Let's See What Christian Democrats Are REALLY Thinking | Guest: Justin Giboney | Ep 406

[Music] [Music] hey guys welcome to relatable today i'm really excited for you to listen to this conversation between me and someone who identifies as a democrat a fellow christian but we've got disagreements politically um and ideologically and that is justin gibboney of the and campaign uh we're going to talk about social justice we're going to talk about some of the flaws and and some of the good parts of both parties and both sides of the aisle and talk about some solutions how can we come together on the issues that really matter as biblical christians so um without further ado here is justin gibney [Music] justin thank you so much for joining me could you tell everyone who may not know who you are and what you do yeah i'm justin gibney i'm an attorney political strategist and i'm the president of the and campaign the anne campaign is a christian civic organization that's trying to raise civic literacy among christians and also help christians apply their values to the issues of the day we want christians to be less ideological and partisan and more christian and so that's what we do and can you tell us your story a little bit of of how you got where you are i know your story i read a really good article about you and kind of where you come from um in the gospel coalition but other people might not know you do have a political background and um that kind of led you to what you're doing now so can you talk to us about that yeah sure so uh once i graduated from law school came down to atlanta and probably within the maybe first four years that i was in atlanta just started getting involved in politics i joined a mayoral campaign and really went from and it was great because i started from the bottom uh from knocking on doors you know going door to door in southwest atlanta to you know doing you know debate prep and and working with the city council and things of that nature and so it was a really great experience and i always tell people if you really want to get into politics and understand politics and understand the people of grassroots people and others you really want to do it you want to be involved in a campaign because you you see so many elements of what goes into in the politics and you get to know the city that you're in the area that you're in and all that stuff and so that's where i started really in a grassroots way going door-to-door and then just learning and meeting the people and learning how politics went because what a lot of people don't realize is you you know there's intelligence and then there's political smarts and you don't get political smarts just from reading books you really have to be out there and doing it so that's where i started uh started running campaigns you know after after that i started running campaigns was still practicing law doing political strategy and really just had some mentors that made me really be a part of the community that let me know you know i could have all the degrees that i wanted but there were certain things that i'd have to learn about the community and really cut my teeth to be uh connected and a true kind of leader and you were in democratic politics correct that was democratic mayoral campaign that you helped out with at what point did you say okay yes i've worked with all these democratic campaigns i guess you identified as a democrat at what point did you say it's not all here i need to try to reach more bipartisan or solutions especially in accordance with your faith yeah i mean so i still identify as a democrat uh but it became very clear to me uh that the pushback that was being received on issues such as you know because there are a lot of biblical christians i'm in atlanta georgia there's a lot of biblical christian churches and biblical christians in atlanta georgia but for some reason even if you're in our neighborhoods when you run for office you have to run like you're kind of like a midtown progressive and you have to kind of put away some of those biblical values whether it be in regard to the sanctity of life or the christian sexual ethic and i saw that happening over and over and it just made me really uncomfortable because honestly i thought it was disrespectful i think people should be able to represent who they are and their constituency and shouldn't have to change that uh just just the one run for office and so i started thinking about why that was and just realized that in some of these progressive spaces there just wasn't a lot of um organization when it came to um how christians did politics outside of what was already kind of uh progressive politics so we did we got out the vote we did those things but i thought we should take the time to really uh put forward some of our values that differ with the secular progressive perspective so ended up running for the democratic national convention in 2012 uh one that ran with a great group of people and just a lot of things happened there that i realized that even more so that the secular progressive perspective was not the traditional kind of black church perspective that i came from and where a lot of folks who are in the party come from went back home and was like man i really need to do something about this i can't stay in a party uh that doesn't represent me and instead of leaving i decided to kind of organize and get some folks together who i knew thought like i did i created an organization called uh crucifix and politics which was me and some other uh political strategists people who ran their county party and other folks who were running campaigns like i was and really unders you know really got to the bottom of why all this was happening that would eventually turn into the and campaign which was not just a democratic thing but i also had friends who were you know in republican politics and thought that they you know felt like they weren't able to be maybe as compassionate as they wanted to be with some of the tea party stuff that was going on and so that's when the income in campaign came together it was a rejection of of kind of the false dichotomy that we see in our politics ran again for the democratic national convention in 2016 but this time i ran on a biblical platform i didn't even say the name of the candidate who i was supposedly a delegate for i talked about the sanctity of life i talked about jobs i talked about voter rights and ended up winning in john lewis's district i mean overwhelmingly to be a delegate again and it just proved that that you know there there are people who think that way but unless it's presented as an option by leaders they're not going to know uh to to go move forward with it and can you talk a little bit more about what that biblical platform was and is i've read a lot of the things that you've written and you probably know this is a conservative podcast i am like you except on the other side i've always voted republican i consider myself a republican there are things that the republican party does and does not do that i don't like and honestly i find myself increasingly disenchanted with washington dc in general but i am a conservative and that's why i'm so excited to hear your perspective because i can't think of an issue that i am that i'm progressive on at all but um you talk a lot about how it's important