The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Episode Date: October 21, 2026

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.On today’s edition of The Briefing, Dr. Mohler discusses the religious impulses behind socialism, the influence of radical professors, the failures of secular sexual ethics, and why Christian parents must never separate love from truth.Part I (00:14 – 12:49)Democratic Socialism as a New False Religion: Recognizing the Religious Impulses Undergirding Modern IdeologiesThe Democratic Socialist Congregation by Commentary (Jesse Arm)Part II (12:49 – 18:08)Radical Marxist Professors in the Academy: When Professors Teach Leftist Ideologies, It Shapes an Entire GenerationRadical Professors Have Poisoned the Electorate by The Wall Street Journal (John Ellis)Part III (18:08 – 23:02)Everyone Has Some Form of Sexual Morality: The Radical Inadequacy of a Secular Sexual MoralityCornell and the Meaning of Consent by The New York Times (Debra W. Haffner)Part IV (23:02 – 27:08)Love at the Cost of Conviction? When Parents Abandon Truth to Affirm LGBTQ ChildrenWhat I learned about my trans daughter changed how I vote by USA Today (Micky Lopez)Sign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Wednesday, October 21st, 2006. I'm Albert Moller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. One of the things to think about sometimes is a steady state understanding of religion. I'm using the term religion intentionally, referring to what we can just vaguely describe as religious ideas. And the fact is that even people who say they're not religious have some religious ideas. Jody Bottom just years ago made the argument that even political arguments often come in a religious shape, the religious shape of political ideas he wrote about, oh, now about a generation ago. And he pointed out that even the people who declare themselves to be secular, they basically show their religion in their politics. And you trace back their

political presuppositions, and quite frankly, they are not explained entirely in secular terms. They are taking on a religious shape. And sometimes that means religious intensity, which you certainly see on the political and ideological left. They can say they're not religious, but they pour their religious intensity into their Marxism or critical theory or campus activism or whatever. Another form of this interesting argument recently appeared in the Jewish Journal, known as Commentary. The headline in the article is the Democratic Socialist Congregation, the subhead, how the DSA, that's the Democratic Socialist of America,

serves as a religion substitute for downwardly mobile elites. Jeffrey Arm is the author of the report. he's vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute in New York. And just taking the title, the Democratic Socialist Congregation, so we're looking at the Democratic Socialists of America. And what he's saying is, you know, in some ways, those local chapters, they actually do function like religious congregations, even though they would be offended to be told this. Jesse Arms makes the argument, and he looks at the fact that the DSA, as he says, quote, attracts people who have benefited from capitalism, but feel cheated.

by it. It provides them with a moral vocabulary that gives them room to reinterpret personal disappointment as systemic injustice. And most importantly, he says it gives them somewhere to go in a lonely Tuesday night. Just as for thousands of years, religion provided a social basis for Mormons on a Monday, Muslims on a Friday, Jews on a Saturday, and Christians on a Sunday. End quote. Now, the interesting thing about this is that as Christians, we also believe that political ideas can often take on a religious shape. We actually agree with much of this, and we see this as evidence of the fact that as God made us in his image, he made us metaphysically hungry. He made us hungry for answers to the most basic issues of life, and we also crave a certain form of consistency in our

ideas. And so if you have merely political ideas and you say you don't have any kind of theological convictions whatsoever, then what you do is you turn your politics into a form of secular or You could just say theology in that sense. You pour the religious intensity into secular ideas. Now, the most important part of this article is the fact that that is exactly what's going on with the DSA. That's exactly what in this generation showing up with the Democratic Socialists of America. Now, as Jesse Arm argues, quote, more than merely an organization with a platform, the DSA is an entire social world. Just as a faith tradition is. It supplies friends, status, identity, rituals, instruction, practical obligations, and a story that situates the individual inside a world historical struggle.

