OWEN STRACHAN | Christianity and Wokeness (Ep. 361)

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0:35 This is Undaunted Life Man's Podcast.

0:51 I'm your host Kyle Thompson.

0:53 Let's get into it.

0:54 Another guy today we got a special guest on the podcast, his name is Owen Strand.

0:57 He is a provost and research professor of theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary

1:01 in Arkansas.

1:02 He's also the senior fellow with the Family Research Council.

1:05 He earned his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and his MDiv from the Southern

1:10 Baptist Theological Seminary.

1:11 And he has authored a bunch of books.

1:13 I think it's close to two dozen now, including Reenchanting Humanity, A Theology of Mankind,

1:18 the pastor as public theologian reclaiming a lost vision and his latest book, which we

1:22 spent the overwhelming amount of our time today talking about.

1:25 It's this Christianity and wokeness, how the social justice movement is hijacking the gospel

1:30 and the way to stop it.

1:31 Guys, we had such a good time on this podcast.

1:34 It took us a long time to get this kind of worked out because he was doing a bunch of interviews.

1:37 And then, you know, we're trying to squeeze it in, didn't quite work out with the schedule.

1:40 So this was a long time coming.

1:41 This was literally months in the making.

1:43 But the majority of what we talked about today is we talked about how a lot of Christians

1:46 are becoming almost romantically enamored with this woke ideology and not even understanding

1:51 that it's happening.

1:52 Okay, you have a lot of churches that are kind of buying into critical race theory and

1:56 buying into it as just, oh, we're just going to use this as a tool with which to differentiate

2:00 ourselves and to view the world and all these different things.

2:02 So we spend a lot of time digging into that.

2:04 We go, we go deep into the definitions like we define wokeness, critical race theory,

2:09 anti-racism, whiteness.

2:10 We even get into soft postmodernism versus hard postmodernism.

2:14 This was a mind-blowing thing for me as I was reading his book.

2:17 It's like, oh man, I've been preparing you guys.

2:20 My audience for this soft postmodernism and not the hard postmodernism that we're seeing,

2:24 but also we just talked about how, you know, wokeness really as an ideology doesn't have

2:28 any grounding, but people are pretending like it does.

2:31 You know, we get into reparations and generational sin, but then we took a hard left turn and

2:34 we started talking about big churches and what churches are getting wrong in terms of

2:38 how they're operating.

2:39 We talk about manhood and guys like the last 15 minutes of this, we really start getting

2:43 into manhood within the church and manhood in terms of rights of passage and things like

2:47 that.

2:48 I wish I would have started that in the first 10 minutes, but I'm so glad we spent so much

2:51 time dealing with the book, but man, there were so many good things about this book.

2:55 So I don't want to keep him from you, but before we get to that, I do want to remind

2:58 you guys about the upper room and the king's council.

3:01 So this is big time attention to all business owners out there, entrepreneurs, soon to be

3:05 entrepreneurs, the upper room and the king's council is something that would be a tremendous

3:08 resource for you.

3:10 So their mission is to create wealth and provision for the purpose of establishing God's covenant

3:15 on earth.

3:16 So how these, these two organizations do that is they equip entrepreneurs like the guys

3:20 listening to this with the tools, systems and frameworks necessary in order for them to

3:24 discover, develop and deploy very, very important to deploy their God given vision into the

3:30 marketplace.

3:31 So specifically it's talked about the upper room because this is a mastermind.

3:33 So you probably heard of different masterminds, but this one specifically is for existing

3:38 entrepreneurs or business owners that are looking for a tribe of like minded kind of

3:42 bold kingdom leaders that are really, really eager to engage in the battle of business.

3:47 This really is something that would be a tremendous asset to you.

3:50 So they host virtual and in-person events every month focusing on business strategies

3:54 that allow these, these individuals, these entrepreneurs, these business owners to increase

3:58 sustainable revenue while providing ongoing accountability.

4:02 So this is highly customizable to your business because depending upon what kind of business

4:05 you're in, it may not be the same things that you're going to want as somebody else.

4:08 So I've spoken to their group before, guys, if you want more info on this, go back to episode

4:12 355 of this podcast that's with Riley Meek.

4:15 He's the founder of the Kings Council and the upper room.

4:18 So that episode is called the King Entrepreneurship and Money again, episode 355.

4:22 But guys, the cool thing that he said in that podcast is he wanted to give a special offer

4:26 just to listeners of Undaunted Life of Man's podcast because he is so busy.

4:30 He does so many different things, but he actually wants to do one-on-ones with you guys.

4:34 So if you feel like you could get some value out of the upper room, he said that he wants

4:38 you to text upper room to 727-472-3860.

4:45 Guys, this will be in the show notes.

4:46 Don't crash your car trying to jot this down.

4:48 And when you do that, you'll get an application and you'll get a time to schedule a one-on-one

4:52 with Riley Meek, the founder of the upper room and the Kings Council.

4:55 So again, that's upper room.

4:57 So that's U-P-P-E-R-R-O-O-M to 727-472-3860 to schedule your one-on-one with the founder

5:06 of the upper room and the Kings Council, Riley Meek.

5:08 So guys, definitely check that out.

5:10 It'll be well worth your time to spend some time with Riley Meek.

5:13 But guys, I know you're here for this interview with Owen, so without further ado, let's get

5:17 into it.

5:18 Owen Strand, welcome to on Daunt to Life of Man's Podcast.

5:43 Okay, I was about to ask you if you go to a coffee shop or something like that, well,

5:47 I guess you don't ever give them your last name.

5:49 But has anyone ever accidentally gotten it correct, like a teacher in school or anything

5:53 like that?

5:54 Nope.

5:55 Okay.

5:56 Well, I am the smartest man alive, at least for the next 30 seconds, because I nailed

6:02 it right from the get-go.

6:03 Maybe it's my Irish Scottish heritage that came out in the Gaelic there.

6:07 But we got a lot of ground that we're going to cover in today's podcast.

6:10 I'm very excited for this.

6:11 But I do want to start simple, just a guy that kind of give guys an idea.

6:13 Of course, I talked about you a little bit in the intro, but you're a theology professor

6:17 and an author.

6:18 But I'm assuming you didn't think that's what you'd be doing when you were five years

6:21 old.

6:22 You probably thought you were going to be an astronaut or a firefighter or a baseball

6:24 player or something like that.

6:25 So how did you end up making theology your career?

6:29 Yeah, I wanted to be a basketball player, which at five, seven was not the best personal

6:34 estimation.

6:35 Yeah, most of those notwithstanding or spud web.

6:37 But you know, there's only two of those guys for a reason.

6:40 Yeah, exactly.

6:41 So that's what I really was gunning for as a young man.

6:44 I grew up in the '90s.

6:45 And so it's the era of the Fab Five Michigan basketball, Jordan, baggy shorts, rap music.

6:51 I'm from the East Coast.

6:52 I'm from Maine.

6:53 And so I loved all that gritty urban culture, even though I grew up in rural Maine.

6:59 And so that really shaped my hopes and my expectations.

7:03 And again, though a shorty, I had a fairly tough spirit in me.

7:10 So I liked having the odds against me in terms of that challenge of becoming a good basketball

7:15 player and worked really hard at my game.

7:17 I would dribble in the summer on my tar driveway until my fingers would crack and bleed.

7:23 I mean, I worked hard, suffice it to say that the highest echelon of glory I ever reached

7:28 was intramural basketball champion at a Division III college.

7:32 So didn't quite pan out.

7:34 And here we are talking about other topics.

7:38 Well, that's kind of a good idea of, hey, guys, always work harder, right?

7:43 One of the cool things that I remember someone, they did a study of all these team captains

7:46 that are like the captain of, you know, Barso are the captain of this random team or that

7:51 team.

7:52 They weren't always the most talented kids when they were younger, right?

7:55 They weren't the savants in elementary school.

7:57 So they had to work really, really, really hard.

7:58 And then their genetics caught up to them and it added all that hard work.

8:01 But hey, I'm only 510, so, you know, there weren't a whole lot of major league baseball

8:05 players that are 510.

8:06 So I was kind of in the same, the same world as you.

8:08 So I guess, again, what kind of got you into the world of theology though?

8:12 Because like, again, that's not normally a track, even if you're interested in theology,

8:16 which a lot of people that listen to the show are, but that's what you do as a profession.

8:19 How did you end up doing all that a winding path?

8:23 Like a lot of men's paths, you know, there's not necessarily a here's how to be a theologian

8:28 at age 16, you know, A to B to C to D to E.

8:32 I was raised in a Christian home.

8:34 I became a born again believer when I was about nine years old.

8:37 I went to a very simple Baptist youth camp and heard the simple gospel, knew that I deserved

8:42 hell for my sin, heard that Jesus was the one who gave his life, gave his blood to wash

8:48 me clean and satisfy the wrath of the father on my behalf.

