Join hosts James Edwards and Hunter Wallace as they discuss the recent decision by the Southern Baptist Convention to denounce white supremacy and the alt-right. They also discuss the history of the denomination and the role of the black church in that process.
00:00:00.000Gentlemen, welcome back to the Bad Out of Hell Death Cast. I am your host, Beazelbub.
00:00:12.960Just kidding. This is Counter Signal with Richard Spencer.
00:00:21.240I don't know if I've ever been called a satanic before. I've been called a lot of names.
00:00:26.340You know, the whole gamut from the historical lexicon, you know, Hitler being the most useful for our enemies.
00:00:37.680But I've never been called the devil, and I kind of like it. I think it's a good look.
00:00:44.460It makes us dangerous. I might grow a goatee and start wearing black and red or something like that. It's kind of fun.
00:00:56.340But anyway, welcome to both of you, my friends, James Edwards and Hunter Wallace.
00:01:20.280This is a very Southern podcast. Hey, y'all. How are you?
00:01:25.780This is the most Southern podcast I've had, with the exception of when I hosted Dr. Michael Hill alone.
00:01:36.240But welcome. And we're going to talk about the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:01:40.760So, first off, before we talk about wider implications, and I do want to also talk about the history of Southern Baptist, the meaning of that denomination,
00:01:54.120why don't we just talk about what happened this week?
00:01:57.460So, I was following it, though in a rather cursory fashion.
00:02:02.640But I had heard about a proposed amendment for the Southern Baptist Convention that was put forward by an African-American preacher that, you know, quoted lots of scripture.
00:02:14.360And then basically, after all this justification from the Bible, he reached utterly PC conclusions where we must denounce the alt-right, but also we must denounce any ethno-nationalism.
00:02:29.420I think that's maybe even more important than denouncing a particular movement in 2017.
00:03:19.380Give us a little taste of all the politicking and, you know, chicanery going on with the situation.
00:03:27.820Well, it's pretty much as you said there.
00:03:30.420This was all caused by the – well, from what I read, the guy who spearheaded it was this black preacher, I think in Texas, and Russell Moore to denounce white supremacy and the alt-right.
00:03:45.480And then they didn't really want to do it.
00:03:51.980And they're like, oh, my God, we're like a bunch of racists and a bunch of white supremacists if we don't do a, you know, a ritual virtue signaling condemnation at our annual conference.
00:04:03.260I think last year it was the Confederate flag where they denounced anyone who used the Confederate flag.
00:04:09.400And this year's resolution was denouncing the alt-right.
00:04:33.160And I was just sitting here thinking to myself, I was just sitting here thinking to myself, aren't all these blacks, don't they have, like, their own black churches?
00:04:41.480I mean, most of the black Baptists and the black Methodists, I know it's like the African Methodist Episcopal Church or something or the national –
00:04:54.920you know, Martin Luther King Jr. and all the reverends, you know, Jackson, the Reverend Sharpton, and so forth, they're all members of this, you know, their own black denominations.
00:05:08.620So you got literally – you got racially – I mean, it's like the black version of Christian identity.
00:05:23.980Let me go back to my black denomination and my, you know, my black historically black college and university and denounce these evil racists who want to segregate America.
00:06:03.020I can add a little more layer to even what Hunter presented because I follow this with a fervent zeal, I guess you could say, having grown up Southern Baptist.
00:06:13.740And the person who wrote this resolution, which read as if it had been written by an entry-level intern for Hillary Clinton's campaign, is a black pastor, as Brad mentioned, from Arlington, Texas.
00:06:28.740He's also the same man who wrote last year's anti-Confederate flag resolution, two resolutions condemning the alt-right and condemning the Confederate flag written by the same black pastor out of Texas.
00:06:42.300So it was presented to the resolutions committee before the convention.
00:06:46.640And the resolutions committee is the body that decides which resolutions will reach the messengers, which is what they call their delegates, and be presented to the floor for a vote.
00:06:57.180It failed to come out of the committee.
00:07:00.760Now, of course, this black pastor was not going to be content with that.
00:07:04.220So he decided to present it on the floor.
00:07:08.420You can do that, but if it doesn't come out of committee to present it on the floor, in order for it to have a hearing, it has to receive two-thirds majority vote.
00:07:19.820Failed to receive the two-thirds vote when he presented it on the floor.
00:07:23.060At that point, as Hunter mentioned, that's when all hell broke loose, and you had Soros' agents like Russell Moore, and you had the black identity pastor stirring up hell.
00:07:31.840This pastor, who presented the resolution, actually started holding court with the press.
00:07:36.600And so now you had the press started ginning up these the Southern Baptists refuse to reject white supremacy stories.
00:07:44.320So, and we've got to understand that these people aren't going to be the people that lead you into battle if you look at these messengers.
00:07:53.500They really are very weak, very soft, spiritually and physically.
00:07:57.540And so, even though this is in violation of their own rules, they started rounding up their delegates, or messengers, if you will, in the middle of the night.
00:08:07.580They brought them in there very late at night, near midnight, for a third vote.
00:09:04.400All of these things, which, of course, have we ever declared ourselves to be white supremacist or anti-Semitic or any of these other things?
00:09:10.100I mean, certainly that's not how we would identify our very heartfelt and reasonable messages.
00:09:14.960But what makes this interesting is not only was it presented by a black pastor, as you might expect,
00:09:20.040this is a guy who publicly stated in October of last year that he was voting for Hillary Clinton
00:09:27.140because the killing of unarmed black men by white police officers was the greatest pro-life issue of our generation.
