00:01:46.880We're going to get to your book and kind of how you got into this lane of talking specifically about church happenings, SBC happenings, what's going on in evangelicalism.
00:01:56.920But I want to zoom out and look at the culture because, really, culture and what's going on in the church, they can't be separated, as you know, and as you write about a lot.
00:02:05.560And one thing that's going on this week is the conversation about an Olympic boxer who is fighting against a female boxer, fighting as a female.
00:02:17.560And there's a lot of outrage, understandably, and a lot of confusion about this person whose name is Ameen Khalif, an Algerian boxer.
00:02:24.740And this person was actually deemed to have male chromosomes and then won a fight in the women's division at the Paris Olympics.
00:02:34.220Today, people are, as I said, understandably, very upset about this.
00:04:18.620And so I asked for clarity from Colin Wright on this because I didn't want to say that a woman who just happens to look kind of manly is a man.
00:04:26.780I don't think that's the right thing to do.
00:05:28.380The two boxers that everyone is talking about are biologically male.
00:05:34.340And so he has looked through all the documents, all the requirements, eligibility, and everything like that.
00:05:42.380And he has determined, yes, this person is a man, even though people are defending him, saying, no, this is a woman.
00:05:49.120All right, Megan, I know that was long-winded and people are here to hear you talk.
00:05:54.080It's just such a complicated summary, and I wanted to make sure that we had the, you know, the full context.
00:06:00.300But I just wanted to set this up as an example of how disordered we are as a society, how crazy things have gotten that now domestic violence, basically.
00:06:12.080A man beating up a woman is now sport that everyone is applauding for.
00:06:28.080Because, you know, even if there is some sort of intersex issue here, that would still create a problem if you have someone on a lot of testosterone.
00:06:37.220And that just tells you what testosterone does to your body to make you bigger, to make you stronger.
00:06:42.480And you have what seems to be a biological man beating up a woman.
00:06:48.080And it's not the first time we've seen this.
00:06:49.600And that's the other thing that I think is the issue.
00:06:52.340And just to see what this movement does to women is so abhorrent.
00:06:58.060And you don't know how to put it any other way other than we have gotten to this point that we have a culture that is so unprotective of women.
00:07:10.660Though there is a part of me, you know, maybe to open a can of worms a little bit that goes, I don't know how I feel about women boxing in the first place for that reason.
00:07:20.800That's like a whole other issue is that I think there's a reason why it is reflexively uncomfortable to watch two women fighting each other.
00:07:29.220Like, I don't mind watching a UFC fight.
00:07:31.320But when the women come out, I mean, and they're strong, tough women.
00:07:58.820It's that C.S. Lewis line that it's a terrible thing when women fight and even more terrible when you see a man beating down a woman and just watching her on her knees crying like that.
00:08:07.560I mean, that creates a visceral reaction and it should.
00:08:10.460I think that goes to something that we just know in the core of our being that this is not right, what we're seeing.
00:08:16.120And you wrote this morning and have written many times before about the infiltration of LGBTQ, that includes this tea that we're talking about, into the church, which has been for thousands of years, at least supposed to be a refuge for women and for children, the most vulnerable.
00:08:35.940Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up because a big part of the soft capitulation of the church has ignored what this does to women.
00:08:43.960And so when we heard terms like pronoun hospitality, a part of that conversation was not what that does to your sisters in Christ to be willing to accept biological lies in that way in the name of winsomeness or in the name of being seeker sensitive.
00:09:00.480And so I think that was part of the problem.
00:09:02.820But then in my book, I also go into how a lot of this is organic and just sensitivity to the culture, but a lot of it's also being deliberately orchestrated.
00:09:11.680So you have, I hate to use the term ministry for some of these organizations, but you have organizations that claim to be ministries that are taking funding from secular left-wing gay lobbying groups.
00:09:37.520Its founder was a surgical supply heir of a hundred billion dollar company.
00:09:43.060And for up until 2015, they continued to lose at the ballot box.
00:09:47.540And they realized that the problem was the church, that they could not get this legislation to recognize gay marriage over the finish line because of the church.
00:09:55.720So even though we had Obergefell, in the meantime, what that foundation started to do, the Arcus Foundation, was look at, okay, how can we reform church doctrine in conservative ministries and in conservative denominations?
00:10:19.580They just went through a schism on gay marriage and gay ordination.
00:10:23.320And they have been pouring money into groups that are associated with churches that you know, like Andy Stanley's church.
00:10:30.720One of them is a program called Embracing the Journey that is supported financially and also in advice and counseling kind of role by Andy Stanley's staff.
00:10:58.240We've discussed Embracing the Journey before when we were analyzing that recent sermon by Andy Stanley in which he basically said that homosexuality is different than any other sin because saying that homosexuality is a sin is saying that who someone is is a sin, which is a completely unbiblical way to look at sexuality and identity.
