Pastor Andrew Isker and the Right Response Ministries host argue Western colonialism was a divine mandate to replace indigenous "savagery" with Christian order, citing pre-colonial human sacrifice in Benin City and Texas as proof of humanity's need for civilization. They reject modern revisionism, championing Christopher Columbus as a benevolent evangelist while warning that premature decolonization caused chaos in Rhodesia and Afghanistan. The discussion links declining Western IQ to family breakdowns, critiques feminism's legal risks for men, and urges financial support to protect their ministry from cancel culture, asserting that only sustained Christian colonization can restore global moral stability. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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In recent decades, a growing chorus of voices has attempted to vilify Western colonialism, painting it as a system of pure exploitation, cruelty, and oppression.
Figures such as Christopher Columbus, once hailed for their exploratory and pioneering spirit, have seen their reputations tarnished by claims of atrocities.
But was Western colonialism a pure and unmitigated evil?
No.
In fact, it was a largely Christian impulse and endeavor, and the world is much better for it.
And if the gospel is going to spread across the entire globe, Christian nations may need to colonize unchristian nations again.
Tune in now.
All right, I'm going to be honest with you.
This one, it's going behind the paywall.
It's not something we typically do.
In fact, thus far, every single piece of content that we've produced here at Right Response Ministries has eventually been made available to you for free publicly.
This is an exception, though.
First two episodes will launch publicly.
The next seven episodes will exclusively be available for our members at patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
Why?
Well, I'll give you the reason.
Because right now, the vast majority of evangelical Christians are not ready for the conversation that we have in these episodes.
And frankly, you and I both know that many of those individuals are actually bad faith actors who will seek to slice it up, take us out of context, put it out there for the World Wide Web in order to discredit this ministry and see to it that we're canceled.
And honestly, I'm not willing to let that happen.
What conversation am I even talking about?
I'm talking about a nine part series between myself.
And Pastor Andrew Isker on Israel.
The history, the scripture, the whole big shebang.
Check it out at patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
You can get every single episode available now, all of it ad free.
And here's a couple clips just to whet your appetite.
And so our entire moral framework is based around 1930 and 1940.
And every bad thing is Hitler, every failure to confront the bad thing is Neville Chamberlain.
And Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Vladimir Putin, Hitler, Donald Trump, Hitler.
That's the only moral framework that we have that is operable.
So the moment that a young man crosses the aisle and the don't believe your lying eyes rhetoric doesn't work any longer, and he's just noticed too much because it really is that lately out.
And he has nowhere else to go.
And he crosses the aisle.
Well, the moment he crosses the aisle, there's no reasonable, wise, mature leader over there.
You would just have the guys on the TV telling them, This is what the Bible says.
You have to believe this, right?
On the radio, the Christian radio stations, you'd only hear those guys preaching that particular thing.
When that is actually, when you look at all of church history, that's the minority view, the tiny minority view.
The rest of theological history in the church is the kind of stuff that we're saying.
Yeah, this one's a banger.
Again, go to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
To get all nine parts ad free right now, available today.
All right, welcome, gentlemen.
Good to see you again.
Yep, you too.
Good to be back.
Another Wednesday afternoon.
Glad to be here.
I just want to be the first one to belatedly wish you all a happy Indigenous Peoples Day on Monday.
I'm sorry, I forgot to text that to you.
No, no, happy Columbus Day.
So that's kind of the springboard for our topic today.
Before we get started, we do want to encourage and ask you all to like the video.
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And if you put questions in, we try in our third segment, we do three segments.
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Absolutely.
Yep.
All right.
So the topic on hand today is Was colonialism an unmitigated evil?
Our answer in the cold open was no.
So, how do we substantiate that claim?
What do we want to say about colonialism?
And like so many things in the West, there is always a shade of truth, right?
Because you can't tell outright lies.
You have to tell 90% lies.
And so, yes, of course, there were abuses, people died, there were slaughters and things like that throughout history.
But the point is, the point is, those things were already going on in a lot of the countries and nations and peoples that we're going to talk about.
And so, Our goal with this episode is to talk about how actually colonization, Christian colonization, which historically was different than pure conquest.
The record for most of history, for a lot of history, not all of it, but a lot of history had been a strong nation emerges or a strong empire emerges and it engages in conquest, right?
It engages in going in and just taking over, leaving nothing in its track.
And colonization, in the Western sense, was actually something of a novel idea where it was a desire to go in.
To acquire resources, but also to spread civilization, proper governance, proper order, proper social structure for a variety of reasons, whether it was so that those nations could be more productive and produce more goods that then could be brought back to Europe, or because of Christian missionary endeavors as well.
They wanted to instill some sort of moral order, godly society among other nations as they believed they were commanded to through the Great Commission.
And so, colonialism, Western colonialism, as it developed.
1600s, kind of 16, 1700s, especially.
I think England's first colony was 1604, Barbados, I think it was, a first official colony.
So, coming 1600s into the 1700s, Europe spreading out.
Our claim is that it was largely a positive force for good in the world, and it was in many ways the product of a Christian mindset and a Christian impulse.
One of the things that we want to do here at the beginning is one of the claims that is made about colonialism.
Is that these peoples who were oppressed or taken advantage of or harmed would have been totally fine.
They were living this kind of idyllic, Edenic lifestyle on their own.
They were one with nature.
They were in harmony with each other and with their neighbors.
They had good social order.
You know, it was kind of this golden age of indigenous peoples around the world.
And then all of a sudden, the colonizers show up and just because they hated everything that they saw, They just torched it all, right?
And so, one of the things that West did was he looked into a couple little vignettes and stories about what life was actually like in some of the places that the colonials, the colonists went to, and why it prompted them, in some cases, to say, We actually have a duty to these people to set up some sort of order because horrific things are happening here that we as Christian people cannot countenance, we cannot excuse.
And now that we've seen it, we can't turn a blind eye to.
So, the backdrop of colonialism was not.
Peaceful, harmonious living.
In a lot of places, it was really horrific and uncivilized and barbaric behavior.
That Wes is going to take us through a couple examples of that.
Yeah.
The Horror of Colonialism00:15:27
Just a warning.
I'm not going to try to be too graphic with it, but these are pretty horrific stories for the next five minutes.
If you have young kids, just be aware, maybe screen it before.
I just wanted to say, too, the Bible provides this framework and this foundation.
We know that from scriptures that men are wicked, that bound up in the heart is all types of malice and hatred and violence.
And so, using a Christian anthropology, even without the stories, you could know that unless the gospel comes to a land and doesn't work upon it, that what you're going to encounter there is not peace and harmony, man loving his fellow man horizontally, man worshiping God truly.
No, men are wicked since the fall, and it's the gospel and its grace that restore and perfect nature.
So, I'm going to read just two stories.
There are hundreds from here in the U.S. and the native tribes, from Africa, from the Far East, but I'm just going to read two.
So, this first one, this is what in present day Nigeria.
Benin city lies to the west of the Niger and is near the sprawling delta of that mighty river.
These days, Benin is just another ramshackle Nigerian town filled with mud walled houses and tiny shops.
But Benin is different from the others in its history.
All of southern Nigeria was a land of oppression, terror, and fiendish cruelty and of slave trades.
But Benin surpassed them all as the city of blood.
Hundreds of people were tortured to death regularly in Benin's Juju rituals.
These blood stained orgies went on for centuries and were only halted in 1897 when the British captured the city.
For the record, the reason they captured that city was because they had sent an envoy to enforce a treaty of 250 people.
They're mostly unarmed, and the natives there fell upon them, murdered all but two that managed to escape.
So the British had to come back in 1987 with about 5,000 men and actually retake the city and avenge the couple hundred men that had died and been murdered.
One man who entered the city in the British expedition gave this description Altars were covered with streams of dried human blood, the stench of which was awful.
Huge pits, 40 to 50 feet deep, were found.
Filled with human bodies, dead and dying, and a few wretched captives were rescued alive.
Everywhere, sacrificial trees on which the corpses of the latest victims everywhere, on each path, were newly sacrificed corpses.
On the principal sacrificial tree facing the main fate of the kingdom, the king's compound, there were two crucified bodies.
It is said that the crucifixion idea was all that remained of a Portuguese attempt early in the sixteenth century to convert Benin from Juju to Christianity.
A Portuguese seafarer had visited Benin in fourteen eighty five, and the first white man known to have done so.
Missionaries were sent out later, but the mission eventually had to be recalled because so many missionaries died.
Fetish worship and juju rituals returned, and in time, Christianity's only permanent solution was to give the Benin the crucifixion idea for its mass ritualistic murders.
This is a letter, notes on Nigeria, to a journal, the Institute of Current World Affairs.
So you're saying that the only Christian influence that survived, that they were like, yeah, we'll take that, was a new way to kill people?
No way to kill.
So a slew of missionaries went over there, many were killed.
And they did take ideas from them, and that was crucifixion is a particularly violent way for us to put our own fellow countrymen to death.
So that's Nigeria, that's across the ocean here in America.
So this is from a book, Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi.
Cahokia was a large Indian city located near where St. Louis, Missouri is today.
There, the natives practiced ritual human sacrifice in and around 950 AD.
So this would be about a thousand years after Christ.
You can visit the Cahokia Mound still today.
The ritual of sacrifice in Cahokia began with the selection process, where certain individuals, including teenage girls, were chosen for their symbolic significance.
These girls, perhaps virgins or of noble lineage, represented purity and fertility, qualities highly valued in ancient sacrificial rites.
In Mound 72, so a specific mound here in these burial hills, archaeologists unearthed a mass grave of 272 teenage girls and young women.
The bodies of the women, for the most part, showed no signs of blunt force trauma.
They were also all not buried at once.
Scholars estimate that based on how they were buried, at least one group of girls was sacrificed every generation, meaning there must have been something in their tradition that required a large number of young women to be sacrificed periodically.
The age and state of the women suggested that their sacrifice was a ritual surrounding fertility.
Given the position of some fingers digging in the soil, it is suggested that some victims might have been buried alive or suffocated.
One thing that struck me just reading that there's wickedness and there's violence, but there's also stupidity.
So, this is a tradition supposed to.
For fertility.
Lord, please, the gods, please bless us with children and mighty warriors.
And to bring that about, what we're going to do is we're going to take young women and we're going to kill them so they can't have any children.
That's what sin and demon worship, like this is what this is.
That's what sin and demon worship does to people.
It doesn't just make them violent and hateful and spiteful, it makes you dumb.
They do dumb things like that.
Right.
Sin, yeah, there's always a correlation throughout the scripture, especially the Proverbs, between sin, the wicked person, and the foolish person.
And likewise, Also, you know, the righteous person and the one who is wise.
And so there certainly is a correlation that as a person, as an individual, or especially over generations with a society as a whole, give themselves over and over, further and further to wickedness.
You know, even Romans chapter one, towards the end, it culminates, you know, as this progression of being handed over sovereignly by God, man choosing wickedness, God handing him over to further wickedness, him choosing that further wickedness, God handing him over to even further wickedness.
And it culminates in being inventors of evil, is one of the phrases that the Apostle Paul uses in Romans 1.
So I look at that as that there's a sense in which sin no longer satiates.
And so you're trying to invent even higher degrees of wickedness and evil in order to satiate your appetite for wickedness.
And then another phrase that's used in Romans 1 is God handed them over to a debased mind.
And the idea that you could have a brilliant mind.
That's brilliant in terms of intellect, but completely debased in terms of morals, I think is a misnomer.
I think that eventually one side does win out and the other side will follow.
