The White Pill with Rod Martin: Iran, China, and the SBC

On the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. I hope everyone is having a wonderful Monday after Easter. In fact, on my calendar it says Easter Monday. I should probably figure out what that means.

I don't come from a tradition that has been the most liturgical, so some of you might be celebrating Easter Monday today. We're doing it with leftovers from yesterday. We had quite the feast and quite the good time at church, and just it's wonderful to focus on the resurrection of Christ and what he's done, what he's accomplished.

For me, I actually wrote an article for TruthScript. It's just a short article, but it's particularly special having recently gone to the area where Christ was crucified, and then he was at the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.

I didn't realize how close those places were. They're both within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today, and you can imagine Christ emerging from the grave, looking upon the area where he was just killed and died for the sins of the world.

I don't know that it makes it more special. It's always special. It's just I have visuals to go with it. I can imagine a little bit better what it might have looked like right outside the gates of Jerusalem.

So special Easter for me, and I hope, like I said, you had a wonderful Easter, and things are really coming to a good start here on a Monday of the following week. I wanted to bring your attention to an article that I just wrote.

I wrote it on Friday. I think I finished it Saturday morning, actually, and it is on Nine Marks. That's actually going to be the topic for our podcast today, the ministry of Nine Marks, which is an ecclesiastical or ecclesiological, I think is the way they put it, ministry.

It starts off with the core teaching, which is Nine Marks of a Healthy Church by Mark Dever. It's a book, and from there, there's all these other resources on church membership and polity and revitalization and all of those kinds of things, and a lot of people use Nine Marks because they are seen as the experts in the Reformed evangelical world on ecclesiology.

Now, they are Baptists, so there are some limitations there. Perhaps Presbyterians might not use their resources quite as much, but their resources are used quite a bit. So I've had requests for years to do something more comprehensive on Nine Marks.

I've also had requests to do something on the Gospel Coalition, which I don't know that I'll ever do. I don't know that it's necessary either, just because there's so much more material at the Gospel Coalition.

It would take a lot more, and they've been, I think, so thoroughly discredited in the eyes of some. They still have some influence, but they certainly have been exposed. Nine Marks, not quite as much, and I finally came to the decision to do this, to do a wide or a comprehensive article on everything that they've put out there, at least on their website.

There's more that could have been added, but I wanted to give you a flavor for what Nine Marks themselves have actually put their stamp of approval on, and things that are still on their website, still live today, still teachings that they're not deleted, they're not retracted, they're still up there.

And I think this poses an issue because someone could certainly go on their website thinking they're the experts on ecclesiology and get very bad advice on certain matters, which we'll go over, or they could think that all of these things are just in the past and they don't matter, and I'm going to tell you why I think they actually do matter.

There's a track record here if you really pay attention to everything that's been said. And the hope in all of this, because I know I'll be accused of this, but the hope in all this is not just that people's eyes would be opened to some of the bad material that they put out there, but that there would be some self-reflection on the part of people like Jonathan Lehman, who I'm sure would not appreciate this kind of exposure to the compromises at his organization, but people like Mark Dever, people like Isaac Adams, and others who we'll talk about a little bit in the podcast.

I hope there'll be some self-reflection and looking back at the broad scope of what they've put out there, that they would realize we've done some damage too here. We may have done some good things with helping churches get better polity and plurality of elders and understanding what it means to be a church, but at the same time, we've really missed it on cultural matters big time on more than one occasion.

That's my hope. And there are a number of people now who have taken that road, people like Willie Rice, like Rosaria Butterfield. They've said we were wrong, and we're going to try to retract what we said that was wrong, and we don't want people following that previous advice.

That's the way to go about this. And then to apologize and say, I'm sorry for those that we misled. That's the way to go about this. And those are two wonderful people in my estimation. And I think there's a way back to build trust, but the level of compromise, the years of compromise, the inability to recognize that publicly, that does make building up trust very difficult.

