The Auron MacIntyre Show - February 24, 2025


Is the Southern Baptist Convention Woke on Immigration？ ｜ Guest： Jon Harris ｜ 2⧸24⧸25

Topics
refugee resettlement and immigration tech elites and Christianity conversion nationhood
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Guests
John Harris Jon Harris
Mentioned
Donald Trump Clint Presley Jose Acampo Al Mohler Isaiah Charles Spurgeon Richard Dawkins Oren McIntyre Doug Wilson Jordan Peterson James Lankford Russell Moore Send Relief Elon Musk Brent Leatherwood Christian Ortega Lincoln Duncan Tucker Carlson Douglas Murray Enrico Palazzo and 20 more
Should We Board the ARC？ ｜ 2⧸21⧸25 US Intelligence Operated a Secret Trans Sex Chat ｜ Guest： J. Burden ｜ 2⧸26⧸25

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

179.09

Word count

10,884

Sentence count

678

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

35

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.
00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?
00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.
00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95
00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.
00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.
00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94
00:00:22.240 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.
00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
00:00:27.340 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.
00:00:28.580 See AirCanada.com.
00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?
00:00:31.580 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.
00:00:33.420 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
00:00:37.820 So, with the breaking open of the USAID story,
00:00:42.500 we're seeing a lot of people focusing on the places that federal aid is going.
00:00:47.860 What is it supporting?
00:00:49.580 What kind of programs is it pushing?
00:00:51.400 What kind of agenda is it installing into these organizations?
00:00:55.020 And an extra focus has really been the role that, unfortunately, many Christian denominations have played in the United States in facilitating mass migration.
00:01:05.640 This often is really out of step with the parishioners, the people who actually go to the church,
00:01:11.540 and tends to be a focus of different bureaucrats, managers, and leaders inside these organizations.
00:01:18.160 Unfortunately, the Southern Baptist Conference is not entirely immune to this, and that's what I wanted to talk about today.
00:01:27.240 Joining me is John Harris.
00:01:28.680 He's an author.
00:01:29.720 He's the host of Conversations That Matter, and he's also a filmmaker.
00:01:33.300 John, thank you for joining me.
00:01:34.240 Thanks, Aaron.
00:01:35.260 I appreciate it.
00:01:36.600 Absolutely.
00:01:37.420 You had a good piece in the Federalists touching on this topic, and there have been many people,
00:01:43.420 like Megan Basham and others, who are documenting what's going on there.
00:01:48.100 But specifically, you focused on the SBC.
00:01:51.840 Now, a lot of people may not be familiar with the different dynamics at play.
00:01:56.880 For those who don't know, what is the importance of the Southern Baptist Coalition?
00:02:02.440 Yeah, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States,
00:02:07.520 and because of that, a lot of the books that are marketed to Christians are going to have to appeal to Southern Baptists.
00:02:14.860 A lot of the conferences that happened in the greater Christian evangelical world are going to have to appeal to Southern Baptists.
00:02:20.920 Southern Baptists have enough numbers to also make a major policy difference, not just with their vote, but also with their lobbying.
00:02:28.260 And because of all of this, they are a bellwether for the direction of evangelical Christianity,
00:02:34.100 which, of course, is a primary base of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
00:02:39.080 And the SBC has a reputation as being one of the more based, as the kids say, denominations, right?
00:02:50.900 Again, nothing's perfect, but out of those that are active and dominant in the United States,
00:02:56.180 it tends to be the one that makes the leftist most angry, right?
00:02:59.940 It's the lone bulwark, some might say, in a lot of moral situations.
00:03:04.840 And so that's another reason that its influence is so critical.
00:03:09.620 That's right. Yeah, I think they were probably primary in that 81 or 82 percent who voted for Donald Trump.
00:03:16.500 A lot of those are Southern Baptists.
00:03:18.160 They primarily exist in the Southern United States, as the name implies.
00:03:22.840 So when you look at deep red states, a lot of them are dominated by Southern Baptist churches.
00:03:28.720 So, of course, they're where they live, who they are and some of their doctrinal issues make them targets.
00:03:36.820 For example, they prohibit or they narrow the range of the pastoral office to men.
00:03:42.660 But even that is cracking a little bit.
00:03:45.700 Last year at the convention, that issue became a point of debate.
00:03:49.600 And it's a little uncertain what's going to happen in the future with that.
00:03:54.420 They didn't want the Credentials Committee to strip churches of their affiliation with the SBC if they had women pastors.
00:04:01.160 So I bring that up only as an example, not to talk about that issue in depth.
00:04:05.040 But because historically and presumably even still, that is one of the requirements.
00:04:10.820 It's in the Baptist faith and message that this office is for men.
00:04:14.300 Of course, that's out of step with the liberal order.
00:04:16.940 And 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.
00:04:25.160 There 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.
00:04:39.740 If it hasn't been entirely defeated, it is certainly retreating to a different position at this point.
00:04:45.600 But it seems like many of the churches are doubling down on this simultaneously.
00:04:51.820 Like, 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.
00:04:59.820 It'd take, you know, a minute or two for it to actually get to the other side of the brontosaurus.
00:05:03.520 It 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.
00:05:16.920 And now that the elite signaling has switched and seems to be heading more rightward, they're still pushing the leftism.
00:05:23.860 The signal is still trying to go from the tail to the head.
00:05:27.220 And 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.
00:05:40.080 And yet that's not reflected in any serious way in a lot of the leadership of these denominations.
00:05:46.300 No, it's not.
00:05:47.460 And there was actually a Southern Baptist poll.
00:05:49.340 I did not include this in the article because it would have been too long.