00:09:37.060And, of course, he pastors an all-black church.
00:09:41.080And in addition to that, the Southern Baptist Convention had officially sanctioned groups such as the African-American Baptist,
00:09:49.920the Korean Baptist, the Chinese Baptist, the Filipino Baptist.
00:09:53.380And so, of course, it's not racial identity that they oppose.
00:09:57.840Even in this convention, a black man was elected to chair the Pastors Conference.
00:10:04.460And as Hunter mentioned, there was, in fact, in 2012, Fred Luter out of New Orleans became the first president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:10:12.400Well, apparently there had never been a president of the Southern Baptist Pastors Conference before that was black until this year.
00:10:17.660And when that happened, of course, all of the whites and blacks alike said,
00:10:20.360it's so great to have an African-American chair of this committee.
00:10:23.840So, of course, racial identity exists for us if there's some sort of guilt attached or some inherited syntax.
00:10:32.860So that really is the chain of events and the chronological timeline of what happened.
00:10:36.840And then, of course, the spin from there has just been grotesque, embarrassing, and pitiful.
00:10:40.580Right. And, of course, the Southern Baptists got no credit for this.
00:10:45.520They were, like, denounced by the Washington Post.
00:10:49.360I, you know, of, like, oh, they're still racist. Don't believe it.
00:10:53.520But let me – I am a little bit curious about what to make of this.
00:10:57.840Because I – a couple months ago, I actually read a book that I would recommend.
00:11:02.820And it is a – it's by Robert Jones, and it's either called The Death of White America or The End of White America.
00:11:15.560It's a very cucked book in its overall message and tone.
00:11:18.660But it's actually very useful in looking at the decline of mainline – mainline Protestantism as a kind of national religion.
00:11:27.420And he – one thing he said about the Southern Baptist Convention is that it is – if you look at it from a bird's-eye view, it is actually a very diverse congregation of faith.
00:11:39.580But if you go down to a ground-level view, it's actually a checkerboard in the sense that the denominations are racially segregated, you know, basically in fact, if not in motivation or in law.
00:11:57.420And the other thing about it is that I would say Southern Baptists are the kind of heart of what people would call evangelical America.
00:12:08.860In this – of a Republican voting, generally pro-life, you know, family values, often – most often rural and suburban or overwhelmingly rural and suburban white people.
00:12:23.480The core of the Republican vote, the core of what you could just say is, you know, normal, middle America or Southern America.
00:12:32.240And so I am curious exactly what to make of all this because do you think it was failing – you know, I don't – I think it's a bit much to say that because those votes failed, that means that the Southern Baptists are alt-right or they're listening to this podcast.
00:12:49.760Yes. I don't think that's the case, sadly.
00:12:52.540I have a theory. I have a theory, and it's simply – probably they didn't really know what they were voting on, and probably most of them were not that familiar with the alt-right.
00:13:04.180But in addition to that, membership in the Southern Baptist Church has declined for 10 consecutive years, which means, of course, for 10 consecutive years there have been less members than the year before.
00:13:16.100After they passed the Confederate flag resolution last year, membership immediately dropped another 7 percent, 7 percent in the last year alone.
00:13:23.760They were probably a little bit hesitant to tackle another controversial political issue.
00:13:29.220Now, certainly, if you go and you talk to the average member of a Southern Baptist church, particularly one that's a little older, and they're comfortable with you, they will probably agree with us on most racial issues.
00:13:42.220On the Jewish question, certainly not at all.
00:13:45.260But I think that they were probably hesitant to tackle another controversial issue.
00:13:52.400But then once it became a point of contention and you had the pressure from the head table coming down,
00:14:00.440if we don't denounce white supremacy and this Satanism, the church is going to fold,
00:14:05.520you've got to understand that most of the people in this, you know, obviously these messengers, if you looked at any of the pictures on Twitter, these are herd-like people.
00:14:13.640And if they're getting the tough sell from Russell Moore, who is there as, I believe, a paid agent and some of these other head cucks, they're going to fall in the line.
00:14:22.660And they do sense it in their hearts or in their bones.
00:14:26.060They sense that this, they might agree with the surface of the proclamation that, oh, yes, we don't like white supremacy, we're all God's children, or what have you.
00:14:39.800But they sense it in their bones that this is anti-them.
00:14:46.400But they're just using – it's not like the Southern Baptists were about to, you know, attend the MPI conference or start, you know, voting Richard Spencer to replace Russell Moore as their leader.
00:15:01.920So it was just a moral signal, basically.
00:15:05.520But I think a lot of the people probably sensed it in their heart that this was just – this was about – it was anti-them.
00:15:11.520It was demoralizing them, and it was moralizing not only, like, you know, non-white Baptists, but it was actually moralizing the liberal media.
00:15:22.440It was moralizing people who hate their guts.
00:15:24.720And they are absolutely right about that.
00:15:26.400Well, I want to hear Hunter's take on this.
00:15:27.940But don't – I can tell – especially these older people in their 60s and 70s, you don't want an obese, black, radical, racial agitator coming up and proposing this kind of stuff year after year.
00:15:43.100I mean, most of the Christians or people who claim to be Christians or identify as a Christian either culturally or even if they're true believers, most of them are from the South.
