The Trojan Horse - Ep. 1: Deconstructing Communities | Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay

[Music] [Music] Pete and James I believe you're aware of what happened with resolution nine the Southern Baptist Convention several weeks ago but I want to just read through some statements that I have taken from that resolution it's quite long to read through but I'm just gonna go through some of the main points that make the case that the committee was trying to make and this is addressing critical race theory and intersectionality which I think we would say that you have done more deep diving on this particular issue than just about anyone else let me start where as and this is from resolution nine from the Southern Baptist Convention where as critical race theory is a set of analytical tools that explain how race has and continues to function in society and intersectionality is the study of how different personal characteristics overlap and inform one's experience whereas evangelical scholars who affirm the authority and sufficiency of Scripture have employed selective insights from critical risks race theory and intersectionality to understand multi-faceted social dynamics whereas general revelation accounts for truthful insights found in human ideas that do not explicitly emerge from Scripture and reflects what some may term common grace whereas critical race theory and intersectionality alone are insufficient to diagnose and redress redress the root causes of the social ills that they identify so stating that they do identify them which result from sin yet these analytical tools can aid in evaluating a variety of human experiences resolved that critical race theory and intersectionality should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture not as transcendent ideological frameworks can you just give me your opinions on hearing that that would tell you that you have a very lovely wooden horse sitting outside your gate every word of that sounds wonderful nice varnish on the wood and what's inside is a hot mess that's it is letting something in that is in many respects parasitic and in many respects designed to be divisive and to increase salience awareness focus upon issues that have a political nature tied to race politics for the purposes of pushing identity politics into whatever it's trying to be inserted in this case the Southern Baptist Convention or whatever organization wants to adopt this subordinate to that which is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States right it's it comes in a pretty package but none of that sounds terrible and it's all superficially true it is a tool for analyzing race relations in society there are other tools that one might consider to be more rigorous but it is a tool and what that tools composed of is let's take a look at the word critical here what does the word critical mean the word critical means in this context looking at an extreme closeness analyzing particularly the use of language history etc in order to make problems related specifically to oppression more visible so that people will want to enact a revolution to overturn the power dynamics that are alleged to be a part of it that's critical critical means in a sense complaining about in a specific way to effect a radical political agenda to make problems visible that you wouldn't otherwise see now obviously there can be benefit to making problems visible but it is a method that is specifically designed to focus on problems and only on problems then there's the theory side critical race theory this theory is not the word theory that you might hear from scientists it's not the word theory that you might hear from you know a layperson I was like oh I have a theory about yeah this is a specific meaning of the term theory in the sense of sociology or social philosophy would be a better way to put it which is supposed to be some kind of an explanatory structure and in this case critical race theory is directly derived from a critical legal theory which does the same thing with law and tries to pick apart where the law is has been insufficient make problems visible in order to effect a political change and be postmodern theory and postmodern theory is this idea among many other things that knowledge is produced within various communities unique to that community that cannot then be evaluated from outside of that community so in the case of critical race Theory the way that gets applied is that say a person of whatever race people of whatever race I should say not a person of roughly have the same experiences in life of oppression based on their racial status or of dominance if that race happens to be one that's considered dominant white and they roughly have the same experiences in life so they roughly should have the same view of oppression and that gives them special insight that is not available to anybody else and so you have to defer to that as though it is true you can't possibly question that or doubt that or demand a different form or more rigor or another layer or level of analysis because that would be to voice another cultures process of legitimizing ideas upon a racial culture that doesn't necessarily embrace that so the claim would be the that group that identity group has knowledge that can't be questioned from outside of that group so you have no option other than to agree with it that's critical race Theory right and then the danger of well I think the first thing is when you take a look at a tool yeah I think the first question you have to to ask yourself is is this a tool of construction or is it a tool of destruction yeah jack hammer is a tool right exactly whichever that solvent is that you can buy that it'll dissolve any glue you've ever put down is a tool and in the sense that's a real issue right the intersectional framework is one where you start subdividing identity groups to try to claim so you as a human being as an individual are not to be viewed as an individual with your own agency you're to be viewed as an individual who is a combination of whichever identity groups you are in and each of those has its own essential experience of oppression particularly that gives you the lived experience as they call it that you have that confers knowledge upon you and then that is intimately related to the power dynamics not just as they happen to be in society now but as they are theorized to be based on history based on the hypothesis that a power dynamic once in place always works to justify and maintain itself and really can't be corrected that that idea is was from Audrey Lorde was articulated as the Masters tools cannot or will not dismantle the Masters house so it's a it's a heuristic or as its its originator as progenitor kimberlé crenshaw a practice of trying to winnow out more and more specific special interests within a population based on their identity markers and to claim that they have unique experiences that give them unique insight into the world that everybody else can't possibly criticize and have to listen to and agita I feel I think it's important at this stage to um hack a little bit what the Masters tools are won at you so some of the Masters tools in this case would be Reason logic science evidence Jesus let that sink in for a second the the argument from within critical race theory is that the people who invented those methods of legitimizing knowledge who happened to be white Western males straight and so what what have you built the method of legitimizing knowledge but we call science reason logic exegesis whatever happens to be specifically for the purpose of understanding knowledge the way they want to understand knowledge so that their power is maintained so that they can exclude what they call other ways of knowing the knowledge is plural of other cultures that within those cultures are equally true and they say that there's no external objective location to which you could retreat or back up and look and say okay no gods I've you know God's eye view from nowhere is what they actually sometimes call that it's the God's eye view from nowhere is what they refer to as the objective stance and they say that such a thing's not possible there's only the possibility of understanding a thing from within your cultural milieu right and your cultural Malou has its methods of making knowledge claims and you can't evaluate one from another so there's no way to say my reading if for this context my reading of scripture is more authoritative than yours my reading of history is more authoritative than yours it's not possible to make such claims because somebody else making it from another culture might say well I see it differently and because you don't understand the oppressions and the ways that we've been excluded from the conversation over however many hundreds of years of history it's not possible for you to even understand what we're talking about so you just have to accept by Fiat what we're saying so yeah it's even worse than Tom Nicholls idea of the death of expertise it's and this relates to many of the things that we talked about the other day about research justice about reality tunnels now you can see why someone who has this reality tunnel is way down here and the Alpha and the Gamma Quadrant and the people reason evidence etcetera are way up there in the Alpha Quadrant so that it really speaks at a very fundamental level to how you make better more discerning judgments about well would anything not just morality literally anything you could think of and there is a certain epistemological toolset that comes along with the standpoint of pistil knowledge even as named for yeah standpoint to smell it so the idea really is like a conspiracy theory with no conspirators it's that society each cultural group within society has its own use of language its own means of producing knowledge and that's only valid within that construct so if you want to appeal to logic to evidence to history to whatever they can say well we have a different logic reason and so on you exclude emotion is a huge one you exclude emotion from being a pathway to legitimate knowledge in and that creates several problems among the problems it creates are and this is what I would have asked Thaddeus rustle up the debate so when the claim comes to put a cross on your black neighbors lawn and lighted a blaze or you just say well you know that's their truth that's just their story that they have and I have my story and you have your story and what so I mean it I would be morally horrified that's why I yell for the audience answer the question because I knew for a fact the moment that Hicks asked the question it would just be obfuscation it would be anything but an honest straightforward answer to the question because that's almost what he has to do to maintain a position that's inherently indefensible but even beyond that when you start thinking about what that means absent the if if it's possible to bracket the moral it's just practical it's impossible to bracket though the the physical horror show and what if you have a dental pain what if you have tooth pain what are you gonna do go to the way you're gonna go to the witch doctor who's gonna sing a rain dance I mean the whole system is set up so that actually underscores the question is this just verbal behavior do people actually believe this or do they just give it lip service mm-hmm well and I think that what you can see and some of the things that you've just stated are evident within New Testament scholarship right now at the conservative evangelical reform level to actually derive the truth you must go through the different standpoint epistemologies because they might have the real truth as opposed to an objective truth right so let me talk about Sandpoint epistemology giving it kind of an analogy so people gonna understand it because it's a really counterintuitive idea for a lot of people so Sandpoint epistemology to speak kind of philosophically and broadly without the analogy is this idea that how you are situated in society meaning how you are situated and I as a identity and how that identity is related to power in society as written by theory in terms of how power works dictates what you can and cannot know a good way to understand standpoint epistemology is to think of it kind of like colorblindness that's caused by having a various identity group privilege okay so if the idea is that if you are in the dominant group you live in a world from the perspective of the dominant in a dominant world so you have one perspective the dominant perspective if you are a marginalized group you will have the marginalized perspective while living in the dominant world so you also have the dominant perspective as well as a marginalized perspective suggesting you have information which is the experience of oppression in this system that other people don't have this has a degree of sense to it there is something to this and it behooves us to listen to things that have been marginalized and excluded but