Based Camp - Redeemed Zoomer： Is it Worth Trying to Save the Mainline Churches Anymore？

00:00:00.000 there was like a time in my life where I realized that the churches were to the left of like

00:00:06.540 atheism at that point. And I was like, how, how did they pull off this heist?

00:00:12.260 Conservatives always give up and run away from institutions. And we make fun of liberals as

00:00:17.320 being snowflakes. But in the past hundred years, progressives have been much more crusader. I've

00:00:22.400 actually noticed that like my, my progressive lady pastor would talk about how she did interfaith

00:00:28.280 dialogues with like progressive rabbis and progressive Muslim imams. And what I was

00:00:33.180 thinking is that's not an interfaith dialogue. You all have the same exact faith, which is just

00:00:37.620 Unitarian Universalist progressivism. A real interfaith dialogue would be like a Christian

00:00:43.300 fundamentalist Baptist debating like a fundamentalist Muslim debating an Orthodox Jew. That would be an

00:00:50.140 actual interfaith dialogue. A bunch of progressive atheists LARPing as the different, the different

00:00:56.040 religions. That's not an interfaith dialogue. Would you like to know more?

00:00:59.960 Hello. I am so excited to be here with you guys today with Reform Zoomer. I know fans have been

00:01:05.080 asking for us to chat with him, but I actually watch his content. It's a really good source.

00:01:10.300 If you are interested in what different forms of Christianity believe and their history, they are

00:01:17.220 videos that I would feel like called to create if he wasn't creating them, but he does such a good job

00:01:23.680 of it. I'd really suggest it. And he does a fairly good job with staying unbiased in this. But he has

00:01:29.340 this project I wanted to talk with him about because it's something that I've been thinking about and I've

00:01:34.540 seen other people think about. And you call it the Reconquista Project. So can you outline the goals

00:01:41.780 of the project and who is invited to it? Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show.

00:01:46.940 It's an honor to be here. By the way, my name is Redeemed Zoomer, not Reformed Zoomer.

00:01:51.080 Redeemed! Sorry, do you want me to say that word again?

00:01:53.540 This is like the 10th podcast I've been on where people have said that. It's fine. It's like the

00:01:57.040 Mandela effect. Everyone, don't worry about it. So yeah, I'm Redeemed Zoomer. I'm not a pastor. I

00:02:03.240 don't have credentials. I just try to be like a gateway drug to point people towards real churches

00:02:07.600 because the church is something I'm really focused on. I am focused on trying to revive the

00:02:13.660 institutional mainline churches. Those are the churches that matter culturally because the

00:02:19.120 progressives in our culture have hijacked every major cultural institution, the mainstream

00:02:23.800 universities, the Boy Scouts, the cities, and most importantly, the churches. The progressives

00:02:29.820 have recognized the impact of the church on society and they were very careful to hijack it.

00:02:34.120 That's why the historic mainline Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church and the

00:02:39.200 United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA, have mostly been hijacked by

00:02:43.660 progressivism. So a couple of years ago, really just a year ago, I started Operation Reconquista,

00:02:49.040 which is trying to retake the mainline Protestant denominations and make them return to the

00:02:55.400 Orthodox Christian beliefs that they were founded upon. So I am a confessional Calvinist. I'm a

00:03:01.360 Presbyterian. I'm part of the Presbyterian Church USA, and I'm dedicated to restoring the

00:03:06.340 Presbyterian Church USA. But Reconquista is an alliance of Christians of all different denominations

00:03:11.120 within the Reliocene Christianity, dedicated to restoring their denominations too. So we're

00:03:16.240 allied with Methodists and with Episcopalians and with Lutherans and with Baptists and with

00:03:20.580 the Dutch Reformed. So that's the basic outline of Reconquista. A big misunderstanding is some people

00:03:26.540 think we're trying to send people into liberal churches. We're not trying to do that. Every

00:03:30.200 mainline denomination is a big tent with liberal and conservative churches. So we're trying to send

00:03:34.740 people into conservative churches within mainline denominations, knowing that in 30 years, they're going to be the

00:03:40.440 only ones left. Ooh, why do you believe that's the case? I believe that's the case because, well, there's

00:03:48.720 like a spiritual reason and just a statistical reason. Spiritually, people only have a desire to

00:03:55.500 go to church if the church is preaching something that they can't get anywhere else. Progressive churches

00:04:00.120 just echo whatever the culture says. So there's no reason anyone should go to a progressive church.

00:04:04.440 The only people who still go to those churches are boomers who grew up in an age when church was a

00:04:08.580 social obligation, but now it's not. Nowadays, the only reason people would go to church is if church

00:04:12.860 is actually preaching anything. So that's just the logical reason. But statistically, we also see

00:04:18.360 that the progressive congregations and mainline denominations are in demographic freefall and the

00:04:23.240 conservative ones less so. That is true. And the progressives know it's true, which is why they are

00:04:28.220 trying to discriminate against the conservatives and the denomination as hard as possible.

00:04:31.840 So I'm wondering if you could talk, maybe focusing on one church or one example that you're aware of,

00:04:38.280 how the progressives pulled this off. And I will say, this is for me who grew up secular,

00:04:44.140 who grew up an atheist. There was like a time in my life where I realized that the churches were to

00:04:50.220 the left of like atheism at that point. And I was like, how, how did they pull off this heist?

00:04:57.000 Can you go into that? Yeah, it's very simple. They didn't give up.

00:05:03.280 Conservatives always give up and run away from institutions. And we make fun of liberals as being

00:05:08.620 snowflakes. But in the past 100 years, progressives have been much more comfortable leaving their

00:05:13.320 comfort zones. They've been much more crusader minded. And here's the best example. In the United

00:05:19.200 Methodist Church, there was a big struggle between the progressives who wanted to have gay marriage and

00:05:23.240 the conservatives who didn't want to have gay marriage. In 2019, they had a vote. The conservatives

00:05:28.260 won the vote. And they said, all the churches have to stop doing gay marriage. And the United

00:05:32.080 Methodist Church sounds like good news for conservatives. Well, the progressives doubled

00:05:36.260 down. They didn't give up. They kept just disobeying and breaking the rules as hard as possible.

