Jon Harris joins me to talk about the influence of the Southern Baptist Conference and its influence in American politics. Jon is an author and filmmaker, and is the host of Conversations That Matter, a show that focuses on the intersection of religion and politics.
00:00:51.400What kind of agenda is it installing into these organizations?
00:00:55.020And an extra focus has really been the role that, unfortunately, many Christian denominations have played in the United States in facilitating mass migration.
00:01:05.640This often is really out of step with the parishioners, the people who actually go to the church,
00:01:11.540and tends to be a focus of different bureaucrats, managers, and leaders inside these organizations.
00:01:18.160Unfortunately, the Southern Baptist Conference is not entirely immune to this, and that's what I wanted to talk about today.
00:03:18.160They primarily exist in the Southern United States, as the name implies.
00:03:22.840So when you look at deep red states, a lot of them are dominated by Southern Baptist churches.
00:03:28.720So, of course, they're where they live, who they are and some of their doctrinal issues make them targets.
00:03:36.820For example, they prohibit or they narrow the range of the pastoral office to men.
00:03:42.660But even that is cracking a little bit.
00:03:45.700Last year at the convention, that issue became a point of debate.
00:03:49.600And it's a little uncertain what's going to happen in the future with that.
00:03:54.420They didn't want the Credentials Committee to strip churches of their affiliation with the SBC if they had women pastors.
00:04:01.160So I bring that up only as an example, not to talk about that issue in depth.
00:04:05.040But because historically and presumably even still, that is one of the requirements.
00:04:10.820It's in the Baptist faith and message that this office is for men.
00:04:14.300Of course, that's out of step with the liberal order.
00:04:16.940And I think that's really important because and we'll get into this, I'm sure, in a bit once we touch on the rest of the subjects.
00:04:25.160There seems to be an institutional momentum effect happening in a lot of church denominations where it looks like leftism, rabid progressivism, wokeness, if you will, is licking its wounds.
00:04:39.740If it hasn't been entirely defeated, it is certainly retreating to a different position at this point.
00:04:45.600But it seems like many of the churches are doubling down on this simultaneously.
00:04:51.820Like, you know, I don't even know if this is still accurate, but, you know, they used to tell us that the dinosaurs, you'd have one thing hit their tail because it's so long.
00:04:59.820It'd take, you know, a minute or two for it to actually get to the other side of the brontosaurus.
00:05:03.520It feels like that a lot of these churches are that kind of dinosaur where, yeah, the elite signaling was leftist for so long that it took them a while, but they finally started picking it up and signaling progressively.
00:05:16.920And now that the elite signaling has switched and seems to be heading more rightward, they're still pushing the leftism.
00:05:23.860The signal is still trying to go from the tail to the head.
00:05:27.220And so interesting that, as you point out in the piece, such a high percentage of Southern Baptist churchgoers are going to be Trump supporters, are going to believe in things like strict border control.
00:05:40.080And yet that's not reflected in any serious way in a lot of the leadership of these denominations.
00:05:47.460And there was actually a Southern Baptist poll.
00:05:49.340I did not include this in the article because it would have been too long.
00:05:52.360But Lifeway, which is a Southern Baptist entity put out where they attempted to justify, I think, at least I'm putting my own interpretation on this as far as why they put these numbers out.
00:06:03.620But I think they were trying to show that the Southern Baptists and the greater evangelical world, because it was outside of just Southern Baptists, believe that Christians had a responsibility to care for illegal migrants and also supported policies to resettle refugees.
00:06:20.060And I don't think this actually jives with the at least what I see on the ground and what some of the polling with evangelicals seems to indicate as far as their vote for Trump.
00:06:31.480Why would they vote for a candidate who has made opposite policies his primary platform?
00:06:37.940But there is some question as far as to what extent Southern Baptists in the pews and in leadership, and they call them in the Southern Baptist Convention, the entities, in these entities who are running them.
00:06:52.540To what extent are they social conservatives and voting on the right issues, right-wing issues like abortion and same-sex marriage and social issues that have been traditionally associated with the religious right?
00:07:08.620And to what extent are they motivated when it comes to America First policies?
00:07:23.960I think the polling that has tried to reflect otherwise is probably there for political reasons.
00:07:30.540And the leadership, as you, I think, just rightly stated, has been trying to ingratiate itself with who they see as powerful and who they can convince to favor them.
00:07:42.660And not see them as these backwater hayseed hicks and bigots like they, you know, they're very sensitive to that image being passed around of them.
00:07:51.920So they're trying to overcome that with the elites.
00:07:56.140So it's just a stupid move, in my opinion.
00:07:57.560But that's kind of that's where things are at right now.
00:08:00.640So when it comes to the actual numbers, the actual involvement of the church organizations and the government, what is the level of overlap?
00:08:12.020I think that the Southern Baptist Convention is probably less egregious in this than some of the other denominations, but still active.
00:08:41.140So I don't know the full extent to which the Southern Baptist Convention is participating in refugee resettlement and getting money from USAID working with World Vision.
