[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome into the Think Deeper podcast, presented by Focus Press. I'm your co host, Joe Wilkie, joined, as always by Jack Wilkie and Will Harib. And we have a big announcement coming next week. We're just going to come right off the top and say we got a big announcement coming next week. We are going to sync up the podcast with the announcement that's coming. And so, uh, we were going to do it this week. We pushed it off one week just to make sure everything is in place and ready. And so for this week, we have a fantastic episode. And this one's actually been kind of in the, on the back burner here for a while. Jack's been pretty hot fire to get this going, and Will and I needed to do a little more research on it and, and come up to speed on what exactly. Um, it was, because we did record a similar thing, I want to say. What, 2022 was it, first year, I think, where we did critical race theory. But in this episode, we are looking at critical theory as a whole. We're going to go back to the beginning. Jack's going to give us a history. He said it's boring. He's going to go through it fast. I find it fascinating, as you read through and research more of the history of how we got here, but it really defines the collapse of America, the societal collapse that we see. And this all goes along with critical theory, and we're seeing everything laid out in that. And so, fellas, before we just jump right in, and before I turn it over to you, Jack, introductory thoughts, anything you want to say before I let.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: You take it away, I just want to say I've had this every time we have a planning meeting, episodes, like, let's do it on critical theory. Like, no, you guys are like, that's boring. I hope that in the research, you guys kind of, it kind of clicked, like, oh, this, this is a big deal. And I hope for the listener, because what we want to finish on and what the title of the episode is is how this has snaked its way into the church and how you can tell a church is captured by the philosophies of the world, and it's really bad. And there are key phrases, key words, things like that that you can listen for and you can just tell how they are pandering to this worldly philosophy rather than the Bible.
[00:02:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I would just say there's subtleties to critical theory that might go unnoticed by a lot of people, but, man, it's its roots and its tentacles, you might say. Very much have leaked into the church. I don't want to spoil that.
If y'all want to, I mean, let's just go ahead and dive in. Jack, you got on here. Second Corinthians ten. Is that where we want to start?
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah, because it is a philosophical battle. I'm just going to read these verses. Two Corinthians ten, three. For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. And we are ready to punish all disobedience whenever your obedience is complete. So when you read that, obviously Paul's, he says it's not, you know, fleshly warfare. We're not taking swords, guns or whatever else like tearing things down. We have to tear it down philosophically.
It's ideas. Exactly. And you look at Ephesians six and people say our war is not against flesh and blood. And so when we start calling out names and schools and things like that, well, it's not again. But flesh and blood is embodying the ideas that we are warring against.
And this is one of them. In fact, why I've been so hot fire to do this episode. I think it's the central idea. I think this is like the Rosetta stone for understanding the wickedness of our society is understanding how this wormed its way in. And you go back to the Garden of Eden. I mean, you take that about the we're warring against philosophies, you go back to the Garden of Eden and how Satan works. It's through inverting good things and by tearing down order. He wanted to strike down God's authority. He told Eve, you know, basically you're going to usurp God's authority. You're going to usurp man's authority. He went to the wife instead of the husband. This is how he works is kind of turning things upside down. And hey, aren't you being oppressed, Eve? You know, you're being told you can't have that look what happens. And so that leads into this critical theory, philosophy again. We're about to lay out what it is. But yeah, it's a philosophical battle and we have to understand that. Was there anything you guys wanted to add before I get into history?
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting. It starts with questioning and all it is we're just questioning. We're merely questioning. That's all we're doing, right, is we're just asking questions about things. We're kind of challenging the order as it is.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: That's all Satan was doing.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Correct. And that's exactly it. As you go back to the garden and it's like, did God really say that? Really? You know, is that what it is, like mere questioning? And look, we're all for questioning things. We question why we do certain things, but there's an answer to each. There's a biblical answer to each. This is, you open your mind and leave it so open that everything falls into it. So that's the problem here, is it starts with this evil intent question, because Satan wasn't just questioning, like, was it? And Eve goes, you're right. You know, God's. Maybe it isn't this case, but she kind of clamps down on theology. And this is what God. Eve didn't do that. The question was intended to open her mind to broader things, which was sin. And I think that's what we're seeing here.
[00:04:51] Speaker C: That's what I was going to say, is it's not just questioning for the sake of, let's find the answer. In many cases, it's questioning with malicious intent. It's questioning knowing. Okay, I want. I want us to get to the answer that I'm looking for, which, for critical theory is that, you know, the hierarchy, those things are bad, that authority is oppressive, that there's victims everywhere, and all these things, like, that's the answer that they already have. And by, quote, unquote, merely asking questions, it's with malicious intent, just like you are bringing up with the serpent in the garden. If Eve had said, you know, when he said, did God really say, and if Eve had, like, stood her ground, do you think the serpent would go, oh, okay, well, that's the answer to the question then. Cool. No, like, he would have found a different way. Or, like, it's merely questioning, but there's a malicious intent behind it to get to the destination that they want to get to 100%.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: And that gets us really to the history is.
So it started as part of the Frankfurt school in Germany, early 19 hundreds. A guy named Max Horkheimer.
Other names that were involved, one Herbert Marcuse or Marcuse, depending on how I've heard of both ways, to quote Sean Spencer, that these guys had these ideas, and it's kind of just asking questions. But you might remember a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago, we talked about Chesterton's fence or Chesterton's gate, which is the idea of if you're going to tear down an institution, something that's been there a while, you need to know why it was there. Their whole thing is we've got to tear down because society is oppressive, society is bad, society is all these things. And essentially, it's these guardrails that were protecting us from really bad things. Because if you also know what was happening in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, we talked about on one of our pride month episodes, you had the institutes of sexology and all these, like, really ugly things that were coming out of there, the early transgenderism movement. And now you've got this philosophical movement of, hey, all of these institutions are in the way of progress, and so we're going to have to get rid of these. And, you know, obviously things started happening in Germany in the 1930s and forties. So Frankfurt got moved westward, and a lot of these guys ended up in America. Marcuse came to America and started spreading these things. He got in with government agencies. These things got into the schools, and now it just dominates our society. Like, he was at the university level.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Trey, interestingly, he goes from Germany all the way over to Columbia. So, you know, Columbia University in New York and then goes all the way to Los Angeles. And where do you see two of the biggest hubs for these things taking place? LA and New York. And so they're spreading it from there. Then they went back to Germany and created it. But the Frankfurt school is more. And, Jack, you may be getting into this, but more of a philosophy. Like, yes, it kind of started at a school in Frankfurt, but it's more of a philosophy where they took a lot of the big thinkers of the day, and they were kind of part of this Frankfurt school of thought. And that's how you got all of these guys in various locations, various universities that started spreading this out. And so when you hear kind of the conspiracy theorists talk about how the universities are ruining America, this is how it happens. You start at the university level. You have multiple around the world. They come to New York, they go to LA, they spread to Chicago, they spread to these different places. And all of these theories start snaking their way into the university. So you have these young, impressionable kids coming up, 18, 1920 years old, and this is what they're walking into. And a lot of us, they've never heard before. And you're at a peak rebellion time in life where you're away from your parents for the first time. And what is it that hooks these kids in this school of thought, the rebellion against social order, the rebellion against hierarchy, it makes perfect sense as to how you would get young kids as they get ready to go into adulthood, to start questioning their parents, question authority, all of these things. And this is the work of, again, guys like WErTHEiMer and such, that they understood how human psychology works. And a lot of this is based in psychoanalysis, freudian psychoanalysis. And so they're using a lot of psychology to kind of snake their way into the minds of young men and women and man. It's sinister. It's sinister. But once you start seeing it, you start realizing it's university and then they kind of bring their way down. Sorry to cut you off, Jack. Yeah.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: Let me add a couple other things that are kind of more specific to what they taught. One of them was a problem posing form of education, which is rather than, hey, we're going to teach you this is right. And the school, the teacher, the parent that has the church has authority, it's, we're going to come in and, well, and this is borrowed from Hegel. You know, we get into, deep into the philosophers. But the hegelian dialectic of, well, I bring a truth, you bring a truth. You know, synthesis or thesis? Antithesis, synthesis. You've got something. I've got something. Let's, let's work and put it together rather than one guy is right. And so if you've seen that meme of like, you know, two people are looking at a number on the ground, well, is it a six is a nine? Well, I think it's a six. I think it's a nine. And they've got to work it. It's either a six or a nine. I mean, somebody wrote it as a six or a nine. Context will tell you whatever else. But this problem posing education model is getting kids to do that. Well, again, it's did God really say, well, how do we know this is good and that's bad? How do we know that the nuclear family's good or, you know, versus other things? How do we know that heterosexuality is good and not like, you see, this is how kids are taught today. They're taught to think. And, well, they do this with religion. And I wrote in my book failure, they bring in. And they weren't trying to make kids Muslims. They weren't trying to make kids Hindus or Buddhists. They were showing, well, your Christianity is not special because, look, here's how people in the Middle east worship. Here's how people in the Far east worship. Here's how people in Israel worship. And your Christianity is just one of those. And so let's make something work together. And so you end up with kids go, well, you know, I'm spiritual but not religious.
