John Harris and his wife attend a Moscow, Idaho conference to defend biblical justice against modern social justice, which they trace from Rousseau and Marx through Gramsci and the Frankfurt School to contemporary cultural Marxism. Harris argues this ideology seeks to destroy traditional institutions by replacing Christianity with a new religion based on identity politics, utilizing standpoint epistemology to privilege subjective experiences over objective truth. The discussion critiques the fusion of the gospel with activism by figures like Desmond Tutu and Russell Moore, asserting that true biblical justice is retributive and impartial rather than redistributive, urging Christians to offer societal stability through faith instead of engaging in cultural deconstruction. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
A Request for Ministry Partners00:04:36
Hey guys, real quick before we get started, I have a small request.
If you've been blessed by our content and you like this show, would you take just a brief moment and leave us a five star review?
This is quite possibly the most effective thing that you can do to ensure that this content gets out to as many people as possible.
Thanks.
A couple thank yous.
One, let's do a warm round of applause thanking John and AD and their wives for flying out here.
Super grateful for both of them.
They're wise, but especially these men actually being men.
We live in trying times.
We have all been so disenchanted and disappointed by pastors, by men, by fathers, by leaders, and virtually every institution within our society.
And the church, sadly, has not been an exception.
And so we need men.
We need men.
And both John and A.D. have served as faithful examples of that.
You guys are here because you've been blessed.
By their ministry and other men like them.
And so I'm super grateful that they were willing to fly out here and be here and minister to you, minister to me, my family.
And so I'm super grateful for them.
The second thank you is for Christ Fellowship Church.
Part of the reason why we were able to keep our expenses low for Right Response, Right Response fit the bill for this.
And it was a lower bill, praise God, because we didn't have to rent a venue.
Christ Fellowship Church allowed us to use their space for free.
So can we give a warm round of applause for Christ Fellowship?
That's Pastor Jeff Ripple.
Can you raise your hand?
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Thank you.
So, that's Pastor Jeff Ripple, and this is Christ Fellowship Church, and that helped us to make this affordable.
And so, last, let's see.
Yeah, last announcement is so we wanted it to be free.
We wanted the conference to be free to you, especially since it's four hours, and especially if somebody's driving 13 hours.
You know, I wanted it to be free because that takes some of the pressure off of me and John and AD, so that if it's a lousy conference, we'd be like, hey, we'll give you a free conference.
You know, full refund.
You know, now the problem is, though, is if you guys from Georgia say, okay, will you give me a gas refund with Biden's economy, right?
Putin's spike, I mean, Biden.
So, anyways, so thank you so much to you guys coming and for you guys helping us to lower our costs.
But for anybody, we want it to be free.
We're not charging you.
But if you are willing and able, we do ask if you would prayerfully consider helping Right Response Ministries to offset some of our costs.
A lot of you guys probably aren't prepared to give or anything like that physically.
But if you are, you could put it in the bucket right there where the Note cards for the questions are if you want to do cash or a check, if you'd like to give a donation, or you could also go to rightresponseministries.com/slash/donate.
One of our prayers is that God would move on the hearts of men and women who have courage, who want to stand for biblical virtues and doctrine and courage, all these things, that they would become monthly partners, that they would help us in the ministry.
And our goal is, Lord willing, that we'd be able to do something like this twice a year.
As of now, we're going to try to make it an annual thing, but within a couple of years, I would love if we could do spring and fall.
Moscow, Idaho, they've got enough stuff, right?
That, you know, it's not fair.
And then we've got, you know, you've got Phoenix and you've got Arizona with James White, you know, and Jeff Durbin.
You've got John MacArthur in Southern California, but Texas needs something.
And I keep thinking of Revelation, you know, 3 2 or 2 3.
I always get them backwards, but strengthen that which remains and is about to die, right?
There are places that, you know, where people would argue, the battle's raging.
And I would say, no, the battle's not raging in California.
The battle was raging and we lost.
We lost.
And then there's the proverbial, uncontested, you know, Timbuktu with a population of 247 people in the backwoods and staunchly conservative.
And praise God for Timbuktu, you know, South Dakota, whatever it is.
But then there's the Battle of Bunkers Hill.
There's a decisive point.
There's the thing where there's still life.
It still remains, but it's about to die.
And we need reinforcements.
We need conferences.
We need things like this to remind us we're not alone.
And for us to do this, we need help.
So if you would consider becoming one of our co laborers, one of our ministry partners with Right Response Ministries, we'd be grateful.
All right, without further ado, let's give a round of applause for Mr. John Harris.
Well, thank you, Joel.
And man, I feel like I have such a long list of people to thank to put this together.
I'm just amazed at everyone who's come out.
Prayer and Spiritual Warfare00:05:01
And I actually was distracted temporarily.
Who came the farthest again?
Can you raise your hand?
Who won that?
Oh, y'all did.
Did you get your free book?
Go grab that before you leave.
Yeah.
Grab two books.
Yeah, thank you so much.
We met first in the restaurant.
So.
Yeah, that was providential.
I'm so glad that you're here.
And technically, actually, AD came the farthest to speak from New Hampshire.
That's pretty far.
And my wife told me this morning, we came from upstate New York.
It's snowing there right now.
So I'm, some people are nodding their heads.
Yeah, I'm very grateful to be here right now.
It's much better than being in upstate New York.
Well, we're going to talk today about social justice and the church, Christianity.
How do these two religions conflict?
I believe social justice is a religion.
Many of you who listen to my podcast, you know I make that argument quite a bit.
And some of this material will be from the book.
For those who have read the book, this will be somewhat of a review.
I wanted to start, though, with Ephesians chapter 5, if I may, because one of the things I've realized is being more academic and putting this whole issue through the grid of an academic eye, you can tend to start to think, and I fall into this, that it's just ideas.
There's just ideas, and there's people, and there's places, and one thing led to another, and here we are.
With George Soros about to take over the world, right?
It was like these little incremental steps, and here we are.
And there's some truth to that.
I really think it's good to look at things historically, to trace lines, to figure out where did these ideas come from?
Who are we being influenced by?
But there's something that's so basic that we cannot forget.
And Ephesians chapter 5, the entire chapter to me, 5 and 6, actually, really simplifies all of this and breaks it down into something very simple.
Ephesians chapter 5 opens with there's a vice list, and it's the opposite of love.
I don't want the left to take that word, by the way.
That belongs to us.
God is love, okay?
Real love.
Not this fake tolerance love of I tweeted something, but I never fed anyone, and that means I love people.
No, like real love, sacrificing oneself for the people in proximity to us that we actually know.
And there's a vice list given of all the things that are not love sexual immorality, impurity, covetousness, right?
And it goes on.