8:51 And so I trusted in Jesus from a young age and followed Christ in a very simple way.

8:56 Nothing spectacular.

8:58 And then went to Bowdoin College in Maine, a kind of tough liberal arts school.

9:02 That shaped me into more of a writer and a thinker.

9:05 As I said earlier, I was really focused on sports like a lot of young men in high school,

9:10 but then I started to get more serious about the life of the mind, as we might call it,

9:14 in college.

9:16 And God then called me into the ministry when I was at Bowdoin, a very secular place of

9:21 about 20 students would show up for the university group that met each week.

9:25 That was the only Christian fellowship group on campus.

9:28 And it was then that I began to get a zeal for preaching and teaching the Word of God.

9:32 And then people around me, men, pastors who were discipling me said, you should go to seminary.

9:38 You should develop this gift and study the Word of God more.

9:41 And then I went to Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

9:44 Then I went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago to do my PhD in historical

9:48 theology.

9:49 And then I basically just got a theology post at Boyce College in Southern Seminary where

9:54 I had been.

9:55 And that's what really kick started being a theologian, but Kyle honestly, I had no plans

9:59 to do this.

10:00 There truly was no master plan, even though a lot of guys in the ministry world would

10:05 love to be a theologian of some kind, I kind of backed my way into it.

10:10 And what I would actually say, of course, as a believer is that it was the grace of God

10:14 that led me there.

10:15 Yeah.

10:16 And I mean, a lot of people that have ended up doing great things, they backed into it.

10:19 It wasn't always part of the plan.

10:20 You know, the best laid plans always end up getting thrown out the window whenever there's

10:23 a little bit of resistance.

10:25 And I have so many theological questions I want to ask you, but we're going to save

10:30 that, even though it took me months to get this all worked out.

10:33 I want to save some of those because I want to spend the majority of our time talking

10:36 about this book, Christianity and Wokeness, how the social justice movement is hijacking

10:40 the gospel and the way to stop it.

10:42 So as soon as your publisher sent this to me, I was like, Yep, we definitely need to have

10:47 this guy on here.

10:48 We need to kind of figure out, you know, kind of where your ideology is coming from and

10:51 we're going to dig deep into it, but I always like hearing from the, you know, the words

10:55 of the author from their own words from the horse's mouth.

10:58 What is the book about in general, like 30,000 foot view and also what do you want readers

11:02 to get from it?

11:03 And then we'll dive in deeper.

11:05 The book is about this ideology that is everywhere around us called Wokeness.

11:10 That's the term I use to describe social justice, critical race theory and woke ideology.

11:16 I began to see like everybody else out there who has senses and innate functioning, that

11:22 there was this massive movement reshaping the church, the culture, the university, entertainment,

11:28 politics and so on.

11:30 And I didn't see a lot of theologians or pastors working really hard to respond to this ideology.

11:37 There have been numerous developments in the evangelical and Baptist world that have not

11:41 been positive in the last five years, basically.

11:44 And that left a lot of people confused about critical race theory, for example.

11:50 Some Baptists a couple years ago said that basically critical race theory is a useful

11:55 analytical tool that helps explain the world.

11:59 And I'll be honest with you, when that was stated in, I believe, June 2019, I knew that

12:06 I didn't agree and I knew that this movement was not building from a corner of the world

12:12 where I found myself, but like tons of people out there, including, I'm sure, many of your

12:17 listeners over time, I didn't really know what this was.

12:21 I hadn't read critical race theory.

12:22 I hadn't read a lot of critical theory.

12:25 And so it took me a little bit of time reading books, getting caught up.

12:29 But then I realized, oh, wait a minute, this is a specter.

12:32 This is a tsunami.

12:34 This isn't a little ankle height wave.

12:37 This is going to sweep over everything and change everything.

12:40 And so I'm nothing, Kyle.

12:42 I'm not God's answer to anything.

12:45 But I felt called to respond in a church, last thing I'll say.

12:51 A church in the Minneapolis area reached out to me winter 2020 about doing talks on critical

12:59 race theory.

13:00 I'd done a few blogs about it after I started reading and getting equipped as a theologian.

13:05 So I was like, I'd love to come.

13:07 But that's in like February, March 2020, the chronology matters here, obviously.

13:12 Then Minneapolis blows up in June 2020, late May 2020.

13:18 And I'm like, oh, that church isn't calling me back.

13:20 You know, that is the hottest topic on the planet.

13:23 They did call me back and they asked me to come in early October 2020.

13:29 So I did a series of talks called Christianity and Wokeness, where I really buckled down

13:34 and gave the best overview of the system I could and the Christian response to it.

13:39 And then that became a book for Salem that you were discussing earlier.

13:42 Yeah.

13:43 And you say several times in the book that this is really a primer.

13:46 I don't think you even use that word, but it really is a primer to the subject matter.

13:49 But you do kind of point people to other resources.

13:52 But there's a couple of quotes from the beginning that I think we'll kind of sum up what this

13:54 book is.

13:55 So the first one is this, the driving thesis of the book, Christianity and Wokeness are

13:59 not compatible.

14:01 Christianity is the truth of God found in the word of God, Wokeness, as we are at pains

14:05 to say, is a different religion altogether.

14:08 And then there's another one here, Wokeness is not as we have been at pains to say, but

14:13 nine.

14:14 It is an and an or a theological.

14:17 It is a direct attack on the gospel itself and it is a replacement gospel.

14:21 There's no room for merging such teaching with the teaching of scripture.

14:24 You choose one or you choose the other.

14:26 This is not a system compatible with Christian faith.

14:28 It is the antithesis of the Christian faith and it is definitely an existential threat

14:32 to humanity as kindy, uh, to use Kendi's line.

14:36 That's Abraham X, Kendi.

14:37 And so I think that kind of gives a lot of people a good idea of kind of where we're

14:39 at and we'll get more into some well-meaning Christians.

14:42 But before we get any further, I really think it's important to do some of this boring stuff

14:47 of defining our terms.

14:49 Okay.

14:50 So specifically for our audience, I'd love to, for you to define Wokeness, critical race

14:54 theory, anti-racism and whiteness.

14:57 And again, you spend a lot of time on each one of those four things in the book, but

15:01 just to give us an idea as we move forward in this conversation, let's start with Wokeness

15:05 and then we'll hit the other three.

15:06 What is a good definition for Wokeness?

15:08 Wokeness is waking up to the nature of systemic racism as really the fundamental problem of

15:14 society.

15:15 So racism is not just found in discrete acts where somebody yells at somebody on a street

15:20 or just something terrible.

15:22 Racism is not just in the American past in terms of slavery or Jim Crow, as it clearly

15:27 is.

15:28 No, racism is invisible.

15:30 Racism is what in particular white people transmit at all times and all places by virtue

15:35 of being the dominant group in society, especially in light of the American past.

15:41 And so Wokeness means, or being woke, means waking up to that reality and recognizing that

15:47 whiteness is the systemic cancer upon our society.

15:50 Okay.

15:51 What's our critical race theory?

15:53 Critical race theory is the theory that helps you, supposedly, see the power dynamics of

16:00 the world in racial terms.

16:02 So when you embrace critical race theory, you're working off of a Marxist system that understands

16:07 that there are racial majority, there's a racial majority group and there's racial minorities.

16:13 And the racial majority has power over the racial minority and expresses and uses that

16:19 power over minorities in all sorts of ways.

16:23 Anti-racism.

16:25 If you are anti-racist, according to Ibram X. Kendi, who's the leading prophet of Wokeness

16:30 and others, then what you do is you commit yourself to fighting white supremacy and systemic

16:38 racism in all levels of society.

16:41 And the way Kendi has it, either everything, basically, is acting in a racist way or an

16:49 anti-racist way.

16:50 So he really has a mannequin kind of dualist understanding of the world where there's no

16:54 gray areas.

16:56 You're either terribly racist or you are ardently woke.

17:01 And the target is always moving.

17:02 All right, last one here, whiteness.

17:06 Whiteness is a construct that has been used primarily by white people in order to foster

17:13 racial power over racial minorities.

17:17 This then is not just a skin color, it is an ideology, it is a way of being, it is fostered

17:23 and fomented by all levels of society, by violinists and birds and target shoppers.

17:32 And so basically, if you apply the understanding of whiteness on the side of the woke, anywhere

17:38 you have a lot of white people just to put it bluntly, a little more bluntly than CRT folks

17:44 would.

17:45 It's a massive problem and I'll just say this quickly, Kyle, there's so many places

17:49 we could go in this conversation and you've been very patient to get me on the podcast.

17:53 Thank you.

17:54 But basically, you could do what social justice, critical race theory and wokeness have done

18:01 in America in any society, anywhere there is a majority.

18:06 This is a Marxist scheme, ultimately, anywhere there's a majority, you could apply all the

18:12 things I just said, doesn't even have to be racial and you could thus gin up revolution

18:18 and hatred against that majority on the part of the minority.