listening is not the same as believing here I'll investigate that's a different thing from listen and belief shut up listen and believe is even further down that path so you can think of it like colorblindness if you happen to be the intersection of all the dominant things the most dominant things white straight male Western able-bodied the thin fit whatever they happen to be then it's like you can only see in greyscale you see the world everything's in the colours that you live in you have only grayscale vision everything's in black and white but then say that you're a woman instead that's like being able to pick up red so now you can see more of the world and we can look at this building we can say oh those bricks are very organized and well nice and level up but if we had a person who can see red you say oh it's red brick but we couldn't possibly know that without somebody to tell us how do we know it's not blue or green or what are those what do those words even mean if we actually can always see them grayscale now suppose it's a black woman then intersected identity this is intersectionality and how it uses standpoint epistemology to justify why people have marginalized identities have a special status that have to be listened to and believed now it's like adding in green so the person can see red and green add in like disability status or a sexual minority now they can see in shades of blue as well you can add in you know we're gonna start running out of colors but you can just continue to add more dimensions like they can see an ultraviolet they can see an infrared - you can add more and more layers of depth that you get the more intersected identities you have in standpoint epistemology is the idea that it is possible that the people who have more experiences of marginalization therefore have more access to see the world and understand the world and access truth that people who live with dominance simply cannot possibly understand and the belief is such that this is so pernicious and so total in the same sense that the same total as you see in total depravity totalizing you know over everything infecting every part of your being privileged in fact every part of you being that you can't possibly understand the experience of somebody who can see in a different color then you can just as if you were truly colorblind and have no idea like they say that there's some people who are so-called tetrachromats who can detect a fourth basic color a very few very very rare they're all women for various biological reasons and it's like that they have the ability to see a richness of color that nobody else has and that's what standpoint epistemology connects to oppression that's what intersectionality uses to claim that the oppressed person has knowledge that you cannot possibly understand and you just have to believe pretty much literally on faith on their testimony that some people's testimony because of who they are and their identity is superior to that of other people and the only thing more privileged can do people can do is listen they can't understand they actually can't even fully empathize because they're outside of it you have to be able to meet somebody to empathize and they can't adjudicate between competing testimonies exactly hmm so if you look at this from the perspective of this is a faith that states that it has believed an objective truth has has objective standards has a confessional process has an exegetical method that it's been committed to for years then all of the sudden with a crisis being reported that we must deal with these things now and this has brought in as an analytical tool in terms of in terms of understanding how we need to deal with these things where else would you see that happen and what would you say what would you say okay go ahead Pete well you know I was laughing for the the way that you explained that it really is the Trojan horse but it's even in a sense worse than a Trojan horse because what it has in it is our horrific parasitizing ideologies that almost like vampire ideologies but we see this in the academy we've already seen it played out and if all you would need to do is you would need to look at a system where it's played out and look at multiple systems where it's played out plot the trajectories of those and then ask yourself what is different about the any other system that could withstand this Trojan horse parasitizing that none of our secular institutions could withstand a good example would be the Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington which melted down pretty famously a couple of years ago it's not difficult to track exactly how this worked what happened was critical race theory and intersectionality were brought in as core tenants and what they called an equity plan for the college what can i I'm sorry can I interrupt ooh yes of course so that is one of the words that I think we have to talk about and it's a key word when people hear equity they have to know that it's not what they think it is it doesn't mean what they think it means and that's time to start paying attention when you hear the word equity boom okay go ahead yeah because if equity meant the same thing as people think which is equality there would be synonyms and you wouldn't have to use the word equity equity is defined to mean adjusting share so that people are made equal it is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity it's you know jimmying the system so that everything comes out fair on the end no matter what the inputs were going in effort Mary etc plus the starting place question so at the Evergreen State College they introduced this with the equity plan and the whole campus more or less adopted it with one exception professor Brett Weinstein who did not accept it and vocally did not accept it and ended up the center of a riot and he wasn't fired from the college but they ended up leaving the College in not a good way and the campus devolved literally to the point where angry students were roving campus and mobs with bats right and they were pulling people out of the cars outside the college presumably looking for Brett Weinstein or other people who they might have associated with them and you had this complete meltdown of anything like order or anything like education utterly and totally and the reason is because critical race theory has this nice Trojan horse even when I described that colorblindness standpoint epistemology it's easy to say there might be something to that and this is the trick is hmm if you think about it there's something there yeah there's something but they're asking for a lot more than what that nice simple something is that's the difference between listen and shut up and listen and believe and so what came with it would the equity plan was a number of the more recent developments in critical race theory and intersectionality as they're applied to education which include concepts especially like white fragility the idea is from critical race theory that are imported on this are that racism is everywhere it is always it is imminent throughout Society and so anytime there's anything that can be read that's the critical part anything that can be read as racist as a manifestation of a systemic problem that leads just beneath the surface and occasionally pops up exactly mmm so therefore every instance of racism is a isn't some jerk did something racist and we're talking about the most possibly small close reading maybe somebody could construe it as racist because they said they were offended and you can't deny their truth because the standpoint epistemology it could be the smallest tiny thing it's not an example of a guy who transgressed or like even me saying a guy instead of a person it's not proof that I've transgressed it is proof that latent Lee I have sexism that's part of my entire worldview that's been baked into me by the way that I've been conditioned to think by a whole society that's infected with this that can only be cured by revolution which is what happened at Evergreen and caused it to melt down right because it comes out with these ideas like racism is everywhere always it's imminent everyone participates in it whites automatically benefit from it and can't help but do so so there's sort of extra complicity the only way to deal with that is to do anti-racist work that's what they call it anti-racist that's like think of it almost like a brand name it's a very specific term it's not this general term and oh that's what I think it means it means that you must constantly look for ways in which you and others around you are participating in the deep system that's just under the surface and always hiding and hides in subtle ways so you have to buy into the ideology systemic racism of systemic racism and constantly look for it in yourself and in others and point it out to make it more visible so that you might lead people to want to effect the revolution so this Rev this particularly the account remember the plank you were eight I think was the last one it's not really asking people to adopt what they think it's asking them to adopt it's asking them to take in an entirely different world view that's in many senses not only incompatible but will eat away the values that they have yeah one of the core tenets is the work of anti racism is never done never you can't do it right you've never damn finish and then never accomplished yeah it's never it can never be accomplished and then they they safeguard this off of these very again superficially interesting at least ideas like white fragility white fragility is an idea that is from us coloring in Robyn D'Angelo she wrote the idea down in 2011 she's got a big book 2018 about it big tour all around it she speaks all over the place about something book by the way yeah to a lot of churches she's spoken to the idea of white fragility is that if you in any way disagree with any of this critical race Theory if you in any way disagree it's because you don't have the racial stamina to do the anti-racism work to constantly re-examine yourself and find your hidden racism that you automatically participate in if you ignore it that's a manifestation of your white fragility that's proving that you are complicit in the system and that you're unwilling to do the work if you just go away from it that's because you're too fragile to get engaged you're unwilling to engage and I bring up white fragility but that's the tip of an iceberg that is characterized critical race and social justice scholarship for the past decade at least and really going back I would say pushing back at least a 2004-5 the scholarship is all been converging upon this idea that any kind of disagreement whatsoever is either a character failure like literally participation in white supremacy grade character failure a failure to be willing to engage because you can't handle it or your fragile your fragile your privilege is made you too weak you've become too comfortable in your privilege to want to do the work to believe the system or that you are somehow actively complicit in it which just parenthetically you could substitute literally anything for white fragility as jim has so yeah yeah you other forms of privilege male fragility if a woman comes up and says you're being toxically masculine and you say I don't think I am or they accuse you of hegemonic traditional masculinity like you saw on the American Psychological associations report on how to deal with men and boys that came out last year and you say I don't think that's what this is or you know the things you're calling toxic masculinity in certain contexts certainly are a problem but in other contexts like you know a war where we're literally defending our soil or like we had happen to us the other night where we're walking down the street and all of a sudden we see a sexual assault occurring right and a couple of us decide to turn and intervene that sometimes that willingness to go do that this toxic masculinity defend impulse is valuable to see that would be say oh that's male fragility you're afraid to engage in your anti patriarchy work right there is no win there's no way to win so let's say finally is there no win there's only Lukas perennial loss there's perennial losing so let's say that you do capitulate you go along with it right you did it wrong no matter what you did you did it wrong why because critical race Theory going back to it's very founder Derrick Bell law professor at Harvard operates off of what's called the interest convergence theory which leads them to rewrite history but also to analyze events in terms of you would only possibly decide to go along with critical race theory as a privileged person for example or do the anterior system work if you identify that it's in your best interest to do so as a white person to position yourself and these are technical terms as a good white Barbara Applebaum is another one of these major critical race and intersectionality educators the pedagogy the theory scholars and she had a