[00:10:21] Speaker C: What's interesting about that is they're looking for that form of quote, unquote, unquote compromise. But the problem is, anytime you get somebody to compromise on truth, they're on the other side. Like that is they have achieved their goal. If you get somebody to say or to agree that Christianity is pretty much just like all other religions, guess what? They have achieved what they wanted to achieve. Just like, again, somebody, you're disagreeing about two things. One's right, one is wrong. If you can get them to meet in the middle, who ends up the most wrong? It's the guy who was originally right because he had to come off of his correct, truthful position to say, well, you know, let's compromise. Let's meet in the middle. And so the person who was wrong got. They won. They got what they wanted. And so that's the, in my view, kind of false viewpoint of this compromise thing or this problem posing education model, is that when you've got truth, when you, or when you've got right, when you got wrong, and they meet in the middle of the wrong wins and the right loses because it's the correct, it's the truth, that or the correct thing, the truthful thing that is compromised and so, therefore, is lost out. But that's what it's kind of, again, it's a subtle thing, because it's under the guise of this compromise or this let's meet in the middle thing that appears so noble.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Well, yeah, there's only one way to be right. There's only one way to be true, and everything else is wrong. And I wanted to read something from Mark Hughes in this essay called repressive tolerance that he wrote, which there's a buzzword right there that should ding in your mind. He said, in the interplay of theory and practice, true and false solutions become distinguishable, never with the evidence of necessity, never as the positive, only with a certainty of a reasoned and reasonable chance, and with the persuasive force of the negative. A lot of fancy words there to say, I can't tell you what's true, but we're going to move away from one thing in hopes that we can find the other thing, he says, for the true positive is the society of the future, and therefore, beyond definition, error, determination. And while the existing positive is that which must be surmounted, so essentially what we have is bad. We know that. The only thing we know is that what we have is bad, and we're just going to keep moving forward. What do you call that? Progressivism? This is progressivism weaponized, turned into a philosophy, brought into religion and education and politics and everything.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: And this is where the hierarchy comes in and why I think intersectionality and privilege and things like that, if you hold the truth and will, it's your point. If I don't back off of truth, off of Christianity, and I say Christianity is true, therefore everything outside of it is not, you can align with it, in which case you're in truth and if not, you're out of truth. What does that create? It creates a hierarchy where you're saying you're right or I'm saying I'm right and you're wrong, therefore I'm on top of you, quote unquote, in that way, you know, theoretically or philosophically. So the, what they would call that is privilege or what they would call that. Is this why intersectionality, they're trying to like usurp or upset the social order of that, and that's why they have to bring you off a truth if we're all in this muddy pool together, which is how they get this intersectionality of like the most broken among us are the ones that ought to be standing above. And so power structure matters a great deal to those in critical theory.
Truth poses power structure because it assumes that there is something that's better than something else. And though they're decry that and they say that's kind of not the case, that's essentially what they're pushing for in intersectionality is they want to take the lowest and bring them up. And to me, it's kind of like the guys that, that started this, I'm sorry, they're losers. They're losers that want to take the, we're sick of being losers and we want to be at the top of the food chain. Therefore, we're going to take those that didn't work for it, that it doesn't belong to they, they don't appreciate it, nothing like that. And they're going to bring it up to the very, they're going to bring them up to the heights and give them everything while everybody else that did work really hard is kind of demoted. It's a complete power structure thing, but they will use it under really slick terms. You have privilege right in. This is just power to impress. I want to read this. Yeah, I just googled critical theory. I wanted to read this because this is from their own words. This is kind of how they. How they look at it. I thought this is very interesting because we look at it from a very negative. This is how sneaky it is. The definition of critical theory according to helpful professor this first thing on Google. Critical theory is a philosophical and sociological approach to understanding power and inequality in society. It emphasizes the importance of questioning dominant culture narratives and cultural narratives and promoting the voices of marginalized groups. Critical theory sees power as unevenly distributed and used to maintain and reproduce social inequalities and seeks to challenge and transform power structures in the pursuit of social justice and equality. Well, who doesn't want social justice? Who doesn't want equality?
[00:14:58] Speaker C: Doesn't that sound a whole lot more noble? Yeah, correct.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: It's like all the uneven power structures. And so they start to start sneaking these things in where it's like, I don't want to be. I don't want a world of inequality. I don't want to be mean to other people. I don't want to be racist. I don't want to be all these things. And so they weaponize these terms to really bring you low. They weaponize xenophobia and racism and homophobia and all of that. That's critical theory as they come in and weaponize these terms to get you to realize this is unequal. You have privilege, you have all the power, and you need to give it to somebody who doesn't have any power.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: And that's. That's exactly. It is. And I like what you said about their losers tearing it down, but if you're just a loser coming in, like, I got to tear this whole thing down. Nobody's going for that. If you go, if you. And that's the thing about this. And I'm not going to jump ahead and get into the church part of it, but where they couch it in christian terms, where good, loving people are like, well, I don't. That's bad. I don't. I don't want people to be oppressed. I don't want people to be, you know, have their rights taken away and such and so forth. And, and then the stuff about power dynamics. Power is bad and stuff like that. Well, so, so much of what you see. But again, I'm jumping out of the head of the outline. Let's talk about it in society before we get into it in the church. And it's just, again, tearing down oppressive authority structures and questioning what we've had to bring in something new. And that starts in the home it's undermining the husband and father. A lot of times. You'll see people call this cultural Marxism, and there's people who deny that. And I'm not going to get into that debate right now, but you can see the marxist roots or the marxist connections in that.
That was Marx's whole thing, is we've got the capitalist oppressors, we've got to tear down the oppressors. And he was very much of tearing down the home and liberating the women and the wives and all that. And it's not a coincidence that Marcuse gets over here, fifties, sixties, you start getting the free love thing, the drugs thing, the Woodstock culture and all that. But you get feminism, you get Gloria Steinem. We've done episodes on this kind of stuff that it all showed up 10, 15, 20 years after he got here, and one of them is undermining the husband and the father. In fact, we've said before, we're the number one pro patriarchy podcast in the churches of Christ. There are people who are very uncomfortable with that word. We are allergic to the term patriarchy, even though it's explicitly taught in the Bible. Why are you allergic to it? Why does that make you nervous? Why does it. Boy, I don't want to say I'm pro patriarchy because critical theory has captured our society to make you think it's a bad thing when the dad runs the home.
And that is inherently oppressive, I should add. Sorry.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Go ahead.
