October 14, 2024 • 46 mins
A podcast to help believers renew their minds and reform their hearts.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to the Thinking Tree, a podcast to help believers renew their minds and reform their hearts.
(00:03):
I'm Adam Sanchez.
And I'm Jeff No.
And today we are taking on critical race theory.
All right, we're taking on a hard subject, one that if we were to go back in our, in our timeline, back when we were doing our YouTube series, The Underground, this is one that we were just beginning to touch on.
(00:28):
It was becoming a big thing during the days of COVID and whatnot.
It was really reaching a zenith during that time.
We started The Underground because of the George Floyd situation and the riots and all that.
So we were talking quite a bit about this back then.
So, but here we are.
It's ongoing.
Here we are four years later.
Yeah.
And we're still discussing it because there's still an impact within the church.
(00:49):
That's right.
And that's the nature of our whole series.
We're not just talking about things for the sake of talking about them, but we want to help believers.
So here's the question for today related to this.
How should Christians think, think about and respond to critical race theory and the policies that come from this worldview?
Worldview is a great word, right?
(01:10):
It's how you see things.
And yeah, and, and a Christian, a lot of Christians are feeling pressured to buy into CRT to some extent.
Yeah.
Or at least to give it credence, academic, you know, credibility, something like that.
So it's definitely hanging out there within the church.
(01:30):
And we still have a lot of division in the church, even people talking about this issue, talking about white privilege, white supremacy, things of that nature.
So it's, it's still, I would say it's less than back in the days of the George Floyd situation, but it's still hanging around in a lot of churches.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I would say to that end today, it seems that people have more of a position on it.
(01:51):
Back then, people were trying to figure out where they would line up on it.
Today, they, they kind of pick their camps.
It's not that there's only two camps necessarily of four against it, but there's probably some variation of degree within there as well of how much of it they'll accept or how much of it they'll say, yeah, yeah, but I get it.
Or those who are, you know, absolutely not.
(02:12):
I don't want to touch it at all.
But I think most people kind of have their camp that they're comfortable to be in.
Right.
So of course we're going to poke the bear on this one.
Please, can we do that some more?
That'd be great.
Why not?
Let's talk about it.
So CRT, critical race theory, there, there are many definitions of this.
So that's not like we have an all encompassing view of this, but I think there are some important components, both of the thinking, the worldview, as well as the policy that we should discuss before how we should think about it.
(02:41):
Because we need to understand it first, then we can talk about the policies that are with it, and then we can talk about how do we respond as Christians to those things.
So in a big picture kind of way, critical race theory, it really, the word race is the big word there.
It's focused on an idea of racism that has white identity as the enemy, right?
(03:03):
White identity being inherently racist and that white identity only promotes and exists in a white supremacy society.
Right.
It's a lot of words that have been said there, but essentially this, to be white is to be racist and to exist in a white society is to exist in a white supremacy society.
(03:23):
Right.
And they'll often use that term supremacy in a way that's probably different than you and I would look at it.
Probably even different than the KKK would have looked at it.
Of course, right, right, right.
And that's actually one of the, for all of my frustrations with the CRT movement, I'll give them credit.
(03:45):
They're pretty good at the propaganda.
And one of the things that they do really well is to vaguely define things.
On purpose.
Exactly.
And that's why this is a moving target of trying to answer it, but I'm using some inflammatory statements on purpose.
Yeah.
I'm not trying to mince words here and nor am I trying to defame people.
(04:05):
CRT is not a person.
CRT is a policy of thinking.
It's a worldview.
It's not a human.
So when we're talking about this, though we have a lot of feelings about it, we really need to table that for a second and say, what are we talking about first?
Then we can talk about people that may exist who love this worldview, who promote this worldview versus those who don't.
(04:27):
We can talk about that next.
But on the table right now, it's just what is this view?
What actually is it?
It's not a person.
It's a view.
And the view is focusing on race.
And the term that you just kind of described here is there are people who are advantaged and people who are disadvantaged.
Oppressed oppressor.
And that's the older language that they've moved away from in a lot of ways because it's liberation theology, which we'll get to in a minute.
(04:50):
But it is really intense language.
So they talk about being advantaged or disadvantaged.
Those are kind of the big terms these days.
There's a dynamic that's within this view that says the civil rights movement had some good things, but it never went far enough.
It never helped us arrive where we need to arrive.
Which was essentially the tearing down of certain structures within society.
(05:12):
Yes.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say now, as much as we want to hold that tension line where the civil rights movement, there were a lot of good things that occurred.
And not everyone was amazing who was promoting ideas.
I think in the coming years, we're going to hear things about Martin Luther King Jr. that are going to make our skin crawl.
And I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
(05:33):
I'm just saying no one's perfect.
You mentioned this in our last episode.
The more we dig in and understand people's lives, man, testimony matters.
And so there are things where we might have a difficult time reconciling that in a couple years.
Now, if that's not the case and some of this stuff was just conspiracy, great. Amen.
But there are too many eyewitness accounts that make this very difficult.
(05:54):
So we don't need to go into that.
But there were some good things that came out of the civil rights movement.
It wasn't all encompassing, but nothing ever is.
Just like today within the abortion, anti-abortion movement, there are some things we're thankful for.
We've talked about that on the episode, but it's not complete.
It's not done and it's not finished.
And we know that.
We can still be thankful for things that have occurred.
For sure.
So we're trying to hold that tension.
(06:15):
We're saying what is good and praiseworthy, that was helpful, and yet may not gone far enough, may not fixed everything.
But we also can't expect policies to fix everything.
Our hope isn't in that.
So there's a bit of a tension that we wrestle with, right?
Right.
That's part of it.
So when we look back on the court over time on the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement was never intended to fix the human heart.
(06:36):
Just like we've talked about policies even with abortion, don't fix the human heart.
That was never intended to, and if people thought that it would have, I think Christians, let's pause, we should have never expected that.
Right.
We should have never expected policies or mandates to fix human heart.
We talked about mandates in the last episode.
Right.
Mandates don't fix people or change people or force them to do righteousness.
Right.
That's not how it works.
So we need to bear those things in mind and wrestle with those a little bit.
(06:59):
But one of the big things with CRT today, one of the terms they use that we do need to discuss a little bit, is equity.
Yeah.
Equity over equality.
Two completely different words.
Yes.
Before you do that, can I do a little more prolegomena?
Sure.
Okay.
I love that word too.
It's a great word.
Yeah.
Just a few more foundational things before we dive in deeper, because equity and equality is a giant piece of this.
(07:22):
But just to help some of our Christian listeners understand a few things about CRT as a worldview or as an institution.
First of all, like everything else, and we've talked about this in multiple things now, what we've seen now over the years is, guess what?
There's money to be made in the CRT business.
It's an industry.
(07:44):
Racism is an industry in this country.
That's one of the reasons why it will never get fully solved, because it pays the bills for a lot of people.
So it's going to keep coming up.
We know now that the Black Lives Matter movement was a scam that a few people got very wealthy from.
Very little of the money raised got put back into black communities.
(08:08):
So we know there is money there.
Race grifting today is a giant industry.
Books, lectures, seminars, conferences.
It's a whole thing.
Political.
Yeah, exactly.
So you just have to know that.
That's part of the thing.
The whole idea of CRT is this systematic white supremacy or systematic white privilege.
(08:31):
You have to understand how many logical fallacies are involved in this.
These broad brush statements about white people.
White people are not a monolith.
There's a whole spectrum of white people in this country from very poor to very wealthy and everything in between.
But if you call something systemic, you can't falsify it.
Have you noticed this?
(08:51):
It's just systemic.
You say, well, is there data?
No, it's systemic.
Well, no, no.
Can you give me some hard numbers?
No, it's just it's built into the system.
So it's literally designed so it cannot be falsified.
And one of the things that the Civil Rights Movement did that was so valuable that I mean across the board,
if you were to talk to anybody in 1985 across the board, black, white, brown, yellow, any color,
(09:15):
they would say what Martin Luther King, the core message that he delivered was brilliant.
That we judge a person based on their character, not on the color of their skin, an immutable characteristic.
And so what does CRT do now?
Points to a color of skin and says that's the problem.
We've completely reversed the Civil Rights Movement.
(09:37):
Only it's been flipped on its head now, whereas before it was black people were the target.
Now it's white people.
But it's still racism.
Yeah, that that's the thing.
So I just wanted to set that that.
Yeah, I think that's helpful.
So that listeners out there, because again, I know Christians, we look Christians have a great desire to love people,
(09:57):
to be loved, to be tolerant, although and those care for the least.
Right. Exactly.
So for some for some Christians, I know they're like, well, I want to I want to believe this and maybe I need to look at my privilege and all this all this stuff.
Right. That's coming at them.
And they go, what can I do to here we go.
Same as last time. How do I love my neighbor better?
Those are good impulses. But you've got to think this through.
(10:19):
You got to be careful about the agenda that's coming down the pike aimed at you and to think carefully about this thing biblically about it.
So anyway, I just I throw that out there so that the listeners will understand.
Again, this is sort of looking back now over the last few years.
We've learned a lot more. Like you said, we were discovering during George Floyd.
(10:40):
It was chaotic. And now we've we've seen sort of the fruit of the movement.
Yeah. By the way, there's a whole have you seen the movie that's come out?
Matt Walsh movie. Oh, yeah.
It's called Am I Racist? Where he goes undercover in a comedic way to sort of expose the grift of these race hustlers.
I haven't seen it yet, but I understand it just exposes these folks.
(11:02):
So they're they're writing books and making so much money.
Yeah. So they're perpetuating this stuff and it's not actually rooted in data.
That's the thing. So that's why they don't like to define things carefully and not with an aim to truly help people.
Yes. Exactly. I mean, that was the nature of the fraudulent BLM.
Right. So many of those individuals.
(11:23):
And when I say so many, like you said, it's a few.
But the fact that it was a few who made millions of dollars for their families at the expense of everyone else who thought they were doing good.
And cities that burned down. It's a shame.
It's a shame that that was even promoted.
And then the nature of, hey, these riots are OK.
These, you know, protests, if we're going to put that in air quotes, are OK.
But you can't go to church. Other things.
(11:44):
The insanity was off the walls during that time.
So I do think it's helpful as you're as you're describing the nature of this worldview, even even still to look beyond.