to have both to have both sides complement one another so i want to hear from your perspective like what is that biblical platform in your view that has some progressive aspects of it and has some conservative aspects of it sure one of the things the anne campaign talks about is the false dichotomy in our politics where people feel like if you're for justice then you have to go to the left if you're for moral order then you have to be conservative you have to go to the right but when i look in the bible when i look in the gospel i don't i don't see that false dichotomy i don't i don't see jesus choosing one or the other and that's where the anne campaign comes from it's both it's justice and moral order and in fact if you don't have moral if you don't have justice you don't have an orderly society if your law and order is not just then it's not serving the purpose that it needs uh needs to be serving and that's really what we say uh and so we want christians not just to assume based on whether something is a conservative conservative idea or progressive idea that it's right or wrong but to really be more biblical i think he can be very intellectually lazy to always be on the side of conservatives or always be on the side of progressives one thing i think conservatives have to deal with is an abject failure when it came to civil rights an abject failure when it came to a lot of different issues concerning uh people of color and explain it's hard to run away go into kind of some some detail and examples on that because a lot of people may not know well yeah i mean simply i think that the white evangelical church during the civil rights movement was not there now they certainly were not uh helpful in that in in certain instances perpetuated that and so i think you know when someone says you know when you realize that that was a huge mistake and there's no group that hasn't made some errors but that was a huge mistake steak how do you correct that you're for example like not standing against segregation and just kind of opposing the civil rights movement in general yeah opposing the civil rights movement you know when when dr king you know people talk about dr king but the fact of the matter is he couldn't get into a conservative uh a seminary they wouldn't let him in because of it because of his color um these are things where the church should have stood up but they didn't stand up against jim crow they didn't stand up against redlining and so many other things that have happened the uh the the majority church in america did not stand up against and so what i'm saying is not that we all have to go back and just cry forever about that but how do we correct that and if we're trying to be conservative are there places where we could make similar mistakes like that again and so what i tell people is not to be so attached to the ideology but really sound theology i'm i'm theologically conservative but i believe that i don't believe that's the exact same thing as being ideologically conservative and i think we can inflate those things too often yeah i think what scares me as a as a natural conservative is um using the government as and you probably unders you've probably heard this before using the government as a vehicle for um big change not that the government doesn't have a role i'm not a libertarian i'm certainly not an anarchist i do believe that the government has a role um but typically i think one reason why conservatives start to kind of wince a little bit when we hear about when when we hear the words social justice and uh things like that is that we worry that it just means the redistribution of wealth it just means more government power it just means more government programs and we can kind of look at the history of that and see that a lot of those things have been very ineffective and don't actually achieve the kind of correction of wrongs that we're looking for and so what would you say to someone like me who says okay you know i agree those are really bad mistakes and we do need to think of ways and solutions to rectify those errors but i'm worried about giving the government more power to do that and i don't know what exactly those solutions should should look like well i would say this i'd give you know a little bit of of of credence to some of the stuff you said which is i've worked in government i know it can be cumbersome i know it can be inefficient there are certain things that i don't want the government to do but when i look at government historically especially from an african-american perspective i mean the government has played a huge role and so it i you know it's hard to to bring the federalism conversation to you know to a lot of african-americans i'm sure there are some but when you talk about jim crow ending when you talk about slavery when you talk about all those things these are the government coming in to do things that the church wasn't doing and that some of the conservatives who are who don't like government still aren't doing and so i think a lot of poor people because they have to deal with the government and they see how inefficient it is they wish they didn't have to to deal with it yeah but when there's no when that doesn't seem to be alternatives uh ideally yeah the government wouldn't do those things i would like to have mediating institutions do more of those things but when they don't do it that needs to be that kind of backstop needs to be there and what are and what are those things like what are some progressive policies that you think would right some of the wrongs of jim crow and the other historical discrimination that you've listed that have already have or that can continue to or that you advocate for that you think the democratic party or progressives do a better job of advocating for or doing than the republican party and conservatives do i mean i think we have to start with the fact i don't see any really any outreach at all from that for the conservatives or republicans at all i don't i don't even see you go like going into those going communities the is going into those communities or dealing with those issues because i think that the republicans i think republicans and conservatives have a wing of their party that would they would catch backlash for really engaging on ra race issues at all i mean so you know we can start from the point you know we can say and i would agree with you that there are a lot of progressive uh programs that haven't been great but what are we comparing it to we're comparing it to not much at all um and so that's i think that's where the conversation needs to start from i i disagree with a lot of the ways that progressives have gone about certain things but the effort has been there and there have been programs that help people you know you may not agree with uh you know food stamps things that nature i do i mean i've seen people in those positions um my father was raised you know in a situation where he had to be on on that temporarily and uh it helped his family out and helped them survive uh so it's not all perfect uh sometimes there can be abuses there but i think those type of programs whether it comes to food when it comes to education those can be very helpful and have been helpful in the past maybe not perfect yeah but many of those wouldn't happen if we had to kind of depend on on