00:15:52.180And, of course, the South has a cultural rudder and a very interesting history that would make them – that would make the Southerners more fertile soil for our more muscular positions.
00:16:03.600And surely, just as there are decent people in the rank and file of the GOP and the head table is completely fraudulent and corrupt, that's basically the same thing you have in Southern Baptist churches.
00:16:14.260Most of the rank and file who would never go to a convention who have no idea what even gets voted on at these conventions.
00:16:20.440Most of the Southern Baptists have no idea what happened this week.
00:16:42.880Well, as you've been following this, I'm sure, you know, Russell Moore almost lost his head recently, twice I think.
00:16:52.220In fact, there was a big effort to get rid of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is his little policy group with the Southern Baptist Commission.
00:17:03.420And there was – he's the most controversial individual in the Southern Baptist Commission by far.
00:17:12.680And there's a lot of – there was a huge amount of resistance to him and wanted to get rid of him.
00:17:16.960And there was a lot of resentment about how he had, you know, so – he was so opposed to Trump during the election.
00:17:25.240He was one of the leading cucks out there.
00:17:27.880He was, you know, leading the charge of cucks against Trump, and the evangelicals completely rejected Russell Moore and all his arguments and all these – the leaders of the – these cucked churches.
00:17:43.720You know, the lay people completely rejected them and voted for Trump in overwhelming numbers.
00:17:48.460And that's because they were – I mean they said all this stuff about race, but it was Trump's – his racial positions, which was resonating, especially in the Deep South.
00:17:59.420That's where, you know, Trump's base was.
00:18:01.100He won – he won every Southern state, I think.
00:18:04.520Well, also, despite being a, you know, thrice married person, I don't think he – I actually don't think Donald Trump is the worst philanderer out there.
00:18:16.480But there's also – he clearly has a history of cheating and of being outlandish and bombastic and having a hot bottle on his arm.
00:18:25.960You know, so he is not – he does – you know, despite all of that and being vulgar and so on, despite all of that, evangelicals really came out in force.
00:18:35.520I mean he could not – he would not be president without the evangelicals, no doubt.
00:20:01.880And they lost, you know, tremendously.
00:20:03.940But that gets, you know, right to the heart of the issue.
00:20:06.300And this is the funny thing about the Southern Baptists.
00:20:11.360When they're condemning racism and they're condemning slavery and they're condemning segregationists and white supremacists, they're condemning themselves.
00:21:47.420And they believed that slavery was a positive good, that slavery was just a great thing, and that Africans had been – were, you know, uplifted by their humane Christian masters.
00:21:57.580And servitude was just a great institution that was going to sweep the world, and free labor was bad.
00:22:07.240And, you know, in terms of their racial views, it was extremely more hardcore than anything – I mean, how hardcore do you have to be to, like, be a slave owner, you know, to actually physically own an African?
00:23:29.360And I know some people in the alt-right are not, but we have reached the same political positions.
00:23:34.200And for me, I got there in part by my spiritual upbringing.
00:23:40.520Growing up at the Southern Baptist Church in the 1980s – I was born in the 1980s, so in the 80s and early 90s – was a wonderful experience.
00:23:47.320Now, granted, I didn't go into church and hear a speech from someone like Sam Dixon.
00:23:53.360It wasn't a political speech, but I do believe it was rooted in the traditional Word of God.
00:23:57.420What we didn't get was obviously these basic, you know, Marxist screeds that you get out of the church now.
00:25:29.440During the Black Lives Matter chaos in Ferguson, he took the side of Michael Brown instead of the police officer who shot him in self-defense.
00:25:37.420He has diverted Southern Baptist money to help build a mosque in New Jersey.
00:25:42.800He called me a white supremacist in the press last year, so that's a little bit personal.
00:25:47.360But in addition to that—now, this is where it really gets absurd.
00:25:50.740Say what you will about Martin Luther King, that he was a degenerate, that he was a plagiarist, that he was all of these things that he absolutely was, a communist.
00:26:00.660But even if you can overlook all of that—and some great men were horrible people.
00:26:07.000Obviously, Martin Luther King was not a great man.
00:26:10.420But there have been great historical figures that were flawed personally.
00:26:14.700But even if you discount all of that about King, he publicly denounced the divinity of Jesus Christ.
00:26:20.060So in order to be a Christian, and certainly on some levels, unless you just appreciate the cultural ramifications that Christianity has played in our people's evolution over the last 2,000 years,
00:26:31.440you would have to say you have to believe in the virgin birth, you have to believe in the resurrection, in order to be a fundamentalist Bible-believing Christian, which the Southern Baptists claim to be.
00:26:38.920So why then are they honoring a man in Memphis, Tennessee next year on the 50th anniversary of his assassination and holding him up as the exemplar of what Southern Baptists should be?
00:26:49.520And that's what they're planning next year.
00:26:50.940So according to them, the great Christians of the past in the South—Robert E. Lee, R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson—they're all in hell, whereas Martin Luther King sits at the right hand of Jesus Christ.
00:27:04.340So this is what you're getting out of the church now.
00:27:06.480No, we didn't get any of that back then.
00:27:08.360We didn't get any of that, but I'll tell you, there was a theologian by the name of A. W. Tozer who had a great line, and this certainly applies to today's Southern Baptist Convention, but really all Protestant denominations in the West.
00:27:25.100Religion today is not transforming people, he wrote.
00:27:28.000Rather, it is being transformed by the people.
00:27:30.580It is not raising the moral level of society.