[00:17:21] Speaker C: Yeah, you're good. It's so interesting. You've got on here under this section of husband and father, the umbrella versus the triangle model of family leadership. And obviously, the umbrella model, as far as the images go, kind of has a negative connotation because of the originator, really, I guess, who popularized that? That whole concept of, you get the father and then you get the. Or you got Christ, and then you got man, and you've got the wife and you've got the children, literally taken straight out of the Bible, straight out of ephesians six, straight out of, you know, the New Testament. But again, that. That's a little bit controversial. And so what have we turned the family leadership image, so to speak, into? A lot of people have heard the. The triangle analogy of, well, you got God at the top, you've got, you know, the husband and the wife down there at the bottom or the bottom corners. And, you know, the closer they get to God and the closer they get to each other, you know, there's. I mean, that's. That's taught at church of Christ marriage seminars. And, like, that's pretty popular these days. What's the problem with that? From a visual standpoint? The husband and the wife are what? They're at the same level. There. There is no, really, authority other than God at the top. And, you know, husband and wife, they're on the exact same level. And, you know, there's elements to it that are. That are true and that are good. I like the idea of, like, if you want to get closer together, get closer to God, I like that idea. But again, just the visual aspect of it is we don't really like the. The umbrella model. We don't like seeing the wife being under the husband. You know, we don't like that, that kind of concept. And so let's create something new to maybe not offend, to not upset the women, to not really have this whole idea of hierarchy. And I think those two visuals are very illustrative to this point. You're making, Jack, in the sense of, if you can undermine the husband, if you can undermine the father, and more importantly, if you can undermine their authority, if you can undermine their roles, that's exactly what critical theory is aiming for.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Jack, you sent us something that I thought was very interesting. I think this out of Pat Buchanan's book. They flatly asserted that individuals raised in families dominated by the father who are flag waving patriots and follow the old time religion, are incipient fascists and potential nazis. As a conservative christian culture breeds fascism, those deeply immersed in such a culture must be closely watched for fascist tendencies. This is, well, as you're talking about, like, this is God's structure. And yet they see that as fascism. They see that as a power dynamic, as you wielding all the power. And what's interesting is we even understand this. Jack's probably sick of me talking about this because I've talked about him. I talked to him about it a few times. But even in the therapy world, structural family therapy from Salvador Mnuchin and Mary Bowen with his family systems model, even in that world, we understand hierarchy happens in pretty much every single relationship known to man. It happens among guys. You can see the hierarchy structure among men and kind of the wolf pack thing. Even in women, excuse me, maybe it's the most beautiful or wherever they. They kind of set their hierarchy. And in the home, there will always be a hierarchy. So this idea of, hey, we're all kind of in it together, and you see this like, we're. We're the same and we have the same, hey, there's neither male nor female of course, it talks about at the end of galatians three. And so therefore, how can you say that the father is to rule the home or the man is to rule the home? Because aren't we all one in Christ? That's the, this is, and I don't want to jump ahead. Like Jack said, I want to jump ahead on that. But that really is how it starts making its way into the church, is we start questioning things like, the father's the head of the home, and we start calling it fascism. We start calling it this destructive patriarchy, toxic masculinity. And there's a lot of people that got chauvinism, and a lot of people go, yeah, yeah, see, because my dad treated me mean one time or because my husband yelled it at me, therefore, he's a toxic masculine masculinity and patriarchy. And we have to tear that down.
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Well, and the accusations on this and all of these kind of fit in the same way. It's if the leadership, if the, the dominant one, if we can kind of cross examine you and find anything you've ever done wrong, that's it. You're unfit, you're out. But we don't do that to the thing that's brought in. And so it's always a left where. That's why it's progressivism. We don't ever question, hey, is progressivism taking us in a good direction? It was that Marcuse quote. That's why I read it, is like, well, we don't know where we're going. We just know we're going away from that thing. Because dad was mean one time, therefore he's unqualified to lead. Let's go find something else. But you see, nobody's against hierarchy. They're against the hierarchy. They don't like. Satan's not against hierarchy. He wants God's position. Right? And so that's a very inherently hierarchical, hierarchical. The way he wants to tear it down is by telling you hierarchy is bad so then he can rule. You see? Exactly what happened with such a good point. The revolution in Russia and everywhere that that's happened, you know, Marx and Lenin and Trotsky, like, everybody that was. I mean, Marx created it. Lenin, Trotsky, and then later, Stalin. Everything that happened in Russia was, brothers, comrades, we're going to be in this together. Oh, by the way, I'm in charge. I'm killing your family, raping your wife. Like all the bad stuff that came out of that, Stalin ended up on top like this. What happened to the brotherhood? What happened to comrades, you know, where.
[00:22:17] Speaker C: Else we see this? And again, we already did the episode on it, but is. Is in the critical race theory discussion. It's not about being on an equal playing field. It's not about, well, let's, let's, you know, put everybody on the same plane. No, we got to pay reparations. We got to, you know, you see the quotes about that. You know, those who are, you know, african american, they need more.
You know, I think. I think the, one of the presidential candidates recently came out and basically was like, you know, when there's a disaster, and I'm paraphrasing here, but, like, when, when something goes, when something is going on, those of the black community need to be served first. And they're more. They're in need more. But you see that kind of thing all the time in the, in the critical race theory discussions and especially in the society we live in, where it's like, okay, if you're a. If you're a white man, guess what you got. You have to go to the bottom of the list.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: You are.
[00:23:03] Speaker C: You are going the bottom of the list. Everybody else is going to the top. Women, again, those who are african american, homosexuals, like those guys, those people are at the top. And so it's not an equal playing field. It's hierarchy. Once again, it's just completely reversed. But it's, once again, under the guise of we want equality. It's not equality. At least that's not what they're aiming for.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Right. So let's get a few more of these. Go ahead.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: And I was just gonna say your point is so good about never understanding the other side. Like, is this going to help? Because you look at. Look, we're. We're downplaying. There have been some terrible fathers along the way. We're not saying there hasn't been. There have been some guys.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: We're going to get to the church thing because it's like, you do have to acknowledge things that have done wrong without throwing the baby out with the bath water. And speaking of babies, parenting comes into this as well, right, of tearing down. So, yeah, there have been bad parents. And that's so much of today's world is like hating your mother and mother and father and my stupid parents, and I've got to detach from them and boundaries and all this stuff. And again, there's legitimate practices for these, but you got to be careful with those.
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[00:24:50] Speaker A: Well, and all I was going to get at is, okay, great. You remove the father from the home. You remove parents from the home. Look at the. Go into the prison system. How many of those guys have dads? Yeah, that's the problem. Is, okay, we removed the problem. Dad's the problem.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Okay. There have been some guys that have. Have done some bad things. So we throw the baby out with the bath water, and then we're left with fatherlessness, which is an absolute disaster on society. And it is rad. Like, it's a completely decimating the black population of fatherlessness. And you can see the statistics on this. That's not going well. But that's the problem. We want to get away from parents. We want to get away from hierarchy because they're stupid and part of what the parents is.
And Jack, I think you have this on here with ancestors. I want to jump ahead on that. But it is kind of the idea of where do we come from? And parents, and all the way back up is the system of we come from somewhere, and my bloodline matters. The family name, the Wilkie name mattered. Not anymore. It doesn't matter because you're part of a giant. Correct. You're part of the giant collective. And they can then control you through.
[00:25:48] Speaker C: The collective, which is what's so interesting about it, is on the surface, it seems like it's individualism gone wild. Not worried about your ancestors, not worried about the future generations, not, you know, you know, unshackling or whatever it is from your parents. And yet the goal of critical theory, as you said, is to make individuals a part of a big collective that pretty much does whatever. Moving on to the next one, unless you had anything else for parenting.
Another, another aim in society for those who subscribe to critical theories.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: I want to say on the parenting thing, we had an episode on gentle parenting. And I think it captures the ideology very well in that, like, hey, it's not my job to teach this two year old. It's my job to figure out what they want to do, respect him, work around that. Oh, he wants to slap me in the face. Okay, well, I've got to figure out how to maybe not let him do that, but also kind of basically, they know what they want, because, again, the bottom of the chain on up the. The kid knows and let the kid run the show. Well, again, you see this in society. You see this in the church. You see these things come out of. I can't be the oppressive parent. If I disciplined him, if I took something away, I'd be the oppressive dad, and I don't want to do that. He knows what he wants, and. And I don't have truth to impose in this situation. And again, gentle parenting is a result of critical theory, that it starts as kids and plays out into adulthood in all these ways we're talking about. But, yeah, go on to the next one.
[00:27:09] Speaker C: Well, real quick, isn't that so amazing that for thousands of years, we have had parents that discipline their children and give them structure, give them guidelines, and then all of a sudden, last few decades, we've got this gentle parenting thing come up just coincidentally after critical theory is really kind of taking hold of society. I'm sure it's completely coincidental, though, but the next thing we have would be undermining sexual norms, undermining husband and father, undermining parents, and then undermining, um, sexual norms. And goodness knows we see that in our society right now. But painting heterosexual people is kind of the weird ones like that. Those are the. Those are the strange ones. You have tv shows. You have, you know, popular. Popular culture, movies, Netflix, all these things where, you know, they are putting very prominent figures. They are putting them in a homosexual. They're putting homosexuals in very prominent roles in movies and tv shows. Obviously, you have transgenderism. That is all throughout our society right now. But just the whole idea of the nuclear family, heterosexual people, husband, wife, children, heterosexuality, none of that. None of that works with critical theory. Those are, once again, they are at the bottom of the list for critical theory, and their goal is to elevate all the deviant sexual behavior that's out there. You got on here. And, Joe, I'll let you take over here in just a second. You've got on here maps, minor attracted persons. We've had episodes before about how.