conservatives to do it and i i agree with you i'm i'm not against i'm not against welfare in general not against food stamps in general i think where conservatives come from what someone like paul ryan who never accomplished this and you know republicans and democrats can talk a big talk about a lot of things and then never do them but republicans have been talking a lot about welfare reform and you're probably very familiar i'm guessing with with thomas soule who also talks about this um i don't know if he is against welfare in general either but he would say that the welfare system as it's set up right now actually incentivizes in some cases unemployment i've talked to families that it's very hard for them to get off of government assistance because it's going to mean that they're actually poor getting a job then staying on government assistance so you're in this very tough conundrum where okay you and your family are actually making more money if you're on welfare but you really want to provide for yourself like you you really you really want your own job and i think i'm not saying that conservatives have have presented the perfect solution for this it almost seems like we're just in this gridlock though because we don't just want welfare to expand we don't want to keep presenting people with that problem who really want to provide for themselves but the system is set up in a way to where they're really disincentivized to do so that that's a big problem in my opinion that progressives are not addressing and and maybe conservatives aren't addressing either would you agree yeah i mean i i think there are very you know there are ways that we can approach it i think you're right there have been some incentives that are set up that are not helpful and so when we talk about welfare reform i'm always very cautious because the you know as they say the devil is in the details what do we mean by that do we just mean cutting because i think a lot of people when they hear conservatives you know fair or otherwise talk about that they think they're just talking about a a cut and if we're just talking about a cut then i don't think that's the place to start i think we should be smart about government i think government shouldn't just be huge but it can be used in smart ways that that help people um and so yeah we just have to dig deeper into what that reform would look like but i'm open to those conversations because i do think there's some adverse incentives that are in there that aren't helping people but in general the program is helping people from what i can see i think it depends on well i think one problem with it is that how some of these programs define success is how many people are on the programs not how many people get off the assistance and i think that we probably need to redefine how we look at success to me maybe as a conservative but i don't know if this is an exclusively conservative position i would define success of a program of a government program by how many people can get off the program and get a job and provide for their families is it pushing people towards what i think most people want is providing for themselves and their families or is it just helping people subsist and i don't yes that's helpful to a degree especially if you're someone who's physically or mentally unable to have a job but to me that's not the definition of success and so i i just don't see a whole lot of movement in that area and i feel like when we talk about social justice and racial justice we're typically focusing on uh poverty which is important but i don't see any advancement in that area so when i hear okay we need more solutions we need more and i just hear government program i'm like but there's so many problems with the government programs that we have and it seems to not be moving we've had these programs for a very long time and so like how do we how do we get out of that gridlock and actually move forward in a way that does help and rectify some of the problems of the past yeah that's right i'm with you on that i think one of the things is people detaching themselves from these narratives one of the biggest problems i think we have in our socio-political landscape is that on the left and the right we have these narratives and we just stick with them regardless of the facts right we have to make sure that we're doing what you're asking that we're examining these programs to make sure that they're doing what they should be doing and if we have the wrong objectives we have the wrong goals then that needs to be examined too but we can't do that in good faith and part of the problem is there's no trust and so as a as a democrat i think what some of the democrats may be thinking is if i do open this up for conversation with the with the right then they're just going to cut it and so i'm just going to hold to my narrative and say this is all working out because i don't have the trust that we can work on this in good faith without just trying to cut it out and so we got to find ways to work past that and work for the better the people and just build some trust because that's why i think we can't get big things done and i think conservatives have the same trust issue and if i talk about this they're just going to talk about expanding it they're just going to talk about adding more welfare which also i don't think addresses the problems uh the problems that are already there let's talk about some of those big issues that people conservatives like me just can't get past when it comes to the current democratic party and i know it's not all democrats for example you are theologically conservative so you believe in the sanctity of life we probably agree on the same biblical sexual ethic when it comes to gender and marriage but i don't see those well i don't see those things really championed by the republican party very much either but conservatives certainly hold those things dear but when i look over at progressives maybe it's just a caricature but what i see is a complete denunciation of the sanctity of life a complete denunciation of biblical marriage and gender as totally bigoted and that just makes me feel like the other side hates me and i can't even imagine voting for the party that represents that can you tell me maybe where i'm wrong or where i'm seeing something that isn't true no i mean i've written about uh kind of the extremes that we've gone to on the democratic side of things when it comes to those two issues so i'm not going to battle you and try to justify the party on that i don't care enough about the party to do that and i think i think they're they're wrong in that regard i think one thing that you might want to consider though is how those issues got such a foothold and why people you know why they you know why in some ways they're gaining momentum in some ways on those issues and i think it's because christians didn't have what i would call a whole life perspective i think because in many instances christians weren't as compassionate to people who had crisis pregnancies or people who were lgbtq who really were looking for community who were in our community who are our neighbors and our brothers and sisters and weren't responded to in a loving way uh not all the criticism of the right in this regard our conservatives on this regard is fair but i think you know within