And I think Nine Marks is in a position now, it is very difficult for me to trust them with anything cultural, but even ecclesiology at this point, I just don't see them as the best resource to go to.

And so this is a personal decision. I don't really recommend Nine Marks. Other people might, and there's nothing wrong with that if they have a good resource like Mark Dever's initial book. I don't think it's a bad book.

At the same time, you need to be aware that there are some compromises that did cause problems that are probably still causing some problems. And there's a track record there. So that's what we're going to talk about in this particular podcast.

I did try to wait to do this. As long as I felt I could, I wanted to give as much opportunity to retract and apologize and those kinds of things. I think what really set it over for me and made me realize I need to do this is the fact that Mark Dever was at the Shepherds conference this past year.

And he was only on a panel from what I understand, but I don't know whether Nine Marks is making a comeback in some of the circles that it was previously popular in. And I want to just make people aware that there are some problems here.

Don't get fooled by some of the things that may still even be on the website that are on the website. So that's the spirit in which I bring this message to you, this information. You can go to my substack, which is substack .com forward slash John Harris, or I think it's at John Harris to find out more.

If you want to find chapter and verse, all the links are there. All the articles that I talk about in this podcast will be there. It is a great place to go and hit the subscribe button. If you like what you see and want to subscribe for more articles that are similar in nature, all the information is right there for you.

So that might be more helpful for some of you who are more readers. But for those who are listeners, I will also put in some information, I'm sure some side comments as we go through this article that I did not include in the original piece.

And so I think you'll be benefited either way. And that's what we're going to be doing on the podcast today. So hopefully that sounds good. I will try to take some comments and questions as we get towards the end of the podcast.

Please, if you're going to comment, use a question mark. So I know it's a question that will help me find it more easily. But I'm going to be pretty focused on the material. So just so you know, I'm going through the material and I'm going to bring a lot of articles to your attention as we go through this particular article.

So that's what we're doing today. And the title of the article is the problem with nine marks, Roman numerals, nine marks, by the way, if you're trying to Google that. And it's it's on substack. Here's what it looks like.

And I'm just going to start reading some of it. There's an introduction that I make. And in that particular introduction, I talk about I mentioned already Rosario Butterfield, Willie Rice, Josh Howerton, people who have actually said, yeah, we were wrong.

We compromise with social justice. And now we're going to try to do the right thing and let people know where we got it wrong so that they don't make the same mistakes. And I think that's a wonderful thing.

But there's also a dilemma. What do you do with organizations? And this is beyond nine marks. What do you do with Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary? What do you do with Grove City College? These are institutions that I was participating in in Southeastern.

I think I probably led the charge with that to say there needs to be reform here. There needs to be some return to the previous standards and their social justice compromise. And neither of those institutions came out and admitted anything.

In fact, both of them said that the accusations against them were untrue, even though there was tons of information. And I've linked you to two videos that I did on it. And do you trust them? What do you do with those organizations?

Things are quieter. I think there's probably been some course correction, but there's not been an admission. And I contrast that a bit with an organization like Liberty that maybe someday I'll be able to tell more fully the story there.

But with Liberty, they did not go down this path as hard at all. And there was some very early course corrections. And it's a very big university also. So it's not like you have one particular person or group of people that are making decisions for the whole entire university.

I mean, I guess you do in administration, but it's so many moving parts. So you'd have a compromise somewhere like the nursing school and it would be minor and it would be reeled in. And that's the way they handled it.

And it's much more easier to trust a Liberty University because of the fact that they weren't doubling down all the time on errors. And the errors weren't as egregious and weren't happening for as long.

So I talk about how frustrating it is to see organizations that tried to reverse course but refused, that we tried to at least help them reverse course and they refused to do it publicly to trust them again.

And figures that are doing the same thing. I use Al Mohler as an example. He changed his position several times on things like same sex attraction, the Me Too movement, and whether women who seek abortion should be punished.