00:08:51.620So let's start there and then we'll go to the policy end of it.
00:08:54.340The policy end of it is a much easier to explain.
00:08:57.360But as far as who's getting what money from the government, the thing you have to understand first about the Southern Baptist Convention is they are different than other denominations that have strong hierarchies.
00:09:08.140So we'll take the Presbyterian Church in America as a comparable denomination with similar conservative instincts.
00:09:16.660That's also there's actually debates right now about that because of an issue with the segregated black church, black history about the dinner that was held.
00:09:25.500One of their main leaders was there advocating it.
00:09:28.680But but well, for the sake of argument, let's say the PCA and the SPC are pretty comparable here on the social issues and they're conservative.
00:09:35.980The PCA has a much more strong ability to control what churches do.
00:09:41.840And there's a mechanism for booting churches and booting pastors, which is much more effective.
00:09:47.320It may work slowly, but they work as as a denomination.
00:09:51.160If you're Roman Catholic, the PCA, you would probably recognize a little bit better.
00:09:55.560They're not quite where the Roman Catholics are, but there's a very much a top down structure.
00:10:45.060We don't know because they always resist efforts to actually get that information.
00:10:50.160But there's also prominent Southern Baptist churches.
00:10:53.260So there's large mega churches like J.D. Greer's Church in North Carolina, for example, that serve as an example to other churches within the denomination.
00:11:02.000And even though they are not in the denomination hierarchy on paper, they function as if they're in the denominational hierarchy.
00:11:11.800You have churches like Summit Church, which J.D. Greer runs in Raleigh, North Carolina, giving a tremendous amount of effort towards refugee resettlement.
00:11:21.000And some of this money is coming from, eventually, organizations like USAID.
00:11:27.200And they work with, in this particular case, Send Relief.
00:12:08.120And I did not mention this in the article because that's not technically the denomination.
00:12:12.520But there are other ways in which the denomination is receiving money directly.
00:12:17.560The example I gave, and this is, I think, the only known example at this point, I think there's probably more, is Send Relief, which is under the North American Mission Board, which is an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention, was giving grants and also receiving money from Send Relief for refugee resettlement in Boston.
00:12:39.300And the reason this is interesting is not just because of the money they're receiving, but it's also because the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Clint Presley, in North Carolina, his church was the sending church that created this plant.
00:12:57.720That's what you say when it's like a smaller church that's just getting started.
00:13:00.480But the money came from Hickory Grove Baptist Church to start this church that's receiving all this money for refugee resettlement, at least $70,000.
00:13:09.300Just as far as we can tell, if there's more, we don't know about it.
00:13:13.360So anyway, it is complicated, and that's why I took a long time explaining this.
00:13:18.520The SBC's decentralized format makes it a little more complicated, but they are receiving money, and we don't know exactly how much.
00:13:25.920So that's the answer to the question of where's the government money coming in for refugee resettlement, allegedly refugee resettlement.
00:13:33.500Some of these people will never get refugee status, but that's what they call it.
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00:14:15.300Well, and I should just say that I have grown up in Southern Baptist churches my entire life.
00:14:21.480You know, my father was in the military, and so we weren't stationary.
00:14:25.280However, the one thing that was always around was the Southern Baptist hymnal.
00:14:30.320So this is a denomination I've been a part of literally, you know, since I was born.
00:14:35.640And while I'm not someone who was ever deep into church politics, knowing all the organizations and structures and these kind of things, it always was something that was home for me.
00:14:47.020Again, when we were moving, you know, every year, the fact that that was always present in our life was something that really continued and brought like a home and a family and a structure and a culture that wouldn't have otherwise existed.
00:15:00.220Probably if I was just, you know, being rootless and moving around every year, that kind of thing.
00:15:04.400So these organizations are very personally important to me is what I'm trying to communicate here.
00:15:10.660The decentralized nature has always been a reality, like you said, and that has its ups and its downs.
00:15:16.820That means that many churches are operating with little to no involvement in the type of things that we're talking about here.
00:15:22.620However, if organizations that influence such a large body of churches can be captured, then they're inevitably going to have a big influence.
00:15:32.760And so that's why I think it's important to recognize that even if a lot of parishioners and a lot of even churches aren't really involved in this at any meaningful level directly,
00:15:43.080if this kind of ideology is allowed to be supported inside these institutions, it really can have a huge impact on a vast swath of evangelical Christians who, like you said, are huge Trump supporters for the most part in the United States.
00:19:24.020We need to find young people to make our denomination survive.
00:19:26.620So they started changing the way that they did ministry.
00:19:30.100Colleges started doing the diversity thing.
00:19:32.500My college, Southeastern, had the Center for Kingdom Diversity.
00:19:35.600But one of the elements of this was the refugee resettlement and the immigration and the softening of the traditional Baptist views, I would say,
00:19:44.840or most Southern Baptists, what they would view, how they would think about this issue.
00:19:49.000And so you look at resolutions from the early 2000s on immigration up until like 2011.
00:19:56.360And when they talk about immigration in these resolutions, they are very focused on the laws must be enforced.