00:27:33.800It is descending to society's own level and congratulating itself that it has scored a victory because society is smilingly accepting its surrender.
00:27:43.080If that didn't really sum up the church of the current year, I don't know what does.
00:27:50.260But, no, the Southern Baptist tradition, even, of course, prior to my experience in the church, was certainly very good.
00:27:57.020Even as late as—you know, we all know why the religion or the denomination came to be, why they said the 1840s from the mainline Baptist.
00:28:04.740But even as late as, of course, the 1960s, you had the prominent theologians of the Southern Baptist Convention using Scripture to back up their positions on segregation.
00:28:13.260Now, that was within the lifetime of many Southern Baptists who were still alive.
00:28:17.760And so I would say it does make—Christianity and the church does make for a very convenient whipping boy for many of us in the alt-right.
00:28:29.420I come from this from a unique perspective, being an alt-right person who was raised a Christian and Southern Baptist.
00:28:37.120But I think the problem is certainly in our society, because what is the church, if not a collection of individuals from the local communities that the church is located?
00:28:49.180And so if our people are infected with this pathological altruism, this disease that seems to only afflict white people,
00:28:56.360well, certainly when they cross the threshold of a church house, they don't become immune to it.
00:29:12.960Yeah, I mean, look, for someone like me who is critical of Christianity itself and its origins,
00:29:22.220I could talk a long time about problems as I see it in the nature of the religion itself.
00:29:31.480But I would say that you're absolutely correct in the sense that the Southern Baptist Convention is just one more institution that has gone the way of PC madness and current year ideology.
00:29:47.000So, I mean, I remember certainly, you know, getting into all this stuff 15 years ago when I was first, you know, becoming an adult and reading and subscribing to magazines and things like that.
00:30:00.960And most conservatives, paleocons and so on would always point to the church as, well, you know, society is infected, but at least we have these, you know, bastions of light out there.
00:30:12.300But the fact is, the way I see it in 2017 is that all of these institutions, and maybe there are a couple of exceptions here and there,
00:30:21.520but all of the institutions are taking parallel paths down this road towards the current year.
00:30:29.580And they just have a different way of doing it.
00:30:32.580So, I mean, I, as I was, I was joking with, with Hunter before we turned on the recorder, like, he said, oh, were you raised a Southern Baptist?
00:30:40.960And I could detect a little bit of sarcasm in that question.
00:31:19.940All universities, whether it's a big state college with a big football team or so on, or whether it's Yale or a small liberal arts college out in Pennsylvania, they are all, they have the exact same, effectively, freshman orientation session.
00:31:34.700They have the exact same ideology animating the, you know, arts and sciences and much of the physical sciences, actually.
00:31:41.820So all of these institutions, the government itself is like this.
00:31:45.200It is very, very difficult to find an institution that actually is not cucked or paused or whatever word you want to use.
00:31:52.820I would say maybe the only institution that isn't fully cucked is the Internet.
00:31:57.180I mean, you know, but in terms of all, you know, wider society, all of the institutions that were basically the institutions of the ruling class, something like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harvard University, the Episcopalian Church, your local Rotary Club, the U.S. military, I could go on.
00:32:21.060All of these basic WASP institutions of the ruling class have all reached the same destination.
00:32:27.980They just have different flourishes and different aesthetics about it.
00:32:32.080And so, no, I don't, I absolutely do not blame the Southern Baptists.
00:32:36.260But the only thing I will say is I totally agree that there are a lot of very, you know, very decent, good people involved in, you know, in these religious orders.
00:32:48.600But as institutions, they have not been able to put up any resistance.
00:32:54.180The fact that they just ultimately folded, it just expresses it all.
00:32:59.440None of these institutions at this point will fundamentally stick up for us.
00:33:06.220And so at the risk of sounding like a Leninist, I just simply think we are going to probably have to go through this process.
00:33:15.620We are going to have to see it to the end.
00:33:18.780We are going to have to have another resolution that is even more ridiculous than this last one in 2020.
00:33:25.620And it's just going to have to get, we're going to have to pass through this era of ideological transformation.
00:33:34.860And it probably will have to get worse because the idea that we can point to something out there that is like, well, at least that's not cucked.
00:33:49.120You know, like some of the stuff Russell Moore has said and like the absolute like moralization and valuing of interracial marriage and things like that.
00:34:01.620Some of the things that they, the religious people have said are actually worse than stuff you would hear at Harvard because there is a kind of religious quality to it.
00:34:12.780I think, I think, again, we have to differentiate between the leadership of any institution, including the church and the laity or the members of any other institution.
00:34:25.580But certainly the leadership of the church, you couldn't get any more cucked than what you're seeing out of Russell Moore.
00:34:31.040But I think Russell Moore, unlike most of the people in the Southern Baptist Church, who are, again, just like most people anywhere else in society, they will take the passively resistance.
00:34:43.620There are very few people in the world who actually have any semblance of leadership quality.
00:34:48.440There are very few people that have any core beliefs.
00:34:50.700You're talking, you're listening to three of them right now, of course.
00:34:53.720But for the most part, that's the issue.
00:34:57.000I think Russell Moore very much is a paid change agent in the church.
00:35:01.780But it is interesting, and I would ask, why was it the Southern Baptist Church?
00:35:06.000You haven't seen all of the other denominations passing resolutions condemning the alt-right.
00:35:11.100Only the Southern Baptists have done that.