But he never acknowledged that he has changed his thinking at all. Like it never happened. And it's like, well, but he did. You could see his quotes, they contradict each other, but it's like it never happened.

Crew is another organization. Crew had a policy that, well, a teaching really that they were giving to their staff members on same sex attraction. And they've completely reversed their teaching on same sex attraction, but without acknowledging it.

It's just on their website. It's not part of any training so far as I know. And it's like, we're supposed to just believe that I guess everything's fine now, but it's really not. Now, this is one of the things that I want to let people know about, because I know this could be very frustrating for some people, especially if you took arrows, which I did quite a bit during this time.

I remember times in 2020 when I was completely alone, there really wasn't anyone to defend me publicly. And it was just organizations really angry that I'm pointing some of these things out. And it's easy to think like, you know, I was right about this.

I was correctly identifying compromises. And, you know, how can they just not acknowledge that? There is a frustration, but here's what I want to emphasize as well. It is a good thing when organizations do course correct, even if they're not admitting that's what they're doing.

Even if there's some kind of a pride or something there, the fact that they're doing the right thing now is still a good thing. And I reference Paul and how he felt about people preaching the gospel from wrong motives.

I think it's very important for us to realize, though, Paul did publicly point out they were doing it from wrong motives. He did publicly shame them in a sense. And he says, look, I'm glad the gospel is getting out there.

The message is getting out there. That's really what matters is this message. But that's as far as his endorsement went. The endorsement is the truth. We endorse the truth. Even if it's coming out of the mouth of people that might have bad motives in telling the truth, we endorse the truth.

We don't endorse the people that are using the truth for their own nefarious purposes or with bad motives trying to preach the truth and that kind of thing. And that's how I view it. I can't. And I think that's the issue with nine marks, too, is I can't endorse the organization, even if they're saying true things now.

But there's no admission. There's no course correction. There's no humility. Or I should say there is some course correction, not enough. There's not self-reflection and even pulling down articles that are still on the website that could potentially do damage.

Can't endorse them. There's no trust there. There's no reason to say, in my mind, go to this organization. They're going to give you good information unless you're very narrow with this particular book is good on this particular topic.

So that's where I'm coming from, just so people know exactly what my motives are in this and how I'm thinking about it and why I think it's a good thing to talk about. So we'll start here. We'll start with the beginning.

Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, and Anti-Racism

Critical race theory, Black Lives Matter and anti-racism. Did nine marks compromise on this? And the answer is, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Big time. So there I go through some of the introductory things I've already talked about with nine marks, their ecclesiology, their ministry, ecclesiology.

But between 2010 and 2021, they dabbled in social justice quite a bit. And this is more than a decade. And I along this time that I was from 2019 to 2021, especially those few years, I was really going in on some of the things that they were saying at the time.

But if I had been paying attention to nine marks in 2010, I would have found plenty on their website that was already compromising on this issue. Starting around 2010, nine marks started publishing material that suggested white evangelicals were lacking sanctification in their conception of race and treatment of ethnic minorities.

The BDN Abouille suggested that the gospel itself included a certain view on race, that it was a social construct, and that white evangelicals lacked the sanctification to realize this truth, even though ethnic minorities were engaging with it.

And Abouille used words like idolatry and segregated to describe the church's failure to bring about racial unity. And in his mind, the church was the answer to the racial divide, but it unfortunately had a ways to go.

This drove a hunger for Christians to find what was allegedly so lacking in our churches and why they were under sinful thinking. Organizations like nine marks were positioned to answer this demand with tools and a syncretic mixture of scripture and social justice to the masses that wanted info on this as it became political and public.

In no time, nine marks was publishing articles on how to diversify churches, such as five steps for racial reconciliation on Sunday at 11 a .m., pastoring a multi-ethnic church and pastors and theologians forum on race.

The forum is particularly interesting because it reveals how early ideas consistent with critical race theory were being introduced into the church. So, let me talk about some of these. I want to show you some of the articles.