So eventually over time, a person who is completely perverse and a person who is murderous and filled with malice and hungry for blood, and that person is not going to be.
Is not going to be brilliant.
That person is going to be, that perversion and that wickedness is going to warp the entirety of his mind.
And sin really does make you stupid.
The last thing that I want to say on that point, though, is so there is a stupidity in murdering children to get children, right?
So it's certainly illogical.
So there is a stupidity there.
At the same time, though, I want to say that I have no doubt that there really was stupidity among savages who were murderous and sinful.
But I also think, to be fair, that there's also an argument to be made for it not all being stupidity, but that part of the reason why human sacrifices and these kinds of things occurred is because they really were worshiping gods, lowercase g gods.
And I think that with the expansion and culmination of Christendom and the Christian gospel, moving from Jerusalem to Antioch and then from Antioch to Ethiopia and these different places, and then eventually this massive expansion of Christianity in the West and in Europe, I think that real demonic powers, the old gods, would flee.
I think of, I've said it before, but Jesus who gives.
It's not really a parable.
It's really more of just a description of what happens in the spirit realm.
He says that, you know, if somebody is exercised, a demon is exercised from a person, that it's utilizing this individual as a host and the demon is cast out, it first goes through arid places, or some translations say waterless places.
And so it's traveling through the air, but it's looking for a host, just like the demons that were cast out and said, send us into the pigs.
They'd prefer, you know, to be in a person, but they'd rather take pigs than.
Being in arid places.
And so, and there's a lot of arguments to be made for, you know, what is a demon?
Is it a fallen angel versus are these Nephilim spirits that didn't go above or below because they weren't entirely human?
And so they're trapped in the world and they were once embodied, but they died out in the flood.
And so they want to be embodied again.
And so being in arid places, going through the air in waterless places without a host, without a body, is torture for them.
So they want to have a host.
But the point is this Jesus says, if you cast a demon out, it goes through arid places.
But eventually, if the person now empty, the demon is gone, if the house, that person's self is swept clean and put in order, but it's not filled ultimately with the Spirit of God, then the demon will come back and not only himself, but he'll come back, find the house swept clean and put in order, and bring with him seven other friends, seven other demonic hosts, even worse than himself.
And so, my point is, I think that that's true, the words of Christ on an individual basis, but I think it's also true collectively.
And so, as whole nations and whole societies and cultures, Began to worship the triune God and began to apply all of Christ to all of life and every single facet of their culture.
Many, many demons were driven out.
I think many, many demons were driven out.
But the question is, where did they go?
Even these demons, with Jesus, they appeal to him and say, Have you come to torture us before the appointed time?
And Jesus doesn't really answer, but I think implicitly we can tell that the answer is no, that there is an appointed time and that that time is not yet.
And so they have to go somewhere.
So when demons are.
Expose from a whole society or country, I believe they actually geographically travel somewhere else.
And I think that many demons went even across oceans to the Americas.
And so I think that these people were down south to certain African, sub Saharan African nations and Nigeria and these places, and they spread out.
And so when these places were eventually colonized by Christians bringing the Christian gospel, I believe that there were very likely that there were demonic manifestations.
And just like the demons reacted when Jesus was coming or the apostles were coming, I have no doubt that demons began to, you know, their hosts foam at the mouth a little bit as they see Christopher Columbus coming in the name of the Lord.
Right?
Crosses, banners, banners, proclaiming the Christian gospel.
And so my point is one, sin does make you stupid, so stupid that your logic would be completely wrong.
You know, reversed and opposite, that like we're going to kill children, young teenage girls, in order to get more children.
On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that, oh, maybe it wasn't stupid.
Maybe it actually worked.
Maybe there really were these demon gods that actually had power, some power over fertility, and actually would grant the people's request if the people gave them blood.
But in either case, whether it's sin making them stupid or whether it's being in covenant and blood packs with demons, both options, I think we can all agree, are pretty bad.
We've talked about it before, but it's funny the two drugs that would be most associated with South America, North America, indigenous peoples would be Awayahasca and.
Peyote, which are both psychedelics, I would believe.
I think you would say the same thing that in the psychedelics realm, individuals who take them in and consume them and have these rituals, they're not just in their head only, right?
They're communing with spiritual realities.
And so, you have two broad obviously, within different tribes, there's differences, but South America, North America, inhabited by hundreds of years by people that consumed these drugs in ritual, communed with demons, with malevolent spirits, and those spirits giving to them their hatred for the image of God.
Satan hates the image of God and man, demons hate the image of God and man.
That's why.
Molech demanded these ancient gods throw your children into the fire, consume them.
Because in every child and in every human being, you can see, in a sense, this is what the scriptures say, what God is like.
You can see his justice and his rule and his glory and his magnanimity.
So you can see all that in the image of God.
These demons hate it.
And so then these cultures that communed with them, with ritual and dance and psychedelic and all those things, to your point, not at all unthinkable.
That part of that communion, part of that, the instructions, part of the This is what you should do, included massacre as many of your people as possible, efface and destroy the image of God as much as you can with the violence that you're capable of partaking in.
Yep.
And it was also the case, I think, of when the Spanish conquistadors discovered the Aztec Empire, right?
And the Aztec Empire had developed, it was a huge, massive empire, right?
And they weren't necessarily killing themselves, but they had.
Totally enslaved the people around them, and there were ritual days where the line of human sacrifices was over a mile long down the temple.
And when Cortez and some of these conquistadors saw this, actually, some of the tribes that had been subdued and were being exterminated by the Aztecs, they pled with the Spanish conquistadors, Please save us from this, we are being destroyed.
And so, they actually saw it as their Christian duty to end that extermination of those people.
I mean, can you imagine a mile?
Like, think about a mile long, right?
A mile long of one person lined up after another, after another for human sacrifice.
Right.
I think one of the legends or one of the bloodiest data that they recorded was something like 80,000.
That's the equivalent of like three times the size of your town, Hutto.
Yeah.
It's almost more than half of Georgetown, where I live.
An entire medium sized U.S. town sacrificed by these people.
Yeah.
So, one of the points that we're trying to make here is even before we look at.
Whether colonialism was a Christian impulse.
Historians, and this guy, Bruce Gilley, that I kind of relied on for the article this week, he points out that just he's not a believer, but just from a non Christian kind of objective point of view, many of the colonial structures of governance and rule were more fair, more efficient, more productive, and more fruitful than the systems of rule that existed.
Push and Pull of Colonization00:02:44
In those places before the colonizers arrived.
And many, he has a really interesting phrase.
He says that colonization spread as much through the push of the colonizers as much as the pull of those being colonized.
They were, in many cases, welcoming.
Please come here.
So, the way that it kind of initially set up was the British would go and they would establish a fort just for trading.
And they would build a fort with walls and it would be safe.
They would have it armed and then they would start to trade.
And they had to have it secured and armed because goods would be coming in, valuable goods that they were trading would be going out.
But many of the people, especially consider India, who were of the lower caste, started moving towards these forts because their life as the lowest caste in India was horrific.
And they would come and the British would offer them jobs.
And it may not have been a glamorous job, but it was better than what they had before.
They would offer them security.
They weren't going to be killed, they were going to be fed.
And so the Western impulse was welcomed into a lot of these lands as much as it was pushed into the lands by the West.
And even then, it started to transform society.
So, people who were part of the lowest caste in India all of a sudden were treated.
And that's one of the things that even a secular historian noticed.
He said Western European colonization differed from previous conquests because it offered not immediately, but the hope that eventually those barbaric pagan nations could become civilized.
And so, they saw even in the Africans or the Indians or the indigenous Americans.
Maybe some.
In fact, in the 1700s, Jonathan Edwards wrote that he hoped that centuries down the line, great works of theology would be written in Africa.
Right?
And so there was this Western colonialism perspective that said, okay, there is savagery, there is barbarism, and that's the case right now.
But over time, we are going to work to bring order, structure, religion, and stability to these places.
And Gilly talks about Western colonialism always had.
As its desire, preparation for proper self government, which I thought was really interesting.
Preparation for proper self government, because then they could be trade partners, they could be allies, they could be, you know, a lot of just from a purely non Christian point of view.
The Western colonial experiment and push was markedly different than what we had seen throughout all of history.
Preparing for Self-Government00:03:11
Yeah.
I was going to say, compared to the gospel accounts where Rome has occupied Judea and the broader region.
You don't see anything in there about Rome coming in.
It's like, you know, we want you to get to a point where you're self governed and you're running your own things.
It's, we're here.
We're going to crush you with taxes.
We're going to make your own people tax collectors to sell you out.
And that's really all we're interested in.
You're a province that we are going to manage.
We're going to put down slave revolts if they show up.
We're going to tax the living daylights out of you.
That's really it.
We have no design for your improvement.
We have no religious program for you.
You're just another annexed colony, like Alexandria, all of these great kingdoms.
That was the extent of their care for the provinces that they conquered.
Right.
Yeah, you're a tax reform.
Okay, well, let's go to our first commercial break and then we'll come right back.
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Hard Earned Money Matters00:16:06
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So, all right.
One of the comments in the chat a bit ago was who started the narrative of European colonialism as oppressors?
What was their motive?
I'm certainly not an expert.
I did some research for this week's article, but it came up actually largely after World War II.
And there were a couple things that I discovered as I researched.
One was this growing sense of an idyllic state of nature that had existed before the West showed up on the scene.
So the idea that what the West was doing was inherently bad and that what existed before them was inherently good.
And so, kind of this really not historical idea that the West had caused all the evils in these places where they had colonies.
Secondly, there was just a fatigue in Europe after the wars.
And so, when people and scholars and a lot of the Marxists began to say, well, you know, the problem is colonialism.
And so, foreign powers, Western imperial powers, need to divest themselves of their colonies.
There wasn't a lot of reserve or stamina left among some of the European nations to say, no, no, no, hold on.
Let's have an accurate telling here.
There was just a fatigue, a tiredness from the two world wars.
And there wasn't a lot of really even kind of moral fiber left for them to try to defend their record.
And so the decolonialism movement began around that time.
And there was a push very quickly for England and other European powers to divest themselves of the colonies.
And why, my question though is why that push?
What's the incentive?
What's the motive for Marxists or whoever to say, let's stop?
Well, you notice that the Marxists.
We're not returning those countries to a sort of native, primitive, pre Western form of government.
They're importing a Marxist government there.
And so, if we want to get rid, if we want to spread Marxism to Vietnam or to Korea or wherever it is, well, we've got to get rid of the imperial powers there because the imperial powers are Western, Christian, et cetera.
I see.
And so, I don't know if that was all of it.
I'm not well versed in it.
So, part of the motive being.
That we need you out so we can come in?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
That makes sense.
And the irony there, of course, we all see it, is that we're merely importing an even worse Western idea upon the world, which is Marxism.
And the really sad record, and maybe, Wes, you can talk about Rhodesia for a moment here, too.
But as the pressure was mounting and organizations like the UN and other organizations, League of Nations, were trying to get rid of the colonies and trying to kind of give them back over to self government, there's a record of many of them asking.
The British or the Belgium, the Belgian people, please don't leave yet.
We are not ready.
If you leave, our nation is going to descend into chaos and insanity again.
Makes me think of Afghanistan.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
And so I guess maybe even if everyone could have agreed at that time that colonialism is bad and that the colonies need to be given back, even if that was agreed upon, which it wasn't, numerous colonialism.
Colonies and nations, third world nations, were saying, We're not ready yet.
If you leave, there's going to be nothing to hold society together.
There's going to be nothing to hold violence or exploitation at bay and in check.
And in fact, that did happen in many of the colonies.