00:11:21.920And what an awful burden to put on someone like, sorry, this is the one sin that Jesus's blood just like could not cover, can't empower you to repent from.
00:11:30.340But embracing the journey, you're not reaching at all.
00:11:32.940That's what the organization believes.
00:11:35.040The people who help run the organization, I believe, if I'm understanding correctly, the family, they are affirming of their son's decision to be in a union with a man.
00:11:46.360And they have also, in their conferences, hoisted up people who are outright affirming of LGBTQ unions.
00:11:55.700Andy Stanley, from my understanding, also really just believes that for some people, they cannot help it.
00:12:10.180And, you know, when you bring up this embracing the journey curriculum, everything you just said is absolutely accurate.
00:12:16.720And part of what they do is they're involved with this other organization that is openly LGBTQ affirming.
00:12:23.400Now, embracing the journey is to if you ask them, they try to fudge it a little bit.
00:12:27.580But if you go look at other organizations they're involved with, they're very transparent when they're on their websites.
00:12:32.160And if you read the curriculum, they hold up transgender pastors or Bible study leaders as being solid, sound Christians that we can learn from.
00:12:44.280And they talk about their son who is in an open gay relationship and an ongoing practicing, you know, same-sex sexual activity.
00:12:55.320That, yeah, that he's, you know, that he's going to go to heaven despite what we know from certain passages of scripture that they call clobber passages.
00:13:02.900So when they're involved with these groups, I think the thing that so many churches unwittingly don't know is that they want to talk about these things in a soft way.
00:13:14.460And they don't realize that our reticence to talk about it is being exploited by actors like this.
00:13:21.880This Reformation Project that Andy Stanley's staff pastors and some church members who are behind this Embracing the Journey curriculum are involved with, it has a Pastors in Process program.
00:13:35.120And it is described as a confidential program to help secretly affirming pastors slowly move their congregations to affirm LGBTQ doctrine and to say it is not sin.
00:13:48.820Wow. Okay. And how does a congregant find out if their church is involved in this? Will there be obvious signs? How do they dig into this?
00:13:58.600Well, I mean, first, we kind of brought up some of the things with Andy Stanley's sort of fuzzy language.
00:14:03.800I think that is one of the red flags. Like this curriculum, when you read it, the language is at first a little fuzzy.
00:14:09.700When you go deeper, it becomes more explicit and it is clear that they're very affirming.
00:14:14.060If you see their speeches and their activities with some of these openly affirming groups, then it's crystal clear.
00:14:23.200But, you know, part of what I would say is to be really aware and ask questions because some of what I cover in this book is how a counseling pastor at Saddleback Church was involved with this Embracing the Journey group, involved with this ARCUS-funded Reformation Project.
00:14:40.340The last I heard, he is still a counseling pastor at Saddleback, even when I asked them about it.
00:14:46.360So when I asked them about it, they just took all of the Embracing the Journey materials off the website.
00:14:52.360And in fact, even the counseling pastors, LinkedIn, was taken down.
00:14:56.960But yeah, I've talked to people at the church and they say he's still there.
00:14:59.860And so that's the first thing is I would ask for transparency.
00:15:02.680When you see the fuzzy language, just know that that can be part of this process.
00:15:06.880Yeah, and this is I mean, this is really a gospel issue because like when we read the passage that a lot of these pastors will say is a clobber passage, 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11.
00:15:22.820Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?
00:15:26.980It includes in there the sexually immoral men who practice homosexuality.
00:15:30.300But the good news that I think Andy Stanley misses, which is so central to the gospel, it says,
00:15:35.380and such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
00:15:41.860And they really get sexuality and identity wrong, which is really fundamental to tell someone this is who you are.
00:16:43.180So the fact that he was taking this stance and they knew it and that he was privately admitting that he had changed his theology on these issues to not be willing to go public about that once they had addressed it with him and to try to get him to repent, that to me is the most biblical of issues.
00:17:03.020And, you know, as we were just talking about, Andy Stanley is one of the greatest and most effective communicators, I think, in the world, in history.
00:17:10.580I mean, he has some like isms that he says that are just true and they're good.
00:17:15.180And I say that because I think that he could probably find a really effective way to share the truth about what God says about sexuality and identity in a way that is really compelling, that communicates both truth and love, because he is good at that.
00:17:42.920But we have seen other pastors who I don't necessarily think have become affirming or anything like that, but they become very soft about how they address it.
00:17:52.360And whether it was this interview that I detail with Rick Warren, where this British journalist had to really, really press him, is homosexuality a sin?
00:18:02.900And he kept trying to turn the conversation to pedophilia.
00:18:06.360And I credit this reporter because she refused to sort of let him wriggle out.
00:18:20.880And, you know, as much as there was a lot to admire about Tim Keller, there were also some interviews.
00:18:27.620And you typically see it when they're talking to secular media where it was the same thing.
00:18:31.040There was just this unwillingness to be very clear about homosexuality or transgenderism or any of the other letters that go in that acronym.