18:22 That's what Marx and Engels did economically.

18:25 That's what the Frankfurt School did in the mid 20th century in Europe culturally and that's

18:30 what the woke are doing today, racial.

18:32 Well, I'm so glad you're going into all this detail and that's why it's so important, guys.

18:36 This book is in the show notes, we're not even going to be able to cover a tenth of the content

18:39 of the book because so many guys want to be angry about CRT, but they have no idea what

18:44 it is.

18:45 They have no idea where it comes from and they have no idea.

18:47 Like, I remember being on the back porch with a guy a couple of years ago, we're having

18:50 a cigar and a whiskey and I mentioned Marxism and he looks at me like I had a boob on the

18:53 top of my head.

18:54 He's like, what's that?

18:55 And I'm like, wait, Marxism, like Karl Marx, like the godfather of communism, nothing.

19:00 He looked at me blank.

19:01 This is a guy with a college degree with kids and a family and it's just like, you know,

19:04 that just wasn't his world.

19:05 So you don't have any excuses here because it's creeping into all these different areas

19:09 of life, but wokeness and CRT specifically Owen are creeping into the church.

19:14 And you kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier, but there are very, there's a lot

19:18 of well-meaning Christians, including some prominent pastors that say things like what

19:22 you said earlier, that CRT is simply a, you know, a set of analytical tools that explain

19:26 how race has and continues to function in society.

19:30 And then there are even more well-meaning Christians that have bought into the idea

19:33 that fighting for quote-unquote social justice and being anti-racist or posting a black square

19:39 on Instagram during the George Floyd riots of that summer, that that's a loving thing.

19:44 So talk to me a little bit about the, the various aspect of this, which is that it's

19:47 creeping into the church.

19:49 And so many people are buying it hook line and sinker.

19:52 Okay.

19:53 Wow.

19:54 This is so fun.

19:55 First, I got to say just a quick commercial on Karl Marx for your, for your listeners

19:59 because what you said is so helpful, Karl Marx with angles doing really the heavy lifting

20:04 communist manifesto, 1871 gave us history's most successful bad idea.

20:10 More people have died under the banner of Marxist ideas than under any other banner

20:15 in history.

20:16 Oh, and I was asked a few years ago on a Q and A podcast, if I could delete one book

20:20 from existence, what would it be and why?

20:22 And immediately it was the communist manifesto because of everything we saw in the 20th century

20:26 but go.

20:27 Yes.

20:28 So what people don't know is that Marxist theory wasn't just economic.

20:32 It wasn't just about the bourgeoisie and owning the means of production and these sorts of

20:35 things.

20:36 Okay.

20:37 Your eyes do not need to glaze over.

20:38 Basically, just know if you're listening to this podcast and you have any intellectual

20:42 stirrings at all, Marx hated everything good in the world.

20:46 Marx hated traditional Western life.

20:49 He hated the family.

20:50 He hated marriage.

20:51 He hated private property.

20:52 He hated what he called capitalism, better term for capitalism is the free market never

20:56 use Marx's term.

20:57 Anyway, I digress and what happens with Marx is that even though he's this economic theorist,

21:03 his ideas end up fomenting revolution all over the world, especially in the 20th century

21:06 and tons and tons of people join up against the means of production, the power brokers

21:13 of society and die because of it.

21:14 So Marx is terrible.

21:17 Marx hates everything scripture stands for quick commercial on Karl Marx.

21:21 Now let's jump over to the church.

21:23 Here's a problem with evangelicalism of the last 80 years.

21:27 The American evangelical church is what I'm talking about when I say that, a whole array

21:31 of denominations.

21:32 Basically, a lot of Christians think that their fundamental task is to be like the world.

21:38 And if I can add a phrase to be liked by the world, by the world, of course, they think

21:44 that they are not just having a decent day at the office, but they think that they are

21:49 batting a thousand at the local batting cage when they show especially elite polished culturally

21:58 sophisticated cool folks in the broader culture that they are not a mouth breathing fundamentalist

22:05 who believes in the Bible literally in all these sorts of ways.

22:08 They think that they are actually helping the cause of Christ by being a kind of middle

22:14 of the road Christian who makes no waves, who is nice, who is pro-culture, and who doesn't

22:21 launch any crusades against anyone.

22:23 Now there's a lot to say about that posture, but fundamentally why I'm raising that for

22:28 our discussion and I'll shut up here is that when it comes to this massive movement I call

22:33 wokeness, a lot of Christians posted the black square because they innately sense this major

22:41 tsunami, as I said, and they try to surf it, not go against it, and that has all kinds

22:46 of effects.

22:47 Well, and I think the issue that we're seeing here is that Christians are not prepared

22:51 to deal with this, which we'll get more into that here in a second.

22:54 But all these churches are desperately trying to be liked by the culture that will only

23:00 hate them because you can never bow low enough before the woke crowd.

23:03 You can never apologize hard enough or loudly enough and just think about all the people

23:08 that posted the black square and then ran afoul of the woke mob only months later because

23:13 of something they said or did back in high school.

23:15 It's like they're there.

23:17 It's a worldview that is completely broken from its foundation.

23:20 And so this actually goes to another quote from your book.

23:22 It's this in wokeness, however, there is no deeper ontological grounding for truth rather

23:27 wokeness simply asserts its commitments without foundation beyond our own narratives.

23:33 Human narratives are the grounding of truth in a woke system.

23:37 I forget who said the quote originally owned, but it's like having both of your feet planted

23:40 firmly in midair.

23:41 So talk to me a little bit more about that because gosh, it's convenient because if

23:45 you're woke, you literally don't even have like a binding document or ideology.

23:50 It could constantly move depending upon what argument you're in.

23:53 Yeah.

23:54 Fundamentally, as a Christian, I am tethered to the word of God.

23:59 So man, life in a fallen world is not boring.

24:02 It is very hard.

24:03 I have my own sin to fight.

24:04 It's a devil who prowls, 1 Peter 5a, trying to devour anyone he can and get them to live

24:10 for their lusts and their flesh and not for Christ.

24:13 But I as a Christian have been taken captive by God's grace.

24:17 And so it's like I'm at sea and I have been strapped to the mass like sailors of old when

24:22 the wind got really bad and the waves are 30 feet tall.

24:26 The last thing to do really is just tie yourself to the mast and pray.

24:30 And that's what we do, but fundamentally what we realize is that wokeness is trying to cause

24:37 us all to just buy into its assertions.

24:40 But that's all it does.

24:42 It doesn't offer you a text.

24:44 It doesn't offer you a priestly class.

24:47 It doesn't really offer you a worldview.

24:49 I think I use worldview in that quote you cited, but it's not even trying to give you

24:54 a coherent system of all things.

24:56 Kyle, that's actually a huge part of how it advances.

24:59 This is shadowy.

25:00 It's not all defined.

25:02 It's slogans.

25:03 It's banners.

25:04 It's marches in the street.

25:05 It's Molotov cocktails and just supposedly white supremacist businesses that have been

25:10 erected off of the evil structure of capitalism.

25:13 It's shooting a police chief, African American police chief in the head in St. Louis in Missouri

25:18 where I lived until last year under the name of justice, under the name of social justice.

25:24 And shockingly few people do what you are doing and your listeners are doing and try

25:29 to probe, forget whether we're agreeing or disagreeing.

25:32 Just even understand what the tenets of the system are when Black Lives Matter put out

25:37 its initial platform and they refined it a little.

25:39 They just asserted that they should dismantle white privilege and the nuclear family and

25:45 these sorts of things.

25:46 But again, aside from a vague hand wave and the direction of Marx and they are decided

25:51 Marxists over there, there was no real grounding at all.

25:55 And so, yeah, this is a very bad movement to join up with for many reasons, including

26:00 there's no foundation for it anywhere.

26:02 Well, that's the thing is they get really mad people on that side when you just point

26:07 at them.

26:08 So the stuff that they put up on the BLM website where they want to do away with the nuclear

26:10 family, they want to do away with, you know, heteronormativity or whatever the nonsense stuff

26:15 they said.

26:16 Well, a bunch of people took screenshots of that, obviously, and then they took it down

26:18 from their website and then they're like, why do you even care?

26:20 It's our website.

26:21 It's not even there anymore.

26:22 But it's like you didn't disavow those beliefs.

26:24 You just took them off your website because you were getting too much heat.

26:27 But also the word games that they play.

26:29 This is especially nefarious in the government schools because they're like, oh, we don't

26:33 teach critical race theory here.

26:35 Look at all of our curriculums.

26:37 There's no mention of CRT, any of those types of things.

26:40 Now they call it social emotional learning, or they call it this that in whose it's what's

26:44 it or whatever they want to call it.

26:46 But you're using the tenets of that worldview.

26:49 You're just not calling it by its name, but it's easy to do.

