How Social Justice Is Corrupting the Faith and Moving Christians Left

How social justice is corrupting the faith and moving Christians left. That is a topic we'll discuss today right here on the Christian Worldview Radio Program where the mission is to sharpen the biblical worldview of Christians and also to share the good news that we can be reconciled to God through faith in Jesus Christ.

I'm David Wheaton, the host, and our website is thechristianworldview.org. A recent Brookings Institution column concluded this way. Though President Trump is a candidate whose personal behavior has often been at odds with the values espoused by many evangelicals, any potential path he has to remain in the White House after January 20, 2021, must pass between the pews of white evangelical churches. In turn, Democratic Party leaders have opportunities to interrupt that passage by paying attention to evangelicals, especially unaffiliated evangelicals, persuadable to add their votes to the 2020 Democratic Coalition. In short, evangelical Christians are the key voting demographic in a national election, which explains why there is so much effort being expended to make them vote a certain way. As Ben Hawley, columnist for the American Spectator, and our guest today on the Christian Worldview will explain, the crack in the door of persuading evangelicals to depart the Republican base and vote for Democrats centers around the issue of social justice.

After all, when words like love and equity and justice are championed, shouldn't Christians be for candidates who, quote, fight for these issues? Let's get to the first segment with our guest today, Ben Hall. Ben, I want to talk about your column that you wrote recently in the American Spectator, the title of the column was Mere Christianity, How Social Justice is Corrupting the Faith. And you start out that column by writing this.

I'm going to read two paragraphs as a lead into our conversation today. You say, even during a season of numerous tectonic shifts in American life, one that deserves special note is the massive leftward political tilt that has occurred among many Christians. People who just a few months ago were filling their social media accounts with photos of their children, cooking recipes, and inspirational Bible verses now voice some of the most radical left-wing talking points about gender, quote, privilege and, quote, whiteness. Pastors promote the work of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, as if they were sacrosanct.

They post long progressive screeds to their blogs and social media accounts and insinuate that those who disagree are guilty of white supremacy. Christianity Today publishes articles that bemoan the fact that Christianity is not central to the activist movements going on in the streets and is instead, quote, more like an awkward extra appendage to progressivism than its beating heart, unquote. Last couple sentences, groups of white Christians are filmed bowing down before their black church members to ask for forgiveness for the sin of, quote, systemic racism. As if some switch had been flipped, a huge portion of the professing Christians are suddenly parroting the most extreme views of what was, until only yesterday, the fringe left. Again, that's from your recent column in the American Spectator that we have linked at our website, thechristianworldview.org. So the first question is, let's get specific about who these people are that are persuading Christians to move left. Are these evangelical Christians persuading evangelicals to move left? Are they progressive Christians that you're referring to? And maybe you could give some names of pastors or Christian organizations or Christian influencers that are pushing what you described in those first two paragraphs of your column. I don't think it is evangelical Christians at large. I think this is mostly coming from progressive Christians. I think progressive Christians kind of have a dual identity, one as progressives and one as Christians. And I think that those overlap frequently, but they are fundamentally different.

And I think sometimes they compete with each other. And I think that's sort of what's happening right now, is that for a lot of people that identify as progressives and Christians, that progressive identity is sort of overpowering the Christian identity and it's turning them, they're more political than spiritual. As far as influencers, one name that comes to mind is someone like John Pavlovich. He has a blog called Things That Need to Be Said. He is a very progressive Christian and he has kind of made a career on lecturing non-progressive Christians for doing Christianity wrong in his opinion. He has one blog entry called The Kind of Christian I Refuse to Be. This kind of came across to me by means of a friend on Facebook who had shared this and I knew that she was involved in the church. And I was a little shocked when I read it because one of the things that stood out about Christian he refuses to be is he says, I refuse to be a Christian who demands that others believe what I believe or live as I live or profess what I profess. And that just to me seems completely at odds with the idea that Christianity is the truth, the way and the light. I think what's significant about this is that it's more grassroots than people really give it credit for.