Yeah.
And it seems like, to me, it seems like, because part of you can start to think, okay, well, we don't want to have forever wars.
And I completely agree with that.
But these things just take so much more time than we're willing to admit.
Like, so, like earlier, you said that, you know, a lot of the Western impulse with, you know, colonization was, well, we don't want to just rule as, you know, some province of, you know, the monarch overseas indefinitely, but we're actually, our long term aim is that you would become self governing.
And I think that that's good, but I think we just forget how long it takes.
That's not a one political term project.
That's a generations and centuries project.
Exactly.
Because, like, that's, it's something that, um, Well, you know, like I talked for like an hour with Stephen Wolf today, and we were talking about, you know, the Constitutional Republic and our thoughts and ideas of what would happen, you know, in the near future for America, you know, here with our country.
And we were just, we both agreed that, you know, we think constitutional republics are great, you know, if you can have it.
But it's like, you know, you kind of like, it's like a husband and wife, you know, that have toddlers, you know, and everything in the house, you know, breaks, you know, like, yeah.
If you have like nice, you know, vase or something that's on a coffee table that's low, you know, and your two year old can, and it's like, you know, you look at each other and it's like, we, why can't we have nice things?
And the answer is, you can't have nice things in about five to 10 years.
Like, you can't have nice things right now because your house is filled with children.
Right.
Well, our house is, as a nation, is filled with children.
We are a country of degenerates and a constitutional republic is a nice thing.
And children, Aren't ready for nice things.
So, right now, it's like I would love to have a constitutional republic.
We used to have one, we don't anymore.
And anybody who thinks, well, you guys are advocating that we move away from a constitutional republic, you, friend, you just need to wake the heck up.
Nobody is advocating for moving it.
We're saying the constitution has been shredded already.
And we didn't do that.
The Christian right did not do that.
The left has done that.
That has been done, I mean, you can argue that's been done 130 years ago, but certainly since the 60s and the civil rights movement.
Read Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell.
There's so many different things that you can look at.
The Constitution is dead.
It's dead.
Not because I want it to be dead.
I love the Constitution.
I really do.
I mean, the First Amendment, I think even the First Amendment is fine because the first word is Congress.
And all you have to do is you don't even have to revise that.
You just get back to authorial intent.
I'd like to, at most, adopt a Christian preamble like the Apostles' Creed to the Constitution and some of the latter amendments, not the Bill of Rights, not the first 10.
I do think that we need to have a discussion about some of those.
Other than that, the Constitution is great.
I think, I honestly think, other than the Bible, which is inspired by God, it's one of the best documents ever written.
So we all love the Constitution.
We're just willing to call a spade a spade and say that these United States, the Constitution is fitting that it's in a museum because that's really all it is.
It's just something that people look at, it's a relic, but it's not actively being adhered to, not any longer.
There's all these.
Three letter agencies and all these different things that started either in the Cold War or in the 60s with the civil rights movement, all these different things that have been placed over the Constitution, right?
Because it's too obvious to just torch the Constitution.
Then you would have some pushback from America.
But instead, what they did was you put a lens on top of it, then a lens on top of the lens, and then a lens on top of that lens.
And by the time you get done with it, you're reading the Constitution and what was once beautiful and Christian.
And now, now is interpreted to say the very opposite of what it was intended to say.
And so, constitutional republics are great.
But back to my conversation with Stephen Wolfe, the point was we think that America like just sprung up naturally from the soil or something.
Like it just materialized out of the ether, you know, it just like in a vacuum, you know, there was nothing there.
And then, and then God said, let there be America.
Right.
And there was America, you know, and Benjamin Franklin, you know, and John Adams.
And that's not how it worked.
Like, so you think of like, well, constitutional republics, you know, there are guys on the right.
Who are entertaining the idea of a monarchy.
Okay, well, let's just, for a second, can we just recognize America didn't come out of the ether?
America came largely from Great Britain, which means America was, I would argue, a constitutional representative republic is the high watermark for a society.
And what was required to get there?
1,500 years of monarchy.
Yep.
5600 that the British Isles, that Christianity lands, begins to establish.
Yeah.
And I'm arguing all the way back to Constantine, but you can argue from Alfred, King Alfred.
So, so then in that case, like six, seven hundred years.
But no matter how you slice it, if I'm arguing from Constantine, then again, at the founding of America, it wouldn't be 1500, it'd be, you know, 1100, 1200.
But the point is a millennium, you know, like give or take, maybe a little less, maybe a little more, but, you know, without being too technical on the numbers, the point is it's not decades.
And it's arguably not even a couple of centuries, but it's a millennium.
So, how long does it take for people?
How long does it, in a home with a family, how long does it, Take to have a vase on the coffee table, you know, that's expensive and nice?
Five to 10 years, you know, like, you got to wait till you're out of the little years with the toddlers that are running around and then you can have nice things.
Well, what about societies as a whole?
How long does it take to have nice things?
And a constitutional republic is, I would say, a nice thing.
I like it.
I just, you know, but how long does it take?
Approximately a thousand years.
I would say, Joel, the only caveat there that I would add is the first person to develop a scientific theory studies his whole life too.
And then you can teach it to high schoolers after that.
Like, there is something to be said.
Because the work has been done.
That's right.
I do agree with that.
I do agree with that.
But I think that there's the intellectual formula or whatever you want to, you know, like, there's the Constitution has already been written and you don't have to write it again.
Like, so you're right.
Like, there are tools that are there and you don't have to make the tools anymore.
Right.
That's huge.
But there's also something to be said, not just for the system of government and for the tools and documents of government.
There's something to be said for the people.
And the people, that's my point.
The French and the Venezuelans basically copied the US Constitution.
Very different.
The French became totally godless.
Venezuela was Catholic, I guess.
But to your point, it's not the tool by itself.
And that's what I'm saying is that it's the tool.
So maybe we can cut that thousand years down.
I think you're right.
I think that's a fair point to say.
Well, it doesn't have to take a thousand years now that we've had it at least once.
Can be replicated a little bit faster in the future.
I agree.
But what I would say, my caution would be I think we can cut that time down and make it faster, but not too fast.
Because what we've seen, even just in latter American colonialism and the American empire, as we've tried to expand and import our sacred democracy in the Middle East and different countries, what we found is that the moment that we pull out, it reverts back to chaos.
And that's like, Like John Doyle, I've talked to him some offline, and I think he's a good guy.
I appreciate him and enjoy his videos with his YouTube channel.
But he recently did a video where he just was trying to get people to recognize, because we just, as Americans, we just don't get it.
We don't understand how fortunate we are and how blessed by God we've been.
And he was just saying, guys, you don't understand civilization, Western civilization is an anomaly.
Yep.
If you look at two things, the world as a whole, And then also human history as a whole.
So, if you look at the full scope of time and then the full scope of humanity across the globe, this is an anomaly.
It's almost like if you study all 6,000 years of history around the world, for the first 4,000 years, you would think if someone said, and then there's going to come a nation that's like this, and they're going to have cathedrals and ballet.
And opera.
Yeah.
And the Mona Lisa and the Sistine Chapel.
And you would like, if you were watching a time lapse of the first 4,000 years of every continent in the world and the way that society was developing, you'd say, no way.
No freaking way.
That's impossible.
And yet, what is impossible with man is possible with God.
It is a miracle.
It is a miracle.
And it's God's work and it's God's glory.
God did that.
And he did it with a particular people.
He did.
And that doesn't mean he can't do it with other people.
But the point is, he did it and it took time.
And the default, you know, like to reset to factory settings, like what John Doyle, the point he was making is the factory settings for a fallen world marred by sin, the factory settings is the Aztec Empire.
The factory settings is like, this is before, exactly, this is before, you know, wokeness.
It wasn't that long ago.
I'm 38 years old.
I'm not that old, little old, but like 38 years old.
And I remember learning in the sixth grade in Bay City Middle School, I grew up in Bay City.
Bay City was, it was like 20, I think 22 miles or 29 miles, something like that, from the Matagorda Beach.
We were in Matagorda County, one of the poor counties in Texas.
And I was going to public school in the sixth grade.
And in public school, but small town, 18,000 people population, small Texas, you know, rural town, even in the public school district, they, as they were teaching history in my history class, they apparently, you know, Bay City, Texas, In the 90s, they had not gotten the memo yet that we're supposed to be woke.
And so they were still teaching actual history.
Whoops.
And so what they taught was we're teaching Texas history.
And part of the Texas history for us, because we were in Matagorda County near the Gulf Coast, was learning about the indigenous people near the Gulf Coast of Texas before it was colonized by Westerners.
And so one of it was the Karankwa Indians.
And I thought it was so cool.
I'm a 12 year old and learning about the Karankwa.
Indians, I was like, this is fascinating.
Like, right here, you know, on the soil where we currently are, before Western civilization and these kinds of things happened, if you were alive today, you would be eaten.
And like, my history teacher is teaching me this.
Learning Indigenous Languages00:14:18
And the Karakwa Indians were, you like, well, I was about to say uniquely, but that's not the case.
They were common savages, common L for the entire world of all of human history until Western civilization.
Common L, it was universal.
They were savages like everybody else.
They sacrificed people and they ate them.
And they would even like take hearts out of their victims and eat the heart, you know.
And that's just what people do.
So, John Doyle, the point he was making is just that savagery and barbarism and anarchy is that's the factory setting.
That's right.
And he said, You think that you can just import the third world.
He said, If you import too much of the third world, you get the third world.
They bring the third world with them.
This is not, see, here's the thing.
So, we're not.
Pagan Norse god worshiping far right, you know, what like a little far right, but you know, but we're not those people.
And so, and so, because we're not those people in terms of our views, we don't think that the soil here in America is magical.
And that if you take someone from Haiti or 590,000 people from Haiti and drop them wholesale in America, that the second that their feet hit the soil, that all of a sudden they're going to become Thomas Sowell and you know, and Clarence Thomas.
It doesn't work like that.
And likewise, in terms of that's importing the third world, exporting the first world.
Likewise, that's my point this takes centuries because, yes, we have the tools.
So, maybe we can cut down that thousand years and make it a little faster than that.
But you're not going to cut it down to where it's like, hey, you know, 20 years and Afghanistan will be a constitutional republic.
No.
Yep.
Like, oh, you know, we'll give it 30 years in Haiti.
And no, like 30 years in Haiti.
And they're eating cats and eating dogs.
And that's on a good day.
And on the bad days, they're eating people and eating missionaries, like white missionaries going to Haiti and being killed and sometimes eaten.
These are not, this is not hyperbole.
This is.
This is the default factory settings of the world.
We have no idea how blessed we are.
And it's important.
I just, my point is, it's important to realize that this did not spring up overnight.
This is arguably from Constantine all the way till, you know, till the founding of America.
This is a centuries and centuries long project.
And I think we're destined to colonize the stars.
And I think we're destined also.
To colonize the world.
I think we are.
And when I say we're, I mean Christians.
I think Christian civilization.
Christian civilization.
God has given us dominion.
The world is ours.
It was given to Adam.
Adam forfeited it to Satan.
And then Jesus took it from Satan.
And he gave it back to his disciples, of which we are his disciples.
And so the world, dominion over the world, and I believe the cosmos, which includes even beyond the world and the stars, it belongs to Christians.
It really does.
And And so I think it is our destiny, but I think we have to realize that this is, it has to be one, uniquely Christian.
It has to be uniquely Christian.
And two, it's a long and tedious work.
You cannot just go and say, here are the principles of XYZ government, democracy, or whatever.
And I'm not a fan of democracy, but whatever.