This is the first one. This is Thabiti and Abouille, and it's called Many Ethnicities, One Race, published on February 26, 2010. It's pretty old when it comes to the critical race theory debate because so many of these things, these teachings, we became familiar with more in 2020, but of course, they were there before.

I know I had highlighted a bunch of these things. I don't see any of my highlights, though, so I don't know why my highlights are gone. I'm hoping it's not that way for all the articles. I made highlights on all of them to show you exactly where I was getting my information from, but I'll read for you a few as I see them here.

So, he talks about systematic silence and how the church is silent on the issue of racism, and this has been a problem in the church for a long time. He talks about how everyone has sin, and this is one of the things that is confusing with many of these articles is you'll find race exists, ethnicity is different than race, but then we're chided for colorblindness at the same time.

Like, you don't see race. Like, you have to realize we're one race, but also you have to see specific races or specific ethnicities. You got to be conscious of that fact. If you're a white person, go out on your own and say that you know about this topic when there's black people that need to offer their perspectives, and you must listen, but at the same time, you need to use your voice against racism.

So, there's all these contradictions, and you find some of this stuff pretty early on on the Nine Marks website. So, has God done anything about race and racism, he asks? Racism, we should be concerned about racism.

It's actually a pretty long article where typically you'll see Ephesians and Galatians used inappropriately, really the idea being that Gentiles don't have to become proselytes to be part of the covenant community, and they use that to say, well, this is about modern races being reconciled to one another, meaning politically, socially, etc.

So, let me go to the end of this article and just see the conclusion here. So, I write this article. Actually, let me back up. The conclusion says, a woman from Maryland visited First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman.

After the service, she excitedly told me how she had driven around the island looking for a place of worship. She was drawn to our church because of the diversity. I smiled at her encouragement. As I write this article, I see that our visitor was almost correct.

The church is diverse, yes, but we are not a miniature United Nations. By God's grace, we are one nation, one new and redeemed humanity in Christ. May it increasingly be so with all of Christ's church.

I think the reason that some of these articles landed early and people didn't suspect them of leftism was because of conclusions like that. The BD drags you through this long article, and within the article are these things that would throw up red flags for any political conservative if they're paying attention, but you get to the end, and there's a decent conclusion, and that's theologically correct, at least, that in one sense, the spiritual body of believers, the universal church, is one race, in a sense.

They're one people, in a sense, and so I think this helps some of these things fly under the radar for a long time. Fortunately, my highlights are back on this one. I don't know why they disappeared from the last one, but this is the Pastors and Theologians Forum on Race, and this was March 1st, 2010.

Here's some quotes from it. Ricky Armstrong says, Growing up in a nation where everything has been divided by the color of a person's skin has made it impossible for the American church to escape the negative effects of racism.

Listen to this. Many whites have been conditioned to deny the existence of racial problems. Most whites do not have to live in an environment controlled by minorities. Some view racism as a primary and individual issue as opposed to a corporate problem, so they fail to address the institutional nature of racism, especially whites, he says.

Most whites are not aware of the various ways. You notice the theme here. You notice who the problem is. They're not aware of the various ways that the culture is used as a tool of racism. Most white pastors and ministers have refused to address the race problem biblically or otherwise, and many white evangelicals are more loyal to their culture than they are to the gospel.

So, what's the conclusion? We have muzzled the gospel so that it can fit within our cultural, racial, and religious traditions. Now, that's kind of a serious charge if you think about it. This is back in 2010.

Nine marks still on the website. White Christians have muzzled the gospel. In other words, they muted it. They've kept it from going forward. This is a very serious charge, right? Muzzling the gospel, preventing the gospel from going forward, that is a serious crime.

That's what Paul says about those who are persecuting the church in 2 Timothy. Is it 2 Timothy? 2 Thessalonians, I'm thinking of. 2 Thessalonians. They're the enemies. That's a very serious charge, and I don't think people realize how serious of a charge that is.