26:52 It's easy to kind of play that show game in terms of what you were saying, but for Christians,

26:57 they have to understand that we aren't just opposing this ideology.

27:00 We're at war with this ideology.

27:02 So I want to read another quote from the book here.

27:04 We must also remember that engaging wokeness is not going to war against flesh and blood.

27:08 It may be presented that way, but as Christians, we work in spiritual powers, Ephesians 612.

27:14 This means, among other duties, exposing and confronting the false teaching of men and women.

27:19 But our goal here is not to condemn or cast out, but rather to help strengthen and call

27:23 the strain back.

27:24 So in the film, Uncle Tom 2, which Salem, the producer or the distributor of your book and

27:30 all that, they helped with the release of Uncle Tom 2, Vodie Bockham is featured prominently

27:34 in that.

27:35 And obviously, he wrote the book, Fault Lines Around The Same Time, Christianity and Wokeness

27:38 came out.

27:39 But he was talking about how these murals in these black communities of George Floyd and

27:44 Breonna Taylor and Michael Brown and all these people, that those are the new stained glass

27:51 windows of this movement, right?

27:53 And I thought it was one of the most powerful quotes I had ever heard that he was just basically

27:56 saying right off the cuff.

27:58 But that was another kind of through point of Uncle Tom 2, is that, guys, this isn't

28:02 just a difference in opinion, choosing a red shirt or a blue shirt.

28:07 This is so much different.

28:08 It goes far deeper than we can even fathom, but I'll let you go from there.

28:13 Yeah, I love Vodie's work.

28:15 I'm so thankful for it.

28:18 There are hard texts behind this movement.

28:21 Let me just add a further word from what I was saying a minute ago.

28:24 There's a book called Critical Race Theory, Colin, An Introduction, which I love to post

28:29 as a screenshot on social media whenever some news anchor somewhere says, "Critical race

28:33 theory, that's just been dreamed up by racists in Oklahoma, Arkansas.

28:38 I live in Arkansas now."

28:40 And so it's like, no, here's the book.

28:42 Critical Race Theory, Colin, An Introduction.

28:44 So there are hard texts, but even those texts are slippery.

28:48 There's not a lot of ontological grounding even there.

28:51 Critical Race Theory starts out as a legal movement in the most precise sense.

28:56 And so what I realized in writing about all of this, the reason I wrote Christianity and

29:00 wokeness, and not Christianity and social justice, Christianity and CRT, was that I realized,

29:07 yes, there's a hard form of this, but very, very, very few people are ever going to

29:12 read Derrick Bell.

29:14 They are, however, going to watch the NBA or the NFL a year or two ago and see all sorts

29:22 of slogans about social justice or stop killing us, their equality.

29:26 They're going to watch the Premier League, Premier League guy like Aston Villa, at least

29:31 I used to until Greelish moved, and he should not have moved.

29:35 But anyway, and they see the players taking the knee.

29:38 So that, there's always a hard form of ideology, a hard form of Marxism, let's say, a hard

29:44 form of the Enlightenment.

29:45 And the philosophers write that form, and then there's usually a soft form.

29:49 And that's what the people imbibe almost without even knowing it.

29:54 And so that's why I use the term wokeness, because most people can get themselves off

30:00 the hook, especially in the church.

30:01 Some pastor who's doing a forum on racial justice, and it's thoroughly woke.

30:06 But he's never read CRT, he can say, I don't, I don't know anything about CRT.

30:11 Some of those public school teachers that you critiqued a minute ago, they honestly,

30:14 they haven't read CRT books.

30:16 But that doesn't mean they're not thoroughly woke, because there's a soft form of it.

30:21 I'm going in, in my book, Christianity Wokeness, I'm going against the hard form, because you

30:25 got to know it.

30:26 And I'm going against the soft form.

30:28 Okay.

30:29 So we need to go deeper into that, because that's exactly where I was going to be going

30:31 next.

30:32 So it's kind of like you're reading up, reading my mind.

30:33 But a lot of these people, and I, I don't mean this to be as demeaning as it's going

30:36 to sound, but like these, these school teachers, a lot of them are useful idiots.

30:39 Like they're, they bought into the ideology because they didn't want to be a mean and

30:43 they didn't want to ruffle any feathers.

30:45 And yet they're pushing a worldview that they don't even fully understand.

30:47 So I want to read this quote, because after I read this, I mean, I highlighted it, I wrote

30:51 in the margins, I was like, this kind of blew my mind, because I'm the one that kind of

30:54 preaches this stuff.

30:55 And then I was like, ooh, I kind of got caught with my pants down a little bit.

30:57 So let me read this quote here.

30:58 We are prepared for what you would call soft postmodernism, the belief that there is no objective

31:03 truth, no ought in life, and that science tells us the meaning of the cosmos.

31:08 We are not prepared for the hard postmodernism that is now dominant in our culture.

31:13 Unlike the earlier form of 10 to 30 years ago, hard postmodernism presents a very carefully

31:18 framed argument.

31:20 Many aughts and clear good group and bad group and maintains that science, like all disciplines,

31:25 is shot through with Western rationalism, born of white supremacy.

31:28 What a stupid sentence to even have to read, but anyway, I'll get back into it.

31:31 If you do not know this, however, however your good intentions may be, you are equipped

31:36 for a different struggle than the one that is knocking on your door.

31:40 Wokeness is not soft postmodernism.

31:42 Wokeness is hard postmodernism.

31:44 So Owen, at Undaunted Life, we equipment to push back darkness.

31:48 Okay.

31:49 That is why we're on this planet.

31:50 Now, one of the examples I use is you want to go to your school board meeting and you

31:54 want to get critical race theory or any of the LGBTQ nonsense kind of pushed out of your

31:58 kids curriculum so that they can learn how to read and write and do math and all that

32:02 basic stuff that we used to learn in school.

32:05 But if you don't understand where this worldview comes from, you can very easily be dismantled

32:10 by one follow up question, but this one hit me because it was like, I've been preparing

32:15 people for the soft postmodernism where it's like, yeah, there's no truth.

32:18 There's no absolute truth.

32:19 But then when you have these other people grounding their ideologies and Ibram X, Kendi

32:23 or Eric Mann or any of these other people that have kind of created this whole worldview,

32:28 it becomes a massive issue.

32:30 So go a little deeper on soft and hard postmodernism.

32:33 Yeah.

32:34 I was working off of an insight from James, Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose, who wrote the

32:39 book, "Cinnacle Theories."

32:41 And I would disagree with them on some very key worldview issues, but they really put

32:44 their finger on a number of important points in cynical theories.

32:47 And one of the points they made, I believe they call it "reified postmodernism" in cynical

32:52 theories.

32:53 I changed it in my book, I cited them, but I changed it to hard postmodernism.

32:58 That is where you don't have any deeper epistemological structure.

33:04 You don't have that sacred text, for example, that we were talking about earlier.

33:08 But you act like you do.

33:11 You act like your ideology, you act like your imperatives are grounded and are true, even

33:20 though you're still postmodern, right?

33:23 So there's no foundation ultimately for them.

33:26 That is very different than soft postmodernism, which is the form, as you said a minute ago,

33:31 that a lot of us were battling, starting to battle 20 years ago, that you were hearing

33:35 about that featured the clash of the new atheists and evangelicals and lots of debates, Christopher

33:41 Hitchens and Doug Wilson and others.

33:43 The point is this, with soft postmodernists are the ones who want to live and let live.

33:49 You have your truth, I have my truth.

33:51 And what that ends up meaning on a lot of college campuses, for example, is what college

33:55 students have used numerous ideologies to let it mean, which is, "I want to live according

34:00 to my lusts and do what I want, and mom and dad and the pastor back home can't tell me

34:05 any different."

34:07 Humanity is always questing, always questing, for an ideology that justifies and unleashes

34:14 our innate depravity.

34:17 We all want it innately, and we use, not only these ideologies and worldviews we're talking

34:22 about, but lots of them.

34:24 Anyway, so soft postmodernism is what the church has been equipped.

34:28 It's what our guns, so to speak, are cited for.

34:32 But we were not ready for hard postmodernism of the last five to seven years.

34:37 And that's why our lunch is being eaten by the woke.

34:41 It's because there's something different than some floppy-haired, live and let live kid at

34:47 NYU.

34:48 It's now that, let's say, evangelicals who go to NYU are being told matter of factly,

34:56 as if it is ontologically true that their white skin basically makes them a white supremacist.

35:02 That's a different animal than soft postmodernity.

35:05 The church has not cited its guns.

35:07 The church built the imaginal line, and what happened is we got blitzkrieged.

35:12 So part of that, I feel like Owen, and you do talk about this in your book, is that we

35:16 have this overwhelming focus and emphasis on race, but that race in and of itself is

35:22 not even a biblical category, right?

35:25 So their ethnicity is, but race is not.