00:20:04.160Even in the 2003 resolution, businesses that hire illegal aliens should be punished.
00:20:12.160There's a softening that happens over time, though.
00:20:14.780And by 2018, they're talking about compassionate ways forward for policy, that the United States, they urge Congress to make legal pathways for citizenship.
00:20:28.400They're not using the term illegal anymore.
00:20:30.320And then by 2023, they're saying that the government has a responsibility to care for the migrants who come across the border, which is that that's unique and novel, because before it was we should care for them.
00:20:44.100But the government needs to do their job.
00:20:45.580So the churches should be involved in this.
00:20:47.480Now the government has a shared responsibility there.
00:20:49.980So they've been pushing the needle left.
00:20:51.800If you just look at these resolutions, one of the and the second part to this question, the second answer is that one of the big engines for this is an organization or an entity in the SBC called the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
00:21:05.260This was run by Russell Moore for many years.
00:21:08.080He's probably the most famous and the worst abuser of his office in this respect.
00:21:13.980He's now the editor in chief at Christianity Today, which many might know is a left leaning Christian publication.
00:21:20.320And he really stressed over the course of years that if the Southern Baptists were going to be pro-life, they also had to be pro-immigrant because the immigrant is made in the image of God, just like the unborn baby.
00:21:33.140Now, of course, I think you probably and many in your audience spot the fallacy here that the issue of murder is much different than the issue of whether or not you let someone into your house or into your country and under what circumstances.
00:21:48.960But he conflated these things and he used his bully pulpit to go to places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and other platforms within the Southern Baptist Convention to berate the own members of his denomination that they were too conservative and that they were out of step with the politics of Jesus and the politics of the gospel.
00:22:10.100And they weren't consistently pro-life.
00:22:12.760So he did this over the course of, I don't know, about six, seven years or so in his position.
00:22:18.900And now his successor, Brent Leatherwood, is basically someone he trained and parrots the same kinds of things.
00:22:24.600So most recently, they were, the ERLC was advocating for a bill that James Lankford, who's a Southern Baptist, put forward that basically, you know, it was an attempt to satisfy everyone, supposedly.
00:22:39.120Democrats and Republicans could get behind this.
00:22:41.880But the bill had within it a provision that if the border crossings were less than 21,000 a week, that the State Department could not use emergency funds to address the problem.
00:22:56.360So it was a sneaky way to try to continue the flow, in my opinion, of the migrants coming across the border.
00:23:04.240But, you know, during the Trump administration, there was a lot of symbolic overtures from Moore and from Leatherwood and from even past presidents of the convention, leaders that Southern Baptists would recognize.
00:23:18.600They tried to say that the whole DACA situation, when Trump tried to overturn that, that this was wrong and immoral and out of step with our views as Christians.
00:23:31.080They tried to do the same thing when there was a moratorium on immigration from these places in the Middle East that were unvetted.
00:23:38.540It was saying they screamed about that and they made a bunch of symbolic statements about it.
00:23:43.460And then you have the Biden administration and they're they're silent.
00:23:46.600They don't say a thing about the border crisis except to support James Lankford.
00:23:49.840So that clearly the Southern Baptist Convention has gone very far left over in a very short period of time, at least on the level of their leadership in the denomination, while the voting patterns of their members seem to be stable.
00:24:33.680We even had the American Bishop Council, I believe, sue the United States, the Trump administration, in an attempt to get their funding back, get their their program back open.
00:24:46.920J.D. Vance famously talked about the Order of Morris.
00:24:49.660And this was like, even the Pope was like, no, he doesn't he doesn't get it.
00:25:30.880And I'll appeal to Charles Spurgeon here since we're talking about Baptists and he's very revered in the Baptist world.
00:25:36.680The historical understanding is that this was a example of the Ordo Amoris, the Order of Loves, because the Good Samaritan was in proximity to the man on the road.
00:25:54.380It was who was in his everyday experience.
00:25:57.000And Charles Spurgeon says about this, that the Good Samaritan figured that he this man was in his neighborhood.
00:26:05.740He you know, if you were in your own neighborhood, think about it.
00:26:08.640And you started walking down the street just for a walk around the block and you notice someone and they maybe weren't from your neighborhood, but they were actually struggling on the side of the road.
00:26:33.520You don't find in the story of the Good Samaritan that he's supposed to prefer someone who's foreign over his own children.
00:26:40.080It's actually a very simple story to just say, if you are coming along the road and there's someone that is in need of help and you have the resources to help that person, God put that person in his providence there for you to help.
00:26:54.040It's not about what the government does either.
00:26:56.400So this has been abused in multiple ways to forward policy that takes it out of the realm of personal jurisdiction, puts it into the hands of the government and then ignores the idea of proximity.
00:27:09.100You know, we're giving all sorts of money to people on the other side of the world and in some cases bringing them here, which, by the way, is a lot more expensive.
00:27:18.700It's actually easier to help them when they remain in their countries.
00:27:21.380But we're spending an enormous amount of money to bring them here and give them welfare and so forth.