book a couple of years ago called being good being white and it's talking about how when you try to do the anti-racism work unless you do it exactly to satisfaction which is never quite possible because of the critical thing because of the interest convergence it was actually in your interest if you go and you try to make yourself less racist and you go and you try to help a minority that you feel has been excluded and do whatever to help them out now you're positioning yourself as a good white you are trying to give yourself extra status in this new community that you didn't really earn you're just trying to make yourself look good for other people ajan and back to the resolutions imagine the incredible extra epistemological and ontological baggage that seemingly innocuous statement brings in right to the point where today there are many articles and books and so forth that are within the evangelical community this isn't on the fringe that are asking the question can a white person be saved can a white person legitimately be considered a Christian that's not surprising at all because the concept of privilege within critical race theory or intersectionality more generally I should say operates in exact parallel to total depravity it is a form of power that corrupts you to want to maintain and preserve it and that were conditions you white fragility to not be willing to engage with the hard spiritual work of undoing that right so then the introduction of something that would be like a woke church then if you know because you're coming from a perspective that's outside the church and you hear someone's now with these concepts and ideologies are legitimizing the idea of a woke church I mean think about it for just like this though you have the idea let's say that you adopt critical race tools and you adopt the idea that somehow white privilege is a sin complicity with the problem and remember everyone is complicit and whites benefit most so that's a sin it's a cardinal sin that's somehow attached to being white whatever that actually means given that people are all kinds of ethnicities and classified is white but then the last tenant was it's never done it's never accomplished so that's your sin there's no way to work your sin off there's no way to atone for your sin there's no wait they say that you know become an ally well Ally shops problematic act in solidarity well that's problematic get involved in research Justin well you probably did it wrong forward Black Voices well how are you gonna afford them without putting yourself in there somehow the work is never done so you have a sin that's there's there's no path if it's never done to be done so if that's considered a let's say a damnable sin how are you going to go to heaven it's completely theologically consistent to make that argument if you want to adopt critical race theory as that kind of a tool right but you were saying something before Peter well you wanted me to be completely honest so the the problem let's forget about Christianity for a moment let's bracket that let's talk about Islam for a moment or any other so it's also being introduced into right right or something not so close to home that doesn't invoke in a defensive posture so let's say that there's another religion part of the danger if if you're not part of that religion is to look at somebody who self-identifies as part of that religion and say AHA he's not a real Muslim because he's not he drinks alcohol or he's not blowing stuff up or in the most vulgar expression or he's not doing X Y & Z so I think we need to be very careful about looking at a religion and having the most fundamentalist interpretation of that religion when we're not belonging to that and looking and superimposing a time on someone else okay now let's come back to this you mentioned the idea of a woke church I'll be incredibly blunt with you when I see members from the wolf church I'll say one thing before I drop the bomb I understand that many people self-identify it's Christians Liberation Theology in the light 90s or I've even spoken there there are fringe but there are lines of literature in which there are Christians who self-identify as christians who don't believe in the historicity of Christ right now Marcus Borg yeah okay that's it straight CA which I write that's hard for me fundamental tenets yeah but you can self-identify as anything you won't want I mean but but now let's get back to the woke church it's very difficult for me as an outsider when somebody says that they participate in this it is like there is an extra religion there so it's less clear to me and this is not an exegetical question this is not like oh this person has this interpretation of Scripture or this book no this is a whole new thing this is a whole something else that's there so this is a it's not even a hybrid it's like it's it's something else and from the out I'll just pay for myself from the outside when I see this this is not identifiable in any sense it's even I'm even going to go a step beyond that that's less identifiable is anything Christian than the guy who self the woman the person that they who self-identifies as a Christian who doesn't believe in the historicity of Jesus Wow so let's say that someone says alright I'm an outsider right so it's not like I'm I have some kind of you have to have this as your patient you have to go through these rituals you know you you have to have some no I don't need a confession etc if you hold this particular tenet of belief and so forth if you're not because I've seen how this ideology this it's like a mimetic ideology it's we think of evolution in terms of a strictly biological component but there are evolutionary processes of ideas I see how this has really spun and again the Presta ties is really the best word and it latches on to whatever cognitive structure one has and it just washed the content into something that's unrecognizable but yet the the sneakiest the throat I love the Trojan horse neighing the stickiest part about this is that to a person these folks think that they're doing I wanted to say God's work but good things like this is Dan Dennett the philosopher Dan Dennett the atheist philosopher Dan Dennett from Tufts idea of belief and belief they believed in their beliefs they believed that this is a good thing to hold these beliefs and to do this so much so that there are and you can parse out the differences basically what I would love to get someone here and just ask them to hire are who we prioritize some of these beliefs mm-hmm so let's say that someone says all right we hear what you're saying and we agree that hard intersectionality that the real hardcore kimberlé crenshaw understanding of things that it's being applied across the sciences everywhere within our society we believe that that's too far but we believe that there could be and tell me what you hear of this new term that I've heard several times now in the last couple months but we we believe in a soft intersectionality as soon as you hear the word soft intersectionality what does that are Trojan horse it's nicer I mean depends on who's who's saying this but if I heard that if I were the hardcore intersectional person okay I'd say what is this white people in the Southern Baptist Convention introducing soft intersectionality is some kind of palette we'll form for white people is a white intersectionality nice job that problematize that to the ground this is white people trying to cash in on a thing that's popular now right do you know how easy it is to be cynical about something that's all this is it's oh this is interest convergence that's white people trying to cash in on anything so that they can attract the youth or not it's not good for other people yeah it's not just the cynicism although it certainly is cynicism it's the institutionalization of these things so my guess is that the next step you'll see is how these ideas become institutionalized in within individual churches organizations etc I'm Tanya it's inevitable I guarantee it oh yeah well I would say that a lot of this was brought in because the concepts that were introduced well let's say more of the strategies 10-12 years ago that look when we look at the millennial generation in the generation that will be coming after that the things that they care the most about we've done our surveys is they care the most about social justice that the demographics of the United States and other areas throughout Europe etc is going to change there's going to be a purposeful intent to change the demographics to in many ways to to break or to fracture the strong cultural influences to really develop a more multicultural understanding which eventually I believe will be a monoculture but we understand this is happening so for us to go from what would be a 1950's model of strategic church growth we need to adopt really a 21st century looking at the realities of things and if we want to actually exist as a faith within this this whole societal construct we have to move along with that change have fun with that right just wait oh wait you know you're you don't buy in like correctly to intersectionality which you can't possibly do if you're white in particular but really pretty much anybody because privilege is relative and somebody's always less privileges than you are and therefore can call you on it well you're not a real Christian then good luck with that Oh what we need is at our at our conferences that our churches in our administrative or hierarchical structures of how things are governed we need representation that's more diverse and inclusive we need to make sure our churches are more inclusive we need to promote equity in terms of how pastors theologians and so on are paid so that's the big three right it's kind of like the Holy Trinity of this thing is diversity equity and inclusion some people have termed diversity inclusion and equity might spelled I usually they don't they usually call our agent laugh at that I mean that's that's really a serious issue but these were again our Trojan horses themselves they sound nice but what do they mean okay we're gonna we're gonna encourage diversity what does diversity mean why do we need diversity do it mean that we need to bring in you know people have studied this sector the this interpretation of the Bible and this one and get them to debate and try to clarify our understanding for no it doesn't mean that it means that black people have a fundamentally different view of the world so you just need black person and all black people think the same apparently well they have the same experiences is the idea and the the that experience informs their thing so you're going to have to start having say a you're gonna have to have a certain number of women you're gonna have to have a certain number of black people you're gonna have to have a certain number of Hispanics you know okay how well equity would say that it's gonna have two most of the theories of equity say you're gonna have to achieve parity right how do you achieve parity well actually parity is not good enough because if you look historically they've been excluded so we're gonna boost up a little bit from parity equity that's equity that's equity an application that's not equality that's equity and then you're gonna have to have all of these things like oh look your church through whatever circumstances maybe your church and it has very few people of whatever identity category that applied for such a thing right they did there just aren't applicants for whatever reason for whatever position so we're looking at administrative positions in all of this or it'll rise up through the ranks there's just not that many I'd actually met Chandler who is the pastor of I believe it's called village Church in Texas which is a large multi campus and I believe there might be trimming down uh some of those campuses but Matt was traditionally understood as a reformed Calvinistic preacher but what he has famously said is look if my leadership team comes to me and we're looking for a new leadership position at one of our churches and they said look we have an Anglo eight in an african-american seven I'm gonna take the african-american seven right over the purposes of understanding equity exactly and then what's going to happen is if let's say that you hire every african-american applicant that applied everyone to achieve equity as best you could and you came out with like six percent and then parity would have had to be 11% or 12% or whatever it is and then beyond that to make up for historical injustice is you really need to be hitting a 20% benchmark the reason you have 6% is because you have a racist Church so guess what you're going to talk about all the time how are we secretly racist how are we doing racist things you aren't gonna be able to get away from these conversations that's the only thing that's really going to be allowed to be talked about you're gonna go talk about a Bible said you're gonna pull up a verse now you have to talk about