And then you get to the end of chapter 5, and there's all these hierarchies that are brought up.
Husbands and wives, labor relationships, right?
And you have an order that God has put down, running into chapter six, children and parents.
And then we get to, and this is the pivotal moment for me, and I think it's something that we should all have on the front of our minds as often as possible, and that's verse 10.
Finally be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.
Put on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic spiritual powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
It's ultimately where the battle is.
It's not with Biden, it's not with Putin or Zelensky or any of the figures that we talk about ultimately.
Satan likes to use people, and he does.
They work for him, but they're not ultimately the enemy.
The enemy is a spiritual enemy.
And so, everything that I'm about to present to you, which is very important historical, philosophical, we need to know those things.
But just remember that this is a spiritual battle, ultimately.
And Satan is on one side and God is on the other side.
And the church hangs in the balance.
Now, we know ultimately the church, God wins, the church is victorious.
We know this.
But right now in our country, there is a great apostasy, a great falling away, and there's few men willing to stand up and call a spade a spade.
And I think there's a variety of reasons.
I think one of it is possibly a lack of understanding.
And that's why we're here today, is to understand better.
And so that's my task right now, is to walk through the history, the philosophy, so we understand what it is we're dealing with.
If we were in Utah, we would want to understand Mormonism to reach our neighbor, right?
If you're a Christian in Utah and you don't understand anything about Mormonism, you're a sitting duck.
If you're in Saudi Arabia and you don't know anything about Islam and you think you're going to reach these people, you're fooling yourself.
You have to know something about what they believe.
Otherwise, they can use lingo that sounds really similar to what you mean, and you can think, well, they wear the same, and you're not.
It's the difference between heaven and hell.
So we live in a culture saturated with social justice, with this political religion.
Understanding Mormonism in Utah00:15:57
So we need to understand what social justice teaches to be able to refute it, to answer it.
So that's what we're going to do.
Let's open in a word of prayer, if we can, before we get started here.
Lord Jesus Christ, you are the maker of heaven and earth.
Father, you are the maker of heaven and earth.
You sent your son.
You sent Jesus to die on behalf of sinners.
And we just thank you so much for the sacrifice that you made.
We thank you for the gospel.
Lord, we want to oppose anything that would come against it because we know, Lord, how important it is.
We know where we would be without your grace and mercy.
And we want others to know that.
So, Lord, I pray you'd fill our hearts, not just with the knowledge of social justice and what it teaches and why it's wrong, but with a heart of compassion for the lost, with humility, knowing that without your grace, that's where we'd be.
And with a just make the immaterial world more real than the material world to us today as we go through this.
In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, I'm going to take you through a slideshow, and I know what you're thinking.
There's no projector here.
So I'm going to try to be very descriptive with my words as much as I possibly can.
And we're going to start just with the history of social justice.
And I don't know where Joel went.
Joel, yeah, if you could just like 10 minutes before I'm supposed to stop, you could just get my attention in the back.
That'd be great so I don't lose track.
When I get into history mode, I just lose focus of everything.
I think AD and Joel kind of figured that out the last few days.
So, we're going to start with what social justice is.
What is it?
That's the big question.
We hear this word all the time.
It's actually been popular for quite some time.
And I'm going to give you a definition that I think captures its essence.
It's pretty technical, and we're going to come back to it at the end.
And the way I think of it, this is a fog.
All right, so if you don't understand right away, that's totally fine.
As we put more meat on the bones, it will be more understandable.
Here's my definition The modern social justice movement is a repackaged configuration of egalitarian ideas, heavily influenced over the past century by postmodern and Marxist derivatives.
Its purpose is to rectify disparities in advantages between social groups through reallocation.
Oh, thanks, John.
We know what social justice is now.
Right?
That was as clear as mud.
Let me read it for you one more time, okay?
The modern social justice movement is a repackaged configuration of egalitarian ideas heavily influenced over the past century by postmodern and Marxist derivatives.
Its purpose is to rectify disparities in advantages between social groups through reallocation.
Okay?
So definitions are very important in this.
And anytime you're arguing with the left, they love to play language games.
These battles are mostly over the dictionary.
So I think it's really important from the start to understand what social justice is.
And to do that, let's take a little walk down memory lane.
Now, one of the things you'll hear is that social justice can be Christian, it can be conservative, because there's Roman Catholics who use the term.
And there is some truth to this.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it, but that's not the social justice tradition we're talking about.
There was an effort, and this term was used in the 1800s, mid 1800s, to try to preserve the social bonds that existed before the Industrial Revolution.
And social justice was sometimes used to refer to that.
Rerum Novarum was one of the encyclicals that Pope Leon put out, and it talks about this.
Now, that Word did not catch on.
It wasn't popular.
People didn't use it.
If you do like a Google Ngram, I don't know if anyone's done that, you can put like a word into this search bar and it'll show you the books written over the past, you know, whatever time frame you want to give it, 100 years, when they became popular, when they were in use.
Social justice doesn't even really become a popular word until the turn of the century.
And then it becomes more popular.
So we're going to trace it from when it became popular.
And that's the tradition that we stand in when people use it.
That goes back to the time during the Fabian socialism phase, and the Fabian socialists are still around, but when it first became popular in Great Britain.
One of the most famous Fabian socialists, some of you might recognize, is a guy named H.G. Wells.
He wrote a number of fantasy, science fiction novels.
I actually like a lot of his stuff, but he was an atheist, he was a socialist.
And Fabian socialism really taught that we're going to get there through progression.
It's not going to be a revolution, we're going to bring about the revolution through this march through the institutions over time.
And there were some Christians in the United States that thought, wow, we really like this idea.
One of them being Walter Rauschenbusch.
I really like the Fabian socialists and their ideas.
Problem is, if I go back to America and I start talking about Fabian socialism, everyone's going to reject me because they think socialism means you're immoral and they think it means that you deny the existence of God.
And I don't want those associations.
So instead, he called it social justice.
And justice wasn't even really a word that socialists were using that much.
In fact, Karl Marx thought justice, justice is just a word that The oppressors use.
You know, the courts belong to them and they oppress the people they hate.
That's what justice is.
It was kind of a religious term.
And then it's used by a number of people, Walter Rausch-Rebenbusch probably being the most famous, to refer to socialism.
And they were pretty much the same thing.
It was a Christianized socialism.
And in the book, Christianity and Social Justice, the new one I have over there, I trace a lot of this.
And most of them are pastors, seminary professors, people like that who are using this term during that time.
So, that's the kind of social justice we're talking about.
Now, what is that?
Socialism, right?
But at the base level, what is socialism?
It's a redistribution scheme.