What's striking to me now is that it just seems to have really rapidly gone mainstream. Other prominent Christian publications like Christianity Today publishing one progressive piece after another that takes up this cause of racial justice without really examining what that term means to the people that have been using it for much longer than the church has. I agree with what you're saying here and I think it goes back to what is the definition of actually being a Christian. Of course, it's anyone can profess to be a Christian. We see that in scripture, what Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount, many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, many call him Lord.

But if your belief is in anything else, but Christ is being, as you mentioned, the only way, the only truth and the only life and that no one comes to the Father but by him and you don't understand the gospel, you're not believing in the same gospel, I would conclude that you're a Christian in name only, in profession only, and not truly born again. I also think that this is also coming from not just the progressive, quote-unquote, Christians, but you also see this a little more subtly coming from some evangelical organizations as well. We played a sound bite a couple of weeks ago from someone involved in Nine Marks trees. That's the one led by Mark Dever, the well-known pastor from Washington DC, a man named Jonathan Lehman, who is the editor for that. These are well-known professing evangelicals. Tim Keller, another one who is the co-founder of the Gospel Coalition and many Gospel Coalition writers, Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission with the Southern Baptist Convention, people like Ed Stetzer even. There are sympathies here and more subtle persuasions that there's merit to these organizations like Black Lives Matter and you see it, of course, in Christian colleges as well. Again, Ben Hall with us today here on the Christian worldview. A column is for the American Spectator.

He's coming to us from Korea today where he teaches English and writes on politics and culture. Ben, let's get to another part of your column where you say those Christians who do so rarely, if ever, understand how specious this movement, this social justice movement with a capital S and a capital J, you'll get into that later, how specious this movement's arguments are or how they manipulate language by loading familiar words with entire orthodoxies. For example, you say, isn't it interesting that words as well as silence are now routinely described as violence but looting and setting fire to buildings is not? Nor are they aware of how radical the agenda is. Black Lives Matter, that slogan, is an indisputably true statement and there are legitimate causes for concern when it comes to policing but why, for instance, does the official Black Lives Matter website have so many references to transgenderism? Why are there exhortations to, quote, dismantle cisgender privilege, unquote, and quote, disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family, unquote, while this talk of fostering a, quote, queer affirming network, unquote, and freeing themselves from the, quote, tight grip of heteronormative thinking? Why is there video footage of BLM co-founder Patricia Coolers calling herself a trained Marxist? And so my question, Ben, is why are, say, society in general, in Christians, evangelical Christians in particular, because I agree with you, you see this on people's Facebook pages, people who are professing evangelicals promoting Black Lives Matter, why are people in general, and Christians in particular, so susceptible to not just the confusion of language, but I'll go further than that, the deceit of language being used and undiscerning about, let's say, an organization like Black Lives Matter's beliefs when they're just right on their website.

That is a huge question and I'll try to answer it as best I can. I think there's a lot of reasons, there's a lot of stuff that goes into this. For one thing, it's the name on the box. So social justice has, for lack of a better term, a brilliant marketing strategy in that they've just essentially labeled themselves as, quote, the good things. So if you're not with that program, it's assumed that you must be in favor of the bad things and you must be a bad person. And I think when the average person, here's someone say that they're against racism, that has a pretty straightforward meaning to that person. And pretty much everybody agrees and is against racism.

So they say, yes, I'm for that. I'm against racism. But they're less likely to interrogate what that person's definition of racism really is or what they believe they're entitled to do to correct for racism. Those are really important questions because until we've come to a kind of agreed upon definition, and these definitions are highly contested right now, but until we come on to an agreed upon definition, we're not agreeing to the same things. We can both say we're against racism. But what we mean by that is something very different from one another.