For young people whose jobs feel precarious or pointless or whose expensive educations have not produced the lives they expected, or whose families and religious institutions no longer provide a thick sense of belonging, or a combination of two or all three, the DSA is the answer to a prayer. He then says, perhaps literally. Now, he takes the argument pretty far here, and yet I think as Christians look at this argument, we understand there really is something to this.

there really is something to the fact that there is now a theological shape to secular ideas. And we understand as Christians that is because we're spiritual beings made in God's image. We cannot not be religious in some sense. The question is whether or not that religious impulse is going to direct us to the gospel of Jesus Christ or to something in terms of a man-made religion, just a synthetic form of religion. And that's exactly what the current leftist activism on so many campuses and in so many cities like New York, and the DSA where it's concentrated, that's exactly what is happening. Now, one of the things that Arm points out is that there are just massive inconsistencies here.

He talks about the DSA co-chair in New York, who is, quote, too perfect an example, a Yale-educated artist living in a $1.5 million townhouse purchased by his wealthy father, who he falsely claimed was an immigrant from Peru. This man cultivated a public identity as a union electrician, even after being dismissed from his apprenticeship for prolonged. absence. He, by the way, again, just all kinds of controversy. The point is this man is not coming from the oppressed masses. This guy has a degree from Yale. And not only that, he's living in a pretty upscale neighborhood. He's clearly coming from family wealth, but he is now pouring this energy

into activism for the Democratic Socialists of America. And you look at this kind of inconsistency, or you might even say hypocrisy, and as Arm points out, there is no one who exemplary. this more clearly than the mayor of New York City, Zoran Mamdani, because he is someone who comes from a very elite background. I mean, his father, a very well-established academic, his mother, very much connected to the cultural world. He grew up knowing all these celebrities because he was a part of that culture. But now he is known as the Democratic Socialist Mayor of New York City. Arm also points out that there's an entire activist infrastructure that is involved in the DSA. and it just keeps pulling people in, animated by this form of secular religion. Now, by the way,

even going back to the early 20th century, there were Christians who understood the communism, you could talk about the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union. It also came as the absolute repudiation of theology, the absolute repudiation of God, the absolute assertion of atheism, but its ideology took a religious shape. But as a Christian theologian, I want to go further and and explain why this is absolutely so. It is so because made in God's image, we crave answers to certain questions, and those questions include things so basic as, how does the world exist? Who did this? How does it come to be? Who am I? How do I know who I am? How do I explain the meaning of life? How do I explain the meaning of history? How do I explain human nature? We crave all those things. We want a meaning to history.

what does past, present, and future mean? What is my understanding of the past? And furthermore, this means even the ancient past, even the first past, thinking as Christians of the book of Genesis. And then think of trying to understand our own predicament. You know, what's gone wrong with me? And of course, this is where modern psychotherapeutics also provides a secular religious system, a very clear explanation.

It's not something you did. It's something outside of you that is impacting you. so that therapeutic worldview is there, but so is this political and ideological worldview, and socialism has always been based upon this kind of worldview, especially when it takes the form that has taken root in so many Western societies. Also, you'd have to say, by the way, the Communist Party in China, which is officially atheistic. That doesn't mean they're not religious. It just means they pour all of their religious impulses into the false God of Marxism.

Now, another things pointed out in this article is that even as there are many young adults, and in particular the youngest generation of adults right now, even as many of them are rushing into the streets and rushing into meetings of the DSA and rushing into political support of these candidates, they say they are in big, their generation is in big economic trouble. One of the things, and it's not only documented in this article, but in many others, the Wall Street Journal's run some really good things, so has the Washington Post, the Financial Times. This generation of young adults is facing some very interesting financial challenges, but it is not poorer than generations that came before adjusted for inflation and for cost of living at the same age.

They think they are, partly because some political leaders keep telling them they are. Once again, I'm not saying they don't face some very significant challenges in one sense every new generation of adults faces a certain set of economic circumstances and opportunities and all the rest. Even as arm writes the article, he says, millennials as a whole are not an emiserated generation. Their median household income is at a comparable stage of life. It is now higher than Generation X's was in the 1990s. Their median wealth has risen rather quickly. He goes on to say something here, and I quote, the discontent is more culturally specific.