So, another word you could use if you wanted to be accurate, if you wanted to be more conceptual and not get tied up with wrangling about the term, you could just call it redistributive justice.
That's what it is.
And for that concept, I trace this back to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher of the French Revolution.
And there were three things that Rousseau wanted to achieve.
He wanted an egalitarian ideal.
Egalitarian is a French word for equal, but it's not equality before the law, it's the elimination of disparities between people.
It's where we're all flatlined into having the same kind of outcome.
We have the same level of income, the same privilege, the same everything, and that way everything's fair, right?
And that's socialism at the end of the day.
That's what they're teaching.
Well, Rousseau was kind of a proto socialist, a socialist before socialism.
And he thought this ought to be achieved.
The problem is standing in the way of achieving this great heaven on earth, this utopia, was social institutions that were preventing it.
The church, right?
You have clerics who.
People call them pastor and honor them, and they have a hierarchy, they have authority.
You had families that are passing down their money and inheritance, and that's not fair because wealth gets passed down.
And there are all these institutions in society that are preventing the achievement of this utopia.
So he proposed the third element to this we need to implement a force capable of executing this utopian dream.
We need to crush all of these institutions that are preventing heaven on earth from happening.
And so, who's going to do that?
The government, right?
That's the logical conclusion.
You're going to have to have a force capable of a big bully who's capable of destroying all the little bullies that are out there, and then we'll have equality, right?
Now, you can see the problem with this already.
If the problem is disparities, you just created the biggest disparity there ever existed in human history.
You have the government up here, and then just an atomistic individual kind of naked in the public square with no voluntary associations or institutions to protect him from this guy.
So, I don't know if it occurred to him, like, what if the Top dog, what if the government goes tyrannical?
Then what?
So that's kind of the Achilles heel of this.
But that's been the scheme of social justice from the beginning.
And every iteration, I don't care which one you're talking about the Me Too movement, feminism, Black Lives Matter, even in some ways the COVID stuff, which I'll get to, every iteration carries this with it.
So fast forward to Karl Marx, socialism and communism.
In 1848, there's a bunch of revolutions across the European continent, and they fail.
But they're all socialist revolutions.
And it's in that same year, Karl Marx writes the Communist Manifesto with Frederick Engels.
And he says, you know, the reason there's inequality?
It's because of economic factors out there.
You have the bourgeois property, and you have the proletariat, and they're oppressed.
And so here's what we got to do we need to implement some policies that are going to prevent this economic disparity from emerging.
So, elimination, abolish actually, bourgeois property through state control of credit.
Transportation and production, as well as free public education.
I don't know if you knew that.
Free public education is a communist idea.
We've just kind of accepted it now.
It's normal.
It was not normal for the greater part of human history.
And what I mean by that is a top down, government controlled curriculum for children.
Now, during this same time, you have in the United States a bunch of social reform movements.
Now, you know, it's not communism, but you have prohibitionism, you have anti Masonry movement, you have abolitionism, you have the women's emancipation movement.
All this stuff is going on.
During the revivalistic times, okay?
And we need to perfect society.
And at the time of these failed revolutions in 1848, a bunch of people from Europe, Germany especially, flocked to the United States.
And they settled, a lot of them settled in the Midwest.
They settled mostly in the North, and some settled down South, but mostly in the Midwest.
And they controlled newspapers.
A lot of them became, they worked themselves in the Union Army.
And there was a merging happening.
These ideas were being introduced into the greatest environment that they could be introduced into.
And so, This is where we get the social gospel movement that starts right after this.
Now, I've already talked a little bit about Fabian socialism.
The social gospel movement is really an Americanized version of that, using the term social justice.
After this, though, we have in this development cultural Marxism.
So, to review, we have Marxism, we have communism, it's property.
There are economic factors that are causing the disparities that we see, and that's what's causing everything to be unfair.
And then we have after that these Fabian socialists who are saying, well, yeah, that's true, but we're not going to get there by a revolution.
That failed.
Let's just kind of progressively do it.
Then came cultural Marxism.
Some of you probably heard this term.
And the father of cultural Marxism is an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci.
And he said that the workers failed to sufficiently revolt because they were controlled by the propertied class.
And so there were things in society like libraries, schools, voluntary associations, architecture, street names, and the church.
And all these things prevented the oppressed people from realizing that they were truly oppressed.
You know, Fourth of July, not in their context, in our context, the Fourth of July parade happens, and what's everyone doing?
American flags coming by, right?
They're holding doors open for women.
They have monuments to people.
That's oppressing people, right?
We're privileging some over others.
This is all unfair.
And so Antonio Gramsci said what needs to happen is we need to cease contenting ourselves to operate within the values of the state and start critiquing the status quo.
Build our own hegemony, I mean, our own system of hierarchy, our own that's fair, and then wait for the collapse of the old order.
Now, from this, The next really rung on this ladder is the Frankfurt School in Germany.
So we're going from Italy to Germany, and they came up with a term called critical theory.
Now, you all have heard of critical race theory, right?
Critical theory comes before critical race theory.
And they drilled down deeper into society than Antonio Gramsci did.
They were going to find that oppression because it's there, it's somewhere.
It's maybe not seen overtly, but it's down there if we can really find it.
It's the advertisements you see.
You really need that car?
They're making you think you need that car.
You're being oppressed.
And one of the members that I like to mention is a guy named Theodore Adorno.
He wrote a book in 1950 called The Authoritarian Personality.
Let me give you the short form so you don't have to read the book.
I know none of you really want to read this book, right?
You're a Nazi, okay?
There you go, there's the book.
And The Authoritarian Personality had a profound impact on university research and psychology departments.
And he said things like submission to parental authority, a belief in traditional gender roles, family pride, Fear of homosexuality is where homophobia comes from, right?
And maybe Freud before that, but a strong devotion to Christianity, the notion that foreign ideas posed a threat to American institutions, all that stuff makes you a Nazi.
And it gives you a level on the F scale.
F means fascist.
So if you really love your parents, kind of a Nazi.
Maybe not like Hitler level, but there's something there.
And is it a wonder that today everyone's called a Nazi if they have an idea to the right of Bernie Sanders?
No.
Because this is what university, this is what our elites have been training in for years.
It's been going on forever.
It didn't just pop out of nowhere.
Now, add to this, to drill down even deeper, radical subjectivity.
And by the way, some people separate these and say, well, there's postmodernism here, there's Marxism over here.
They're not separated in my mind, they're the same thing.
Why do you say that, John?
Well, because the postmodern theorists said that.
Jacques Derrida, one of the French postmodernists, said that what he was doing was a certain kind of Marxism.
Well, what was he doing?
He believed that meaning was not found in what was said, but rather by what was meant in accordance with the hegemony of language.
