The Dr. Owen Strachan Interview | Woke Culture, Escaping Oppression, and Dissecting Movies
On The Babylon Bee Interview Show, Kyle and Ethan talk to Dr. Owen Strachan about defining wokeness, never escaping your oppression, and the deeper meaning behind the movie, 1917. Owen Strachan is the Provost and Research Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary. He received his Ph.D from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Dr. Owen has written several books, including his latest book, Christianity and Wokeness, where he speaks on the new philosophy that is infecting churches with Marxist ideology. Kyle and Ethan dig in deep with Dr. Owen about defining wokeness and how it has been affecting churches. Dr. Owen describes how the wokeness ideology keeps people from ever leaving their oppression. He goes onto describing how white people are being told that they can never escape themselves being oppressors. Kyle and Ethan find out more about the complex issues that are fueling wokeness. In the subscriber portion, Kyle and Ethan find out more about Dr. Owen's views on the movie, 1917 and how the director, Sam Mendes is up to something deeper than mere movie gimmicks. Kyle and Ethan continue their streak of flawless segues by moving the conversation into why Dr. Owen has problems with Thomas Aquinas. Kyle and Ethan fulfill their promise and find out from Dr. Owen on how to stop wokeness in your church. They finish the interview with the ever amazing 10 questions.
I just have to say that I object strenuously to your use of the word hilarious.
Hard-hitting questions.
What do you think about feminism?
Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Hey, I'm sleeping, and I wish someone would woke me up.
Well, prepare to get woke.
Actually, we're going to get unwoke.
We're going to get unwoke.
We're going to get put back to sleep today.
Yeah, because we're all about asleepness instead of wokeness.
And so we have an expert on the subject, Dr. Owen Strand.
Now, it looks like his last name is pronounced Strachan, but we were very, I really wanted to say that, but it's not.
Really disappointed to discover that that wasn't.
There's a bunch of letters in his name that are just ignored.
Very sad.
He's a provost, provost, and research professor of theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Arkansas.
And he wrote a pretty popular book on wokeness called Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel and the Way to Stop It.
We had a fun conversation.
You know, we talked about a lot of the topics we've covered on this on unwokeness Christianity.
I finally got fascinating.
And I do, I have to say, my favorite part of the show was the subscriber portion.
Yeah, but you always say that.
But it's actually true this time.
It's actually true this time.
Because we started talking about movies.
He's a really dishonest person.
We started talking about movies and all kinds of stuff.
Yeah.
It just really got into a good conversation.
Yeah.
Let his hair down a little bit.
And then he also, he liked me.
It was a very, yeah, I kind of hated this interview, to be honest.
You shouldn't listen to it.
Ethan was a little teacher's pet, and I was kind of like, you know.
Kyle's always trying to be the bad boy.
I'm the class clown.
Works with the league.
They asked me to sit outside.
So very sad.
Listen to this interview.
If you are worried about wokeness or anything and you want to hear, talk about 1917 at the end.
Yeah.
Then join us.
And Aquinas.
And Aquinas and all kinds of fun stuff.
All right.
Well, what the heck, Dr. Owen, how you doing?
I'm doing great.
How are you guys?
We're doing great.
We're woke or something, or we're not woke.
Yeah, yeah, we're ish.
I mean, it's still early in the day.
But I don't think that's what.
I'm still drinking my coffee.
So why don't we start out just talking about what the heck wokeness is?
Because wokeness has become this term where everybody uses it for everything.
And your uncle on Facebook is like, ah, you know, they didn't have the coffee I wanted this morning at AM PM.
They're going woke.
They're racist.
They're woke, man.
Oh, they're woke.
CRT.
Yeah, it's all CRT's fault.
So what does it mean?
Is there an actual definition for wokeness or not?
Yeah, I think so.
If you go by a source like the Cambridge English Dictionary, you'll see that wokeness is defined pretty simply as recognizing the reality of systemic racism and systemic inequality.
So basically, wokeness is birthed out of a leftist and a neo-Marxist framework.
So you need to recognize that at the outset, that being woke is really kind of a secular conversion where you now see society and the world in new terms.