00:18:39.800Just being sin that, yes, will condemn you to hell if you don't seek repentance.
00:18:44.780And that is the good news of the gospel.
00:18:46.500And it's why we're depriving people of that good news if we lack that clarity.
00:18:50.620And it's telling people that a testimony like Christopher Yuan's or Rosaria Butterfield's or Beckett Cook's, that those are actually impossible.
00:19:23.980And if someone would have told you at the time, sorry, this is just who you are, your choices are who you are, then that would have been devastating.
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00:21:14.660Can you tell me what role Revoice plays in all of this?
00:21:23.040Yeah, so I go into Revoice quite a bit.
00:21:25.900To me, Revoice was not one of those ARCUS-funded groups, though some of the people involved in Revoice are connected to those groups.
00:21:33.400But essentially what Revoice was was a way of one, and actually I'm glad you asked, because I would say it is a way of leveraging toxic empathy.
00:21:45.860But it's a way of saying we as, and they will use this term, so I'm going to use their terminology, we as gay Christians or we as transgender Christians have been abused by the church.
00:21:58.000We have been so hurt by the people in the church that you need to treat our sin in an especially soft way.
00:22:05.400And in order to do that, you have to be willing to adopt particular terminology.
00:22:13.020You have to adopt, so instead, so you need to use gay Christian or queer treasure.
00:22:21.720But also that you need to see how we need to form relationships in a way that's different than heterosexual relationships so that the standards are different.
00:22:32.420So they will say things like, we're going to have a spiritual friendship, which is some sort of commitment between two people of the same sex.
00:22:42.100It's romantic in nature, and they may even cuddle, they say, in some of this material.
00:23:03.460And we would not counsel our teenagers that this is a good way to go about holy sexuality.
00:23:08.220Ironically, it's kind of like purity culture that just says, okay, as long as you don't have actual intercourse, everything is fine, which of course purity culture is something that they say is very damaging, but it's not all that different.
00:23:21.860You're towing the line, which is, of course, not the holiness that Jesus calls us to.
00:23:26.240And that is really where that toxic empathy comes in, because it's saying that you have to treat us in a much more soft way because the church has been very damaging to us, which I would dispute.
00:23:36.580But very frequently, if you push and say, okay, what are the specifics on how the church has been so damaging?
00:23:43.120Because when I look back, I don't think that on any issue has the church handled everything perfectly.
00:23:49.020But I have never seen willful cruelty.
00:23:53.800I think those would be really isolated cases if it happened.
00:23:56.540I've really seen a desire on the church's part to try to figure out, okay, how do we help people who are struggling with this particular sin?
00:24:04.400So I've never seen just a malicious motivation there.
00:24:09.560But that's one of the things they used to bring in revoice.
00:24:11.840And once it came in and there was this, okay, we need to make amends for how badly we treated the LGBTQ community, it was then to bring in these new definitions.
00:24:24.460And then these, you know, odd relationships that we're supposed to condone that are clearly unbiblical.
00:24:30.600And then that has expanded into, okay, now what we're going to do is start to slowly redefine our terms and we're going to bring in these conferences.
00:24:40.900And when there was pushback, it was surprising to see how many of the pastors were very wary to confront it early on when it wouldn't have gotten so far.
00:24:50.280And I think that's part of what I trace in the book is that it isn't necessarily that everyone is compromised on this issue in the sense of where they stand doctrinally, but they became compromised on their clarity on the issue.
00:25:07.160Your book is called Shepherds for Sale.
00:25:09.600And you are going into evangelicalism and you are basically affirming a lot of our suspicions that there has been a leftward drift.
00:25:18.060Now, you and I, we're kind of like in the know, at least we're on acts.
00:25:22.940And so we've seen statements that people like Andy Stanley or like Russell Moore or David French have said over the years.
00:25:29.640And so we know, yeah, it's going that direction.
00:25:32.660But for others who, you know, that's not their job, but they're just sitting in their congregations.
00:25:37.200And maybe especially after Trump became president in 2016 and then again in 2020, they just felt like, hmm, things seem to be shifting.
00:25:47.120And I'm not sure if it's biblical, but for some of them, they're like, OK, but these are my most trusted Bible study leaders.
00:26:09.620And that was really the purpose of it was to say, OK, yes, I think this has been going on.
00:26:13.960And for the people who were not very online but would just hear a little bit of the controversies, you would sometimes see some of these well-known pastors, people like J.D. Greer, sort of use their platform to suggest that the critics or the people who were sounding the alarm were malicious or that they had nasty motivations or things like that.
00:26:35.560And then you look at what was actually said and you go, no, this is concerning.
00:26:39.300You know, it was concerning when affirming the term Black Lives Matter in a specific way, which was giving a certain amount of support to the Black Lives Matter movement, was called a gospel issue.
00:26:56.400And it was a way of binding consciences to say you must view this issue this way to be acting faithfully as a Christian.