It's just kind of casually thrown out there. Of course, white Christians muzzle the gospel. Anthony Carter, the unfortunate truth is that there is a racial divide in evangelicalism. The issue primarily lies in our inability, particularly, again, our white brothers and sisters to live according to Philippians 2 .3, and if humility can't others is more significant than yourselves.

So, whites are the problem. Until we see white men and women doing what black men and women have long learned to do, sitting and submitting to the leadership and authority of those who are ethnically different, we will not see real diversity.

It's particularly evident when the majority learn the worth and joy of submitting to the minority. It demonstrates that they fear God more than men. White people are having problems here. They're not fearing God.

They're muzzling the gospel. J .D. Greer, in order to accomplish diversity, you have to have a program for it. Okay, so there you go. Now, Nine Marks is positioned to help you understand how your church needs to diversify.

Whites have a special challenge. Minorities know what it feels like to be in a minority position. Cross-cultural awareness that minorities neatly automatically develop must be actively learned by whites.

That's Sam Land. Eric Redmond, my white brothers of the faith often miss the race problem. My white brothers must work at seeing life through the eyes of African or Hispanic or Asian or Native American.

It just keeps going. Evangelical seminaries tend to be overwhelmingly white. That's a problem. Juan Sanchez, race is a gospel issue which reflects an ignorance, distortion, or blatant denial of particular applications of the gospel.

Man, you can't get a break. If you're a white Christian, you're just getting beaten up by this kind of stuff. Unfortunately, this is early on. This is 2010 that we're seeing some of this. I talk about some of that and how early on you see this on the Nine Marks website.

I believe one of the things that helped shield Nine Marks also from criticism, especially in those early years, was the fact that they continued to oppose theological liberalism, which has often been associated with political liberalism and for good reason.

For example, Russell Moore's piece, Social Gospel Redux, took aim at Walter Rauschenbusch and the emergent church for denying the place and power of the individual salvation. As I've often said, though, the social gospel critique did not start out as an attempt to replace the gospel, but to expand it into corporate structures.

Here's a quote from Walter Rauschenbusch. He says, The social gospel is the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith and the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes in.

Here's what I'm trying to say. Look, you heard this a lot and Russell Moore said it on the Nine Marks website. Social gospel is a problem, but it's because they lack balance. They didn't have the individual gospel as part of the mission.

But if you actually go back and you read social gospel writings, Walter Rauschenbusch himself is saying and acknowledging and promoting the individual gospel. The same thing Russell Moore is saying that they lack, they're saying they have, and their critique is that the more fundamentalists, the people who are trying to go win souls and are not as involved in activism and making the world a better place, and so they're missing this corporate element to the gospel.

That's the critique that the social gospel crusaders are using. Well, it's the same thing you heard from evangelicals who were on the left when it comes to these issues. They were saying the same things Walter Rauschenbusch is saying while claiming that Rauschenbusch doesn't have the balance they have, even though he's the one also claiming he has balance.

So I'm trying to demonstrate this so people can see this is the same thing happened with liberation theology. Social gospel subversives in reformed evangelicalism made a similar move by claiming they possessed this.

So I basically already said this, the balance that both social gospel adherents and fundamentalists who focus more on personal conversions lacked. But all they were really doing was claiming the same balance that many social gospel advocates and liberation theology proponents already claim for themselves while packaging their salvific corporate element in more racially charged and less economically charged language.

So what I'm trying to say also is that, look, when you start saying, look, I'm against the social gospel, I'm against liberation theology, conservatives say, okay, good, good. We were worried there for a second, but now that you've made the statement, now you're saying I'm not Walter Rauschenbusch.

I realize that there's individual salvation. We're not going to replace that. Then people were, I think, a lot more accommodating and Russell Moore kind of could cruise under the radar for a long time with this kind of rhetoric because that's what people were looking for.

Okay, well, you check the box there. Good. But meanwhile, checking the box, they're actually, if you look at what they're actually saying, it's basically what the liberation theologians are saying. There's really not a big difference.

