Cultural Marxism

My assignment tonight is to address the topic of cultural Marxism. And it's a topic that I have been talking about for a long time, and it's a topic that most people didn't want to hear me talk about. But now, for some strange reason, people are finding it more relevant. There's a passage of scripture that I want to read for us. It's from the Book of First Chronicles, chapter twelve. First Chronicles, Chapter twelve. I was trying to think about a passage of scripture, you know, talking about cultural Marxism, Like where's that text, you know? And this is not a text on cultural Marxism, but I believe it's a text that really explains the importance of us addressing this issue tonight. First Chronicles, chapter twelve, Beginning of verse twenty three, these are the numbers of the divisions of the armed troops who came to David in Hebron to turn the kingdom of Saul over to him, according to the word of the Lord. So David, the man after God's on heart, he is about to inherit the kingdom. He's about to become king. And there are men who came with him. Because if you're going to be king, if you're going to govern God's people, if you're going to lead God's people, there's some things that you need. Amen. The men of Judah bearing shield and spear were six thousand, eight hundred armed troops of the Simianites, mighty men of valor for war, seven one hundred of the Levites, four thousand, six hundred, the Prince Jehoyda of the House of Aaron, and with him three thousand, seven hundred Zadok, a young man mighty and valor, and twenty twos from his own father's house of the Benjaminites. The kinsmen of Saul three thousand, of whom the majority to that point kept their allegiance to the House of Saul. Of the Ephramites, twenty thousand, eight hundred, mighty men of valor, famous men in their father's house. Of the half tribe of Manassa eighteen thousand, who were expressly named to come and make David king of Isakar, men who had understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do. Two hundred chiefs and all their kinsmen under their command, swords, shield, mighty men of valor. You need all that, amen, But you also need some men who understand the times so that you know what you ought to do. And that's what I hope this session will be about. I hope that it will be about us trying to understand the times. Now, what I don't want to do is I don't want to just offer you a dry lecture on the topic of cultural Marxism, which is kind of hard not to do because it is cultural Marxism. But what I want to do is sort of put this in a context, help you understand why it's important, why this matters currently in this discussion, in this debate, and I even hesitate to call it a debate, and I'll talk more about that as the weekend goes on. One of the reasons is not really a debate is because there's a lot of name calling, right people address the issue of social justice. Some topic comes up, one person says it's a social justice issue, the other person calls them a cultural Marxist, and then they turn around and call the person a racist. And that's about all the debate that you get. It's name calling, and things get short circuited because of the name calling. And often neither side is being completely honest, and we know it. Often the person who's looking at their brother and saying, ah, you're just a cultural Marxist doesn't necessarily mean that that's what the person is, even though they may believe that they're espousing some of the ideas that come from cultural Marxism. And generally the person who turns back and says, are you just a racist? Knows better. But both sides recognize that that's a way to shut the other down, because right now, these are not issues that are being debated. These are not issues that are being discussed, and in fact, in many instances, the mere act of debating and discussing these issues is considered to make you a cultural Marxist or a racist. On the one hand, if the one person says that this was an injustice and you turn around and want a debate and whether or not that was an injustice, and look at you, how dare you? I just told you that this was an injustice? How insensitive can you be to not acknowledge this injustice? And on the other hand, the other person who genuinely doesn't believe that an injustice has occurred is trying to point out why an injustice hasn't necessarily occurred here and have a finger pointed at them and are called a racist, and they say, wait a minute, really, how long have we known each other? You know, that's not who I am. And so we end up just sort of not addressing the issues, not debating the issues. That's the great irony here is that there are issues that need to be dealt with, that we need to press in on, that we need to press each other on. But this has been declared ground where we're not allowed to fight because merely deciding to debate and argue these issues disqualifies you, and for some people it even disqualifies you as a Christian. You're no longer a brother or a sister if you're not right on these issues. Another part of the problem is our ignorance of or misuse of the terms, which is one of the reasons that I want to address this tonight. But first let me tell you what I'm not saying. I'm not here to state that all who disagree with me are are Gramsian cultural neo Marxists. You'll understand those terms as we go