00:27:03.680And I think we saw that on so many issues, whether it's been climate change or how we approach immigration policy or gun control or all of these things that should have been debatable Christian issues where we could say, OK, let's we can all look at various scriptures and that might inform our consciences differently.
00:27:23.240Secondly, it became an issue of biblical fidelity was you have to agree with how we approach this particular piece of legislation or policy.
00:27:33.720And at that point, it becomes legalism.
00:27:56.340And then he named names like gave us quotes, gave us examples, which I think was really helpful.
00:28:01.540But I think the whole social racial justice issue in my mind is almost even more slippery than the LGBTQ issue, because I know a lot of pastors, they probably call them and female Bible study leaders who probably call themselves conservative Christians.
00:28:17.640And who would say publicly or not, yeah, a man can't become a woman or no, two men or two women getting together is not a biblical marriage.
00:28:27.460And yet they will pay homage to Black Lives Matter.
00:28:30.960They will say, I even heard riots are the voice of the unheard in 2020, or we're not going to criticize the violence because we have to at least understand why it's happening.
00:28:41.200Talking about white privilege, systemic racism, we need to listen and learn a lot of how to be an anti-racist, white fragility.
00:28:52.120This is where the whole inspiration from, you know, for my book came from is the conversations that I was having with these prominent Christian leaders at the time.
00:29:01.020And I'm asking, like, where's the biblical support for it?
00:29:04.840They're pushing partial justice, social justice that is not biblical justice.
00:29:11.200In your research, when you're looking at, you know, some of these shepherds for sale and others who were just, like, compromising it in some ways, did you find that that subject was kind of, like, the impetus for a lot of compromise?
00:29:25.780I mean, and what was so interesting to see was how all of these issues have sort of mirrored whatever the cultural flashpoint is.
00:29:34.820So when in 2020 and 2019 that DEI was a really important issue to corporate America, suddenly it was coming into the church.
00:29:44.220We had the president of the Southern Baptist Convention saying, all of my committee appointments now are going to be 30% women or minorities.
00:30:19.560And they were told you had church members who were told if you were a white church member for the first six months of this Bible study, you are not to talk.
00:30:29.160I chronicle one woman who's a good friend now, and she was telling me, sweet woman, you know, not somebody who would have questioned her pastors.
00:30:42.300So, you know, when her pastors told her we're going to have segregated Bible studies because our minority church members need their own place to lament, she went, okay, I'll go along with that.
00:30:53.640And she really did try to do the work of dealing with her white privilege and making amends for that.
00:31:00.220And it was so divisive and damaging in her church.
00:31:02.960And those are the kind of stories that, you know, we see the little funny viral clips of, you know, Matt Chandler or someone doing his white privilege video.
00:31:11.220But we don't see the stories of how this is impacting ordinary people in the pews.
00:31:20.660I remember everyone was pushing be the bridge.
00:31:23.860And, you know, I thought at the time, like, okay, we obviously do need a way to talk about what's going on in 2020.
00:31:31.240Like, there's a lot of misunderstanding, misrepresentation.
00:31:35.140And I thought maybe be the bridge is the solution to that.
00:31:38.280Maybe it is a way for me to come together with someone like Jackie Hill Perry and, like, really try to understand and parse things out.
00:31:45.760And then I looked at the Facebook group and the rules of the Facebook group.
00:31:50.200They're out there, or they're probably not anymore, but very explicit about, okay, white women and white people in this group, here's what you can do.
00:32:32.800And that, again, was my whole big problem with this is that over and over again, whether they meant to or not, these pastors are preaching two different gospels.
00:32:40.000A gospel of chastisement to white people and a gospel of unconditional understanding of partiality and resentment and anger toward black people.
00:32:52.960Really burdening both sides with a burden that Jesus doesn't give us rather than saying, hey, like, here's impartial justice.
00:33:01.540And, oh, by the way, the statistics in history don't bear out the narratives that you're hearing about systemic racism and policing.
00:33:08.680I saw very few pastors willing to stand up and do that.
00:33:44.320But those same sorts of leverage points were used, obviously, during the pandemic to say you must get this vaccine to show that you love your neighbor.
00:33:55.900And it's been done on issues where you do see the left wing funding coming on, coming in.
00:34:02.800And it's a little more explicit buying of shepherds on issues like climate change and how Christians have to think about immigration policy.
00:34:38.860That, for me, was the light bulb moment.
00:34:41.540That was kind of the story that put me on the map.
00:34:43.640You know, I didn't really set out to write about these evangelical issues.
00:34:47.940I had worked for an evangelical magazine for many, many years, one for which you are an opinion contributor, World Magazine, and just experienced some of this going on in the church, in my workplace, with some coworkers who viewed these issues in some of the ways that you and I just discussed on the other side.
00:35:04.220And then when COVID happened, it was sort of like all of the pretenses that we were kind of all on the same page just broke down.