00:05:52.360 But 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.
00:06:03.620 But 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.
00:06:20.060 And 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.
00:06:31.480 Why would they vote for a candidate who has made opposite policies his primary platform?
00:06:37.940 But 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.
00:06:50.920 That's like your bureaucracy.
00:06:52.540 To 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?
00:07:08.620 And to what extent are they motivated when it comes to America First policies?
00:07:11.800 And I don't know the answer to that.
00:07:13.020 I think we're still trying to figure that out.
00:07:15.560 But I'll just give you my guess.
00:07:17.120 My guess is that Southern Baptists in the pews primarily are against illegal migration.
00:07:21.080 They do believe in America First.
00:07:23.960 I think the polling that has tried to reflect otherwise is probably there for political reasons.
00:07:30.540 And 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.
00:07:42.660 And 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.
00:07:51.920 So they're trying to overcome that with the elites.
00:07:54.920 And it hasn't worked. 1.00
00:07:56.140 So it's just a stupid move, in my opinion. 0.99
00:07:57.560 But that's kind of that's where things are at right now. 0.97
00:08:00.640 So when it comes to the actual numbers, the actual involvement of the church organizations and the government, what is the level of overlap?
00:08:12.020 I think that the Southern Baptist Convention is probably less egregious in this than some of the other denominations, but still active.
00:08:21.280 What what are they supporting?
00:08:24.020 How much money are they getting from the government?
00:08:25.880 What's involved in kind of this mass migration effort?
00:08:29.720 OK, so like policy wise, what what is the denomination advancing?
00:08:33.060 Yeah, what's their policy and what and practically on the ground with organizations, what actions are they taking?
00:08:39.560 This is what my article is about.
00:08:41.140 So 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.
00:08:51.620 So let's start there and then we'll go to the policy end of it.
00:08:54.340 The policy end of it is a much easier to explain.
00:08:57.360 But 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.
00:09:08.140 So we'll take the Presbyterian Church in America as a comparable denomination with similar conservative instincts.
00:09:15.420 At least they have.
00:09:16.660 That'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.
00:09:25.500 One of their main leaders was there advocating it.
00:09:28.680 But 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.
00:09:35.980 The PCA has a much more strong ability to control what churches do.
00:09:41.840 And there's a mechanism for booting churches and booting pastors, which is much more effective.
00:09:47.320 It may work slowly, but they work as as a denomination.
00:09:51.160 If you're Roman Catholic, the PCA, you would probably recognize a little bit better.
00:09:55.560 They're not quite where the Roman Catholics are, but there's a very much a top down structure.
00:10:00.280 The SPC is not like that.
00:10:01.900 So the SPC has individual churches and some will even tell you we only exist three days a year when we come together for convention.
00:10:08.100 That's a little bit of an overstatement.
00:10:09.860 But there are churches who come together to fund very specific things.
00:10:13.920 It's kind of like the federal republic that we were supposed to have.
00:10:16.380 We come together to fund missions, they come together to fund education for pastors, and it should be limited to that.
00:10:22.980 And the people who give to the SPC think that's what they're giving to.
00:10:26.300 Now, these entities that the denomination funds who have these stated purposes have, I think, veered off track.
00:10:33.000 And there's been attempts to audit them to find out what's going on.
00:10:36.520 Why did the North American Vision Board give so much money?
00:10:39.340 I don't remember the exact figure, but to lobbying.
00:10:41.220 It was it was an astronomical amount.
00:10:43.320 Where were they lobbying?
00:10:44.520 What are they doing?
00:10:45.060 We don't know because they always resist efforts to actually get that information.
00:10:50.160 But there's also prominent Southern Baptist churches.
00:10:53.260 So 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.
00:11:02.000 And even though they are not in the denomination hierarchy on paper, they function as if they're in the denominational hierarchy.
00:11:10.260 So here's why I say all this.
00:11:11.800 You have churches like Summit Church, which J.D. Greer runs in Raleigh, North Carolina, giving a tremendous amount of effort towards refugee resettlement.
00:11:21.000 And some of this money is coming from, eventually, organizations like USAID.
00:11:27.200 And they work with, in this particular case, Send Relief.
00:11:31.200 Send Relief is an NGO.
00:11:32.720 They were started after World War II by the National Association of Evangelicals as a way to give relief to Germany, to Japan.
00:11:40.140 And in the 1970s, they started getting money after the Vietnam War for some refugee resettlement.
00:11:47.060 And then in the 90s, USAID started giving them money.
00:11:50.540 And now over half their budget is government money from the State Department, from USAID, up until recently, to resettle refugees.
00:11:58.460 So they have gotten their tentacles into various churches, denominations, and other groups to help supply volunteers.
00:12:06.860 J.D. Greer's church is one of those.
00:12:08.120 And I did not mention this in the article because that's not technically the denomination.
00:12:12.520 But there are other ways in which the denomination is receiving money directly.
00:12:17.560 The 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.
00:12:39.300 And 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.
00:12:56.080 So it's a church plant in Boston.
00:12:57.720 That's what you say when it's like a smaller church that's just getting started.
00:13:00.480 But 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.
00:13:09.300 Just as far as we can tell, if there's more, we don't know about it.
00:13:13.360 So anyway, it is complicated, and that's why I took a long time explaining this.
00:13:18.520 The SBC's decentralized format makes it a little more complicated, but they are receiving money, and we don't know exactly how much.
00:13:25.920 So that's the answer to the question of where's the government money coming in for refugee resettlement, allegedly refugee resettlement.
00:13:33.500 Some of these people will never get refugee status, but that's what they call it.
00:13:36.220 What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?