And you recognize that the public order you once thought was at some level virtuous and just and the beneficiary of common grace is actually shot through and infested with racism of all kinds, such that it is literally everywhere, even as it is hidden.
And so wokeness involves waking up to these realities and never going back to the old order.
This intersects with American societal dynamics in that we were said to be a post-racial society 15, 20 years ago, 10 years ago.
Obama's election supposedly signaled that.
But in reality, the woke today have made a lot of hay off of saying, no, We're not post-racial at all.
Racism, in fact, has actually gotten worse.
And it's systemic.
As I said, it's hidden.
You can't actually put your finger on it.
And you can't even change your nature if you are racist.
I'm getting ahead of myself, but this is a pretty bonkers ideology that has all the exits covered.
You can't get out.
If you are racist, you are racist.
And you can't change that.
Yeah, Chesterton talks about GK Chesterton.
You know, he calls it monomania, how we take one virtue and basically worship it and make it create an entire circular watertight ideology that you can't get out of.
And it's all based around just one thing.
And he says that's also the lunatics do that.
And it feels like that.
And I don't know if I'm just saying, that's not a question, I guess.
Do you like that?
You like that?
I can catch what you're throwing, I think.
Yeah, yeah.
Excuse me.
I think that is realistic.
I think this is, you know, let's say you recognize that there is racism now and there will be racism and there was racism, certainly in the American past in the form of slavery, Jim Crow law, these kind of things.
And you're obviously not a fan of that as none of us should be.
But what can happen is that you cannot simply recognize that racism is part of the American past, true, but you can now so emphasize racism and the racist past of America that I'm not entirely sure why, honestly, but it becomes an all-consuming cause.
And the historical factors that I was mentioning a minute ago, I think, relate here.
It's very similar to me to how Marx and Engels in the late 19th century identified economic inequality as really the central problem of Western society.
Many of us can say that there is inequality in the world economically.
We have a lot of things to say about that.
I wouldn't read that negatively the way Marx and Engels did.
But what happened for them is it became the all-consuming cause of everything bad in the world.
And it then morphed its way into a revolutionary force far beyond what Marx ever would even have known or intended necessarily in the mid-20th century.
And I think something similar has happened with the woke case against racism.
You can put your finger on something real that racism is bad and should be opposed.
But all of a sudden comes this neo-Marxist idea that white people are the oppressor class and people of color are the oppressed class.
And that then becomes the lens and the paradigm through which you view truly everything, such that everything is racist.
What did I see this morning on social media?
Dieting.
That's the newest one.
Dieting is racist.
So there you go.
I can get behind that.
Yeah, I was going to say you should stop dieting.
It feels racist.
Like, I feel a press phone dieting in our dieting right now.
We all do.
Well, but when you defined awokeness, you said it was like acknowledging that systemic racism and systemic inequality exist on some level.
But I mean, it does exist on some level, right?
But the question is, like, does that you assume it exists in everything and you're always looking for it?
Is that a distinction that's worth making?
Yeah, I would try to parse that a little bit.
I know what I think you're affirming in that sin, of course, takes structural form.
It gets into governments and becomes part of law and policy.
And myself, as a Christian theologian, of course, I know that from the Bible.
There's all sorts of oppression in the Bible that I oppose.
And oppression will happen in our time and will continue to happen until the world is made right.
But what I would say is I want to be very careful about using the board the way Marxism or neo-Marxism sets it up.
So it is telling me I need to use its terms.
It's telling me I need to use systemic racism as a term.
And it has a whole trail of thought behind it, like a plane in the sky.
And I just don't affirm the neo-Marxist framing.
So personally, I will affirm, yes, that sin goes public, but I will not affirm myself systemic racism when woke people urge it upon me.
Was that a reference to chemtrails?
Chemtrails.
You snuck that in there?
I could not think of the term, which is probably for the best.
So, I mean, obviously, anything that catches on like this has a seed of truth to it.
So is there anything to glean from critical race theory or wokeness that, you know, obviously there's a problem that needs to be addressed.
This seems to be the wrong route.