Okay, so now there's this hegemony of language.
There's like words that we can say and words we can't say, and they have oppression values attached to them.
There's no concrete, rooted in reality objective truth.
There's just competing social groups.
So, have you ever used this oppressive term?
I don't know, shock all of you, but have you ever said, like, called someone a woman?
You ever said that?
Yeah.
Or maybe a man.
That's another really oppressive term.
Well, you're imposing your values, right?
Because there is no such thing as reality.
There's rootedness, objectivity.
There's no woman or man.
There's just this subjective categorization that we create in order to oppress other people.
So we're going to conform someone to our standard because, wow, they have short hair and they're more muscular and they're taller, and we're going to say that's a man.
Well, you know, you're just, you know, you know where this is going because you live it every day.
Well, this is rooted in radical subjectivity, Jacques Derrida.
You can thank him for it next time.
Well, if you're going to heaven, you'll never be able to probably thank him, but I hold him responsible.
Another guy is Michel Foucault, and he deconstructed knowledge by making it dependent on power.
So he said basically everything's a power play.
And so, think about it this way this is the best way I can articulate it.
If right now, outside this door, let's say there was a car accident, and it was a police chase, and a criminal gets out of the car, and he's got the money bag, and he's running in here for cover, and the police officer shoots the criminal before he gets in here.
Foucault and Power Plays00:02:52
And there's eyewitnesses, and they all have a story to tell about this.
Well, Foucault would teach us that the way that this story is told, the things that are emphasized, this is all designed for a power play to take place.
We're supposed to have a bias towards either the criminal or the cop.
And of course, I'm bringing out a bias by saying criminal, right?
So the way that the story is told is very important.
There's really no truth, there's just narratives out there that support either, in this case, the police or the criminal.
And so Foucault deconstructed all of knowledge this way.
The things you know, it's not because they're objectively rooted anywhere.
It's because it's a story you've been told to support some kind of a power structure.
Now, this brings us to Derek Bell and critical race theory.
Derek Bell was a law professor at Harvard and one of the founders of critical race theory, and he believed that progress in American race relations was largely a mirage, obscuring the fact that whites continue consciously or unconsciously to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain control.
So, that whole ending slavery, the whole civil right, meaningless.
There's still the systemic racism out there that is oppressing people.
And the only way, really, to solve this problem is to look through the lens of minority experience, to gain a solution.
And society has to address this.
So there are a number of elements to critical race theory.
I break it down into two for simplicity's sake, because there are like seven elements here.
But number one is the Marxism.
So you have oppressor, oppressed, these sides kind of pivoted against each other.
And then you have kind of the postmodern, which is a deeper kind of Marxism, but there's subjective truth.
That you need a certain kind of lens from my minority experience to even approach solving this problem.
And so this became, this evolved or was built upon by his student, Kimberly Crenshaw, and she came up with the term intersectionality.
So critical race theory, critiquing society, it's all racist, it's all bad, racism is normative, we've got to change our history books and vilify a certain group of people, right?
Then you have intersectionality, and this is, Not about ripping things down, this is about building things.
We're going to build the great new society based on this principle.
There are people out there who are more oppressed than others, and some have multiple identities of oppression.
If you're a woman and you're gluten free, that's two levels of oppression.
No, she didn't say that.
My brothers are celiac, by the way, so I can say that joke.
If you, though, are homosexual and you're also some other identity that's oppressed, you're an immigrant, you understand oppression in a unique way.
So the goal should be to find the most oppressed people, and then we take our cues from them because they know more.
They've experienced oppression.
And you can see what this does.
Flattening Reality with Social Justice00:15:10
There's a race to the bottom now.
Everyone's oppressed, right?
Like everyone wants to be oppressed.
If they're not oppressed, they start making up stuff about themselves being oppressed so they can impress you with how oppressed they are.
And, you know, the quality of everything goes down.
I mean, we're reaping the consequences of this.
But, yeah, the bottom line is, you know, this is going to undo the wrongs that society has imposed.
Now, what's the end goal of all of this?
The end goal is this, and this is my thesis.
It's to destroy Christianity, okay?
And I know some conservative commentators say, well, it's just against white people.
Oh, they just don't like men.
They just don't like America.
They don't, yeah, okay.
I see all that.
But ultimately, if you wanted to, you know, look at it, think of it like as a circle with interlaying like levels of circles, yeah, of course there's all these things, but where's the trajectory?
Where are they headed?
They're headed to Christianity.
That is the ultimate goal of this whole thing.
And I have a number of quotes.
I can't read them all to you.
Let me read you a few, though.
Karl Marx, the social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and oppressed class.
Meaning they believe in a hierarchy.
The proletariat, though, is revolutionary.
How about Antonio Gramsci?
He wanted socialism to kill Christianity.
His words, not mine.
Foucault desired to liberate people from political rationality, which he thought stood on the idea of Christian pastoral power.
And I can go on.
Now, that's part one destroy Christianity.
Part two replace Christianity.
How are you going to do that?
Well, Rousseau believed Christian law was harmful to the constitution of the state.
So instead, he imagined a religion that would one day Make a revolution among men.
Rather than biblical revelation, he based his new faith on the innate principle of justice and virtue.
People are good.
We can come together.
We can have our own religion.
H.G. Wells was actually his word, not mine.
He said the New World Order would, he compared it to a religion.
That's what it's going to be.
Herbert Marcuse, one of the Frankfurt School members, he believed that religion inspired guilt in the present life, it postponed human fulfillment to the afterlife and reinforced the evil status quo.
Yet, he also held out hope that religion could be beneficial in transforming society if it became a heretical expression of a political attitude.
In other words, maybe if we can subvert Christianity and kind of rearrange some things, then it might be helpful.
Derek Bell, father of critical race theory, thought fundamentalist Christians divert political protest and reaffirm the conservative values on which the white middle class's traditional illusions of superiority are grounded.
Nevertheless, he also saw How a new interpretation of Christianity could lead to enlightenment instead of pacification.
We need to reimagine Christianity.
We need to reinterpret Christianity.
We need to change Christianity.
And the whole intent is to replace Christianity.
Don't buy it.
That's what we're living in right now.
People who studied this, who knew the writings of these utopianists, weren't surprised by what just happened and what they're seeing in the church.
This has happened before in other ways.
Liberation theology.
Being probably one of the most recent examples.
So that brings us to our context.
And I can't show you the pictures, but you can probably imagine some of them from 2020.
Riots in the streets, civil religion on full display, white people bowing down to BLM protesters.
Michael Tracy, a reporter, said, I'm telling you, every protest I've been to so far perfectly mirrors an outdoor evangelical Christian worship service.