It is concentrated among urban-educated urbanites who compare themselves not with a country at large, but with their parents and peers. Okay, there's something else that is also explicit in this article, and it's explicit in much of the political activism. These are young, well, they declare themselves socialist, and they are overwhelmingly concentrated in places where such people gather. And that also happens to be places with extraordinarily high costs of housing and costs of living. In other words, this generation is at least in trouble, in part, because they want to live in places like Manhattan, where quite frankly it's really not economically feasible, certainly over any long period of time. unless you all of a sudden hit the professional jackpot, but then again, socialism is not likely,

in the least, to lead to that. Again, looking at the theological or the religious shape of secular ideas, listen to this. Quote, human beings need belief, obligation, and belonging. The danger is that it takes a limited human enterprise and makes it absolute. A political movement that becomes a church develops a creed that explains all suffering, a doctrine of sin that divides oppressor from oppressed, rituals that certify righteousness and heretics whose arguments need not be answered because their moral corruption has already been established. It offers redemption not through repentance or grace, but through power, end quote. It's interesting. I think that this article with that very argument shows up in one of the most influential Jewish periodicals in the United States, but I think it's based

in some very, very cogent, very clear observations. And I think there's some points here we just need to come back to. I also want to say this is a very very very cogent. I also want to say this is a very very important. argument isn't new. As I say, Jody Bottom argued this a generation ago, and even before that, in the Bolshevik Revolution and in other periods, other observers made the very keen observation that what you're looking at here is political fervor that takes on a religious shape, even among people who declare themselves not to be religious at all. Oh, yeah, they're religious. Their religion's just Leninism or Marxism. Go down the list. The other thing I want to point out that's rather significant about this article in commentary, which is generally a pretty conservative journal.

One of the things that I should point out is that Jesse Arm expresses some sympathy with these young radicals. In other words, he sees them as asking some of the right questions, just ending up in the right place with their answers, and then he looks at the confusion of our society and says, this is where that ends up. That confusion produces a generation like this. He writes, quote, A lonely society will manufacture gods. A generation denied durable sources of meaning will find them in movements that promise total explanations and instant fellowship. The Democratic Socialists of America get this better than most of its opponents, and that's why the movement is a force to be reckoned with, even if some of its leading voices make fools of themselves trying to justify their own resentments and weaknesses. I think it's good for Christians to hear that.

even though we look at this and recognize just how ideologically bankrupt this is, we do realize that there is a craving among many young Americans for answers to their questions for a worldview that they believe will give meaning in life. And if they're not going to find that in Christianity, then they're going to find it in something else. And right now, there's something else that is growing with so much influence is this kind of Marxist mentality and worldview. It's just a good reminder to us of what is at stake here. And another reminder of the fact that, as human beings made in God's image, and of course the secular don't believe that, nonetheless, it's true, they manifest religious yearnings that show up in secular ideas presented with religious

fervor. That also is just a very important issue for Christians to understand. All right, so then a second issue related to this is where in the world are these young people getting this kind of Marxism? Where are they getting these ideological structures and frameworks? Well, they're getting it largely from liberal professors in the academy. John Ellis, who is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He's the author of the book, The Breakdown of Higher Education, how it happened, the damage it does, and what can be done. He makes the argument published in the Wall Street Journal that radical professors have poisoned the electorate, particularly when it comes to the young. He writes this, quote,

the terms of the controversy over higher education hardly changed for three or four decades. Conservatives complained of political activism, freezing out serious scholarship. Liberals rejected that criticism as politically motivated and argued that Marxist professors do little harm because students see through and laugh at their ideas. He makes very clear, we're not laughing at any of this now. And you have the same people who are bragging about the influence now that these Marxist professors have. He says this, quote, those ineffective Marxist professors have. He says this, quote, those ineffective Marxist professors, it seems, have changed the educated