But is there still a is there still a path that we need to be taking to solve this problem?
Or is it mostly a drummed up thing, do you think?
What do you think is the correct answer?
That's a good question.
Thank you.
Dang it.
I think Ethan won, Kyle Zero, Strand's grand reckoning.
I'm oppressed.
Yeah.
I think the point that lands that woke voices make is that the American past has real pain and sin in it, and that that has not gone away.
It has not magically disappeared.
So there's truth there.
You shouldn't think because of the Civil Rights Act and various policies in America since the mid-1960s, racism vanished into thin air, right?
But I don't think that racism is nearly the problem that woke voices say it is today.
They can say that.
They can make that argument, but they have to substantiate it, of course.
The way they typically substantiate their argument that racism is truly everywhere is to talk about systemic racism and then talk about things like disparities of household net worth, which could possibly indicate that something wrong is happening, but also very much could trace to other factors.
Many of us, for example, would believe in what's called complex causality, that in many events in history, especially long-term events, especially events involving lots and lots of people, there's usually not just one factor behind them, like we were talking about a minute ago, but there's usually many factors behind them.
So I don't think, as Ibram X. Kendi, the leading woke prophet in America today says that, and Robin D'Angelo has her own form of this as well, that America's actually gotten worse in terms of racism.
That is how those folks make their money, and they make way more than I made from my book.
So maybe there's bitterness seeping out here.
But all joking aside, they are making a mint off of telling everything, telling us that everything has gone even worse than it used to be in the days of slavery.
And that is truly just bonkers.
And when you hit those moments like that, or when you have a supposed theologian at Mercer University praying that God would help her to hate all white people, what you're getting are you're getting these moments where the outer limits of the sanity fence is being crashed into.
And that is calling you out of your stupor if you have been lured to sleep by wokeness, no pun intended.
And that should actually wake you up to recognize this is a bankrupt system.
The claims of wokeness should be investigated, but in a great many cases, they're being exaggerated.
And so you should not buy into this ideology.
You certainly should not buy its program of social action.
And you definitely should put away that Antifa bandana and not throw that cocktail through the small business store on your local neighborhood corner.
Oh man, sad.
Well, see if we can get those cocktails returned.
Amazon's pretty good about that.
Check the return policy and those things.
So, okay, so you're talking about like ways that wokeness, we see it seeping out into culture because it's easy for us to laugh at the videos of, you know, you watch, you see a BLM professor or somebody going off and, you know, there's videos of people saying like, oh, white people are racist and evil.
And you can be like, oh, that's crazy.
That person's insane.
But is this hitting the mainstream?
I mean, where do you see this?
What's the more subtle version?
Yeah.
Yeah, what he said.
But it's my question.
So if it's a good question, I get, I want the good emendation to the question, Ethan.
Give you the assist, man.
Dang it.
Yeah, I mean, it's everywhere in that more subtle sense.
Yeah, you get the wacko clips that are, frankly, all over the place.
Like, this is not a philosophy that encourages you to dwell in the area of a sound mind.
Like, this is an ideology, Colossians 2, 8, that takes you captive.
And it takes you captive quickly.
Some systems are easier to master than others.
And this is a pretty simple one.
And thus, it drives you to its extremes relatively quickly.
So, yes, you do get those crazy clips where people are saying things that even just a few years ago would have gotten stares of disbelief if you said them in public.
And now you get, you know, a New York publishing house running after you to publish your thoughts and hundreds of thousands of dollars on the speaking circuit.
In the softer form, you hear this ideology advancing when people talk about being anti-racist or being for equity or being for social justice.
Those are all softer forms of this where people aren't necessarily saying, I hate white people and you should all join me on the side of the righteous.
But they are saying, well, you know, we should be anti-racist.
But again, as we were talking about with the term systemic racism, that doesn't mean what you think it means initially.
And there's a lot of Christians, for example, in the church, but also beyond in society who don't know that.
They think that because somebody starts a conversation about justice, they must agree with the Bible, when in reality, these are two completely opposite worldviews.
So a lot of fathers and mothers, thankfully, across America have been rebelling.