You know, like, here are the principles of a government, and we're going to be here, you know, with boots on the ground for 20 years, and we're going to teach you, and then you guys can take it from there.
No, they can't.
No, they can't.
You know, what's interesting, Joel, is a lot of the early kind of proto colonial models, because initially it was not the British government or the Belgian government, it was private trade companies who were kind of going to Africa to look for resources to trade for and things like this.
A lot of the kind of management of the area where trade was developing was managed initially by these private organizations.
And in some ways, the British government stepped in because the private entities.
Number one, they weren't equipped to manage a people, to rule a people.
And number two, they weren't necessarily upholding the same principles of jurisprudence and legal fairness and things like that.
And we have this idea that the British government or the Spanish government, the French government, they decided to go there just to destroy.
But really, it was the opposite.
This was going to happen anyway.
Europe was developing ships, it was developing technology, guns and crossbows and all that sort of stuff.
It was going to spread around the world.
And I think especially the case can be made for the British government that they had to step in in a governmental sense because private trading companies were not equipped to handle the management of entire foreign countries.
Defend themselves.
Defend themselves.
Yeah, things like that.
The other thing I wanted to say that you're exactly right about is the early missionary efforts in the 1600s, 1700s.
They considered spreading the gospel to be almost synonymous with spreading Christian civilization.
And it's one of the reasons why they.
Begin translating the Bible into native languages.
And to do that, they, in often many cases, they had to write the language.
Which is great.
Think about that for a second.
We're talking about people who they're not just committing human sacrifices and cannibalism and all kinds of savagery.
But you're going in, you don't have to merely learn their language, but you have to learn their language and then find a way to translate it into a written form.
Because this people has existed for a very long time.
And they have still not compiled a written form of their language.
Everything is simply oral tradition.
It's not that they don't know how to read English, they don't know what reading is.
They don't know what writing is.
There's even broader concepts like sacrifice, covenant, even time.
I did a high level African philosophy course.
Time in those cultures was the near immediate and the far distant past.
So when you give them conditionals like going to heaven in the future, That if you place faith in Jesus at a later date when you die, you'll go to heaven.
You're even teaching that concept of covenant, the idea of someone being put in your place.
Yeah.
Because they'd show that's why the Jesus movie was kind of helpful, which is not a great evangelism tool, but at least it gave a visual that didn't exist in the language to try to get across.
This was for you.
This is what will happen if you trust in Jesus, et cetera.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there was one missionary named John Elliott.
He was in New England and he actually was called as a Presbyterian pastor.
Outside of Boston, and he maintained that presbytery his entire career.
But on the side, he was reaching out to this indigenous people in the area and he learned their language.
He translated it, he developed it, and he didn't just translate the Bible and the catechisms.
He started translating things like the Christian Commonwealth, right?
Because he's like, these people need laws, they need a foundation for how to order their society.
And, you know, obviously it wasn't going to happen immediately, right?
But he was already thinking it's not just the gospel, it's civilization, it's order.
It's logic, it's rule, it's productivity, it's accountability, it's structure, like all of these things.
Yeah.
I'm just sitting here thinking, I've had this thought before, but it just feels like clearer than I've ever had it before.
You know what I think is wicked?
I think it is so wicked that revisionist history of all these colonizers were oppressive and mean and malicious and went like everything that we're discussing.
When you think of the Karankwa Indians, or you think of the Aztecs, or you think of all this, and then you think of the Africans and savagey, and then you think of no written language, and you have to teach them, you have to create their language and put it in written form, and then teach that language to these people, and it's their own language, and you're having to teach it.
It's not that you just have to learn their language, you have to teach them their language and how to write it.
And the fact that we would read, The history of our ancestors in Western civilization, our fathers, in light of the fifth commandment, we were commanded to honor them.
And we would read someone like R.L. Dabney, you know, or we would read, you know, some of these guys and we would read some of the things that they said about other peoples.
And we would say, oh my goodness, how arrogant, how racist, how.
And it's like, we weren't there.
These guys, Um, all these, uh, you know, America is a very diverse nation, it is, in my opinion, a little bit too diverse in terms of continuing to import the third world.
But for heritage America and those who really can track back their family lines, multiple generations, and that includes more than just Europeans, more than just white people.
But the point is, you look at different people, different ethnicities within our nation, and many of them doing incredible things, wonderful things.
But then, together collectively, we then look back and scoff at guys from the 1700s and 1800s and the things that they wrote and the things that they.
Believed and thought because they had firsthand accounts and observed them.
And we say, how could they?
And when the reality is, the reality is that the reason why we are as developed as we are and are as civilized as we are and multiple different ethnicities able to live together and worship the triune God and all these things is because of Dabney.
It's because of Edwards working among indigenous.
Tribes, you know, he spent after he was wrongfully excommunicated from his church, he devoted the rest of his life as a missionary.
Like these guys, they saw the savagery, these guys, um, they saw the barbarism and they gave their lives for it.
And the reason why a lot of other, you know, the rising tide lifts all the ships as Christendom began to rise more and more and expand across the world, um, all these different peoples, uh, were caught up in the wake, and everybody, um, every society, every culture began to improve.
And not all equally, not every culture is equal, but every culture did improve because of the West and predominantly because of Christendom.
And so now we're sitting here at like a high watermark of looking at the most developed the world has ever been and all these different peoples who have gone from not even having a written language to now they're studying and going to Yale or American citizens and All these different, and then we look at our fathers and we say that they were the bad guys.
No, that's insane.
I mean, what would you do?
What would you think?
It's so easy to be arrogant and puffed up, but what would you think if you were born into a civilization in, let's say, the 1600s, and already from Constantine to the 1600s or even Alfred, you're still looking at 500 years, like a thousand to 500 years.
And you've got cathedrals and art and philosophy and the Christian religion.
And human sacrifice is a thought that you can't even fathom.
And you're sitting here, it's the 1600s, 1700s.
And then through technological innovation and developments, you begin to explore the rest of the world.
And as you begin to be introduced to other peoples in the rest of the world, and you've known cathedrals and fresh baked goods and ballet and operas and Shakespeare, and then you go to the rest of the world and you think that your people are superior?
Yeah, like that's not a crazy thought.
Now, why would be the question?
And how can we fix it?
Why and how can we help?
But the mere idea, the mere thought of superiority, it's quite an arrogant thing on this side of history after these guys who thought that they were superior.
And many of them did not mean anything malicious by that.
They're like, it's just a fact.
It's just a fact.
There's mud huts and then there's cathedrals, right?
We're learning Latin and we're having to write a language for them.
We eat baked goods, they eat each other.
Like you come in, you think you're superior because you objectively are.
And I want to argue by the grace of God.
You objectively are by the grace of God.
And then you write about that, and your thoughts are written down.
And you're the one who had to literally, in many cases, dodge spears thrown at you.
You're the one who, and you could have just wiped them all out, but you didn't because you wanted to spread the Christian gospel and you wanted to be benevolent and you actually protected them from themselves.
Superiority and Civilization00:07:38
And from neighboring tribes that were at war, constantly in endless wars, you actually were benevolent, you were kind.
I'm thinking of Columbus, you know, these kinds of guys.
You were benevolent, you were kind, altruistic, and more than all that, more important than all that, you were an evangelist.
And you shared with them the heart of Jesus Christ, while also just writing down objectively in a scientific way what you observed.
And what you observed at that time was that your people and your culture were superior, vastly superior to theirs.
And because of your work, your altruism, your benevolence, your kindness, and your Christian faith and work of evangelism among these people, over the next 400 years, 500 years, God in his mercy and grace, many of those people are elevated and cultures are radically elevated and developed.
And now, after they're developed, now we go back and say, Oh, wasn't it racist of Christopher Columbus to say XYZ?
Wasn't it racist of Downey's?
What a just a jerk thing of us to that.
That's just yeah, I like this one of the common themes I think people probably pick up with right response ministries.
But, um, man, I just don't know, I red pilled pretty hard in 2020.
And then a lot of people that that was it, you know, they're like, I'm you know, I'm just not going to be woke, you know, and um, I'm not going to be woke and I'm not going to wear a mask.
And and then that was kind of the extent of their journey.
And but for me, it was like 2020, like you know, I was already taking some red pills leading up to that, so that that might have been the problem, but I was already on this train.
And then 2020 was a big, a big red pill, but then they just kept coming.
And for me, like I'm at the point now where I feel like when I think of, you know, what are guiding principles for life?
You know, what are like strong, innate, core convictions?
One of them for me is I want for me and my wife and my children and my church that I pastor and my descendants and great grandchildren, I want us to be a family and a people that no matter how much gaslighting, no matter how subversive the psyop, no matter how convincing.
The narrative I want me and my house to be the type of people who cannot ever be convinced to hate our fathers.
Like, I feel like that's like that's a commitment.
Like, it was similar, it's not the same, not on the same level, not even close, but similar to when I became a Christian.
As for me and my house, we will fear the Lord.
Like, and my descendants in my house, we are going to serve the Lord.
And it doesn't matter what.
You know, James Lindsay, 1990s new atheist comes our way.
They're not going to be able to convince us to hate Jesus.
We love Jesus.
And in a similar fashion, a lower degree in terms of priority, but same principle, similar principle concept, as I'm older now, I feel a similar zeal in saying, I will not hate my fathers.
I just, I won't.
I won't hate them.
They were good men.
And the reality is they were flawed men, but they were good men and they're better than the men we have today.
And if we ever are going to criticize guys like Dabney, I think we're going to have to wait.
A couple generations.
We're going to have to wait a couple centuries until we have the caliber of men who are qualified to criticize Dabney.
Because currently, in 2024, with a bunch of queers, I'm sorry, the queer generation does not get to criticize Dabney.
So we're going to need better men for that.
I wanted to add, that was great.
I did want to add one note to the person who asked why the sudden anti colonial sentiment?
You mentioned some of the cultural changes, Britain holding together an empire.
But man, World War I and World War II, politically, it did a number on the way we used to think, but also theologically.
Towards the end of the 18th, 19th century, so late 1800s in the US, you have efforts beginning to revise the Westminster Standards to get more of God's love in there and less of his judgment.
The Enlightenment does a number.
You have humanism doing a number.
And then the horror of World War I that goes right against communism.
So then you have millions that die.
We think we're civilized, right?
So we're spreading the gospel, we're sending missionaries.
Like we've done this.
A horrific war tears apart Europe.
And then communism, you have half of the world shut off in communism.
And then 20 years later, you have World War II.
That's why the Swiss theologian Karl Barth writes the Epistle to the Romans.
And it's so radical because to men in those days, after all of that destruction, God was just something that was like very imminent, maybe a little bit better than us on his best day.
But he wasn't the transcendent, wholly different God.
And that's kind of Barth obviously overcorrects to the other end.
But theologically, too, we lost so much of what we had from the Reformation.
Due to the Enlightenment, due to humanism, due to these wars.
And so then you get to the 60s and people no longer believe we're a force for good.
So as Britain lets go of these colonies, as their empire shrinks, are we really that much of a force for good?
Is there really a great commission to be fulfilled?
Is it really worth holding all of that together?
So think about, too, how World War I and World War II and communism, how all of those then created the seedbed that by the 1950s, 1960s, war in Vietnam, war in Korea, empires lost.
It's like the British, just with eschatology, like that's when post mill.
Right.
Like, you can look at like post mill trending up, you know, like many of the Puritans were post millennial.
Right.
But then it's like, when, you know, when did post millennialism just become the minority eschatological position and the rise of dispensationalism is, yeah, Schofield and, yeah, that, you know, mid 1800s, that, that, you know, there's a rise there.