So there's that. There's just the fact that most people are not accustomed to examining language in this way. Another aspect, especially for young people, is that they're primed to these ideas by college. The academy is a huge part of this higher education, is where I became aware of this stuff. So I studied English literature for my masters. And in that field, and in the humanities in general, this stuff is everywhere. And you get familiar with analyzing or deconstructing text to find hidden meanings, which frequently means finding some kind of prejudice inside the text. And very often this begins by looking for sexism or racism. And the standards for finding it are so low that oftentimes it's more like you're reading it into the text. Like it's not there, but you find a way to interpret it into that situation. And some of these arguments are very flimsy, but it really mirrors what you now see happening in social media and places like Twitter with online cancel culture, where people are just going through the words of other people or events and with a fine-tooth comb, almost trying to insert some type of bigotry or prejudice into it.

And they're just doing what they've been trained to do. That's very common, especially for anyone who went through college in the humanities. Another reason is that these topics, they go into the philosophical deep end really, really quickly. Okay. Ben Hall will go into that philosophical deep end and explain more why social justice is such an effective tool to make evangelicals move to the left.

He's a columnist for the American Spectator. We'll talk about more about that when we return from the Christian Real View. Just a reminder, we're only one week away from the Christian Real View golf event on September 21st. If you haven't signed up for that, you need to do so as quickly as possible. You can also take part.

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To think biblically and live accordingly. That is what we strive to do as we cover topic after topic week after week here on the Christian Worldview radio program. I'm David Wheaton, the host. Our website is thechristianworldview.org. We have a lot going on right now in the ministry.

I encourage you to go there. I don't have time to get into it right now, but we will later in the program. We're talking today with Ben Hall, a columnist for the American Spectator, about how social justice is corrupting the faith and moving Christians left. He's in the middle of an answer on why Christians in particular are so susceptible to the deceit of language in this issue of social justice.

Let's get back to the second segment of the interview. Another reason is that these topics, they go into the philosophical deep end really, really quickly. And most people just are not equipped for that type of thinking.

They don't do it often. And so it's unusual to them. I'll take the concept of equality. Equality is actually a very tricky concept. What's the sense in which one person is really equal to another? We're all very different in reality, and that's shaped by a lot of things.

So you ask what causes these differences. And one of the big causes, if you believe that people are individuals that have agency, is going to be the choices that we make. We choose different things, and that ends with us being different people than we might have been otherwise. And if you and I make different choices, and that leads to us having different abilities and interests and so on, does it really make sense to say that society should ensure that we get equal outcomes? Like this is the difference between the idea of equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, which is usually referred to as equity now. There's a lot of pushes for equity. But it's really up in the air as to whether or not true equity is something desired Do we want everybody to have the same outcomes regardless of what they do, regardless of who they are as people? A lot of these ideas fail for pretty obvious reasons when you apply them to the individual, which is part of why I think social justice is focused on collectives defined by race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on.

But your average person is not thinking these things. They're adopting the message. And that kind of leads me to the last thing, which is conformity. And they're going to latch on to whatever beliefs or political movements or political mood is ascendant at any given time, especially if there is, as there is now, a perceived cost to not going with the flow.

And right now, the cost is very high. People are routinely losing their jobs becoming unemployable for disagreeing with this stuff. As humans, we're social animals, and we are we're measuring the costs and the benefits to whether or not to adopt these views. And I think that a lot of people just see the cost of rejecting it or criticizing it. And then also they see the name on the box that these are the quote unquote good things.

And so that makes it very easy for them to go along with this, even if a real examination would show that these are these are bad ideas and ideas that are going to lead to pretty bad consequences. Ben Hall with us today on the Christian worldview radio program talking about his recent column in the American Spectator, which we have linked at our website, how social justice is corrupting the faith. And then I added to the end of that and moving Christians to the left.