Interestingly, at the school board level, school board meetings are typically where action goes to die, but they have become like this absolute pitchfork revolution site where courageous dads and moms speak up against the idea that their children should be taught that if they're white, they're an oppressor.
And if they're a person of color, they're oppressed.
So you're seeing this trickle down into society and there's a backlash against it today, thankfully.
What about the church?
Are there denominations?
Are there churches that are going that direction?
I mean, you know, you'd think a lot of the progressive churches are already there, but are we seeing that in more mainline denominations as well?
Yeah, basically in the mainline, this is the new social gospel.
So it's really become the marching orders of the Christian left.
And it's fascinatingly seeping into conservative evangelicalism and what's called reformed evangelicalism, the more doctrinally conservative churches historically.
And there's a lot of, I think, white guilt out there.
And so I think what has happened is that in a good number of congregations, if you really do look at the American past and see failing in it along racial lines, so-called, I don't believe in race, Acts 17, 26, one human race, not many races, and yet we'll use that term racism or racial in certain instances.
But you recognize there are failings in the American past.
But weirdly, a good number of once trusted evangelical voices have been recommending books like White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.
That book has gotten shamed into the shadows in more recent days with Vodi Bakum's book Fault Lines coming out and other books coming out showing, again, that that's a bonkers text.
I lost track of how many times Robin D'Angelo was confronted at break time by a person telling, a white person telling her she wasn't racist.
But pastors have really sold D'Angelo a lot of books and sold Ibram Kendi a lot of books because they assume that the church really is susceptible to these failings that these authors say it is.
And so there's been a real vanguard into evangelicalism through those kind of authors and those kind of texts.
And it's extremely problematic, honestly.
So if like Robin D'Angelo and Ibram X Kendi are saying that we're more racist now than we were in the days of slavery.
So like, would they be happy if we went back to that?
Like, at least it's an improvement.
That's a good question, Ethan.
It's not a good question.
It's not illogical.
I'm just saying.
What I would say is that actually is pointing out the bankruptness of this ideology.
But actually, you're exposing something that is really at play and wokeness, that there is no real place to go that is the good place, that is the safe zone.
Let me illustrate.
Just before coming on here with you guys, I was on social media and this person was giving the lecture on how even if you're an anti-racist, if you're white, you're a racist anti-racist.
Okay.
So because this is framed in a Marxist way, you never leave behind your structure.
You never leave behind the group you belong to.
You never transcend your whiteness.
You cannot do enough good works to overcome your participation in the oppressor class.
If you say this in public, people go, no, surely that's not true about woke voices.
That just sounds crazy.
That is exactly what they are saying.
You never transcend your belonging to the oppressor class.
You never transcend, I suppose, on the other side, belonging to the oppressed class.
So this is not a solution for racism.
If you adopt this system as a white person, you don't get a gold badge.
All you are doing is recognizing that you are a racist and you'll never overcome that.
You're trapped there.
So this is really weird historically because typically if you are selling something like an elixir that does nothing to help you, at least there's the promise that you'll get better.
But with wokeness, for white people at least, drenched in white guilt in many cases, they're being sold something that won't actually cure them or improve them.
It only opens their eyes to their ongoing failing as a racist.
And that's kind of unique, honestly, in the history of the free market.
And isn't the issue not only that it's not that they you're not going to get cured, but they don't even know back again to a Chesterton analogy.
Yeah, he talks about how we don't even have a doctor looks at a sick person and they have an idea of what a healthy human looks like.
And so they work towards that.
There's no concept of what health looks like, it seems to me, in this whole thing.
It's as if you're in a hospital and the doctors are like, yes, you're horribly sick.
We have no idea what a healthy person looks like.
I've never seen one before.
But you do need lifelong therapy, intensive, but you will be sick forever.
There are a million things wrong with you.
Every doctor has a different idea of what's wrong with you.
Good question, Ethan.
Is that a question?
You're really carrying things, Ethan.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would say I'm never going to get invited back on this.
I would say that's right.
I mean, honestly, it's weird because it's not even, we need a new term.
It's not even really therapy.