But then there's also this massive drop after two world wars.
Yeah.
You know, like, like everybody went to war, they saw incredible atrocities and a lot of people came back and they're like, there is no God.
Or they said the end is near, and there's a very reductionistic model of evangelism where they got this idea that if we just finish up, right, we brought the ball to the 10 yard line.
If we finish up and evangelize the rest of the world, like when the gospel has been heard by all the world, that's when the end will come.
Man, we're within like 10 years of it, so let's just, you know, top three things Jesus died for you.
You're a sinner.
Trust in him.
Let's go out and do that.
Destroyed our evangelism because we didn't give them a rooted, grounded, not just faith, but civilization and way of life.
It wasn't about that.
It was just like, let's make sure the savages ask Jesus into their heart.
And they can keep living in the mud huts.
Show them the Jesus movie.
Get some raised hands.
We did it.
And they can stay in the mud huts.
And maybe we'll also send some money and some doctors for immediate diseases.
If they have malaria, we'd like them to live.
But we're not thinking of how to transform them for the next 500 years.
We're thinking a personal Christian gospel for the soul and some immediate physical needs like some shoes, some food, and some vaccines, which turns out they didn't, but some kind of medical assistance.
But we weren't thinking about and how will they have highways.
150 years.
I'm not sure the missionaries themselves are the ones to do that.
No, I'm not saying they didn't plant that seed that we're evangelizing you, young man.
You became a Christian.
How is your nation going to be more civilized and Christian in four generations?
That seed was not planted.
Culling the Brightest Minds00:15:19
And then the best of them, the best of different peoples from all over the earth, they leave.
That's part of it too.
And you think of.
This happens.
This is a phenomenon.
I've been thinking about this too, but this is a phenomenon even like in our country.
So you can be on a global scale or even just a national scale.
So, like, have you, are you guys familiar with the concept of IQ shredders?
Shredders?
Yeah, shredders.
No.
So, like, it's, you know, the idea that basically like your highest functioning, highest caliber people are usually going to go to big cities.
And the reason why is because that's where the most opportunity within their field is going to be.
So, in terms of universities, universities are, you know, usually not in the middle of nowhere.
The most prestigious universities, Because you want to study under the most credentialed so and so professor who's written this many volumes on this topic or whatever.
He's going to be at this university, this big university.
It's not going to be in Timbuktu.
It's going to be in Manhattan or it's going to be Chicago or some.
And so that's the university level, but then also industry.
And so you're going to get a job.
And then you also just, the things that would attract high functioning, highly intelligent people like symphonies and operas.
Like Nathan over there in the closet, like his, you know, his, uh, Nathan's our technician, um, uh, his brother, you know, who, um, and Nathan is a family member, so we're cousins, and so, uh, his brother, my cousin, um, is an incredibly, incredibly gifted and talented and, and intelligent, um, pianist.
Um, but he, you know, his whole life until very recently, he, well, sadly, he finally had to kind of leave.
Could you just, you, you have to leave?
And part of that's just because of the decline of Western civilization.
Like, you can't be, He would play for symphonies and he would play, you know, he's played at the Lincoln Center, what is it, Nate?
The Lincoln Center, you know, all these different places.
And so his whole young adult life was, you know, after getting his PhD and all these, like, was just basically every six months to a year, he has to go somewhere else, you know, and he's following an orchestra around or following a symphony.
And it's only a few cities.
Like, he's going to be in New York, he's going to be, you know, in San Francisco.
He's going to, and my point is, he's going to be in, He's limited to a very, very limited scope.
He's not going to get to live in Georgetown.
He's not going to have any of his tenure be in Oklahoma.
We'll say that.
I love Oklahoma, but it's not going to happen.
Not with that, his vocation, his field.
And so you're going to those kinds of places, but then in those kinds of places, you're pursuing universities, pursuing certain fields, and then Pursuing arts and philosophy and all the and cuisine and all the kinds of things that big cities have to offer.
And, but then that kind of life, it wasn't always this way, but that kind of life became, it became incompatible with child rearing, with family, with marriage and children.
So these people pursuing PhDs, which take time.
So, like, you're not, you're in school until you're 27, 28, 29, 30 years old.
If you start early enough.
If you start early enough.
So, that whole time you're in school, you're not making money, you're accruing debt.
And then you've got to get out of debt.
And so now you're trying to get out of debt.
And let's be honest, like a lot of these people, like highly intelligent people, but it doesn't necessarily pay a lot.
Right.
Like, you know, if you're a piano performance guy, like, you know, you're working for Peanuts.
And why is that not a viable vocation?
Because C.A., we are a nation of degenerates.
People are listening to, I don't know, who do they listen to now?
Who's a.
They're listening to Taylor Swift.
Taylor Swift.
Yeah.
You know, or and and that might even be on the better end of you know, maybe the divine feminine and goddess worship, but uh, which is kind of a big one, but I you know, like hip hop and rap, you know, which um, it's like hip hop and this is just subjective, nope, uh, it's absolutely objective.
Hip hop and rap is inferior, it's absolutely inferior to opera, to symphonies, to um, and it is it is degrading, um, it absolutely has degraded western civilization, um, that like music actually does matter, it actually does matter.
And so we have debased our appetites.
And so there's no, my point is, there's no market.
There's no market for symphonies except for three or four cities in the country.
And even there, it's dying.
It's like 90 year old women.
And the only way it's surviving is because they were super rich and they have trust set up so that because they believe that the next generation they'd like to see one opera that their grandkids might be able to watch, which is somewhat of a noble endeavor.
Some of these rich benefactors that leave an endowment.
To the San Francisco Symphony.
But then here's the problem all the musicians there in the San Francisco Symphony, they're all queers.
And so none of them have kids, right?
So they play beautiful music for one generation and never have kids because they all want to have butt sex.
And then the symphony's dead.
And so my point is the IQ shredder kind of mentality is that basically it takes our best and our brightest and takes them to hellholes, blue, Progressive big city hellholes that are designed, they're literally designed to be incompatible with family, marriage, and children.
And so, your brightest, your 160, 170 IQ people don't procreate, they don't have children.
And who does have children is a bunch of farmers, God bless them.
And I'm not saying this as a negative thing, but a bunch of it's more blue collar people that will have families, will have children, will raise them in the fear and admonition of the Lord to where they actually value marriage and family, they have children.
And so there's something to be said for like within, and I don't know how it happened or why it happened.
It's something I'm exploring, but Western civilization, there was like a bell curve, I think, of even not just Christianity and the religious side of things, but even at the side of intelligence, of like growing within Western civilization more and more brilliant people, more innovations, more inventors, and more scientists and more philosophers.
And it's getting because marriage and family was normative.
Within the culture.
But now that academia and the higher institutions and elements of culture have normalized perpetual singleness, then your brightest people don't procreate.
And so now I think not only do we have actually a decline because we're under the replacement rate of reproduction, so not only a population decline, which presents its own problems, but also IQ, you can map it.
Lifespans have been going down.
We hit the high mark in Western.
Lifespans are decreasing for the first time in centuries.
And IQ is decreasing.
And I think what I just said, the IQ shredder mentality, is I think one has some explanatory power for that.
And then, of course, church attendance and religion is decreasing.
And then, over our up a young man, though.
Young men are an actual bright spot.
And that's because of people like us.
Yeah.
It really is.
I'm not trying to brag, but it's because of people like us.
Who said, We're not gonna be big Eva, we're not gonna disparage young men, and we're gonna talk to them.
But IQ declining, lifespan declining, and then overarching population declining.
And then on the macro scale, if you think of the world as a whole, so that's just within our country.
But then if you think of the world as a whole, your best and brightest, they leave Uganda.
It's one thing to colonize, that I think there's merits, especially Christian colonization.
You can look and say, There was a lot of great fruit.
And argue that it's part of the Christian gospel to go and do that again.
And it's not going to be a 20 year project, but centuries to eventually people are capable of self governance.
And that's a great thing.
That said, though, there's a difference between Christian colonization and secular culling.
Yep.
Culling is different than.
C U L L I N G. Culling, yeah.
Is different than colonization.
Colonization is pushing civilization into other geographic regions and nations and peoples.
Culling is coming in.
Doing something, getting some oil and killing one dictator so that a worse one can take his space, you know, and being there for 20 years and then leaving them with billions of dollars of weapon grade, you know, military grade weaponry to be sold on the black market, you know, that ultimately, like, so that we can now see, you know, Iran, my tax dollars, and Israel also somehow my tax dollars, you know, and so, you know, like, so that's what we do now.
Instead of 200 year colonization projects, we do 20 year.
In the name of benevolence, where we really just come in, we get some oil, we end a war, start a worse war, and then take the best and brightest out with us.
So the guys who helped us, who were translators, you know.
So they learned the language.
Who learned the language.
So now the best people come out.
And if we won't let them out, they try to get out by hanging on to the wheelwells of the airplane, like we saw, which is tragic, you know.
But my point is, and then Afghanistan just becomes a hellhole.
Yep.
Same as it was 20 years ago when we burned.
Billions of dollars.
Our sons died and our daughters, because we're wicked and we send daughters to war.
But our sons and daughters died and billions of taxpayers, we used the tax farm of America and wasted their money.
So, wasted lives, wasted money.
And the final thing ends up being just as bad.
If not, given time, I predict it might be worse.
And so, my point is, and the IQ shredder, you take a JD Vance.
Is a perfect example, actually.
And now, by God's grace, he's procreating.
I wish it was a Christian woman and not a Hindu woman.
Is she Christian?
Does she convert to falsehood?
She attends Mass with him.
But does she still maintain?
Is it like Vivek who's like, which God, Vivek?
Yeah.
Which of the three million gods?
I don't think she's converted.
And he got serious about his faith a little later.
So it really might be something where he realizes I married an unbeliever.
So we'll give it to him.
Yeah, so he probably did that without realizing that, you know.
But hopefully she converts if she hasn't already and becomes a Christian, and then great.
But my point is that most examples of your JD Vance type, like JD Vance is probably a pretty high IQ.
The dude seems sharp.
I bet he's probably 160, something like that.
140, 150.
Okay.
You get a little weird at 160.
Yeah, that's true.
The wheels still off the car.
You can't communicate with normal people.
That's true.
He talks to, ironically, much to the chagrin of the leftist, JD Vance.
Is not that weird.
Right.
If he was as weird as they said, then he might be like 171.
Yeah.
But so you're right.
But the point is, here's a brilliant guy from flyover country, and he's not going to stay there.
And he doesn't have to, because he's going to do, by God's grace, hopefully more good for flyover country than he would if he stayed.
But most people like that.
The point is, most people like that.
They move to the cities, they get vasectomies, they never marry, they hook up and sleep around.
And write for scientific journals, and then their high IQ dies with them.
And it's not biologically passed down to anybody else.
And then the rest of the world, same thing the best and the brightest, we take them out of their countries.
And so we actually are on a path right now.
So, yes, it's first and foremost about the gospel, it's first and foremost about religion, the spiritual aspect.
But that's one of the marks I think is quickly becoming.
Maybe it wasn't from the beginning, but maybe, like I said, I'm just red pilling.
I think that's becoming one of the marks of this ministry, of Right Response Ministries.
Is never over and against the gospel and the spiritual reality.
The world is not just stuff, but we're saying alongside it is nature.
And nature is just undefeated.
You're not going to defeat nature.
And Gnosticism does not work, and pietism does not work.
It's God's truth, which is a spiritual reality and timeless and eternal, but then in his created order and the natural peace.