I think it's helpful talking about it. Look beyond even our current history.
Look at history. You talk about white people are in a monolith.
They're not today. There is the nature of America having a percentage of white people.
(12:05):
But this is only because we talk about and like to like to categorize people by the color of their skin.
Right. That's the nature of it.
Because somebody may be white in color, but they may have grown up in, you know, down in South Central L.A.
And they don't identify white.
They may be put into the census that way, but they don't identify that way.
Culture is so much more important than skin color.
(12:27):
It is. There's a lot. We're going to get to that.
Yeah. We're going to talk to that a lot.
But we have this current season of human history where there is a quote unquote dominance of a certain skin color here in America.
But if we were to rewind the clock.
Two thousand years, twenty five hundred years, three thousand years,
(12:47):
there wouldn't be a single white person thought of.
Well, yeah, they were barbarians.
I mean, they were knuckle draggers.
I think we would think about my ancestors were Celtic barbarians.
Right. Exactly. And that was that was at best two thousand years ago.
Yeah. But three thousand years ago when the world was centered in North Africa.
(13:08):
Right. In the Middle East.
Right. No, I know. I know. Right.
You know, we go back to Noah's day.
We have a little wooden carving of Noah's Ark over here in my house.
We were looking at it. We go back to Noah's day and Noah's day.
You didn't find this great amount of white people because Noah was from the Middle East.
(13:29):
Right. And his children are the ones who populated the earth.
Yeah. Anyways.
Yeah. So we just find ourselves in a unique time is all I'm pointing out.
So yes, there may be this visual that we have in our mind about where wealth is concentrated in the current day and age,
but it has not always been this way.
And it won't. It won't always be this way.
(13:50):
Right. And we just find ourselves here now.
And that's not to justify any kind of intentional wickedness or wrongdoing that may occur in the world.
But also let's not accuse wickedness and wrongdoing just because we see a certain skin color being more predominant.
So we have to weigh those things.
Right. So now let's talk about equity and equality.
Because these are two huge words.
I know you have a lot of thoughts on these things.
(14:12):
Any opening remarks or big picture ideas you want to get across to the listeners?
Well, you should know that, again, the words sound the same and they often get used interchangeably,
but they're very, very different.
And so you'll hear it come out of the mouths of primarily Democrats, leftist, you know, speakers, things of that nature.
(14:32):
And basically, it's rooted in Marxism.
I know it's scary. It's the M word. It's scary. Right.
Oh, Soviet Union, all that. But it is.
It's basically what was the formation of the Soviet Union, the foundation for that economic perspective.
And it where it goes, and I have to say this, Kamala Harris has actually said this publicly.
(14:54):
It's about equal outcomes.
And she is she has said this adamantly.
I don't think she knows. Maybe she doesn't even know what she said, but she said it very clearly.
It's on tape. We want equal outcomes for all people, regardless of education, regardless of how hard they work,
regardless of their skill level, their merit, any of that, we should have equal outcome.
(15:16):
That is the fastest way to destroy a society.
Yeah, it's absolutely devastating because it destroys motivation to entrepreneurship.
It destroys innovation to hard work, innovation to innovation, all that stuff.
It is an absolutely destructive force in society.
That's how countries die from within.
(15:37):
Yeah. When you start doing that, because everybody just goes, OK, fine.
So there's OK, there's no incentive to do anything.
So why should I be a doctor?
I get paid when I get the same outcome. If I don't go to work.
Just imagine that.
So I remember to that point, I don't know if I told the story on the show or not,
but I was in Uganda a little while ago and one of the pastors there was talking to me about,
(16:01):
you know, hey, what do you think about the presidential race?
And I didn't say much because I'm just curious.
I'm like, what do you think? He's like, well, you know, Harris, she has a nice smile.
And I was like, OK.
And so here's the thing.
You know that I work at Children's Hunger Fund and work with people who are impoverished over Africa
is my main focus, but we do help people who are poor.
(16:22):
And there's a very different focus.
And I'm not even going to bring all that to bear in terms of our conversation because it's not for this time.
But I do see poverty at a scale that most human beings don't see.
But I also see those who work with those who are in extreme poverty.
And those are the ones that I support and encourage along the way.
So when he mentioned her and liking her smile, I said, well, let me tell you about a policy that she's promoting.
(16:45):
And I told him exactly about that one, the equal outcomes.
And his face turned quick.
Now, here's a man who sacrifices for the sake of others.
This is a man who gives of his own well-being for the sake of others.
There are times when he and his own household with his wife and his kids will give their food to other neighbors.
(17:05):
During COVID, when there were supply chain issues and all kinds of things, they would help out their neighbor, even Muslims.
They would care for others.
So he is a very caring man, very loving for others.
But he does see the human heart.
And he sees what you just pointed out, that a man, if left to his own devices, has no incentive to care for himself or others.
That is the nature of the human heart.
(17:27):
The nature of the human heart is so selfish.
So when I said, what about equal outcomes?
Are you going to, that's what you want?
Would you be good if every other homes that you go and visit had the men who were completely able to work,
but choose not to because they don't want to?
Are you good with that?
How does that make you feel?
And his everything turned.
His wife said, nope, that's not the one for me.
(17:51):
She was the first one to say, no, I don't want to.
That's the nature of the human heart though.
If left to whatever we want to do, none of us has any incentive.
None of us has any push to provide or to pursue excellence.
If we can just get equal outcomes, we can all just sit down and have wealth generated for us passively.
Oh my goodness.
But ultimately what that leads is everybody goes to poverty.
(18:13):
Yeah, that's the thing that the utopian vision is, is this leads to everybody being wealthy and everybody being able to do whatever they want and not have to work.
Yeah, it's a lot.
It's absolutely drives us into the ground and everybody's poor except for the elite who run the system.
They stay wealthy.
Yeah.
So equity, by the way, to have true equity, you can't just lift up the oppressed.
(18:35):
You have to take down the oppressor.
So equity always involves taking from some to give to another.
Correct.
But not the elites, not the ones who run the system.
No, you take from the middle class.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And drive everybody into poverty and then you have control over them.
Yeah.
And this is literally what the Democratic candidate for presidency right now has talked about openly.
(18:56):
Promoted.
Now we are hugely in favor of equality.
Amen.
That's and that's the thing.
This is the thing you've got to understand equality of opportunity.
I want the best.
I want I want a merit based system.
I want people that that work the hardest and you know what?
I don't care what your skin color.
I don't care anything about your immutable characteristics.
(19:18):
I just want to see, you know, are you are you working your tail off to make this happen?
And you know what?
If you do well, if you prosper, God bless you.
That's wonderful.
And and look at how much look at how much that has impacted America positively.
It's what made America America.
The nature of capitalism here.
Everyone the the left and not just left politically the left ideologically.
(19:39):
Yeah.
Sees capitalism as an enemy.
Right.
What they don't see is that capitalism has made the wealth that we have in America.
Right.
When you go and you see man, it always seems to be a Middle Eastern or running, you know,
running the the gas station and I'm not trying to be racist and saying that I'm saying sometimes people say that.
Sure.
You know, you might see that I saw that growing up that there were families that had multiple gas stations and they were one descent.
(20:03):
There's nothing wicked about that.
Right.
But if they do that, what a great opportunity they have for their family.
Right.
I knew a man he's Indian man who he said look our family came over in waves.
We came over and the first generation came over and the first generation saved all their money.
They worked hard and just low range jobs so that we get enough money to buy a laundromat.
(20:23):
And then once we bought that laundromat, then the next wave came over and the next wave came over and then they bought the shop next to the laundromat and turned it into what they wanted to a cafe or restaurant or something.
And they did that.
Then the next wave came over.
And then when that first wave aged out, now they're the grandparents.
They pass it on to their kids.
They take care of the kids so that that they're the grandkids so that their kids can run the shop.
(20:46):
Right.
And pretty soon you have these families who own four or five different shops in the same shopping center.
And what an amazing opportunity.
They left India.
Right.
They left Delhi.
They let they left a really poor area came to the U.S.
Now they have life.
They have livelihood.
They're working.
They're all excited to be here because of opportunity.
(21:06):
And as a white skinned American, I am so proud of that.
Isn't that amazing?
I think that's so amazing.
And I say, wow, that's that is what we're about.
I don't care that his skin is darker than mine.
It has nothing to do with that.
And that wasn't a merit.
That wasn't a value of whether they deserved a loan or not.
(21:26):
Right.
They worked hard.
They saved money and they had a strategy.
Yeah.
And they were able to implement it in a free market capitalistic society.
That's right.
What an amazing thing.
We know where they couldn't do that.
Where they came from in India.
Right.
Exactly.
That's the hard part.
The caste system.
Right.
Exactly.
They had zero opportunity to do it there.
So what an amazing thing.
(21:47):
They changed the generational outcomes, at least financially, not not salvifically and as believers.
We care about that most.
But at least gave a different opportunity for everyone in the family.
Right.
Where now they had an opportunity to think about schooling.
They had an opportunity to think about what do I want to be when I grow up?
Do I want to be a doctor?
Do I want to be a dentist?
(22:07):
They had that opportunity.
They did not have that opportunity when they were in India.
And that's an example.
Probably a family would say, look, if I have to get ahead by taking from someone else,
they say, no, thank you.
I want to earn this.
And that's the American spirit.
Right.
But this whole idea of equity, well, you know, sorry, we all just get the same thing.
And you know, we need to tear some things down to build these up.
(22:29):
And that a large percentage of our population is OK with that in America.
We've been lulled into thinking that's good.
It's so sad.
Well, and so speaking about that lull, let's talk about one of those policies then.
Yeah.
So within this equity focus within CRT, there's this policy of DEI.
Yeah.
And many, many people have heard about this now, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
(22:52):
So these are policies and programs that are promoted from the ideology or the worldview
of CRT.
So CRT is the beginning point, the starting point for this.
Undefined, as you noted earlier, there's not a clear definition, but it very is clearly
focused on race.
DEI is the policies that come out of it to promote equity.
It's even in the name.
It is.
(23:13):
Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And so within this, there's this aim to see people of all types of backgrounds, all type
of races, I'm putting that in air quotes, because technically, there's one human race.
We've covered this before.
There's one human race.
There may be different ethnicities, different cultures, but there's one human race.
Right.