00:35:13.160And I think, of course, the reason is twofold.
00:35:15.460Number one, the history of the Southern Baptist Church being so demonstrably of segregation into existence over the issue of slavery.
00:35:26.820But I think the leadership knows that on a fundamental level there are a lot of people in these pews that, to go back to something I said earlier, are in agreement with some of our issues.
00:35:38.800I think there's certainly some natural overlap there.
00:35:41.140But the church is dying because they alienate men who are the natural leaders of families, whether it be spiritual or otherwise.
00:35:50.440The church today, as is written at Faith and Heritage, a website that I like, with its cucking on race and feminism and immigration, demands that the grace of Christ comes attached at the hip with this suicide cult manifested by feminized leaders like Russell Moore.
00:36:08.940So any reasonable person is going to reject this ridiculous practice of religion out of hand, which means, of course, the very best people would be alienated from Christianity.
00:36:17.980So I understand fully why nonbelievers in the alt-right, who didn't have my experiences with Christianity growing up, cannot but look at the church and gag.
00:36:26.560And to them, I would say, just as the political establishment must be destroyed by an outsider that we thought could have been Trump, probably not now, but so too must the Christian religious establishment be destroyed by a charismatic and forceful advocate of the traditional faith of our fathers.
00:36:43.240He's going to have to drive these cucks out of the pulpits.
00:36:45.880And, Richard, you say this, you've said this quite right.
00:36:48.180First, the culture changes, then politics changes.
00:36:51.140Well, there's another cliche that goes, you tell me what the world is saying today, and I'll tell you what the church will be saying in seven years.
00:37:19.280But even William Pierce said two people, a Marxist and a Christian, can take the same scripture and interpret it in a way to defend their position.
00:37:29.680But there is something beautiful about it, I think, that is worth preserving, and we need to retake everything.
00:37:39.500But as far as it exists now, it needs to be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.
00:37:43.000You lose a fortress, you fire on your own fortress, you recapture it, and then you restore it.
00:37:47.640But it's a mess, and believe me, again, I say this as someone who grew up and had wonderful experiences in that church, but it's embarrassing.
00:38:11.780In the Deep South, it's, you know, the Methodists and the Baptists are predominant here.
00:38:16.580And then, you know, as I got older, you know, I started to realize that they believed all these cucked things about race, all these, you know, terrible things about social issues.
00:38:28.140And that just, you know, alienated me from it.
00:38:30.500It's just like, you know, I don't want anything to do with this.
00:38:33.160And it took me for the longest time, you know, to do, you know, in my mind for a long time, Christianity, I associated Christianity with types like Russell Moore.
00:38:43.660But then again, you know, like I said, my sense of history, you know, allowed me to, like, you know, see this in perspective.
00:38:51.160And this is what I was going to go into.
00:38:56.580If someone looked at the SCV, speaking of cucked institutions, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, you would think that the war between the states was between legions of black confederates who were fighting on behalf of the multiracial, anti-racist South.
00:39:14.160Yeah, for states rights and to oppose high tariffs against Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, who was a racist monster.
00:39:24.100So millions of black confederates fought to liberate the South, you know, multiculturalism and anti-racism.
00:39:31.860Okay, so that's just one example of a completely cucked institution.
00:39:36.720But you read history and you're like, okay, wait a minute.
00:39:40.100And then you, like something else, Russell Moore wrote one of his big essays.
00:39:43.980One of the first things that drew my attention to this guy was he wrote an article called The Cross and the Confederate Flag, like, absolutely can't coexist, right?
00:39:55.440They coexisted, like, they coexisted just fine.
00:39:59.440It was, it was absolutely the whole, like, all the churches split over slavery and over race.
00:40:05.300And then, like, after the war, the whole lost cause ideology was, you know, it was Southern theologians, you know, who said, you know, the Confederates had been baptized in blood and were God's chosen people.
00:40:19.100And, you know, race was right there in the middle of it.
00:40:22.880So they've completely tossed aside their own history.
00:40:27.960And they seem to believe that we are right now, I mean, we are correct right now, not to be too ambiguous there, in the sense that all these other Christians, basically the whole history of Christianity was effectively wrong.
00:40:48.320Because clearly, identitarianism or nationalism or whatever you want to call it, racialism, certainly in the United States, clearly coexisted with Christianity.
00:40:59.680And so it is a very bold claim to make.
00:41:03.340I mean, Russell Moore is basically saying, I am correct on this.
00:41:07.740And all of the, my forefathers were wrong.
00:41:13.420I mean, he, and I don't know if he's ever, I'll sometimes talk to Christians.
00:41:17.620They don't, they're not willing to say this.
00:41:20.140I've talked to, you know, these really cucked Catholics, like John Smurak, and they seem to believe that, like, the Catholic Church was always about multiracialism and denying race and all this kind of stuff.
00:41:31.420And it's just, I mean, that's just totally delusional.
00:41:34.500I mean, you, I would almost rather they, as opposed to, like, calling upon, you know, this theological wisdom that they've just pulled out of their ass, that they just openly admit what they are doing, which is that we are, we are right.
00:41:50.240And everyone who preceded us is wrong, because that is the only thing you can say.
00:41:54.340Even churches now, I mean, particularly in Eastern Europe, another irony of history, there are many ironies of history, is that many of the people, many of the nations that suffered under communism did not suffer under something worse, and that is cultural Marxism.
00:42:10.580And so they actually have very strong, intense senses of nation.