It's not going away.
So, we have to find a way with the Christian gospel to work with nature and not against it, working with God's design and what the fabric that He's built into the world.
And when you look at that, it means, yeah, let's go and do the work of evangelists and preach the gospel.
But it also means, yeah, it's going to be 200 year works, not 20 year works.
It's going to be colonization.
It's going to be civilized.
And it can't just be IQ shredders and culling the best and brightest and then teaching them a godless worldview of secularism to where they don't procreate.
We are right now.
In a natural sense, we are on a death sentence.
We are spiraling into lower lifespans, lower populations, and lower IQ.
I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a win.
That sounds pretty negative.
And so those things have to be fixed.
And it's not going to be just the Romans Road in personal evangelism.
Like, that doesn't, like, these conversations have to happen.
These kinds of conversations of nature and civilization and IQ and government, and even getting into things like what we've talked about in the past, like talking about health and that we shouldn't be fat and these kinds of things over time.
There's a reason.
Last thing I say I know I've been talking too much.
Last thing I'll say is this the gospel affects everything.
We all say that.
We all believe that, but do we?
Like, because when I say the gospel affects everything, I'm talking highways and cathedrals and philosophy and art.
But I'm also talking about one thing that it certainly affects food, diet.
Religion is, or to say it the opposite way, diet, what people eat, what cultures eat, is incredibly religious.
Always has been.
Like in India, not everyone in India, but India is a pretty big place.
What, a billion people?
Diet as Religious Practice00:05:08
1.3.
Yeah.
1.3 billion people.
There are millions and millions and millions and millions of Indians who are using cow feces.
Not eating the cow, one of the most nutritious animals out there.
Yes, because of the feces.
Right.
So we're going to use the cow crap, but we won't eat the cow.
Right.
That's religious.
That's religious.
That is religious.
Cannibalism, like we already talked about, it was in worship of demons.
Religious.
So whether you're eating other people, Or eating or using cow feces, but missing the cow.
Like all these are religious things.
And so then back to my point, the gospel changing everything.
What happens, like honestly, like what happens over generations, generations, centuries of, I mean, one of the big things with England that made it superior, and it's all related to religion and Christianity.
It was as Christianity took over and there were innovations.
One great innovation was the sewer system.
Yep.
It turns out a whole lot of less people die if a society doesn't have trash laying everywhere.
Like we talk about, oh, our carbon emissions, and you know, it's just not fair, you know, because we have such a developed world, but we're making the world work.
Nah, you go watch a video of the rest of the world.
They're literally wading through bottles of trash.
Like they literally, like walking, it's just in the streets everywhere.
Everywhere.
No, it's not that, like, oh, but you know, but your pollution with your factories, they are burning trash.
And that's if they take the time to burn it.
Or not put it in the stuff.
It's just sitting there.
Or in the ocean.
Or in the ocean.
Or the US sending piles and islands of trash.
Islands of trash.
It's the Eastern world mostly.
Yes.
The non Christian world is a hellscape.
That is the factory settings.
The factory settings, apart from Jesus, is a hellscape.
And so at every level, my point is with communicable diseases, lack of sanitation, Lack of functioning sewer systems, lack of medicine, lack of nutrition, and all this being religious, eating cow dung instead of cow.
Pretty basic, but religious.
All of it is religious.
What does that do?
And you might say, well, that doesn't have an effect.
What does it do over 10 generations?
Yep.
Would that affect your great, great, great, great grandchildren's health?
Yes.
Could it affect, in terms of their health, could it affect their, like, every part of their body, including their brain?
Yes.
Could it affect their capacity with their mind to have high intellect and high functioning?
And yes.
Is Joel right now making an argument for the Christian gospel affecting IQs over the course of a millennium?
Yeah.
The Psalm 19, the law of the Lord makes wise the simple.
Yes.
Yes.
So we're playing for keeps, is what I'm saying.
This is the fight that we're fighting against Marxism, communism, the left, the third world, fighting for the third world, but also in some sense against the third world, but for their good and for their welfare.
This is.
This is a fight, win or keep, keep all.
This is a fight to the death.
This is not just so that people will go to church on Sunday.
But here's the thing it all starts with people going to church on Sunday.
The beachhead is the Christian church.
And out of that little thing that the West and our secular humanism has decided doesn't really matter, with the loss of that, has been the loss of everything else.
And we will fall just like the rest of the world.
And it's already happening with lifespans and IQs and population.
Unless we repent of our sins and turn to Christ.
And when we have, I think of what Jesus says to Peter you'll deny me three times.
Or he says, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you.
And when you have been strengthened, after you fall and you've been restored, then go and strengthen your brothers also.
The West needs to be restored.
My prayer is that Christ, in his priestly prayers, would sustain the Christian West.
Amen.
And that we would be strengthened.
Even though Satan has been actively seeking to sift us like wheat, but that we'd be strengthened by Christ, return to Christ, and after we have returned, that we would go and strengthen our brothers also.
Meaning our brothers in India, our brothers in all over the world, in Uganda and Burkina Faso, and that we would go and strengthen our brothers also, and that the entire world would rise and experience the kind of Christendom that, and knowing that for many of our brothers, it's going to take centuries, but that we would come alongside them as kind of like the scaffolding, you know, like the brace supports.
Ruin in Modern Marriage00:05:42
That they can't, and I'm not trying to be demeaning, but this is just the reality they can't do it.
They can't do it, not for a while.
But we can brace them until they can.
And that is what we've seen for 2,000 years of history and the spread of the Christian gospel, and with it, the spread of innovation, of civilization, of the very life from the dead.
And I want to see that happen again, but it's not going to happen until one, we repent of our sin and turn to the Christian gospel, and two, We have to be able to put on our big boy pants and have a serious talk about nature.
We have to be able to say, yeah, not all nations are currently equal.
Yeah, not all cultures are equal.
Yeah, cannibalism is inferior to souffles.
And until we can have serious conversations about these, and that's one of the marks, I hope, by God's grace of this ministry, whether it's, you know, I know that we upset people, you know, with the controversy, but.
We don't want to be unhinged.
We want to be godly.
We want to be rooted in scripture.
But we do want to be the kind of ministry that will talk about something that everyone else is thinking about, like Israel, or that everyone else is thinking about, like racism, or that everyone else, like we want to be able to talk about those things and talk about them in Christian ways, Christian ways, not pagan ways.
We don't want to talk about it the way that, you know, some of the, you know, a guy like, you know, like Bronze Age pervert, or, you know, I don't hold his views.
But he is noticing something that's real.
And so we want to go, or the red pill guys.
Right.
Like they're giving the wrong solutions, but they are right and recognizing, yeah, it is incredibly dangerous for a man to get married today and have kids.
And the big Eva solution to that, to just say, well, the red pill guy, you know, like that's not true.
They just don't get it.
They don't get it.
Women are great.
No, they're not.
No, they're not.
Women today, in general, not talking about every single woman, I married one.
She's great.
My wife is great.
Women are not.
My wife's great, your wife's great, your wife's great.
But women on the whole are not.
And my point is, men aren't doing too fabulous either.
But the point is that we are so drenched in feminism that right now it is you are taking the moment you say I do and choose to get married, you have just given over to this woman who has been indoctrinated by feminism from the womb.
You have just given to her legal and financial right over your entire life.
The entire court systems in our nation are geared towards her.
The entire financial incentives in our nation are geared towards her.
Everything's like you are literally casting yourself at her mercy.
And the red pill guys are right.
That is a massive risk.
She will be able to ruin your life.
You do it the moment you enter marriage, and that's when you start the process of casting yourself at her mercy.
And then, especially the moment you have a kid.
As soon as you have a kid, she has, if she wants to, if she wants to utilize this power legally, financially, culturally, the moment that you have a kid with her, she owns you.
She owns you and she can enslave you and ruin your life the rest of your life, cause you to go bankrupt, make sure that you can't ever be employed, make sure everything.
She can ruin your life.
That's where we currently live.
That's what we chose.
We chose feminism.
And so, the big Eva and mid Eva, for that matter, the typical evangelical Christian response to that is young men are just not going to, that doesn't help them to say, well, just servant leadership a little bit harder.
You know, just a happy wife, happy life, a little bit harder.
Just lay your life down for your bride as Christ laid, like a little bit harder.
No, we've got to also talk about the sins of women.
And we've got to call women to repentance.
And we've got to be able to talk about all these things.
And so, anyways, I just think that that to me is shaping up to be a consistent theme and a mark of why I think this ministry continues to grow and be a blessing to people.
Is because we're willing to talk about spiritual matters alongside that which is natural and recognizing that the two are not opposed to one another.
Grace does not destroy nature, but elevates and restores nature and having real conversations with nature about men and women, about different races, about like these things have to be talked about.
And you've got the right, far right wing.
Cesspool online that talks about them, but it's Christless, it's godless.
And then you've got the Christians, but they won't address it at all.
And when they do, it's just some little pietistic cliche that just drenched in apologies and caveats.
Yeah, that just glosses over and just says, you know, really everybody's the same.
You know, like the disparity between crime in America with different demographics, it's just, it's really just because at the end of the day, you know, Christians haven't done a good enough job.
And you know, it's mainly white people's fault, right?
It's like, is it though?
Is it can we talk about there are massive disparities?
We have to be able to talk about these things, and then we need to talk about them in Christian ways with a solution.
So, and colonization, I feel like fits into that theme.
Like, I feel like that's in our wheelhouse.
Building Wealth Through Banking00:02:37
You guys came up with the idea.
It's Columbus Day on Monday.
It's a perfect fit.
Like, that's, you know, everybody's saying, well, this is bad.
And I'm looking at the world, I'm saying, right about the time we started deciding that colonization was oppressive, it's also right about the time that IQs went down, lifespans went down, population went down, and things, you know, and we started, you know, having furries.
So, I think, you know, make colonization great again is how I'm thinking.
It's not just.
All right, we're not going to rebrand it to Indigenous Peoples Day.
We're not going to make Columbus a bad guy.
It's an actual positive celebration.
It's not just the negative.
Well, we're not going to tear him down.
We're not going to get rid of his statute.
We're not going to rename the holiday.
Don't do those things.
And positively, not all the time.
I think maybe one in about 365 days.
You know, thank God for the men.
Think about this set sail across an ocean with no idea what was on the other side.
Thank God for that spirit of adventure and for saying, and I'm going to do it and I'm going to bring the Christian gospel with me.
I'm going to bring, as it were, expand the kingdom of God.
I think it's good to take one day a year and say, Praise God for Columbus and for those men and for that spirit.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's do one more commercial break and then we'll just do some questions.
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Turning Away from God00:06:45
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All right.
Well, welcome back.
We had a good question.
So this is from Semper Reformanda.
He asked, why, I'm just kind of paraphrasing, why isn't it that the founders, why is it that the founders, they weren't more, yes, the American founders, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, why weren't they more explicit about the specifically Christian nature of Of the United States.
Like, doesn't that seem like if they were all Christian, we had this robust Christian founding, that in our Constitution, in our foundational documents, they would have imbued it with language about the Lord Jesus, language of the Trinity?
Like, wouldn't that have been more present?
And we were talking about it.
I think there's two kinds of things that cause them to have to take some broader language.
The only reference you would have to God would be in the Constitution that all men are created by their endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.
To get some of that language in there, the Creator.
That's about the only acknowledgement.
One of them is the Enlightenment.
There's coming from the French Revolution, there is a starting to have a turning away from God, a turning away from this idea that we can use reason to arrive at these conclusions of spiritual and natural things.