00:05:41.500 And within about a year, the conservatives got so fed up, they left the denomination and formed the

00:05:47.180 Global Methodist Church. They won the dang vote and they left the dang church. Conservatives over

00:05:53.160 the past 100 years have been complete cowards and the leftists have been really strong-willed

00:05:57.560 conquistadors. And that's why the left has taken over every major institution. Now, you could say the

00:06:01.920 left is funded by people like George Soros. That's absolutely true. But it's also just the mindset.

00:06:06.340 The left has an activist mindset. The conservatives have a retreatist mindset. And that's why they

00:06:10.840 always lose. That's why conservatives have lost every single major institution. It's why rates of

00:06:15.040 Christianity go down every single year. It's why rates of LGBT acceptance increase in the

00:06:19.880 institutions every single year. Can you talk about how you could inspire this within conservatives?

00:06:26.300 Like, what would it look like to approach this differently as a conservative? And do you think

00:06:31.560 the conservatives can out the, what's the word here, conquistador or crusade the progressives? Or are

00:06:36.840 the progressives always going to win on this front? They can. They're just not willing to. They're just

00:06:41.240 too lazy. They'd rather not focus on this. A lot of conservatives would just rather move to a farm in the

00:06:46.780 middle of nowhere and do homesteading and raise kids. It's like, that's honorable, but that's not

00:06:51.100 what the early Christians did. That's not how the early Christians conquered the Roman Empire.

00:06:54.880 The early Christians went to the cities and they were fed to the lions for it. But over the centuries,

00:06:59.160 they rose in the ranks of the Roman Empire and they took it over from the inside. But right now,

00:07:04.120 it's the left that's doing this. It's the left that's going to the cities and rising the ranks.

00:07:07.780 It's the conservatives that are retreating to the rural areas. I believe, and I think most

00:07:11.980 conservatives believe, conservatives are inherently stronger people than progressives. They're

00:07:16.460 much more mentally stable. I think they're much more sane. They have a lot more common sense.

00:07:21.780 I do like to think that conservative men are tougher than liberal men. I think that's pretty

00:07:26.460 obvious, but it sure doesn't seem like it. They sure ain't acting like it. They're acting like a bunch

00:07:31.540 of wimps when it comes to the culture war. So I think once conservatives just realize that running away

00:07:38.300 has been the only strategy conservatives have employed for the past hundred years and it keeps not

00:07:42.700 working. I think once they realize that they will start to have more of a reconquista mindset

00:07:47.180 as opposed to a retreatist mindset. Okay. But I frame this a little differently here. I think

00:07:53.260 this has been happening because I was thinking through my mind, like where in history has the more,

00:07:58.160 in my mind, conservative faction been like, nope, we're out. And I'm like, oh, that's how America

00:08:02.900 was founded. A bunch of different actual Bible readers were like, nope, we're out. We're not

00:08:08.640 playing this game anymore. And they ended up building this great institution. And then over

00:08:14.400 time, it sort of corrupted. And we personally have this model of the way that like religions grow

00:08:20.460 and that you have these reformational periods where you get to like a purer strain of the religion.

00:08:27.320 And then you have this explosion of culture and technology, and then that creates bureaucracy.

00:08:33.000 And then the bureaucracy allows for the progressives to gain power. I don't know if in a historic example,

00:08:39.540 I think you're right about the Roman empire. That is a historic example of where conservatives

00:08:44.420 beat progressives within a bureaucracy. But I wonder if the Christians of the Roman time period

00:08:51.520 weren't the progressives. Well, Malcolm, are you saying that we need to build our city upon a hill in space?

00:08:57.140 Is that your Reconquista? Well, no. Yeah. Build it on another planet. I don't know.

00:09:03.480 But what are your thoughts on this framing of like the US is like, yeah.

00:09:08.140 Yeah. So one of my most watched videos is I graph denominations on the church compass. You've heard

00:09:13.480 of the political compass. Well, there's also the church. I watch these videos. They're great.

00:09:16.640 The church compass. Yeah. So you would know that there are two axes. The thing with America,

00:09:20.900 with the Puritans leaving England, that was not a left versus right issue. Both sides of that

00:09:26.480 debate were far right extremists by today's standards. High church versus a low church issue.

00:09:33.000 The Episcopal Anglicans of the Church of England were high church and the Puritan congregationalists

00:09:38.520 were low church. So I don't think this model of retreat and Reconquista really applies to high

00:09:44.240 church and low church debates. I think it does apply to progressive versus conservative debates,

00:09:49.340 to right and left. So I just don't think the Puritan model is really relevant to this.

00:09:53.760 I don't think there's ever an example of conservatives leaving a left-wing institution

00:09:59.720 and the conservatives succeeding more as a result of that. I don't think there's a single example of

00:10:05.720 that. Okay. Here's a question I have for you. Do you think more, because high church versus low

00:10:10.940 church is in part about the way the bureaucracies are structured. Do you think that one is more

00:10:16.400 susceptible to this progressive sort of memetic virus than the other?

00:10:19.640 No, because across the denominational spectrum, progressivism has sort of equally hijacked both

00:10:27.520 high church and low church denominations. With progressivism, it's really a trade-off because

00:10:32.100 in denominations with a low church structure, with very little bureaucracy, it's a lot easier for the

00:10:40.620 progressives to hijack it because there's not much of an authority to keep them out. But once they do

00:10:45.480 hijack, it's a lot easier for conservatives to resist. That's why in the United Church of Christ,

00:10:50.620 the successors of the Puritan Congregationalists in New England, yeah, it's very, very progressive.