00:27:28.820And the Good Samaritan story is not that doesn't reflect that at all.
00:27:33.720So so I think it's an abuse of the story and it's kind of a shame.
00:27:39.400I think it reinforces probably our views that the Ordo Amaris is actually something that applies to the people in closer proximity.
00:27:46.340Yeah, I think it would be a different story if the Samaritan had decided to move the entirety of Syria into the city he was passing by.
00:27:54.440Right. Like that would have been to the right.
00:27:56.080Right. That's a pretty critical distinction of one individual who happens to be traveling in an area as opposed to relocating large amounts of people.
00:28:08.540Also, you know, I see this one cited a lot.
00:28:11.940There's neither, you know, Jew nor Gentile, you know, right?
00:28:15.400Like, you know, male, female. This has been erased.
00:28:19.440Like there's no everyone is just a Christian.
00:28:22.500There's, you know, so you can't have nations anymore because Christians have to welcome all Christians into their country.
00:28:29.920Is that the intention there from that passage is that we're abolishing the existence of nations and that all Christians have to be welcomed into all nations at all times?
00:28:41.800So in Ephesians 2 talks about this barrier wall being taken down between Gentiles and Jews.
00:28:47.800It's talking, it actually specifically says the wall is the law, the Old Testament ceremonial law that gives a specific Jewish identity that separates them from the Gentiles.
00:29:02.900And if you wanted to become a Jew, you had to actually keep that law, circumcision being the primary commandment.
00:29:08.920And that was abolished in Christ in the, in a spiritual sense, the church is a, an entity that unites every tongue, tribe, and nation, as we see in Revelation.
00:29:20.740But this was not supposed to apply to the temporal world as a way of making nations obsolete or no more than it is gender.
00:29:30.920I mean, we're one in Christ as male and female, but of course that doesn't mean that males and females now don't exist.
00:29:37.560So, so actually I think that people who try to use that verse are completely abusing it.
00:29:44.640And if they go to other sections of scripture that talk about the spiritual nature of the church, they'll find such as Revelation 6 and 7, which I just cited, they'll, they'll find that nations are a reality, even into the new creation, the new world, the consummation of all things.
00:31:20.120They also had laws in the Old Testament concerning the ownership of property, that it had to remain in the hands of ethnic Jews.
00:31:30.160So in the year of Jubilee, even if someone who is a stranger would purchase land, it would revert to Jewish people because they weren't strangers or foreigners were not allowed to have that kind of a stake in Israel.
00:31:42.880So there's a very strong in-group preference, which we do not have now.
00:31:45.940They didn't have the same welfare rules and all these kinds of things.
00:31:48.340So when it talks about the law being applied equally, it just means that things like murder and rape and these crimes that are punishable, they would be punishable to, you would punish someone who's Jewish.
00:32:02.200You would punish someone who's foreign.
00:32:20.540We're bringing these people in and we're immediately giving them every kind of privilege that comes with citizenship, which was fought by our fathers and forefathers that was gained through much sacrifice.
00:32:33.740So I just think that Christians who try to appeal to these things are making some basic errors.
00:32:38.160Yeah, this is something that I didn't quite grasp, you know, when I was young listening to these stories.
00:32:44.920Of course, you're right that, you know, the constant waves of immigration would have been rightly understood as invasion.
00:32:51.720In fact, the Roman Empire had to fight several wars to prevent large scale immigration into its borders.
00:32:58.240It's not that people even wanted to conquer Rome.
00:33:00.860It's just that they wanted to be a part of it and the Romans had to fight them off because they knew that their, you know, republic could not continue if they allowed a large number of foreigners in and let them join in and hold power.
00:33:13.600Italy had to go to war to get Roman citizenship for crying out loud.
00:33:17.340You know, forget all of the other outlying provinces, but also a really critical thing that I didn't get when I, you know, I read the, you know, the stories in the Old Testament about not consuming the sacrifices to other gods, you know, and I didn't recognize until I read the ancient city from Kalange that that practice was one of joining into the identity of the nation.
00:33:41.320That the shared meals of sacrifice meat to the gods was actually the initiation ritual of spiritual joining into the city, into the population.
00:33:51.960And so those, those distinctions in the Old Testament are critical.
00:33:55.780They're not just, oh, well, this was, you know, a sacrifice to an idol and we only believe in Jehovah.
00:34:33.420Like this is the idea because they happen to fall now under the operations of the state, the government, the country, but that doesn't mean they've joined the nation.
00:34:42.300And it never did in any serious sense throughout history.
00:34:45.540And that disconnect, I think, is very difficult, especially for Christians who have not, like myself at the, you know, until just a few years ago, really understood the historical context of nationhood.
00:34:57.960Yeah, that's a really, really great point.
00:35:01.260And if you read, it's, I think it's Isaiah.
00:35:04.100I can't remember if it's Isaiah or Ezekiel.
00:35:06.780The prophet says that the Northern, if you remember from biblical history, and some people may not know this, I'll just explain.