Where our country has gone from, homosexuality, about 1015 years ago. Now we're with now transgenderism. And where it's headed to is acceptance of pedophilia. That is the inevitable destination, and that is where we're going to get to. And you've already got people that are kind of coming out advocating for that. It's just another level of undermining the sexual norms that, once again, Christianity with heterosexuality has put. Has put forth for thousands of years.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: What's war with words, right? They are always trying to win the word battle. And this is why accepting stupid words like cisgender, that is a. Now it's a pejorative against heterosexuality. Oh, you're cis. You're cisgender. And they would say, it's not a peer. It is. You don't need to label me. No, I'm normal. That's. That's what it is.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: Norm MacDonald called it a way to marginalize normal people.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. And the minor attracted person, if you don't believe us or if you. You think will, is crazy, seriously, go google minor attractive person. Um, you will find that they're absolutely pushing for pedophilia.
[00:29:44] Speaker C: They're trying to make it sexual orientation.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: But they can't come up with, like, hey, we're pedophiles. They can't say that they. Which. Pedo is just a child, and Philia is love, right? The lover of children. And so they decide, minor attractive person sounds better. Well, they're pushing it through war with words. They're trying to win their way. But, yeah, I mean, the sexual norms, I think you're seeing the free love of the sixties, flower power, all of those things that have taken place and playboy and pornography and the rise of all of that through. And then now we're seeing the LGBTQ.
All of those.
All of that is coming from critical theory, where you seek to subvert that which is normal. They try to take anything that you believe in that you think is legitimate, that comes from scripture. They will look at it and they will subvert it. And it's everything. It's capitalism, it is heterosexuality, it is the family and the father being a strong figure. If you look at all this, that's why this episode matters, is critical theory is literally that which is tearing down everything we hold dear. And sexuality is a big one in this culture that we're struggling with it so much. But these roots have been laid down since the thirties, if we really look at it. And probably even before that, some of the critical theory stuff goes back to the 18 hundreds, really, since the thirties this has been taking place. And you see the slow progression of sexual, the sexual slide into deviancy where now we have minor attract persons. That's critical theory, Jeff.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Right. Well, and this one also gives one of those underlying things, just like gentle parenting shows how they feel about the individual and authority and stuff like that. This shows that there's a leftward purity spiral. Again, as Mark, you said, we know that this boundary that we have had is bad, so we're just going to move away from it and find something else out that leads to this leftward purity spiral that keeps happening. That, okay. And we've talked about this before of divorce and cohabitation and all that is what leads to drag queen story hour down the line when you give an inch as they just keep going. They keep going. And how that happens is somebody goes, oh, well, if you're pro gay, I'm pro trans. And you see this JK Rowling, I mean, a very liberal, progressive woman has been thrown under the bus because she didn't keep swimming leftward with them. She said, no, I'm going to park right here. They're just going to keep going. And the person who was the progressive yesterday is now the regressive stuck in the past because they keep going and going and going. And we're, again, a few years away from you, bigot. You don't accept minor, attractive people. I mean, you're seeing it right now with drag queens and stuff like that. And, you know, and so the leftward purity spiral that deals with the homosexuality thing, but it deals with everything that they touch is I'm going to one up you by, I'm more pure than you by accepting even more and by undermining oppressive structures even more. And there's no, there's no breaks. And so that's an important thing. We'll get to that. How it applies to the church here in a minute. One more brief one on this front end. We've talked about critical race theory before. I think that's the one people are familiar with. So I'm going to pass over that.
Undermining ancestors. Interestingly, a Columbus day is just a few days away, or indigenous people's day, as some people call it. That's why they call it that. That's what's going on here. Even thanksgiving, some people, I'm not going to celebrate thanksgiving because, you know, things like that happen. And the 1619 project that America is a slave state, that's what it's always been. 400 years of slavery and oppression and all this stuff.
Again, we're going to save the conversation for the end of how do you deal with bad things that have happened in the past that's important, and acknowledge those things and acknowledge that people weren't perfect and did bad things or whatever else. On the other hand, Columbus made the world a better place. Thanksgiving was something worth celebrating and things like that. Our ancestors weren't inherently evil. But ask, why do they want us to disown all of our ancestors?
[00:33:19] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, that's.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: What do they get from it?
[00:33:23] Speaker C: They get the hierarchy. They get the. All the things that we have held dear for so long. If they can undermine that, get that, get us to look at that as bad, get us to look at that as immoral, then they pretty much uprooted what our country was founded on, which, coincidentally, christian principles. What I was going to say, Jack, is this is a quote that you sent us, and so I'm not trying to steal your thunder here, but when I was reading through it, to me, it was very illustrative of what critical theory is. And as we're going through all these, this is just. I wanted to read it so that people are aware of kind of this. This very good summarization says critical theory eventually induces cultural pessimism. I thought this was very interesting. Cultural pessimism, a sense of alienation, of hopelessness, of despair, where even though prosperous and free, a people come to see its society and country as oppressive, evil, and unworthy of its loyalty and love. The new Marxist considered cultural pessimism a necessary precondition of revolutionary change. Hating America, right? Hating. Hating what we stand for. You got, I don't know if you guys saw this Macklemore, a pretty irrelevant music artist right now, but got up on stage and, you know, said, bleep America, and got a bunch of cheers from everybody like that. That is very, very in vogue now to hate on America. Obviously, the Kaepernick thing was about ten years ago now, but you know, that that's kind of been in the works for a decade of just viewing your country, viewing all these things, parents, religion, ancestors. That's why I want to bring it up here as something that is to be looked at negatively. And I love the cultural pessimism phrase that they use in that quote, because to me, it sums it up perfectly. There is a pessimism associated with somebody who hates the way they live, hates their parents, hates, you know, the history of their ancestors. It's like, what do you have to look forward to? What are you excited about.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: This is where you get real conspiracy theory on this one. But demons are at play. Satan is at play. But yes, literal demons, in my opinion. If you notice, globalism is a big deal to them in this whole transcendent eastern religion ideology of like, there's multiple gods, and people take ayahuasca and they take all of these psychotropic medication or psychotropic drugs and LSD and things like that, and what do they hallucinate? We are merely part of everything, right? And so that's what's going on here. That's ultimately the game that's being played. I think Satan is at hand. And those that kind of push a globalist agenda, which is a lot of people in the church. We need to help the guy in Kazakhstan. We need to help the people in China. Like, we could pray for them. We could pray theoretically for them. We don't actually know them. We need to think about the people that are across the street from us. But if you hate. Cause you to hate your neighborhood, the people across the street from you hate your country, everything that your country stands for, all of your. The ancestors and all the good and bad, and just appreciating this is where I come from. These are my roots. You take that away. We're all part of. We're children of the sun. You hear that? Kind of go back to sixties, right? Like, we're children of the sun. That literally is the. And I know that's probably for Native Americans, but still, that's kind of what they talk about is we're all part of a bigger globalist. Like, you know, we're all the same.
We are. We're all humans. We're all children of God in the way that, you know, or we're all creatures of God. He's created us at the same time. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but I really think that's the work of demons, is to make us think that literally we're part of a big collective, and there's a pantheon of gods, and we're one with the world. And this is Buddhism and Taoism and all of the different things that you see. It's eastern philosophy that really starts snaking its way in where what is truth? How can we know truth? And we start questioning everything. And that is what this speaks to me, is roots are what give us ground the roots. They ground us to something. When you remove that, we're all floating in this ethereal kind of space of, oh, it could be anything. You know, you could do anything. You could we're all kind of collectively together. No, we're not. I'm an American. I'm proud to be an American. I have some roots in Scotland. The blood that's running through my veins matters to me. The. The american blood matters to me. But you get a lot of people where it doesn't. And I think this is what gets us into. Unless there's other things, you guys.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Well, I want to. I do. I want to use this as a transition point. That kind of the hating your ancestors and again, global and things like that. That David Platt, one of. He was a big author 1015 years ago, and he's just radical and more into how he became radical. He's one of the foremost critical theorists in a pulpit in America, but he's had a lot of influence. And there was a video going around where he was talking about immigration and just, again, the globalization. There's no. Everybody should all just dump in the same place and, hey, welcome however many millions they want to drop into your country, even if it bankrupts you. Because the gospel, this, that, and the other thing. And he pointed to acts 17, and basically that God brings all people together for the gospel. It literally says the opposite. And it says in acts 1726, and he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God if perhaps they might reach for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
Literally says the opposite. Says God put people all over the world in their own nations and borders and boundaries, things like that.