it in terms of how that Bible verse it governs everything comes up how is racism involved in that what does it say about racism how is it how is it racist itself did they talk about and if you don't talk about it you're fragile yours you're refusing to engage you're not doing your any races your racers don't have racial stamina and you aren't probably doing so because you are part of that imminent complicit of racism that lays underneath everything that's all you're allowed to talk about that's the critical part you keep looking and looking and looking and looking till you find examples of the imminence because you know is already there but what do we call it hold up what do you call it when you look for evidence of the thing that you claim is there and then when you find the evidence you say okay so everything we know everything's racist how do we know boom something races happen see that's a proof that everything's racist that's called circular reasoning you started with the thing you that's what you're basing it on and the conversations will continue and what happens is so the goal is to attract people to be with a 21st sentence what the young people want oh my god here's what's going to happen you have your congregation that's gonna be made up of X percent they're gonna be answered sitting in this stuff it's gonna be interesting made up of why percent they hate this stuff it's gonna be made up of people kind of close to each of those then it's gonna be made up of a wide majority of people who are there to go to church they don't want their church to be out racial politics they don't want to think about this all the time they don't want to squabble they don't wanna be accused of race racism all the time they don't wanna be accused of subscribing to some weird notion of sexuality or something like this that's horrible makes them a horrible person they want to be told their gender doesn't exist if they have to accept this they don't hear any of it and so they're gonna hear it they're gonna be like I'm just not gonna go to this church not because the pastors got any particular problem it's because the community becomes obsessed with it and so the middle starts to fall out churches have got to pay for themselves I hate to make it about money all organizations have to fund themselves and when the middle drops out you're not financially solvent anymore unless you have something that's filling the middle unless you have something that's pouring money and to keep it going right correct right and I think the scary part about this is is that you just identified every problem we were talking about the epistemological problem did we're talking about the idea of collectivism you know and I had stated before that well that their assumption or actually their assertion is that all black people think the same all Latino people think the same all Asian women think the same therefore we must have one to have that particular epistemic Island that exists so we understand that oppressed community exactly and I so understand that oppression specifically not to understand like it's not like they know physics better than somebody else it's to understand oppression so they can talk about oppression so or really do something about a prayer in this case the gospel and let me tell you let me tell you how I know that this is what it does to an organization not only have I seen it happen in very since we came out with the work that we've done in the past couple of years looking into this countless people have emailed us and told us this is happening in my hiking club they describe the dynamic it's the same thing as just described this is happening in my knitting community to describe the dynamic this will just happen this is happening in my legal professional association this narrows juggler but nursing their this is where I saw this we are atheists we were active in the Atheist and the New Atheism movement you know sorry guys it happened there right and that's where you start talking about that huge middle who doesn't want to go to conferences the financial thing that keeps it going the energy that keeps it going it keeps it building keeps it interesting and vibrant they don't wanna go to conferences anymore where it's gonna be people squabbling over who's gonna be who about some racial thing or get accused of something their parity at conferences or what's going to happen is there will be factions that build up that are into this and they're gonna demand that at conferences etc their speakers get priority and if you don't you're sexist you're racist your auntie this your auntie that and if so what's going to happen is at first people are gonna bend over and accept this oh we can't we don't want to be that you know we're trying to do the right thing so let's put some on there and that's your first mistake and then what happens is there's their honor Oh people didn't come to your people didn't necessarily come to see those but maybe it's fine at first but then they're gonna take whoever your big names are whoever your big draw is whoever your biggest people are I don't know who they are whoever they are I can bet you within a year or two they're gonna have some secret racism discovered in them and they're problematic and we're not going to go to your conference if that racist is allowed to speak so now your big draw guy he's out he's not allowed up there anymore and they're gonna replace him with five people that nobody really wants to listen to this peddling their message and what happens is people won't go to the events because a they're less interesting and B they're probably gonna get called a name for going now they went to this event that was branded as racist who wants to go to a racist event how are you gonna financially support that and it could be a church it could be an event it could be whatever this is what they do this is how this works we watched them do it to the atheist movement you never knew that a theism was kind of on this rocket ship ride 2004 sam harris wrote at the end of faith boom shot out of a cannon just fly into the stars Richard Dawkins God Delusion right after that Christopher Hitchens God is not great all these big things and then you said to him do the headliners what happened to him sexist racist whatever it happened to be all of a sudden they start making conferences and if one of them's going to be at it with Richard Dawkins you got invited to one of these conferences a couple of years ago they decided that something that he had said about Muslim women was so or women in knows Muslim women and feminism may be compared there was a funny video that came out comparing extreme feminist people to extreme Muslims showing how their extremely similar and then how they have this weird relationship where they don't criticize each other where you think they would and he praised this video and they canceled his membership caused him so much stress problematized him accused him of so many things the poor guy is old he had a stroke almost died as a result of this and they could take him off he's not allowed at conferences anymore we're gonna put five of our people in instead don't worry it'll draw the same crowd well it doesn't draw the same crowd that's not how anything works and so if you guys are gonna introduce this good luck with that the old-school atheists of me and I don't mean to be rude to you all the old-school atheists of me it's kind of like okay mission accomplished from if we were still in the new atheist movement really up with it we would haven't mission accomplished they screwed themselves watch their church split crumble fall apart financially destroy itself unless there is something that is actually providing the finances unless those things funneling money in them you have to be right as it might be maybe the new grid work or the new framework because it has its act together logistically to be the new intersectional there will be no organic means for it to sustain itself after just a few years because they make everything about problems they complain about stuff constantly they will find problems ever your good point you know Lorne you go to the conference's Center but I'd like to if it's okay I'd like to take a step back because I think what this conversation has been missing so far our ways for people who are watching this to identify when this is happening like how do I know this is happening in my doesn't have to be a church can be in literally and he said nursing yeah I mean I'll give it to you what about my son's school forget Church okay so I get the emails my son was in Portland Public Schools my daughter is still in Portland Public Schools and I get emails and when I see the word equity boom I know that's it when you start seeing people throw around the word equity that's it and if you're fortunate enough to have a conversation with one of these people I would like to suggest a question what who's me why do you use the word why are you using the word equity instead of equality and I would wait and if they don't know the question the answer to that question then they have bought into the whole milieu they have bought into the ideology I receive a barrage of emails for from a University where I teach and the overwhelming majority of these emails and I don't mean like you know nine out of ten I mean like nine hundred and ninety nine thousand out of my you know the they're all about the same thing are they abut do you think that's oh how do we distribute grades how do we write a syllabus what do we do with an unruly student who stands up and or what do we do if there's a active shoot or whatever it is no no that never I don't think I've received a single email about that it's always diversity inclusion equity always how do we you know and now they're big into but the basic the idea is how do you know that you're swimming in this pond because it's the old story of the lobster and the pot and so I think it's you know the lobster doesn't know that it's in the pot and then it's just the water keeps getting hotter and then it just dies so I think the key is you look for the word equity as opposed to word equality you look for the constant emails barrage messages of the word diversity if we need diversity and then I wouldn't be honest I would ask what do you mean by diversity I don't know I'm not religious at all I'm not a Christian I would ask you know what role should ideological diversity play in the church I mean it'd be kind of weird I don't know to have a Christian Church and have like Hindus singing hymns in there but but it would seem to me that within the well you haven't been to an Anglican or Episcopalian Church but any no I'm not no no I'm sure that so forth and yes no but I mean it's some there has to be some basic participation in the foundational beliefs but I would imagine that there's a some leverage for how those things are interpreted well when that gets overridden by everything Jim talks about that's not that it's no it the whole thing will just cease yeah what are you gonna do if somebody comes and says well we're gonna make this aspect of our church experience be about anti-racism work and then that's happening oh no no no but what are you gonna do let's say you're the you're the guy in the pew and the pastor says we're gonna make this portion of the sermon or the whole church experience be about anti-racism work and you say you know pastor I don't know about that and then that is taken as proof that you need it you saying wait a minute equals proof you need more of it how do you fight back against that and so what happened a drew to the analogy to the Evergreen State College before what happened there is you had an entire faculty and many in the student body and certainly many in the administration who had bought into this program and understood these concepts and they knew that they had no recourse but to go along they knew and they didn't there's some who just cynically they're like I know this is wrong but I'm scared so I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do anything there's cowards there are others who were afraid in the sense I don't want to be called a racist I don't wanna be branded as a racist there are others who are I don't want to be a racist maybe it's right maybe there's something to it that I don't get and I don't want to be that but what you are completely disarmed if what gets taken off the table is your ability to raise your hand and say wait a minute Barbara Applebaum being good being white which is about complicity with white supremacy which is everywhere always explained that the only legitimate way to question critical race theory or intersectionality is to ask questions to clarify such that you will have eventual agreement cannot accumulate current oh sorry uh Robyn D'Angelo gives you one pathway to deal with white fragility if you disagree if you stay silent if you get upset if you go away white fragility guilty as charged you have to agree yeah and I want it I want to add to that again I don't know the