Ben, let's get on to another paragraph from your column. You say, not to be confused with the lower cased general term social justice, which is the liberal pursuit of a more fair society. The political movement that has taken the name social justice with capitalized letters is a complex amalgamation of neo-Marxist and postmodernist theories about power, language and knowledge that became popular in academia in the 1960s. And then you mentioned these two two scholars as Pluckrose and Lindsay explain these theories originally so extreme and unstable and unstable as to prove self-defeating went through major alterations in the 90s and 2010s, eventually evolving into forms that with the use of identity politics were politically actionable. These origins are too complex to cover here, but suffice it to say that social justice again capitalized is marked by cultural moral relativism and a neo-Marxist lens that must interpret all things as interactions between oppressors and oppressed, extreme cynicism. And as Douglas Murray points out in The Madness of Crowds book, an increasingly visible inclination toward the politics of revenge.

There was a lot in that paragraph. So I'd like just you to simplify how this social justice worldview with the capital S capital J, how did this develop from the 60s were sort of untenable into what it has turned into today? So if you start off with the original postmodern intellectuals in the 1960s, what they had set out to do was to examine really high level questions like in what sense does language alter our perception of the world and how we can know things. And they made a practice of deconstructing what they called meta narratives.

And a meta narrative is kind of a story which makes sense of the universe or makes sense of the world. And the way they would deconstruct these meta narratives was by kind of attributing bad motives to them showing ways in which one meta narrative or another actually was used politically to fortify power for one group or another. But the problem with this was that the way that they would go about this, the way that theory worked was so radically skeptical that you could actually use postmodernism to kind of unmake postmodernism. Postmodernism was so destructive that it couldn't even stand up to its own critique. Since then, it's just been kind of slowly growing in power in the academy, where it's been able to garner respect for itself, because it very rarely gets challenged.

And by now, it's even built in ways to dismiss any challenges that it experiences. So, for example, one of the examples that Lindsay and Pluckrose use in their book is an essay by Alison Bailey, published 2017, and it's called Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes. And basically, the point of this essay is to delegitimize any critique of social justice in terms of feminism and critical race theory by saying that the only reason you could possibly have for objecting to anything that these theorists say is that you are trying to preserve your prejudice and your privilege, which is just assumed. So, by now, theory and social justice have created a loop where they are unfalsifiable. They just assume the thing that they're supposed to be proving. And because they do that, it's really impossible to challenge them, because any challenge can just be dismissed on the grounds that you are a morally bad person, and if you were morally good, you wouldn't be challenging them. What you were just describing, I think people who are listening today had said, yeah, I feel that. You can't object to this because they can't be wrong. If you're white, you're just automatically an oppressor, you're a racist, whether you think so or not.

And if you don't admit it, that just shows that you're all the more what you think you aren't. Ben Hall with us today on the Christian Real View radio program, a columnist for the American Spectator. You say in your column, Brett Weinstein, he's an evolutionary biologist and former professor at Evergreen State College. He was propelled to national attention in 2017 when the Evergreen campus was taken over by a mob of students who have been radicalized by the dogmas of social justice. These students targeted Weinstein individually for objecting to and refusing to comply with a newly altered what was called a day of absence in which white students and faculty were told not to come to the campus.

Some people listening, they might remember this, it was in the news. For speaking out against an obviously racist event, this professor Weinstein was himself labeled a racist, targeted by a mob of activist students and eventually forced to resign. The footage emerging from that episode is disturbing and serves well to illustrate how social justice in practice differs from how it presents itself. Whiteness is referred to as quote, the most violent system ever to breathe. The great irony again is that they're accusing everyone of being racist except themselves, but they're just overtly racist. How is that actual racism overlooked by not only the people accusing others of being racist, but how do they get away with it in broader society? Essentially defining it out of existence, like probably most people may be familiar with this new formulation of racism that was actually recently adopted by Merriam-Webster, where it's racial prejudice plus power. The assumption is that if you're a racial minority, it's taken for granted that you cannot have social or political power, therefore you cannot be racist.