I guess the best analogy I draw that I can know to draw, that I draw in my book, Christianity and Wokeness, is it's like Catholic guilt.
There is no transcending it.
That guy is Catholic.
There is no getting over it.
You will always be in this place that ends up with you in purgatory unless something massive happens.
But wokeness is even more severe than that, because even in Catholicism, there's ways of transcending that case, of course.
But in wokeness, honestly, I repeat myself.
For white people, if you belong to the structural oppressor class, you don't get out of this.
It doesn't get better.
This is it.
But you also say it doesn't get better if you're like a person of color, right?
You're always oppressed.
Is there any getting that as that?
You guys want to be an oppressor?
Seems like some of them might want to be.
Do you guys want coffee?
I can go get coffee.
Oh, sorry.
Did you have a question, Kyle?
No?
You have all the good questions for you.
Numerous people have pointed that out, that wokeness is supposed to be.
Wokeness is supposed to be the system of thought that liberates people of color, but actually it makes you way more dependent on white people.
You're always in this very, honestly, very tragic place.
The American past is never gotten beyond the Western past more broadly is never transcended.
You're just always in this deprivileged status.
And by the way, wokeness is not just about color.
It's primarily about color, but it goes really to intersectionality.
So any person who is in a minority position is by nature oppressed.
So for example, fat people are oppressed by thin people and able-bodied people oppress disabled people.
And those same categories are never overcome.
So the story, I was reading this story.
You know, those weird ads that are on the right side of Your page on the article you're reading.
I blueprint.
Yeah, I goofily clicked on one of them because it was like, he and she, yeah, this amazing toe fungus, check it out.
It's great to watch.
Um, this one, this one was on um, they lost a combined 600 pounds together, and I couldn't resist.
I clicked on it and I did one of these slideshows for like 20 minutes.
It took me 20 minutes to come out of the ad clicks, yeah.
Yeah, I made somebody hundreds of dollars, and um, and those kind of self-improvement, I'm getting a little afield here, but it relates, I promise.
We like those kind of self-improvement stories, which ultimately probably trace back to the Christian worldview in some form, um, they're gone in wokeness.
You don't improve yourself, you just you just acknowledge who you are.
And again, if you're an oppressor in any of those categories, if you're a if you're part of the sexual majority, if you're a white, heteronormative, capitalist, patriarchalist oppressor, you never transcend any of that, you're trapped.
Sad, Kyle.
Oh, what?
What do you want me to say something?
I don't know.
I had a question, but I was like, oh, I should let Kyle talk.
Oh, I did have one question because maybe you were just touching on it now, but I wasn't paying attention.
But when you talk about you define awokeness in terms of racism and systemic racism, believing systemic racism exists, but doesn't woken, isn't wokeness more?
I didn't think it was always specifically connected to race.
Like, it is this oppressor oppressed as a broader structure.
And then, how did, how is that distinguished from critical race theory?
Because this is another thing people keep talking about: oh, you know, they're teaching critical race theories in schools, and then they'll defend it and say, no, critical race theory is actually this legal term from the 70s.
It has nothing to do with today.
So, is critical race theory a useful term at all?
Is that a good question?
I don't know.
Thanks, Kyle.
Thank you.
That was a good question.
The reason the reason the conversation is so fixated on race is because many of the guns are trained on race, on whiteness.
The steam that drives this movement through the 80s, 90s, aughts into today is critical race theory at the academic level, which begins first as critical legal studies.
So, if you're just tracing the map of these complex ideas that flow together, that's one of the really key ones.
But it's not isolated to race.
And that's why this ideology I just mentioned is called intersectionality, because racism is really the dominant problem in the West, but it's not the only problem that we face.
The whole order, the whole order is infested with evil and oppression.
Authority is really the problem in all of these situations when people get cultural authority.
And so, for example, this even goes to the family, like a father having some form of authority from God to lead his family, to shepherd his family to know Christ as Savior.
That's evil, according to critical theorists first, and now critical race theorists and woke voices and intersectionality.
So, again, I would repeat myself: the dominant focus of this whole complex of evil ideologies is race.