dimensions of churches to say the least I'm not a religious man but I know what happens in the Academy and how it functions and I'll tell you from the beginning of the Academy up until a few years ago it was always acceptable always to ask somebody what is your evidence for that always how do you know that you always had a culture of you you know publishing or always just too strong but certainly for the last 150 years you had a culture of writing scholarship it became refined publishing we were spoken speaking today about what happened to Bruce Gilley you have an idea that's a heterodox idea or something that doesn't comport with the dominant cultural narrative or value system Bruce Gilley wrote in this paper the case for colonialism it is irrelevant what you think about colonialism of you none of us are colonial sex but none of us have published in colonialism I have know the content of the article isn't relevant what is relevant is that he played the game he went through the rules he popped that's literally his job literally his job is to publish and if he doesn't he gets fired it's called publish or perish so they wanted to take his PhD thousands of signatures online they wanted him removed from his job they wanted his tenure taken away the journal editor got incredible death threats they had to retract the article now I'm not saying this is going to happen in churches but this is the type of ideology this is the nasty the two pretty horrific ideology and the sorts of people you see who subscribe to this ideology it is wicked because they perceive themselves as doing the Lord's work to eradicate racism and this is a manifestation of race and of course we don't want actual true racism and the thing is is that what's being introduced is I think as James and I had talked about the other day is that critical race theory especially is introducing strategic racism yeah and what what it's also doing that the example I gave you is an extremum but I meant it to illustrate that what's happening is a culling of voices that don't go along with the dominant narrative we call them I'm telling you don't believe anything about the church all you need to do is look at academia all you need to do is look at where it James - more from Google look at other places where this has happened if you voice an idea that in any way could be considered anti egalitarian or what would it you can look it up with the with evergreen the Evergreen situation Bret Weinstein even raised the question where is the evidence where is the evidence that evergreen is a racist institution the evidence doesn't support this what's the evidence and you know what they told him you asking for evidence is proof of your racism right that is the because you would just believe that's a coffin kafka trap it's so what I'm saying to you is dude what's a Kafka traffic in just a Kafka trap just go ahead so not too long but a caf-co trap is when you are going to be if say you're charged with a crime of some kind and you confess to it that you're found guilty right but you're charged with a crime and you say I didn't do it it wasn't me you give any kind of a thing and then your response is taken as proof of your guilt that's everything as proof of your guilt right that's the whole thing is a big Kostka trap you can't say no no but my point too about the Academy was that we have created AK institutions were asking for evidence for things like safe spaces trigger warnings and microaggressions is evidence of racism asking for evidence in in an institution whose whole point is to look for evidence and justify arguments and why because critical race Theory operates on the assumption that knowledge is perd evidence evidentiary knowledge is just a white man's tool it is the man's tool it is the Western tool and outside of that paradigm where that's valued it doesn't mean anything so it isn't inherently white supremacists question it is a tool that was invented by white people for white people to maintain their hegemonic domination over other I mean how could forget about an institution how could you do anything without asking people well why do you know that why do you think what's your evidence then why do you believe why should I do this what should I do it I mean when you don't do that with your finances you don't you don't do that with your diet you don't do that with you go to people who have cultivated an expertise and it's also not you're not being a Berean which is one of the Christian foundations in terms of making sure that look whatever you're telling me I want to make sure that I'm comparing it against what we believe to be objective truth in terms of the scripture which is our Authority well you're not doing that or that you when you are doing that you have to look at it from a different perspective now as opposed to where you didn't and that here's the funny thing well it's not funny this is serious is that you're coming into this without any real true deep knowledge on what's really happening within Christian churches I would say Protestant Christian churches Pentecostal churches Roman Catholic churches within Islam I can assure you that's true it's it's it's well I know that it is and that's what I'm saying that's what I'm saying no it's kind I don't it's coming and so what I'm trying to tell a lot of the folks that I've been speaking to they're like this is happening it's an attack on the Protestant evangelical church like no it's an attack on everything right now everything I can give you an example of how deeply impossible it is we've talked about oh you didn't agree whatever let's take another step you say okay I want to do my anti-racism work how do I do it and they tell you to go read some stuff well if you didn't agree with every conclusion you didn't engage properly engaging in what's called privilege preserving epistemic pushback that's Alison Bailey okay so let's say you say well I want to do my anti-racism work what do I need to do and like well you need to understand the oppression from the perspective of somebody who experiences it because it's the only people who know it so you need to find a person of color to teach you about that and you say you're a person of color will you teach me about that no they can't because it's epistemic exploitation epistemic exportation nor Berenstain 2016 wrote about epistemic exploitation which occurs anytime a person with privilege or power asks a marginalized person to explain the lived experience and do that work such that they understand which improves them and makes them a good dominant person who has done their anti-racism work so you're exploiting that you can only possibly learn about marginalization or oppression by talking to somebody who actually experiences it there's no other possible way but to do that is a form of exploiting them which is racist you can only learn about racism by talking to somebody who experiences racism which is everybody who is that has the identity whether they claim to or not and then if you ask them to explain it which is the thing that they demand of you you're exploiting them which is racism this is what their theory this is the this is the state of critical race theory since roughly 2010 this is what the theory says it is infecting every field you can not every field thereof every field every time even the STEM fields in the Academy yeah right the way they do that is they create a parallel thing all right critical nutrition studies next to nutrition studies they start picking at nutrition studies until they get taken seriously salmon its geography feminist geography until that gets taken seriously you could go post-colonial theology critical race theory so then you have theology critical race Theory post-colonial theology although there's three different kinds of theology but what do you have here well you have this one that's focused on justice of RACI of this this focus on justice of whatever colonialism represents then you have the one that's not focused on justice is that the one you want you want the one that's not justice so they create this parallel thing that's designed to complain about and point out problems with with the main thing to give itself legitimacy this is how a vampire looks like a person he called it a vampire ideology it looks like a person you invite it into your house and it can bite you on the neck and drain your blood and kill you and extend its own life it looks like the thing Oh critical race theory it's a form of theology it's legitimized as a form of theology by the very name all it does is attack the other kind of theology and then eventually when it gets enough credibility it sets itself in opposition is as well whether that we're the critical race kind you're the chauvinist kind pick whichever one you want I'm sure your free miss chauvinist be a racist this is how it operates I wish I was exaggerating I wish I hadn't read this theory to know this and the other part of this is when you see this manifest in organizations and don't think oh well the pastor hasn't read this book so therefore it we're safe from this well it is a it's like a pond that does ripples there are there are i lost my thought because what I wanted to say what I wanted to say in this is the conclusion that I wanted to to give I don't know why I find this so heartbreak it's kind of emotional I don't know why it's emotions I'm not religious at all but bring it out man it just it will just destroy a community because I've seen it destroy every community that I've seen it destroy the communities that I love and the one of the ways that it destroys it is it creates a toxic caustic silence you're constantly afraid that you're going to transgress yeah you can even when I teach and I teach ethics I don't teach you know math or a county taught math but when you're in the center of this you're not just walking on eggshells it's a certain point there was a great article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed and actually Peter Brown has it was a noted anthropologist from Emory weighed in on this and when he weighed in on this I mean some big names have been weighed in on this the idea that not only is there a silence but there are things you won't talk about you won't teach and I guess people go to church you know anything of my grandparents they went to church they always said the Catholic Church they always sat in the second-to-last Pew and they would bring me there with them and everybody was really nice to me when I went there and in Brookline Massachusetts and I just think of like just decent people going about their day doing their thing and then just having this weight on them and really a kind of sense it's even worse than the sarsen silence like you're yes you say there's things desire did you say there's things you can't talk about disease you can teach there are people you can't associate with right right okay so let's say that you get accused of being racist and not doing your anti-racism work and it gets the round that's the rumor you know Michael doesn't do his anti-racism work he's kind of a racist hanging out with you is legitimizing that so you can't be hung out with so put your scarlet R on your chest it's not just silence it's the it's the death of friendship let me ask you you're you're religious I'm not religious I haven't been to church in a very long time I'm supposed to confess that from my previous previous religious experience we'll work on that today some day I'm confessing now not to make light but what is a church if it's not a community yeah if you take the community that what is a church what the ekklesia is the called out ones called out of the world into community they are in the world but not of it and but now what's happening is that you must be of the world you must be of the intersection and and I want to go back to something he said because I have been thinking about that it was in court but when you said it I was like wow I have had in the back of my mind that if this were at the height of the new atheist movement and when you know we were extremely involved in that if I wanted a plan if I were going to design a plan to bring down the whole all of Christianity let's end Christianity how do we do it um yeah how would you do it make them woke yep it'll eat itself from the inside and then I'd be I'm not the old guard atheist therefore I I alluded to earlier people can believe what they want I'm happy about that let them then we'll talk you know we'll figure this out we'll figure out what's true together but that's not what the goal is if I wanted to end there totally want to know what's true if know it but if I were the old-school angry atheist is like let's just throw rocks at the cathedral till it falls down and start making woke pastors and sending them in because they're gonna tear everything apart because gonna make everything about identity it's inevitable and it's all they talk about justice justice justice what does justice mean justice means something to do with equity inclusion bla bla bla what