That just throws the doors wide open. You'll hear some people still referring to saying that like, oh, a minority cannot be racist, but they can still demonstrate racial prejudice. Now, if you're a normal person, you hear racial prejudice and you think, yes, racism, that's what that means. But there's been this big push to redefine this word in such a way that it doesn't apply to things like telling a group of students that their skin color makes them unwelcome on their campus if they're white. You would think being racially prejudiced would still be a bad thing for obvious reasons. But again and again, what you see is that when these ideas hit the mainstream or hit the public, the attitude is kind of, if it's not racism according to the new definition, then it's fine. It's not that there's no real consideration about whether or not being racially prejudiced is bad.

It just seems to have flown out the window. If you point this out, they already have ideological mechanisms in place to dismiss that out of hand. Like what you were saying before about if you object, it's taken as a sign of being racist.

That is straight out of Robin DiAngelo's white fragility. Like she says explicitly that there is never a question of whether or not some act was racist. It's assumed to be racist. And the only question that you get to ask is how was it racist?

According to her, if the white person does anything in a situation in which they are confronted by some accusation of racism, if they do anything other than agree with the accusation and ask how they can improve, that is taken as an example of white fragility. So you're just, you're barred from the start from being able to think critically about these things and agree or disagree with them. If you like golf, you'll love playing in the Christian Worldview Golf Event at Historic Woodhill Country Club in Moiseta, Minnesota on Monday, September 21st. Golf registration includes lunch, range, and 18 holes with cart on one of the best courses in the state. Bring your own foursome or we can fit you into a group. Hole sponsorships are also available. Shotgun start is 12 30 p.m.

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That's in the West Metro. We have a silent auction going on, and this year, because we didn't have a dinner event this year, we're opening up that auction, because it's a fundraising event for the Christian Worldview ministry, to the entire listening audience. So if you just go to our website, thechristianworldview.org, you can take part in the silent auction this year, all in support of the Christian Worldview. Also, we have kind of a a new opportunity, if you'd like to sponsor a pastor to come to the golf event this year. We have a couple pastors and other kind of friends of the ministry and people we'd like to invite to the event. If you'd like to sponsor a pastor to come, get in touch with us.

It's $140 to do that, and you can just go to our website and email us or just contact us in our office at 1-888-646-2233. So we have more to talk about with regards to that and other ways to support the Christian Worldview, but we better get back on track with our guest today, Ben Hall. We're talking about how social justice is corrupting the faith and moving Christians left.

Let's get to the next segment with Ben Hall. We've talked about the basis of this worldview, this critical race theory, social justice worldview and what it does and so forth. And maybe listeners are thinking, well, how does this relate to where we are right now? Well, I would posit that this is the animating worldview of the left today, of the Democrat Party, of those running for president and vice president, what's taking place on the streets, the violence on the streets, the protests, the demonstrations, the looning, the burning. This is all driven by the worldview that you've been describing so far. But I want to transition now into how that worldview is affecting, or as you said, corrupting evangelicals in the way they think.

Again, you see it in the Facebook posts of people you thought were evangelicals supporting Black Lives Matter and all these different things and making the absolute assumption that there absolutely is systemic racism in this country and so forth and so on. And you say in your column, Ben, there is a sense in which it is true that modern progressive movements have some roots in Christianity. There have been times when the moral foundations of Christianity have been used as a force for the improvement of the political sphere, most notably the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But what is occurring today, it is not Christianity acting on politics, but the reverse. It is the political usurping Christianity, in other words, politics influencing, corrupting the faith. Though they are different in nature and desire different destinations, there is a place where social justice and Christianity cross paths, an intersection created by language and by words such as love, equality and justice. Christians fail to understand that out of the mouths of social justice progressives, these words are merely homophones.

I had to look that word up there, Ben. That word means it's a word having the same sound, but a different meaning. It's like the word new, K-N-E-W, means something different, very different than the word new, N-E-W. That's a homophone.

These words love, equality and justice are homophones. They're words that we think we understand, but that side has completely different meanings to them than like a biblical evangelical Christian. You go on to say they conceal crucial definitional distinctions grounded in questions as philosophically bedrock as whether or not human beings have free will or even objective truth exists.