It's not a Christian observation, that is someone from the world.
Why did he say that?
Well, it's because we have a new religion in front of us.
Salvation, right?
In Christianity, it's original sin.
That's the bad news.
There's a divine law.
We've broken it, and there's going to be some judgment.
The good news is we can be born again.
There's also, I put in the sacraments, but you use a different word for that ordinances.
There's things that Christians should do when they're saved.
And then there's a heaven in the hereafter where we'll be with God.
Well, in social justice, it's whiteness, it's maleness, it's heterosexuality.
These are original sin.
These are the replacements for that.
Political correctness replaces the divine law.
Judgment is getting canceled because there's no afterlife.
You've got to have it now.
The good news is you can become woke, which is like being born again.
You can do progressive political things, those are your sacraments.
And then you can have social equity, inclusion, and diversity.
And they have their own deity.
And it's not a personal deity, just like in some religions, like some Eastern religions, there's no personal deity.
But they believe that social conflict theory is the hand of providence.
You didn't build that.
Someone else did that for you.
It wasn't hard work.
It was because of the forces of history.
Conflict theory through the years brought you to this point and benefited you because you have white privilege or something along those lines.
Instead of the love of Christianity, we have a revolution.
And they call it love, it's not.
The collective state becomes justice.
We have the canon of woke books instead of the Bible and oppressed perspectives.
Are inspired and you may not question them.
They're inherent.
They are infallible, inhumanly good.
We have social studies programs instead of seminary.
And of course, they have their own hierarchy, even though they're against hierarchy.
The critical theorists, the media, the community organizers.
They participate in activism and implicit bias training and decolonization.
This is evangelism, this is discipleship.
Instead of the world of flesh and the devil, it's systemic racism, white privilege, and white supremacists lurking around every corner.
And the hope is, if there is a hope, is that intersectionality is going to be applied by the social justice warriors with the inspiration of our saints, the victims of police shootings, and we'll get there one day to equality.
And it's a pipe dream.
It only produces less equality, it produces more pain because this isn't how humans are actually wired.
And the COVID religion actually really parallels this.
In fact, they're very similar.
Salvation is vaccination, the sacraments are masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and booster shots.
Proselytizing is public service announcements and social media virtue signals.
Membership in the club, in the religion, is your vaccine card.
The heathens are the unvaccinated.
The heretics are the anti vax conspiracy theorists.
Any conspiracy theorists here?
There's a few.
Okay, wow, okay.
The high priests are Anthony Fauci and the government health officials.
God is government and the Savior is science.
You think this is political?
How about all the pastors who said this is just a political thing, I'm staying out of it?
What foolishness!
Can they not see what's right in front of them?
So, we know people, and I'm sure you do too, that got woke, checked their privilege, and then started to shame others.
That's the progression, right?
They get woke, and you've got to check everyone's privilege, become the policeman, and we just got to shame people when we figure out they're part of the problem.
And this saddens me.
There's real people that are caught up in this, and compassion should make us strive to, as we would with a Mormon or a Jehovah's Witness, to help them see the error of their ways.
And this is not going to provide satisfaction.
You're just going to get angrier.
I don't know if you've seen that with your friends or your family members who've gone this direction.
It's exactly what I've seen.
They're never satisfied because there is no utopia here on earth.
We're never going to breach a state of equality in that sense.
So, to review social justice, what is it?
It's a modern movement, a repackaged configuration of egalitarian ideas heavily influenced over the past century by postmodern and Marxist derivatives, and its purpose is to rectify disparities and advantages between social groups through reallocation.
Goals are achieving an egalitarian idea, dismantling the social institutions that prevent its achievement, and implementing a force capable of executing the utopian dream.
So that's the history.
That brings us to today.
Now, I think I probably have like maybe 10 minutes or five minutes.
I don't even know.
I don't have much time, but I want to bring you through briefly the philosophy, real quick.
That's what it is, and we've gone through some of that.
What does it teach?
Let's talk about, let's drive down deeper into what it actually is saying?
What are people actually buying into?
What are they assuming when they go into this religion?
And I want to break this down really into four sections here briefly.
We're going to talk about metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory.
Sorry, I say metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, value theory, and then also just the gospel.
I want to talk about their scheme of how do you get saved and all of that.
So Christianity has attempted to merge with this, and the clearest way to see it is to compare what Christians believe about these things.
And what social justice warriors teach.
So, metaphysics, that's the first category.
Metaphysics, it concerns, it's a philosophical study that concerns what is reality?
What stuff exists in the universe?
What's the universe composed of?
What's it made of?
Now, I'm not recommending this movie, okay?
Don't tell anyone I recommended this movie.
But if you happen to have seen this movie in your BC days, for some, right?
The Matrix.
Have you ever seen The Matrix?
Yeah, me too.
Okay.
Everything's broken down into a computer.
It's ones and zeros.
That's reality.
And you were deceived, right, into thinking there's real tangible things out there.
Like I'm in reality, but actually I'm not.
I'm asleep and it's all one big giant computer.
It's just a bunch of ones and zeros out there, right?
That's the matrix.
Social justice is like that, okay?
It flattens reality down into ones and zeros.
Everything has an oppression value.
So it doesn't matter if it's the McDonald's menu, you're going to find some racism on it.
Or sexism or something.
It's not like you walk in and you're like, is there racism here?
It's like, where's the racism?
We know it's here.
You're hiding it.
Now, have anyone ever seen this show, CSI?
Don't raise your hand.
CSI, Crime Scene Investigation, all right?
My parents used to love watching this show.
And you know, the murder happens and the guys walk in with the lights that show the blood.
And they're like, oh, that's where it happened.
I can see, you know, here's the blood and everything.
Well, social justice warriors, they have this like defective light that they walk in and they're like, it's blood everywhere, everything's blood.
So that's kind of the way to view social justice metaphysics.
What's reality composed of?
Well, it's oppression, and it's everywhere.
And if you don't see it, you just need the right glasses so you can see it.
And you can see the dangers of this right away.
Destroy social trust by presuming guilt on any human activity not advancing egalitarianism.
Like if you're not with the revolution, there's only one other option, you're with the oppressors, right?
Doesn't matter who you are, what your experiences were.
It also requires immediacy.
This is an emergency, we gotta act now.
How many of the things over the last few years, it's like, don't think about it, don't research it, act now.
Right?
So it's this horrible evil.
It's this big boogeyman that we didn't even see, and all of a sudden we can see it's going to destroy us.
It reorientates the purpose of life towards political activism as well.
So everything just becomes political.
Pastors who say, like, I'm just going to sidestep politics.
I'm a pastor.
I can be neutral on that.
Well, this is a political religion, and they see you as political.