00:35:12.740And part of that was the elevation of Francis Collins.
00:35:16.860And I, knowing what I did as a journalist about his record, was so shocked to see how so many of these church leaders who really up to that point, I thought, I may disagree, but I have a lot of respect.
00:35:59.780And he was very much a proponent of funding research on aborted baby tissue, on aborted fetal remains.
00:36:10.260He fought for that when the Trump administration was actually trying to shut a lot of that down.
00:36:14.740He went on record saying, we argued for it.
00:36:17.140But he also did things like fund awful chimeric experiments at the University of Pittsburgh, things like grafting infant scalps onto lab rats.
00:36:27.280And we have to keep in mind that that kind of demand.
00:36:30.920I remember those images are stuck in my heart and mind.
00:36:35.020And I didn't know at the time that Francis Collins, professing Christian, was helping push those experiments.
00:36:41.420I mean, you literally saw, just to give people a picture, because they're experimenting on these aborted babies, taking the scalps, putting them on rats to do whatever experiments they need.
00:36:52.180And you literally saw these rats with, like, human baby hair on them from a human who should have been alive.
00:36:59.500And who knows what incentive structure is there with the local Planned Parenthood?
00:37:04.380What profit incentive is there to make sure that those aborted babies are used for experimentation?
00:37:13.900We saw a little bit of it from David Daleiden's leaked videos that have been suppressed.
00:37:17.280But we saw Planned Parenthood staffers and doctors saying that, well, we want to try to grab here and get, you know, this organ because this organ fetches a lot of money.
00:37:31.280And we want to try to get this organ because there's a high demand for it.
00:37:34.320So we try not to damage that when we're performing the abortion.
00:37:37.100So, yes, we do know that there is an incentive structure for this.
00:37:40.680And Francis Collins was a part of that.
00:37:42.660Right. And again, I just want to say it's not like it was something that was just going on under his watch at the National Institutes of Health.
00:37:50.400He explicitly said, I am arguing for this, that I think that this is a moral position that we can take to utilize these parts.
00:38:15.100And so he initiated this program that it funded transgender research on children, including giving them cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, mastectomies to girls as young as 12.
00:38:29.760And it also included a study that traced the homosexual activity of teenage boys and didn't inform their parents.
00:38:39.860And so this was not just something that happened under Francis Collins' watch.
00:38:44.380This was something that he spearheaded and highlighted as one of his great accomplishments as director of the NIH.
00:38:51.160None of this information was provided when Christianity Today and the Billy Graham Center and Tim Keller and Rick Warren and so many of these other trusted voices were bringing Francis Collins on and literally saying, this is a man you can trust.
00:39:09.160And all of this should have been disqualifying to use him in that capacity.
00:39:15.040Maybe if you wanted to have him as a science expert and then one more thing is that he used these platforms to lie about what was going on during the pandemic.
00:39:25.640He claimed that the virus was definitely nature made, that it was a conspiracy theory to suggest that it might have leaked out of a lab.
00:39:35.000And of course, now we know he knew at the time that there was a very good chance that it leaked out of a lab.
00:39:39.740And we still don't know the full extent of what he was covering up with that lie.
00:39:45.860Like we know, I guess we know what it was covering up, but we don't know everything about why, about why he was covering up the true source.
00:39:54.860I mean, we know about the gain of function funding and the questions about were laws broken there.
00:40:01.740But it is a terrible thing to look at our Christian platforms, some of whom I would go, okay, maybe they didn't know the extent of some of his record.
00:40:10.700But then there are other people who I did a report and someone gave me the leaked audio from a private meeting of Francis Collins, Russell Moore, and some students at the University of Chicago.
00:40:23.060And Russell Moore was very clear that he did know Francis Collins' record and that he just felt that one could have a difference of opinion on these issues and still be a faithful Christian.
00:40:35.440Just to verify what you're saying, this is from Francis Collins celebrating in 2021.
00:40:42.520This is his announcement as the director of the NIH celebrating Pride Month.
00:40:49.060And so he says, I am proud to announce that the NIH recently funded a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study to review current measures and methodological issues related to measuring sex as a non-binary construct, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and surveys and research studies, blah, blah, blah.
00:41:11.980And it's a long letter basically saying that we need to support research and affirmation of gender as this kind of social construct of something that is very fluid.
00:41:25.600And there are many different instances in his tenure of him supporting this very radical idea of the non-biological reality basically of male and female.
00:41:39.000I mean, not only is that a Genesis 1 issue as a Christian, I mean, that's basic biology.
00:41:43.840It's a little discrediting scientifically as well.
00:41:59.340Second sponsor for the day is Focus on the Family.
00:42:01.980Their podcast, Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, is just awesome.
00:42:05.680Every episode of this Christian podcast is designed to help you parents confidently guide your loved ones through the unique challenges that we face today with the truths of God's Word.