00:10:55.600 It's very low church. It's very progressive. But there's no apparatus to enforce that progressivism,

00:11:00.260 so conservative congregations are able to resist no problem. Then look at the Episcopal church,

00:11:06.720 very high church, very bureaucratic. It is harder for the progressives to hijack that. It's slower

00:11:13.640 to make change in the Episcopal church, but once the change is made, it is almost impossible for

00:11:18.360 conservatives to resist. I know an Episcopal priest who tried to resist, and he got forced out of the

00:11:22.840 Episcopal church due to that. Same with Bishop Love of Albany.

00:11:27.300 So this is, hold on, Simone, before you go, I was just going to say that this is a concept that we

00:11:31.600 would call institutional inertia that he's describing, that they have higher institutional

00:11:36.120 inertia. It takes more force to get the ball rolling, but it also takes more force to stop the ball.

00:11:41.180 Anyway, Simone, you were going to say something? You described the first step of the Reconquista

00:11:46.240 of we have to recognize that basically conservative Christians need to grow a pair and fight,

00:11:53.220 not retreat. What are the logistical next steps, the concrete things that you see happening? Are

00:11:58.800 people forming new congregations? Are they like, I mean, to a certain extent, I don't know how the

00:12:06.680 bureaucracies could be retaken. Are they like dissolving what exists?

00:12:10.780 He referenced one win that they've already had. Can you talk about that?

00:12:14.780 Did I in this video?

00:12:16.200 No, not in this video, but in some of your videos, but you just didn't explain it.

00:12:19.640 So to answer your question, no, we're not going to try and create new congregations.

00:12:23.220 We're trying to strengthen the existing conservative congregations. In the Presbyterian

00:12:26.560 Church USA, only 10% of the congregations are conservative, but that's still 100 congregations

00:12:32.220 all over the country. It's still quite a few. And those are going to be the only ones left if

00:12:36.500 we strengthen them. Also, there's a lot of moderate congregations. I'd say about 30% of the

00:12:40.480 denomination is moderate. And most of their inhabitants are 10 boomers, basically. It is so

00:12:46.240 easy to influence a mainline Protestant church because they give out leadership positions like free

00:12:51.640 candy. I was one of the Sunday school teachers when I was 15. It took my dad like two

00:12:56.440 years to become an elder at our church. It is so easy for lay people to have an impact,

00:13:00.460 especially because there's a severe pastor shortage. The severe pastor shortage, over half

00:13:04.780 of PCUSA churches are without a pastor. So that means it's run entirely by lay people, which means

00:13:09.240 anyone could join the church and influence it. So those are some practical strategies for how to

00:13:13.740 influence the individual congregations. But what about the denominational bureaucracy? Well,

00:13:18.520 last year is when the Reconquista movement started. It started with just an Instagram group chat of 12

00:13:23.840 people, and then it expanded to a Discord server of about 3,000 people, including a lot of pastors.

00:13:28.260 And then within the incubator of that Discord server, we started the non-profit Presbyterians

00:13:33.360 for the Kingdom, dedicated to retaking the PCUSA. And simultaneously, for this summer's General

00:13:40.500 Assembly, there was an overture. An overture is like a bill, like a congressional bill. An overture

00:13:46.240 to require new pastors to be gay affirming. And that would basically kill all the conservative

00:13:52.740 churches. But thanks to our organization, the president of our organization, who's not me,

00:13:57.240 it's a guy named David Yancey. But the president of our organization visited the General Assembly,

00:14:02.240 put together a coalition of conservative pastors, and amended that overture so it would no longer

00:14:08.340 examine new pastoral candidates according to principles of non-discrimination against LGBT folks,

00:14:14.120 but instead according to historic principles of the church. So he basically neutered that amendment

00:14:18.940 and protected all the conservatives. So if a bunch of kids on Discord were able to stop

00:14:23.580 the denomination from kicking out all the conservatives, imagine what pastors who actually

00:14:27.680 have a footing in the denomination could do. How did they get that language in the bill to,

00:14:32.540 like, what logic were they using? Do they have to explain this, or they can just, like,

00:14:37.440 put a bill like that out? Well, the way it works is that Presbyterians in the denomination

00:14:42.980 can send an overture that the rest of them vote on. It was a very progressive presbytery that wrote

00:14:48.780 this. And because the majority of the denomination is progressive, basically any progressive overture

00:14:53.300 that gets written will most likely be approved. But there was nothing stopping us from trying to

00:14:59.420 amend the overture. And my friend David, who's the president of the organization we started last

00:15:04.560 year, he was able to actually get that done. So I want to highlight what you're saying here,

00:15:09.520 because it's actually really important. We've had people in our Discord who have told me,

00:15:13.160 just get involved as one of the mainline churches. You know, they are desperate for people like this.

00:15:19.540 And I think for our audience who are maybe less theologically weird than us, there is not a lot

00:15:24.960 of competition, as it seems like you're saying, for moving up within these organizations if you're

00:15:28.840 really passionate about it, especially if you're young and this, if you've been thinking about it,

00:15:34.000 but, like, think you might not be qualified or think you might be, it's probably worth doing

00:15:37.840 because there are a lot of people who seem to have this predominantly progressive religion,

00:15:42.400 where, like, their religion actually is far progressivism, and they'll just go into other

00:15:46.980 institutions. They see it as their calling, whether or not they're competent, whether or not they know

00:15:51.960 anything about the Bible, to get into churches and start voting on stuff. So I absolutely love that

00:15:58.360 message. A question I'd have, because I actually wonder about this. Now, I can see if we were talking

00:16:05.620 about, like, a church with, like, a lot of money and where, like, the central body is, like, laying out

00:16:12.780 the doctrine, like you might have with the Catholic Church or something like this, why this would be

00:16:16.560 really important. I'm a little, like, what's the value of institutional continuity? Like, what core

00:16:26.820 good thing are you getting by taking the time to win this fight instead of just starting something new?