But people of different backgrounds having equal representation at every level of society,
(23:35):
regardless of their percentage in society.
So for example, if you have a society that has, let's break it down by 100.
Say there's 100 people in a society.
OK.
In the society of 100 people, you have one person who is LGBTQ+, you have one person
who is a Pacific Islander, one person who is a Spanish speaker, one person, I'm purposefully
(23:58):
naming these, one person who is of Asian descent, one person of African descent, and then everyone
else is European.
So I've just labeled five people out of the 100.
Right.
And the 95.
The DEI says those five people have to have the same representation at the top as the 95.
Now, some of us may say, but that's fair, though.
(24:21):
That's fair, because isn't that loving that the least would get cared for?
Well, God's word's a little bit different.
Right.
God's word doesn't say that they need equal representation at the table.
God's word says his people are to care for the least.
Right.
Which means if somebody is disadvantaged, somebody is, and I'm using that term purposefully,
somebody is disadvantaged, somebody is poor and downcast and at the edge of society, God's
(24:44):
word's very clear about how we're to care for them from the church, from believers.
Right.
God's word doesn't say that the role of government is to mandate that every person has a seat
at the table.
Right.
That's actually nowhere in God's word, and even Christians, we expect the opposite.
We expect to even not have a seat at the table.
That's what we were talking about even last episode about COVID-19.
(25:05):
We didn't have a seat at the table to say, well, God's word says this.
It was, well, if you think God's word says that, then we're going to punish you.
And then when they couldn't punish us, they said, well, we're going to get your leaders
to say that God's word says this.
Right.
Whoa.
Wow.
That got wild.
So I'm not promoting that the 95, you know, whatever white monolith is the narrative today
(25:26):
should have this charge of society, but I'm pointing out that this thinking is whatever
is the least represented group, they need the equal representation at the table.
That's DEI.
It has nothing to do with their qualification to care for others.
Right.
So let's say out of this hundred group, you're trying to get 10 people that are going to
be tasked with the good of those hundred.
(25:47):
Now, who's going to be qualified to be tasked for the good of others?
Maybe people with certain skills, right?
You might think somebody who can manage resources, maybe somebody who's good at protection,
maybe somebody who's good at raising crops and food.
You would think about certain things for a society that are needed.
Skills and merit?
Maybe skills, maybe merit, right?
(26:08):
Yeah.
So you would think those would be most important for the good of the society.
No, skin color.
And that's what it comes down to.
Right.
And DEI says it does not matter what your skill is.
It does not matter what was needed for the furtherance of a society.
What's needed is your voice because you're different.
Yeah.
(26:28):
Because you're different.
It sounds so foolish when you say it out loud.
Yeah, sorry.
You just have to be here because of your skin color, because your culture,
because of your perspective.
It's a fool's errand because you can...
Look, the world for some reason continues to seek after fairness.
And it's a fool's errand.
You will never ever be able to have a group of people or any organization
(26:51):
and say, it's absolutely fair.
We have absolutely equal representation in a country like America,
which is a melting pot.
Yeah.
You're just never going to get it because the problem is,
is we tend to put things in these categories.
I guess white, black, brown, Asian or something, whatever.
But how is that equal?
A Peruvian person is not the same as a Honduran person.
(27:13):
It's not the same.
I don't care what the shades of the skin are.
So do we need equal number of Peruvians to Hondurans?
And DEI says yes.
It's crazy.
At a certain point, there's such a rule.
They're so ruled by this desire.
You talk about fairness, right?
They're so ruled by this desire for them to be fair at every level
(27:36):
that you actually can't even get done what you intended to get done in the beginning
because you're so focused on filling the seats that fit the quota that you need.
And is an Italian really the same as a Scandinavian?
Is the same of an Irish?
I mean, honestly, we could play this.
You could play this game.
You could just go to the sexual orientation side.
And there's how many of those?
Infinite, right?
So it's just silly.
(27:56):
And here, honestly, this is one of the reasons why this is not good for anybody,
especially for those who are in the minority classes or the minority groups.
Because think about like Kamala Harris right now is,
and I think we shouldn't do this,
but I think people are calling her the DEI candidate.
Well, why are they calling her that?
Because Joe Biden, when he was running for president, said,
(28:19):
I am going to pick a black vice president.
So when you say that out loud and then she gets picked,
what are you supposed to think?
She was picked because of her merit?
She's the most skilled person?
No, she fit a category.
So how do you take someone like that seriously?
So in a company, if you're looking at board directors of 10 people
(28:43):
and you see, let's just say, a black woman on that board,
and you're going to look at her and go, how did she get here?
Diversity hire.
And that's not fair to her.
No, because she might have the merit.
She may have earned it.
Yeah.
But you know what?
There will always be, oh, maybe you're a DEI hire.
That is not fair to her.
Yeah.
So it actually does not help anyone.
(29:05):
No, it doesn't help anyone's cause.
It definitely doesn't help the efficiency or the prosperity
of that organization, because you
should have the people, the most skilled people with the most
merit who are going to move the organization forward.
It doesn't matter what their skin color is.
So DEI is a fool's errand, and it doesn't make anything better.
No, it doesn't.
(29:25):
I mean, to that end, if there is a desire
to see representation at a certain level,
you want merit because of exactly what you said.
If the same people who promote the DEI system.
I'm going to pick on one of our more recent Supreme Court
justices, Katanji Jackson.
(29:47):
If they're promoting DEI, we need a woman.
We need a black woman who is going
to be on the Supreme Court.
When that becomes the narrative, now the case of, well,
but she has merit too.
It doesn't hold up the same way.
It doesn't.
Because the first category wasn't merit.
The first category wasn't qualification.
(30:09):
The first category was it needs to be a woman,
needs to be a black woman.
Now after that, then you're saying, but there is merit,
but there is, even if she has it, even if she has it,
the whole conversation didn't start with it.
The conversation started with fitting a certain narrative,
fitting a goal, not finding the right person.
And the first time she writes an opinion that
(30:30):
doesn't hold the standard of the Supreme Court,
everybody says, well, DEI, it's terrible.
It's awful.
So it isn't good for anyone.
And I think that is important for our listeners to hear.
When we think about policies, when we think about voting,
this is not helpful for anyone.
If we truly want to care for the least,
the way to do it is not through DEI.
(30:50):
The way to care for the least first is from God's people.
That is what we see first and foremost.
The second thing is we need to see that CRT actually
isn't biblical.
CRT isn't.
And I'll give you a quote.
So Iman Kendi, I think is his name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kendi, right.
He is a very big proponent of CRT, has been.
(31:12):
Yeah, he's a race grifter.
Yes.
He really is.
He has made a lot of money and been at a lot of conferences
speaking on this.
But here's a quote from the book that we have been reading.
But I think it's helpful to help you listeners understand
what's being promoted by CRT and how it doesn't map on
with biblical Christianity.
(31:32):
Right.
So here's what the book has said about Kendi.
And if you want to look up him up,
you can actually see that he's had worse quotes than this.
That's just the reality.
So Kendi, there's a quote.
Kendi has argued that the job of Christians
should not be to bring sinners into the church
and heal them and save them, but to revolutionize society,
(31:55):
to liberate society from the powers on Earth that
are oppressing humanity.
That's straight out of the playbook of liberation
theology.
So just so again, the listeners can understand,
liberation theology grew out of Latin America back in the 1970s.
And all it was was you had a whole bunch of third world
(32:18):
countries that were looking at Western civilization,
America in particular, and saying,
the inequity here between us and them has to go.
So it starts with tearing down the wealthy, the prosperous,
the merit-based system.
Tear it all down so that we can lift up and liberate.
That's the key word, liberate the lower classes.
(32:38):
Again, everything's the same.
That's straight out of Marx's playbook.
It's the same stuff.
So structures of privilege get torn down to lift up the masses.
And again, where does that lead?
To massive poverty.
I mean, that's the reality.
That is where it leads to.
So Candie is throwing an entire gospel out the window,
(32:59):
saying the gospel isn't the issue.
And this is the problem of everybody
who wants to talk about bringing the kingdom to Earth.
Yeah.
Eternity doesn't matter.
We're never going to get in that catalog again.
I know.
But let's bring it down here.
And what should happen if we're going
to establish a kingdom on Earth is equity.
And so we tear things down.
We build others up.
And everybody's equal.
(33:20):
And it's just liberation theology.
It's just incredibly radical leftist theology.
Yeah.
And it's very damaging.
Listener, I hope you can hear that when
the aim of the Christian is not to seek the loss to be saved
into Christ, but to see them engage
in this oppressor versus oppressee thinking
(33:43):
and to act out then according to that,
to overthrow the oppressor, that that is the goal of a Christian,
no longer is the goal of the Christian to obey Christ.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, right?
The goal of the Christian in that worldview
is that the Christian would overthrow the oppressor.
Radical social justice.
And that's where we land with a completely de-evolved,
(34:05):
not even de-evolved, that's a terrible word.
We need to talk about evolution, actually,
one of these days.
Yeah.
Bring Rossi or something.
Yeah.
But it completely just destroys a society from within
when that becomes a main emphasis.
There are a couple other quotes from the book.
And I think they'll be helpful for the listener to hear,
not because we've said this on the beginning,
but I'll say it again, not because we're promoting
(34:26):
the book as the be all end all more than anything.
We're just wanting to help frame some of these big thoughts
because there have been Christian leaders who
have been promoting these kinds of thinking components
that we want to help you think critically about.
We want to help you.
And if there's critical race theory,
there's critical theology, there's
critical thinking about God's word.
Let's be critical of even the things that think
(34:47):
they're critical on their own.
There's a quote from Owen Strachan.
Owen is an outspoken critic at times,
can be a little bombastic.
And so like every man, best of men or men at best,
we're not promoting him any more than any other.
But I think his thoughts on this are helpful for us
when we try to consider what CRT is proposing
and how we can think about it.
(35:09):
So in his quote, this is what he says about CRT.
It is no more an analytical tool in a positive sense
than Marxism.
And you heard Jeff say that.
Or nihilism or existentialism or any non-Christian worldview
is.
So it's no more an analytical tool in a positive sense.
I would say we don't think the Marxism is an analytical tool
(35:30):
in a positive sense.
So he goes on.
He says, are there fragments and elements
of the truth in many different worldviews?
Yes, there are.