along, right, That's that's not what I'm here to say. I don't believe that I believe that there are some people within these circles. There are some people within these movements who absolutely holds to this ideology that we're going to talk about here tonight, but there are others who don't hold to the ideology, who unfortunately have decided to use the terminology, and that's a problem. I'm also not here to state that all of the ideas is with which I disagree in the current debate are Marxists, because that's not fair. As well. I am not a social justice warrior. I am not an advocate of intersectionality. I'm not even an advocate of systemic racism theory, and it is a theory. I'm not an advocate of those things. But I don't believe that everyone who is an advocate of those things is necessarily a Marxist, and I think we have to be careful about that. That we're dealing with brothers and sisters here, and again, while I would actually love and enjoy to be treated with that level of brotherly love and respect, I can't demand it. I won't demand it, but I have to give it, amen, I have to give it. And so that's my decision here. My decision here is to give that and hope for it in return. Hope that people are honest enough to deal in kind. So what am I saying? What is my goal here? My goal is to lay out a sketch of cultural Marxism. We won't be able to go into every aspect of this ideology, but I want you to at least have an idea of where it comes from and what we're talking about when you use the term. My hope is to make it clear why and how I and others use the term and what we mean by it, because I do use the term, and I have used the term for a while, and I believe it's appropriate to use the term, although it's unfortunate because when people hear it that sense of fini, so we have to be careful and doing so, I hope to help you understand a couple of things why this terminology is important. Ideas matter, words matter, and it's important that we understand the words that we use. And it's important on both sides. It's important for you, whichever side of this thing you find yourself on, to understand the words that you use and the implications of the words that you use, and not just assume that people know what you're talking about or what you mean when you throw out those words. Secondly, I want you to understand why I believe it's important to address these issues. And you've heard some of that already today, but I do believe that this is a critical issue and we are at a critical juncture. There are things at stake here that are of the utmost priority and significance. I also want you to understand why certain ideas are being embraced today, or why some of these ideas are actually antithetical to the gospel that we love and preach, and why these issues that we face are important enough to discuss and find a way forward because we knew we do need to find a way forward. Sticking our head in the sand is not an option, and not only is it not an option, because you know we find ourselves at this crossroad within evangelicalism that that's important. It's important that we battle these things out. It's important that we understand each other. It's important that we have clarity. It's important that we find ourselves on the same page. But there are a couple of other things that are important that I want you to hear tonight. Because remember what I said about the courtesy that I want to extend that courtesy that is not always extended in the other direction. Racism is real and it's sin. And I think it's sad that there are people who are actually arguing that those of us who have been part of the statement on social justice in the Gospel have somehow made a statement that we don't believe that racism is real or that racism is a sin. Racism is real, it's a sin. Oppression is real, it's sinful. Hatred is real, and it's sinful. My aim here is not to merely fight battles of terminology in order to avoid acknowledging real issues like these. These are real issues. And enough already with the people who are saying you just use terminology like cultural Marxism, you just use these words like this so that you don't have to address these real issues. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are too many people who've been killed by police officers. Guess what, There's too many police officers who have been killed by citizens. That's a problem. We have serious problems in immigration that demand not only political solutions, but also present an opportunity for those of us who love the Gospel and want the Gospel to be preached to every day. Amen, somebody. They are far too many educational opportunities, too many educational resources in this country for so many people to have so poor an education. That's an issue. It's real, Amen. So simply because I am going to argue and will not stop arguing against cultural Marxism does not mean that I am unwilling to acknowledge or to engage on these real issues. And it is insulting, unfair, and unbrotherly to suggest otherwise, just as much as it is to say that anybody who emphasizes these issues more than I would somehow doesn't love the Gospel. My background just want to help you understand why this is something that I've been addressing. I was raised in south central Los Angeles now just South LA. I don't know why they changed all that, but by a single