does inclusion mean inclusion means that nobody ever gets offended how're you gonna do that yes censor speech so you don't talk about things you know what's being good being white something something the trajectory of your own demise well you were just telling you this is what's gonna happen as a know if I was still the angry atheist that I was at one point in my life that I think was a fool I would this is the plan that I would imagine like do you know what to do nobody he'd never had now let's take perspective on that I know we're laughing about that but then think about it that's not just being done in the Christian Church and with it within the pail of Orthodoxy that's happening everywhere it's happening everywhere and that's why we are deeply concerned about this problem you can't turn on the TV and watch an ad for a razor right without being hit in the faith you can't we said by buying a bag of Oreos without yet having a gender pronoun you know push with it there are no cookies but then you have the American Psychological Association saying that traditional masculinity is getting close to mental disorder you know who would have had a field day with that Michel Foucault who's documenting the way that madness has been scripted by doctors and psychologists in order to get rid of dissidents Michele Foucault the mr. post-modernism for dr. post-modernism I guess if you want the the Joker figure to bat you know the Batman styled Joker figure of this whole enterprise what had a field day with the fact that the APA has decided to assign traditional masculinity as a medical condition a psychiatric condition that needs treatment well and think about what this does as well in the field of apologetics is that you have had men that have taken apologetics especially with the challenges of modernism that have come in and been able to defend the faith rigorously men like dr. RC sproule that passed away a few years ago men like dr. James white other men that have been really truly becoming to the scriptures as well historically as well as the general revelation around them and really crafting disk demolishes that practice there is no more actual progress in that field and then inability ain't cancelled that's what's that's the next thing canceled yes because we cancelled the wrong videos are canceled and what you're gonna hear if I might predict it what you're gonna hear over and over again is are going to hold up some icon of some identity a woman racial minorities sexual minority something and they'll say a church that doesn't have room for this person doesn't have room for any of us actually I don't know if you know that but that's actually was just said by dr. Russell Moore the Southern Baptist Convention tell you in reference to Beth Moore who's Owen exactly what did I tell you right so the the push for Galit arianism the push for equity within the church right so that's actually happening and here's the scary part about those you didn't even need a crystal ball or revelation to predict I know the thing is we've seen it put in a Venus we're over and over again we saw in the skeptic movement we've seen it so in other words the church needs to understand and and of course they need to go back to pointing towards objective truth but they need to understand that this battle is not just within the church itself and that's where their main focus needs to be absolutely but they need to realize that this is civilizational and with that intent where this is everywhere this isn't a civilizational battle at this point and there are times where yes we can learn and and be brought for because this is new this hit us like a ton of bricks I knew it was coming and tried to prepare people with it they thought that I was wearing a tinfoil hat when I was trying to explain this is what's going to happen here's who's gonna be doing it and so forth no mic there's that person and unfortunately it's a lot of the leadership that has that have been trusted voices doesn't have another evergreen so yeah it's so uh they start bringing in new leadership yet that's in honest right so have they done that with bringing in new leadership pacifically bringing in new leadership does the plan what they've done is helped to raise another sure that route but but but some of the core leaders have been and there's one particular organization that I would name it's the gospel coalition that has been around for about ten eleven years which has a purposed intent I believe I know that Tim Keller would reject the the the label of postmodern he would look at the new modern but certainly his concepts as well as you know bringing Dehradun Foucault into the conversations and so forth really raising the concepts in a positive sense of crenshaw of others that you've referred to as well and as well introducing these ideas of your church should look like your community it should is your is your church colorful in essence so an article by Joe Carter and with these confidant understand that no this stuff is being done everywhere everywhere well that's what we you name the group yes happy or will be happening to it one of the concerns that we have is that this is an assault on Western civilization this is an assault on science this is assault on reason on the role of evidence and belief formation this is an absolute assault on the constituent values of Western civilization II look at the colonial theory side of it which is just one dimension of many of the intersectional dimensions good it's explicitly against the West there what's post-colonial well you say that's against colonialism and then you start looking at what they say are they against the fact that some you know Chinese colonized someplace no are they against the fact that they hate imperialism are they against the fact that like pretty much every culture ever had empires but they could get one if they could kill enough people to make an empire then they had one no which one are they concerned about Western one-and-only right right I think that if you don't mind why don't you speak to the Hong Kong situation if you don't mind I don't know a whole lot about it but I do know that I do some - yeah go ahead there's a huge protest recently that occurred in Hong Kong and the the part that I know a little bit about the very interesting part that I know a little bit about is that the coma this the culmination of this protest the millions I think of protesters came out in rejection of I think Chinese rule and what they did is they made their way into the center of whatever they were trying outside of what their partisan he made their way to the lectern and of all the symbols they could have hung up did they hang up some kind of like Revolutionary flags that hang up this light so they hung up the British colonial flag okay so they were making this statement of some kind saying that the fact that we were a British colony somehow very relevant invaluable to us and the result has been that nobody knows how to talk about this nobody knows what to do because colonialism by the West which British is supposed to be the most powerful evil force in the world and here you have this group who's clearly in some sense being oppressed but what did they hearken to was the fact that they were colonized so there's no framework to talk about that in realistic terms available and so there's this huge void of being able to talk about this in real terms and so what this is the dynamic I can also describe when you have an utter void of being able to talk about a thing insane terms who's gonna fill the void the lunatics who are willing to jump in and say this craziest stuff that's who's gonna fill in and people want an explanation for stuff something really oh well that guy's saying something he's got a lot of passion probably got something to it so this is another problem is it hollows out the ability to have any conversation that goes off-script which usually they try not to allow or they problematize out of existence but then when one comes up so big there's no space to have the conversation so you can guarantee it's gonna get filled by some lunatic right right and editable and the thing is is that what this does is it shuts down our conversation because the unifier for those that are accepting this discipline and really this new religion of intersectionality is that that's where the conversation needs to take place therefore we can't have that conversation anyway and and we can't we can't go back to well what do you believe true and give me a reason and so here's here's part of the the dozen we can't even argue right well here's part of the problem so not only can we not argue but already your voices collectively are removed from the Academy systematically and yours are and and mine are and I know for a fact when this interview comes out we are gonna get grief you know I don't know if you know VeggieTales yes yeah well the guy did that feel vicious a friend of mine he's a really good guy staying in my home he's just a lovely human being and remember when I went on his podcast just to kind of build bridges understand what you know just a good dude I got unbelievable grief from people that I did not go at him that somehow I have to have an antagonistic or relationship with him and I said be my enemy or something or I know you're I know for a fact if you haven't already you're gonna get grief for sitting back and what we can do is like let's make a date a few years from now well we're gonna go at this but the thing is is we need to preserve the opportunity the ability and the platform's to be able to have those arguments without being completely d platform that's right because we're actually looking to preserve the opportunity to search for objective truth in a correspondent manner right and my point is that just because you have a different and totally different view of metaphysics you believe in God that doesn't mean that we don't want to get rid of plastic in the oceans like we talked about today that doesn't mean that when the aliens come down there isn't a common threat that we need to do that doesn't mean that we don't agree upon basic rules of engagement with each other we agree on the basis of it now we have substantive content differences but I don't look at you as my enemy I think you're wrong about some things your your belief system is not correct and I'm just you would have to think that about mine if you sincerely held your ballot and we're both citizens of this nation right and somehow we have to be neighbors we have to get along that's exactly correct and within this great experiment that's known as America that has to exist without demonizing the others yeah my I don't know if you are familiar with the he's deceased now but my mentor he actually wrote Jim and I published peace with him and I think he wrote the foreword to your book Victor Stenger was a particle physicists in one of the world's pre-eminent leading atheists and I went to a conference and I really he was kind of a mentor to me he's just a great great guy he was one of the most hardcore atheist I have ever I mean this guy was uh he was he was all in he actually wrote one of the only books that actively you know many of the atheist arguments are there's not sufficient arguments to believe in God and then new atheist came and said if you believe in the base of insufficient evidence you're somehow rational Stengel wrote a book claiming that there that not only is there an insufficient evidence but the evidence actually shows that there's no God and he wrote about that anyway my point is that he was telling me a story that his neighbor I think he lived in Colorado his neighbor was a Muslim and they got along awesome right well actually I have a lot of Muslims that I get along with my care about them right like I care about you and care and another value I empathetically care about you as a human being all right as my neighbor is my friends right and yet we're able then to have these discussions and even have our debates with each other right and that's became art go here in the church it seems like that's kind of the point I mean I've read Zach I've read your book a couple of times and if I picked up the message I mean it's sort of how do you evangelize if you don't talk to people who don't know relationship evangelism yeah how are you gonna do it though if you're not allowed to talk to people who have the wrong idea well how are we going to live in a country that has divergent beliefs that has different beliefs without that the founding principle right well in the thing is is that the the real goal is to eliminate us from having any of the argument that is absolutely intra really hash it out because there needs to the collectives that are having actually end up with a unification so where the idea is is that we must get rid of tribes we must break up these different factions and so forth there's a unification model in the end which means a unification of thought a belief that would end all wars and end all conflict and so forth that's the