[00:38:28] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:38:28] Speaker B: Set these boundaries so that as a means to find him. And he turned it around to look as many people as they want to drop in here. We should be thankful for it, because the gospel opportunities like this is how you start reading the Bible backwards through critical theory. Right. You know, you're. You're captured by it, as. As we're saying here. So that gets us into this religious side of it is.
And this is the interesting thing. Some of the things we've said have probably made people uncomfortable, like, yeah, Columbus and slavery and things like that. And again, you can look back and say bad things happen, but when they do this and this idea comes into the church, a lot of these ideologies work their way out. Number one, it starts with undermining God's authority of. Well, again, are we sure God really said or man, there's some verses in the Bible we're pretty uncomfortable with. Some people call them problem verses. And I really like this. I read somebody the other day said one of the keys to strong Christianity is to have no problem verses. There's nothing in the Bible where you look at and you're kind of ashamed of God, where you've got Andy Stanley up there. And again, one of the biggest book selling church, of the preacher of the biggest church in America saying we need to unhitch from the Old Testament because the secular people, they really don't like that God killed a lot of people. They didn't like the flood. They didn't like the conquest of Canaan. So we're with Jesus and not the Old Testament. We need to unhitch ourselves from it. You're apologizing for goddess, you're embarrassed by God because he looks oppressive. He critical theory works its way out in that way.
[00:39:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it's all authority play. So of course they would reject the ultimate of course they'd reject the ultimate authority. They rejected their ancestors, they rejected fathers in the home and husbands and they've rejected every societal structure. So you go all the way to the top of that umbrella. Of course they'd reject God's authority. That's what started at the very beginning with the questioning from Satan is rejecting God's authority. Did God really say that? Is God really in charge? Did he really do that? Right? Would he really follow through on like it's undermining God's authority from the very beginning of time and this is the play that Satan's been running for 6000 years?
[00:40:28] Speaker C: Yeah, I would just add, obviously this is, you know, a branch of this, but undermining the Bible's authority as well. You know, you've got people that are, that, you know, come out and say that biblical authors disagreed with each other. And so maybe we need to have more open conversation about, you know, what were they really saying? Pitting, you know, guys like Paul and, and James against each other or whatever it is.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Like Genesis one through eleven isn't real stuff like that.
[00:40:52] Speaker C: Right, right. You know, maybe there's, there's multiple, you know, flood accounts or whatever. It is crazy things that people say undermining the Bible's authority. Anytime you can, you can put just a little bit of a, you know, raising eyebrows to something the Bible says or, you know, just seep a little bit of lack of credibility into it. You've gotten what you wanted. You undermine the Bible's authority. You undermine God's authority to the point where once again you look at the Old Testament, you look at the wrath of God, you look at God's judgment on sin. You look at things like hell and all those things you can kind of work out of your religion. You can still be religious. You can still love God. You can still go to church. But, man, we're not real. We're going to kind of unhitch or detach from hell or from God's punishment, all these things. That's where you see this in the church.
[00:41:37] Speaker A: Undermining biblical authority means you've undermined truth. It goes back to the very beginning. You've undermined truth itself. If the Bible is truth, and if you start picking that apart and notice how it starts with textual criticism, did Moses really write the pentateuch? Is it really, you know, the synoptic gospels? Is it really Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Or did Mark take from Peter and did take from the j document, whatever it is, right? And so the textual criticism that you start getting in scripture is where it opens the door to all these, hey, I didn't say it's not inspired. I just said, maybe it wasn't Moses that wrote it. And then you get into, like, well, how do we know? You know, if you really think about the cultural context, a real big. And the cultural context, the cultural context of the time, would it really make sense that Moses is really saying something literal if he did write a pentateuch about creation? And so, boom, it just opens up into it. And if you get one thing wrong in the Bible, which Jesus says, Moses wrote the pentateuch. So if you take that as not real, can we take anything Jesus says, it starts crumbling. The very foundation of truth, the fabric of truth that we get everything from. If you can start picking apart God's word and Jack, as you said, with the problem verses, oh, well, let's just kind of shove that to the corner. We don't want to talk about slavery. We don't want to talk about these things that the Bible clearly talks about. We're undermining truth, and this is how they slip in, especially the younger kids who go, that does seem problematic. Wow. The Bible talks about. I never even read that in my teen Devos. I never read about Leviticus. And so I didn't know that it was saying stone homosexuals. And it was saying, you know, all of these things about slavery and how to own slaves appropriately, like, hey, wow, that's. That's wrong. Gotcha. Now you have undermined truth.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the other things, the title of this episode is how to know when your church is captured. So I want to put that point on each of these critical theory in the church undermining God's authority. If your preacher starts talking about how things in the Old Testament, although this is more of a jewish myth or the poetic language is not meant to be read, all that literally pay attention to that job is another one they like undermining. And one of the problems is some of the better, deeper Bible study material out there these days is the stuff that is paving the gateway to this of Bible project Michael Heiser, guys that are very popular and have some really good stuff and say deep stuff you might not find anywhere else will slip in little subversive things like this to undermine some bible authority. If your preacher or Bible class teacher really gets squirrely about Old Testament like you say, stoning people to death or the conquest of Canaan, pay attention. You know, like, oh well, it was probably not a global flood because God wouldn't kill that many. Just keeping keep an ear out for that second social justice language, the socialism kind of talk. The BLM thing was huge a few years ago of just sit down and listen. There's that guy at, well, I'm not going to say names. People know if they know white guy goes around, gets lectureship circuit stuff, gets writing stuff like that prominently featured, telling other white church Christ, yes, telling other white people how racist they are and how racist they've been and how they've got to, I mean, Robin D'Angelo, Ibrahim Kendi, critical race theory garbage of decentering your whiteness and stuff like that. And people just lap it up. They invite him to say, tell us how racist we are, tell us about this stuff. And again, you can clothe it in biblical language of the minor prophets and justice and oppression and the gods against oppression and absolutely. But that doesn't mean you've got to roll in all of this. You don't need critical theory.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: But you see, I mean, Matt Walsh's movie came out right, and the ridiculous lengths people are willing to go to. But this absolutely seeped into the church where you do start seeing the he gets us movement, the commercials on tv of Jesus is just like one of us. He gets us and he understands being oppressed and he understands party and he understands all these things. And so they're trying to create this jesus that knows all about that. It's like, but Jesus also knows the rich white guy too, but we're not going to talk about that like he gets us type of thing. That is a big play on the social justice and everything else. Because you look at the language that's within these commercials, that's all it is, is social justice and trying to get the. But the crazy thing is, you look at it, it's like the population you're speaking to, the LGBTQ and such. They fundamentally reject God. You read Romans one, you realize these commercials are going nowhere. Those people reject God. Oh, wow. I didn't know. Jesus gets me. Yeah, Jesus gets you to the point where he says, go and sin no more. Maybe he didn't cast the stone type.
[00:45:49] Speaker C: That wasn't in the commercial.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: That's weird. That wasn't in a commercial.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: Interestingly, repent word isn't on their website. Oddly enough.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Him coming with the flaming eyes and the sword and everything else on his, uh, on his horse and revelation. I didn't see that one in the commercial. But of course, that one's not going to play as well to the social justice. So, yeah, this one really does sneak its way in. You got to be careful from the pulpit when they do start discussing this. And if there's any semblance of, like, we need to almost bow down to or apologize for our whiteness or anything like that, you're at the wrong church. And they have been captured. Will, any thoughts before we get to the third one?
[00:46:20] Speaker C: No, but I did want to make a comment on the next one. So if you guys have anything else.
