, because it had some good things in it, and I don't wanna take away from the people who produced it, but there was an interview in it that was just,

53:19

I thought, this is a terrible interview, but it had glowing music behind it, just patriotic music, military -type music.

53:29

This is where Americans, and the person who was being interviewed said, essentially, that a real

53:38

American isn't someone who's born in America. It's not someone who looks a certain way.

53:44

It's not someone who speaks a certain language. It's not someone who has a certain religion. A real

53:50

American is someone who believes in the idea of freedom. That's a real

53:56

American, and I just thought to myself, well, you just destroyed, really, any meaningful definition of what

54:02

American is, because what's freedom? Freedom is so, that has to be contextualized.

54:11

So anyone can change what freedom is supposed to be, or the definition, and I'd say the left says equality.

54:17

The right tends to say freedom, but it gets you into these weird places.

54:24

So is someone who believes in freedom in Afghanistan then a real American? They were never born here, don't speak the language.

54:29

They have no attachment other than they believe in freedom. Does that make them an

54:34

American? What makes someone an American? We're losing the definition of this. We're losing what it means.

54:41

We can assimilate people. People who come here, they go through, who immigrate legally, go through a process, and they become

54:48

Americans, but the way that they become Americans is by, it's the way that families adopt children, in a sense, or the way someone becomes part of a family that they're not connected to genetically.

55:00

They become part of the family by means of the family accepting them and them going through a process by which they become, trust is built between them and the other family members, to some extent.

55:13

In family arrangements, of course, this, generally, it takes time and the formation of identity through, it's a complex matrix, really, but it's experiences, identity, it's beliefs, it's all kinds of things.

55:31

It's the protection and love and resources being administered and the roles being set.

55:39

But when someone becomes a citizen of a country, at least in our country, we have required certain things.

55:46

In order for them to have that trust built and for them to be integrated, to be grafted in to what is the

55:51

United States, what is a citizen. But the people who are born here, who live here, who carry on the tradition, speak the language, that kind of thing, those would be, that's always how we thought, that's always what we thought an

56:05

American is, right? Now, we see the left and the right having a tug of war over this in ideological grounds.

56:13

And there are many on the right who just wanna say, if you don't comport to these certain beliefs, you're not an American. And we have on the left, which, and they're way more aggressive, you have

56:20

Biden saying, if you don't comport to our ideals of equality now, you're not even part of this country.

56:26

Can you imagine being raised here, born here, having parents who made it, grandparents who went off to war, let's say, parents who participate in civics, maybe police officers, firemen, whatever.

56:38

You're so ingrained into this country. Your family heritage goes back to the very moment of exploration and settlement.

56:49

And you might even be related to prominent presidents and explorers, but you're not a real

56:54

American unless you comport to Biden's definition of what equality is and agree with it.

57:01

Southern Baptist Convention can't seem to define what a pastor is. Revoice can't seem to figure out what a man or a woman is now.

57:08

The definitions are falling. All around us. And as Christians, we have to hold them up.

57:15

We have to say, our eyes aren't lying to us. Call a spade a spade. And we're not gonna participate in this childish illusions.

57:24

We live in a world of order and the order is becoming disorder. And when we leave

57:31

God, when we leave, and the Christians are, professing Christians are doing this. That's the thing.

57:36

They're leaving God. They think that they have the Bible, they have God. They're leaving order.

57:43

They're leaving definition. They're leaving biblical norms. They're attacking norms where they are found in traditions and social mores.

57:55

They wanna be a part of that stagecoach. They wanna be a horse running in the direction that the globalist elite masters on the stagecoach wanna take it.

58:05

And they think that's gonna give them fulfillment and they'll be able to survive what's coming.

58:10

And no, they won't. So what can the righteous do when the foundations crumble is the question.

58:16

And that, that, last thing I'll say, that is what I'll be talking about.

58:22

In October, you can go to worldviewconversation .com to get more information about this conference.

58:28

But I will be talking at the Jesus and Politics Conference coming up and I'll show you on the website, if you go to worldviewconversation .com,

58:37

you go to speaking, speaking tab. And it is right here.

58:45

It's the Syracuse, Indiana, the Jesus and Politics Conference, October 22nd. And then

58:50

October 20th, which I really got these reversed, I guess. So October 20th is the first one. I'll be in Kendalville, Indiana, speaking at Fellowship Bible Church.

58:58

So first in Kendalville, Indiana, and then in Syracuse, Indiana. Would love to see you, but at the Jesus and Politics Conference, which you can email

59:05

Tim Bushong if you're interested and I will be speaking on the subject, what can the righteous do when these definitions, when these foundations are completely attacked and destroyed.