But actually, Black Lives Matter itself, for example, and its platform before it was scrubbed a year ago, was gunning for the nuclear family, so-called.
So, absolutely trying to mainstream homosexual identity, blended families, polyamory, transgenderism, all of it.
So Black Lives Matter is ostensibly about race, but it is actually about a lot more than that.
So that's true.
Good answer.
Good answer.
Oh, now you're just kissing up to him.
So I had a thing.
I lost it.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah, it's gone.
I don't have it.
You got any cool stories?
Like, I don't know.
You go around talking about wokeness and stuff.
You got any cool wokeness story?
Anybody throw a Maldiv cocktail at you?
It's a good question, Ethan.
I had a young woman come up to me when I gave talks on wokeness for really the first time for me a year ago in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb.
And she was at a Christian college.
And I gave a few talks that I was giving out of several that became my book, Christianity and Wokeness.
And she said, thank you for these talks because I just assumed that everything you just said was true about me, that I'm naturally a racist, that I can't change that I'm a racist because this is what my school has promoted and taught me.
And that was one of those moments that you get in, you know, trying to be out there promoting the truth however you can.
And, you know, you're not some big deal.
You don't have John MacArthur.
You don't do John MacArthur business or something like this.
But, you know, occasionally the Lord gives you a little sign that his word is having an effect.
And here's just one example.
Here's this, you know, 20-year-old so-called white girl who thought she was a racist, not because she had done racist things.
She knew she was a sinner.
I would tell her she's a sinner, but she thought she was an oppressor.
And hearing these things broken down meant that she was honestly released.
I mean, I almost went TD Jakes on her and said, woman, thou art loosed.
But I didn't say that.
That one fell flat.
But anyway, you can look that one up later, kids.
So there are real stories and people are being taken captive by this ideology.
I mean, it's a humorous discussion at places, but really and truly, like people are being taken captive.
And it's dividing churches.
It's dividing homes.
How many people know of somebody who went to honestly, in some cases, a Christian school, a Christian college or university, and they come back at Thanksgiving, kind of stereotypical, right?
And they're like now haranguing their father and mother for being part of the evil order.
You hear these stories and it's awful.
So hopefully there'll be more positive stories like that.
So what's like the root level worldview?
You know, like if you're woke and you're writing a movie and you want this moral at the end of like, this is what life's all about.
And usually it's something like be yourself or whatever, but like, what is that?
And how does that differ from the Christian view of what life is all about?
Because I feel like that's, you know, to get down to that is kind of I'm fascinated by that because people don't just come out and say it, but what do you read into the, what do they think being a human and being born into this world is what's the point of it?
Yeah, that's really the question of the age identity.
What does it mean to be human?
Who am I?
And I think if you look at the genetic strand of woke thought, if you break it down under the microscope, you see that it is about, it is saying to you, you are your background.
You are your skin color.
That is the most important part of you.
Whoever you naturally, and if I can even go broader than that, in terms of the other issues, sexuality and so on and so forth, whoever you naturally are without anyone influencing you, that's you.
And so there's a real, to be clear, overlap here with what is called expressive individualism and a therapeutic mindset.
We could bring in numerous ideologies and worldviews here that are ultimately bankrupt.
But basically, the natural you is the true you, and others should conform to your reality.
And there's no one who has any transformation to call you to.
For example, there's not going to be something more important than your skin color.
That defines you now and forever.
And becoming a Christian, trusting in Christ, for example, that doesn't mean now that Christian outranks whatever skin color you are.
No, The most important part of you is your skin color.
And that's why this is so devastating and damaging in the church, because it's just flatly not true.
In Ephesians 2, 11 to 22, the Apostle Paul says to a group of fighting Jews and fighting Gentiles, quite an image, you're one new man.
You're of one family.
You're not different families.
Stop it.
You have faith in Christ.
And so you're literally part of a new human race through faith.
But wokeness goes against all that.
So like if you really wanted to keep racism like going, they've found the perfect system for it, even more than the worst racists could come up with.
It's pretty ingenious.
I think racism, honestly, in the West and in America was on fumes.