00:16:33.100 What's the value in recapturing these old institutions? Because every time the church

00:16:38.180 has transformed culture, it's been through the institutions. The church didn't transform Roman

00:16:42.820 society until it became institutional and established with Constantine. It was the church

00:16:47.680 that founded the modern hospital system, that founded the university system. It's the church that

00:16:51.600 made Western civilization what it is, and it wasn't able to do that without being strong, established,

00:16:56.180 and institutional. You know, Jesus said, heal the sick. How did Christians do that historically?

00:16:59.960 By building hospitals. There's a reason you never see non-denominational churches building

00:17:03.720 hospitals. They don't have the resources to do that. They're not established. They don't inherit

00:17:07.160 generational wealth. It's important for the church to be the kingdom of God, and a kingdom is not just

00:17:13.900 a gathering of individuals. It's organized. It's developed. It builds beautiful things for the king.

00:17:19.100 So there are, I can't even list all the benefits of having a strong, established institutional church.

00:17:26.480 That is what all Christians had between the years like 321 and 1960. Between those two years,

00:17:36.820 for the greater part of church history, every Christian was part of an established institutional

00:17:41.980 denomination. And the only reason that's declining is because of the rise of non-denominationalism and

00:17:48.060 conservative offshoot denominations. Because like I just said with the Methodists,

00:17:53.060 every denomination split in recent years has not been a split. It's been the denomination splitting

00:17:58.980 into original and conservative. It's been the conservatives leaving the original thing and

00:18:03.620 making their own thing, which does not inherit the denominational structures, universities, hospitals,

00:18:08.340 buildings, all that.

00:18:09.260 So it's as much about the institutional continuity and the maintenance of the assets as like a,

00:18:18.160 but what's even the point of splitting off if you have now lost this large structure that you need to

00:18:23.100 do all of these big acts, which is a very strong argument that I hadn't considered.

00:18:27.680 What's the point of splitting off if you lose all that?

00:18:31.500 Yep. I know that's the point that you're making.

00:18:33.560 That's what I'm asking. Now, what they would say is we want a pure denomination. We want a

00:18:40.400 denomination where we don't have to battle liberalism, but two things. If you split off

00:18:45.400 and your denomination actually grows into something, the liberals will just hijack that too. Because

00:18:49.540 right now, even the poor evangelical offshoots are now getting hijacked by liberalism, not to the

00:18:55.880 same extent, but the liberals will hijack everything. They just hijack the more powerful things first and

00:19:00.640 then move on to the less powerful things. It's the same reason there's no red states because Gen Z of

00:19:05.440 every state is completely progressive. But another thing I would say is purity is a spiral. There's

00:19:13.360 like purity spiraling. No two fundamentalists have the same set of fundamentals. So if you split off

00:19:20.080 because not everything's going your way, people are going to split off from you because not everything's

00:19:24.480 going their way. It's an endless cycle. A lot of Catholics will say Protestantism leads to endless schism.

00:19:30.480 No, I think retreatism leads to endless schism. Because if you split off from your denomination

00:19:35.280 because they're not doing everything the way you want, someone's going to split off from you because

00:19:38.480 you're not doing everything the way they want. That's why, sorry, that's why in every tradition,

00:19:44.240 like Presbyterian, Episcopalian, you'll have one mainline denomination and like 20 conservative

00:19:50.800 offshoot denominations because the conservatives can't agree with each other on what they need to

00:19:55.360 conserve. Yeah. And I think for people who aren't involved in church politics, like me,

00:19:59.800 putting on my old hat, I would have assumed that when the church was splitting, it would have been

00:20:04.520 the progressives who were splitting off from the conservatives, but it's the progressives that

00:20:08.680 inherit. And when the conservatives split off, another thing to remember that I hadn't considered

00:20:12.240 before is, okay, so you have a big institution and you create a conservative offshoot. Now what you've

00:20:17.560 done is you've drawn all the voting power that used to be in that institution that now moves to your

00:20:22.600 conservative offshoot out of the original institution, giving the progressives even a firmer grip than they had

00:20:28.840 before. Yes. I forgot to mention that. When I first saw all the progressivism in my denomination,

00:20:34.440 the PCUSA, I told my mentor who is still conservative, I told him I wanted to leave.

00:20:39.160 And he said, don't leave. The reason it got this bad is because the conservatives kept running away.

00:20:45.320 You need to fix it. So it's like, whenever the PCA, the PCA is the conservative counterpart to the PCUSA,

00:20:52.120 and they are a lot more doctrinally sound, I'll give them that, but they didn't inherit all the

00:20:56.440 institutions and they're poor. So whenever they say, oh, your denomination is super liberal. I'm like,

00:21:02.440 yeah, because you ran away from it. You ran away when push came to shove. And now I have to deal with

00:21:08.280 all the liberals. The funny thing that I'm thinking about is once progressives begin to go extinct,

00:21:13.800 you know, because of fertility rates and their ability to speak to people, is there going to be an

00:21:18.920 opportunity for conservatives to go into institutions like the UUs and try to take over

00:21:23.560 their apparatus? I would love to see that. Now, reconquista, the re in reconquista means

00:21:30.040 turning things back into the way they originally were. I'm not interested in hijacking heretical

00:21:35.480 denominations because I don't want to make the Unitarian Universalists go back to traditional

00:21:41.240 Unitarian doctrine because that's heresy. Same with the Mormon church, same with Islam, even though

00:21:45.640 Islam is experiencing no progressive hijack, same with Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm only really

00:21:50.360 interested in retaking the historic Trinitarian denominations. But to answer your question,

00:21:58.120 if the progressives go extinct, that'll be great. Yeah, then we could take back anything. But the

00:22:03.400 problem is, I don't think they're going to go extinct because, yeah, they have low birth rates,