35:29 So maybe talk about that a little bit, because I know you go into grave detail in the book

35:33 about that.

35:34 But that might be something that a Christian needs to hear today is like, look, you're

35:37 overwhelmed with race, but you're forgetting that there is the human race, that ethnicity

35:42 is a category, but if you're going to the Bible looking for how you should treat your

35:45 black brother or how you should treat your Latino brother or something like that, it's

35:49 like, you're not going to find the answer in the way that you think.

35:53 Critical race theory has pointed out.

35:55 It does have one point to make.

35:58 It is pointed out that race is a construct, but the problem with critical race theorists

36:03 is that they then bizarrely take that truth and then actually treat race as if it is real.

36:12 And it's called strategic essentialism in critical race theory circles.

36:17 In biblical terms, it again is true that the concept of race can be used against other

36:23 people.

36:24 You can invent lots of concepts to divide humanity into good and bad groups, and that

36:29 is truly what happened with the concept of race.

36:32 In the Bible, there's no grounding for the modern understanding of race.

36:37 There's of course diversity of skin, there's diversity of background, there's diversity

36:41 of ethnicity of culture, all throughout the scripture.

36:45 There's Greek terms like ethnos, for example, to capture different ethnic groups, but there's

36:51 no sense anywhere in the Bible that were anything but one race, Acts 1726, God has made us one

36:59 human race.

37:00 We're all image-bearers.

37:02 So having white skin doesn't make me different than somebody who has brown skin or somebody

37:06 who has black skin.

37:08 We all have different shades of melanin actually.

37:10 And so there's a lot that this term race is used to do that the scripture in no way funds.

37:18 When even beyond that, I just got through speaking out of men's event yesterday, and

37:21 I pointed out to everybody because there was a guy there who's like, he was like six foot

37:24 nine or six foot 10, and I made him stand up and I used him as an example.

37:28 But I was like, look, his height was given to him as a gift.

37:31 He didn't sit in a room one day and like, try real hard and being incredibly enormous.

37:36 He just is that your skin color is a gift.

37:39 Your athletic ability is a gift.

37:41 Your height or shortness is a gift because it's going to give you an in-road to a gospel

37:45 conversation at some point in your life or many of those conversations, and it had nothing

37:49 to do with anything that you chose.

37:51 And so now we live in this era where you're supposed to have pride in something that you

37:55 had nothing to do with, like it's just as dumb as people that are white supremacists.

37:59 They're like, I was born this way and that's awesome because we're the most awesome.

38:02 It's like, really?

38:03 You didn't do anything like you didn't like wake up one day and decide you were going

38:07 to do that so that you could have, you know, power over a particular group.

38:11 But it's one of those things that people are buying into in 2020.

38:15 So even in modernity, we're buying into this idea that we, again, as well-meaning loving

38:21 Christians should repent of sins, not by us that were perpetrated by people that looked

38:29 like us against people that don't look like us in the past, right?

38:35 They basically just call it reparations.

38:37 But I'm seeing these Christians that are lamenting their skin and apologizing to black or brown

38:43 people in their congregations for something that they themselves didn't do.

38:48 And they think it's well-meaning and they think it's beautiful and they think it's loving

38:51 and they're being cheered on by their woke pastor, that's probably a woman or something

38:55 like that.

38:56 But it's like, I don't understand where people are getting the biblical idea that reparations

39:02 is a good thing to do.

39:03 And you do a talk about that in the book in terms of, you know, lamenting the sins of

39:07 your forefathers when you're not actually having to pay for them.

39:09 So give us a little bit more on that.

39:11 Whoo, man, we could talk for hours just about that fundamentally what fundamentally what

39:17 people want, what men want, is straight talk.

39:20 And they're tired of mealy-mouthed pastors and religious leaders.

39:25 And so we need to be very clear that we have absolutely not a hitch in our spirit about

39:31 naming sin in the American past, in our heart, the potential for sin in the future.

39:37 So there are terrible stains of racism in the American past in Western history, for example.

39:42 Let's be clear about that.

39:43 It doesn't mean that all of Western history now is poisoned and we have to hate our country

39:47 and hate everything about our society and our culture.

39:50 It means that things are blended in a fallen world.

39:53 What we need to understand about generational guilt is two things.

39:57 Oftentimes the Bible doesn't just say one thing, it says two things.

40:00 It says that God is one, one God, but then it goes on to say a second thing.

40:04 God is three persons, that's two things.

40:06 One God, three persons, welcome to Trinitarian Christianity.

40:10 We have to say this as well when it comes to understanding humanity.

40:14 Humanity has two federal heads.

40:16 There's a fancy term.

40:17 You said you wanted to talk theology, so everybody buckle up on this very exciting adventure ride.

40:22 You've got Adam, who sins in the Garden of Eden, a real historical fall, real historical

40:28 garden.

40:29 He sins against God.

40:30 He and his wife eat the forbidden fruit.

40:31 They make us all sinners in the process.

40:32 We're not victims of what Adam did, we're criminals with Adam.

40:36 So Adam is our federal head.

40:38 What that just means is he represents us and we become sinners in him.

40:42 Then we have a second federal head, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ dies on the cross, sheds his

40:47 blood for our sin, satisfies the Father's just hatred against us for our sin and dies

40:53 in our place.

40:54 He's the second representative.

40:56 All who have faith in Jesus Christ will be born again, saved and live forever with God

41:02 in the new heavens and newer.

41:04 Two federal heads.

41:05 Now here's the problem, wokeness of the religious kind has corrupted what I just said.

41:13 It's totally appropriate to understand Adam representing all of us and Christ representing

41:18 all his blood bought people.

41:20 It is not right to think of my 13th great grandfather as making me guilty for his sins.

41:31 The only representatives that we can recognize are the ones that God recognizes.

41:35 Ezekiel 18, 19 to 20 and the Old Testament actually goes so far as to speak against corporate

41:41 guilt.

41:42 It says that the Father is not responsible for the Son's sins and the Son is not responsible

41:47 for the Father's sins.

41:48 So I can keep going here at length.

41:50 That's a lot of theology to pack into just a few minutes if you want to double down.

41:54 We can, but basically we're guilty and Adam, we're justified in Christ, but my son right

42:00 now Gavin, 11 years old, if I go out there and do something terrible in the streets of

42:05 Conway, Arkansas, no guilt whatsoever transfers to him.

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42:42 Well, I actually want to pull the thread on something that you kind of brought up.

42:46 That was a through line of that.

42:48 And you know, I like to just read this quote from your book, our culture and society are

42:51 falling prey to what we call mono causality.

42:55 This means that we trace very complex realities to just one simple factor.

42:59 So on my show, I talk about univariate analysis all the time to where it's just like, oh,

43:03 you know, these, all these people are being killed with guns, we should probably just

43:06 get rid of guns.

43:07 And if you do a univariate analysis, that seems entirely plausible and seems like it

43:11 would work.

43:12 But then when you start digging down way deeper and say, what are causing these issues?

43:15 Oh, not only does it get more complex, but it also gets more descriptive.

43:19 You see how that works?

43:21 But I feel like that's what we're dealing with right now is people want to say, well,

43:25 I'm white and white people, you know, own slaves back in the day.

43:30 So I should say sorry to a black person today, whether we, we don't even know if that was

43:34 a black person that was a descendant of a slave, descendant of a slave owner.

43:38 If they came from Africa, like, you know, a year or two ago, like we have no idea.

43:43 But because of what they look like and because of what we look like, mono causality or univariate

43:47 analysis, we just go that route.

43:50 Why have we become so enamored with mono?

43:52 Well, I know the answer to this, but, you know, I want you to talk a little bit further.

43:56 It's because people are stupid and lazy and we just want things to be simple.

44:00 We want to wrap them up in a bow and just shoot it off into the future, not have to think

44:03 about it anymore.

44:04 But Owen, that's not the world we live in.

44:07 It's really not.

44:08 Um, yeah, I mean, amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman is an important book that helps

44:13 us understand why society is where it is.

44:16 You could trace things like entertainment culture.

44:18 You could trace addiction to technology.

44:21 You could trace the corruption of the Western university by Marxism and by postmodernism,

44:27 such that universities become breeding grounds for activists, not incubators for thinkers

44:32 and doers.

44:34 So there's a lot of things to say.

44:36 If you think about the church, if you think about Christianity, the pulpit has been majorly

44:40 dumped down and going to corporate worship is really about a feeling, feeling good spiritually

44:46 about yourself and having music that rouses you or whatever, rather than it's great to

44:51 have beautiful music, but rather than sitting under the truth of God's word of me, shaped

44:55 by it.

44:56 You could say a lot of different things, but fundamentally, yes, we're desperate.

45:00 How strange that we're in the soundbite era of like 10 second talking heads on ESPN or

45:06 FS1 shouting at each other.

45:08 And that's exactly what we want politically.

45:10 I'm not against, you know, conservatives having short video clips and this sort of thing.