And if you don't see them as political, you're the one at the disadvantage.
So, how do we respond to this?
What are some Some things.
Well, one of them is this.
Social justice warriors, ideologues, they do not apply their own standards to themselves.
Have you ever noticed that?
If everything is oppression, what about the idea that everything is oppression?
Could that be oppression too?
What about all the efforts to bring about this egalitarian utopia?
Could that also be part of oppression?
How do we know that we haven't been duped into Thinking everything is about oppression, and that itself is oppression somehow.
Someone's behind that.
It's like Wizard of Oz, there's someone behind that curtain too.
So it's kind of self refuting.
That's one of the problems with it.
It also has limitations.
It is impossible to impose these egalitarian abstractions beyond the limits of rationality and of reality.
So, you know, really, this little girl with a doll, that's oppression.
Like, you're going to find an oppression value here, right?
There's certain things that we just intuitively were like, well, that's not a threat.
That can't be oppression.
We know it, but we have to buy into this ideology to put these glasses on to just subvert what we already know.
Attempting to immediately force the destruction of hierarchies representing barriers to this vision often produces unintended consequences.
The solutions often, the cures are worse than the disease, oftentimes.
So that's another problem with this.
And it fails to take into account the full spectrum of attributes woven into the created order, including the Categories of being people share beyond oppression level.
We're not just oppressors or oppressed.
There's so many other things that we are.
We're made in the image of God.
We're accountable to God.
We're subject to the law of God.
We're in need of salvation.
And if we're saved, we're redeemed.
A lot more fundamental than whether I'm an oppressor or an oppressed.
And that's the glue that can hold us together.
This stuff only breaks people apart.
So it's metaphysics.
Ideology is fundamentally.
Grounded in an abstract world that doesn't exist.
It's a figment of someone's imagination, and they're just imposing it upon the real world that we all know exists, but we suppress in unrighteousness.
It's an attempt to recreate what God has already created.
Now, there's some questions, some practical things you can ask people.
You can ask basic questions.
Has proper time and attention been given to comprehending all the available facts?
Things like that.
Generally, unless they're already a little reasonable, you're not going to get many places with that.
But one of the questions I think that gets to the heart of it could the motives of social justice activists be connected to a desire to oppress?
That'll make them really think.
If not, why not?
Another question what tangible things are social justice activists personally doing to elevate the condition of suffering people?
That exposes it right away.
Standpoint Theory and Charity00:13:32
Did you know?
Actually, question and free book.
And if you already have a free book, grab a DVD or something.
Does anyone know the state in this country that gives the most to charity?
Anyone?
No one's gotten it yet.
What'd you say?
Okay, I'll take that one.
There's one other state.
It's Utah.
You're close.
Utah and Mississippi compete every year for who's going to give the most to charity.
And how could it be that the poorest state in the country, Mississippi, with those backward hillbillies, are giving more to charity than New York and California?
How is that possible?
Did you know political conservatives give more to charity than political liberals who say they care about the poor so much?
Isn't that weird?
What are these ideologues doing to actually tangibly help real people?
Or is it just they want to take our money?
To go do something.
Well, that's hypocrisy.
So, these are the questions you can ask to help people.
And of course, I have a lot of Bible verses here I don't have time to get to about charity and about the problems with ideology, but this is totally against a biblical worldview.
The Bible does not see mankind like this.
The Bible sees a robust vision for human nature.
We have so many identities.
We have, and I don't mean the ones we make up, like real ones that we actually know we have, like I'm a man, right?
And there's responsibilities attached to that, I have a culture.
There's borders around me.
I have them in my house.
I have them in my county.
I have them in my state.
I have them in my country.
There's things I enjoy doing.
I like fishing and stuff.
And people that like those things, I have an identity with them.
It's a weak identity, but that's part of who I am.
There's so many things that God has put around us that confer identity.
And it's not just where you sit on a spectrum.
So that's metaphysics.
I want to talk a little bit about standpoint epistemology.
This is.
This is the social justice warriors' epistemological belief.
How do we know truth?
That's epistemology.
What is truth?
How can we come to understand what things are actually out there?
And they believe in standpoint theory or standpoint epistemology.
And it's a Marxist belief imported into feminist critical theory.
Marx called it class consciousness.
It's developed since then.
The underlying assumption is that different experiences produce different kinds of knowledge, which in turn produce different understandings of reality.
Standpoint theorists consider.
Oppressed experiences to be superior in understanding because they require knowing the standards of the group oppressing them as well as their own standards.
So, I have some cartoon characters that I can't show you, but I can try to explain to you how this works.
Imagine with me for a minute, you're gonna have to be very imaginative here.
You have blue world and red world, okay?
And there's boxes around blue world and red world, and no one can get out.
There's a blue man in blue world, there's a red man in red world, and they're stick figures, and they just cannot transcend the 2D box they're in.
So, everything looks To the blue man, it looks blue.
He thinks blue lives matter.
To the red man, it looks red.
And they can't see it any other way, right?
Well, how are we going to know who's lying to us if they contradict each other?
Blue says one thing, red says another.
Blue says we should fund the police, red says we shouldn't.
Well, how do we know?
How do we adjudicate between blue and red?
If everything falls into these categories, then who's going to come and tell us, right?
Well, these sociologists will come.
And they'll compare blue and red.
And they'll tell us, actually, you need to trust red.
Red is the experience that's right in this.
So somehow the sociologist gets a pass.
They can transcend, look at both of these red world and blue world objectively and say, it's red world.
Red world's the one.
Now, they never tell you this.
They just assume that everyone should know we should trust red.
Red knows.
All right?
And so, what does the Bible teach about this?
And actually, let me say one more thing before I get to the Bible.
So, blue needs to put on some red glasses, too, okay, to try to somehow see the world red's way.
They'll never get there, but, you know, it's on the hamster wheel of trying it.
So, it's really hopeless.
The Bible, though, presents a different story on knowing truth.
There's God's view, not the sociologist, there's just God's view.
He has the objective view, bird's eye view, he sees everything.
And blue world and red world don't exist, there's God's world.
And blue man and red man need to put on God's glasses.
They need to see their experiences through the revelation of God.
They need to look at things and they need to see that there's natural revelation, there's special revelation, and this should inform how we think about what's in front of us.
And guess what?
We can all do it.
There's no barrier.
Social location doesn't prevent us from doing it.
It's the man of God who is equipped.
It's the Bereans who even checked Paul out, and Paul's like, that was good.
You should do that.
We can all get there.
If anything, Proverbs would teach it's those who are wise we should go to.
Why are they wise?
Because they're godly.
It's not because they have a social location.
It took work to get there.
We got it flipped upside down.
We got it flipped way upside down.