00:42:16.940If you told a Polish Catholic that the true meaning of his religion was about globalism and multiculturalism, they would look at you like you're speaking to them in Arabic.
00:42:29.800I mean, it's, no, actually, our Catholicism is about us.
00:42:34.340And, you know, I don't know what to say, it's just, it is amazing, but I, at the same time, I would put this forward, is that Christianity does have, any kind of monotheism, at least does have something, it does have an inherent universality that is something it can call upon to make this point.
00:42:59.100And that it is interesting, and that, you know, I agree with you, I absolutely agree that most of the whites in the Southern Baptists, who are Southern Baptists, are decent, that even if they're flawed, like we all are, they want to be family men, leaders of families, hardworking people, I absolutely agree with that.
00:43:20.380But the fact that they don't have an ability to oppose Russell Moore, and they clearly didn't, like when Russell Moore browbeat them or twisted arms or shamed them, wagged a finger, they ultimately went in line.
00:43:33.440They didn't have anything to call upon to say, no, actually, the Confederate flag is something we should be proud of as Southerners and as Southern Baptists in particular.
00:43:44.480No, I don't even know what the alt-right is, is what they probably should have said, but, like, who is, who are these people? We have no earthly idea.
00:43:54.440However, we, yeah, nationalism and ethno-nationalism, that, how are we really going to denounce this?
00:44:03.660I mean, you know, this is just insane. They don't have the, they don't have the words to, or the ability to oppose their leaders, and I think that is a very tragic thing.
00:44:14.960One thing I was going to pick up here, it's amazing, you know, like you said, that they don't have the ability to reply to Russell Moore.
00:44:23.180Now, if they actually wanted to make all the correct biblical arguments for racial, for white identity, for racial differences, for slavery, for white supremacy, for segregation, that's what Southern Baptists, you know, had.
00:44:37.560They made all those arguments against everything they believe today for well over a century, right? Over a century.
00:44:46.880And you look at the timeline here, and we were talking about how institutions, you know, go on parallel paths, and that's the interesting thing about the Southern Baptist Convention,
00:44:55.780in that, of all the institutions in our society, it was the last one to, I would say, it was the slowest one,
00:45:06.300in that the Southern Baptists discovered that racism and slavery was this horrible thing in 1995.
00:45:14.360Yeah, they announced, they announced in 1995 that, you know, racism is a sin after all.
00:45:20.200Well, like, 30-something years after the Civil Rights Movement, hundreds, over 100 years after slavery, they make these arguments.
00:45:31.980And we have to ask, why is this going on?
00:45:34.820Why isn't it not just, why is it the Southern Baptists?
00:45:37.140Why is it Presbyterians or, you know, even atheists or agnostics or Catholics?
00:45:43.380You know, at the end of the day, they all believe the same thing.
00:45:46.720And whether it's, you know, the universities or the churches, they're all screaming, bleeding, the same message about race.
00:45:54.360And that really gets to the heart of it and what changed.
00:47:15.820And like we were saying, the cause of all this, the ultimate cause of all this is that, you know, the natural organic culture of, say, the South or the natural organic culture of Ireland or Germany or France.
00:47:28.140It's all, like, been subordinated to this globalist, well, this global mass culture that comes down through television, through radio, through newspapers and stuff like that, through elite universities.
00:47:42.420And that's what they're conforming to, is my sense, is that they want to be mainstream, they want to be respectable, so they give ground to the dominant culture.
00:47:52.920And that's what they become, more like over time.
00:47:54.640That's what all institutions become, more like over time.
00:47:57.560They become, like, the dominant group in society.
00:48:01.420Yeah, and this has actually been challenged by the Internet and social media.
00:48:06.880And I think there are a lot of bad things about the Internet and social media.
00:48:11.460I read less books now, fewer books now, because I'm on Twitter too much or I'm reading stuff on the web and so on.
00:48:21.920At the same time, this is the dynamic that I totally agree with what Hunter is saying.
00:48:29.180Like, there is a kind of monopoly, there's a definite monopoly on culture by the big three television stations, by Hollywood, and so on.
00:48:39.260And this is actually being challenged for the first time through the Internet, where society is fragmenting, and that these new views are actually coming in.
00:48:54.300I mean, the alt-right's collective budget isn't even approaching, like, the budget for the SBC conference, I mean, you know, or convention, not to mention the budget of, the combined budget of all these individual churches.
00:49:10.520Yet they feel the need to denounce us as some terrible threat.
00:49:39.080Well, it's a little ironic, I think, that the guy who, in some capacity, and this is not conspiratorial, Russell Moore sits on the board of an organization whose sole purpose is to push amnesty to their flocks.
00:50:01.980And in part, that organization is funded by George Soros.
00:50:05.240So a man who, at one degree of separation, accepts money from a very nice atheist Jewish individual, is claiming that the members of his own congregation are Satanists if they disagree with him.
00:50:18.740But, again, a lot of this is societal gentlemen, and they do want to be accepted.
00:50:25.820But as it was said, I guess halfway in jest, just as every German girl in the 1930s wanted to be with an SS officer, when the culture changes, the church will change once again.
00:50:37.880So as bad as it is, I guess that can give us some hope.
00:50:42.620But these people are also very spiritually illiterate.
00:50:44.880And if you want to hear about something else that's ironic, we've all seen the Mark Dice videos, the Man on the Street interviews, where people can't answer first or second grade questions about civics or history.