Critical race theory looks at a real problem,
the problem of racial division, ethnic division in our society,
and it posits a solution.
But in terms of how it understands the human condition
(35:52):
and the solution that it posits, neither is Christian.
Correct.
So what he's saying, unpacking the hair here,
he's saying that, yes, there are things
that critical race theory is looking at that are problematic.
There are divisions among people groups.
And I have seen that even in Africa,
there are divisions among people groups.
(36:13):
If you want to study apartheid, you
want to look at the Rwanda genocide,
you want to look at what's going on in South Sudan these days.
That's just in Africa.
You want to go look at Myanmar, and you
want to look at what's happening in northern Myanmar.
You want to talk with the Uyghurs.
There's so much division around the world ethnically.
So there is a component where CRT is addressing ethnic divisions.
(36:34):
Those are real things.
However, the problem of these divisions,
they don't understand them in terms of a Christian worldview.
So they don't understand the problems
from the starting point of Christ.
They understand the problem from a human standpoint.
The Christian starts with, OK, who is God?
Who is he said he is?
(36:54):
Who is Jesus?
Now who is man?
The secularist says, well, who am I?
And just focus on self first.
That's the mistake that they make.
There's another quote here, and you might
have thoughts about this one.
And this is, I think, straight from the author.
Christianity teaches that mankind's greatest need
(37:14):
is salvation from his sin.
I think we would say, amen.
It's a greatest need.
I would say myself, even, who works in a nonprofit ministry
to the poor, their greatest need is sin.
That's my greatest need.
My greatest need is salvation from sin.
Whereas, and the quote continues,
CRT teaches that it is power over his oppressors.
(37:35):
That is the greatest need of mankind, power over his oppressors.
Right.
That is liberation theology.
It is, right.
And look, there's value in helping oppressed people.
And again, and you said it so well,
but that's not the government's job
to reorient the economic structures to change that.
That's the job of people with compassion, Christians,
(37:58):
who reach out.
We're going to lift up the oppressed.
But we never, ever, ever want to say
that it's somehow biblical that we lift up the oppressed
by stealing from others, or tearing down others,
or taking from others.
How could that ever be biblical?
And at the end of the day, the idea
that that's the greatest need of man
is for the oppressed to rise up.
(38:21):
That's not even eternal.
That's nothing but a temporary need.
It's not eternal at all.
So we seek to lift others up, but we always
seek to give them the gospel, right,
because the eternity is actually what matters.
Because you can suffer a lot on this earth,
and you can be oppressed.
Christians have been oppressed.
White people have been oppressed.
(38:42):
Right?
But what ultimately matters is eternity.
So the idea that anybody would think that CRT is somehow
anywhere in the same ballpark as the gospel
as a solution to man's greatest need is ridiculous.
Well, and to that end, there's one more good quote
to what you just were talking about,
how we can look at the world and how we look at the future,
(39:04):
even.
And it's from a guy named Craig Mitchell.
Early on in the 2020s, he was a very prominent guy speaking
out against this stuff.
I think he's a little quieter these days.
But early on, he was pretty vocal in his opposition.
But he said this.
He said, if you're looking for perfect justice,
if you're looking for perfect righteousness,
you're not going to find it until Christ comes again.
(39:27):
Amen.
He said, the best thing you can do
is share the gospel of Jesus Christ with this fallen world.
To the degree that you share the gospel with others
and they come to Christ and they strive for justice
and righteousness, we will have a more righteous society.
There you go.
That's it, right?
Because that's who Christ is.
(39:47):
Christ is also after those things, justice,
actual justice, actual equality and righteousness.
So get people saved.
That changes a society, for sure.
By the way, don't forget in Matthew 26,
Jesus was the one who affirmed in himself,
he'll always have the poor.
So what he's saying is, yeah, if you're looking
for any type of perfection in this world,
(40:09):
it's not going to happen until the perfectly righteous one
comes back.
Yeah.
I mean, in Mercy Ministry, for example,
when we're walking with churches and they say,
what do I do when they're always poor?
How do I deal with them?
Now, we are not the solution finders in every situation.
Even as an organization, we can't
(40:30):
find solutions in everything.
But what I will do as a pastor, as a shepherd,
is encourage them, help the people to be workers.
Help them to find something that they're industrious in,
that they can put their hands to, that they can work in.
Now, that's practical.
But what matters more?
That they worship the creator.
(40:52):
Right.
That they honor Jesus as the Savior.
Because you can help them in all these other things.
That doesn't mean their life is going to change.
Right.
What does matter, like you noted,
the suffering can continue.
What does matter is that they would know Jesus.
Right.
So there's a lot of good things you can do.
I know a lot of microfinance, you name it.
We could talk.
I could talk for years off for hours
about all the different strategies
(41:13):
that we see internationally to help
lift people out of poverty.
But what is their greatest need?
A Savior.
Right.
That is the number one need.
And I can tell you from eyewitness account
myself that when people honor Jesus as king,
their lives are different.
Oh, absolutely.
This is not the prosperity gospel.
Right.
Right.
They can have joy and suffering.
Right.
They can have joy and sorrow.
(41:34):
They can walk through any difficulty
that they're in because Jesus is their king.
And that changes a village and a town
and a city and a country.
It changes everything.
Right.
It changes everything.
Right.
We know that.
So that's the dynamic.
Our goals often get too low.
So if our goal is I want to give them the gospel
so that we can lift the poverty rate.
(41:54):
Yeah.
That's the wrong goal.
Yeah.
Right.
That's the goal should be I want them to worship Jesus
as king because Jesus is king.
Right.
And this is a matter for us as believers.
Right.
So for the believer who's wrestling with CRT,
this is what I would say.
Make sure your goal is Jesus Christ and Him
crucified being honored because He was slain for sinners.
Right.
If Jesus is our aim, then the way that we do ministry
(42:16):
is going to focus on elevating Him,
not elevating our status here on this side of glory.
Yeah.
Amen.
There you go.
I got nothing to add to that.
So a couple quick things as we wrap up.
Thinking about CRT and policies because we could just
keep going, but we're going to wrap it up here
because it's been a lot.
But when we're thinking about CRT and policies,
(42:38):
we need to remember as believers, Jeff,
you said this really well earlier,
not to view the world in terms of race,
not to view the world in terms of ethnicity.
What does God look at?
I mean, last time I checked, He looks at the heart.
Right.
Man looks at the outward appearance.
Right.
Exactly.
But God looks at the heart somewhere.
Somewhere.
Exactly.
And so imitate God in that.
(42:58):
Take the Galatians 3 perspective.
We are all sons of God through faith in Jesus.
That's the redeemed perspective.
There is now no Jew or Gentile.
Yeah.
It's not about those other characteristics.
It's not about those things.
No.
And at the same time, while it's not about those,
in loving our neighbor, we can consider their background.
Sure.
I mean, like Paul gives the example in 1 Corinthians 9
how he considers the Jews.
(43:19):
He considers the Gentiles.
He considers the weak.
And he says, I become all things to all men
that some may be saved.
But his emphasis there is that he's trying to meet people
where they are.
He doesn't say that I am a Jew.
Yeah.
He doesn't say that I am a Gentile.
Yeah.
He said, I'm meeting them where they are
that they would know Jesus.
Right.
That they would know Him and worship Him and honor Him.
And you said it earlier.
It's all one race.
We're all descendants of Adam.
(43:40):
Right.
But it is kind of, and there's nothing wrong with saying,
I'm Irish on one side and I'm French on the other.
And I love to look at my background.
It's Norman and it's Viking and it's all these things.
It's really cool.
Yeah.
And I can talk to your wife and she has a completely
different background.
And I can hear about her story.
Celebrate that.
(44:00):
Yeah.
At my office, we got the table of nations.
We got a guy from Africa.
We got a guy from Central America.
We got a guy from the Middle East.
We got a guy from Asia.
And we have a great time.
Isn't that great?
We share different food things that we like,
all kinds of things.
And it's a wonderful time to celebrate our differences.
But you know what we have in common?
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
Right.
(44:21):
How did we as a race just allow Satan to get in there
and divide us over something that just didn't need to be
divided over?
And I'll point out something you mentioned earlier,
but just to hit this one really hard,
you mentioned immutable.
Yeah.
Something that we didn't decide.
Right.
You didn't wake up and say, hey, you know what?
I want to be white.
(44:41):
I would really like to be white.
This was my choice to be white.
Right.
Nor did anyone who was born in Central America decide that
or anyone who was born in Africa decide that.
None of us chose where we were born.
God did.
Right.
What we do with all that we are now,
that's our response of who we're worshiping.
Are we worshiping the creation or are we
going to worship the creator?
(45:02):
And I think this is our challenge when we think about CRT
and the policies that flow.
Either we're going to pursue very man-centered policies.
Yes.
Or things that pursue excellence in every person,
everywhere.
And that's really what we should desire.
You mentioned this earlier, that the DEI policies really,
they bring down everything.
They bring down the excellence.
They bring down the goals.
(45:23):
There's no motivation, all of that,
because there's nothing to push you forward anymore.
Why strive and be excellent if you're just
going to get the same outcome at the end of the day
with inequity?
There's a lot there where we can consider
how we as believers really should push everyone
to be excellent in everything they do.
And even going to Africa, just to give another real quick
(45:43):
example here, as we wrap up, talking to that man
about how do you feel about this policy with Harris.
When we were talking about how to help lift people out
of poverty, we were zeroing in on how
we want to help every man be an excellent husband,
and father, and laborer, that he would
do it to the glory of God.
That was our aim of our conversation together.
(46:05):
I think as believers, that really should
be our aim when we're thinking about matters
of CRT and policy.
Boom.
All right.
Well, that was an easy 45 minutes.
Good.
OK.
All right.
On CRT.
We'll see if anybody got to the end.
Hey, if you got to the end of this, send Adam or Raya a text.
Shoot us a text.
Let us know you made it through.
Yeah, that would be encouraging.
(46:25):
Well, we do have a couple more hard-hitting episodes
this season.
We're going to take on some heavy things.
Just that teaser.
I'm not even going to tell you what they are.
But they're going to be intense.
And we've got election season coming up here.
We're in it.
So we're probably going to talk about that as well.
But we pray so far today that this
has helped you to renew your minds and reform your hearts.
And we'll catch you next time on The Thinking Tree.