the church there's certainly things we could have done better to not give them a foothold here and we need to approach it in the in a different way so what i say in regards to the issues is that i agree with you the left has some real problems when it comes to this i will continually fight against that whether somebody i've been told that when i made my speech at the 2016 democratic uh dnc uh selection that i had committed political suicide well i'm going to continue to say that because i think it's i think they're wrong for going so far left on those issues however i don't think the conservative ideologically conservative approach is the best approach and i think we need to re-examine how we might want to um really focus on those issues and how we address those issues see i would disagree with you at least on at least when it comes to abortion now i would say like within the actual walls of a church that there does seem to be either a silence about abortion in that there could be you know people who had abortions in the congregation who wouldn't feel comfortable coming forward and saying hey this happened in my life i need help i need counseling i need grace or whatever it is i think that's probably true but when i look at the crisis pregnancy centers when i look at the pro-life centers that i have spent so many hours at and that i have talked to so many people who who run these organizations i obviously can't say they're exclusively conservative evangelicals but they are these pro-life evangelicals who pour their entire lives into helping women and families and babies in crisis and so a lot of times i hear this what i think is a false dichotomy from people on the left are christian democrats saying yeah sure we need to care about babies inside the womb but making it illegal isn't the way to do it we need to do xyz program to show that we really care about the women in need that's what it means to be pro all life and that to me is just crazy so you have to vote for legal access to dismembering babies inside the womb and you can only be pro-life if you're for these government programs when there are people voluntarily spending their entire lives and livelihoods helping these women like it's just not true that most pro-lifers are just pro-birth so my question is like what what more is there to do for a conservative pro-lifer there's so many people who spend so much helping these families we just don't think that the government is the most effective means to do that well i think there's plenty to do uh and so what let me be very clear what i'm saying is that no not that there's there is good work going on um i'm not saying that no one that it considers themselves an ideological conservative has done anything that's that's whole life that's not the conversation but i think if we step back and we look at the rhetoric if we go back to the moral majority and really you know what what got a lot of this really really going and a lot of their rhetoric was lasting there wasn't the compassion there there isn't the compassion and a lot of the other issues that we talk about so when we talk about civil rights and all these issues these are issues that linger and the failure there lingers and when you haven't taken when you haven't taken the precautions to make sure that that never happens again then people see that when you talk about immigrants or you allow people to talk about immigrants in a way that is not that is not humane that's not okay uh when you show a lack of care for that people are gonna look at you and say that you're not whole life that doesn't mean that no one among you is doing things it just means that you could do better just like i admitted that on my side we can do better we have to be open to saying you know what maybe we can look at there and that and there's things that we can do but it's a it's it's not just that one issue there are a lot of other issues that seem to tell people that maybe you don't have the compassion when it comes to the lives of others that that you that people think conservatives should have so i think what i'm hearing you say is that yes conservative evangelicals might show compassion for the unborn but when it comes to racial justice issues or social justice issues or immigration they show a lack of compassion that kind of belies the title pro-life i want to be specific is that what you're saying yeah i think that's part of it that uh they when it comes to those other issues i think we see what i call the politics of christian self-interest rather than the police the politics of neighborly love i think sometimes we put ourselves before them and don't realize that those issues have life implications as well now i say that again without at all defending what's going on on the left what's going on the left is not okay it needs to be stopping i'll fight for the rest of my life if i have to to make sure that that stops but i'm just telling you why people uh christians who may vote democrat don't see the conservative side of the republican party as being as pro-life as they say they are i think a lot of conservatives would say that republicans are not as pro-life as they say they are i would agree with that just even if we're just talking about fighting for the unborn there's a lot of showmanship every four years or if it's a you know senatorial race every six years whatever it is um saying you know we're gonna defund planned parenthood we're gonna fight for the unborn it's an issue that whips up conservatives and that we will vote on but at least i've kind of grown cynical to realize that there are very few republicans that will actually fight for this issue they have to hold on to it because it's what gets them votes every time if they actually defund planned parenthood what are they going to run on and so unfortunately that is true um and there are certainly things i would agree with you that donald trump said and did that conservative pro-lifers would say the family separation how people were treated at the border was not right and we can we can agree on those things but then the reason why we just can't we can't bring ourselves to turn to democrat because it's like but but but you're fighting for especially someone like kamala harris or warnock fighting for the unfettered access to what is such a brutal act and i know you agree with me i'm not arguing with you and i think that's why we just it's so hard for us to find any reconciliation there even if we might agree that some of these other issues are problematic when we look at what abortion is i mean we're literally talking about murder we're not talking about some intangible thing we're not talking about um you know some historical uh thing we're talking about something that's happening right now thousands of times a day and it just seems like so many people on the left say yeah that's true but we're still gonna vote for the party that it that allows unfettered access to that and not only that but wants me to pay for it um and that's just too far the other direction that when we look at the other issues we're like yeah those are bad but i know i can't get on board with that and it seems like you feel that way except the opposite about the republican party yeah and and mind you i'm not saying that i respect that decision i'm not saying that everybody has to be democrats i i think that