So explain this. Now, I think I would say it's an intentional deception to use words that evangelicals are familiar with and are fond of and how they are used to persuade evangelicals over to the political left side. It works on everybody because everybody wants to believe they're a good person. And it works especially well on Christians because our identity is focused on trying to embody the values of Christ and love and justice especially are pretty important to that.

Christians aren't ready to interrogate these words when they hear them. They just assume that they're in agreement. For instance, there was an example pretty recently of a BLM leader in the UK who had a tweet taken down. And the substance of the tweet was something to the extent of the white man will not be our equal, he will be our slave.

And she hashtag that with no justice, no peace. In this person's mind, it is possible to say that I'm going to enslave another person and that is justice. And I think most people if they were to look at it in this way and they were to see this evidence, they would say, okay, we clearly mean different things like it was wrong of us to assume that this word meant the same thing to both of us. But it's very understandable that people make that assumption because that's the point of language.

The point of language is that we can use a sound and be reasonably assured that both of us are thinking the same thing because of that sound. It's no longer true and the push to do that has been very deliberate, comes from a place called post-structuralism. It's a field of study that is very interested in the way that language can be used to shape power. And so it's been studied, it's been kind of dissected, and now academics are able to use what they've learned to load words with more and more ideology that people aren't aware of. Again, Ben Hall with us today on the Christian worldview. You say in your column as a result of this confusion, the confusion of language and meaning, a great many Christians have probably unawares switched paths.

In other words, they've gone from more conservative, let's say politically, to moving to the political left. Undoubtedly, part of this shift has occurred because social justice is less difficult than faith. Its arguments, though deeply flawed, are superficially attractive because they are easy to grasp, appeal to readily available sentiments of compassion and empathy, and confer cheap and easy virtue upon those who voice them. So what I'm understanding you to say here that social justice at its root is really a false gospel of works righteousness. I can be virtuous by being for being for this definition of social justice. Is that correct, Ben?

I think that that's a good way of understanding it, especially when it's in the context of Christians kind of converting over to this, is that it appeals to those sentiments. Yes. Do you think that this is going to, as we bring this into the American election coming up, what we've seen in America the last five, six months, let's say even going back further than that with the attempted impeachment, well, he was impeached technically in the House, attempted removal of office of the president. And then right after that, on the heels of came the coronavirus.

And then on the heels of that came the death of George Floyd right here in the Twin Cities. And all that has spawned across the country and around the world. Now we face this election ahead of us with two very extremely different worldviews, one very nationalistic by President Trump and one very leftist globalistic with this worldview of social justice you've been describing today. How much do you think this corrupting of the faith that's taken place very quickly as you describe it in your article, how much do you think that's going to affect how professing evangelicals vote in this particular election? If there's anything I've learned since 2016, it is to never try to make any prediction with any amount of confidence.

But it seems to me that it can't help but have a large effect. There are many people I know that in 2016, they either did vote conservative or they would have voted conservative, who are now openly saying that they're going to vote for Biden. The interesting thing is that the reverse is also happening on the left. There are many people on the left who are now leaving the left.

I was one of those in 2016, 2017, when I kind of realized how toxic this new ascendant ideology was. So there's traffic in both directions. And I really just, I can't begin to try to calculate how this is going to work out. Sure.

Yeah, I don't think anyone knows how this election is going to turn out and what the after effect of the election might be, depending on whoever seems to be the winner on election night, if we even have a winner on election night. Again, Ben Hall with us today here on the Christian Royal View, a columnist for the American Spectator. Just a couple more questions for you. Want to read one more paragraph from your column. You say social justice is a radically different religion. Interesting how you call it a religion with its own epistemology and metaphysics that are incompatible with and indeed hostile to Christianity, which it ultimately views as a colonizing Christianity, now as a colonizing Western force and another source of oppression.