[00:46:23] Speaker B: On the social justice, go just briefly on this. We talked about they undermine the inspiration of scripture. This is where they undermine the sufficiency of scripture. Scripture is not good enough. We need critical race theory. We need these things. We need socialism. We need marxist critiques of society because the Bible doesn't talk enough about that stuff. No, the Bible handles these things. Racism is wrong. The Bible gives us how to handle somebody who is treating somebody else poorly because the color of their skin or whatever. We don't need Robin D'Angelo to lecture us on whiteness about that. And so, yeah, I mean, that's.
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[00:47:24] Speaker C: So we've talked about undermining God's authority. We've talked about social justice language. The next area that we've got on our outline here is the idea of scolding christians while glorifying the world. And the area that I really wanted to talk about is, in Jack's first point he has on here of when we have the, when we, when we listen to the why we left the church and the deconstruction content, when people are out there saying, I deconstructed my faith. And, and here's why we, here's why we left the church. It's almost like we put those people up on, on a pedestal in a way of like, well, let's, let's hear what they have to say, because, man, the church sure does have a lot of problems, and the information that they have might be really valuable. And, man, let's, I really want to, really want to hear you out. Let's, let's have dialogue about why you've deconstructed your faith about, about why you left the church. And once again, it's, it's, it's treating them with kid gloves. In a way, it's like protecting their feelings. And, man, I just really want to hear what you have to say. And there's elements of it where I guess that's nice of like, okay, well, you know, let's, let's just talk about it. But the same time, they left the church and they deconstructed their faith because they didn't want to submit to God's authority anymore. That's the bottom line. And anytime you, you're, well, let's. Let's hear what the other, let's listen to how the church oppressed them or, or the, the church trauma that they dealt with. Once again, treating them with kid gloves. It's like, let's call it what it is. They didn't want to submit to God's authority. They didn't want to, to live with moral guidelines, with moral structure, so they left the church. And you say, man, will, you sure are generalizing. You sure are being maybe a little bit stereotypical there. That's why people leave the church. That's why people, you know, are deconstruct. Their faith is because they, once again, they don't want to submit to God's authority. They don't want to live a life where there are things they cannot do if they want to be a Christian. And so it's easier to say, well, I've deconstructed my faith. Or, you know, once again, I just, it is frustrating that we, that we, in a way, in an odd way. Put up on a pedestal. All these people that are willing to talk about why they left the church and why they deconstructed their faith. It's like, let's hear them out. Let's hear how the church has oppressed them. I don't know. It's frustrating to me. What are you guys thoughts on what you would add to that?
[00:49:24] Speaker A: Well, because then the church tries to pander to them. And Jack, I don't know exactly. Yes, I heard it from you, and I don't know if it was native to you, but it's the idea of the country club. And somebody leaves the country club and you run after them like, hey, why did you leave? It's just too expensive. Okay, well, half the cost. Half the cost? How's that? What about a quarter of the cost? And then they leave and they go, well, I just don't like the dress code. Okay, well, forget about dress code. Bring in your flip flops, shorts. That's fine. Well, I left because I don't really like the food. Okay, what can we get you? Can we get your Mac and cheese? Like, what would you like? No country club, self respecting country club, would do that. They'd go, sorry, man. Clearly you don't want it. You don't want to pay the high price, and you don't want to stick to what we have going on here. And yet, when it comes to the church, because we have this in our mind, we have this critical theory in our minds. It's like, how can we serve the underprivileged, quote unquote, those that are struggling from the inequality that faces? And then you have people that want to say, well, christian kind of comes with this. I'm not even comfortable using the term Christian, or I'm not comfortable using these specific terms because that might offend a certain person. Like, maybe they need to be offended. Maybe it's okay to offend certain people with the gospel, to defend certain people standing up for Christ. And I love your point, Will. Like, man, I wonder if maybe one of the reasons they left is because they rejected God. Did we leave room for them rejecting God? Or was it just because it's always our fault and we have to take it because the church is supposed to be for everyone. Like, no, the church is supposed to be for saints. The church is supposed to be for people that truly do desire God. And you look in the Old Testament, God didn't exactly have the warm and fuzzies for the people that rejected him. I remember him swallowing them up with the ground. I remember him sending fiery serpents among them to kill them. I remember that. I don't remember him pandering to all of the Israelites going, please, can you please want me? And what can I do to change it? That is not the God we serve. And yet Christians, because of critical theory, get into this and we look like losers to the rest of the world because we stand for nothing. The Andrew Tates that go after Islam, it's like, at least they stand for something. He's an idiot. Don't follow him. But at least they stand for something. Christians are willing to give up everything. We can't even get to like inch number one before we go, okay, let me give up ground because we don't want to offend somebody.
[00:51:28] Speaker C: Well, what did Paul say about Demas in two Timothy four? Demas has forsaken me because the church really hurt him and because he felt like he was oppressed and, man, he had some trauma. No, he said, demos has forsaken me because he loved this present world. That's what Paul said. You know, again, we can call it whatever we want in today's terms, but loving the world, rejecting God, that pretty much sums up most of the reasons why people leave the church.
[00:51:49] Speaker B: And with all of these, again, the hook they have is churches do bad things. Preachers do bad things. Scandals happen, people are mistreated. Things like that really happen. And so they say, you're denying all that. No, I'm not. And we're saying once again, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because what happens is you never, and this is an important point, I'm coming back around to it. You never measure the goodness of the direction you're going. It's just, okay, I know that other thing was bad. Like, okay, well, some things are bad. And again, the Bible is sufficient to tell us when a church leader is a stumbling block. When, when a church does something bad, that's not an excuse to leave God. It's not an excuse to leave the faith or the church. And so let's take the scripture and apply that. But to tear the whole thing down because of one, you know, something bad that happened, it doesn't work that way. And this whole listening to, again, scolding, there's the two sides of it glorifying the world. Let's just listen to them. It's, again, it's gentle parenting. We don't have, we've got things to learn from them. No, we've got the truth. We have things to learn from the Bible. There's nothing they can teach us that the Bible cannot teach us. If you don't believe that, you don't believe in the sufficiency of scripture. So there's the glorifying the world, then there's the scolding christians, there's the accusing the brethren. It's. People love that Gandhi quote, I love your Jesus, but not your christians. Yeah, we're imperfect people. Don't talk about my family that way. Okay. It's kind of that thing of, I can pick on Joe. Somebody else comes and picks on Joe, we got a problem. Okay? And so we can talk about the church does need to grow. The church does need to do better. But when we're talking to the world, this is our family. We love the church. But people will throw christians under the bus. They're throwing Trump voter christians under the bus. Russell Moore and David French have made their career into doing that now of throwing. Well, you're, you're a republican Christian. You're just damaging the church's witness, Tim Keller, again, slamming people to his right all the time. And it's always moving left. Never, always coddling to the left, never telling the, you know, Keller had abortionists and gay rights people in his pews, and he would never tell them they were wrong. But somebody who was right, oh, man, you're just embarrassing the church. You're not being very winsome. You're not. And so you're accusing the brethren again. The guy that gets up and calls christians racist tells white christians how evil they are. You're an accuser of the brethren. You know who else is? This goes back to, you're doing his work for him. When you bring in critical theory. And so there's that side. There's the apologizing for the truth. The church has been real mean to gays. You know, the. Well, I know a lot of people think the Bible is pretty subversive toward women. And we got it. We got to platform women. We've got to make sure that, like, we need to do what the Bible says, okay? We need to glorify women. And it's a beautiful role God has given them and that they have a value. That is incredible. That doesn't mean we subvert what the scriptures say.
You know, the, I just did a video on this. I hate religion, too. You're a preacher. Nobody buys that, okay? You're like, stop saying that religion is terrible. Stop saying the church has been mean. Stop saying all this stuff. If there's something that you have to apologize for that you did wrong. Apologize for it. Just this generic apologizing. Well, the church has been pretty. No, the church says homosexuality is a sin. I don't see, you know, that's not oppressive.
[00:54:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:54:53] Speaker B: The Westboro Baptists out there picketing funerals and stuff and God hates, you know what, like, none of us are on board with that. None of us have signed off on that. And so we've distanced ourselves from that. Why do we act like we have to apologize for them? And so this apologizing for the truth thing is something that you see and going back to our subverting the husband's leadership.