there should be a critical mass of christians on both sides and i would love to see two very strong parties uh but what but what i am saying is that christians if if you are of the mind that to say that trump should you know what happened on the border was terrible that trump shouldn't have said the things that he he said there should have been a louder chorus behind that uh and when those things happen you know it's hard to see the the folks that you're talking about you don't see enough of them saying no that's not right you more so people see people defending it and that that happens on the on the right uh on the left too yeah right when we see things that we don't like because we want to maintain a narrative we feel like if i voted for this person then i'm justifying myself by defending this person and i think that's just the wrong way to go about it especially for a christian and i i think on both sides for those voices to rise up and say no that's not okay that can't happen again i'm not going to vote for you if you do that again that's the kind of things we need to do when it comes to immigration when it comes to uh abortion on the other side we need to take those stands and be a little louder and it's just not happening right now yeah and i think it depends on the people that you hang around too because i actually feel like there are a lot of people on the conservative side saying hey what's happening at the border it isn't right now i understand that's probably not represented in the media in the same way that people on the right would say i never hear people on the left talking about abortion being bad it's almost like we add nuance to the topics that are convenient to add nuance to the ones that we don't want to just say yeah this is wrong on i think that's a fault of both sides i just hear a lot of unnecessary nuance from the left when it comes to abortion that yeah it's bad but you know i'm not for it i'm personally pro-life but i'm politically pro-choice i mean we're talking about murder and then there are other things on the right that we probably just you know we add nuance too because we don't want to give any credence and we don't want to move an inch in the in the other direction um it i i really commend what you do it's hard for me to understand how the two sides you know can can and i don't even want to say it as two sides um they just seem in some ways so fundamentally far apart in what we believe and what we believe the solutions to be they are fun uh very far apart in a lot of ways and so i want to what i would want what i want to be clear is about is this is not saying that if we can bind both a perfect they make the perfect position that's not what we're saying yeah we're saying take the best of both and you might get more of the best from one side or the other is not a false equivalence so i understand how you know people could think the democrats may be better the republicans might be better take the best out of both sides and how do you judge what the best is by biblical standards by the compassion and the conviction that the anne campaign uh wrote a whole book about and we talk so much about that's what we're really trying to get at not to say if you can bind them they're equal and you'll come to the right place in some kind of hegelian you know dialectic but they're don't just assume that your side is right 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people who are socially conservative like you and me but um i wouldn't call myself economically liberal but if there's anywhere i could find wiggle room it would be on those issues i do think that there could be a path forward for people like that and that some people would say that's a form of like right of center populism um that there are people on the left and the right who could represent that i think the big sticking sticking point i've heard you talked about this is the cultural issues for people on the left like even if i agree with some of the solutions or some of the problems that they point out and maybe even some of the solutions like i don't disagree with everything that aoc says or ilhan omar and they're like very far over to the left but some things they say i'm like okay that's fair but the reason why i couldn't support them is because of these social cultural and you know moral issues that we just can't get past do you see any path for the social conservatives and the economically at least left of center people to move forward together and say okay these are the best policies for families for working class people and for poor people because at the end of the day that's the kind of country that i want yeah i think there's there's plenty of room for a realignment we see what's going on with with the republican party i mean there could be some divisions there i don't know if these differences are irreconcilable or not but there's some very serious differences that that uh we'll see how they get ironed out and then on the on the left there is a some serious uh fractures and really what people don't realize is that on the left the only thing that was holding these folks together was trump i mean trump held together a group that is really falling apart right we'll see how biden does and kind of keeping that together i think he may struggle to do that but but there's some fault lines that i think are going to be exposed and we'll just see what happens i think you know at very least when it comes to people of faith there should be some core issues that we should be able to say you know what even if we remain in different parties that we can come together on some of these these core issues i i i mean that type of coalition that's that nimble coalition that can do some of those things it's probably more likely in the near term more doable in the near term but we'll just have to see what happens but something's got to change because i think especially for christians there's some elements um on the right and on the left that we should just not tolerate that we should push harder against and i i think you talked about civic liber um literacy and how important that is i think it is important for us to be able to distinguish between the values that we hold dear and what the government's role actually is in some of those some of those things like if we believe in traditional marriage well is there a government role in that or is there not like how do we balance some of these social issues on the left with things that we hold dear like religious liberty and how do we bring those things together in a way that allows freedom to flourish for all people but also doesn't leave anyone out even if your personal values disagree with someone else's lifestyle and i'm very open to that conversation i think that you see that struggle already within the biden administration you saw it in the campaign but i hear it in the speeches now wanting to appeal to those people of faith who are still kind of over here maybe in the center or center right but also trying to get those far left progressives like saying things like sure if an eight-year-old wants to change genders that's fine and the rest of us are like what are you talking about and the hyde amendment and things like that and for me the constant categorization of people by race that is a real turn off for a lot of christians on on the other side