00:22:06.680 but they make up for it in indoctrination. And even conservatives who try to shelter their kids,

00:22:11.880 if you own the cultural institutions like the left does, you will always be able to influence

00:22:17.000 the masses and convert the masses. The left does so much more evangelism than Christians,

00:22:21.320 because Christians evangelize individuals, but the left evangelizes institutions. So they just

00:22:26.040 pollute the waters with leftism. And that reaches the masses without them having to talk to a single

00:22:31.240 individual. Yeah. Yeah. We always talk about this. I mean, as we call it, the urban monoculture can

00:22:36.200 only survive by parasitizing children from demographically healthy cultural groups or importing

00:22:40.680 children. I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing, which is, there was something else you

00:22:45.720 said that I wanted you to expand on because I thought it was such a good point. You were saying

00:22:50.600 one of the reasons why the progressive churches are going to die is what you will hear at a progressive

00:22:56.280 church isn't differentiated from what you hear within generic media, within online spaces, within,

00:23:02.360 well, anywhere you go for an urban monoculture message. But what you hear in a conservative

00:23:06.680 church is unique and you can only get it in that venue. Can you talk a bit more to this? Because I

00:23:12.200 found this really profound. Yeah. Well, when I was in my local PCUSA church, at first we had a normal

00:23:20.120 pastor, but then he retired. So we had a progressive interim lady pastor and she was my first introduction

00:23:25.880 to progressive Christianity. And because I came from a secular liberal background, I considered it.

00:23:30.520 She recommended that I would go to progressivechristianity.com and become a progressive

00:23:35.080 Christian, basically. I considered it because, you know, I come from a progressive background. What

00:23:39.960 if I could make progressivism compatible with Christianity? That sounds great to me at first.

00:23:44.440 But what I realized is these people don't believe in anything at all. All they believe in is whatever

00:23:49.800 the secular culture believes. They don't believe in the supernatural. Progressive Christians don't believe

00:23:54.040 Jesus rose from the dead. Progressive Christians don't think of God as something that's actually real.

00:23:58.840 They think of God as a nice way to inspire people to do love and social justice. The only difference

00:24:04.120 between them and hardcore atheists like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens is they believe

00:24:09.480 that the idea of God can inspire people to be woke. They believe the concept of God can be used as a tool

00:24:16.280 for oppression when in the hands of the white man, but can also be used as a tool for liberation when

00:24:21.720 in the hands of oppressed POCs.

00:24:23.800 That is, by the way, I had to Google this website that you mentioned here to see if this was a real

00:24:29.800 thing. And I am going to be diving into this. This is fantastic. But I think that you're really

00:24:34.840 right. And it's a concept that we talk about on the show pretty frequently, which when we're talking

00:24:39.480 about the urban monoculture, that it allows you, or this progressive culture, it allows you to join it

00:24:46.760 and maintain your church and your church identity. You just have to change your entire internal

00:24:52.280 ideology. It keeps very, very little of the original ideology. And it's actually interesting

00:24:58.360 when contrasted with a point that you made earlier, which is to say that all of the conservatives,

00:25:02.680 because they actually really believe stuff, they have much more different theology between them

00:25:09.320 than the progressives do between them. Where if I get to like an extremist conservative

00:25:14.600 of one denomination of Christianity, they will have more differences with another extreme

00:25:18.920 conservative of the same denomination than like a progressive Christian will from a progressive muscle.

00:25:23.720 Exactly. I've actually noticed that like my, my progressive lady pastor would talk about how she

00:25:29.880 did interfaith dialogues with like progressive rabbis and progressive Muslim imams. And what I was thinking is

00:25:36.360 that's not an interfaith dialogue. You all have the same exact faith, which is just unitarian

00:25:41.000 universalist progressivism. A real interfaith dialogue would be like a Christian fundamentalist

00:25:46.600 Baptist debating like a fundamentalist Muslim debating an Orthodox Jew. That would be an actual

00:25:53.160 interfaith dialogue. A bunch of progressive atheists LARPing as the different, the different

00:25:58.600 religions. That's not an interfaith dialogue. That is such a good way to put it. Is there LARPing as

00:26:03.560 Christians really to gain access to the Christian bureaucracies and the resources those bureaucracies

00:26:09.240 have as well as the wills of these idiot doomers who don't realize that this isn't the 90s anymore,

00:26:15.080 which as a Zoomer must be so hard for you. Like how do you wake up the older generation? I'm wondering

00:26:21.480 what trends are you seeing in your generation right now in terms of faith and the way they're relating to

00:26:27.080 it. Okay. So there's a lot of bad and there's a little bit of good, but the little bit of good is

00:26:32.280 still kind of bad. So a lot of bad. Gen Z is the least religious generation in history, statistically.

00:26:39.320 It's also the most depressed generation in history. What a coincidence. If you ask boomers why Gen Z is

00:26:45.480 so depressed, they're all like, it's those dang phones. That's why. No, it's not those dang phones.

00:26:52.120 If you ask the mainstream media, it's like, oh, well, the economy is kind of bad. No, people lived

00:26:57.000 through the Great Depression, the Black Death. They were not as depressed as people are today.

00:27:01.400 It's because they abandoned God. That's why. That's why they're depressed. But there is a segment of Gen Z

00:27:07.640 that is very trad. It's like the trad movement reacting against that. So that is a good thing.

00:27:13.800 It's got a lot of good potential. We are seeing a bunch of young men reacting against this. Young men

00:27:18.840 grew up in public schools where they were basically told that they're bad for being

00:27:22.760 straight white men. I'm a Calvinist. I think we are bad. I am a bad person,

00:27:26.280 but it's not because I'm a straight white man. It's because I'm a totally depraved sinner.