Today, don't trust the old guys, right?
Don't trust anyone who's got experience and wisdom.
Trust that oppressed social location.
But behind the oppressed social location isn't an oppressed person, it's an elite sociologist telling you what the oppressed person thinks.
They're not going to the factory line and asking what Bob, the factory worker, thinks about things.
They're telling you in their theories what would be good for Bob.
And that's why it drives them nuts if they lose elections and it's the working class that outvote them because they're like, no, we represent the poor and the lowly and they don't.
So we see this everywhere in our society.
Believe women, right?
Why?
Because they're women, they're oppressed.
We should believe them.
White people need to listen when people of color talk about racism.
Hillary Clinton.
Why?
Why do we just because they're people of color?
That's the only reason.
How about whether or not there's truth?
That should be the concern truth.
How about every time there's a police shooting, right?
Or not a police shooting, sorry, a school shooting.
Who gets on the television?
It's some kid who survived it, or parents of the kid.
And they're going to lecture us on gun rights.
Why?
They have no experience in that.
They just survived a shooting.
That doesn't give them the authority to lecture everyone else.
But that's the world we live in now.
The Bible talks a lot about truth, objective truth in particular, right?
John 4 says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.
John 8, you will know the truth, the truth will set you free.
I could go on and on and on.
I'm the way, the truth, and the life.
Truth is assumed.
Objective truth is assumed in Scripture.
It's something that we can all access.
God has given us a word.
And that should be a comforting thought.
You're not morally or intellectually inferior because you come from some social location.
God's spoken to you, He's put you here for such a time as this, and He's given you a word and He's given you things to do.
And we can know.
What he wants you to do.
It's in his word.
So, responding to this, obviously, biblically, God's justice is universally accessible.
We have principles.
God's justice is known by the righteous, not people from a certain social location.
God gave us an objective standard, his word.
Christians should have no business going to the world for understanding justice.
Questions to ask people Why should a person's external identity factors or personal experience alone qualify them more than someone else to speak authoritatively on law, justice, and history?
Or, how about this?
Why would we assume someone is qualified to write instruction manuals for surgeons simply because they underwent an operation?
You want the diversified guy who didn't go to school to operate on your brain?
If so, that's fine, but I don't want that.
I want someone who did well in medical school and who knows what they're doing and has been tested.
And I don't care what they look like, frankly, all that matters is are they going to be able to do the job?
So that's standpoint epistemology.
Now, the third philosophical branch here is.
Ethics.
And social justice warriors, as we talked about before, they believe in egalitarianism.
Now, I love this definition of socialism.
This is from a former secretary of the Treasury, Leslie Shaw.
He said, Socialism is the idea that men must succeed equally regardless of aptitude.
Socialism is the idea that men must succeed equally regardless of aptitude.
Okay, you want to break it all down?
That's what they're teaching.
Today's march towards equity, diversity, and inclusion seeks to universally eliminate disparities in influence, privilege, and resources.
Between various social groups.
And the term egalitarianism is often applied to a similar set of ideas promoted during the French Revolution, as we just discussed.
And they called it at that time liberty, equality, fraternity.
Same ideas, just getting repackaged.
And so the goal is not equality before the law, where Lady Justice is blind and anyone walking through that courtroom is going to have applied to them the just standard.
Instead, Lady Justice takes off the blindfold and says, wait, okay, that's a woman over there, so we're going to have to treat.
That person differently than the man we just sentenced for the same exact crime.
Lower the sentence, right?
That would be true justice in the egalitarian sense.
So, Lady Justice is blind, Lady Justice takes the blindfold off.
That's the difference.
And just about every social move in our society right now is towards egalitarianism.
Positive rights, which would be like you have the right to free health care, you have the right to a living wage, preferred pronouns, hate speech laws, being a global citizen.
Defunding law enforcement, reparations, replacing historical monuments, the list goes on and on and on.
These are all about forwarding egalitarianism.
That's all they are.
That's what it's rooted in.
Now, as Christians, we know justice is the faithful application of God's law, irrespective of who a person is.
Biblical justice is retributive, meaning criminals are punished for their actual crime.
Today's social justice is redistributive, meaning it seeks to reallocate in order to create more equitable outcomes in society.
So the go to section for Christians on this is Exodus 23, in my mind.
Where God lays down his justice.
And he talks about the different groups that we should not be influenced by.
If it's your family and they're like, hey, give a break to so and so, it's a relative, don't listen to them.
If it's the alien and the sojourner, if it's a stranger and they don't have the way of navigating the culture because they're new and they don't have the widow maybe who doesn't have a husband protecting her, these kinds of things, the orphan who doesn't have parents, don't take advantage of those people, right?
Treat them equally, equal before the law.
It also says, though, in verse 3 of Exodus 23, you shall not be partial to a poor man in a dispute.
Just because they give you a story and they're poor and they're oppressed, don't be partial to that.
Don't let that sway you emotionally.
You need to apply justice faithfully.
Giving a man his due.
Questions to ask Is God's law just?
It's not egalitarian.
Does diversity, equity, and inclusion exist as part of the state of nature or the state of grace?
Now, this is more maybe heady, but where do those things actually exist?
Exist if they exist anywhere.
You often hear every tribe, tongue, nation, right?
Well, that's a heavenly reality, right?
And we have a preview of that in the church, but we live in the real world.
There's real hierarchies.
There's real things that exist here and relationships we have that are going to change when we enter the eternal state.
And that's fine.
God made it that way.
On what basis are humans entitled to social privileges?
Now, this is actually an interesting question.
For instance, what makes an American an American and able to access all of the privileges that come with that?
Is it they just live here?
Well, a lot of people.
Live here, they moved here from other places, they land here from England or somewhere.
Does that make you an American?
Does it make you an American because you happen to like baseball and apple pie?
I mean, what is it that makes you an American, right?
That's actually a harder question than I think.
So, we have in our country a process of citizenship where you have to actually share in American values.
You have to know something about this country, you have to value its history, you have to defend the liberties for which it stands, you have to take some ownership of the country that you're coming into, knowing that.
Men have bled and died.
Women have sacrificed for centuries to bring us to the point we are now and all the blessings we enjoy.
It doesn't just belong to everyone, it's not for the whole world.
And that's the distinction of nations and countries.
Are there certain hierarchies that should not be deconstructed?
Do they produce disparate social outcomes?
So, like, all right, if it's a Christian, you know, deconstruct the nation.
Well, what about the family?
It's just like, you know, the nation's kind of an extension of the family.
Do we just get rid of the family too?
Like, where does this train end?
Because this is a slippery slope we're on, a real one.
So, the last section of this that I want to end with the difference between Christianity and social justice is on the, and I wish I had more time, but let me just briefly give it to you.