um but i want him to do well and i want the country to come together i just i don't want to be cynical i just don't see i don't see him doing that i don't see that from his rhetoric i just think that he's trying too hard to play both sides and it's gonna end up being everyone's frustrated yeah he's gonna have a difficult job uh i you know i think he's up more up to it than a lot of those other candidates were and so we'll you know i'm going to give him a chance to see to see what he can do um but but yeah it's going to be interesting to see how he deals with that one of the problems that i think a lot of democrats are having is is staffing and so there's you know they may think one way and you saw it in the biden campaign where he may think one way but he had a staff a communication staff and other staff that was trying to go in a completely different direction go completely left he's going to have to find a way to get that under control and really it's going to be about the people who are around him working with him in good faith to get his vision out uh because i do think biden has shown that he does try to walk work across the aisle that he that he's not as far left as even that he seems to have been pushed in some areas but he just still doesn't seem comfortable there yeah but in in in regards to the first part of your your question i think you were kind of asking how do we you know apply biblical values in a way that isn't that still is respects the pluralism of this country right and i don't know that there's a bright line for how we do that but i think it starts with being able to articulate why christian values are good for everyone right not just saying this is what the bible says therefore you should do it i think that was kind of the moral majority stance and some of the things we did before but articulating why marriage is good for everybody why you know our definition is good for everybody why you know children not going through some of the things that they're being pushed to transform to why those things are good but you got to articulate it in a way where people who aren't christian can see oh that benefits me too there are practical benefits for for the for society as a whole and not just doing it because christians said it i think that's the first way to start because we can get caught flat flat-footed on issues because we haven't thought them through in that wider context and i think that will help us articulate and persuade people to some christian values if they are willing to debate those issues i think one of the problems that we see on the right is um an unwillingness by some it seems like a lot on the left to debate these issues like i hear a lot abortion or bodily autonomy isn't debatable people's identity which they say is you know gender isn't debatable how people love isn't debatable and so it's hard to find a forum where people on the other side will talk about these understandably tense issues um i have i there was someone who he now identifies as a conservative but he was a liberal and he's married and he's gay and i was able to tell him this is what i think because you know this is what the bible says it was a theological conversation but it's very very rare to be invited into a space like that to discuss those issues how do you think we can better facilitate it yeah we've gone back and forth on a lot of things today but you're not gonna get any any pushback on me on that one uh the the left has created so many rhetorical devices to cut off the debate to not have to discuss the things that they know don't really have a rational basis uh that is a tough conversation but i but i think it's really a small group right i think it's a lot of the representatives i think it's the professional class that stand there and it's really is it's shallow um and so we have to get to the people we have to get to the grassroots to have those conversations because most people understand that in a democracy what do you mean you have to debate these things you can't move legislation and have these sweeping changes and not have a real public debate and discourse about what's going on and so we just have to really one of the things the ann campaign tries to do is really dismantle some of these rhetorical devices that you know and many of these are on the left that the left uses to not have a debate to not have to discuss the things they really want to do but can't really defend we got to call it out and we got to make sure that we let others know that we can't democracy can't survive like that we have to have discussions there's nothing that's above debate we can have decorum we can be civil but you don't get just get to say that i don't want to talk about that but i'm going to enforce it on other people and that's why conservatives are so worried about censorship not that these tech companies can't have rules that they can enforce but we are worried about political bias and censorship and i mean we do feel like we have to self-police especially when we're talking about some of the issues that uh you know we we just mentioned and and that is one thing that i feel like is almost in exclusive concern of the right is censorship is that you know there's some people on the left who think that conservatives are harmful that almost i saw a pro-life activist who really is non-partisan she said abortion is violence well she had an abortion doctor who has tons of followers say this is what domestic terrorism looks like saying abortion is violence like whoa whoa whoa so we're not even allowed to say anything with some with without someone saying that it's inciting violence we i mean we can't move forward like that and i think that's very rare that doesn't happen a lot on the left but that's something that people on the right are concerned about yeah i mean i'm concerned about uh censorship too uh i just think you know on the right you gotta maybe choose the examples better i think i don't know if trump and what you know what happened with the us capital is is really where you want to place your argument there one of the things that i think that conservatives can do better is realize you have a lot of you know there's on some issues especially an issue like this there are allies on the other side but we got to make sure that we're connecting in a way and on a you know on a premise that people can can gather gather together and i think to you know to really make the what happened with the capital and what happened on twitter in regard to trump what you're arguing based on you're gonna lose a lot of the people that really agree with you that hate the idea that they can't say what they want to say that react the polls differently because they don't trust that they can say what they really want to say all these things there's a lot of people who feel that way i think it's a small minority of very powerful well-resourced people who are trying to do this but when you get on the ground when you really get to the grassroots they don't agree with most of the stuff that these folks are pushing forward yeah like the aclu who i would say is on the left they had a problem they actually had a problem with the president being taken off twitter and they do have a problem with censorship because they are actually able to see okay if they can do this in this case then they're probably going to