00:27:30.120 But Black women are also totally depraved sinners. So a lot of young men are reacting against this

00:27:35.720 leftism. But a lot of the trad movement is not directing people into traditional confessional

00:27:42.200 Protestant churches. A lot of people are part of this trad aesthetic without actually going to church.

00:27:47.320 A lot of people are LARPing as like trad Catholic or trad Eastern Orthodox, not realizing that

00:27:54.120 Eastern Orthodoxy did not build Western civilization. If you go to an Eastern Orthodox

00:27:58.280 country, it's a crap hole. Protestantism and Calvinism built the West.

00:28:03.880 We talk about this a lot. We don't want to get too in it for our Catholic audience,

00:28:08.760 but we have this meme where we do the scene in Indiana Jones where they're trying to choose

00:28:12.440 the correct Holy Grail. And I always overlay it with pictures of the different churches.

00:28:17.560 Yeah, I know. Protestantism is what built Western civilization. Maybe Catholicism,

00:28:22.360 not East Orthodoxy. People are trying to move towards what they think has not been hijacked

00:28:27.640 by leftism. And I will grant that East Orthodoxy has not been hijacked by leftism. But it's the same

00:28:32.040 reason Islam has not been hijacked by leftism. It's the same reason Somalia has not been hijacked by

00:28:37.240 leftism. The leftism hijacks what's good and powerful. Protestantism was successful and powerful.

00:28:43.320 That's why the leftists hijacked it. The leftists don't hijack, you know, poor countries. The leftists

00:28:48.680 don't hijack religions that are not a threat to them, like Islam or Jehovah's Witnessism.

00:28:53.720 The leftists hijacked Calvinism because that's what's the biggest threat to them.

00:28:57.720 So a lot of the trad movement is has good intentions and a lot of good potential, but it's still

00:29:02.280 directing people in the wrong directions. It's also directing people towards like Andrew Tate and the

00:29:06.120 red pill movement, which is like actually very disrespectful towards women. It does not create

00:29:11.960 gentlemen. It creates a bunch of jerks on Twitter and it does not create anything that's actually

00:29:18.440 productive for society. I, I love this. No, I, I agree with everything you're saying here.

00:29:23.880 One of the, and I had a few lines of questions that I wanted to go in from here. One of the things

00:29:28.440 that we've noted before on this show, and I was wondering your thoughts on this,

00:29:31.320 is when society started to become more secular, many of the men and the women broke off from the

00:29:39.080 church, but many of the men are returning because the way they broke off was different. And I think

00:29:43.960 that this is also true as in the younger generations, whereas the men mostly became atheists. And then just

00:29:48.920 logically they went back to the church, whereas the women became like pagans and Wiccans and spiritualists.

00:29:54.920 And it's much harder to reconvert the spiritualist than the, the atheist. And so the example that I

00:30:01.640 use here is like, well, first I can be like, how do you, how do you think that we can win the women

00:30:05.960 back or what's the, yeah. I think men need to act more mature. Jordan Cooper talks about this.

00:30:12.920 Jordan Cooper is one of the best theologians online. He's a Lutheran pastor. And he talks about

00:30:19.480 actually being trad in a real sense, not just in a LARPing sense. And he says that a lot of the ways

00:30:26.360 in which men are trad is actually not very trad because they'll like insult women on the internet.

00:30:31.880 Traditional men would never insult random stranger women. They would be very respectful. They'd be

00:30:37.000 gentlemen. So a lot of women see, see the whole Ben Shapiro owning the libs type conservatism as

00:30:43.080 immature. So the way to make women like this conservative movement more is for the men to

00:30:51.160 grow up more and to be more respectful and chivalrous. And that'll make them actually like

00:30:56.120 it because men are the leaders of society, whether we like it or not. I'm not saying women can't be

00:31:00.200 leaders. I'm saying naturally, if men go a certain way and they succeed in that way, women will follow.

00:31:05.880 So I think we mainly need to target young men while also promoting female influencers like

00:31:10.840 Allie Beth Stuckey who contradict the mainstream leftist narrative about self-love and self-care

00:31:16.840 and self-obsession, all that. Oh, before I go with the next question here,

00:31:20.680 I want to hear your two questions. One is, do you have a partner and what is dating like for

00:31:26.120 conservative Zoomers of your generation? Yes, I have a fiance. I'm getting married in a couple months.

00:31:33.480 Congratulations. Thank you. And she is a based trad Calvinist, just like me,

00:31:38.600 but unlike me, she's from Kansas. I couldn't find any Christian girls where I was. I had to go over

00:31:44.760 a thousand miles away to find her. I found her on an online Bible study that she started during COVID.

00:31:50.440 So what it's dating like for Gen Z, it's a nightmare. I hit the jackpot. I'm weird.

00:31:56.200 For most men, they can't find any girls at all, let alone Christian girls. They can't find any girls at

00:32:02.120 all because hookup culture has just caused most women to have hookups with a bunch of popular

00:32:09.640 guys who will use them. So it's not good for men. It's not good for women either because most women

00:32:15.080 can only find men who are total slobs, men who just want to use their bodies and will dump them

00:32:19.320 like they're a piece of garbage who won't value them at all. So yeah, dating is more of a nightmare

00:32:24.040 for Gen Z than for any other generation. I think the only safe haven for dating is in the church.

00:32:30.520 And that's why I was only able to really find a decent woman through the church. But of course,

00:32:35.880 not my church. It was from Presbyterian church over a thousand miles away. But still, the church

00:32:41.160 is a bit of a safe haven. And I think that can be an evangelistic tactic because when people see that

00:32:46.280 relationships are more stable in the Christian church, they will maybe see that Christianity

00:32:51.880 help stabilize society. And there might be some truth to it. Of course, I don't think

00:32:55.640 Christianity is true because it's useful. It's useful because it's true, but go on.