00:50:56.660They can't name the belligerents in World War II or any of these things.
00:51:00.460Well, certainly that, too, can be found in the church.
00:51:03.540And so, of course, as they passed this resolution damning the alt-right as Satanic, as anti-Semitic, as white supremacist, and on and on, they also passed a resolution, quite rightly, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, which began by many accounts in, well, what year is this?
00:51:59.820But we do know, as I said earlier, and I'm not sure if I said it on this call because I've had some trouble with the connection.
00:52:04.980I know I said it earlier before the call, the alt-right is the only organized force fighting degeneracy in the West.
00:52:14.640So for any conservative Christians out there, if they want to join a battle that their ministers don't have the stomach for, they need to join ranks right here.
00:52:43.400The Southern Baptists, one of the interesting things, you've got to think, well, you know, they completely accommodated the South's racial culture, the South's, you know, belief in white identity, the South's slavery culture.
00:52:58.680And you've got to think, what if, you know, what if the Third Reich had won the Second World War and had conquered America?
00:53:07.160You know, they would probably be conforming to whatever, you know, national socialist America would be preaching today because, you know, they want to be –
00:53:17.160the key thing about these people is they want to be accepted, they want to be respectable, and they'll accommodate, you know, whoever bestows respectability, whether it was the slave owners in the antebellum South or the media moguls who control the television channels today and who are the big donors.
00:53:38.500And it'll be something else – it'll be something else, you know, 20, 30 years from now, I think.
00:53:44.640I absolutely agree, and I would say this.
00:53:48.860A lot of Americans really love this notion of the separation of church and state, which can be traced back to a letter written by Jefferson.
00:53:58.800But – and it does have, obviously, some historical basis.
00:54:03.820I think there were many people in the founding of America feared the notion of a national church because America was multi-confessional.
00:54:12.420And, you know, a Baptist or a Catholic didn't want an Anglican, you know, forcing his religion down their throat.
00:54:21.120But I do think this notion of the separation of church and state is actually wildly naive and wildly ahistorical.
00:54:33.120States, and that is governing bodies and communities, they congeal through religion.
00:54:42.420And it's actually the religion that grants legitimacy to the state and vice versa, actually.
00:54:50.240And a religion does – it is a – religion is almost inherently tribal.
00:54:54.120Even in a universalistic faith like Christianity or Islam or something like that, there is this tribal element to religion.
00:55:05.580And the tribe enforces – or reinforces the religion, and the religion reinforces the tribe.
00:55:11.220And we really can't ever get away with that – get away from that.
00:55:16.580And we have to understand the degree to which – yes, what you were saying, Hunter, is true.
00:55:23.040Like, if there is a change of regime, we will, within about 10 years – because Southerners, you know, they're a little slow.
00:55:30.760They'll be quoting scripture, justifying the new regime.
00:55:35.840And we can look at that cynically, but we can also look at that as a sign of hope.
00:55:40.980And we can also look at that from a standpoint that I am not – whatever I'm – however I might feel about religion itself or my faith or lack thereof, I don't believe there can ever be a society without a religious sensibility and without a religious institution.
00:56:01.620And there is going to have to be, for any kind of new society that we want to found, there is going to have to be a binding force that is supernatural, natural, that isn't the police, that isn't the constitution, that is something that is theological and that is in our hearts and in our minds and in the air, you could say.
00:56:26.960Well, and this may have been their overzealous attempt to stave off something that they feel is happening in the church.
00:56:35.720I think there is a lot of pressure building up in the church.
00:56:41.460I mean, on the political scene, all was calm and serene until Trump happened.
00:56:45.200Now, certainly he's underperformed based upon our expectations, but what he did – that campaign was really one of the most enjoyable years of my life watching the people.
00:56:53.240And I believe that some of these churches may be feeling that as well, and it can happen in the church.
00:56:59.620Certainly, I can tell you from being on the inside of this thing, not with the Southern Baptist Convention currently, but having grown up in the church and having still – and I still take my kids to church.
00:57:11.160I can tell you that the average person in the church in the South does not want to go and hear Marxist bilge coming from the pulpit as they are inundated incessantly with all other forms of media,
00:57:29.200except for the ones, of course, that we control, bombarding them with this worldview.
00:57:35.540They don't want to go to church on Sunday morning, hear a sermon that reflects the Obama MSNBC worldview.
00:57:44.780I think that something could break in the church.
00:57:46.840And if you look back, not just on the South, obviously – and this has been talked about, this is not a new idea, and this is something that hasn't been said a hundred times before.
00:57:54.680But if you look back, our people do owe a lot to the Christians in terms of, to varying degrees, certainly the great white kings of Europe, Charlemagne, Sobieski, Martel.
00:58:06.900It was the banner of the cross that united a lot of those tribes.
00:58:11.440So I don't know if that's the role Christianity can play going forward, but I think it's certainly nearsighted or short-sighted to blame Christianity for the plight of the world as it stands today.
00:58:21.000And so I do agree with you, Richard, that we will need something going forward that fills that void on a spiritual plane that things in the physical realm can't.
00:58:44.800But the only thing I would say about Rod Dreher, he is a bit too extreme, and I feel that I will have to distance myself from some of his white supremacist and eliminationist viewpoints.
00:59:02.220However, as a lover of free speech, I am willing to tolerate the radical anti-Semite and neo-Nazi Rod Dreher.