teenage Buddhist mother and so yes, I was a fatherless young black man growing up in the ghetto in South LA, drug infested, gang infested South LA. The police who policed my neighborhood were from the famous or infamous, depending on who you're asking. Rampart Division. You don't even have to be from Los Angeles to have heard about the Rampart Division. The Rampart Division was the baddest gang in LA. They made sure we knew that. There are a number of family members of mine who have spent most of their adult life in prison. There are two first cousins of mine who've been gunned down in the street. So again, I also think it's rather ironic that, you know, when people listen to me talking about these issues, there are some people who've suggested that my position on these issues somehow rises out of the fact that I'm not in touch with blackness or the black experience, or I've been so privileged that somehow I just don't get it. It's especially ironic when some of these people have seen virtually nothing in the way of real oppression, who have the audacity to say such things. So that's where I come from. I come from a family of activists. I come from I remember, I mean, I just hey, you know, black power, black nationalism, members of my family who were part of the Nation of Islam, members of my family who were parts of other organizations, members of my family who were part of protests and the whole civil rights movement and everything else. That's where I come from. I didn't grow up with my father, but I knew my father. My father was always an advocate. He worked in the criminal justice system. He worked as a counselor and juvenile detention centers. He worked a boy's home. My mother was a victim's advocate until she retired in San Antonio, Texas, working in the legal system there. My first three jobs were in group homes because of the influence of those people who raised me. So again, this is where I'm coming from on these issues. And yet I despise cultural Marxism. I am not a social justice warrior, reject ideas like white privilege, intersectionality, and systemic racism theory, absolutely, unequivocally so, and not just since yesterday. I started writing about cultural Marxism in the mid well any early two thousands, somewhere around two thousand and five, six and seven, blogged about it intently, intensely in two thousand and seven during the election because of what I saw as the incredible threat of Barack Obama, who was a massive cultural Marxist and in my opinion then and now, a dangerous man on a number of fronts and for a number of reasons. And so yeah, I ended up. You know, some of you may have seen an interview that I did on CNN before the election talking about, you know, some of these issues. I only got to do that one time, so that was pretty much it. Lady. He said after the interview was over that yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll have to have you back. And I knew at that moment that I would never be back on that person's show again. And so this is not something new. Why did I think it was an issue at that time because of a number of things. Let me give you just a few that I wrote about then and was worried about then. Because of the philosophy of cultural Marxism, and because of this man's long history with cultural Marxism, not only from his university days but even his church. This man sat under an overt Marxist pastor for decades. Jeremiah Wright was an overt. He was not just a cultural Marxist, he was also a classical Marxist. Okay, this man had sat under that teaching for years and years. Not only had he done that, but his position on certain issues, like, for example, his homosexual agenda. The most radically pro homosexual politician that I had ever seen or experienced in the mainstream, his position on abortion and infanticide, which was radical, on judicial activism, hate crimes legislation, and I believed, and said openly on a number of occasions that I believed this man's presidency would make race relations in America worse, not better. An article that I wrote and actually reprinted two years later because I'm not big on I told you so, but I told you so, and so yes, I don't think that I've come here this week and suddenly talking about cultural Marxism, because you know, now it's a trump card that can be used in this particular debate. Nearly a decade and a half now, I've been addressing this issue. So with that in mind, let's look at it a couple of things. First, culture Marxism and classical Marxist Marxism are two different things, and this is one of the things that makes the discussion difficult. Classical Marxism, Karl Marx was an economist, right. Classical Marxism is an economic system. You know. We know about the bourgeois and the proletariat. We know from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. We know about the uprising of the masses. We you know, to to overthrow capitalism. We know that Marx was a communist who wanted to see capital overthrown. He saw capitalism as oppressing the masses. He also saw religion as the opiate of the masses that allowed them to be oppressed by capitalism. So he was rapidly atheistic. And this is one of the things that makes it difficult to talk to people about cultural Marxism, right because classical Marxism is something that for most Christians, for most Evangelicals, for real Christians, for