The Gospel Beyond the Nation00:07:18
It's on redemption, it's on the different gospel that social justice promotes.
For secular social justice activists, human participation in achieving egalitarian equality is good news.
It means the world will eventually overcome inequalities through corporate human action and enter a utopian state.
And social justice activists within Christianity often merge the gospel's message of salvation by grace through faith with a law derived from the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
And such fusion merges elements of law with gospel.
And this is one thing Paul said we can't do.
That's Galatians.
So, J. Gresham Machen, by the way, just I want to tip a hat to him because he actually pointed this out.
He said, look, this is what's happening 100 years ago.
Same thing's happening again in a repackaged form.
And we can see this all over the place.
Desmond Tutu, right, just died here recently.
He believed that the Christian message was that God relied on us to help make this world all that God has dreamed of it being, which meant a diverse, equal, and inclusive place.
MLK Jr. believed just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet in the Greco Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom.
And he called his march in Selma the Third Great Awakening.
This is a gospel move, even with people who don't believe the gospel, right?
That's the crazy part of this.
I could go on and on in evangelical circles.
Richard Mao, Ron Sider, John Perkins, they said some of the same things.
They're kind of the grandparents of the movement we have now.
But today, who do we have?
We have Paul David Tripp.
He says, I was guilty of believing a truncated and incomplete gospel in 2018, which left out the gospel of God's justice.
Russell Moore preached the gospel through activism.
And he said that the civil rights movement failed to be a gospel people during the civil rights movement, Christians, because of our silence in the face of systemic sin.
And we could learn from MLK.
He was doing it right.
Anthony Bradley believes evangelicals have never had the gospel because of their failure to believe in black equality, apparently.
Eric Mason.
Eric Mason, I don't know if any of you have read Woke Church.
What a dog's breakfast.
I mean, this book is just a mess.
And I can't believe, I'm just going to call him out.
Lincoln Duncan wrote the forward to that, and he ought to know better.
And if you look at some of the things Lincoln Duncan said years ago, he would never have said what he said in the complimentary fashion he said to Eric Mason's book.
But Eric Mason thinks that Epiphany Fellowship, his church, can learn about how to apply the gospel from who?
From Rwanda's, and I'm probably going to botch this, but Gasana Court.
From South Africa's Racial Reconciliation Committee, Germany's denazification programs.
These are examples of promoting the gospel in society.
Really?
Because they're not even Christians.
Where do we come up with this stuff?
This is not the gospel of grace through Jesus Christ, salvation by grace.
So, what is the gospel?
It's really important, right?
The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.
That's the gospel.
Nevertheless, Galatians 2 16, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus so that we may be justified by the faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, since by the works of the law no flesh will be justified.
There's the gospel issue, gospel above all, it is gospel centered this and that, and you're never talking about the gospel, but somehow the gospel is attached to it.
This is the gospel.
Christ.
That's what it is.
It's God's work, not our work.
So you can't, as a Christian, because you fail in some work, that doesn't mean you're failing the gospel.
You only have half the gospel.
No.
No, it's Christ's work.
That's the gospel.
So, in closing, I just want to say in the book of Galatians, Paul talks about false brethren, the Pseudadelphos, who came in.
They subverted the church.
I think we're seeing the same thing.
And they said, look, you've got to have the gospel plus circumcision plus the law.
And he said, that's heresy.
That's anathema.
Curse that.
He said to Peter, you're giving them cover.
You're being confusing.
And you need to stop.
And Peter repented.
And that's what we need to do today when this kind of stuff comes into your church.
In fact, on the issue of circumcision, Paul was fine in one circumstance in Acts 16 promoting the circumcision of Timothy.
But he was not fine promoting the circumcision of Titus in Galatians.
Why?
Because they made it a gospel issue.
That was the whole difference.
So I want to end with this.
What does Christianity offer, right?
Social justice warriors picking apart our culture, our families, our very way of life.
And Christianity all along offered this forgiveness of sins, including injustice, real injustice.
Unity in Christ.
Gender, class, age, tribe, tongue, nation, all of it unified in Christ.
There is a unity there.
Those distinctions don't go away, but there's a unity that we have.
Fulfilling identity.
You're more than just power relationships, you're something way more than that, way more valuable than that.
Roles and responsibilities.
Social justice doesn't give us a clear insight on.
People are confused.
Am I a guy?
Who am I?
There's a purpose in Christianity.
There's function, a basis for rights.
They're found in responsibilities.
God's given different responsibilities to different people.
That's how we know what our rights should be.
Government, you can't tell me how to spank my kids or discipline them.
That's my responsibility, right?
It's not the pastor's job either.
In the same way, it's not the government's job to go and impose upon the pastor and tell them what they can and can't preach.
So, there's distinctions there.
We have a basis for rights, and we have a theology of culture.
There's a sense of belonging that Christians have.
We know the world's not our home ultimately, we know that there's a heavenly home.
We also know God put us here for such a time as this, for good works which he preordained.
And so we're not confused.
We're actually the stable ones in society as Christians.
And that's what we need to offer to the world.
There's a stability that we have.
And I would just suggest if anyone's looking to be practical, find your local college campus, open your home, go find whatever ministry and say, come on over, I got pizza.
And they'll flock.
You'll find people that, you know, all over your house that you're like, how did you get here?
And it's not just because they want pizza, it's because they want to see a stable home.
And most of them now haven't seen it.
Their parents are divorced.
They've moved all over the country.
They have no identity.
And you can show them the stability that comes from being in Christ.
Let's pray.
Father, thank you for all that you've given us in your word, that you've given us a clear word.
Lord, I know this is a lot to take in, and we just went so fast through so much.
But, Father, I pray this would spark in the minds of many here, Lord, a passion to go and to battle, Lord, in this world where the devil's fill is all around us.
And young people, especially, are being swept away into an alternative to the family and to the church.
And Lord, let us give them the real deal.
Let us show them, Lord, what it means to be in Christ and to be secure in Him.
Stability in Christ and Support00:00:56
In Jesus' name, Amen.
As a special thank you for your gift of any amount, we'll be happy to send you a free digital book from our store.
To access this offer, visit rightresponseministries.comslash offer.
We highly recommend Pastor Joel's book, Am I Truly Saved?
If you or someone you know has wrestled with doubts about the love of God, this would be a great resource.
As a reminder, to get this offer, go to rightresponseministries.comslash offer.
And thank you for your generous support.
Thanks so much for listening.
But real quick, before you go, do us a small favor, take a moment, and leave us a five star review if you enjoyed the show.
This is undoubtedly the best way that you can help us get this biblically faithful content to as many people as possible.