00:32:59.000 Well, so I make two notes here. One is, you know, from your fruits, you'll know them. I see a lot of

00:33:04.280 influencers out there. When I look at these red pill adjacent people, they're never engaged. They're

00:33:08.440 almost never married. When I look at the young Catholic influencers, like almost never married. So like

00:33:13.880 clearly when he's saying you don't need to be this ultra masculine, whatever thing to secure a good

00:33:18.760 partner, I think you're showing like by your own win that that's true. But I was on the second

00:33:24.600 question I had about your partner, because I was thinking like, where are all the conservative,

00:33:29.000 sane women I know? And they're all sort of autists or on the spectrum. Is that your wife or is that not?

00:33:34.520 No, I mean, she does. She has very high IQ. She's a classical musician, but she's relatively normal.

00:33:41.160 I will say that you are right that most women who are like really conservative and active about it

00:33:49.080 are maybe a little bit on the spectrum, but not exclusively. I know. Okay, get this. For some

00:33:55.400 reason, for whatever reason, up until college, most of my friends were just female. Now it's kind of 50

00:33:59.400 50. I know I have so many male friends who are like, there are no Christian girls. And I have so many

00:34:05.080 female friends who are like, there are no Christian guys. Something isn't adding up mathematically.

00:34:10.920 People just have to meet each other. And most of these ladies I'm friends with or guys I'm friends

00:34:15.320 with are not like autistic or anything. People are just antisocial. They don't put themselves out there.

00:34:21.320 They don't see any people at their own local church and they just give up. It's like, for the secular

00:34:27.240 world, there is no hope. But for Christians, if they put themselves out there enough, they can meet

00:34:32.360 people. And I think the internet might be okay with that. Yeah, no, I think you make a good point

00:34:38.520 there. And I look at the sacrifices you made to find your partner, dating someone a thousand miles

00:34:42.680 away. Whenever somebody's like, oh, I don't have a partner. I'm like, are you doing your five dates

00:34:45.800 a week? And they're like, what, a week? I'm like, yeah, it's hard. You've got to be doing a lot.

00:34:51.720 Another thing I wanted to ask for your generation, because I think this is the big thing that has

00:34:55.000 switched between the generations. When I was growing up, but I mean, I think perceptionally,

00:35:00.360 it must be very different for you. When I was growing up, you had the Christian like fuddy

00:35:05.080 duddies and then the secularists and the secularists were like, come join us. Like we're having fun.

00:35:11.240 Like you can have sex whenever you want with whoever you want. You can do whatever you want

00:35:15.720 and look at how much fun secular society is. And now in your generation, they, I think it's very clear

00:35:22.520 that the secular society is like breaking down and like having mental breakdowns every other day and like

00:35:26.920 barely holding their lives together. And just the draw of the other isn't as big anymore.

00:35:33.640 I'm wondering, do you think that this will help you in terms of like you're raising your kids?

00:35:37.240 How are you thinking about as you raise your kids to keep them from falling?

00:35:40.200 I think we need to give them atheism vaccines. So many times I've seen Christian parents try to

00:35:47.480 shelter their kids so much and hide them away from society. And the second they get the slightest bit

00:35:53.400 of exposure to atheism and leftism they go all in. So I am not planning to raise my kids in a farm in

00:36:00.360 rural Idaho. I'm a Yankee. I could never do farming anyway. I'm planning to live in a major city. I'm

00:36:06.120 planning to let my kids see how much idiots, how much of idiots secular people can be and have them know

00:36:14.680 what it is from an early age. And I'm not totally against public school either because a lot of people

00:36:20.600 are like, oh, you have to send your kids to Christian schools. Most people associate school

00:36:25.080 with the worst times of their lives. I don't want people to associate God with school.

00:36:31.160 I'm okay with people associating secular progressivism with school. I'm okay with that.

00:36:37.400 It's hard to survive public school as a Christian. But if you do, which I did, you'll be basically a

00:36:42.520 Christian Navy SEAL. Nothing will fix the faith. The most jaded people to Christianity I've ever met

00:36:48.680 are people who are raised in dumb evangelical schools where the janitor is the science teacher

00:36:54.040 and science class is just watching God's Not Dead, episode 57. If you're going to do Christianity,

00:36:59.320 don't do low IQ Christianity. But I think the worst thing you can do to keep kids in the faith

00:37:03.480 is shelter them in low IQ fundamentalist Baptist Christianity. The best thing you can do is

00:37:09.000 catechize them well and raise them in the faith, but also give them exposure to secularism from the

00:37:13.240 time they're babies. Oh, that's great. I completely agree with you. And it's something that we often

00:37:17.800 talk about on the show is that one of the core ways that the progressive urban monoculture will

00:37:22.920 peel out your kid is in the areas where you haven't built solid memetic structures for them.

00:37:27.800 The most common one they use here is gender and sexual identity stuff. And that means that you

00:37:33.640 need to teach them this stuff before the schools do. And you need to teach them it without strawment.

00:37:40.120 Like if you teach it to them and you're like, all these people are evil. And then they meet one

00:37:43.080 and this person doesn't feel evil to them immediately. You're like, oh, maybe my parents

00:37:47.080 were lying about that. I'm open to hearing what you have to say. And this is why it's really important

00:37:50.920 to not go with the, their evil mindset, but a, you know, they're trying to do what they think is

00:37:56.040 right. But they fall in for the path and that, you know, that, that, that this stuff isn't going

00:38:01.240 to come looking evil. It's going to come looking like a friend trying to help you. And I think that

00:38:07.480 you, you've done a very good job with, with how you'll handle that. They're not evil. They're not

00:38:12.040 evil. I mean, we're all evil. They're not evil. They're just depressed. I've never seen a mentally

00:38:16.520 stable trans person. They don't exist. What I was a leftist. I was fully supportive of all this LGBT

00:38:22.360 nonsense. What convinced me was I kept seeing young women who were perfectly happy and healthy,

00:38:27.720 much more happy and healthy than me, perfectly happy and healthy develop some LGBT identity,

00:38:32.600 usually like the first stage is bisexual. And then they moved from bisexual to she slash they

00:38:38.920 then to they them. And then their lives would completely fall apart. They would attempt self

00:38:43.080 harm. They would go to the mental institution and then they would just be, they would look different.