real evangelicals who are not way out there in the friends somewhere, just wouldn't identify with Marxism. And if we don't understand the difference between classical Marxism, this economic system, and cultural Marxism, which is very different than this in its approach, then if you just hear the word, it's like, how can you say that? How can you suggest that? Three main ideas, Let me give you this just to understand Marx a summary of his salient points. Number one, he believed that history had really three stages or epochs. Number one, the ancient stage, secondly the feudal stage, and thirdly the capitalist stage. He believed that he was witnessing the rise and would see eventually the fall of the capitalist stage. The second idea was the idea of class consciousness, that each one of these societal epics contained internal contradictions, and these internal contradictions is what would lead to struggle and would eventually lead to the next phase, which led to the third idea, his idea of historical determinism, that ultimately capitalism would fall. Capitalism had to fall. Why because the way he viewed history was history was a view of struggle, was a series of struggles, a series of conflicts. He was a disciple of Hegel, So this was sort of his dialectic, if you will, thesis antithesis, synthesis, right, So capitalism had to fall. Workers of the world would unite and there would be a revolution, and there was, right, but not everywhere. And so towards the end of his life and then during the life of his followers, they tried to explain and understand why it is that capitalism didn't fall. I mean, if capitalism is exploitation of the masses, and if history is all about these conflicts, and if this conflict is going to come, and if the next thing that is going to come is a postc capitalist society. Then why haven't we seen this? Enter the cultural Marxists with a couple of goals. Number one, to explain why the revolution didn't occur as Marx thought it would. Marx died in eighteen eighty eight, by the way, So now we get into the late eighteen hundreds, the early nineteen hundreds, we get into World War One, and there are a couple of players that you need to know if you're going to understand cultural Marxism. One is a guy by the name of Antonio Gramsey. Gramsey was an Italian Marxist. Another one is not an individual, but a group of individuals known as the Frankfurt School. Two ideas. One Gramsey's idea of cultural hegemony. Listen to the way one sociologist puts it. Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview and behavior of the rest of society. Cultural hegemony, that's the power. By the way, this idea of cultural legimity explains something have you ever wondered why women who make up more than fifty percent of the population are considered a minority? You ever wondered why because women are not seen as part of the cultural hegemony. The cultural hegemony is patriarchal. The cultural hegemony, for example, in our society is white, male, heterosexual cisgendered, able bodied, native born Americans. You know who you are, And everybody who's not that is a minority. And everybody who's not that is a victim of the cultural hegemony established by those individ jewels, which means that everybody who's not that is at war with that, and everybody who is that is privileged. And the more of those boxes you tick off, the more privileged you are. Shame listen to this Gramsey developed the concept of cultural hegemony in an effort to explain why the worker led revolution that Marx predicted in the previous century had not come to pass. Central to Marx's theory of capitalism was the belief that the destruction of this economic system was built into the system itself. Since capitalism is premised on the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class, why didn't it happen? Well? Because we're not dealing with economics, we're dealing with culture. Marks missed this part, or so Gramcy would argue, he missed this part. So the revolution that comes doesn't need to be an armed revolution or a revolution of force. It needs to be a hegemonic revolution. In other words, we need to change the cultural hegemony. We need to overturn the cultural hegemony. And how do you overturn the cultural hegemony? A couple of things. For Gramcy. Control the robes of society. What are the robes of society? You know, the people who wear robes, judges, professors, pastors, politicians. Leverage those positions in order to educate and mobilize the masses against the hegemonic power. Use the educational system, the political system, the judicial system in order to overturn the cultural hegemony. Does that sound at all familiar? This is how you gain power. By the way, in the meantime, how do you gain political power. You gain political power by promising various groups of people that you will advocate for them. That's how you do it. That's why you can have so many white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able bodied, native born American politicians who present themselves as representatives of the people who are not any of those things. That's how cultural Marxism works. Well, there's another group of individuals, the Frankfurt School, and let me give you this quickly. The Frankfurt School refers to a collection of scholars collection of scholars in Frankfurt, Germany. These individuals who