00:35:13.340The Northern tribes of Israel were separated from the Southern tribes of Israel over really who was going to be king and what direction the nation would go.
00:35:24.320And then they were both in captivity at different points, and they had a different series of kings.
00:35:29.020And that's what First and Second Kings is about and First and Second Chronicles.
00:35:33.140So during that time, the Northern tribes ended up being, to make this simple, they ended up mixing in with the Assyrians.
00:35:47.920And because of that mixing, and that was intermarriage, that was, some of this was, I think, policy, because empires in the ancient world, if they wanted to destabilize you, they could just take captive your people, import them.
00:36:00.520This is what the story of Daniel's about, right, in the Babylonian empire, import them into their country and replace you with people from their country.
00:36:11.020And so this happened to the 10 tribes.
00:36:12.720They mix in with Assyrians and other groups.
00:36:15.640And part of the mixing is they start worshiping their gods and so forth.
00:36:19.680And Isaiah says that they ceased to exist, that they were no longer a nation.
00:36:25.480Now, if you go fast forward to Jesus's time, the story of the Good Samaritan, the woman at the well, when he goes into Samaria and talks to this woman at the well, and the disciples are like, why would you talk to her?
00:36:38.740He's talking to a descendant of those people.
00:36:41.780And they were allies with the Romans against Israel.
00:36:45.360So through this intermixing, they end up creating a new people that is now hostile to the southern tribes that remained as Israel and continued.
00:36:59.360So this is a warning you see throughout scripture not to do this.
00:37:05.940Solomon is, of course, the poster child for compromise because he married all these foreign women, and then he allowed them to have their idols, and they turned his heart away.
00:37:18.160And that's, of course, viewed rightly as a spiritual compromise.
00:37:20.800But as you say, there are cultural components to this, and it's the loss of identity that's also a big part of it.
00:37:27.900And so it's politically incorrect to say now, but a number of the minor prophets warn against intermarriage with foreign peoples for this very reason.
00:37:36.940And the people who like to appeal to the Old Testament for their immigration policies that are leftists do not want to bring up those laws for obvious reasons.
00:37:46.220Yeah, I mean, these are practices that still exist inside Orthodox Jewish communities today, right?
00:37:50.740There's a high level of intermarriage there because they want to keep the nation alive.
00:37:55.780That's what was necessary for many thousands of years when you're trying to keep a diaspora community together throughout being stateless in these kind of things.
00:38:06.080And so it's understood that even though they had no state, they were a nation in a very real sense because they understood the need to kind of perpetuate that.
00:38:14.820But back to kind of the operations on the ground, you know, refugee gets you a lot, right?
00:38:23.080That's the language in Europe as well.
00:38:25.560If you go everywhere, it's the refugee crisis, it's refugees.
00:38:28.840Even though the vast majority of these people are not fleeing violence, they're not under threat, they're not being ethnically cleansed or anything in their home countries, they just want money.
00:38:38.920And I get it. You know, if I was starving in a third world nation and I had the opportunity to flee to the United States and make a better life for my family, I would absolutely do it.
00:38:50.720I 100% understand the incentive structure and everything else about it.
00:38:54.620That said, the United States can't say the United States if the people in the United States aren't from the United States.
00:39:01.460And so if you continually encourage every single person who wants a better life for their family to come to the United States, you won't have that better life because the United States is what it is, not because it just happens to be sitting on magic soil, but because the people here matter and they made a country that matters.
00:39:18.440And so the word refugee seems to be like the silver bullet that gets around people's understanding of this.
00:39:24.400This guy must be fleeing political persecution somewhere, you know, his entire family is going to get put up against a wall if they don't get out of the country tomorrow, when in fact it's usually just single guys moving to the U.S. hoping to or Europe trying to trying to get onto the welfare state there.
00:39:42.220And so I wonder, do you feel like a lot of these organizations are just confused by kind of a bad exegesis and the word refugee or is it the financial incentives or is it malicious?
00:39:58.820Well, yeah, I think you actually have a very shrewd point there because when I was writing the article and it goes through an editing process and the editors at the Federalist wanted to know why I use the term refugee so much.
00:40:13.500And the problem was that's the word the Southern Baptists are using.
00:40:17.200So I'm like, I don't really I mean, if I'm quoting them, they understood you have to use the term refugee.
00:40:21.320So I just put in a little sentence that we understand many of these people will not actually receive refugee status, but they're called refugees from a very early stage.
00:40:28.980And this is where this is kind of the boomer con like, you know, I just don't want illegal immigration, right?
00:40:36.100I legal immigration is fine, but here's the problem.
00:40:39.260The lines are so blurred between those two things at this point.
00:40:42.740We actually don't know, you know, who is in this country that applies for refugee status that will actually attain that status.
00:40:52.380And they're here with a distant court date waiting for the time and maybe not even waiting.
00:40:58.960They've just diffused into the culture at this point.
00:41:01.460You know, they've they've jumped the ship and you're not going to find them.
00:41:06.340But I mean, this is kind of the problem is this was being used as a pretext for illegal migration.