We don't need the scriptures.
So, first, it's well, they're kind of on par, right?
Scripture, nature, natural revelation, they teach us equally.
And then they kind of let the scripture fall out of the way, and it's all reason, and it's all nature, and it's all reasoning to these conclusions.
So, the Enlightenment does a number on that, and many of these men, some of these men, they felt Well, we don't need scriptures.
And deism is a valid premise for a nation.
So, some of the founders, some of them were seminarians, a small number.
Some of them were deists.
And that meant the second element.
So, first element, you have the Enlightenment, you have the receding of Christianity.
Second element is it's tough to bring coalitions of people together.
So, you had 39 signers out of the 55 delegates.
It's tough to get 40, almost 40 people to come together and agree.
And so, to broadly, Kind of get as many to sign, get the Constitution ratified.
I think there was definitely some concession, whereas those that had seminary degrees, those that were staunch Christians, which were many of them, Washington was a little too private about his faith.
I wish he had been more like Lee or Jackson.
But so some of the guys, they're willing just, hey, we can keep it broad.
But what this does though, because we don't have that language you see in some court cases like Holy Trinity versus United States, it's more difficult later on for the United States to hold to and justify that Christian foundation that we all know we had.
There were state churches in many of the original colonies.
We've been a Christian nation without question since our inception.
But that not getting the language in there, not explicitly calling out by name, not just the Creator, but the Lord Jesus Christ and the Triune God, those things they've cost us.
And now it's more deniable that, yeah, well, maybe we were always just kind of a broadly deistic, liberty, fraternity, justice for all kind of hodgepodge of people.
So it was a compromise, I would say, stemming apart from the Enlightenment, stemming apart from pragmatic needs.
And it goes on to hurt us in the long run.
I hear what you're saying, Wes.
I have just one counterfactual for that is that Canada was an explicitly Christian charter from the beginning.
I mean, they quote Psalm 72.
Their mission statement was to extend the glory of Christ from sea to sea.
Like that was in their original governmental charter.
But their charter doesn't have the teeth that the Constitution has.
I agree with that.
So my point is they had explicitly Christian language and they have fallen faster.
Than we did in a lot of ways.
So they're like, so Canada's like Big Eva.
And in the sense that, like, you know, wrapped in Christian language, but the actual principles didn't actually articulate and have as strong of a muscular defense for the freedom of men.
Whereas, like, the Constitution, the principles are all Christian, deeply Christian.
So, better, actually, theological principles in the American Constitution, but these better principles, but not.
But not the explicit Christian language of the Lord Jesus Christ, the triune God, those kinds of things.
And I've thought often, like, well, if only they had written explicit things like defining marriage.
And the reality is, the other reality is, evil and perverse ideas and wicked ideologies are always going to attack.
And part of what happened was we stopped being vigilant, right?
We stopped being vigilant.
And there's lots of reasons for that historically.
But I think that the founders also couldn't really imagine a time where the church wasn't fighting to keep people truly Christian.
I don't think they could have imagined a time when the church was flying rainbow flags and apostatizing en masse.
We're talking close to 98% of the United States was Christian in 1900.
124 years ago, basically, could have been your great grandparents.
99, 98, maybe it's 95% of the nation professing.
Now, regenerate would be a smaller subset of that, but probably the majority, I would have to think.
And what an incredible place.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I can answer this question.
So, Vlad Jakobetz, Jakobetz, was Columbus Jewish?
Columbus Was Jewish00:07:06
I'm 30 minutes into the stream.
I may have missed the answer.
I did a little bit of digging on this.
My background's in biology and genetics.
So, when we say, is someone of a certain lineage, of a certain race, we're looking for genetic markers.
And so, the big news about Columbus being Jewish was the presence of a haplogroup.
So, this will be like a group of genetics that are only signaturely carried with a.
Just certain individuals.
So, if only a certain lineage contains a certain genetic mutation and someone has that, then you could say at least part of their lineage was this.
As I understand it, the haplogroup that have been identified is certainly many people who are Jewish have it, but it's also more broadly European.
So, we would say no, it doesn't appear that he would have been.
There you go.
Columbus.
He's not a Jew.
That's science.
Yep.
All right.
Let's see.
Who is your best favorite colonizer in history?
Is another one of the questions.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Columbus is up there.
Columbus is pretty.
Let's just honor him.
It's Columbus Day.
Any other good questions, Nathan?
I think he already put them up there.
Okay.
All right.
Okay, cool.
All right.
Well, thank you guys so much for tuning in.
While I have your attention, we've got 130 people right now on the live stream.
Help us out.
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150 would be phenomenal.
So, right now, I know the stream is always a little bit behind.
So, by the time I'm saying this, you will be hearing it about three minutes from now or so.
But I'm going to keep saying it for a second.
And you guys are going to start liking the video, not just a thumbs up as a comment in the chat, although that helps too.
So, if you want to be active in the chat, that certainly helps.
If you want to put in a comment for the algorithm, we appreciate it.
But right now, there it comes.
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Give us the thumbs up.
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And, guys, Again, we're not trying to be prideful.
We're not trying to be arrogant.
We're made from the dust.
There's nothing special about the three men in this room.
This is not making much of Joel, Wes, and Michael.
This is making much of Jesus on the one hand.
And on the second, this is making little of the evangelical church as a whole.
Guys, it is rough out there.
You guys know it.
You guys, you follow this ministry because you can't find a church, you know, or you follow this ministry because nobody else talks about these kinds of things.
And by God's grace, you know what?
There are, you know, if we were to do a follow Friday, we'll call it a follow Wednesday.
But John Harris, Talks about these kinds of things.
Eddie Robles talks about these kinds of things.
Stephen Wolf talks about these kinds of things.
Let me think, who else?
Andrew Whisker and CJ Engel on Contra Mundum.
Check them out.
Stephen Wolf has a YouTube channel now.
So look up Stephen Wolf.
And just today, when I was talking to him, he's asking me for some YouTube advice.
But help him out.
The channel is small, but Stephen Wolf is.
He's a sharp guy.
Gosh, he's brilliant and well worth your time.
So check out Stephen Wolf.
Check out Contra Mundum.
Check out Conversations.
Uh, that matter with John Harris.
Check out Eddie Robles.
Uh, who else can we plug?
Who's some other Center for Baptist Leadership?
Center for Baptist Leadership with William Wolf.
He's doing great work.
Check him out.
Um, has Dusty Deavers started his podcast yet?
He's gonna for a while, I think.
But so if he ever does, then check out Dusty Deavers.
If not, uh, feel free to move to Oklahoma and vote for Dusty Deavers.
Uh, he'll be up for re election soon.
Um, Backwoods Belief, Backwoods Belief.
If they would, Jeff Wright put out an episode, yeah, they do from like once a month, not super often, but.
Backwoods belief.
These guys, you know, there's about, I don't know, 50 of us, Wes, probably like 50 of us that like, we try to collaborate and stay in relationships, stay in friendship, and sharpen one another.
Iron sharpens iron.
And there's about 50 guys, and we've just named some of them, but there are others that I would say, man, when I think about these names, these men, I feel particularly bullish.
On American Christianity.
When I look outside of those 50 names, I get really, really discouraged, really discouraged.
But there are some good guys.
So we've got 92 people right now.
Guys, that's pretty weak.
Help us out.
Go ahead and like the video, subscribe to the channel.
Again, subscribe to the channel and click the bell.
That way you'll be notified.
So what we do is every Wednesday at about 4 p.m. Central Time, we do the live stream.
Every Friday, there's some off days in between, but typically every Friday, We do our Friday special.
Right now, we've got running me and Isker on all things Israel, getting really just into the covenant theology and dealing with biblical text.
And so that's on Fridays at 4 p.m.
A lot of them, though, are behind the paywall.
You'll have to become a member at Patreon.
So go over to patreon.com forward slash right response ministries.
But that's Wednesdays and Fridays.
And then Mondays, I do an interview with different guys.
And that's, again, 4 p.m.
So it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, three shows a week, 4 p.m. Central Time.
If you click the bell, you'll be notified all three times every week.
When our show comes out, we want you guys to be able to follow along.
Also, if you're able to, we ask that you would be willing to donate and help support this ministry.
A one time gift makes a world of difference.
But the biggest difference is, honestly, you guys who are willing to sign up and support us monthly.
To do that, I think, Nathan, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's rightresponseministries.com forward slash donate.
Right response ministries.com forward slash donate, and you'll find there's a couple different options to where you can be a monthly supporter.
You even get a gift.
We'll send you a free book.
We'll send you a shirt, Right Response shirt.
And by supporting us monthly, it helps tremendously.
We're in the works right now.
We've got some big things, some of the things I can't really talk about yet, but we're building a new studio.
We're excited about that.
We're hiring, well, Michael and Wes.
We want to compensate them.
Nathan needs a raise, and we want to get an administrator, a part time administrator with Right Response to help us.
And so, you know, we're trying to continue to grow.
But basically, what I've noticed, eventually I want to do a whole episode on this.
I told you guys about this, but I'll just tease it right here at the end.
I kind of want to do like an episode where the thumbnail, it's like a silhouette, you know, with a question mark, and it says the most, like the most valuable person or that, like, you know, MVP in all of Christendom, you know, or in the new Christendom.
And basically, the case that I would make is, and I know it sounds sappy, but the case I would make is it's you.
Risking Cancel Culture00:15:26
And what I mean by that is, The total state that, like, Orrin McIntyre talks about, the regime, the left.
I mean, it's just, it's captured everything.
And basically, here's the deal it really is playing for keeps.
I'm not trying to use hyperbolic language or be exaggeratory, but really being objective here.
If you say the kinds of things you guys have seen it just the last week and a half.
And before that, you know, if you go back, so, you know, two weeks ago, it's this, you know, and then two months ago, it's Joel talking about white and black doctors, you know, like, there's always something.
It's always something.
And all the things that I'm saying are biblically defensible.
They're not racist.
They're not anti Semitic.
They're not misogynist, right?
Like the first thing that I first went viral for was telling my wife that I didn't want her to read a particular book.
And the larger point was talking about different spheres of authority.
The state has authority over a lot of people, but not that much authority.
And then, you know, a church, pastors have authority over less people, but a little bit more authority.
And in a home, a father and a husband have authority.
Has a lot of authority and not just authority but also a responsibility, a duty to protect, uh, to provide and protect, and that's physical and spiritual.
And part of that spiritual protection is being, um, observant and monitoring, uh, what is the spiritual intake, uh, the spiritual diet of my children and my wife and my family.
Well, I said that, and um, and it went viral because you know, there was a pastor who was, um, losing the debate about Christian nationalism on the merits of the theological arguments, and when you can't, you know.
Beat me in a theological argument.
What you do is you take something that's not related to it whatsoever and try to make that go viral.
And so that was Andy Woodard.
And so he shared that clip because he was losing the conversation about Christian nationalism in my book, Fight by Flight.
And then, you know, that put me on the map and people started canceling me because of that.
And then, you know, since then, he's completely, you know, blown up his life and is no longer pastoring that church.
And it's really sad.
Less than a year from a front runner in the anti Christian nationalism discourse.
And now, Extremely disqualified from ministry.
Yeah.
From ministry.
I'd like to say rare L, but that would be a common L. That's a common, common one.
So, lesson from that is one, be faithful to the Lord and your family.
And lesson number two, don't be an idiot and try to blow up other people's ministries because vengeance belongs to the Lord and he will have it.
I left that one to the Lord.
Yeah.
And, whew.
I probably should have taken vengeance on my own.
That's what I'm saying, yeah.