00:13:41.240 A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.
00:13:47.940 A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.
00:13:52.420 Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.
00:13:56.220 Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
00:14:01.460 Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.
00:14:04.320 Instacart, groceries that over-deliver.
00:14:07.600 Oh, sorry, go ahead.
00:14:09.560 No, I was going to say, I'll go on to the second part, but I need to catch my breath.
00:14:13.020 I'll let you engage.
00:14:15.300 Well, and I should just say that I have grown up in Southern Baptist churches my entire life.
00:14:21.480 You know, my father was in the military, and so we weren't stationary.
00:14:25.280 However, the one thing that was always around was the Southern Baptist hymnal.
00:14:30.320 So this is a denomination I've been a part of literally, you know, since I was born.
00:14:35.640 And 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.
00:14:47.020 Again, 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.
00:15:00.220 Probably if I was just, you know, being rootless and moving around every year, that kind of thing.
00:15:04.400 So these organizations are very personally important to me is what I'm trying to communicate here.
00:15:10.660 The decentralized nature has always been a reality, like you said, and that has its ups and its downs.
00:15:16.820 That means that many churches are operating with little to no involvement in the type of things that we're talking about here.
00:15:22.620 However, if organizations that influence such a large body of churches can be captured, then they're inevitably going to have a big influence.
00:15:32.760 And 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,
00:15:43.080 if 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.
00:16:00.120 So I think it's pretty important.
00:16:01.800 But you're saying also the doctrines that had been affected or that were being affected by the church.
00:16:08.280 The policy end of it.
00:16:10.420 And before I get there, I just thought of something else.
00:16:12.220 You know, when I was a seminary student, I've actually never shared this even on my podcast.
00:16:15.860 In 2017, I went to a Southern Baptist seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina called Southeastern.
00:16:20.680 I got wind of a situation near the seminary.
00:16:25.320 And one of the reasons I haven't talked about this, and I will, because I couldn't confirm the story, and I'm going to say this.
00:16:30.440 I can't confirm what I'm about to say.
00:16:33.000 The reason I'm saying it, though, is because I think it plays into what's happening now.
00:16:37.020 The story is there was a church plant near the school that was doing the kind of thing we're talking about now, refugee resettlement.
00:16:45.620 But it was illegal migrants that were getting finances from the church.
00:16:50.440 So, in other words, they would go to the church, receive money for a living and, you know, for food and shelter and so forth.
00:17:00.000 And this was a church plant.
00:17:02.040 And since then, I have heard a lot of stories about SEND and the North American Mission Board.
00:17:10.700 It really is more like the North American Mission Board planting churches.
00:17:14.320 So, these are church plants that have very strong left-leaning pastors.
00:17:20.360 And they incentivize this kind of thing because the Southern Baptists are essentially giving money.
00:17:26.480 Traditional churches, probably like the one you grew up in, Aaron, which is conservative and all the rest.
00:17:31.240 But you're giving money to a denomination that says, we're using this for missions.
00:17:35.300 And then they will do their missions overseas and also their missions in North America.
00:17:41.560 And because it's coming from the top of the denomination, the elites get to choose who is getting the money and how it's being used.
00:17:49.560 And so, I just wanted to say, if you're a Southern Baptist listening to this and people do come to me with leads and that kind of thing,
00:17:55.720 you might want to look into church plants specifically.
00:17:58.280 They have less accountability sometimes, depending on how they're formed.
00:18:02.640 And I just hear a lot more stories.
00:18:04.820 I'm not surprised in Boston that we could confirm that this was a church plant that was started that ended up getting all this money.
00:18:11.880 Now, the policy end of it.
00:18:14.240 There are two things going on in the Southern Baptist Convention, primarily pushing the needle left on immigration.
00:18:19.620 One is when the assembly meets every year, they vote on what are called resolutions.
00:18:26.400 These are non-binding, but they are symbolic of the direction of the denomination.
00:18:32.280 And this is where they make moral evaluations and statements.
00:18:34.760 Very famously, they boycotted Disney.
00:18:37.960 Remember that?
00:18:39.080 Oh, yeah.
00:18:39.240 I remember.
00:18:39.880 We couldn't go for years.
00:18:41.340 Yeah.
00:18:41.420 Well, that wasn't a binding thing.
00:18:43.660 You didn't have to not go.
00:18:44.820 It was just that Southern Baptists said, this is what we want to do as a collective effort.
00:18:48.980 They rebuked Bill Clinton, right?
00:18:50.360 These are the kinds of things that some people think the Southern Baptists are still doing.
00:18:53.900 In reality, if you start reading the resolutions from the past 10 years, you will find there is a solid leftist trajectory,
00:19:01.020 especially when it comes to matters of race and ethnicity.
00:19:03.520 I think every year, it's almost required, it seems like.
00:19:06.800 I asked before the convention, I said, okay, which is the one on race they're going to do?
00:19:10.340 Because we know they're going to do something on that.
00:19:14.040 I think a lot of this started with something called the Great Commission Resurgence in 2010, 0.90
00:19:18.160 where the Southern Baptists got together and said, our denomination is going to die because it's a bunch of old white guys. 0.92
00:19:22.960 We need to diversify. 0.77
00:19:24.020 We need to find young people to make our denomination survive.
00:19:26.620 So they started changing the way that they did ministry.
00:19:30.100 Colleges started doing the diversity thing.
00:19:32.500 My college, Southeastern, had the Center for Kingdom Diversity.
00:19:35.600 But one of the elements of this was the refugee resettlement and the immigration and the softening of the traditional Baptist views, I would say,
00:19:44.840 or most Southern Baptists, what they would view, how they would think about this issue.