That's how the left views Christianity, not as an inherent good that helps people and understands, helps people understand to be right with God and come to saving faith and be forgiven and all the beautiful attributes of Christianity. But they see it as a colonizing Western force, genocide of the indigenous people, inherently racist, oppressive, slave holding, that kind of thing as an oppressor. As a political ideology, you say social justice is totalitarian. It cannot tolerate the presence of dissent or opposition and is never slow to play the censor when and wherever it achieves power, eliminating whatever it finds, quote, problematic. The ceaseless proliferation of outrage and grievances, easily observable in online cancel culture, is not a bug but a feature of this movement. In time, the church too may be dismantled in the name of social justice.

We can already observe the beginning stages. And that's a very, very bold statement you're making there that the church might be dismantled or attacked or canceled if they don't go along with this social justice critical theory worldview. So what do you think, Ben, that Christians and the church, Bible believing churches, should be doing to combat this?

And is it likely, considering how much social justice has been imbibed nowadays, that there is really any stopping this? Okay, our guest Ben Hall from the American Spectator will answer that question right after this final break of the day here on the Christian worldview program. So stay tuned.

I'm David Wheaton. The Christian worldview radio program airs live Saturday mornings at 8am central time. But did you know you can also listen according to your own schedule? One simple way to hear past programs is at our website, thechristianworldview.org.

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It's very widely available outside the live broadcast time, which is every Saturday morning at 8 a.m central time. Now before we get to our guest today, Ben Hall's last answer about what should the church be doing to combat this, I just want to give you a short soundbite example of what he's talking about today, how Christians, even Christian leaders, have been influenced by this critical race theory, the issue of social justice, systemic racism, and how they are used as, and I won't use the communist term useful idiots, I think that's a very disparaging term, but let's say useful advocates. Maybe knowingly, but maybe just unwittingly. So I'm not going to ascribe motive to it, but I'm just going to give you a soundbite of what it sounds like when a Christian imbibes or drinks this in and starts talking about it, gets influenced by this worldview. This is a soundbite I played a few months ago on the program, probably now, it's by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country. He's a pastor named J.D. Greer, pastors a very popular church in the southeast.

So here's what he said after the death of George Floyd leading into the part of the summer where all the unrest happened. Southern Baptist, we need to say it clearly as a gospel issue. Black lives matter. Of course, black lives matter. Our black brothers and sisters are made in the image of God. Black lives matter because Jesus died for them. Black lives are a beautiful part of God's creation and they make up an essential and beautiful part of his body.

And we will be poorer as a people without them and other minorities in our midst. Let me echo my friend, Jimmy Scroggins, pastor down in Florida and saying that black lives matter is an important thing to say right now because we are seeing in our country the evidence of specific injustices that many of our black brothers and sisters and friends have been telling us about for years. And by the way, let's not respond by saying, oh, well, all lives matter.

Of course, all lives matter. But I've heard it described this way. Say you're in a group or with a group at a restaurant and the waiter brings the food to everybody except for one guy at your table, your friend, Bob. And so you say to the waiter, hey, excuse me, Bob deserves food.

And somebody at your table corrects you to say, no, no, no. All of us deserve food. Well, that's true, but you're missing the point.

Bob is sitting there by himself without food. And so we are saying, we understand that, that, that, that, that many of our black brothers and sisters have perceived for many years that the processes, the due processes of justice have not worked for them as they have for some others in our country. And by the way, like Jimmy, like Dr. Scroggins says, let's spare each other the quotation of stats right now.

You know, if you talk to some black friends, you'll know that they can tell you about their experiences and how some of them can be quite different from, from others in our country. Okay. J.D.

Greer again. Now, if you listen to that and you thought, I agree with everything you said, then you missed the complete point of what our guest is talking about today. It's saying it's, you need to say it. You need to say black lives matter because the implications are there. They must not matter in our society.