You can talk about the phrase post-racial, whatever is meant by that, but we made massive progress as a society in the last 50, 60 years.
Evil hasn't gone away.
People are going to be racist, but at the level of government and law, major advancements were made.
Flat out.
I don't even really think there's an argument there.
It doesn't mean there's not suffering.
Doesn't mean there's not, there are communities that need help in all sorts of ways of various kinds.
Absolutely, there are.
But in terms of overcoming slavery, where beings owned other beings based in part on skin color, that's overcome.
In terms of laws of segregation, that's overcome.
That is progress.
But what has happened, as I alluded to some minutes back, is racism was really plucked off of the fire in structural form.
Systemic racism is really, it was really, you know, a kind of bygone concept, but it's been revived in part through police shootings and more specifically the politicization of numerous police shootings.
And that's really what sparked things in America five or six years ago.
It was said that these tragic encounters, which really were tragic in different cases, were said to be actually showing us the true America.
We thought Obama's election meant everything was hunky-dory.
And in reality, these shootings are showing us, no, the police are hunting down young African-American men in these communities.
That's the narrative.
Now, there's all sorts of things to say in a conversation about police and police shootings and how to address different issues in the inner city or these sorts of things.
But that's what happened.
Even though we have made major progress as a society, not banishing all problems, but progress was made, especially relative to those past centuries.
But now we're pretending as if progress wasn't made.
And you can't say that.
I mean, look, I'm saying this to you on your podcast.
If I said this on an Ivy League campus or a secular university campus and I was a professor, you know, I should have my bags packed by the next hour because I'm gone.
So well, you'll be gone like in like 15, 20 minutes.
So it's true.
That's a good point, Ethan.
Thank you, February.
What was I going to say?
I had something again.
It was there.
Oh, yeah.
Hey, what do you, oh, no, this is my question.
What is the most compelling argument you ever heard from somebody who is sincerely buying into this?
I think those are the people that there's the people that I have my doubts about who just seem like they're selling it like the Robin DeAngelo's or they make a bunch of money.
But then there are like people that I go, that's a genuine person that really I know like feels things and like they're buying into this and they have a good heart.
Have you run anybody like that where you go, you know, you see there's pain there.
What's the most compelling case you've seen or just a point that you've, is there, have you had anything like that?
Yeah.
I mean, when you look at the argument that statistical inequities reveal injustice and systemic racism, you have, you frankly have a good bit to think through.
This is a really complex question, honestly.
That's part of why it's so problematic that wokeness.
I don't mean your question.
Oh, I mean the question.
I'm taking that one back from you.
I think you're still ahead seven to one, though.
Yeah.
I can afford it.
When you look at why one, here again, racial group is different than another group.
Why is there different household net worth between this group and the other group?
You are in very complex territory.
I don't know why.
You're talking about potentially tens of millions of people who all have their own way of life.
Why do people from this country originally do it this way such that their net worth is this?
And these people, Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans have different household net worth.
Like just on the face of it, that's not going to take you five minutes to talk about, to really explore.
I mean, you're going to need to write a monograph on that.
You're going to need Thomas Sowell and genius economists and other thinkers about the public square to sort that through.
You're going to need to look at data probably.
You're going to need to look at a lot of data, very boring data, but it's going to help you over time.
So Soule has done some of that work, for example, in his book, Discrimination and Disparities.
And I cite this in my book, Christianity and Wokeness.
And Soule talks about the two groups I just mentioned.
And he shows, you know, it takes some work, but he shows that ultimately Japanese Americans as part of the Asian American group, so-called, have not benefited from white privilege.
That's not why they have higher household net worth.
It's actually that their households on average tend to be smaller and older than Mexican-American households.
There's no racism in play here.
It's that these people in the Japanese American family on average are at more peak earning years.
So that's why they have different net worth.
But if you looked at this according to woke categories, you would probably, at least some people surely would, neatly and cleanly conclude that that is evidence of how Japanese Americans benefit from white privilege and Mexican-American people don't.
But that would be an example of very lazy thinking being reinforced by very lazy proofing.
So I can say that kind of thing, even as I can say this as well.