00:19:49.000 And so you look at resolutions from the early 2000s on immigration up until like 2011.
00:19:56.360 And when they talk about immigration in these resolutions, they are very focused on the laws must be enforced.
00:20:04.160 Even in the 2003 resolution, businesses that hire illegal aliens should be punished.
00:20:10.280 They use the word illegal alien.
00:20:12.160 There's a softening that happens over time, though.
00:20:14.780 And by 2018, they're talking about compassionate ways forward for policy, that the United States, they urge Congress to make legal pathways for citizenship.
00:20:28.400 They're not using the term illegal anymore.
00:20:30.320 And 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.
00:20:44.100 But the government needs to do their job.
00:20:45.580 So the churches should be involved in this.
00:20:47.480 Now the government has a shared responsibility there.
00:20:49.980 So they've been pushing the needle left.
00:20:51.800 If 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.
00:21:05.260 This was run by Russell Moore for many years.
00:21:08.080 He's probably the most famous and the worst abuser of his office in this respect.
00:21:13.980 He's now the editor in chief at Christianity Today, which many might know is a left leaning Christian publication.
00:21:20.320 And 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.
00:21:33.140 Now, 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.
00:21:46.400 One's a quality of life.
00:21:47.700 One's an actual life issue.
00:21:48.960 But 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.
00:22:10.100 And they weren't consistently pro-life.
00:22:12.760 So he did this over the course of, I don't know, about six, seven years or so in his position.
00:22:18.900 And now his successor, Brent Leatherwood, is basically someone he trained and parrots the same kinds of things.
00:22:24.600 So 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.
00:22:39.120 Democrats and Republicans could get behind this.
00:22:41.120 This was last year.
00:22:41.880 But 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.
00:22:56.360 So it was a sneaky way to try to continue the flow, in my opinion, of the migrants coming across the border.
00:23:04.240 But, 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.
00:23:16.900 And they opposed Trump at every turn.
00:23:18.600 They 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.
00:23:31.080 They tried to do the same thing when there was a moratorium on immigration from these places in the Middle East that were unvetted.
00:23:38.540 It was saying they screamed about that and they made a bunch of symbolic statements about it.
00:23:43.460 And then you have the Biden administration and they're they're silent.
00:23:46.600 They don't say a thing about the border crisis except to support James Lankford.
00:23:49.840 So 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.
00:24:05.240 They're still voting Republican.
00:24:06.700 They're still voting for Trump.
00:24:07.760 So that's a long way of me explaining kind of where they're at now.
00:24:10.960 Yeah, you can really see conquest second law just absolutely sprinting away from the center on that one. 0.99
00:24:18.960 So.
00:24:20.500 Unfortunately, you know, the Southern Baptist Convention is far from the only denomination experiencing this.
00:24:27.520 Obviously, Lutherans are running a large amount of these type of operations.
00:24:32.660 Catholics.
00:24:33.680 We 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.
00:24:46.920 J.D. Vance famously talked about the Order of Morris.
00:24:49.660 And this was like, even the Pope was like, no, he doesn't he doesn't get it.
00:24:53.700 He doesn't understand.
00:24:55.000 John, help me out here.
00:24:56.240 You went to seminary.
00:24:57.740 There's a book.
00:24:58.680 There's a story about the Good Samaritan.
00:25:01.600 And that means that the entire population of Africa has to move to Ohio. 1.00
00:25:07.240 That's the only interpretation that seems to be available in that passage that, you know, God said you have to take care of the stranger.
00:25:15.660 And so you just have to move entire continents worth of people into the United States at our expense. 0.92
00:25:24.380 That's biblical, right?
00:25:25.740 That's just that's the doctrine every church has to hold.
00:25:28.740 The historic understanding of that.
00:25:30.880 And I'll appeal to Charles Spurgeon here since we're talking about Baptists and he's very revered in the Baptist world.
00:25:36.680 The 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.
00:25:50.440 He was passing by.
00:25:52.320 So it's who he saw.
00:25:54.380 It was who was in his everyday experience.
00:25:57.000 And Charles Spurgeon says about this, that the Good Samaritan figured that he this man was in his neighborhood.
00:26:05.740 He you know, if you were in your own neighborhood, think about it.
00:26:08.640 And 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.
00:26:18.500 What would you do?
00:26:19.540 Well, that's your neighborhood.
00:26:20.380 And that's what Charles Spurgeon says about it.
00:26:22.740 And that's the historic Christian understanding of that.
00:26:25.420 So it actually reinforces the idea of proximity, which is the principle here.
00:26:31.060 It doesn't override natural relationships.
00:26:33.520 You don't find in the story of the Good Samaritan that he's supposed to prefer someone who's foreign over his own children.
00:26:40.080 It'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.
00:26:53.240 And it's about charity.
00:26:54.040 It's not about what the government does either.
00:26:56.400 So 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.
00:27:09.100 You 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.
00:27:18.700 It's actually easier to help them when they remain in their countries. 0.73
00:27:21.380 But we're spending an enormous amount of money to bring them here and give them welfare and so forth. 0.93
00:27:28.820 And the Good Samaritan story is not that doesn't reflect that at all.
00:27:33.720 So so I think it's an abuse of the story and it's kind of a shame.
00:27:39.400 I think it reinforces probably our views that the Ordo Amaris is actually something that applies to the people in closer proximity.
00:27:46.340 Yeah, 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.
00:27:54.440 Right. Like that would have been to the right.
00:27:56.080 Right. 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.
00:28:08.540 Also, you know, I see this one cited a lot.
00:28:11.940 There's neither, you know, Jew nor Gentile, you know, right? 1.00
00:28:15.400 Like, you know, male, female. This has been erased.