This is seen in a 2014 Nine Marks article by Stephen Harris, and no, I don't think I'm related, that seeks to correct the problems with liberation theology, including its over-realized eschatology and its framing of sin according to social dynamics instead of a violation of God's law, but also seeks to legitimize its fair critique of some in the evangelical community by exposing what can only be regarded as indifference towards injustice.

In Harris's piece, the gospel was not reducible to anti-racism, but anti-racism was part of the gospel ministry as was opposing institutional and corporate sin. This was allegedly what many of our forebears who sat on the bench during the civil rights movement failed to see, that it was their duty to support racial, social equality if they were consistent Christians.

Where orthodox believing Christians had apparently failed, liberation theologians and the new left had succeeded. And so here's that particular article by Stephen Harris. It's called Biblical Theology and Liberation, and you can certainly look it up.

It says, the mission of local church no doubt is the delivery and spread of the gospel message. That's correct. He says, Christians who submit themselves to the government of Christ should therefore be among the first to recognize not just the prevalence of individual sin, but institutional and corporate sin.

He goes on, he says, there is something of worth that needs to be acknowledged here. Their critique of some in the evangelical community by exposing what can only be regarded as indifference towards justice, albeit couched in orthodox doctrine.

So you have a foot getting in the door very early on at nine marks. And I just give you an aside here that I saw this attitude myself at Southeastern when I was there, because I was there at the same time in 2014.

And there was this attitude that began to emerge that not only were evangelicals who slanted left right about things, but also there was a point to be made by the Democrats that they had something of worth to offer that if Christians were thinking biblically, they would realize, they would see that the Republican party had a few points that were good.

Their Democrats had some points that were good. And over time that began to tilt more in favor of the Democrats. And these are in institutions that are conservative. I saw it firsthand at Southeastern, even among people who came in there more right wing, it, there was a shift that sometimes would happen with them.

I saw this with people I know, unfortunately, and nine marks reflects some of this shift. You can see it on their website and it's in the pursuit of being balanced. It's in the pursuit of being of transcending the political divide that we're going to not be categorized into the Republican party.

Like so often we've been, we want to repel that kind of characterization by showing people and proving to them that, look, no, we think the Democrats actually have some good points. There's justice issues on race and immigration and climate change.

And the list goes on that Christians ought to be involved in. Yes, of course, Republicans, they're, they're better on abortion, but you know, you got to balance all of these things. And can they really do anything to stop abortion?

I mean, this is, this is the kind of logic that began to get employed. And that's why you had people claiming orthodox theology that could say like, I'm going to vote for Hillary Hillary Clinton, because it's going to be all in all the outcomes are better that way.

And it's like, how did you get there? You got, they got there by starting out this way and it's on the nine marks website. You can see it starting to form around this time on right-leaning issues. Nine marks seems to use a much softer voice.

Jonathan Lehman, the current president of nine marks made sure to tell readers in his article that he was not encouraging them to be a culture warrior or to raise up a church of culture warriors on the issue of same-sex marriage.

This was less than a year before Obergefell versus Hodges, which we could have really used some cultural warriors for, to be honest with you the same year, Russell more practically celebrated the demise of nominal cultural Christianity in the face of secularism in the hope that the church's lost influence would lead to the purification of the church.

Nine marks was sending a message that it was time for the church to work for social change on institutional racism while simultaneously resigning the culture to slide on sexuality. In 2015, the anti-racist push intensified.

And in the aftermath of Obergefell nine marks published, this isn't crazy. Listen to this for a moment. Okay. Just listen to what I'm about to say. Obergefell is approved by the Supreme court. The decision is rendered and nine marks publishes 16 consecutive articles on race, racism, and racial diversity while offering only a single article on homosexuality rather than preparing Christians for the lawsuits that were coming their way.