00:41:11.620So I don't know the percentage of people helped by SEND or World Relief who were actually ultimately just illegal migrants that were getting welfare and all the rest and who actually have a valid claim for refugee status because of the way our system is.
00:41:28.820You are allowed to stay in the country while you're waiting for the courts to hear your case.
00:41:33.380And then it depends on what the judge says.
00:41:35.740And I remember when I was in Los Angeles last year and people in my area, I'm in upstate New York right now, have told me they don't believe that this is actually happening, that no illegal migrant gets Social Security.
00:41:48.560But I was actually in Los Angeles on the street in Van Nuys, California, right outside of L.A.
00:41:54.800And I looked up and there was a billboard on a very busy street and it had a picture of a Social Security card and it was in Spanish, so I couldn't read it.
00:42:02.660So I took a picture and did the Google Translate and the translation said, we'll get you the documents, even the ones that are hard to get.
00:42:12.280Obviously, it is for illegal migrants and everyone in the area knows that's exactly what's going on, that these are people who under normal circumstances could not attain and could not get these documents.
00:42:23.160And somehow lawyers are getting them to them.
00:42:26.020So I think this is there's so many working moral issues here, but I think ultimately this is robbery.
00:42:33.320This is taking from those who have sacrificed much for their children.
00:42:37.640And society is the relationship between the past, the dead and those who are yet to come, the living.
00:42:43.440And it's taking from them and it's giving to those who are not part of that story.
00:42:48.360And if we choose to do that kind of thing, that's one thing.
00:42:50.900But to do this in the manner in which they've done it through bureaucracy without people actually weighing in is very unjust and very wrong.
00:42:59.440Yeah, and that's what really hurts my heart so much, because I've been in these scenarios where it's like, OK, let's go pack a bunch of food for, you know, people who are coming across the border, you know, and it's nothing but people with the best hearts in the church thinking, oh, well, we're helping someone.
00:43:19.420Right. Like, but ultimately, they don't really want to be involved in bringing a large amount of illegal aliens into the United States.
00:43:29.420And, you know, speaking again about kind of the order of Morris, I used to be a public school teacher.
00:43:36.800I would sit in classrooms, you know, Christmas time would come 80 percent of my classroom was, you know, immigrants from Haiti or Central America.
00:43:49.360And I would ask them, hey, you know, let's let's do a quiz about Christmas.
00:43:54.900And they would just know nothing about Christ.
00:43:59.000They would know nothing about the Christmas story.
00:44:00.680They would know we're told all the times, oh, these are Christian countries.
00:44:05.180But they would be completely ignorant of what was going on there.
00:44:08.580And, you know, at the very least, at the very least, if you're dedicated to reaching people for Christ, could you at least reach the immigrants that are in your hometown at this point?
00:44:22.300Like the United States is wildly unchurched.
00:44:25.100So maybe we could reach some Americans for Christ instead of just automatically sending all of our money overseas to reach people who we don't even see.
00:44:33.780But also, what about, you know, the immigrants you have already brought here who are wildly also unchurched and unfamiliar with what's going on?
00:44:42.840And it just, you know, again, I understand that the, you know, the Great Commission is to reach all nations, but maybe you should reach the people in your own nation first before you send all of your money and missionaries to other nations and encourage all the people there to come in and still have them not churched?
00:44:58.600Maybe I'm crazy here, but I feel like that's just the wrong order of operations.
00:45:02.480There are two strategies to, they seem opposite, but they have been employed by prominent Southern Baptists to convince the masses in their denomination to support these policies.
00:45:12.440And one of them is that, and I heard this all the time when I was in seminary, the nations are coming here.
00:45:30.300So we're also going to go over there, but they're coming here.
00:45:33.640So this is a great opportunity for the gospel.
00:45:37.260And that's the only thing you should think about is the religious opportunity.
00:45:41.540And you're kind of guilty if you start saying, well, wait, what is this going to do to my town, my community, my country?
00:45:46.960You're a bigot if you say that because you're denying or rejecting this great opportunity that exists before you.
00:45:53.100So that's one of the things that has been used.
00:45:54.940The other thing that's been used, though, is to give the impression that there are a very high percentage of Christians in these migrant populations.
00:46:10.240Now, you have to understand, Roman Catholics in these Latin American countries are much different than Roman Catholics coming from Europe.
00:46:16.740Their voting patterns are even different.
00:46:19.060And so, but they'll just sort of like make a blank statement.
00:46:22.580I know Lincoln Duncan, who's in the PCA, did this a few years ago, this like almost tear field rant about how this is going to be great because it's going to replace all the Richard Dawkins and the white, you know, wasp skeptics of Christianity are going to be replaced by these great Roman Catholics who align with us more socially.
00:46:40.820And they'll use, like, so they'll use a poster child or, you know, a model migrant for this.
00:46:47.440And one of them, I'm going to name him.
00:46:48.660I might get in trouble for this, but who cares?
00:46:51.900Jose Acampo is a worship and student discipleship associate.