00:28:17.840 So nations are just gone, right?
00:28:19.440 Like there's no everyone is just a Christian. 0.56
00:28:22.500 There's, you know, so you can't have nations anymore because Christians have to welcome all Christians into their country. 1.00
00:28:29.920 Is 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?
00:28:40.220 That's another novel interpretation.
00:28:41.800 So in Ephesians 2 talks about this barrier wall being taken down between Gentiles and Jews.
00:28:47.800 It'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. 0.86
00:29:02.900 And if you wanted to become a Jew, you had to actually keep that law, circumcision being the primary commandment. 0.98
00:29:08.920 And 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.
00:29:20.740 But this was not supposed to apply to the temporal world as a way of making nations obsolete or no more than it is gender.
00:29:30.920 I 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.
00:29:37.560 So, so actually I think that people who try to use that verse are completely abusing it.
00:29:44.640 And 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.
00:30:00.140 They still exist.
00:30:01.460 There's still distinctions there.
00:30:02.780 So those distinctions are not erased.
00:30:06.020 And I think the other thing, and you haven't brought this up, but I think it's good for me to probably talk about this as well.
00:30:12.380 I hear this a lot that in the old Testament, the law given to Israel was supposed to be a law that applied equally to foreigners.
00:30:20.720 And they were supposed to treat the foreigners well, or the strangers.
00:30:24.080 Sometimes they'll call them in the land, the sojourners.
00:30:27.280 And there's a few problems, I think, with people who try to also appeal to that, to justify these kinds of immigration policies.
00:30:34.260 The first one is a scale issue.
00:30:36.320 As you rightly pointed out, the good Samaritan isn't about more than one person and it's on this human scale.
00:30:42.920 It's not about importing the whole country into your country or something of that nature.
00:30:48.000 And it's the same thing in the old Testament.
00:30:49.880 When we're talking about foreigners, we're not talking about an invasion.
00:30:52.720 The ancient world would have seen what's possible now with modern technology and mass transit as an invasion.
00:30:59.380 If it was the same scale, if you saw millions of people swarming into your country, you would have gotten, you would call the military.
00:31:06.640 So it's a different set of circumstances.
00:31:09.640 The ancient world, they did not have, I mean, unless I guess you're talking about the Great Wall of China.
00:31:13.620 There weren't the long walls, but they did have walls around their cities and so forth.
00:31:18.600 So there was security.
00:31:20.120 They also had laws in the Old Testament concerning the ownership of property, that it had to remain in the hands of ethnic Jews.
00:31:30.160 So 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. 0.82
00:31:42.880 So there's a very strong in-group preference, which we do not have now.
00:31:45.940 They didn't have the same welfare rules and all these kinds of things.
00:31:48.340 So 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. 0.76
00:32:02.200 You would punish someone who's foreign. 1.00
00:32:04.260 They would both be punishable.
00:32:05.540 But it didn't mean, you know, foreigners were prevented from becoming kings.
00:32:08.900 They couldn't have political leadership.
00:32:10.780 Foreigners could be perpetual slaves and native Israelites could not. 1.00
00:32:14.580 So there's all these privileges that foreigners did not enjoy.
00:32:18.880 Our situation is much different.
00:32:20.540 We'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.
00:32:31.480 And now we're bankrupting our system.
00:32:33.740 So I just think that Christians who try to appeal to these things are making some basic errors. 0.99
00:32:38.160 Yeah, this is something that I didn't quite grasp, you know, when I was young listening to these stories.
00:32:44.920 Of course, you're right that, you know, the constant waves of immigration would have been rightly understood as invasion. 1.00
00:32:51.720 In fact, the Roman Empire had to fight several wars to prevent large scale immigration into its borders.
00:32:58.240 It's not that people even wanted to conquer Rome.
00:33:00.860 It'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. 0.97
00:33:13.600 Italy had to go to war to get Roman citizenship for crying out loud.
00:33:17.340 You 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.
00:33:41.320 That the shared meals of sacrifice meat to the gods was actually the initiation ritual of spiritual joining into the city, into the population.
00:33:51.960 And so those, those distinctions in the Old Testament are critical.
00:33:55.780 They're not just, oh, well, this was, you know, a sacrifice to an idol and we only believe in Jehovah.
00:34:01.180 So you, you can't do that.
00:34:02.500 It was an additional layer of, no, that would mean you would join another nation.
00:34:07.000 You would be of another people. 0.96
00:34:08.220 And the, the distinction between nation and state was still rather relevant at that time.
00:34:14.660 Today, we just kind of fold them into the same thing, country and nation are the same thing, but they're not at all.
00:34:21.420 And this is recognized through most of history until now.
00:34:24.680 And so when people come and as soon as they get, you know, an EBT card and a social security number, they're American.
00:34:32.140 You know, they're right.
00:34:33.420 Like 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.
00:34:42.300 And it never did in any serious sense throughout history.
00:34:45.540 And 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.
00:34:57.960 Yeah, that's a really, really great point.
00:35:01.260 And if you read, it's, I think it's Isaiah.
00:35:04.100 I can't remember if it's Isaiah or Ezekiel.
00:35:05.400 I think it's Isaiah.
00:35:06.780 The prophet says that the Northern, if you remember from biblical history, and some people may not know this, I'll just explain.
00:35:13.340 The 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.
00:35:24.320 And then they were both in captivity at different points, and they had a different series of kings.
00:35:29.020 And that's what First and Second Kings is about and First and Second Chronicles.
00:35:33.140 So during that time, the Northern tribes ended up being, to make this simple, they ended up mixing in with the Assyrians.