Why is it that white net worth is higher than black net worth, so-called?
It's hard to answer that.
So honestly, Ethan, when I am presented with that argument, it's not that I have nothing to say.
I think I have numerous things to say.
But it is that there are complex realities before us, like why different groups are different from one another.
And Seoul points this out as well.
He's like, why would we assume that racial groups or people from different ethnicities would magically accrue to this golden mean of measurement?
People assume that.
Tons of people assume that.
That is the working hypothesis of wokeness.
But who said?
Like, prove that.
Why would that be?
Don't groups have different customs, traditions, backgrounds, religions, worldviews?
Don't they have different work ethics for various reasons?
Isn't there sin that falls prey to groups?
Isn't there righteousness that God's providence for some of us?
These are complex things, but it is hard to push into those categories and answer those questions for anyone because none of us has a God's God.
None of us has God's perspective on these things.
Yeah, generally people just don't like complicated things, right?
It's just easier to have the one answer, the monomania.
And it's like what you were talking about with the madman.
You know, it's like the conspiracy theorist who believes, you know, whatever, birds aren't real or whatever.
You know, it's like if you buy into that, and then you just assume that you just isogette that into everything that you see, all the data points to it, you know.
Well, and you don't have to dig into all this stuff about Japanese culture versus whatever the different cultures might be.
I mean, you've already made your conclusion and you just read everything into it.
I grew up in a small Oregon town where literally there was railroad tracks going through this tiny town that was far enough out that the cops rarely came out there and it was on a nice lake.
On this side of the tracks were retired people and on this side of the tracks were meth heads.
All white.
I think there was maybe one black guy now and then.
But, you know, in this worldview, they're all the same.
They're just white, but like totally.
Two different cultures that have used their responsibility or misused it in two different ways and been raised in different cultures and families.
And it's just like somehow it's so obvious, but we can't see that.
I don't know.
I feel like when I get into this stuff, I'm preaching to the choir, but, um, so you really know when you're, oh, go ahead.
Sorry.
I almost got topics on you there.
Sorry, to jump on your sentence there.
I was just going to say, you're also not allowed now to talk about these matters with any moral framing at all, especially with regard to minority cultures.
So you can savage white people for their racial failings over and over again when these startled white people, as you're saying this, have no idea what you're even talking about.
They're not white supremacists.
I haven't used that term, but that's really the term to describe white people today in air quotes.
At the same time that you can't talk about any problems, any failings in any communities where there are people of color.
Thankfully, people will dismiss me for saying this even now on this podcast, but thankfully, there are lots of people who don't play by those rules.
So you've got Seoul, you've got in the evangelical world, the just thinking podcast.
You've got Daryl Harrison.
You've got Vodi Bockham, Virgil Walker.
You've got a growing chorus of people who will say, no, we need to address these issues morally.
There's complex causation in play in a lot of these cases, but every community has moral failings and moral successes, or frame it how you want.
Use the term you want.
Every community does.
Not just white people or not just black people or not Africans or Russians or Chinese people.
Every community is subject to a fallen world.
Every community benefits from common grace.
And every community, or at least many communities, have Christians in them.
So there's this complex interplay of good, bad, and neutral in every society, every country, every nation.
It's not always the same, but that's not racist to acknowledge that, but it's essentially racist per the terms of public discourse today.
You really got them going.
I did, yeah.
That was a good question.
Riled them up.
Well, we're going to move into our subscriber exclusive portion now, and we're going to pick your brain on a few things.
Yeah, so get ready for that.
We've got some good stuff going on there.
But everybody, check out the book, Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel and the Way to Stop It.
Maybe this is what we'll talk about.
Yeah.
The way to stop it.
Maybe the way to stop it.
Yeah.
Let's do it.
Subscriber portion.
Let's go.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
Are we seriously transitioning right now from Predator to Thomas Aquinas?
This is the beauty of this podcast.
Yeah.
Have you ever seen the movie 1917?
I think Mendez is again up to something, and I think he's making a statement about the what do you do?
What are you doing when that kind of stuff hits your church or whatever?
Leave.
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