You shouldn't mention statistics because that would be factual and the statistics don't really matter. And there's a perception and all these different, what he said in there is, is a perfect example of how this worldview of social justice and the left is infecting the minds of evangelicals and then opening the door just from the downstream of this for evangelicals to say, well, gee, you know, this, the Democrat party really more owns that particular issue. And so therefore we need to move over to that side. I wish I had more time to read a longer screed of a student at Southwestern Baptist Seminary who writes specifically about this and I'll try to do it next week, but let's get back to the last segment, last short amount of the interview with Ben Hall. So what do you think, Ben, that Christians and the church, Bible believing churches should be doing to combat this? And is it likely considering how much social justice has been imbibed nowadays that there is really any stopping this? There's always a way of stopping it in the fact that Christians who maintain faith to like the real substance of Christianity can always form their own churches. They can always withdraw from churches that they believe have lost their way and create their own, even if these are just small groups.

And I think this may end up being the way of the future, but to the extent that they don't want to do that and they want to maintain the communities that they have, I think that there are two very important things that Christians can be doing at this point. And the first is educating themselves on these topics. It is extremely difficult to argue against these narratives if you don't have a greater awareness of their aims and their origins, because they do overlap with things that we acknowledge are good and things that we acknowledge are bad. We do recognize that there is racism and there are problems with policing.

It should not be the case that anybody is more likely to die at the hands of police because of the color of their skin. And to the extent that that happens, we want to fix that. But in order to be able to distinguish between the real problems and the real solutions, people have to educate themselves and get a grasp on what this ideology is and where it goes wrong.

Because the real problem with social justice is that it has no way of critiquing itself, so it cannot ever understand when it goes too far. And that's what is going to end up being the problem. The second thing is that I think people in general, Christians in general, need to re-examine what faith means. It's very easy to become complacent about faith and beliefs, because the events that they're centered on are so distant from us and so different from the world of consumer capitalism that we live in. When you think about the things you have to believe to call yourself a Christian, they're profound and radical things.

You believe that there's a loving God who created everything and who sent his only son, whom he loved more than anything in the world, to die for your sins so that you could join him in heaven. Those are exceptional beliefs, and it should be much harder to reconcile those with the world that we live in. So it's very easy for the church to become a cultural institution where people go to feel a sense of community and wholeness and not really involve themselves in the spiritual aspect as much as they should. And to the extent that the church becomes simply cultural, it's not going to be able to stand against or even differentiate itself from the culture of the world. I think what I heard you just say and what I would believe is that no, you actually go back to the fundamentals of the faith, what the gospel is, sound doctrine, the spiritual bedrock of the faith, that's what changes people.

And when they're changed and transformed through the renewing of the mind through the word, then their worldview and then their actions flow out of that and then and then change happens in their own life and in their own circle of influence. Ben, we appreciate again your column and we thank you for taking the time all the way halfway across the world in Korea to join us this weekend on the Christian worldview. All of God's best and grace to you. Thank you, David.

It was a pleasure. Well, again, I hope you gained from listening to this interview today because it is very tricky, the words being used, social justice and love and equity and unity and racial reconciliation and quote Black Lives Matter. They mean something very different to those advocating for those words than what a biblical Christian would understand those words to mean.

You know, we do live in a changing and challenging America, but there is great news. Jesus Christ and his word, they are the same yesterday, today and forever. God's weird word is clear. The gospel never changes and we can be reconciled with God through Christ. Until next time, think biblically and live accordingly.

Six four six twenty two thirty three. The Christian Worldview is a weekly one hour radio program that is furnished by the Overcomer Foundation and is supported by listeners and sponsors. Request one of our current resources with your donation of any amount. Go to the Christian Worldview dot org or call us toll free at one triple eight six four six twenty two thirty three or write to us at box four zero one Excelsior Minnesota five five three three one. That's box four zero one Excelsior Minnesota five five three three one. Thanks for listening to the Christian Worldview. Until next time, think biblically and live accordingly.