Welcome to the Thinking Tree, a podcast to help believers renew their minds and reform their hearts.
(00:03):
I'm Adam Sanchez.
And I'm Jeff No.
And today we are taking on critical race theory.
All right, we're taking on a hard subject, one that if we were to go back in our, in our timeline, back when we were doing our YouTube series, The Underground, this is one that we were just beginning to touch on.
(00:28):
It was becoming a big thing during the days of COVID and whatnot.
It was really reaching a zenith during that time.
We started The Underground because of the George Floyd situation and the riots and all that.
So we were talking quite a bit about this back then.
So, but here we are.
It's ongoing.
Here we are four years later.
Yeah.
And we're still discussing it because there's still an impact within the church.
(00:49):
That's right.
And that's the nature of our whole series.
We're not just talking about things for the sake of talking about them, but we want to help believers.
So here's the question for today related to this.
How should Christians think, think about and respond to critical race theory and the policies that come from this worldview?
Worldview is a great word, right?
(01:10):
It's how you see things.
And yeah, and, and a Christian, a lot of Christians are feeling pressured to buy into CRT to some extent.
Yeah.
Or at least to give it credence, academic, you know, credibility, something like that.
So it's definitely hanging out there within the church.
(01:30):
And we still have a lot of division in the church, even people talking about this issue, talking about white privilege, white supremacy, things of that nature.
So it's, it's still, I would say it's less than back in the days of the George Floyd situation, but it's still hanging around in a lot of churches.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I would say to that end today, it seems that people have more of a position on it.
(01:51):
Back then, people were trying to figure out where they would line up on it.
Today, they, they kind of pick their camps.
It's not that there's only two camps necessarily of four against it, but there's probably some variation of degree within there as well of how much of it they'll accept or how much of it they'll say, yeah, yeah, but I get it.
Or those who are, you know, absolutely not.
(02:12):
I don't want to touch it at all.
But I think most people kind of have their camp that they're comfortable to be in.
Right.
So of course we're going to poke the bear on this one.
Please, can we do that some more?
That'd be great.
Why not?
Let's talk about it.
So CRT, critical race theory, there, there are many definitions of this.
So that's not like we have an all encompassing view of this, but I think there are some important components, both of the thinking, the worldview, as well as the policy that we should discuss before how we should think about it.
(02:41):
Because we need to understand it first, then we can talk about the policies that are with it, and then we can talk about how do we respond as Christians to those things.
So in a big picture kind of way, critical race theory, it really, the word race is the big word there.
It's focused on an idea of racism that has white identity as the enemy, right?
(03:03):
White identity being inherently racist and that white identity only promotes and exists in a white supremacy society.
Right.
It's a lot of words that have been said there, but essentially this, to be white is to be racist and to exist in a white society is to exist in a white supremacy society.
(03:23):
Right.
And they'll often use that term supremacy in a way that's probably different than you and I would look at it.
Probably even different than the KKK would have looked at it.
Of course, right, right, right.
And that's actually one of the, for all of my frustrations with the CRT movement, I'll give them credit.
(03:45):
They're pretty good at the propaganda.
And one of the things that they do really well is to vaguely define things.
On purpose.
Exactly.
And that's why this is a moving target of trying to answer it, but I'm using some inflammatory statements on purpose.
Yeah.
I'm not trying to mince words here and nor am I trying to defame people.
(04:05):
CRT is not a person.
CRT is a policy of thinking.
It's a worldview.
It's not a human.
So when we're talking about this, though we have a lot of feelings about it, we really need to table that for a second and say, what are we talking about first?
Then we can talk about people that may exist who love this worldview, who promote this worldview versus those who don't.
(04:27):
We can talk about that next.
But on the table right now, it's just what is this view?
What actually is it?
It's not a person.
It's a view.
And the view is focusing on race.
And the term that you just kind of described here is there are people who are advantaged and people who are disadvantaged.
Oppressed oppressor.
And that's the older language that they've moved away from in a lot of ways because it's liberation theology, which we'll get to in a minute.
(04:50):
But it is really intense language.
So they talk about being advantaged or disadvantaged.
Those are kind of the big terms these days.
There's a dynamic that's within this view that says the civil rights movement had some good things, but it never went far enough.
It never helped us arrive where we need to arrive.
Which was essentially the tearing down of certain structures within society.
(05:12):
Yes.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say now, as much as we want to hold that tension line where the civil rights movement, there were a lot of good things that occurred.
And not everyone was amazing who was promoting ideas.
I think in the coming years, we're going to hear things about Martin Luther King Jr. that are going to make our skin crawl.
And I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
(05:33):
I'm just saying no one's perfect.
You mentioned this in our last episode.
The more we dig in and understand people's lives, man, testimony matters.
And so there are things where we might have a difficult time reconciling that in a couple years.
Now, if that's not the case and some of this stuff was just conspiracy, great. Amen.
But there are too many eyewitness accounts that make this very difficult.
(05:54):
So we don't need to go into that.
But there were some good things that came out of the civil rights movement.
It wasn't all encompassing, but nothing ever is.
Just like today within the abortion, anti-abortion movement, there are some things we're thankful for.
We've talked about that on the episode, but it's not complete.
It's not done and it's not finished.
And we know that.
We can still be thankful for things that have occurred.
For sure.
So we're trying to hold that tension.
(06:15):
We're saying what is good and praiseworthy, that was helpful, and yet may not gone far enough, may not fixed everything.
But we also can't expect policies to fix everything.
Our hope isn't in that.
So there's a bit of a tension that we wrestle with, right?
Right.
That's part of it.
So when we look back on the court over time on the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement was never intended to fix the human heart.
(06:36):
Just like we've talked about policies even with abortion, don't fix the human heart.
That was never intended to, and if people thought that it would have, I think Christians, let's pause, we should have never expected that.
Right.
We should have never expected policies or mandates to fix human heart.
We talked about mandates in the last episode.
Right.
Mandates don't fix people or change people or force them to do righteousness.
Right.
That's not how it works.
So we need to bear those things in mind and wrestle with those a little bit.
(06:59):
But one of the big things with CRT today, one of the terms they use that we do need to discuss a little bit, is equity.
Yeah.
Equity over equality.
Two completely different words.
Yes.
Before you do that, can I do a little more prolegomena?
Sure.
Okay.
I love that word too.
It's a great word.
Yeah.
Just a few more foundational things before we dive in deeper, because equity and equality is a giant piece of this.
(07:22):
But just to help some of our Christian listeners understand a few things about CRT as a worldview or as an institution.
First of all, like everything else, and we've talked about this in multiple things now, what we've seen now over the years is, guess what?
There's money to be made in the CRT business.
It's an industry.
(07:44):
Racism is an industry in this country.
That's one of the reasons why it will never get fully solved, because it pays the bills for a lot of people.
So it's going to keep coming up.
We know now that the Black Lives Matter movement was a scam that a few people got very wealthy from.
Very little of the money raised got put back into black communities.
(08:08):
So we know there is money there.
Race grifting today is a giant industry.
Books, lectures, seminars, conferences.
It's a whole thing.
Political.
Yeah, exactly.
So you just have to know that.
That's part of the thing.
The whole idea of CRT is this systematic white supremacy or systematic white privilege.
(08:31):
You have to understand how many logical fallacies are involved in this.
These broad brush statements about white people.
White people are not a monolith.
There's a whole spectrum of white people in this country from very poor to very wealthy and everything in between.
But if you call something systemic, you can't falsify it.
Have you noticed this?
(08:51):
It's just systemic.
You say, well, is there data?
No, it's systemic.
Well, no, no.
Can you give me some hard numbers?
No, it's just it's built into the system.
So it's literally designed so it cannot be falsified.
And one of the things that the Civil Rights Movement did that was so valuable that I mean across the board,
if you were to talk to anybody in 1985 across the board, black, white, brown, yellow, any color,
(09:15):
they would say what Martin Luther King, the core message that he delivered was brilliant.
That we judge a person based on their character, not on the color of their skin, an immutable characteristic.
And so what does CRT do now?
Points to a color of skin and says that's the problem.
We've completely reversed the Civil Rights Movement.
(09:37):
Only it's been flipped on its head now, whereas before it was black people were the target.
Now it's white people.
But it's still racism.
Yeah, that that's the thing.
So I just wanted to set that that.
Yeah, I think that's helpful.
So that listeners out there, because again, I know Christians, we look Christians have a great desire to love people,
(09:57):
to be loved, to be tolerant, although and those care for the least.
Right. Exactly.
So for some for some Christians, I know they're like, well, I want to I want to believe this and maybe I need to look at my privilege and all this all this stuff.
Right. That's coming at them.
And they go, what can I do to here we go.
Same as last time. How do I love my neighbor better?
Those are good impulses. But you've got to think this through.
(10:19):
You got to be careful about the agenda that's coming down the pike aimed at you and to think carefully about this thing biblically about it.
So anyway, I just I throw that out there so that the listeners will understand.
Again, this is sort of looking back now over the last few years.
We've learned a lot more. Like you said, we were discovering during George Floyd.
(10:40):
It was chaotic. And now we've we've seen sort of the fruit of the movement.
Yeah. By the way, there's a whole have you seen the movie that's come out?
Matt Walsh movie. Oh, yeah.
It's called Am I Racist? Where he goes undercover in a comedic way to sort of expose the grift of these race hustlers.
I haven't seen it yet, but I understand it just exposes these folks.
(11:02):
So they're they're writing books and making so much money.
Yeah. So they're perpetuating this stuff and it's not actually rooted in data.
That's the thing. So that's why they don't like to define things carefully and not with an aim to truly help people.
Yes. Exactly. I mean, that was the nature of the fraudulent BLM.
Right. So many of those individuals.
(11:23):
And when I say so many, like you said, it's a few.
But the fact that it was a few who made millions of dollars for their families at the expense of everyone else who thought they were doing good.
And cities that burned down. It's a shame.
It's a shame that that was even promoted.
And then the nature of, hey, these riots are OK.
These, you know, protests, if we're going to put that in air quotes, are OK.
But you can't go to church. Other things.
(11:44):
The insanity was off the walls during that time.
So I do think it's helpful as you're as you're describing the nature of this worldview, even even still to look beyond.
I think it's helpful talking about it. Look beyond even our current history.