00:35:47.920 And 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.
00:36:00.520 This 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. 0.97
00:36:07.760 And that's how they take your land. 1.00
00:36:09.600 I mean, very smart.
00:36:11.020 And so this happened to the 10 tribes.
00:36:12.720 They mix in with Assyrians and other groups.
00:36:15.640 And part of the mixing is they start worshiping their gods and so forth.
00:36:19.680 And Isaiah says that they ceased to exist, that they were no longer a nation.
00:36:25.480 Now, 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?
00:36:36.460 Because she's a Samaritan. 1.00
00:36:38.740 He's talking to a descendant of those people.
00:36:41.780 And they were allies with the Romans against Israel.
00:36:45.360 So through this intermixing, they end up creating a new people that is now hostile to the southern tribes that remained as Israel and continued. 0.85
00:36:59.360 So this is a warning you see throughout scripture not to do this.
00:37:02.900 The Samaritans are a bad example. 1.00
00:37:04.900 Don't be like them.
00:37:05.940 Solomon 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. 0.94
00:37:18.160 And that's, of course, viewed rightly as a spiritual compromise.
00:37:20.800 But as you say, there are cultural components to this, and it's the loss of identity that's also a big part of it.
00:37:27.900 And 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.
00:37:36.940 And 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.
00:37:46.220 Yeah, I mean, these are practices that still exist inside Orthodox Jewish communities today, right?
00:37:50.740 There's a high level of intermarriage there because they want to keep the nation alive. 0.52
00:37:55.780 That'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.
00:38:06.080 And 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.
00:38:14.820 But back to kind of the operations on the ground, you know, refugee gets you a lot, right? 1.00
00:38:23.080 That's the language in Europe as well.
00:38:25.560 If you go everywhere, it's the refugee crisis, it's refugees. 1.00
00:38:28.840 Even 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.
00:38:38.920 And 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.
00:38:50.720 I 100% understand the incentive structure and everything else about it.
00:38:54.620 That said, the United States can't say the United States if the people in the United States aren't from the United States.
00:39:01.460 And 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.
00:39:18.440 And so the word refugee seems to be like the silver bullet that gets around people's understanding of this.
00:39:24.400 This 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.
00:39:42.220 And 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?
00:39:56.120 What is driving this?
00:39:58.820 Well, 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.
00:40:11.180 And could you use a different word?
00:40:13.500 And the problem was that's the word the Southern Baptists are using.
00:40:17.200 So I'm like, I don't really I mean, if I'm quoting them, they understood you have to use the term refugee.
00:40:21.320 So 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.
00:40:28.980 And this is where this is kind of the boomer con like, you know, I just don't want illegal immigration, right? 1.00
00:40:36.100 I legal immigration is fine, but here's the problem.
00:40:39.260 The lines are so blurred between those two things at this point.
00:40:42.740 We actually don't know, you know, who is in this country that applies for refugee status that will actually attain that status.
00:40:52.380 And they're here with a distant court date waiting for the time and maybe not even waiting.
00:40:58.960 They've just diffused into the culture at this point.
00:41:01.460 You know, they've they've jumped the ship and you're not going to find them.
00:41:05.200 Maybe ICE will find them now.
00:41:06.340 But I mean, this is kind of the problem is this was being used as a pretext for illegal migration.
00:41:11.620 So 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.
00:41:28.820 You are allowed to stay in the country while you're waiting for the courts to hear your case.
00:41:33.380 And then it depends on what the judge says.
00:41:35.740 And 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.
00:41:48.560 But I was actually in Los Angeles on the street in Van Nuys, California, right outside of L.A.
00:41:54.800 And 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.
00:42:02.660 So 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.
00:42:08.780 And it was a law firm.
00:42:10.920 Who is that for?
00:42:12.280 Obviously, 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.
00:42:23.160 And somehow lawyers are getting them to them.
00:42:26.020 So I think this is there's so many working moral issues here, but I think ultimately this is robbery.
00:42:33.320 This is taking from those who have sacrificed much for their children.
00:42:37.640 And society is the relationship between the past, the dead and those who are yet to come, the living.
00:42:43.440 And it's taking from them and it's giving to those who are not part of that story.
00:42:48.360 And if we choose to do that kind of thing, that's one thing.
00:42:50.900 But 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.
00:42:58.360 And it amounts to stealing.
00:42:59.440 Yeah, 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.
00:43:19.420 Right. Like, but ultimately, they don't really want to be involved in bringing a large amount of illegal aliens into the United States.
00:43:29.420 And, you know, speaking again about kind of the order of Morris, I used to be a public school teacher.
00:43:36.800 I would sit in classrooms, you know, Christmas time would come 80 percent of my classroom was, you know, immigrants from Haiti or Central America.
00:43:49.360 And I would ask them, hey, you know, let's let's do a quiz about Christmas.
00:43:54.900 And they would just know nothing about Christ.
00:43:59.000 They would know nothing about the Christmas story.
00:44:00.680 They would know we're told all the times, oh, these are Christian countries.
00:44:03.540 It's Christian populations coming in.
00:44:05.180 But they would be completely ignorant of what was going on there.
00:44:08.580 And, 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?
00:44:22.300 Like the United States is wildly unchurched.
00:44:25.100 So 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.
00:44:33.780 But also, what about, you know, the immigrants you have already brought here who are wildly also unchurched and unfamiliar with what's going on? 1.00
00:44:42.840 And 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?
00:44:58.220 I guess.
00:44:58.600 Maybe I'm crazy here, but I feel like that's just the wrong order of operations.
00:45:02.480 There 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.