00:38:47.960 They would make themselves look ugly on purpose. So it doesn't take the genius to

00:38:52.120 sense that something is wrong with this LGBT movement. I've actually made memes about the

00:38:56.840 stages of an Emily. It's like, she starts off being a happy, healthy girl. Then she gets into

00:39:00.920 left-wing activism. Then she becomes bisexual. Uh, then she, uh, attempts self harm. Then she's

00:39:06.280 a she slash they, and then she runs away from home and hates her parents who did nothing but love her.

00:39:11.160 Did you know that 89% of trans people regularly think about, and that around 40 to 50%, depending on the

00:39:17.320 study you're looking about, have tried. So if you want to love your neighbor, if you want to love your

00:39:21.800 trans neighbor, you got, you have to help them with this. It's clearly not healthy. If the vast

00:39:27.320 majority of them, I think every single one of them has severe mental issues. It's not good for them.

00:39:31.560 And yeah, well, and we're not going to, we're going to do a future episode on this, but this is

00:39:36.200 something that I'd note is there are other, uh, solutions to this. For example, there was a study that

00:39:41.080 showed that antipsychotics remove feelings of gender dysphoria. So, you know, it's, it's more

00:39:46.360 just that we're not allowed to say that there are other potential solutions that don't lead to a 40%

00:39:51.880 unaliving themselves rate. And I will say that for me on this topic, very similar to you,

00:39:56.440 I used to be totally open to it. And the core thing that has moved me progressively against it

00:40:01.640 is knowing trans people over time, where at first I was like, this seems to be working for them.

00:40:08.600 Everything is good. And then over time, I'm just like, of the ones I know, I'm like,

00:40:13.160 Ooh, this did not work out as well. It was the same with polyamory. I used to be like much more

00:40:17.720 pro polyamory. Uh, but then now knowing lots of polyamorous couples over time, there are very,

00:40:22.920 very few that have worked out that I've seen when contrasted with the monogamous couples I know.

00:40:28.920 Any final questions, Simone? Yeah. I wanted to ask, I mean, you mentioned that Gen Z is not doing so well

00:40:34.920 by most measures. Sometimes I get the intuition that Gen Alpha is starting to turn around. Like

00:40:40.600 Gen Alpha is taking a hard conservative turn in many ways because they're seeing Gen Z crash and

00:40:45.800 burn. They're seeing how miserable millennials are. They're seeing that a lot of the stuff that

00:40:49.480 boomers preached is like ruining the world. Are you seeing that? And do you think that this is a matter

00:40:55.240 of like a groundswell from Gen Alpha really fueling the Reconquista? Or do you think it's more just that

00:41:01.400 in the end, kind of similar to prenatalism, this isn't about winning everyone over. It's about

00:41:05.880 a very small number of people in the end, ultimately inheriting the future because they're the ones that

00:41:10.280 just show up. What, which way is it going to go? That's a good question, Simone. I agree that even

00:41:15.720 if we get a bunch of numbers, it won't matter if they're not elite and in the institutions. But it is

00:41:20.280 true that we are seeing an even stronger reaction in Gen Alpha. You know, many times I'll get messages

00:41:25.160 from people saying like, Oh, your videos converted me to Christianity. Thank you so much. And I'm like,

00:41:30.120 I'm like, Oh, great. Do you need help finding a church? They're like, Oh, I can't go to church.

00:41:33.720 Why? Because I'm 13. And my parents won't let me and I'm like, seriously. And in my discord server,

00:41:40.600 you know, I interact with a lot of Gen Alpha people. That's why I know all the Gen Alpha means and stuff.

00:41:45.560 There are so many Gen Alpha people who want to be Christians. Unfortunately, it's often Eastern

00:41:49.640 Orthodox, but still it's good. A lot of Gen Alpha people who want to be Christians and their

00:41:54.840 liberal millennial parents won't let them. So it's like the first case I've seen where it's frequent

00:41:59.960 that young people are more conservative and right wing than their parents. So for all the Gen Alpha

00:42:05.160 people watching, I have Skibbity Ohio Riz. Skibbity Ohio Riz. I love that. You're going to be old,

00:42:15.080 too. You have no idea. I wonder. I already am old. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm the next generation on the

00:42:19.880 chopping block. Right? Well, it has been great to have you on. I really hope our fans who are

00:42:25.560 watchers and maybe who knows how many hot watchers we get like 96% out of votes. I don't think we get

00:42:30.040 that many hate watchers, but I imagine that we do like in my head. I always expect half our watchers

00:42:34.520 are hate watchers, but anyway, go check out his channel, go check out the Reconquista movement.

00:42:39.160 I think it's a really important movement. And it's something that I, before this video,

00:42:45.800 I had not thought about trying to get involved in any traditional churches. And now I'm like,

00:42:50.360 maybe it's worth the effort. I have a map of 2 million people see the map.

00:42:56.280 You can find traditional churches all over the country. If you're in America,

00:42:58.600 you can find a traditional church. Can you send me the map? No. And I should note that our theology

00:43:04.840 is pretty weird, but it's less weird than like women preachers. You know, our theology is off

00:43:11.560 the rails, but then when I consider what's taking over these churches, I'm like, well,

00:43:14.600 that's even more off the rails than us. So, you know. Cool. I sent the map in the private chat.

00:43:19.880 All right. I'll put it in the description here for, for viewers. We'll have an absolutely

00:43:24.600 spectacular day and please have lots of kids. Great.

Based Camp - September 12, 2024

Redeemed Zoomer： Is it Worth Trying to Save the Mainline Churches Anymore？

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