were known for develop critical theory and popularizing the dialectic method of learning by interrogating society's contradictions, and it's most closely associated with the work of a number of German philosophers during the early twentieth century. They saw a couple of things that for them explained why the revolution didn't happen. And for them, part of it was the fact that people were receiving so much information through mass media. Remember this is the early twentieth century, radio, you know, just coming around TV not so much. So people weren't necessarily associating and interacting with each other like they had been in the past, but were receiving information through things like newspapers and radios and so on and so forth. So one of the main goals of the Frankfurt School was to leverage these tools in order to bring about the change and the hegemonic powers reduce everything to discussions of race, class, gender, sex, and notice I use both of those because sex and gender are two different things. Right. Sex has to do with your biology, gender, social construct. Your gender doesn't necessarily have to match your sex. We are aware of this, and if your gender doesn't match your sex, then you are transgender as opposed to cisgendered. For those of you who are wondering what that was, cis cis gender just means that you're not special. The Frankfurt School was concerned with mass media, and the mass media culture saw people becoming passive recipients of political and ideological information instead of being activist, and they believed that this explained why the revolution didn't take place. They theorized that this experience made people intellectually inactive and politically passive as they allowed mass produced iology, ideologies, and values to wash over them and to infiltrate their consciousness. Because of what happened in World War One, they left Germany and in nineteen thirty three they went to Switzerland, but they only stayed there for a couple of years, and in nineteen thirty five they came to New York and became affiliated with Columbia University. There's a man by the name of Blint veasagna I. I probably didn't say his name correctly. He came to the United States fleeing the Nazis in Eastern Europe, fleeing the Nazis in Hungary, and he wrote a book called America's Thirty Years War. And essentially his thesis was this, he ran away from what was happening in Europe by force, only to come to the United States and watch it happen gradually over the course of a generation. So what do these guys give us? A number of things, namely critical theory. Have you heard the idea of critical race theory? It's a grandchild of the Frankfurt School, political correctness, multiculturalism. Any of these things out familiar. So as a result of these ideologies, we have all been taught over time, through our media, through our educational systems, to view ourselves not as part of a whole, but as part of subgroups, as part of subgroups who in some way, shape, fashion or form are being oppressed by the hegemonic power that rules and governs our culture. And so even when we talk about elections, we don't talk about this person is ahead in the polls by this much. That person is no, this person is ahead with red headed, left handed white people from the South, while this person is getting the vote of second generation migrant workers with ezema. Why do we talk like that? Why do we think about politics that way? Why do we think about each other that way? Why do ideas like intersectionality from Kimberly Crenshaw in eighteen eighty nine gain such popularity that people use it like like we know what it is. By the way, if you don't know what intersectionality is, just what's the hegemonic power? White, male, heterosexual cisgendered, able bodied, native born American people, that's the man, right? He heard that saying, you know, the man keeping us down. That's the man. And by the way, the list could go on and on and on. Intersectionality in a nutshell basically is the idea that to the degree that you don't have those things, you are oppressed. And so if you are male, heterosexual, cisgendered, right, native born, American, able bodied, by the way, also attractive, there's pretty privileged too. By the way, if you are all those things but you're not white, right, then your oppression is limited to this area. But what if you're not white, but you're also not male. Now that place where you're not whiteness and you're not maleness intersects is where you feel the weight of the oppression. But what if you're not white and not male and not heterosexual. Well, now the oppression is even worse on you because you have these three intersections of oppression. What if you're not white, not male, not heterosexual, and not cisgendered. Woh, so now you are a black trans male lesbian anyway, you're now there are four intersections of oppression, right, Well, well, if you're not white, and you're not male, and you're not heterosexual, and you're not cisgendered, and you're not able bodied, or you're not a native born American, you're an immigrant, or you're not a you see, intersectionality says that the level of oppression and the kind of oppression that you experience combines itself in these areas and layers itself in these areas, these intersections, if you will. But what is that if not a grown up expression of