00:42:53.660When I think leftward immigration, which was huge during the Trump administration with his policies, I think of the ERLC and Russell Moore.
00:43:04.300So tell us how evangelicals, at least that part of evangelicals, have kind of like moved on immigration.
00:43:11.720So part of what I trace in my book, and I use this example because everyone knows George Soros, but there are plenty of other billionaires in these books, in these instances that you don't know their names and you wouldn't recognize them.
00:43:26.020So his foundation started funding a secular left immigration NGO called the National Immigration Forum.
00:43:35.660And around 2013, 2015, they realized that they needed to move the evangelical vote on this particular issue if they wanted to get some of these immigration reform policies, what I would call very lax border policies across the finish line.
00:43:52.640Because for those who are not aware, evangelicals are roughly 30 percent of the electorate.
00:43:57.600You have even the secular left media calling them America's most powerful voting bloc they are.
00:44:03.120So they don't always win, but they are certainly incredibly influential at the ballot box.
00:44:08.900So they started to look around and say, okay, what do we do to move that constituency?
00:44:14.380And what they came up with was they partnered with the National Association of Evangelicals and some people from Sojourners and other groups.
00:44:23.400And they launched this front group, I would say, sort of a shell group that is called the Evangelical Immigration Table.
00:44:31.040And its purpose, to be very clear, is not to do things like spread the gospel to illegal immigrants.
00:44:39.660It's not to feed and clothe people regardless of how they got there, because I think that's something all Christians could agree with.
00:44:47.180So at that point, groups like the ERLC, as you mentioned, and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities has been heavily involved.
00:44:56.960That includes 185 Christian schools, including Azusa, Biola.
00:45:02.400So they all became involved with this group that is under the umbrella of a secular left immigration NGO that is taking funding from people like George Soros in this program that was specifically designed to target conservative voters, specifically evangelicals.
00:45:22.580And what they did was bring in pastors that they, you know, some of the people that they hired were pastors that they called regional mobilizers.
00:45:30.620And the regional mobilizers were then to set up meetings with local legislators, your state lawmakers, your national representation.
00:45:40.560And the idea was to convince them that evangelicals want you to back, at that time, around 2013, it was the Gang of Eight bill, if you remember that.
00:45:49.100And that would have legalized 11 million illegal immigrants for a pretty low bar, that the fine was going to be up to $1,000.
00:46:59.220The only thing that I really can think about when it comes to that.
00:47:02.440Of course, there's people who have been manipulated into believing that that is that that's the righteous position to take that toxic empathy.
00:47:11.420But then, I mean, I've got to think that there are the explicitly bad progressive actors who are, you know, taking funding from people like George Soros, like you said.
00:47:20.860And who really just think that open borders, that chaos and the demise of Western civilization is a good thing.
00:47:27.440I've got to think that some of those people exist in these institutions to push something as crazy as basically borderlessness.
00:47:33.900Well, and to push it in a way that is so spiritually manipulative.
00:47:37.620So what you also saw was them developing this Bible study curriculum called I Was a Stranger.
00:47:42.060So what they do is they take something that is a command for Christians to welcome people, to be loving, to be hospitable, to be charitable.
00:47:52.480And they're saying this has to be a national policy for your nation, which at that point, you are now hurting your citizens.
00:47:59.620So how are you being loving to those neighbors?
00:48:02.660And, you know, this is an issue that I go, I do think this is something that I'm perfectly willing to say we can all be believers and have this debate.
00:48:11.080But we're not having this debate based on policy and based on the impact on our legislation, on our citizenry.
00:48:19.200We're having these debates through that kind of legalistic spiritual manipulation suggesting you're not loving your neighbor, you're not welcoming strangers if you're not supporting these policies.
00:48:29.540That's such a good point that it's really those on the progressive side that are doing that that make something like immigration a gospel issue or a pro-life issue.
00:48:37.580They expand the definition of pro-life so much to just mean like the death penalty, policing, immigration, but somehow not abortion, somehow not getting rid of abortion legally.
00:48:47.760And they really do make it a, well, you don't follow Jesus, who was a refugee, a brown Palestinian.
00:48:56.820It's total manipulation and misconstruing of scripture.
00:49:00.320And it's interesting, too, this dynamic because these are the very people that would say that you and I, because we allow the Bible to inform what we think about abortion or marriage or sexuality, for example, some of them might call that Christian nationalism.
00:49:13.660They might say that that is theocracy, and yet when they use a verse from the Old Testament about welcoming the foreigner, completely decontextualizing it, ignoring that Israel had very strict regulations and high bar for foreigners coming in and they had to assimilate and follow the law, that's not Christian nationalism.
00:49:33.080So they can misconstrue scripture and say, well, this scripture should be national policy, and it means open borders.
00:49:39.500But if we say, well, you know, God tells us that murder is wrong, so I'm against abortion and legal abortion, that's scary Christian nationalism.