45:15 I want to engage at all levels of technology and culture.

45:18 I really do.

45:19 And there's a place for soundbites.

45:20 There's a place for Twitter, but fundamentally, if your intellectual diet is only that, is

45:26 only TikTok, you are in a very bad place.

45:30 So what we've got to recognize is you have to do hard work with these things.

45:35 You can't reduce things to mono causality, as you say.

45:39 You can't assume that because somebody has white skin, they have privilege and wealth

45:43 and all sorts of great things.

45:46 Let's even say this, sorry, real quick.

45:48 If you see a wealthy white person, don't assume that they're living off the largesse

45:53 of a slave owning for bear.

45:57 That person may come from tremendous poverty.

46:01 We don't know each other, but wokeness trains us to hate each other based on our skin color.

46:05 There's a lot more to say.

46:07 Suffice it to say that the world is complex and we should distrust mono causal explanations

46:13 in general.

46:14 Well, we're going to leave some meat on the bone so guys will go out and actually buy

46:17 the book and check it out.

46:18 But there's something that you talked about there and that you do talk about in the book.

46:22 So I want to take a little bit of a left turn away from the race issue.

46:25 And I want to talk about kind of the modern church.

46:27 And the easy way to talk about it is mega churches.

46:29 And I'm trying to draw a dividing line between mega churches that are healthy and the majority

46:34 of mega churches that certainly aren't.

46:36 But there was actually a quote from Christianity and wokeness where you kind of talk about this

46:39 a little bit.

46:40 So I'll read it here.

46:41 This was such a twofold calling.

46:43 We remember that it is not our job to give Jesus good PR.

46:46 We are not trying to niceify the Christian faith.

46:49 We are not seeking to make it palatable to the natural man.

46:52 We are not downplaying the hard truth of biblical teaching in order to get people in.

46:57 We are striving as godly men and women to present the whole council of God in order to

47:01 glorify God as witnesses and make disciples who obey all Christ commanded and taught as

47:07 we see in Matthew 28 16 through 20.

47:09 Now in modern mega churches, a lot of these mega churches, it is what I say all the time,

47:15 which is the head senior pastor who's basically the senior communicator.

47:19 He doesn't do any pastoring duties.

47:21 He has a board of directors.

47:23 He's trying to figure out which, you know, next campus he's going to launch or which book

47:27 he's going to write next or whatever.

47:28 He basically builds his four or five week life lesson is four or five week long TED talk.

47:34 And then he sprinkles some scripture over the top of it so he can keep it's tax exempt

47:38 status.

47:39 And then he calls it good and they don't want to talk about any of the hard subjects.

47:43 They don't want to talk about race.

47:44 They don't want to talk about LGBTQ issues.

47:47 They don't want to talk about the transing of children.

47:49 They don't want to talk about, you know, fundamentalist Islam because all those things might affect

47:53 their ability to keep the lights on because people love going to church, get their spiritual

47:57 skittles, hear their rock concert and shoot out the door and have no life change, no discipleship,

48:03 nothing whatsoever.

48:04 It's an easy box to check in our modern TikTok era where we want the most amount of content

48:09 and the least amount of time possible so that we can get back to our regular lives.

48:13 But we're doing ourselves a disservice as a modern church by supporting churches like

48:17 that.

48:18 But also whenever something real like critical race theory comes up that requires a full

48:23 throated and theologically based response.

48:26 We don't have any theologians around to do that.

48:29 We don't have any Christians that have been discipled up and mature Christians that have

48:33 been eating meat and not drinking milk in order to push back against this darkness.

48:36 So I feel like I'm preaching now, but you know, kind of give me a little bit more information

48:40 on that.

48:41 Bro, speaking of sound bites, let's just clip that and let's go home.

48:46 That was that was that was fire.

48:49 Yeah, I would just fundamentally say, Amen, I don't know what else to add.

48:52 I mean, yeah, the church is a church in too many places, not every place.

48:59 There's lots of sound congregations.

49:01 And by the way, to everybody listening to this, find one man or woman alike.

49:06 Find a strong doctrinal church.

49:08 Don't worry about the size.

49:11 Don't worry about how cool it looks.

49:13 Don't worry even fundamentally about its branding.

49:16 Find a place that is led by strong, godly men that stand on the word of God that preach

49:22 the word of God fearlessly.

49:24 Join it.

49:25 Serve it.

49:26 Become a member.

49:27 Do humble things.

49:29 And watch as God blesses your life by the power of his gospel grace.

49:33 Sadly, a lot of churches are ordered around what you said.

49:37 They're ordered around, as we were talking about some minutes ago, accommodating the

49:41 culture, trying to be liked by the culture, trying to probably, you know, to speak a

49:45 little bit charitably, not be the world, but be as world adjacent as the church possibly

49:53 can be.

49:54 To come as close.

49:55 It's like youth group, bro.

49:56 It's like youth.

49:57 It's like the youth group question.

49:59 How much can I do with this hot teenage girl before I'm in sin?

50:05 Now, we understand masculine instincts.

50:08 We want young men to buck the trends.

50:10 We want them to marry young women.

50:11 We want them to build families and et cetera and so on.

50:14 But fundamentally, that is not a good question.

50:17 The question is how holy can I be by the power of God's grace in me?

50:20 I'm not going to be perfect.

50:21 We all sin in many ways.

50:22 James 3, too.

50:23 We all stumble.

50:24 Me included.

50:25 But how holy can I be?

50:26 What the evangelical church has been asking.

50:29 How close to the line of the world can I get?

50:32 And that's just the wrong question.

50:34 And too many churches are ordered around that.

50:36 Listen, you don't have to be some weirdo congregation that is no grounding.

50:40 It's like you live in Mars in order to be faithfully Christian.

50:43 You can be fun.

50:44 You can be friendly.

50:45 You can be warm.

50:46 You could be loving.

50:47 That's good.

50:48 There's a lot of biblical material about that, Galatians 5, 22 to 23, the fruits of

50:51 the spirit.

50:52 Love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, self-control, kindness, these sorts of things.

50:56 And men need to display these things as much as women.

50:59 But fundamentally, we're not trying to get as close to the line as we can.

51:03 Find a church that's going to take you deep in the Word of God and tie yourself to the

51:07 mast.

51:08 That's what we need to do.

51:09 One, that's the thing that I tell people all the time, because I went to a big-time

51:13 mega church for over 10 years and I just kind of was what it was and I didn't advance

51:17 at all.

51:18 And then I went to a church that I go to now, which is Faith Bible Church in Emma and Oklahoma.

51:22 Hitchcock is the lead pastor there and it doesn't have any of the feel of the previous

51:28 mega church.

51:29 And it's not, you know, it's not as fun.

51:32 And there are some things that really drive me nuts about the church.

51:36 But the overwhelming thing I have in my brain when I think about my church is man, my church

51:40 is healthy.

51:41 Like, yeah, do I wish this was a little different?

51:43 Do I wish they would talk about this more and do I wish that would be just like, yeah,

51:46 I've got my preferences because if I'm a content creator, when I see content that I don't like,

51:50 I want to say, you know, hey, let's change it and make it better, but the church is healthy.

51:54 And how much of a blessing is it that that church has seen explosive growth in the last

51:58 year or two, because, you know, there was a big building expansion, but for the decades

52:02 prior to that, it grew by a few dozen people a year, just kind of grew and grew and grew

52:09 and it wasn't explosive, it was just healthy.

52:12 But what a lot of churches do now, I want to kind of move over into this area, is the

52:17 modern church may as well put neon signs up outside of their doors that say, men, we didn't

52:24 do any of this for you.

52:27 Nothing that you're about to see has you in mind, right?

52:29 The pastor did not think of you whenever he was creating a sermon content.

52:33 The band did not think of you when they were trying to pick out the songs or what key they

52:37 were going to sing them in or the lyrical content and every of those things.

52:40 And it's what Jordan Peterson talked about recently in his YouTube video, Message to

52:44 the Christian churches, we require so little of our congregants and specifically so little

52:49 of our men, then you were talking about the youth.

52:52 When you expect the youth to just hang out, play video games and eat pizza, and then you'll

52:55 just kind of sprinkle a little gospel on them at the end.

52:59 Don't be shocked when you don't see this tremendous societal change within your community

53:02 with the youth, but the same is true for the men.

53:05 You expect nothing of them and you basically tell them, hey, we didn't do this for you

53:09 churches for women and children, you don't need to be here, and then you're shocked when

53:14 the men aren't around when you need them.

53:16 When they don't sign up to volunteer, when they don't sign up to go on mission, when

53:19 they don't sign up to drive the bus to youth camp or any of those types of things.

53:23 So it's like my buddy Chad Prather said, it's like, we gut shoot our preachers and then,

53:26 you know, we get after them for not having any guts.