cultural Marxism. By the way, when people use the term racism today, the term racism, you got to be careful and you got to understand what people are talking about, because when people say racism, they could mean you are being accused of being an individual who has racist, prejudicial ideas toward other individuals, or they could just be saying that you are a person who is part of the cultural hegemony, which, by the way, is inherently racist against people who are not right now, which means that now you have racism without a racist, by the way, hand, how do you handle that racism in the heart of an individual. Let's go to the book. Let's go to the book. Let's call that what it is, racism that exists because of cultural hegemony. How do you fix that? Now? Instead of a preacher, you've become a politician, because the only way to fix that one is to change the hegemony. Do you see why these ideas matter? And so the very ways in which we think about ourselves, the very ways in which we think about issues, the very ways, and this is why some some times you can feel like you're having a different conversation than another person. A prime example is the Mike Brown case. I mean, I got absolutely hammered, hammered over the Mike Brown case. Tom Ascal got hammered over appreciating what I said about the Mike Brown case. And you can feel like you're having two different conversations because on the one hand, you come to this and you say, okay, a guy six foot four, three hundred sumidd pounds reaches into a police car and grabs the gun of a police officer. Anybody who knows anything about anything says, if I have a gun and you reach to grab my gun, one of us is in trouble. If you get it, it's me. If you don't, it's you. Hands up, don't shoot. Never happened. It was a complete fabrication. So a guy who had just strong arm robbed somebody in a store stop by a policeman, aggressive action against the policeman, get shot and killed. And you may have had some of these conversations. You're sitting there and you're going, okay, okay, listen, you tell me the story of the police officers who acted inappropriately, and we can go together to be against that person. But you tell me this story, and I say, there was no injustice here. That wasn't racism unless the problem is not one police officer and his actions on that one night, but a cultural hegemony that has established structural racism that disproportionately targets black males. Therefore, every time something like that happens to one of them, it is another piece of evidence, which is why you have people who say things like the facts of that case really don't matter, or worse, you start talking about the facts of that case and people say, oh, now you're blaming the victim. What's the end result of that. The end result of that is you don't engage, you don't discuss, you don't interact, because here's what you learn. Whatever your answer is, if it doesn't lie with what the cultural Marxist says it ought to be, or with the person who is borrowing the ideology of the cultural Marxist says it ought to be, or the person who is unwillingly falling prey to the cultural Marxism that all of us have been saturated in wants it to be, then you're wrong and you're a racist or in my case, a sellout who's trying to curry favor with white people. Why is this important? I'll leave you with this. Here's why it's important. It's important because this is an agenda, not just an idea. It's a disruptive transformative agenda. That's number one, and it's an agenda that needs to be recognized and an agenda that needs to be confronted. Here's the second problem, and to me, this is the sinister part of the problem. The sinister part of the problem is that the end result of this agenda is real pain, real sin, real brokenness that doesn't get addressed. Let me explain, as someone who grew up in drug infested, gang infested South LA, the son of a single teenage mother. I look at the Mike Brown situation and I want to say to all of the young black boys like him, who are young black boys like me, we can't live like that. To all of the fathers who are not there, to the tune of nearly seventy five percent among black children, what I want to say is, we have a problem that needs to be addressed. We can't live like this. We have to deal with this. There is brokenness here that has to be addressed. There's brokenness that has to be fixed. But the way things stand now to say that is to blame the victim. Do you know what that means? That means that whatever ologies there are that need to be addressed, don't get addressed because it's the system's fault. And again, like I said at the beginning, I am not arguing that there's no racism. I'm not arguing that there's no brokenness, that there's no injustice. And we got way too many people in prison in this country. Amen, somebody, we got way too many people in prison in this country. There's something broken about that we imprison more of our population than like any two three countries in the world. There's something broken about that, especially when a large number of those people are in there because of addiction to drugs, I mean, right or wrong. And so here's what worries me. What worries me is that we've created an environment where we've divided everyone up into constituencies, which is incredibly ironic because what that creates is stereotypes. And