Look at history. You talk about white people are in a monolith.
They're not today. There is the nature of America having a percentage of white people.
(12:05):
But this is only because we talk about and like to like to categorize people by the color of their skin.
Right. That's the nature of it.
Because somebody may be white in color, but they may have grown up in, you know, down in South Central L.A.
And they don't identify white.
They may be put into the census that way, but they don't identify that way.
Culture is so much more important than skin color.
(12:27):
It is. There's a lot. We're going to get to that.
Yeah. We're going to talk to that a lot.
But we have this current season of human history where there is a quote unquote dominance of a certain skin color here in America.
But if we were to rewind the clock.
Two thousand years, twenty five hundred years, three thousand years,
(12:47):
there wouldn't be a single white person thought of.
Well, yeah, they were barbarians.
I mean, they were knuckle draggers.
I think we would think about my ancestors were Celtic barbarians.
Right. Exactly. And that was that was at best two thousand years ago.
Yeah. But three thousand years ago when the world was centered in North Africa.
(13:08):
Right. In the Middle East.
Right. No, I know. I know. Right.
You know, we go back to Noah's day.
We have a little wooden carving of Noah's Ark over here in my house.
We were looking at it. We go back to Noah's day and Noah's day.
You didn't find this great amount of white people because Noah was from the Middle East.
(13:29):
Right. And his children are the ones who populated the earth.
Yeah. Anyways.
Yeah. So we just find ourselves in a unique time is all I'm pointing out.
So yes, there may be this visual that we have in our mind about where wealth is concentrated in the current day and age,
but it has not always been this way.
And it won't. It won't always be this way.
(13:50):
Right. And we just find ourselves here now.
And that's not to justify any kind of intentional wickedness or wrongdoing that may occur in the world.
But also let's not accuse wickedness and wrongdoing just because we see a certain skin color being more predominant.
So we have to weigh those things.
Right. So now let's talk about equity and equality.
Because these are two huge words.
I know you have a lot of thoughts on these things.
(14:12):
Any opening remarks or big picture ideas you want to get across to the listeners?
Well, you should know that, again, the words sound the same and they often get used interchangeably,
but they're very, very different.
And so you'll hear it come out of the mouths of primarily Democrats, leftist, you know, speakers, things of that nature.
(14:32):
And basically, it's rooted in Marxism.
I know it's scary. It's the M word. It's scary. Right.
Oh, Soviet Union, all that. But it is.
It's basically what was the formation of the Soviet Union, the foundation for that economic perspective.
And it where it goes, and I have to say this, Kamala Harris has actually said this publicly.
(14:54):
It's about equal outcomes.
And she is she has said this adamantly.
I don't think she knows. Maybe she doesn't even know what she said, but she said it very clearly.
It's on tape. We want equal outcomes for all people, regardless of education, regardless of how hard they work,
regardless of their skill level, their merit, any of that, we should have equal outcome.
(15:16):
That is the fastest way to destroy a society.
Yeah, it's absolutely devastating because it destroys motivation to entrepreneurship.
It destroys innovation to hard work, innovation to innovation, all that stuff.
It is an absolutely destructive force in society.
That's how countries die from within.
(15:37):
Yeah. When you start doing that, because everybody just goes, OK, fine.
So there's OK, there's no incentive to do anything.
So why should I be a doctor?
I get paid when I get the same outcome. If I don't go to work.
Just imagine that.
So I remember to that point, I don't know if I told the story on the show or not,
but I was in Uganda a little while ago and one of the pastors there was talking to me about,
(16:01):
you know, hey, what do you think about the presidential race?
And I didn't say much because I'm just curious.
I'm like, what do you think? He's like, well, you know, Harris, she has a nice smile.
And I was like, OK.
And so here's the thing.
You know that I work at Children's Hunger Fund and work with people who are impoverished over Africa
is my main focus, but we do help people who are poor.
(16:22):
And there's a very different focus.
And I'm not even going to bring all that to bear in terms of our conversation because it's not for this time.
But I do see poverty at a scale that most human beings don't see.
But I also see those who work with those who are in extreme poverty.
And those are the ones that I support and encourage along the way.
So when he mentioned her and liking her smile, I said, well, let me tell you about a policy that she's promoting.
(16:45):
And I told him exactly about that one, the equal outcomes.
And his face turned quick.
Now, here's a man who sacrifices for the sake of others.
This is a man who gives of his own well-being for the sake of others.
There are times when he and his own household with his wife and his kids will give their food to other neighbors.
(17:05):
During COVID, when there were supply chain issues and all kinds of things, they would help out their neighbor, even Muslims.
They would care for others.
So he is a very caring man, very loving for others.
But he does see the human heart.
And he sees what you just pointed out, that a man, if left to his own devices, has no incentive to care for himself or others.
That is the nature of the human heart.
(17:27):
The nature of the human heart is so selfish.
So when I said, what about equal outcomes?
Are you going to, that's what you want?
Would you be good if every other homes that you go and visit had the men who were completely able to work,
but choose not to because they don't want to?
Are you good with that?
How does that make you feel?
And his everything turned.
His wife said, nope, that's not the one for me.
(17:51):
She was the first one to say, no, I don't want to.
That's the nature of the human heart though.
If left to whatever we want to do, none of us has any incentive.
None of us has any push to provide or to pursue excellence.
If we can just get equal outcomes, we can all just sit down and have wealth generated for us passively.
Oh my goodness.
But ultimately what that leads is everybody goes to poverty.
(18:13):
Yeah, that's the thing that the utopian vision is, is this leads to everybody being wealthy and everybody being able to do whatever they want and not have to work.
Yeah, it's a lot.
It's absolutely drives us into the ground and everybody's poor except for the elite who run the system.
They stay wealthy.
Yeah.
So equity, by the way, to have true equity, you can't just lift up the oppressed.
(18:35):
You have to take down the oppressor.
So equity always involves taking from some to give to another.
Correct.
But not the elites, not the ones who run the system.
No, you take from the middle class.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
And drive everybody into poverty and then you have control over them.
Yeah.
And this is literally what the Democratic candidate for presidency right now has talked about openly.
(18:56):
Promoted.
Now we are hugely in favor of equality.
Amen.
That's and that's the thing.
This is the thing you've got to understand equality of opportunity.
I want the best.
I want I want a merit based system.
I want people that that work the hardest and you know what?
I don't care what your skin color.
I don't care anything about your immutable characteristics.
(19:18):
I just want to see, you know, are you are you working your tail off to make this happen?
And you know what?
If you do well, if you prosper, God bless you.
That's wonderful.
And and look at how much look at how much that has impacted America positively.
It's what made America America.
The nature of capitalism here.
Everyone the the left and not just left politically the left ideologically.
(19:39):
Yeah.
Sees capitalism as an enemy.
Right.
What they don't see is that capitalism has made the wealth that we have in America.
Right.
When you go and you see man, it always seems to be a Middle Eastern or running, you know,
running the the gas station and I'm not trying to be racist and saying that I'm saying sometimes people say that.
Sure.
You know, you might see that I saw that growing up that there were families that had multiple gas stations and they were one descent.
(20:03):
There's nothing wicked about that.
Right.
But if they do that, what a great opportunity they have for their family.
Right.
I knew a man he's Indian man who he said look our family came over in waves.
We came over and the first generation came over and the first generation saved all their money.
They worked hard and just low range jobs so that we get enough money to buy a laundromat.
(20:23):
And then once we bought that laundromat, then the next wave came over and the next wave came over and then they bought the shop next to the laundromat and turned it into what they wanted to a cafe or restaurant or something.
And they did that.
Then the next wave came over.
And then when that first wave aged out, now they're the grandparents.
They pass it on to their kids.
They take care of the kids so that that they're the grandkids so that their kids can run the shop.
(20:46):
Right.
And pretty soon you have these families who own four or five different shops in the same shopping center.
And what an amazing opportunity.
They left India.
Right.
They left Delhi.
They let they left a really poor area came to the U.S.
Now they have life.
They have livelihood.
They're working.
They're all excited to be here because of opportunity.
(21:06):
And as a white skinned American, I am so proud of that.
Isn't that amazing?
I think that's so amazing.
And I say, wow, that's that is what we're about.
I don't care that his skin is darker than mine.
It has nothing to do with that.
And that wasn't a merit.
That wasn't a value of whether they deserved a loan or not.
(21:26):
Right.
They worked hard.
They saved money and they had a strategy.
Yeah.
And they were able to implement it in a free market capitalistic society.
That's right.
What an amazing thing.
We know where they couldn't do that.
Where they came from in India.
Right.
Exactly.
That's the hard part.
The caste system.
Right.
Exactly.
They had zero opportunity to do it there.
So what an amazing thing.
(21:47):
They changed the generational outcomes, at least financially, not not salvifically and as believers.
We care about that most.
But at least gave a different opportunity for everyone in the family.
Right.
Where now they had an opportunity to think about schooling.
They had an opportunity to think about what do I want to be when I grow up?
Do I want to be a doctor?
Do I want to be a dentist?
(22:07):
They had that opportunity.
They did not have that opportunity when they were in India.
And that's an example.
Probably a family would say, look, if I have to get ahead by taking from someone else,
they say, no, thank you.
I want to earn this.
And that's the American spirit.
Right.
But this whole idea of equity, well, you know, sorry, we all just get the same thing.
And you know, we need to tear some things down to build these up.
(22:29):
And that a large percentage of our population is OK with that in America.
We've been lulled into thinking that's good.
It's so sad.
Well, and so speaking about that lull, let's talk about one of those policies then.
Yeah.
So within this equity focus within CRT, there's this policy of DEI.
Yeah.
And many, many people have heard about this now, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
(22:52):
So these are policies and programs that are promoted from the ideology or the worldview
of CRT.
So CRT is the beginning point, the starting point for this.
Undefined, as you noted earlier, there's not a clear definition, but it very is clearly
focused on race.
DEI is the policies that come out of it to promote equity.
It's even in the name.
It is.
(23:13):
Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And so within this, there's this aim to see people of all types of backgrounds, all type
of races, I'm putting that in air quotes, because technically, there's one human race.
We've covered this before.
There's one human race.
There may be different ethnicities, different cultures, but there's one human race.
Right.
But people of different backgrounds having equal representation at every level of society,
(23:35):
regardless of their percentage in society.