53:29 Well, we're gut shooting our men and then we love when Father's Day comes around so that

53:33 we can take a diarrhea dump on top of their heads.

53:35 But I want to talk a little bit just about man-friendly churches.

53:38 So you're the former president of the Council on biblical manhood and womanhood.

53:42 We've lost that even as an avenue of description now in terms of describing something as biblical

53:47 man or biblical woman.

53:48 It sounds so old fashioned.

53:49 You know, you say the word headship and people are like, Oh, here we go.

53:52 He's going to talk about Ephesians and tell me I need to wear a bon and go cook.

53:56 But talk to me a little bit about how churches can be more man-friendly because if the church

54:00 is going to have a future, especially here in America, like we're going to need the men.

54:04 Yes, there's a strong parallel between the man problem you just described and my book

54:12 that I'm writing when we are off this podcast is The War on Men.

54:16 It's my next Salem book.

54:18 And I think it should come out in the next year or some time.

54:21 So I'm literally on this issue right now that we're talking about day to day.

54:27 Just burn in it bro.

54:28 So exciting.

54:29 I love doing it.

54:30 So there's a parallel between the problems with men that you just rightly described.

54:36 And I'll just jump over to a related issue quickly and then jump back.

54:40 Problems with worldview and political approach, okay?

54:46 The church has given up discipling men and the church has given up forming a meaningful

54:54 biblical worldview.

54:55 I don't mean just the soft stuff.

54:56 I mean like, okay, let's dig in, let's talk about the heart issues, which you were talking

55:01 about a few minutes ago.

55:02 Let's talk about trans, let's talk about LGBT, let's talk about these kind of matters.

55:06 Let's talk about abortion and not in a glancing way.

55:09 Not in a only, we're going to be known by what we're for, we're four babies.

55:13 Okay, great.

55:14 But are you then turning around and telling women who abort that they're victims of abortion

55:19 culture when they're actually murderers?

55:22 These kind of realities, even sound churches don't want to say the hard words anymore.

55:29 And so what I've seen even among my generation, your generation of preachers is they will

55:35 excoriate men for listening to Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and Jaco

55:42 Willing or whoever.

55:44 And they will excoriate a lot of older Christians, especially for watching Fox News.

55:49 Okay, neither of these two categories is composed in a large part of Christians.

55:56 These should not be our primary places we're going for truth in these realms.

56:01 But what has happened is the church has stopped speaking about manhood in a meaningful way.

56:07 And the church has stopped speaking about politics or worldview in a meaningful way.

56:12 And that has left many Christians with nowhere to go in terms of evangelical voices.

56:18 So guests that they go to, they go to conservative voices or Republican voices or the intellectual

56:23 dark web or whatever you want to call it.

56:25 Okay, when actually the same pastors who are burning their people down for watching Fox

56:31 News are the ones who have abdicated discipleship.

56:34 Okay.

56:36 So what this means is, there's so much to say, I know you are unfair.

56:43 You have put so much weight on this bar for me.

56:45 This is too fun.

56:47 What this means is we have to recover.

56:49 I'm jumping out of politics.

56:51 That's a whole nother podcast.

56:53 We have to recover that political discipleship or whatever worldview discipleship.

56:57 We have to restructure church, not to be a boys club, but to engage men.

57:03 And the test for me, so much I could say, the test for me is the parking lot.

57:11 Are there men in the parking lot when you show up to church?

57:16 What I mean is, are they guiding people to their places where they need it?

57:21 I mean, not in a weird way.

57:22 Are they holding umbrellas for ladies in the rain?

57:25 Are they holding the door open when you walk through?

57:28 Are they shaking hands?

57:29 Are they on the sides of the church?

57:32 Are they watching?

57:33 These are wild days.

57:34 The shooter could enter any congregation at any time.

57:36 Are there men?

57:37 Do they have heat on them?

57:40 Are there men?

57:41 And then of course, are there men in the pulpit?

57:42 Are there men leading?

57:43 Are they leading a masculine way, of course they're gracious and kind and filled with

57:47 the fruits of the spirit, but are they men?

57:50 I could go on, but that's my test, parking lot test.

57:54 So the dichotomy for me, and you know, this is the first time we've interacted, so no

57:58 reason why you would know this.

57:59 But whenever I became a Christian at the age of 15, I was at that age where I was trying

58:03 to figure out what it meant to be a man, and now I'm trying to figure out what it means

58:06 to be a Christian, okay?

58:08 And what I found very early on is that, okay, all the manly men were outside the church,

58:13 doing man stuff, right?

58:15 And all the godly men were inside the church, doing godly stuff, like praying for people

58:18 and touching them on the shoulder awkwardly and shaking their hand somewhat limp-rusted

58:22 like.

58:23 And then all the manly men were out doing like different things.

58:26 And I kept that dichotomy on into my early 20s, and then I realized, wait a minute, Jesus

58:31 was a rough dude, like Jesus cast out a demon with his voice.

58:34 Jesus snorted with anger when he arrived at Lazarus's tomb.

58:38 Jesus cleared the temple with a whip of quartz that he made.

58:42 He left in an act of premeditated, sustained, intimidating aggression, came back and smoked

58:48 a bunch of human beings and animals and ran them out of his dad's house, right?

58:52 And I'm like, wait a minute, that's not the sense I get whenever I look at what's happening

58:56 in the pulpit.

58:57 When I see these mealy-mouthed preachers or these incredibly effeminate men trying to

59:01 teach me how to be a godly man, it just, it doesn't make sense.

59:05 And you see a lot of guys, rougher guys, like the guys that listen to this show, they walk

59:09 into a church, they see all these soft, doughy-looking men and they're like, ah, I think I'm going

59:14 to go do something else.

59:15 I'm going to go to the range.

59:16 I'm going to prepare for my next fantasy football draft.

59:18 I'm going to go play Call of Duty.

59:19 And they don't engage because it's not engaging to them.

59:23 And that doesn't mean your pastor should go up there with mud on his shirt and blood

59:27 on his lip and eating beef jerky and then take off on a motorcycle out of the sanctuary.

59:32 But if you look at your pastor and you don't see a man that you're willing and wanting

59:36 to follow, look at all the examples from the great generals we had just from World War

59:40 II.

59:41 These men were, these, you know, corn fed Iowa farm boys were willing to fight and die because

59:46 of the general, because of the manliness of the general, because of guys like Winston

59:49 Churchill, because of guys like MacArthur.

59:52 And it's like, who are those guys today in modern Christendom, right?

59:55 A lot of people have looked at me like someone's told me, they're like, Kyle, you're like Joe

59:58 Rogan, but Christian, to me, like again, that's a stupid thing to say because of the differences

1:00:03 in our, in our platforms, but it's like, Hey, I wish a guy like Jocko Willink or Tim Kennedy

1:00:08 or Joe Rogan or Cam Haines or any of those guys had a really overwhelming gospel message

1:00:13 in addition to all their manhood, endurance and resilience messages.

1:00:18 Does that make sense?

1:00:19 Oh, totally.

1:00:20 What has happened is that manhood has been isolated to a spiritual reality.

1:00:26 It is absolutely true that the core of the Christian faith for a man and a woman is a

1:00:30 spiritual reality, so it needs, so as a man, fundamentally to be a Christian is to be

1:00:37 regenerated by the spirit, to be born again, and under the good news of Jesus Christ.

1:00:43 And then you live a life of virtue, according to the scripture, by the power of the spirit,

1:00:46 you live out the teachings of Jesus Christ, you're a disciple, okay, the problem is that

1:00:53 what I just said is as far as many churches will go in engaging men.

1:00:59 Then there's nothing beyond that for men to understand themselves distinctly as God made

1:01:06 men or women to understand themselves as God made women.

1:01:12 What what our accommodationist church has done is it has it has gender neutralized Christianity

1:01:19 such that everything is boiled down into saying this and all the similarities of discipleship

1:01:25 between men and women are emphasized and all the distinctives in the scripture are very

1:01:30 much downplayed, ridiculed, played down.

1:01:33 So what we need to do is keep the spiritual core of Christianity, recognize that men and

1:01:39 women are alike disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, but then we need to we need to also

1:01:43 recognize boys need training into Christian manhood, and similarly girls need training

1:01:48 into Christian womanhood.

1:01:49 We fundamentally, most of us are going to have very different callings, men are called

1:01:53 to be a leader protector and provider in the name of Jesus Christ, women are called to

1:01:57 be a nurture, a homemaker, child raiser, submissive to their husband in the name of Jesus Christ.

1:02:02 And so those are fundamentally different callings.

1:02:04 Our bodies are different.

1:02:06 Those bodies reflect imperatives from almighty God himself, men of wider shoulders, a thousand

1:02:10 to two thousand percent more testosterone on average, deeper voice, aggression, ability.

1:02:16 There's a reason why our sons often tackle us when we're home from work and our daughters

1:02:20 often squeeze us and want us to hold them close.