00:45:12.440 And one of them is that, and I heard this all the time when I was in seminary, the nations are coming here.
00:45:18.400 This is a good thing.
00:45:19.360 And so policies that bring people who are not Christians to the United States are good because then they can be exposed to the gospel. 0.95
00:45:25.120 And somehow this is in tandem with, we're also sending our money overseas.
00:45:29.380 That's not changing.
00:45:30.300 So we're also going to go over there, but they're coming here.
00:45:33.640 So this is a great opportunity for the gospel.
00:45:37.260 And that's the only thing you should think about is the religious opportunity.
00:45:41.540 And you're kind of guilty if you start saying, well, wait, what is this going to do to my town, my community, my country?
00:45:46.960 You're a bigot if you say that because you're denying or rejecting this great opportunity that exists before you.
00:45:53.100 So that's one of the things that has been used.
00:45:54.940 The 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.
00:46:02.540 And there's two ways I've seen this.
00:46:04.340 One is because many of the Latin American countries have people who are Roman Catholic.
00:46:09.180 At least they say that.
00:46:10.240 Now, you have to understand, Roman Catholics in these Latin American countries are much different than Roman Catholics coming from Europe.
00:46:16.740 Their voting patterns are even different.
00:46:19.060 And so, but they'll just sort of like make a blank statement.
00:46:22.580 I 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.
00:46:40.820 And they'll use, like, so they'll use a poster child or, you know, a model migrant for this. 0.90
00:46:47.440 And one of them, I'm going to name him.
00:46:48.660 I might get in trouble for this, but who cares?
00:46:50.740 Jose Acampo.
00:46:51.900 Jose Acampo is a worship and student discipleship associate.
00:46:56.820 I assume that means a pastor of some kind, or maybe just someone who works under a pastor at Hickory Grove Baptist Church.
00:47:03.840 And 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.
00:47:10.400 In 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.
00:47:24.300 So 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.
00:47:35.800 And 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.
00:47:48.780 And if you don't support this policy, I have to go home.
00:47:53.040 And 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.
00:48:01.360 And 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.
00:48:10.740 And and he's just doing so many great things for our church and on staff.
00:48:14.120 And so that's what you're doing.
00:48:15.580 And I mean, it's kind of resembles the Social Security defense of you're killing grandma. 0.53
00:48:20.520 Right. Right.
00:48:21.560 And that's what they they've run these kinds of plays. 0.90
00:48:24.180 And it's ironic that Clint Presley has been pretty quiet lately on the whole refugee resettlement issue when he was pretty loud in 2017.
00:48:31.700 But Jose's still working at his church.
00:48:35.220 So 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.
00:48:45.660 And 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.
00:48:57.020 Last 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.
00:49:04.280 The good news is that I think we finally got kind of the rational centrist types to the point where they're like, Christianity.
00:49:12.520 Yeah, I guess that's kind of important.
00:49:14.720 Like they're like, yeah, I guess I guess those Western values came from somewhere.
00:49:20.680 They're not just they didn't were just materialized by, you know, the Declaration of Independence or something.
00:49:26.160 But they have roots in a particular tradition and a particular understanding of the world or religion, these kind of things.
00:49:32.500 And so there was a lot of talk about Christianity in the cultural sense, right?
00:49:36.620 Like 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.
00:49:47.140 And for some reason, we keep calling the West when we mean Christendom.
00:49:50.240 And so that that was positive, right?
00:49:53.140 That's a good step.
00:49:54.240 Good.
00:49:55.020 However, there was a bad step as well, which was whenever someone attempted to say, OK,
00:50:01.060 but we're moving a large amount of, say, Muslims into Europe.
00:50:05.220 And if we're going to be a Christian culture, wouldn't we need to like prefer Christianity?
00:50:10.840 Wouldn't there need to be some way that we promote Christianity?
00:50:14.640 Isn'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?
00:50:24.080 And the answer was uniformly, well, no, of course not.
00:50:27.680 Like we're not going to be a Christian civilization. 0.87
00:50:30.540 You know, it's going to be pluralism.
00:50:32.420 It's going to be tolerance.
00:50:33.520 It'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.
00:50:38.000 And 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.
00:50:57.340 It turns out you need a religion of some kind.
00:50:59.200 However, when they start to discuss our Christian values, they seem to not believe you actually need to be Christian to have them.
00:51:07.260 And 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. 0.99
00:51:21.060 And 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? 0.99
00:51:29.660 And so what do you think will happen with that?
00:51:34.100 Do you ultimately see kind of a lot of these secular government forces that are trying to kind of give lip service to Christian values?
00:51:45.000 Are they going to tie that together?
00:51:46.260 Are 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?
00:51:54.220 You have to prefer it.
00:51:55.060 This 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.
00:52:05.380 What do you think about that?
00:52:06.640 So 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.
00:52:18.340 John 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.
00:52:25.860 But 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.
00:52:36.040 So Elon Musk is one, political conservatives like Tucker Carlson.
00:52:40.080 I just saw Tim Allen is reading the Bible.
00:52:41.900 I 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.
00:52:52.500 And 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.
00:53:05.520 There's been a few others who have either converted to Catholicism or Protestantism of various types.
00:53:10.760 And 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. 0.74
00:53:27.920 And 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.
00:53:43.640 Like Bill Maher and stuff has even said things like there's your Dawkins himself was like, yeah, he said he's a cultural Christian.
00:53:48.700 Yeah. Yeah.
00:53:49.360 Yeah.
00:53:49.520 Guys like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.
00:53:51.740 Right on Hersey Ali.
00:53:53.440 What 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. 0.65
00:54:07.420 Right. They're like, well, Christians are a little more lenient on this.