Because it would have been more merciful.
It would have been far more merciful.
But I left that one to the Lord, and the Lord has crushed Andy.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.
So, all that being said, the point is this we are constantly in the crosshairs of being canceled.
Constantly.
Whether it's, hey, husbands have authority over the spiritual diet of their wives and children.
Radical, misogynist, canceled, right?
Or, hey, DEI and affirmative action has radically transformed.
The way Americans have to think about merit and whether or not people are qualifying for positions radical, racist, canceled at every single level.
Um, people, you get if you can't, if you haven't picked that up, guys, I really again, I'm not trying to be self serving and I'm not trying to be hyperbolic.
Have you noticed maybe you can just put in the chat right now, help me realize I'm not crazy.
Have you noticed that uh, there might be a few people, or perhaps let's say a few million people.
That want to cancel right response ministries?
Am I crazy?
Nope.
Is that fair?
I think that's pretty fair.
I think they're trying to keep us alive.
They keep putting our stuff out there.
They keep publishing it for free.
That's true.
But the point is like, and here's the deal why would they do it?
Oh, you know, here's the point I'm trying to make.
They're trying to do it because it works.
It works.
That's true.
On the one hand, it's like, oh, well, you guys are just getting mileage and this and that and the other.
It's like, yeah, we're getting mileage and people are coming to us.
But 12 second clips taken out of context really do damage.
They really do.
And so, for every person who sees that in good faith and then goes and watches the full length video and realizes, oh, he's just a Christian who thinks like every other Christian has thought in the entire world until the 1960s, you know, like, oh, like, and all this is perfectly defensible.
And oh, he gave that clarification and that, you know, disclaimer and that caveat.
For every person who actually comes and watches the full video, at least 100, if not 1,000 people don't.
And they just write you off.
And those people, here's the point those people don't want us to be employed.
Right.
Those people, we're talking about wicked people.
And yes, about half of them profess to be Christians, sadly.
So I'm talking about even Christian people.
There are thousands, tens of thousands of Christians who would love if I couldn't feed my children.
They would absolutely love it.
Like they would be elated, they would be laughing and giggling with glee.
Christians, if my wife Megan and my children starved, like they won't say it out loud, but that's their heart.
They hate this ministry.
They hate God's word.
They hate the truth, the eternal, universal truth of God being applied in practical ways to the topics that matter.
Because, and here's the deal here's the thing that is so sad and pathetic.
It's weak.
It's weak.
The thing that they hate, they hate me for, they will, because we will win.
They will be saying those things as though they always believed them themselves.
Right.
And just five to 10 years from now.
Right.
And yet they wanted my family to be destroyed five to 10 years earlier for saying it.
I'll put it like this they always killed the prophets in Israel.
But the people of Israel didn't kill the prophets because the prophets were right, they killed the prophets because the prophets were first.
Everybody, it wasn't because, because later on, everybody claimed to agree with Jeremiah.
Everybody claimed to agree with Isaiah.
Everybody, they built tombs and monuments to the problem.
It's not being right that gets you into trouble, it's being first.
That's my point.
And here's the deal you want all your mid Eva favorite pastors and ministries, which I'm trying to be charitable today, so I'm not going to name some of them, you want them to come out and take some strong stands.
I'll tell you how it's going to happen.
It's going to happen by us first going and clearing the room.
Special ops go in, clear the room, and then everybody else can follow up.
So we're going to go in with night vision.
Under the cover of darkness, specially trained with real courage and take out the baddies and go into the real risk, the real danger when it's actually costly to do so.
And once we've cleared the room and once it's safe for Mid Eva to come in, they will.
And then once Mid Eva has come in, then Big Eva will come in.
So you want to win?
You need Mid Eva to step in.
Mid Eva won't step in until we've already dived into uncharted waters.
That were dangerous and tumultuous and cleared away and acted in real courage and made it safe.
And here's the whole point who's the most valuable, the MVP of the new Christendom?
Because it sounds like, Joel, you're saying it's you guys.
No, it's you.
Here's the deal we can only do what we do because everyone right now wants to cancel us.
But you can actually make us bulletproof.
You want to win?
If you want to win, we need numbers.
You know how you get the numbers?
First, you get some guys to say it.
And then in five years, everyone will say it.
This is what happened in the push against wokeness.
This is what happened in the push against COVID.
This is what will always happen some guys say it, then everyone says it.
But for the guys to say it, they have to be able to say it.
And if they say it and get crushed a week later and disappear, then that's the sign.
That's like Noah with the ark sending out the dove and it never comes back, you know?
Or.
You know, it's not a good analogy.
It drowns, right?
It's the canary in the coal mine.
You know, it's that's your sign.
That's your sign that, oh, I guess it's not time.
I guess it's too risky.
I guess it's too dangerous to say these things because I watched the right response say it and they got crushed and we never heard from them again.
Well, here's the commitment that I'm making to you I won't quit.
I won't quit.
And we will continue to have the hard conversations that need to be had.
But what we're asking from you is will you collectively, And anonymously, you can do it.
See, you get to.
I'm the face, so I'm the guy who risks getting punched in the face when I walk down the street because 10 million people hate me.
Okay, and I will bear that risk.
What we're asking from you is that you will financially help us to bear that risk because big evil will come if mid evil holds the line, and mid evil will come if we go and clear the room, and we can keep clearing the room and be bulletproof and never canceled if you won't let.
If you won't let the demons cancel us, that's all it takes.
Like, if we could get my goal, if we can, and I'm not saying it's going to happen next year, but over time, my goal is that both Wes and Michael could be full time employed with Right Response, and that it would predominantly be individual donors, the salt of the earth, the widow's mites collected, all you far right wing anons, you know.
Who are starting your own business and raising your kids and working hard and blue collar guys that you pitching in $100 a month?
Especially, I'll just say this, especially you guys who don't have a church.
Number one, first, get a church.
If there's no church in town, plant one.
If you're not qualified to plant one, then you have to move.
I don't care what it costs.
Being churchless indefinitely is not a viable option.
That has not been afforded to you by Jesus Christ in his word.
You don't get to do that.
You don't.
So, you guys who don't have a church, get a church.
Find one.
Well, Joel, I've looked in a 60 mile radius.
Now do 70.
We've got people driving two and a half hours to our church.
So, drive further, move.
Or start a church, but you can't be churchless.
That said.
So that's first and foremost.
That said.
Secondly, until you get a church, though, why are you not supporting this ministry?
You email me.
You tell me how much you appreciate us as you're churchless.
So why don't you?
I understand the economy is not great.
I understand it's difficult.
And we're not a church.
And so there's not a biblical obligation to tithe.
So while you're churchless, why don't you give?
Some of the money that you would be tithing to this ministry and save the rest for your kids.
And then also, C.8, be active and diligent and find a church and stop being churchless.
So, those kind of things.
My point is if you guys supported us monthly, then the MVP, as far as I'm concerned, of the new Christendom is you.
You guys in other ministries like Brian Sylvain and Eric Kahn, like they are saying things that need to be said, and everyone wants to cancel them.
People hate Eric Kahn, they hate Stephen Wolf.
They hate him.
And I'm talking about good people.
Christians, they hate Stephen Wolf.
They hate Andrew Isker.
They hate Eric Kahn.
They hate Joel Webbin.
They hate John Harris.
They hate A.D. Robles.
They want us crushed.
And the reality is, we live, like we've talked about, the spiritual, but also the natural.
We live in a real world.
And the reality is that it is possible to crush us, it is possible to leverage influence and to actually financially crush someone to where.
They can't, they have to be silenced.
Like, canceling is a real thing.
But it's not possible if you guys just say, We won't let it happen.
Like, we are going to rally around not just watching and benefiting ourselves, but we're actually going to make this a mutually beneficial relationship.
You guys have been a blessing to us.
And so we're going to commit in 2025 to be a monthly blessing to you.
And maybe it's 20 bucks.
And maybe for some of you, it's 200 bucks.
But If enough of you guys who follow this ministry and claim to have been so blessed by it do that, then guess what?
Everybody else who's trying to cancel us can pound sand.
They can just, they can, they can squeal and screech and wail into the void as much as they want.
But they can't, they can, this ministry can't be stopped if individual Christians like you say, we won't let it be stopped.
This ministry will end the second that you say, we're going to let it end.
But if you say no, we're not going to let that happen.
We're going to make sure that these guys continue to have a voice, then we'll continue to talk.
Our commitment is we'll continue to talk about these things and we'll do it with courage.
But we can only do it if you guys help to insulate us.
Because apart from that, what I'm saying is apart from that, the stuff that we're talking about, it's like, well, why don't you guys just work another job?
Because the stuff that we're talking about, when it goes viral to 2 million people, it makes you unemployable.
You can't get another job.
That's what they want to do.
What the left regime and sadly many Christians and many reformed Christians, you know who I'm talking about, that's what they want to do.
They want to make us unemployable.
They want to, they actually, the left starts screeching and then they join the left.
And they want to ultimately drop an anvil and crush this ministry to where we, like, it's just too high.
Because at the end of the day, our obligation is to our wives and children.
If we have to choose, we're going to choose our families.
And so, yeah.
If I have to choose, then I'm going to go into obscurity and I'm going to drive a FedEx truck or whatever and do what I have to do to feed my kids, because that's what God calls me to do.
I only get to do this if enough people commit to financially insulating me.
Choosing Family Over Society00:02:43
That's it, that's how it works.
And these guys only get to do this if people will commit to financially insulating them.
Because if not, then it's suicide.
And it's actually unbiblical to just put your neck out.
And not just to be killed, but financially destroyed and blacklisted when you have a wife and children that you're obligated to defend and protect and provide for.
So we will be as courageous as you will be generous.
And that's kind of the way it works.
So, you guys have anything you want to say?
No, that was good.
It's good.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think that that eventually should be like a full episode, like even mapping out some of the statistics and cancel culture and how it like, Because you can see, like, the guys who are invulnerable.
They're like, they just can't be immune to canceling.
They're the guys who have the most committed followers who just.
I talked to Stephen Wolf at the Ogden conference, and he's like, I'm untouchable.
Like, the way his life is set up, I won't give details.
There's nothing anyone can do to him.
So he's able to write any book he wants, to say anything he wants on Twitter, to go on his channel, on his podcast, and say anything because nobody can touch.
Any aspect of his life and significantly affect it.
That's the ideal, I would say, for every Christian.
That's the ideal.
And there's so many guys, I mean, it really is that simple.
It's sad, but this is the truth.
So many guys who are not, it's like, why?
I thought that guy was so solid.
Why did he choke on this?
Why did he cower on this?
Because he's not insulated.
That's a big part of it.
Some of these guys that you admire that are so courageous, that's one of the common denominators.
Is that, yes, part of it is just sanctification and spiritually that they love the Lord and these kinds of things.
But also, part of it is one thing that they all have in common is like Stephen Wolfe, they live on land.
They're a little bit away from society.
Like geographically, they're insulated.
Financially, they have some kind of, they either own their own business.
Like Andrew Isker, you know, like how is he so courageous?
Well, he works for Andrew Torba.
And half of his salary is going to be covered by Gap.
And now the other half is going to be with the new founding guys and going to Ridge Runner and, you know, and those kinds of like, so like those things make you bulletproof.
Living Insulated on Land00:00:19
Without those things, what you get is Russell Moore.
And you get Russell Moore saying, well, I'm going to go to the people, you know, who will promise to take care of it.
You get David French, you get, you know, The right kind of Francis Collins.
Yeah.
So you guys get it.
That's enough.
But thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.