So for example, if you have a society that has, let's break it down by 100.
Say there's 100 people in a society.
OK.
In the society of 100 people, you have one person who is LGBTQ+, you have one person
who is a Pacific Islander, one person who is a Spanish speaker, one person, I'm purposefully
(23:58):
naming these, one person who is of Asian descent, one person of African descent, and then everyone
else is European.
So I've just labeled five people out of the 100.
Right.
And the 95.
The DEI says those five people have to have the same representation at the top as the 95.
Now, some of us may say, but that's fair, though.
(24:21):
That's fair, because isn't that loving that the least would get cared for?
Well, God's word's a little bit different.
Right.
God's word doesn't say that they need equal representation at the table.
God's word says his people are to care for the least.
Right.
Which means if somebody is disadvantaged, somebody is, and I'm using that term purposefully,
somebody is disadvantaged, somebody is poor and downcast and at the edge of society, God's
(24:44):
word's very clear about how we're to care for them from the church, from believers.
Right.
God's word doesn't say that the role of government is to mandate that every person has a seat
at the table.
Right.
That's actually nowhere in God's word, and even Christians, we expect the opposite.
We expect to even not have a seat at the table.
That's what we were talking about even last episode about COVID-19.
(25:05):
We didn't have a seat at the table to say, well, God's word says this.
It was, well, if you think God's word says that, then we're going to punish you.
And then when they couldn't punish us, they said, well, we're going to get your leaders
to say that God's word says this.
Right.
Whoa.
Wow.
That got wild.
So I'm not promoting that the 95, you know, whatever white monolith is the narrative today
(25:26):
should have this charge of society, but I'm pointing out that this thinking is whatever
is the least represented group, they need the equal representation at the table.
That's DEI.
It has nothing to do with their qualification to care for others.
Right.
So let's say out of this hundred group, you're trying to get 10 people that are going to
be tasked with the good of those hundred.
(25:47):
Now, who's going to be qualified to be tasked for the good of others?
Maybe people with certain skills, right?
You might think somebody who can manage resources, maybe somebody who's good at protection,
maybe somebody who's good at raising crops and food.
You would think about certain things for a society that are needed.
Skills and merit?
Maybe skills, maybe merit, right?
(26:08):
Yeah.
So you would think those would be most important for the good of the society.
No, skin color.
And that's what it comes down to.
Right.
And DEI says it does not matter what your skill is.
It does not matter what was needed for the furtherance of a society.
What's needed is your voice because you're different.
Yeah.
(26:28):
Because you're different.
It sounds so foolish when you say it out loud.
Yeah, sorry.
You just have to be here because of your skin color, because your culture,
because of your perspective.
It's a fool's errand because you can...
Look, the world for some reason continues to seek after fairness.
And it's a fool's errand.
You will never ever be able to have a group of people or any organization
(26:51):
and say, it's absolutely fair.
We have absolutely equal representation in a country like America,
which is a melting pot.
Yeah.
You're just never going to get it because the problem is,
is we tend to put things in these categories.
I guess white, black, brown, Asian or something, whatever.
But how is that equal?
A Peruvian person is not the same as a Honduran person.
(27:13):
It's not the same.
I don't care what the shades of the skin are.
So do we need equal number of Peruvians to Hondurans?
And DEI says yes.
It's crazy.
At a certain point, there's such a rule.
They're so ruled by this desire.
You talk about fairness, right?
They're so ruled by this desire for them to be fair at every level
(27:36):
that you actually can't even get done what you intended to get done in the beginning
because you're so focused on filling the seats that fit the quota that you need.
And is an Italian really the same as a Scandinavian?
Is the same of an Irish?
I mean, honestly, we could play this.
You could play this game.
You could just go to the sexual orientation side.
And there's how many of those?
Infinite, right?
So it's just silly.
(27:56):
And here, honestly, this is one of the reasons why this is not good for anybody,
especially for those who are in the minority classes or the minority groups.
Because think about like Kamala Harris right now is,
and I think we shouldn't do this,
but I think people are calling her the DEI candidate.
Well, why are they calling her that?
Because Joe Biden, when he was running for president, said,
(28:19):
I am going to pick a black vice president.
So when you say that out loud and then she gets picked,
what are you supposed to think?
She was picked because of her merit?
She's the most skilled person?
No, she fit a category.
So how do you take someone like that seriously?
So in a company, if you're looking at board directors of 10 people
(28:43):
and you see, let's just say, a black woman on that board,
and you're going to look at her and go, how did she get here?
Diversity hire.
And that's not fair to her.
No, because she might have the merit.
She may have earned it.
Yeah.
But you know what?
There will always be, oh, maybe you're a DEI hire.
That is not fair to her.
Yeah.
So it actually does not help anyone.
(29:05):
No, it doesn't help anyone's cause.
It definitely doesn't help the efficiency or the prosperity
of that organization, because you
should have the people, the most skilled people with the most
merit who are going to move the organization forward.
It doesn't matter what their skin color is.
So DEI is a fool's errand, and it doesn't make anything better.
No, it doesn't.
(29:25):
I mean, to that end, if there is a desire
to see representation at a certain level,
you want merit because of exactly what you said.
If the same people who promote the DEI system.
I'm going to pick on one of our more recent Supreme Court
justices, Katanji Jackson.
(29:47):
If they're promoting DEI, we need a woman.
We need a black woman who is going
to be on the Supreme Court.
When that becomes the narrative, now the case of, well,
but she has merit too.
It doesn't hold up the same way.
It doesn't.
Because the first category wasn't merit.
The first category wasn't qualification.
(30:09):
The first category was it needs to be a woman,
needs to be a black woman.
Now after that, then you're saying, but there is merit,
but there is, even if she has it, even if she has it,
the whole conversation didn't start with it.
The conversation started with fitting a certain narrative,
fitting a goal, not finding the right person.
And the first time she writes an opinion that
(30:30):
doesn't hold the standard of the Supreme Court,
everybody says, well, DEI, it's terrible.
It's awful.
So it isn't good for anyone.
And I think that is important for our listeners to hear.
When we think about policies, when we think about voting,
this is not helpful for anyone.
If we truly want to care for the least,
the way to do it is not through DEI.
(30:50):
The way to care for the least first is from God's people.
That is what we see first and foremost.
The second thing is we need to see that CRT actually
isn't biblical.
CRT isn't.
And I'll give you a quote.
So Iman Kendi, I think is his name.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kendi, right.
He is a very big proponent of CRT, has been.
(31:12):
Yeah, he's a race grifter.
Yes.
He really is.
He has made a lot of money and been at a lot of conferences
speaking on this.
But here's a quote from the book that we have been reading.
But I think it's helpful to help you listeners understand
what's being promoted by CRT and how it doesn't map on
with biblical Christianity.
(31:32):
Right.
So here's what the book has said about Kendi.
And if you want to look up him up,
you can actually see that he's had worse quotes than this.
That's just the reality.
So Kendi, there's a quote.
Kendi has argued that the job of Christians
should not be to bring sinners into the church
and heal them and save them, but to revolutionize society,
(31:55):
to liberate society from the powers on Earth that
are oppressing humanity.
That's straight out of the playbook of liberation
theology.
So just so again, the listeners can understand,
liberation theology grew out of Latin America back in the 1970s.
And all it was was you had a whole bunch of third world
(32:18):
countries that were looking at Western civilization,
America in particular, and saying,
the inequity here between us and them has to go.
So it starts with tearing down the wealthy, the prosperous,
the merit-based system.
Tear it all down so that we can lift up and liberate.
That's the key word, liberate the lower classes.
(32:38):
Again, everything's the same.
That's straight out of Marx's playbook.
It's the same stuff.
So structures of privilege get torn down to lift up the masses.
And again, where does that lead?
To massive poverty.
I mean, that's the reality.
That is where it leads to.
So Candie is throwing an entire gospel out the window,
(32:59):
saying the gospel isn't the issue.
And this is the problem of everybody
who wants to talk about bringing the kingdom to Earth.
Yeah.
Eternity doesn't matter.
We're never going to get in that catalog again.
I know.
But let's bring it down here.
And what should happen if we're going
to establish a kingdom on Earth is equity.
And so we tear things down.
We build others up.
And everybody's equal.
(33:20):
And it's just liberation theology.
It's just incredibly radical leftist theology.
Yeah.
And it's very damaging.
Listener, I hope you can hear that when
the aim of the Christian is not to seek the loss to be saved
into Christ, but to see them engage
in this oppressor versus oppressee thinking
(33:43):
and to act out then according to that,
to overthrow the oppressor, that that is the goal of a Christian,
no longer is the goal of the Christian to obey Christ.
Yeah.
At the end of the day, right?
The goal of the Christian in that worldview
is that the Christian would overthrow the oppressor.
Radical social justice.
And that's where we land with a completely de-evolved,
(34:05):
not even de-evolved, that's a terrible word.
We need to talk about evolution, actually,
one of these days.
Yeah.
Bring Rossi or something.
Yeah.
But it completely just destroys a society from within
when that becomes a main emphasis.
There are a couple other quotes from the book.
And I think they'll be helpful for the listener to hear,
not because we've said this on the beginning,
but I'll say it again, not because we're promoting
(34:26):
the book as the be all end all more than anything.
We're just wanting to help frame some of these big thoughts
because there have been Christian leaders who
have been promoting these kinds of thinking components
that we want to help you think critically about.
We want to help you.
And if there's critical race theory,
there's critical theology, there's
critical thinking about God's word.
Let's be critical of even the things that think
(34:47):
they're critical on their own.
There's a quote from Owen Strachan.
Owen is an outspoken critic at times,
can be a little bombastic.
And so like every man, best of men or men at best,
we're not promoting him any more than any other.
But I think his thoughts on this are helpful for us
when we try to consider what CRT is proposing
and how we can think about it.
(35:09):
So in his quote, this is what he says about CRT.
It is no more an analytical tool in a positive sense
than Marxism.
And you heard Jeff say that.
Or nihilism or existentialism or any non-Christian worldview
is.
So it's no more an analytical tool in a positive sense.
I would say we don't think the Marxism is an analytical tool
(35:30):
in a positive sense.
So he goes on.
He says, are there fragments and elements
of the truth in many different worldviews?
Yes, there are.