00:54:09.360 But the problem is they're looking for a basis for their liberal values.
00:54:13.780 And I think that liberalism is still their primary religious default.
00:54:19.300 But you realize you can't actually ground liberalism.
00:54:22.060 So you look for a religion to do it with because secularism won't do it.
00:54:26.660 So Christianity becomes the only game in town. 0.96
00:54:29.500 But I think as the pressure mounts, they're going to realize that can't happen.
00:54:32.960 They're going to actually have to choose.
00:54:34.620 So 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.
00:54:45.120 And 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.
00:54:52.040 Think of like the West Huff situation.
00:54:53.480 Even these weren't from the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:54:57.200 These 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.
00:55:10.720 But the, you know, he cares, Jesus cares, ads, whatever they call those.
00:55:15.900 You know, it's not those things that are actually making the difference.
00:55:19.540 It's people realizing that the high school down the street is trans and kids and that can't be good.
00:55:26.700 And that's making the difference.
00:55:28.040 And so God takes credit for this.
00:55:29.900 I think God is doing something where none of the institutions can take credit for any kind of Christianization, which is kind of cool.
00:55:37.820 It's it only goes back to God and his glory in that scenario.
00:55:42.540 Absolutely.
00:55:43.080 All right.
00:55:43.360 Well, we're going to head over to the questions of the people.
00:55:45.560 But before we do, John, you got a new book coming out.
00:55:47.760 Is there anything else people need to know?
00:55:50.060 No, I think I said so.
00:55:51.460 The website, you go to Amazon or you get an autographed copy at JohnHarrisPodcast.com.
00:55:55.680 That should be up.
00:55:56.540 I'll make sure it's up within the hour.
00:55:58.700 Well, glad I could be the first stop on the book tour.
00:56:01.580 I didn't even know.
00:56:02.300 I just saw that it's printed now.
00:56:05.580 So there you go.
00:56:06.680 All right.
00:56:07.160 Well, let's get the questions here real quick, everybody.
00:56:11.300 Enrico Palazzo says, I represent Al Mohler.
00:56:16.300 We must ask you now to stop the stream or face potential legal consequences.
00:56:20.900 Thank you for your understanding.
00:56:23.540 Actually, Mr. Mohler follows me on Twitter.
00:56:25.340 So if he wanted to let me know, you could just shoot me the DM there.
00:56:28.400 But has he taken any stance on this?
00:56:32.120 Is there does he have a track record on any of these issues that is significant?
00:56:36.360 Well, what I'm about to say is not the viewpoint of Aaron McIntyre.
00:56:39.640 So I hope Al Mohler follows you and you guys become friends.
00:56:42.380 But my opinion is Al Mohler is a political animal who will go with the wind and whatever's opportunistic.
00:56:48.240 So 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.
00:56:58.920 And so with the immigration thing, I am not 100 percent sure.
00:57:03.060 But 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.
00:57:10.280 But I don't know if his record on specifically immigration.
00:57:13.780 Yeah, he had a debate with Doug Wilson at NatCon on the issue of Christian nationalism.
00:57:21.600 And it really is less of a debate and more him agreeing with Doug on a good chunk of the whole thing.
00:57:27.880 He used the word ontology a lot.
00:57:31.640 But ultimately, it seemed to be at least signaling in the direction of we do need a Christian culture.
00:57:39.380 We do need Christian institutions.
00:57:41.700 So I hope ultimately that is shifting.
00:57:44.660 Like you said, maybe he's taken different positions over the years.
00:57:47.820 I once again will speak to my ignorance when it comes to church politics and the record on a lot of these guys.
00:57:53.300 But 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.
00:58:06.120 Yeah.
00:58:06.940 Truddle says something, something, something, sojourner, stranger, et cetera.
00:58:11.700 We have to figure out.
00:58:13.080 We have to figure this out in the church.
00:58:15.840 It's past due.
00:58:17.380 Many such issues, I guess.
00:58:19.380 Yeah, 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.
00:58:30.340 I just hear this from so many people.
00:58:33.380 And 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.
00:58:42.620 I 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.
00:58:54.620 They 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.
00:59:05.160 And I think there just has to be a serious effort by Christian teachers to kind of reintroduce the concept of nationhood.
00:59:15.860 Again, it shouldn't be a central doctrine.
00:59:18.200 You know, it's not the most important thing in the world, you know, when it comes to sharing Christ.
00:59:21.880 But 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.
00:59:46.480 It just has very little bearing on what the Bible actually says about the truth of nationhood.
00:59:51.880 Yeah, amen.
00:59:52.620 I actually have a chapter, what is a nation, in the book, and it's just Bible verse after Bible verse.
00:59:56.520 So people can use that if they find it useful.
01:00:00.020 Yep.
01:00:00.340 And I hope, again, I hope many more do, because I think that's really important in the future here.
01:00:05.180 All right, guys.
01:00:05.840 Well, you should certainly be checking out John's work, his new book, his podcast, everything else.
01:00:11.800 If it's your first time on this channel, you need to subscribe, click the bell, notifications, all that stuff.
01:00:17.180 If you would like to catch these streams when they go live.
01:00:19.360 If you want to get the broadcast as podcast, then you need to go to your favorite podcast platform and subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show.
01:00:26.800 And if you'd like to get my book, The Total State, of course, it's still out there on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, all of that.
01:00:33.300 If you'd like to support the show, there is merch over at The Blaze.
01:00:36.720 You just go to shopblazemedia.com and click on The Oren McIntyre Show, and you can pick up something there.
01:00:42.880 Thank you, everybody, for watching.
01:00:44.060 And as always, I will talk to you next time.