00:46:56.820I assume that means a pastor of some kind, or maybe just someone who works under a pastor at Hickory Grove Baptist Church.
00:47:03.840And the reason I bring his name up is because Hickory Grove Baptist Church is where Clint Presley, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention pastors.
00:47:10.400In 2017, when we were having this debate over the Dreamers, the Southern Baptist Convention and at least certain entities like Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission decided to go pretty hard in lobbying.
00:47:24.300So they actually, Southern Baptist money was used to pay for lobbyists in D.C. to pressure Congress to support the Dreamers and the Dream Act.
00:47:35.800And so when this was going on, Jose Acampo was one of the guys who went on radio shows and was kind of publicly out there as, I'm a dreamer.
00:47:48.780And if you don't support this policy, I have to go home.
00:47:53.040And so Clint Presley, the president now of the Southern Baptist Convention, even went out there and did a whole video saying that, you know, basically this guy's a Christian.
00:48:01.360And you're sending a brother in Christ to a country that he was not as familiar with as the as the one that he's primarily grown up in the United States.
00:48:10.740And and he's just doing so many great things for our church and on staff.
00:48:21.560And that's what they they've run these kinds of plays.
00:48:24.180And it's ironic that Clint Presley has been pretty quiet lately on the whole refugee resettlement issue when he was pretty loud in 2017.
00:48:31.700But Jose's still working at his church.
00:48:35.220So so this is the play that they run, that the people coming, if they're not Christian, you should feel guilty about supporting policies to prevent them from coming because they need to hear the gospel.
00:48:45.660And if they are Christian, you should see that as a positive because it's going to actually form a culture and society that is more in keeping with Christian values.
00:48:57.020Last thing I want to ask you before we go to the questions of the people, I just got back from Jordan Peterson's ARC conference in London.
00:49:04.280The good news is that I think we finally got kind of the rational centrist types to the point where they're like, Christianity.
00:49:12.520Yeah, I guess that's kind of important.
00:49:14.720Like they're like, yeah, I guess I guess those Western values came from somewhere.
00:49:20.680They're not just they didn't were just materialized by, you know, the Declaration of Independence or something.
00:49:26.160But they have roots in a particular tradition and a particular understanding of the world or religion, these kind of things.
00:49:32.500And so there was a lot of talk about Christianity in the cultural sense, right?
00:49:36.620Like even if everyone involved wasn't a personal believer, they recognize the centrality of Christianity as kind of like a foundation for what was Christendom.
00:49:47.140And for some reason, we keep calling the West when we mean Christendom.
00:49:55.020However, there was a bad step as well, which was whenever someone attempted to say, OK,
00:50:01.060but we're moving a large amount of, say, Muslims into Europe.
00:50:05.220And if we're going to be a Christian culture, wouldn't we need to like prefer Christianity?
00:50:10.840Wouldn't there need to be some way that we promote Christianity?
00:50:14.640Isn't it insufficient to just say we're Christian, but then move all of the most rabid fanatics of a different religion into the country and expect Christianity to thrive?
00:50:24.080And the answer was uniformly, well, no, of course not.
00:50:27.680Like we're not going to be a Christian civilization.
00:50:33.520It's going to be, you know, we got to figure out how to, you know, we'll win in the marketplace of ideas or something.
00:50:38.000And so I guess my question here is there seems to be a gap now where our technocratic secular ruling class that hasn't gone completely woke has finally recognized that Christianity is kind of your only other option to either wokeness or militant Islam.
00:50:57.340It turns out you need a religion of some kind.
00:50:59.200However, when they start to discuss our Christian values, they seem to not believe you actually need to be Christian to have them.
00:51:07.260And I think this becomes incredibly important, again, when we're importing a large amount of people from foreign countries who are unchurched, are not particularly Christian, even though, like you said, they might be, you know, Catholic in the loosest sense possible.
00:51:21.060And so you're really, even though, again, like you said, we're going to get rid of the Dawkins and we're going to bring all these Christian people, that just turns out not to be the case, right?
00:51:29.660And so what do you think will happen with that?
00:51:34.100Do you ultimately see kind of a lot of these secular government forces that are trying to kind of give lip service to Christian values?
00:51:46.260Are they going to understand that you can't just import X number of people like you actually have to have people who care and Christianity matters?
00:51:55.060This has to be something that if our government is not, obviously, we're not like establishing the state church, but our government understands like this is the preference we should have in the United States.
00:52:06.640So if I could plug this, because I write about this, I have a book that is coming out actually this week, you might even be able to get it on Amazon now called Against the Waves, Christian Order in a Liberal Age.
00:52:18.340John Harris, go to Amazon or you can go to my website, it should be up later today at johnharrispodcast.com and I have autographed copies there.
00:52:25.860But anyway, one of the things that I get into in the book is I try to predict what is going to happen with the new enthusiasm I see among tech elites.
00:52:36.040So Elon Musk is one, political conservatives like Tucker Carlson.
00:52:40.080I just saw Tim Allen is reading the Bible.