do it in other cases too to people like you know consistently marginalized voices and that does become a problem which is why i should i do think it's a bipartisan issue not necessarily the president but just in general there's one more thing i want to ask you about um if you have time do you have time yeah let's do it okay um and it has to do with something that you said about rhetorical devices that i think are used i agree that they're probably on the left and the right but one thing recently that i see a rhetorical device that has come up on the left and i think you're gonna disagree with me based on a tweet that you said um about critical race theory you have said you know it's better to just you know we don't have to worry about critical race theory if we just abolish racism um it seems to me though that critical race theory is kind of a bludgeon that is used by people on the left to dismiss any conversation about systemic racism today what it actually looks like which disparities actually point to discrimination and which doesn't what are actual what are examples of white privilege what aren't examples of white privilege it's almost like when we're shutting down conversation with just the critical race theory assertion that all black and brown people are oppressed all white people are a form of oppressors and anything that i say is just evidence of white fragility um that to me seems like a rhetorical device to where we can't even have conversations about this and certain people aren't allowed to push back because of the tenets of critical race theory what do you think yeah so what my statement was saying because i don't i don't really use critical race theory to say anything i mean i think there are some merits i think there are some perils to it so i that that that's not the argument i was making the statement i was making was i think racism is worse than critical race theory and if you look at the history again i think the reason that people don't accept um because a lot of people are i mean in my community most of people don't even really know what critical race theory is because that's not you know we know racism we have our theories but we don't even it's not like it is without you to use it i think people use it without knowing what it is right but i'm just saying even though we're not like married to wedded to any of those theories right my understanding of what race is and how it's been used is through history through you know my grandparents and and people who taught me in reading about what this was would you know i'm not like you know you're not going to see a lot of adherence to uh to critical race theory but but i think what part of the problem is is that the people that want to talk about critical race theory don't have any credibility on race based on the history that i've named already and so when you failed you know when your tradition fails on civil rights when it fails on many of these things that come up over and over again and actually perpetuates it people aren't going to accept what you have to say very easily when it comes to race when you haven't shown a real concern to get it fixed it seems like a distraction and so that's what i was trying to say like worry more so about what racism is and maybe the failures there than critical race theory because i don't think a lot of i think again i think there's a group that uses that for everything i think most people don't even aren't even worried about critical race theory i don't really i wasn't given a defense of it i think it has some merits because when it comes to race power there are some very serious power dynamics that have been used historically but i also think there's some very serious perils and so when people in a christian community ask me about critical race theory i say look you got before you go to anybody talking about critical race theory you better understand the perils of this because one thing you and i both know there are good people who are black they're good people are white they're bad people are black they're bad people white your color tells nobody anything about your character and i think we can both agree on that and so in any system or theory that says anything different is just wrong but at the same time power has been used when it comes to race i mean this is a country that codified discrimination for hundreds of years that has an impact on the present day and we have to be able to admit that yes now i don't know if it's fair to say that people can't criticize critical race theory if they've been a part of like a quote tradition that hasn't fought against race because that's very that's collectivizing people in a way to say okay well because i'm a white evangelical and white evangelicals didn't fight against or they did fight against civil rights in the 1960s i can't talk about critical race theory so i'm not saying you can't talk about it i'm saying you might not have credibility when you talk about it uh so i'm never one of those people to say you can't talk about i'm saying when people look at it and they look at the history of how either somebody personally or their group has handled race if you haven't handled race in a uh concerned way in a careful way then people are going to say you know what this seems like a distraction why don't we do something about the race issue then we can have the credibility to really attack the perils of what comes with crt but i actually think that there's such a an opportunity right now with the people who are talking about critical race theory to be able to say hey i i want to have a conversation about these solutions too i think people are thinking about race and race issues for some people for the first time some people more than ever whether it's on the left or the right and are very willing to have conversations where they would listen to something that you've said and say okay yeah that is a problem i wasn't aware of that or that is a historical injustice that hasn't been writed but i think win i i think that critical race theory that you can't just say okay racism is worse because critical race theory is a form of racism it is a form of racism and so it it is counter-productive in these conversations because if someone wants to hear about race but they say you know um they they hear terms like you know you're just fragile if you're if you defend this or everything that happens that a white person does is white privilege then that is really hard for people who genuinely are like okay i want to talk about race let's talk about this but you're not allowed to push back at all like you're not allowed to have any defense against any assertions you're not allowed to say okay what is the proof of that or well that doesn't really sound logical or do we know that that's evidence of discrimination when we're not allowed to ask those questions because we're white or because we're conservatives then there really is no way forward because people are just like well i don't know how to have these conversations and i guess i don't have any credibility to um and so i think that the tentative critical race theory turned people off to what could be very very productive conversations about solutions that can be done so yeah so let me be clear there's no question i don't think somebody can ask based on that there's no person that i wouldn't have