Jonathan Lehman wrote a piece with a question in its title. Check this out. Should Christians disown gay sons and daughters? Spoiler alert. No, that's mind blowing to me. I did not expect to find that when I was looking back at their articles at 16 articles in a row on the subject of anti-racism and diversity and these kinds of things after Obergefell and one on homosexuality.

And it's not even what you would expect to find. It's trying to let parents know that if their child comes out of the closet, they need to love their child still. And you're like, what about the lawsuits coming?

What about the church policies that need to be crafted to meet these threats? What about the fact that you weren't anywhere to be found before this, this, uh, travesty and, uh, the, the, the only thing I could find that was pushing in the right direction on this came much later.

Uh, it was almost a year after Obergefell nine marks did publish a sample marriage policy that among other things was intended to help the churches navigate the ongoing pressure for the church to participate in homosexual weddings.

Now it wasn't even advertised that way, but there's a, there's a little offhanded, uh, remark in the article that says, yeah, this would help you with this as well. It was still more than a little odd though, to me for a ministry.

So focused on ecclesiology to fail, to anticipate the threat from Obergefell while pouring so much energy into narratives adjacent to BLM. And they truly were embracing those narratives long before 2020.

So we haven't even gotten to 2020 yet. Let me see if, uh, I had, so when was this published? 2014. Okay. Pastors, homosexuality and same sex marriage. Okay. So this, this was before Obergefell and it's Jonathan Lehman saying that I recently heard Tim Keller say that he is looking forward to getting on the other side of this cultural moment because we'll discover that life goes on and that we should not respond in paranoia.

In the meantime, he says, I'm not encouraging you to be a cultural warrior or to raise up a culture, a church of cultural warriors. Well, thanks Jonathan Lehman. Like we could have used churches with cultural warriors in 2014.

Um, he's basically throwing cold water on the fire. He's saying, let's wait, let's be patient. Let's be passive. Let's get past this cultural moment. Life goes on. Don't be paranoid. You should be paranoid about race though.

Apparently like racial inequities and so forth. Um, this is also from 2014 Russell Moore, an article, the title of the article is left behind in America following Christ after the culture wars. So even the tense of that, trying to get it behind you, right?

The idea was that most Americans share the common goals of Christianity, at least at the level of morality. He's talking about cultural Christianity. Like, look, most people who share cultural, cultural Christianity, we ought to see the ongoing cultural shakeup in America as a liberation though, of sorts from a captivity.

We never even knew we were in. So he's saying, look, the true Christians are captive here. They're this cultural Christianity stuff is the problem. We need to get past this. We need it. The demise of cultural Christianity is a good thing for the church.

He says a rapture indeed is happening, but those who are evaporating in front of us are those structures of nominal cultural Christianity. Good riddance. Thanks Russell Moore right before Obergefell. Thank you for saying that our cultural standards that derive from Christianity, they need to just go.

Here's one from Brian Davis. How do we respond to the cultural crisis over race? So I'm just showing you, here's some of the articles that you'll see right after Obergefell race, racial reconciliation, the gospel and the church by Jarvis Williams says the good news of the gospel includes racial reconciliation.

So the Christian gospel tells us that racism fundamentally exists because of sin. We should promote gospel centered, racial reconciliation. We must do a better job living out the gospel of racial, the gospel of racial reconciliation.

New title for the gospel just dropped. Whites must welcome minority voices at the leadership table whenever and wherever discussions about the gospel and race happen. Here's why churches by white churches are hard for black people by Isaac Adams.

The world readily admits that white supremacy resounds today and that subtle racism skulks and way more is way more difficult to discern. The majority dismisses the truths of racism and black feelings go invalidated, right?

That's like a big thing that blacks have certain feelings and you should just validate them in these writings. Black churches are the only space where many blacks find it safe to be Christian and black.

So if you want to know why they go to black churches and not yours is because yours isn't safe as a black individual. It's exhausting to feel as if you're constantly representing all black people. Acting as if your church has no ethnicity or is ethnically neutral makes blacks feel like your church isn't for them.