00:49:50.540And what's interesting to me is to see even how some people who don't profess to be Christians could not be the furthest thing from Christians.
00:49:58.080Someone like Gavin Newsom, who picks up on this, you saw him putting up billboards saying, if you're in Texas, come to California, get an abortion because here we love our neighbors, which was an appalling abuse of scripture.
00:50:12.320And you just see that it became something that even people who have no connection to these evangelical groups or to even evangelical or Christian understanding figured out, oh, here's how you willed this manipulative tool.
00:50:28.080All right, the last sponsor for the day is Preborn.
00:50:34.060I get asked all the time, like, what can I do to help save babies?
00:50:40.960A lot of you, maybe you don't have a pregnancy center close to you and you're looking for a reliable place to donate to, donate to Preborn.
00:50:48.200They are a very large network of pregnancy clinics across the country.
00:50:51.320They are saving thousands of babies every year by providing free resources to these pregnant women who are in need.
00:50:57.140And they offer free pregnancy tests and, most importantly, those free sonograms.
00:51:01.540And the reason I say most importantly is because when a woman sees her baby on the screen, when she hears that beating heart, she is so much more likely to choose life for that child.
00:51:11.200Planned Parenthood wants them to think that it's just a club of cells, that it's not a human being.
00:52:17.500So part of what happened is very similar to what I just described with immigration.
00:52:23.200There was a large ecumenical group that, I'm trying, I'm struggling to remember the acronym, but it was an ecumenical of Jewish, Catholic, mainline, Christians, people of other religious faiths, who were very much on the political left, who were working to get a cap-and-trade policy, fracking limited, all of those kind of things.
00:52:46.820But again, they were running into that firewall of evangelicals.
00:52:50.440So the question became, how do we get around them?
00:52:53.620And what was really great for the book is one of these left-wing secular think tanks actually published a report on, here's why they failed before in the early 2000s, and here's what we need to do going forward.
00:53:06.100And it was this great sort of autopsy that laid out all of this information about how they went about trying to infiltrate churches and ministries.
00:53:13.780And it was a goldmine for me to go through this report, but essentially what you had is a lot of large organizations like the Clinton Foundation, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, all very left-wing, all very supportive of abortion as a measure of population control.
00:53:30.300And so what they did was they started this group called the Evangelical Environmental Network, and it quickly recruited people like Christianity Today, again, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities got on board, the National Association of Evangelicals also got on board.
00:53:49.740They met in kind of early 2000s when it started to come back and said, we are making a covenant to help see this cap-and-trade policy passed, to make a statement and get this legislation passed.
00:54:04.480And so this group is, again, very much one of these shell groups, and what you have seen is their influence go out and start to bring this into what we trust as conservative seminaries from conservative voices.
00:54:20.920I spend a lot of time going into how Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Raleigh has brought in climate change activist speakers, the same people that you see with Leonardo DiCaprio and Obama.
00:54:35.280They are coming in to speak at that seminary, arguing that Christians need to take up the issue of climate change activism under the moniker of creation care.
00:54:45.980And again, it was being peddled at that school as a gospel issue.
00:54:50.240To be faithful to the gospel, we have to take up the issue of climate care.
00:54:55.820And what's been interesting, and a little bit of the controversy with my book, because some people have been, I think, deliberately literal, saying, well, anyone you mention, you're saying is for sale.
00:55:05.020And, you know, some of those early people were very much for sale, but I think you can also see the influence and the success of those groups, as we have seen other lesser known pastors, but who are still influential.
00:55:17.680A younger pastor who is a theology YouTuber, Gavin Ortlund, I spent some time dissecting a video where he said Christians really need to take up this issue of climate change, that it is important for us, for our voice to be heard on this issue.
00:55:36.860And here's why I think it needs to be something that we take up.
00:55:40.380And, you know, once again, I would just say this is an issue that we can debate and disagree scientifically, and there's a lot of reason to have a lot of skepticism.
00:55:48.620The problem is when we say because of creation care, Christians need to take up this issue.
00:55:55.120Yeah, I just saw, we were just talking about a children's Bible yesterday called Peace Table Storybook Bible, and one of the pages on there was like, how do we basically reconcile with creation?
00:56:07.100And so basically casting humans as the exploiters of creation, well, we use less water, we don't drive our cars.
00:56:14.220This is like a kid's Bible, so it starts really young.
00:56:17.060But I want to talk about Gavin Ortlund, because I want to talk about some of the critiques that you've gotten and you've dealt with over the past few days, because he made a video that responded to what you wrote about him in your book.
00:56:32.280And I watched the video, and basically, he accuses you of slander.
00:56:39.580I'm not sure if he uses that exact word, but he says that you misrepresented him worse than he's ever been misrepresented.
00:56:45.860He says that you accused him of making this a gospel issue, and he says he does not make it a gospel issue.
00:56:53.620He said it's fine to disagree, but we just need to talk about climate change.