end that's really where things are moving if if everyone can't figure out well why is it that you know I can't watch anything without hearing the word I can't get out of my lane that's always a great well you know without them going through the whole safety instructions of the plane without them somehow at the end having a forty second commercial with the owner of the airline talking about their commitment to equity well why is that and so everybody's need to take a step back and have a satellite view of there is this to understand that we have to have impossible conversations and that we want to have those conversations continue we also don't want a statist force on the outside of us saying oh you cannot have those conversations unless those conversations are had in this fashion and in this manner with these epistemic realities around you otherwise that's an invalid question we're in a valid conversation and you can't have that the fundamentalist impulse is what that is right the fundamentalist impulse it is this utopian belief that if you just somehow made everybody think the same way then what would there be to fight about we all agree there's nothing left to fight so if you can just get everybody on the same doctrine the same or DOX the Huq trainer you get the same idea and everybody's had no problem that's the that's actually the statement of part that's the belief upon which the the argument of the Islam is a religion of peace is is made if everybody was a Muslim we'd have peace right right well the thing is is that and that's exactly the same move your fault right his fault because he's gonna happen is people are gonna dig in and have their own interpretations and they're gonna start especially in this dirty do they're gonna start claiming their own special access that they what will they learn through this perspective then is that what you have this new societal dogmatix that are not just being pressed upon the church and when I say the church I'm talking about in and out of the pail of Orthodoxy also and and I understand to be some criticisms but also talking about Roman Catholicism talking about the Orthodox talking about the the Protestants talking about every strain of Protestantism that you can imagine both Calvinists and non Calvinists and reformed and non reformed people that are dispensational covenantal Cato cradle Baptist paedo Baptists and then outside all of us including you including everyone that's walking around this city in New York City today is going to have the same dogmatix push down upon us legislatively through corporate means and you know it's economically you know it terrifies me that you haven't even mentioned they'll be morally pressured to adopt the same epistemology yeah and that's the thing this is the new religion yep and I think both of us are concerned that we need to be able to stand up against it and we do we need allies we need people to help us because I genuinely believe that this is tearing apart the fabric of Western civilization I mean look as just a very briefly and Ino was the journalist who was attacked in Portland the big thing now it went from punching Nazis people who self professed to be neo-nazis to punching Democrats who no no definitely know that no that's what she did a publicans party Republicans right to milk shaking is the big thing and and Ino was a journalist in Portland and the mayor Ted wheeler who's a disgrace was told to stand and told the police to stand down and they basically beat him and he had brain hemorrhage brain hemorrhages and I saw I went into it with Brett I went to visit him in the hospital afterward but but the point is that that is not with all due Berserker something but that is not a third world country somewhere this is Portland Oregon in the United States in 2019 that's right it's a women aged when I do events I have to have the SWAT team when Dave Rubin and I with christina hoff sommers damn it we had the SWAT team come in people were threatening to throw dirty diapers in me at me for the d'amore event with helen pluck rose bricks and grenades were mentioned one of the guys who said he was gonna cut the wires thing so but what I I believe that watching some of this stuff play out might be very powerful for the people viewing this and I would recommend watching Mike Nana's YouTube channel and looking at the canoe video now look what happened to evergreen here's a three-part documentary Netflix quality on YouTube watch that he goes through I mean it's see how crazy I'm not even gonna it did you know everybody has to get in this canoe and their watch and it's a Native American I mean it's so utterly bizarre I don't know what they made American University have I soft white intersectionality or whatever it is they're trying I don't know what they mean by that first but I can tell you that if whatever that resolution nine is whereas nice thing whereas nice thing whereas a nice thing we resolve to let's at least include critical race theory as a tool if that depending on how far down that road that goes the Evergreen State College is at the end of that road that's what's happened that's what happens when it's institutional when it's put into an institution to put into action where a sufficient number of especially the administrative class and the the people in the pews or the students if you will take it up down bottom up that's what's going to happen evitable right squeezing the middle guys think what yeah let my final thing is I think we should meet in a couple years and I think we should go over this and I think we should take a look at this video take a look at the very specific predictions that we've given you and fill those in with examples specific churches Pacific regions specific events that have happened I'm telling you this is gonna play out exactly like we said and that's the tough part is that people that have been hearing me warn them about this for four to five years now and really try to help the leadership understand what was coming eventually they had to say okay everything that you said was going to happen has happened how did you know this and the thing is is that now again almost prophetically and of course I believe it's because of Providence but prophetically you are right now stating to to not just look and at this you could have this conversation about what's happening within the Christian Church but again this could be about anything this is happening it's very wouldn't and what he has just said what you have said what James has said as well he's pretty much laid out the groundwork of the strategy and how this is done actually the tactics and you have a choice of speaking up standing up against it they're going to call you a racist right if you say to see you and not see if you say that you love this country they're gonna call you a snap as opposed to somebody that al loved my country to love the freedoms that I have you know my my family in my abuela no bueno from Cuba yet they got out of that my wife's family left the new territory of China and came to Hong Kong what they're doing to Andy knows family who's from Vietnam Vietnam he's engaged journalists from Vietnam they're saying his family were collaborators right exactly so anybody that is fleeing something to the freedoms that they have in America that we have by our Constitution our Bill of Rights and honestly that is source from the Declaration forward is that all of that is under threat at this point and those things that allow us to be able to have disagreements and intense disagreements even but yet and the non inflicting violence that is about ready to possibly disappear if this is allowed to take over let me let me throw in the other side of that and for what let's answer the and for what question and uh no because I know a lot of people hear this stuff and they want it they care they want to help they want to help so let's take the most charitable simple what are you doing why are you wanting why would you say yeah bring this intersectional Creole race theory tool post-colonial theology whatever into my church why because you care because you want to help you are worried that you know various identity groups have been cheated in significant ways historically throughout the country there are still lingering effects from that where there are some disparities that are problems and you want to do the right thing but how is giving somebody a pass like I don't know a whole lot about what it takes to become a theologian or a pastor but how on earth know what it takes to be a knowledgeable professional to say your identity gets you most of the way there how are you helping let's say it's a black person or a Hispanic person or how are you helping them wrestle with the challenges that make you understand your faith or understand your knowledge or understand whatever it is how are you helping them get more knowledgeable and deeper into that by giving them a pass and in some sense saying you know what you don't really have to work as hard because you have special knowledge automatically you're not helping so knowledge that's not even related necessarily to the thing in question you're not helping them how are you helping them by making everything about a divisive issue which moral and psychologists and moral sociologists have identified if you start getting people to focus on a victimhood oh well my situation as a XYZ has led me to experience this and that and it's hard and it's terrible the psychology moral and psychology and moral sociology are clear on this it induces a state of what's called competitive victimhood if I tell you about how hard my day was your gut reaction for most people most of the time is to say oh yeah my hard day was because you are trying to empathize in the most clumsy way possible and so how are you helping them by making the issue come up where all of a sudden you have the the minority group or whatever saying all is well it's been like this for me in the church and this is how I've been oppressed and victimized and then all of a sudden the white majority is like yeah you want to hear how we've been oppressed are you trying to start a race war I don't mean to speak in such a terrible blunt terms are you trying to start a race war is that what you're actually after to to team up all the different minority groups under a banner of intersectional as if there's unity there and it caused them to wage war on the dominant group by getting them each to focus on their grievances and find reasons to dislike each other and feel cheated by the other look at what happens when you start talking about oh you know we need equity because but you know minority group XYZ has been excluded from the workplace bubble bla so we need an equity initiative like affirmative action what happened when that happened whether the you know there's a debate to be had about the effectiveness of these policies or how they should or should not be able implemented fine but what happens you have a reactionary group that a me immediately emerges and says ah well you're just cheating me out of my position and oh well my boss is only my boss because she's black she's a black woman she's not competent I don't believe in her competence because she got the job in the cheap way how are you helping people by setting them up in that situation so if you want to help do it the right way do it with the liberal approach you try to raise people up through rigorous epistemology there are rigorous epistemologies don't buy into this belief that oh well you know that's just a white man's tool knowledge is the white man's tool how are we in a skyscraper you know it's don't buy into principles that violate the liberal ethics and I don't mean that like politically liberal conservative I mean that in the broad sense the the enlightenment principles that have led us to be able to generate knowledge that every single time you do anything you do a little experiment no matter who you are you think it's different every time I pull out my cell phone and I make a call you know how much physics went into making that stupid thing work and is it every time I call my wife on my cell phone hey wife I love you how are you every time I do that I do an experiment on that physics to say that it works does it matter if I'm a black person if a black person picks up a phone does it have to work differently no and they're doing the same experiment to prove that the knowledge that went into building that technology was sound how are you helping people by saying let's throw that out you're not raising people up there are ways to raise people up we know they're always raise people up we know there are ways to opportunity our contract of the nation was all men are created equal live up to that what are you doing by adopting this crap which is a form of grievance politics we called it grievance studies for a reason well this is grievance Christianity well its grievance yes everything's applied its grievance it's cream grievance agreements all the way down but where grievance [Music]