00:52:41.900I mean, this is just like every day there's someone else I'm hearing about who's a celebrity or someone of influence who is curious about the Bible or Christianity and they see it as important as you said.
00:52:52.500And I think some of them are converting Russell Brand, obviously, Nayla Ray, who was a pornographic actress who just had a high profile conversion last year to Christianity.
00:53:05.520There's been a few others who have either converted to Catholicism or Protestantism of various types.
00:53:10.760And I think that as things, the pressure mounts, which it will, it is going to be more and more clear that it's either going to be Christianity or Islam or Christianity or some kind of horrific dystopian state.
00:53:27.920And you can choose the halfway point and where we are right now is that these tech guys, many of them, Elon Musk included and in other comedians and I'm trying to think of names and I don't know why it's escaping me.
00:53:43.640Like Bill Maher and stuff has even said things like there's your Dawkins himself was like, yeah, he said he's a cultural Christian.
00:53:53.440What they're doing is I think they're they're some of these guys are looking at the Christianity and they're saying, I get I have a better deal with those people than I do with Islam, especially like someone who's homosexual or wants to protect homosexuals.
00:54:07.420Right. They're like, well, Christians are a little more lenient on this.
00:54:09.360But the problem is they're looking for a basis for their liberal values.
00:54:13.780And I think that liberalism is still their primary religious default.
00:54:19.300But you realize you can't actually ground liberalism.
00:54:22.060So you look for a religion to do it with because secularism won't do it.
00:54:26.660So Christianity becomes the only game in town.
00:54:29.500But I think as the pressure mounts, they're going to realize that can't happen.
00:54:32.960They're going to actually have to choose.
00:54:34.620So I am optimistic that moving forward, we may have a lot of turmoil over this, but I think people will come to Christianity more and more.
00:54:45.120And I and I think the cool thing about it is a lot of the high profile conversions and interest that's been sparked by Christianity.
00:54:52.040Think of like the West Huff situation.
00:54:53.480Even these weren't from the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:54:57.200These guys aren't getting saved and evangelized because the Presbyterian Church in America or some big Christian conference or or, you know, the Super Bowl ad that I forget the name of those.
00:55:10.720But the, you know, he cares, Jesus cares, ads, whatever they call those.
00:55:15.900You know, it's not those things that are actually making the difference.
00:55:19.540It's people realizing that the high school down the street is trans and kids and that can't be good.
00:56:32.120Is there does he have a track record on any of these issues that is significant?
00:56:36.360Well, what I'm about to say is not the viewpoint of Aaron McIntyre.
00:56:39.640So I hope Al Mohler follows you and you guys become friends.
00:56:42.380But my opinion is Al Mohler is a political animal who will go with the wind and whatever's opportunistic.
00:56:48.240So he has a long history of trafficking in wokeness, hiring woke people, supporting critical race theory, and then turning around and saying that he disagrees with critical race theory.
00:56:58.920And so with the immigration thing, I am not 100 percent sure.
00:57:03.060But I do think, yes, I believe he did sign some of the first term Trump stuff, if I'm not mistaken, some of the statements against Trump policies.
00:57:10.280But I don't know if his record on specifically immigration.
00:57:13.780Yeah, he had a debate with Doug Wilson at NatCon on the issue of Christian nationalism.
00:57:21.600And it really is less of a debate and more him agreeing with Doug on a good chunk of the whole thing.
00:57:41.700So I hope ultimately that is shifting.
00:57:44.660Like you said, maybe he's taken different positions over the years.
00:57:47.820I once again will speak to my ignorance when it comes to church politics and the record on a lot of these guys.
00:57:53.300But I hope that that was reflective of perhaps a shift in general of kind of where they're going, because it did seem like he was more in agreement with Doug Wilson than he was speaking out against him.
00:58:19.380Yeah, and I guess we kind of already discussed this, but ultimately, the fact that this has been pushed so heavily as the church is the destruction of nations.
00:58:33.380And it's used as often by, you know, kind of pagans and people who want to oppose Christianity as it is by kind of the Christians themselves.
00:58:42.620I see also, unfortunately, a number of people who consider themselves on the right who are Christian, but don't seem to grasp the basic biblical understanding of what a nation is.
00:58:54.620They have this wildly modern, you know, kind of post-enlightenment understanding of nationhood that has very little to do with any ancient wisdom or Christianity.
00:59:05.160And I think there just has to be a serious effort by Christian teachers to kind of reintroduce the concept of nationhood.
00:59:15.860Again, it shouldn't be a central doctrine.
00:59:18.200You know, it's not the most important thing in the world, you know, when it comes to sharing Christ.
00:59:21.880But since it seems like we're going to be informing our kind of political organization by this doctrine, we should at the very least understand it and what it actually means, what the Bible really says about it, rather than have it kind of completely chopped up and thrown around and tossed to a modern blender and spewed out the other side by kind of the current wave of civic nationalism, because it's just inaccurate.
00:59:46.480It just has very little bearing on what the Bible actually says about the truth of nationhood.
01:00:05.840Well, you should certainly be checking out John's work, his new book, his podcast, everything else.
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