a conversation with so i want to make sure that we distinguish between my position and where some you know maybe secular progressive theorists may be i want to have those conversations i invite those conversations with you and others and you can ask me any question that you that you want to ask i want to be very very clear about that but i think we also need to realize that uh number one there needs to be a sense of urgency because as we have these conversations i would say that people are still suffering so it's not something that we can just kind of lollygag around and kind of deal with when we can and the other thing is if you really think something is wrong if you really think there's racial injustice or there's you know that historically this country has codified racism and that still may have lingering effects somebody else's rhetoric should not stop you from doing what's right and and that's the thing that i don't accept that's it a lot of this stuff is not me too but listen a lot of this stuff is obnoxious to me too but if i think something is wrong i'm not going to let somebody else's rhetoric or how they talk about it or because they're annoying or because they try to shut me off stop me from doing what is right and that's what i don't accept kind of from the conservative point of view if you think this is right don't let their rhetoric get in the way of you doing what's right that doesn't make sense especially from a christian point of view if it's right then you need to do it regardless and what i'm saying is i have an open invitation to have those conversations with you even if there's some other people that won't have those conversations you can you can ask me whatever question you want to ask so so let's have that conversation but understand there should be a sense of urgency and i don't care what anybody else is doing if it's right then you should do it anyway like what like what would be some tangible thing that someone could do you should pursue making sure that some of these communities who have been you know who have been downtrodden since uh we had a codified discrimination in our laws that have never risen up make sure that that you're going out of your way to kind of provide resources make sure that you're looking at some of these issues when it comes to disparities in education when it comes to disparities in health care why black people were dying at such a rate when it came to covid unlike other communities take your time to look at the policies that have an impact on that and have conversations with people in those communities i think one of the unfortunate things that happened ali and i appreciate this conversation is that these the conversation between me and you don't happen a lot we talk through other people we talk through fox news or we talk through msnbc we need to have these conversations and we need to make sure that once we decide something is right and something needs to be dealt with not to let these other voices and other distractions stop us from doing what's right and there's a number of disparities that we could go in depth on that we really need to examine and see how we can fix some of these things because again people are suffering and i don't think it's something i i think it's something that again we should have a sense of urgency about because these are serious issues that i think could have been prevented if you know people in the church had stepped up sooner and i think where i think here's like one minor adjustment that people on the left and the right can make in these kind of conversations about like disparities in education disparities and abortion rates disparities in in poverty there are disparities between white and black people there are also disparities between asian and white people the the bigger disparities are really between classes more than between races i think something that people on the left need to understand is that not every disparity points to discrimination that's a logical fallacy what people on the right need to realize is that some disparities do point to discrimination that we shouldn't be searching for every other possibility that it could be when it may very well be discrimination but we can't on the left say every single disparity between every single group is because of racism or is because of discrimination i think that would actually blind us to other possibilities that need other solutions that could be fixed um because it could be class issues people in appalachia have been dying at the same rate as as people in inner cities um and so i think that we have to have and that's to me where critical race theory gets in the way is that some issues are racial issues some issues are class issues that we see as racial issues because of the length of critical race theory that prohibits us from actually looking at what the issues are but to your point we can't just say well that's critical race theory and so the end we need a sense of urgency into saying okay if it's a class issue if it's a racial issue whatever is causing this disparity let's get after let's get after making it right as much as as much as we can disparities will never be closed forever they just won't individuals are different um but if there is an injustice there if something wrong is happening there um then i agree with you there should be a sense of urgency on both sides to fix it i'm about finding solutions and so if that is not the problem then i want to identify what the problem is and i'm not one of those people you know i push back against that i think there are a lot of disparities and issues that are based on class and i push back on that all the time so i think that's something that we may be able to end with an agreement on yeah well thank you so much i really appreciate you taking the time if you could just tell everyone again where they can find you social media your book all that good stuff yes again i'm justin gibney uh i am the president of the ian campaign you can go to uh twitter and instagram and that's at and campaign a-n-d campaign or you can go to my personal which is at justin e gibboney g-i-b-o-n-e-y uh you can catch us there you also can go get our book which is compassion and conviction it's the ann campaign's guide to faithful civic engagement and we just really go over what we think it is to apply biblical values to the issues of the day and let people know that whether you're a republican or a democrat we can disagree and be and be christian but there are certain principles that we must all adhere to thank you so much i appreciate you taking the time to talk to us thanks for having me aly you take care you

Channel: Allie Beth Stuckey

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Rating: 4.8385649 out of 5

Keywords: Allie Stuckey, Allie Beth Stuckey, allie beth, relatable podcast, relatable with allie beth stuckey, relatable with allie stuckey, conservative woman, christian woman, apologetics, christian apologetics, podcast, theology, theology podcast, christian podcast, critical race theory, critical theory, liberation theology, justin giboney, and campaign, crtv, talk radio, talkradio, progressive christianity, blazetv, allie on blazetv, social justice, christian democrats, democrats, blaze

Id: BmJq7Ss38wQ

Length: 56min 17sec (3377 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021