Critical race theory looks at a real problem,
the problem of racial division, ethnic division in our society,
and it posits a solution.
But in terms of how it understands the human condition
(35:52):
and the solution that it posits, neither is Christian.
Correct.
So what he's saying, unpacking the hair here,
he's saying that, yes, there are things
that critical race theory is looking at that are problematic.
There are divisions among people groups.
And I have seen that even in Africa,
there are divisions among people groups.
(36:13):
If you want to study apartheid, you
want to look at the Rwanda genocide,
you want to look at what's going on in South Sudan these days.
That's just in Africa.
You want to go look at Myanmar, and you
want to look at what's happening in northern Myanmar.
You want to talk with the Uyghurs.
There's so much division around the world ethnically.
So there is a component where CRT is addressing ethnic divisions.
(36:34):
Those are real things.
However, the problem of these divisions,
they don't understand them in terms of a Christian worldview.
So they don't understand the problems
from the starting point of Christ.
They understand the problem from a human standpoint.
The Christian starts with, OK, who is God?
Who is he said he is?
(36:54):
Who is Jesus?
Now who is man?
The secularist says, well, who am I?
And just focus on self first.
That's the mistake that they make.
There's another quote here, and you might
have thoughts about this one.
And this is, I think, straight from the author.
Christianity teaches that mankind's greatest need
(37:14):
is salvation from his sin.
I think we would say, amen.
It's a greatest need.
I would say myself, even, who works in a nonprofit ministry
to the poor, their greatest need is sin.
That's my greatest need.
My greatest need is salvation from sin.
Whereas, and the quote continues,
CRT teaches that it is power over his oppressors.
(37:35):
That is the greatest need of mankind, power over his oppressors.
Right.
That is liberation theology.
It is, right.
And look, there's value in helping oppressed people.
And again, and you said it so well,
but that's not the government's job
to reorient the economic structures to change that.
That's the job of people with compassion, Christians,
(37:58):
who reach out.
We're going to lift up the oppressed.
But we never, ever, ever want to say
that it's somehow biblical that we lift up the oppressed
by stealing from others, or tearing down others,
or taking from others.
How could that ever be biblical?
And at the end of the day, the idea
that that's the greatest need of man
is for the oppressed to rise up.
(38:21):
That's not even eternal.
That's nothing but a temporary need.
It's not eternal at all.
So we seek to lift others up, but we always
seek to give them the gospel, right,
because the eternity is actually what matters.
Because you can suffer a lot on this earth,
and you can be oppressed.
Christians have been oppressed.
White people have been oppressed.
(38:42):
Right?
But what ultimately matters is eternity.
So the idea that anybody would think that CRT is somehow
anywhere in the same ballpark as the gospel
as a solution to man's greatest need is ridiculous.
Well, and to that end, there's one more good quote
to what you just were talking about,
how we can look at the world and how we look at the future,
(39:04):
even.
And it's from a guy named Craig Mitchell.
Early on in the 2020s, he was a very prominent guy speaking
out against this stuff.
I think he's a little quieter these days.
But early on, he was pretty vocal in his opposition.
But he said this.
He said, if you're looking for perfect justice,
if you're looking for perfect righteousness,
you're not going to find it until Christ comes again.
(39:27):
Amen.
He said, the best thing you can do
is share the gospel of Jesus Christ with this fallen world.
To the degree that you share the gospel with others
and they come to Christ and they strive for justice
and righteousness, we will have a more righteous society.
There you go.
That's it, right?
Because that's who Christ is.
(39:47):
Christ is also after those things, justice,
actual justice, actual equality and righteousness.
So get people saved.
That changes a society, for sure.
By the way, don't forget in Matthew 26,
Jesus was the one who affirmed in himself,
he'll always have the poor.
So what he's saying is, yeah, if you're looking
for any type of perfection in this world,
(40:09):
it's not going to happen until the perfectly righteous one
comes back.
Yeah.
I mean, in Mercy Ministry, for example,
when we're walking with churches and they say,
what do I do when they're always poor?
How do I deal with them?
Now, we are not the solution finders in every situation.
Even as an organization, we can't
(40:30):
find solutions in everything.
But what I will do as a pastor, as a shepherd,
is encourage them, help the people to be workers.
Help them to find something that they're industrious in,
that they can put their hands to, that they can work in.
Now, that's practical.
But what matters more?
That they worship the creator.
(40:52):
Right.
That they honor Jesus as the Savior.
Because you can help them in all these other things.
That doesn't mean their life is going to change.
Right.
What does matter, like you noted,
the suffering can continue.
What does matter is that they would know Jesus.
Right.
So there's a lot of good things you can do.
I know a lot of microfinance, you name it.
We could talk.
I could talk for years off for hours
about all the different strategies
(41:13):
that we see internationally to help
lift people out of poverty.
But what is their greatest need?
A Savior.
Right.
That is the number one need.
And I can tell you from eyewitness account
myself that when people honor Jesus as king,
their lives are different.
Oh, absolutely.
This is not the prosperity gospel.
Right.
Right.
They can have joy and suffering.
Right.
They can have joy and sorrow.
(41:34):
They can walk through any difficulty
that they're in because Jesus is their king.
And that changes a village and a town
and a city and a country.
It changes everything.
Right.
It changes everything.
Right.
We know that.
So that's the dynamic.
Our goals often get too low.
So if our goal is I want to give them the gospel
so that we can lift the poverty rate.
(41:54):
Yeah.
That's the wrong goal.
Yeah.
Right.
That's the goal should be I want them to worship Jesus
as king because Jesus is king.
Right.
And this is a matter for us as believers.
Right.
So for the believer who's wrestling with CRT,
this is what I would say.
Make sure your goal is Jesus Christ and Him
crucified being honored because He was slain for sinners.
Right.
If Jesus is our aim, then the way that we do ministry
(42:16):
is going to focus on elevating Him,
not elevating our status here on this side of glory.
Yeah.
Amen.
There you go.
I got nothing to add to that.
So a couple quick things as we wrap up.
Thinking about CRT and policies because we could just
keep going, but we're going to wrap it up here
because it's been a lot.
But when we're thinking about CRT and policies,
(42:38):
we need to remember as believers, Jeff,
you said this really well earlier,
not to view the world in terms of race,
not to view the world in terms of ethnicity.
What does God look at?
I mean, last time I checked, He looks at the heart.
Right.
Man looks at the outward appearance.
Right.
Exactly.
But God looks at the heart somewhere.
Somewhere.
Exactly.
And so imitate God in that.
(42:58):
Take the Galatians 3 perspective.
We are all sons of God through faith in Jesus.
That's the redeemed perspective.
There is now no Jew or Gentile.
Yeah.
It's not about those other characteristics.
It's not about those things.
No.
And at the same time, while it's not about those,
in loving our neighbor, we can consider their background.
Sure.
I mean, like Paul gives the example in 1 Corinthians 9
how he considers the Jews.
(43:19):
He considers the Gentiles.
He considers the weak.
And he says, I become all things to all men
that some may be saved.
But his emphasis there is that he's trying to meet people
where they are.
He doesn't say that I am a Jew.
Yeah.
He doesn't say that I am a Gentile.
Yeah.
He said, I'm meeting them where they are
that they would know Jesus.
Right.
That they would know Him and worship Him and honor Him.
And you said it earlier.
It's all one race.
We're all descendants of Adam.
(43:40):
Right.
But it is kind of, and there's nothing wrong with saying,
I'm Irish on one side and I'm French on the other.
And I love to look at my background.
It's Norman and it's Viking and it's all these things.
It's really cool.
Yeah.
And I can talk to your wife and she has a completely
different background.
And I can hear about her story.
Celebrate that.
(44:00):
Yeah.
At my office, we got the table of nations.
We got a guy from Africa.
We got a guy from Central America.
We got a guy from the Middle East.
We got a guy from Asia.
And we have a great time.
Isn't that great?
We share different food things that we like,
all kinds of things.
And it's a wonderful time to celebrate our differences.
But you know what we have in common?
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
Right.
(44:21):
How did we as a race just allow Satan to get in there
and divide us over something that just didn't need to be
divided over?
And I'll point out something you mentioned earlier,
but just to hit this one really hard,
you mentioned immutable.
Yeah.
Something that we didn't decide.
Right.
You didn't wake up and say, hey, you know what?
I want to be white.
(44:41):
I would really like to be white.
This was my choice to be white.
Right.
Nor did anyone who was born in Central America decide that
or anyone who was born in Africa decide that.
None of us chose where we were born.
God did.
Right.
What we do with all that we are now,
that's our response of who we're worshiping.
Are we worshiping the creation or are we
going to worship the creator?
(45:02):
And I think this is our challenge when we think about CRT
and the policies that flow.
Either we're going to pursue very man-centered policies.
Yes.
Or things that pursue excellence in every person,
everywhere.
And that's really what we should desire.
You mentioned this earlier, that the DEI policies really,
they bring down everything.
They bring down the excellence.
They bring down the goals.
(45:23):
There's no motivation, all of that,
because there's nothing to push you forward anymore.
Why strive and be excellent if you're just
going to get the same outcome at the end of the day
with inequity?
There's a lot there where we can consider
how we as believers really should push everyone
to be excellent in everything they do.
And even going to Africa, just to give another real quick
(45:43):
example here, as we wrap up, talking to that man
about how do you feel about this policy with Harris.
When we were talking about how to help lift people out
of poverty, we were zeroing in on how
we want to help every man be an excellent husband,
and father, and laborer, that he would
do it to the glory of God.
That was our aim of our conversation together.
(46:05):
I think as believers, that really should
be our aim when we're thinking about matters
of CRT and policy.
Boom.
All right.
Well, that was an easy 45 minutes.
Good.
OK.
All right.
On CRT.
We'll see if anybody got to the end.
Hey, if you got to the end of this, send Adam or Raya a text.
Shoot us a text.
Let us know you made it through.
Yeah, that would be encouraging.
(46:25):
Well, we do have a couple more hard-hitting episodes
this season.
We're going to take on some heavy things.
Just that teaser.
I'm not even going to tell you what they are.
But they're going to be intense.
And we've got election season coming up here.
We're in it.
So we're probably going to talk about that as well.
But we pray so far today that this
has helped you to renew your minds and reform your hearts.
And we'll catch you next time on The Thinking Tree.
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