Channel: Sovereign Nations

Views: 191,137

Keywords: Sovereign, Nations, Sovereign nations, Christianity, Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, Grievance Studies, equity, michael o'fallon, diversity, inclusion, intersectionality, philosophy, critical race theory, critical theory, postmodernism, new york city, interview, sbc, resolution 9, social justice, grievance, new discourses, academia

Id: YDFL3xwEEG8

Length: 95min 21sec (5721 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/knockingsparks]

Submission Statement: In this first of five interviews conducted in New York City, Sovereign Nations Founder Michael O’Fallon and the co-founders of New Discourses, Dr. Peter Boghossian and Dr. James Lindsay, discuss the current tools of societal and institutional deconstruction being introduced throughout civilization under the banner of “Social Justice.” These, they discuss, are presented in a manner not unlike the legendary Trojan Horse.

[u/Flexit4Brexit]

I love the setting. Outside, great. NYC, great. Balcony, great. Camerawork is very tight too, and emphasises the setting. Even the diagonality of the table is pleasing.

[u/SpaceKarate]

I think all the talks with James and Peter are great. What's also very interesting is the extent to which they link their current efforts to their involvement in the New Atheist Movement. Even though Sam Harris was one of the Four Horsemen of new atheism, I would not necessarily have made that connection.

[u/[deleted]]

One major takeaway from this conversation that I wasn't really expecting to hear is just how far the social justice narrative has penetrated into organized religion. I was sort of relieved to hear the conversation's participants voice concerns that this will weaken the institutions where it is present (since I think the epistemology of evangelical Christianity contains a vicious anti-science bias at least as problematic as the one in intersectionality, if not more so), but that's pretty cold comfort, given that they also agree that the social justice ideology is a new religious movement, and could therefore reorganize under a new banner from the ashes of the religious institutions it destroys.

​

At the same time, as the IDW itself shows, opposing intersectionality forces you to make some awfully strange bedfellows. Based on Sovereign Nations' other (very conservative) content, I think my own immediate political objectives are more in line with those of social justice activists than this guy, even though we broadly agree that intersectionality as an ideology is a negative and destabilizing force. Biblical Christianity may well be a stabilizing force for our present society, but our present society is currently one of free market capitalism and nationalism which makes the ecological systems of the planet far less stable, so if intersectionality destroys it from within, that's only a bad thing if intersectionality itself becomes the dominant social paradigm as opposed to something else.

​

Intersectionality is indeed a destabilizing social force, but there are far more serious threats that must be overcome, especially ecological catastrophe. If the choice becomes an alliance with conservatives against intersectionalists, or an alliance with intersectionalists against conservatives, the latter is at this point, vastly preferable in my book. There is no absolute reason this has to be a binary choice though, but the nature of electoral politics in the US is likely to force voters into that position unless the mechanics of voting are altered in such a way as to make 3rd party and independant candidates competitive. My preferred method for doing that is called ranked choice voting.)