1:02:23 There's all sorts of things we can say.

1:02:25 We have to not let discipleship of men in some be only spiritual.

1:02:32 Our discipleship is spiritual at its core, but that flows into from the shared gospel

1:02:37 core that flows into Christian manhood and Christian womanhood.

1:02:42 And that has all kinds of effects in terms of how you raise your son, for example.

1:02:48 Do you raise him to be able to handle himself in a fight?

1:02:51 Is he outdoors?

1:02:52 Are you, are you not, um, doping him up so that he stops being aggressive?

1:02:58 But for example, as a father trying to funnel through much prayer, it's not easy to do this.

1:03:03 It's up to God ultimately, but trying to funnel that aggression into good causes and to Christian

1:03:08 manhood.

1:03:09 There's so much more to say, uh, Kyle, but, um, we can't, we can't cut discipleship off

1:03:14 into only spiritual reality.

1:03:15 Yeah.

1:03:16 You opened up a huge can of worms here, which is definitely going to lead to a second conversation,

1:03:20 but unfortunately we're running out of time, but I think that the biggest issue that we

1:03:23 see is in a culture that doesn't have rights of passage for men.

1:03:26 We allow our young men to self initiate in a manhood.

1:03:29 We allow them to choose.

1:03:31 We allow them to pick when they become a man, first time they have sex, first time they,

1:03:35 uh, they get their driver's license, first job, when they move away to college, whatever,

1:03:38 they just get to pick.

1:03:40 And if you're not calling that out in your young man, and I'm, I'm now obsessed with

1:03:43 this cause I have two sons.

1:03:44 I have a two year old and a six month old, I'm obsessed with this idea because I don't

1:03:48 want them to just wake up one day and be like, well, I guess I'm a man.

1:03:51 Why?

1:03:52 Because I turned 18, but again, modern Christians and in Protestant Christians, we don't do

1:03:56 that.

1:03:57 We don't have rights of passage.

1:03:58 And again, you can go crazy.

1:03:59 Like, you know, having your kid put their hand in a glove full of bullet ants, you know,

1:04:03 that's probably not the greatest idea and that's not really going to do much for them other

1:04:06 than to, you know, prove some physical resilience in that moment, but being able to call some

1:04:10 things out in your son and say, here are some things that I love about you and hear some

1:04:15 things that everyone's going to love about you.

1:04:17 But also here are some things that are going to cause you some trouble as you get older

1:04:20 and as you grow, but also letting that young man know now that you're a man, whatever that

1:04:24 time is that you've defined.

1:04:26 Here are some things that the community is going to require of you.

1:04:29 Here's the responsibility that we are going to heap onto the bar that is on your shoulders

1:04:33 because that's what's important.

1:04:34 We need you in our church, son.

1:04:36 We need you in this house, son.

1:04:37 We need you on this team, son.

1:04:39 And if you don't carry your weight, the entire thing will come down and not be what it could

1:04:43 be, we have to be calling that message out in our kids, but oh, and I really appreciate

1:04:48 all the time you've given us today.

1:04:49 I know we've gone beyond that, but you got something else?

1:04:51 Go ahead.

1:04:52 I just have to say one more thing.

1:04:53 I love your words there.

1:04:56 I don't want to make hash of your podcast time allotment or whatever, but very quickly,

1:05:03 men have migrated to the shadows because men have been kicked out of the main center of

1:05:10 American public and cultural life.

1:05:13 And so what you have now is men having their own places where they go that are culturally

1:05:19 taboo.

1:05:20 So you think about this with sports, to some degree, you think about it with MMA, these

1:05:23 kind of realities.

1:05:24 You think about it with movies or whatever it may be, hunting.

1:05:28 Men always like their own stuff and we need to give men their own spaces just like women

1:05:32 need their own spaces.

1:05:33 But fundamentally, we've got to recognize that even if we would see things in some of

1:05:37 those pursuits where we would be like, okay, I affirm that.

1:05:40 I don't affirm that if I was ever going to watch a fight with my son, I would not want

1:05:44 him watching the parts where attractive women are wearing underwear.

1:05:48 But there is something, for example, to guys being tough.

1:05:53 And again, as we were saying a minute ago, if you only have Christian manhood meaning

1:05:59 be gentle, you're not going to have the warrior aspect of biblical manhood.

1:06:04 You're not going to have Jesus coming back to deal out death to Satan.

1:06:08 So you cultivate toughness in lots of different ways, just like you cultivate tenderness in

1:06:14 lots of ways and boys.

1:06:15 But you've got to preserve the ability for boys to be aggressive, to be physical, to

1:06:22 take risks, to get hit.

1:06:25 You have to balance these sorts of things, of course, wisely.

1:06:28 But man, if you only coddle your kids and only preach safety at them the way our COVID

1:06:33 culture, our lockdown culture has done terrible culture for men, by the way.

1:06:38 Just live safely.

1:06:39 Safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe, safe.

1:06:41 That's terrible culture for raising boys and to men because fundamentally it's not safe

1:06:46 to become a man.

1:06:47 And so a lot more to say, but we've got to help our boys rightly cultivate their aggression

1:06:54 and channel it in a Christian direction.

1:06:57 I absolutely agree with that.

1:06:58 You are certainly preaching to the choir here, but I'm so glad that you're writing a book

1:07:02 like that.

1:07:03 I think there need to be more books like that that go deeper.

1:07:04 The number of Christian manhood books that I've been sent that are trying to recreate

1:07:10 the will that John Eldridge did with wild at heart back in the day, but they're doing

1:07:14 it so poorly because they're basically trying to say the same things without any level of

1:07:18 nuance or poetry that John Eldridge has brought to us.

1:07:21 And there's no heft to what they're doing.

1:07:23 They're just like, you need to be better.

1:07:24 How do we be better?

1:07:25 Read your Bible and pray more.

1:07:27 It's like, great.

1:07:28 Thanks for the specificity.

1:07:29 Now, now how do I translate that into something that my, you know, four year old eventually

1:07:33 will be able to understand, so I appreciate the amount of time and effort you're putting

1:07:37 into that and the amount of time and effort you put into today.

1:07:40 But for now, that's all for me.

1:07:41 Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?

1:07:42 No, it's just funny that Jordan Peterson is specific about like making your bed and the

1:07:49 church isn't.

1:07:50 It's like read your Bible and pray, which we must do.

1:07:52 But then it's like, okay, what do I do to become a man?

1:07:55 And so any pastor listening to this man help men disciple them, train them.

1:08:01 You don't have to pretend you're Moses on a mountain, but like give them instruction.

1:08:05 Give them wisdom.

1:08:06 We need more of those kinds of men.

1:08:07 I've said this before and I'll say it again, Jordan Peterson is the most influential secular

1:08:13 non-Christian on the Christian church in existence today.

1:08:17 There's a reason why young men to pastors out there, there's a reason why young men in

1:08:21 your congregation are listening to Jordan Peterson more than they're listening to you.

1:08:25 And if you don't figure out the reason for that, it's going to be a major issue for you

1:08:28 and your congregation moving forward.

1:08:30 Oh, and strand, thank you for coming on a dog to life of man's podcast.

1:08:34 Thanks, Kyle.

1:08:35 It was great.

1:08:36 There you go, guys.

1:08:37 I hope you enjoyed my interview with Owen Strand before we let you go.

1:08:39 We are going to do it a quick resilience boost.

1:08:41 Add on dog to life.

1:08:42 Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that for just spiritual, mental

1:08:46 and physical resilience.

1:08:47 So again, just a reminder to those of you that were interested, you entrepreneurs, you

1:08:50 business owners out there, you need to text upper room to seven, two, seven, four, seven,

1:08:55 two, three, eight, six, zero.

1:08:56 That's upper room to seven, two, seven, four, two, seven.

1:09:00 Or four, seven, two, three, eight, six, zero, seven, two, seven, four, seven, two, three,

1:09:04 eight, six, zero.

1:09:05 That will get you an application and a time to schedule a one-on-one with Riley Meek of

1:09:08 the upper room and the Kings Council.

1:09:10 So for the links I've got for you today, I've got a link to several of the books from Owen

1:09:13 Strand.

1:09:14 So I've got a link to his Amazon pages where you can look at Christianity and Wokeness,

1:09:17 reenchanting humanity and the pastor and the public theologian.

1:09:20 And then I've also got a link to his Twitter because he's very, very active on Twitter.

1:09:24 He's a great follow.

1:09:25 You should check him out there.

1:09:26 All right, guys.

1:09:27 Thanks so much for listening to the show.

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1:09:32 If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, just shoot me an email

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1:09:49 And as always, we want to thank the band August Burns Red for allowing us to use their music

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1:09:59 The links are in the description.

1:10:00 I'm your host, Kyle Thompson.

1:10:02 Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience.

1:10:09 Keep seeking the Lion of Judah.

1:10:27 They reside!