00:56:57.920So how would you respond to what Gavin said?
00:57:01.060Well, you know, when I watched that video, I was surprised to see that so many of the things I said as general summary at the end of the chapter that were not specifically about him,
00:57:11.040that were, in fact, about a speaker at Southeastern Seminary who directly said that to be faithful to the gospel, we need to take up the issue of creation care, which means taking up the issue of climate change.
00:57:23.020And it came in the very last paragraph.
00:57:31.820And he said, well, she said I'm a shepherd for sale.
00:57:34.060And I mean, I think I think a little bit that this is a tactic to be deliberately over literal to say every single person in this she is saying is bought by George Soros.
00:58:02.740And some people are simply influenced by the culture around them.
00:58:06.420And that was part of what I was illustrating was that these left-wing foundations have been promoting climate change in churches, in seminaries.
00:58:15.000And that has an impact on how we talk about it within the church.
00:58:20.080And you don't always know how you're being influenced sometimes by some of this dark money that's coming in.
00:58:25.720So that was an illustration of this is how some of that impact is happening, that people much, much further down who are just in these environments of these seminaries are then, they are taking up the charge just as those foundations, as they wrote about in that report, wanted.
00:58:47.380What is your message for people who are listening to this, watching this, and they're like, oh, my goodness, I want to know if the people who are influencing me, the people in my life, in my church, if they're headed this direction.
00:58:58.860And they don't want to be in a constant state of, like, anxiety or paranoia about that.
00:59:06.220They just want to be discerning, and they want to be peaceful about it, and they want to follow what Scripture says to, as far as it depends on us, be at peace with everyone.
00:59:15.400That doesn't mean, though, that we don't call people out when they are not telling the truth or when they have been bought and paid for.
00:59:22.720But at the same time, we have to be kind about it.
00:59:27.480So, like, what is your message for people who want to be as discerning about this stuff as you have been?
00:59:32.840Well, I think that's a big part of it is that the anger about bringing it up, we have to sort of confront that, that, look, a lot of these things have flourished because we didn't talk about it openly.
00:59:43.500And there was this 11th commandment where to mention it at all is somehow unloving.
00:59:50.880And that allowed a lot of things to fester for a long time so that now that we are talking about it, you get that kind of pushback that's very angry and defensive.
00:59:59.920And I think just because someone brings it up and says, hey, I think this is a problem, doesn't mean you're not, you're saying you're not a Christian or you're not a believer.
01:00:08.240But it is saying, look, we have a problem with legalism.
01:00:10.880It didn't mean that Peter wasn't a Christian when Paul confronted him and said, you are bringing, adding things to the gospel that are not a part of it and that this needs to be addressed.
01:00:20.980And so, you know, for those who are kind of sitting on the sidelines going, well, how do we deal with it?
01:00:26.760I think one is don't be afraid to have those uncomfortable conversations with your pastors, with your ministry leaders, with your seminary administrators when you see it happening.
01:00:39.080And I think you can do that respectfully and graciously, but we have to acknowledge when it's being done in a way that it is politicizing the gospel.
01:00:48.940And then I hate to say this, but I do think we live in an era where you have to do your homework on all of this curriculum and all of the people that you're listening to.
01:00:58.160And when those little alarm bells go off, you know, don't be suspicious, don't have a spirit of suspicion, but you do need to sort of follow them because that is the Berean way.
01:01:07.140And check the scriptures, check your Bible and see, is there justification for what I'm feeling or do I need to consider what this person is bringing up regarding, you know, some issue on immigration or climate change?
01:01:19.160I think that's the answer is that we just, we go back to the Berean model.
01:01:25.060I think that's a really good point is that, you know, we're not asking, Megan's not asking, hey, compare what your pastor is saying to what Megan says or what Megan wrote or what I say or anything.
01:01:35.420I don't care at all if you read my book or listen to my podcast.
01:01:39.920I want you to compare what your pastor is saying to the word of God.
01:01:44.700And that's really, that's really important too.
01:02:03.460Now, some of them are abortion, gender, marriage.
01:02:06.360Those are black and white because they're Genesis one issues, but immigration policy, even somewhat gun policy.
01:02:12.540And your point is that these cannot from the progressive side or either side, but in this case, the progressive side become salvation issues for these people that you're beating over your congregation's heads with.
01:02:25.780And if they're flip-flopping the issues, if suddenly, you know, something that scripture is crystal clear on, like homosexuality, like transgenderism, if that's being labeled a political issue, where these other things that I'm talking about, the debatable things like immigration and climate change, those are becoming the gospel issues.
01:02:43.860And I think you should know you have a problem at your church.
01:03:31.000You can get Shepherds for Sale wherever books are sold.
01:03:34.660And it's climbing the charts on Amazon.
01:03:36.460I know we don't love what Amazon supports, but if there is any way to kind of, like, fight back against the craziness of Amazon, it's to buy a Christian book like this, Shepherds for Sale.