See, how many guys can preach a sermon on wives, submit to your husbands without making it all about the husband?
[00:55:22] Speaker A: Hmm.
[00:55:23] Speaker B: I.
[00:55:23] Speaker C: Without giving a million qualifiers as to, you know, not to, you know, take advantage.
[00:55:28] Speaker A: And I'm not saying that exactly.
[00:55:29] Speaker B: Right. Which again, this is. They'll come back to. But there is that. Yes, there is. Teach the full council. You're only going one direction.
[00:55:37] Speaker A: Well, and, boy, again, I beat a dead horse on this one quite a bit, but run to and not away. And the entire thing of critical theory is run away. Run away. Run away. We run away from patriarchy. We run away from. From religion. We run away. Okay, what are you running to? They don't know because what they're running to is dead and it's worthless. And it's. So if you ran to proper biblical authority, proper church authority, which is another one on here, the next one on the list, effeminate church leaders. That's a big part of cradle theory is we're not going to offend anybody, but we're also not going to pose a threat to anybody. Whereas I look at guys like Elijah, I look at guys like Paul, very imposing figures. And Paul talks about maybe not so as much in person as he is in his letters, but still imposing figures. Men like, men's mental. And these are the leaders that God chose, is not these effeminate church leaders who were just apologizing for their masculinity and really trying to get away from their masculinity. But that's all part of critical theories. We don't want to create any inequality and we don't want to create any oppressive oppressor, you know, oppressed type of dynamic in the church. Therefore, I will lose everything that makes me an oppressor and I will be a brother who, just a servant leader who comes behind you. And I can't. I'm not actually going to tell you what to do because that would be me. Oppressing you. And so I'm going to be a servant leader who just kind of leads from the back, which is an oxymoron. Nobody leads from the back like you. You put the women and children to the front of the battle line like I'm leading from the back. No, you're not. Right, but that's what a lot of servant leaders do. That's the effeminate church leadership. That's another sign of your church has been captured. The man can't stand up and say, hey, your wife, you need to get your wife in line type of thing because she is not in line or husband. You are not leading your family appropriately. You need to step up in your home. If your church can't do that because they're too afraid, you may have been captured by critical theory.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: Well, and the idea of like, what is the term? I'm drawing a blank on it. Of at will membership. Well, you know, if we can get more out of them, if we can bring them along, and this has been my thing about closed communion. Well, and this critical theory, guys, these are the ones that are putting out podcasts. There's multiple of them. We should give the Lord supper to everybody. The visitor who walks in who doesn't know Jesus, the atheist, the. No, absolutely not like this.
Yeah, everyone's welcome to a degree. You don't get to walk right into the temple of the Lord, the tabernacle of the Lord if you know you're unclean. And it's a new covenant. Yeah, but God is not different. Okay? And so a couple more quick ones before we run out of time here. Soft pedaled individual worshiping evangelism like you're just trying to, man, I'm just. There's something so good for you here. There is. There's that half of evangelism. There's also the half of king of kings and lord of lords. You better bow the knee or else you're going to regret it. You know, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess. Do it now before it's too late, before you have to do it. In a way, you don't want to do it and you're forced to do it. And so there's that literally the opposite.
[00:58:26] Speaker C: Of the he gets us commercial, basically.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. You know, it's just, man, we hope by being real nice you're going to want to come around. No, there's the other side of it. Okay. And then the wimpy social engagement. Christians in power don't mix. Christians, when they've had power, have done a lot of bad. Yeah. They've also done more good than any people, group of, in human history. Have elevated more people out of oppression, elevated more people out of poverty, elevated more people out of sickness when christian slavery. Yeah, out of slavery. Again, we're not judging. Well, boy, we were a racist, slave owning society. We're not anymore. You know why christians, you know, like this is. We're apologizing for things that we've made more progress. And again, compared to what? Compared to how are things going in China, how are things in Soviet Russia, how are things in all of these bad places that things have happened versus a christianized society. It's the way of the cross. And again, it sounds so holy, sounds so pietist or pious. It's really just pietistic and it's critical theory. So how do you know your church has been captured all of the, where they talk about the oppressed, and it's not really the oppressed, it's the socially glorified. And they talk about the meanness when they're embarrassed by scriptures, when they're qualifying everything that might step on some toes, when everything they say is approved by the New York Times and CNN.
Yeah. That you can see your church is captured. So before we get kind of these last hit points, do you have anything else?
[00:59:45] Speaker A: I would add? Just r1 fast. When it all becomes about the kids and the women. We talked about the women's side. When it all becomes about the kids as well.
[00:59:50] Speaker B: Brought that up.
[00:59:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, you know, when, when the vbs and when I know, I go off on voice. The children's worship. Anytime you have a VBS, your church is. No, I'm not saying that. But the, the children's worship, the elevating children every chance we get to let them go up to the front of the stage in the middle of worship and make it all about them. Making all about the women. Can't say anything. You're taking it's intersectionality, and you're taking the weakest and elevating him because the, the guy, the most powerful man in the congregation, quote unquote, the most masculine man in the congregation, we can't give him too much power because, you know, we can't tell the elders. Like, we'll, we'll make jokes on behalf of the elders and kind of, you know, like, preachers from the pulpit will joke about people and make fun of people and make fun of the church leadership. Not ever. Don't ever do that once. And yet you see that in critical theory, churches and so they elevate the children and they make them. That's intersectionality at play. It's just. It's covert. You don't necessarily realize that until it's, like, too late, basically.
[01:00:46] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we told this on a deep end. And we were at a church one time and they said, all right, let's have all the elders stand up, have all the deacons stand up. And I've seen churches do that, like, recognize, here's your leadership. If you need to talk to somebody, go to these guys. And at the end they said, let's have all the women stand up. And every woman in church stood up. Let's clap for the women.
Like, this is exactly it. This is, well, the, you know, the women, we need to make sure that. That we're. We're putting them up on a pedestal. We need to be thankful for our women. What you just told all the men is you're less important than to us than they are. Like, it was bizarre. But this is the kind of stuff you see. So a few things. What critical christian critical theorists don't understand. First of all, critical theory is an attack explicitly on christian culture. When they talk about tearing down the oppressive, they're talking about the bulwarks that were keeping society from turning into this degenerate pro drug, pro gambling, pro everything sexual, pro everything that it's become. It was designed to get those roadblocks out of the way, and it did. And so when you join with this, you're joining a satanic Christianity destroying or attempting to destroy thing. Critical theory in the church is a skin suit religion. It will get Bible verses. It will sound holy. Its results are death. There are no breaks. It will eventually devour and cancel everyone. You might think that you are, you know, leading the pack and that you're a progressive. You're. You're. You're kind of. You're more loving and soft hearted and all that. Then there's people that say that about us, you know, like really looking down a boy. Those guys, they're real hard. You're going to be that guy. If you don't keep swimming leftward with them, in ten years, they're going to be looking at you going, wow, that guy. That guy is a hardliner. We got to get rid of that guy in the church.
[01:02:21] Speaker C: Just like JK Rowling in society, right?
[01:02:23] Speaker B: Exactly.
The other thing, apologizing for something you didn't do is a lie. You know, when in 2020, I remember there's all this stuff preachers need to preach on this racism stuff. And I was looking around, and I had a very mixed race congregation, and they're telling me I've got to preach on racism in society. This was a mixed race congregation that deeply loved each other. I'm supposed to tell the white people in there they're racist? No, they don't need to apologize for something they didn't do. Okay. We can say certain things that happen are bad. They didn't do it. Why am I holding that against them? And so these are things that we have to realize and stop apologizing for God. Stop apologizing for the Bible. Stop apologizing for christians, your parents, your ancestors. It's absurd.
[01:03:01] Speaker C: We've got to go because I. Joe's got a. I think fast for us. But I did have a question that I wanted you guys thoughts on specifically, I guess, within the churches of Christ. I'm not really talking so much about the, you know, David Platts and guys like that. When people get up in pulpits and church leaders and I guess specifically ministers who do this kind of thing that we're talking about, apologize for the truth, scold christians, glorify the world, all these things use social justice language. Do you think that they are aware, consciously aware, that they are subscribing to critical theory, or do you think this is just more of a.