we look at everyone's issues problems whenever in relation to the system and what the system is doing, has done, needs to do, And what that has the potential to do is to move us away from addressing individuals and their sin and their pain and their brokenness. Does this make sense because we don't have to be either or it doesn't have to be that, you know, either we address individuals and their sin and their brokenness, or we look at problems with systems and this and that it doesn't it doesn't have to be. Why do I have to choose between advocating for laws to change in the area of abortion, which disproportionately affects people who look like me, or proclaiming the Gospel with a view toward changing the hearts of young women so that they won't kill their babies. Don't make me choose between those two. I won't. I want both, coach, huh? And why do I have to choose between acknowledging the fact that there are huge problems and pathologies both among individuals and cultures and systems. And again, let me hasten to say, I'm not arguing that everybody who talks about justice issues is somehow excluding both. Here's what I am saying. When we choose to talk about this in certain terms, and when we choose to accept certain ideologies and agree with certain premises, the end result is that if you don't find yourself on the right side of this, you're disqualified. And that can't be. That can't be. So what do you do with this? In all honesty, I'm in a unique position. I got a magic melanin. So even though there's people who will say certain things about me, when I address certain of these issues, I can say things that a lot of other people can. Amen. Amen, I've said to people. I think Jesus was a Pharisee. Number one, I don't think it's likely that he would have gone through thirty three years of living and not identified with any of those groups. Number two, theologically, all the rest of them way far away from where he was. Number three. He hammered those dudes in a way that generally you only get away with. Now again, I'm not going to go to the mat over. You know, Jesus was part of the Pharisee group whatever. But there is something real about that. But there's also something wrong about that, because, as we heard earlier, in Christ, there is now neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male, no female we're all want in Christ. So we end up in a very unique situation. And this goes back to something that I said earlier, And it's controversial, and I don't want you to hear or understand this the wrong way because a lot people like, oh, you tell them black people to shut up, Nope, nope. I will never tell black people to shut up. But for me, there's something that I have to consider. If I'm your brother and there is something between us that causes you to be afraid, apprehensive, unwilling to speak truth into my life, then I got to go the extra mile to free you up to do that, and you have to go the extra mile to trust our relationship in Christ and do that. Well, that's hard, y'all. It's hard both ways, isn't it. It's hard. If Tom and I are friends and brothers in Christ, and there are things that Tom can see in my life, and I know that I can come back at him and play the race card and maybe even prevent him from speaking to some of the things that he sees in my life, it's hard for me to say I'm not going to do that to him, my brother, And it's hard for him knowing that I have the ability and opportunity to do that, to speak certain things into my life for fear that I might. And that's why. One of the things that this culture of Marxism has exposed recently is a false unity. We've got people who for years, for years have been talking about how unified we are in Christ who now are suddenly dismissing one another because of where they fall on a particular social issue. And again, I'll say more about that as the weekend goes on, but for now, just know that that's why these things matter. That's why that's why these things are important. It's important because there's an ideology here, there's a goal here, there's an endgame here, and we see it in the world of politics. It has an If you've been on a university campus at all recently, you see this. It has to be addressed. And secondly, because there are issues, real brokenness, real sin, real problems that if we're not careful, we render ourselves unable or unwilling to address because of these ideologies that we've imbibed, which means that finally we have to love the Gospel enough and we have to love one another enough. Here's the great irony. The great irony is that, in a way, I'm borrowing language from the other side now, because the other side is always saying check your privilege, right, and I'm kind of saying that. But here's the difference. I'm saying it to everybody. I'm not saying that if you're white male, heterosexual, cisgendered, able bodied, native born American, Check your privilege. I'm saying, if you are a member of the Body of Christ, and in this discussion and this debate, you have learned how to shut down the other side, regardless of who that other side is. Check that, check that. And it's going to require boldness both in terms of trusting our brothers and sisters in Christ and in terms of willingness to speak to issues that in this day and age, will get you outright just castigated, but the truth is worth it.