00:59:12.960Okay, so commenting on Rod Dreher, I do read Rod, and I think from reading Rod's blog –
00:59:23.620If I read him every day, I would just be in a bad mood.
00:59:27.500I would just be like, oh, this guy is so stupid.
00:59:29.640I keep tabs on Rod to see what Christian conservatives and these types are thinking.
00:59:38.740And you've got to think maybe the reason they're condemning the alt-right is the same reason the Southern Baptists were condemning integration relentlessly back in the 50s, 60s.
00:59:48.640You know, they were denouncing integration with resolutions because the alt-right is gaining ground, and they see the alt-right as a thread.
00:59:56.040And I've seen many blog posts by Rod Dreher when he talks about how all these Christian principals and Christian schoolteachers and all these people who do Christian homeschooling are complaining that their kids are on their smartphones talking about the alt-right and Pepe and all this stuff.
01:00:18.980And it's kind of like, you know, denouncing pornography.
01:00:30.480Even though we have such a small budget, you know, our voice is everywhere on the Internet, on Twitter, on YouTube, some places, if you count Paul Jusuf.
01:00:43.920But, yeah, I mean, we're getting our ideas out there, and they feel threatened by us.
01:00:47.480And that's probably one of the reasons you had this big denunciation.
01:00:52.660Well, and then, Richard, you even mentioned with what the alt-right's been able to do on this budget that wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket.
01:01:00.980I mean, there are single churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, single churches that bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in time every week.
01:01:09.260And they are completely weak, effeminate, emasculated, and the future is not there.
01:01:15.180I'm not saying as a Christian that the future can't be, that that faith can't be part of our future as a people.
01:01:21.320But the future is not in the Christianity that you're getting at the denominational head table right now.
01:01:27.740Oh, I think it's absolutely true, and I'll just add to the Rod Dreher discussion.
01:01:33.160Rod Dreher is kind of like an expression of the older, worrying, hand-wringing Christian who doesn't want to see this going.
01:01:43.680Rod Dreher has expressed a kind of, well, not a kind of, he's expressed a cultural pessimism.
01:01:49.660I mean, he has thrown out this idea, the Benedict Option, a romantic retreat from the world.
01:01:55.780We need to go, we need to basically retreat from the culture war and set up camp somewhere and then maybe come back after it's burned itself out or something.
01:02:04.740That is the Benedict Option to the degree that I understand it.
01:02:09.000But it is interesting that people like Dreher will say things, he'll even say things that I might agree with on a lot of issues, things affecting our society.
01:03:36.340You know, even if we agree with Dreher on some important points, if you're not going to enter the field of battle where the battle is taking place, you might as well go play tiddlywinks.
01:03:48.200You know, it's like the left, the enemies of everything Rod Dreher likes, they have amassed an army on the race battlefield.
01:03:58.560And yet Rod Dreher is like, no, to the sea.
01:04:01.500Or, you know, no, let's, you know, let's go over to this other country where we might be able to win this tiny little skirmish.
01:04:09.560No, at some point you have to face down your enemies.
01:04:15.600I don't care what your opinions are on abortion or pornography or the decline of the family or civil discourse or profanity or whatever the hell you want to talk about.
01:04:27.800If you're not fighting the battle that matters, you might as well go take up tiddlywinks.
01:04:32.580Because that is just as useless as what you're doing right now.
01:05:32.340And it's always the response to everything is a stern moral lecture and a complaint about double standards and the usual hand-wringing and never doing anything but denouncing us because, you know, we're the only ones who are going to get out there and do anything about it.
01:05:48.800They'll call us, you know, when we go out there to oppose the antiphots who are beating people up in the streets, they're like, oh, well, there's just two sides of the same coin is what they'll say.
01:05:59.600And they're weirdly right because we're – both of us, both of these sides are actually fighting.
01:06:36.700Of course the battle is – of course the battle is racial, and I'll give you two examples.
01:06:41.040One is how the phrase white male has become a derogatory term.
01:06:46.660Like, you know, you used to call somebody a racist.
01:06:48.280Now you call them a white male or a white conservative.
01:06:51.840You attack them – you specifically attack them on the grounds of their race and demographic.
01:06:57.660It doesn't get any more clear cut than that.
01:07:01.000And the second is, you know, with the Southern Baptist Convention, you know, they condemned in their little resolution.
01:07:05.920They said that white – they said that white identity was satanic, right?
01:07:11.500Now, they didn't condemn – they didn't say that black identity was satanic.
01:07:16.020All these black Baptists who have their black congregations or these black Methodists who have their race-based congregations, they didn't say that they were satanic.
01:08:09.040This is why my connection has been so poor.
01:08:11.440And I think I even dropped off the call a few minutes ago for a moment.
01:08:15.200And so to your audience, I would apologize for my lack of accessibility here.
01:08:20.040But I would leave you with two thoughts.
01:08:21.760Number one, what you're seeing here is nothing more than the modern-day witch hunt to identify and punish and persecute so-called racists.
01:08:30.320But unlike those days when the people perpetrating it had some semblance of power, the future will not be written by people like Russell Moore,
01:08:40.040who publicly admitted to crying uncontrollably when the Southern Baptist Convention denounced the Confederate flag.
01:08:48.980History is not going to be written by people who cry tears of joy when the Christian cross of his fathers is denounced by his own church.
01:08:57.840That's not going to be who writes history.
01:08:59.660The people who write history are the people who are listening to this podcast and the people who support the institutions that represent this podcast.