This is. It's seeped into the culture, so it's kind of seeped into their brain. They think they're supposed to talk that way. And so it's less of an intentional thing, less of a conscious thing, and more of a, oh, I just kind of thought this was what you're supposed to do. What are y'all's thoughts on that? I was very curious.
[01:03:48] Speaker B: I know some of them are aware because they'll quote the stuff. Most of the time, I think it is going with the tide. It is the, oh, this is what's being said. We're just going to go out and echo this. Christians have been oppressive, and the church has been mean, and we. And we've been hard on women, we've been hard on kids, we've been hard on LGBT. We, you know, like all of these things so as to look unthreatening, so as to look more pleasant, so as to line up with a he gets us commercial. You know, that's the meek and lowly kind of thing. Well, yeah, Jesus is Meek and lowly, but there's. You're cutting half of it out. But I know some of them are explicitly view themselves that way. I don't think that's most of them.
[01:04:26] Speaker A: I think if you went to college, and I think if you're an academic white person or a white collar, rather, a lot of them are white people. But. So freudian slip there. But no, a white collar academic, which a lot of people in the churches you look at, all these guys are getting masters and PhDs and all this stuff. Well, when you go to PhD and you're writing on something, are you really going to write on, especially in academia, are you really going to write on Indonesia?
[01:04:50] Speaker B: It's swimming with the current. It's.
[01:04:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:54] Speaker B: How many guys come out of certain institutions with a master's degree going, boy, I don't know about Genesis one anymore. You know, like.
[01:04:59] Speaker A: And that's what I'm saying is if.
[01:05:00] Speaker B: You all came to the same conclusion, what a bunch of free thinkers.
[01:05:03] Speaker A: If you have too much time on your hands, you will end up subverting things. Some of the best and most sound people I know are blue collar workers who get out there, brave the elements, do things in the dirt. And you know what? They may not be the academics. They may not have the PhD, but they're in reality. They're based in reality. And I don't think those. So do I think they're aware of it? Not a lot of them, but I think that's what they've been steeped in, the culture they've been steeped in within academia. They get in the pulpits and they don't really know any different. And their entire job all week is to study and to not be among, like, reality, in my opinion.
[01:05:34] Speaker C: And ivory tower, right?
[01:05:36] Speaker A: Correct.
[01:05:37] Speaker B: Finally, just briefly, I mentioned we talk about it, and so I'll just hit it for 30 seconds here. When we have done wrong, when there is.
[01:05:42] Speaker A: Well, hold on. I want to push that to the deep end.
[01:05:44] Speaker B: Well, no, we need to talk about it on the public.
[01:05:46] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[01:05:47] Speaker B: Because this is the big question. People like, well, there is racism. There is oppression. There is. There was slavery, there was bad things that happened, and I. Things like that, yes. You have to realize human history is a flawed history because we're humans. I mean, we have a fallen nature. That's one of the other subversions here, is we believe in the. Mankind is sinful. They believe that mankind can be purged of their sinfulness by education and all this stuff. It's not true. There's always going to be that kind of thing. Acknowledge it. Don't throw your ancestors under the bus, because, again, it's kind of the. Compared to what people who have aborted, 70 million babies are going to look back and lecture about slavery. I mean, come on. Like, yeah, they're, we're going to be looked at as evil people, too. It's not all or nothing. And throwing out the baby with the bathwater. So acknowledge wrongs when it's there. If somebody needs to apologize, they should apologize. The oppressive husband, the unsubmissive wife, the every side of the equation, wherever you are in the power dynamic because that's the other thing. Well, a wife can, can't sin because, you know, power dynamics. And, you know, minorities can't be racist because of power dynamic. No, everybody can sin. Okay? And so if you do apologize, fix it, move on, call for repentance. Pretty simple. Acknowledge sin as sin and take God's definitions and not the world's definitions.
[01:06:56] Speaker A: If you apologize when you didn't do anything wrong, then when you did your apology, yeah, you're lying and your apology is worthless. So don't apologize for the things you didn't do. But here's the difference. We have grace. We have a way out of this. We can offer grace when they offer cancel culture. So while your life is ruined, people will make their way back to Christianity. Because it's like, where do I go from here? Well, we are the people of grace that recognize, yes, you did do wrong, go and sin no more. But there's also grace for that. There is forgiveness. They don't offer forgiveness on their side unless you bow the knee completely and even then you're waiting to get canceled yet again. We offer truth and we offer something that has heart to it that they cannot possibly offer.
[01:07:31] Speaker B: And that's just to wrap this up. That's why it's so important not to have captured churches with critical theory in them is as the world keeps swimming left, if the people in the world keep getting canceled and they're looking for somewhere to go and they see a church that's like 5ft behind just drifting left with them, there's no hope in that. They're looking for something solid, something where we can say this is truth and we're standing on it.
[01:07:51] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:07:52] Speaker C: What a great way to wrap.
[01:07:54] Speaker A: All right, well, circle ahead. We're supposed to do a. Yeah, but I'll keep it very, very brief on the. Think fast. The thing that's happening just today when we're recording. So by the time this comes out, I don't know what will happen within this next week. By the time this comes out, dock workers from Maine to Texas are on strike. That is a kind of under sir or like underplayed news story. It may get huge over this time, but, you know, this has been taking place for the last couple days where it's kind of coming into, wow, this might happen, that they've officially gone on strike. Times may get very, very difficult for christians. The things that we ship in that are no longer from Maine to Texas, all the way down, that are no longer going to be coming in, especially with the hurricane, things can get very tight for a lot of people. You may not be able to get gas. You may not be able to get bread and eggs and milk and things like that. This is when the church shines the most is specifically among its members. We can farm out everything and help the world. Okay, maybe, but make sure everybody in your congregation is taken care of. So I say that to say if you're somebody that has plenty or somebody that thought ahead, be willing to share with those in the congregation. And if you're barely plugged into the church and you think that you're going to be the first to line up and, you know, get the loaf of bread from brother so and so who's being real kind.
No, that, that needs to go to the people that are very close. Right. Those that the church families that are actually families. Everybody comes for the handout. Make sure you're taking care of those in your church, and if you have more to offer, make sure you're offering that. But also don't be too prideful to go to somebody in church and go, hey, things are tough. This may work out to be nothing. They could solve this tomorrow and everything is fine. So by the time this comes out, maybe this is irrelevant, but it goes to show the.
How fragile the system is, that all it takes for them to go on strike and we could be toast. It could be really, really bad. And that's why the power of the church and the church family taking care of one another, that may be more relevant in the next five years, in the next five weeks than ever in America. Really important for us to plug into our local churches, look for ways we can help. Don't be too prideful to ask for help if that is the case. And, yeah, you say that just that is happening. That happened today. Yep. Yeah.
[01:09:56] Speaker C: I didn't even know.
[01:09:56] Speaker A: Which is October 1. Yep.
[01:09:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, it could be one that becomes nothing, but there's for all the nothings. You know, I remember the panic of shopping in 2020. I mean, like, things can go down and, yeah, having community, having connection, and you just never know, you just never know.
[01:10:12] Speaker A: If you have a little more money to go buy a little extra to help somebody else, now might be a good time to do it. I don't want to panic. Buy a go go get everything. No. But at the same time, maybe grab that extra toilet paper roll or whatever it is, you know, package that you can then give others or to others in your church who may be in need. So it's just a way to start thinking about how we can serve one another a little bit more tangibly. Other than just praying for each other, people may have legitimate needs coming up here in the next little bit. Even after the election, things could get very tough.
So it may be a good idea to just start thinking about that. So that would be my think that's. Any thoughts, fellas?
[01:10:45] Speaker B: No? Interesting point.
[01:10:46] Speaker C: Very interesting to see what comes of it.
[01:10:48] Speaker A: All right.
[01:10:49] Speaker B: All right, that's a wrap on our episode. Uh, comments, questions. We do have some stuff for the deep end, but I didn't want to leave people hanging on what I think is a really important point. Um, and so, yeah, critical theory, uh, in captured churches, uh, what we will leave for the deep end is if you're in a captured church, if you're in a church where the preacher is always apologizing, is always throwing people under the bus or whatever, we'll talk about that. And we're going to save that for the deep end because this is so stinking widespread. It is. It is very subversive, very difficult. So we'll deal with that. We'll talk to focus plus on Friday, talk to the rest of you guys next Monday.