electorate so profoundly that hitherto unelectable socialist can now prevail across the country, end quote. This too is a very important issue. We have to ask, why now? Why the socialist temptation is showing up as it does now? And the answer is it's not showing up proportionately through the population. It's showing up geographically and generationally in certain hotspots. And those hotspots tend to be those very much. much associated with elite education in the United States. And for that matter, higher education

and various representations in the United States. And we have known for a long time, it's been well documented that Marxist professors and professors that are at least committed to Marxist forms of thought, they have been gaining an influence and in number and, frankly, self-replicating through the academic process. And guess what? Ideas have consequences, as Richard Weaver reminds us, and those consequences show up. Hiring professors come with consequences. And when you have a faculty in an institution that is basically shaped by Marxist ideas, eventually you can't fain surprise at the fact that a bunch of young socialists are showing up across the country. You can do the math. It's intellectually dishonest not to do the math. John Ellis is quite perceptive, I think,

and quite direct in making his arguments. He says this, quote, virtually our entire educational system has been captured by destructive political radicals, and it is madness for an advanced society to know this is happening and do nothing to stop it. He writes, continuing, quote, optimists who think the foolishness will blow over are mistaken. We're now seeing the effects of one generation indoctrinated by Marxist-dominated campuses. A second is on the way. As the last cohort that had a real college education begins to vanish, our constitutional order will go with it. Now, that's a very dire warning, but I want to say, I think he's absolutely right about what is at stake. I think he's also absolutely right about the fact that we should

anticipate thousands upon thousands of young Marxists coming out of major American institutions. And one of the things I want Christians to think about is the fact that it's not just the importance and the power of worldviews, it is also the importance and the power of faculty self-selection and graduate student selection. And we know that this is a major factor because you have liberal faculty committed to the ideas of the, of the, the far ideological left and even Marxism and for that matter, extreme forms of Marxism, and they replicate themselves. They hire each other. They select doctoral students who are going to continue this trajectory. They supervise doctoral programs so that they're producing

the faculty who will share this worldview and these commitments. And then the rest of us can't act like we're shocked when you see the massive influence of Marxism and Marxist ideology spreading through society. And it is also very, very sad that a good many parents, and I want to say this directly, a good many parents are so attracted by the esteem of elite education, they will send their kids into this even basically knowing how bad the context is, how toxic the intellectual climate is. I don't know if there's any likelihood in most academic institutions of something like this happening,

certainly in the world of elite academia. but Professor Ellis ends his piece with this quote. We know exactly what's wrong with academia. We know how damaging it is, and we know what group is doing the damage. There are no legal obstacles to their removal, speaking of the faculty, and opposition from liberal scholars is weakening as they too come under fire. Some problems are too complex for easy understanding or remedy, but this isn't one of them. It is time for university leadership to oust professors whose interests have more to do with activism than academia.

I just want to give you a little more bad news on this. the faculty basically is self-replicating and self-selecting, and it is simply a matter of fact that in far too many institutions the faculty are in control. And that means the ideological left is very much in control. You have governors such as Ron DeSantis in Florida and some others who have been pressing back on this. We need to hope that that pushback will continue and that, quite frankly, that approach will spread state by state. Okay, while we are talking about the college campus, we have to go back to Cornell and the controversy about the sexual assault there and all the breakdown of a complete moral order that was very clear in that picture. And it's going to be a continuing and expanding controversy, I think, here in the United States. But it also brings out some very interesting things that you might not expect.

And they may show up in places that most people don't notice. I want to point to the fact that I mentioned that Christine Inba wrote a very interesting piece. on the moral context, which is what most people don't want to touch, the moral context of the scandal and the controversy at Cornell. And as I said myself, trying to lay all of this out even more comprehensively, that when you look at this, the modern secular morality can't handle it because all they can talk about is a false moral understanding, a false moral framework. Now, I just want to give you a classic example of that, because in response to the argument made by Christine Emba, the Reverend Deborah W. Haefner has written in from Newton, Massachusetts.

Now, she was rather well known for decades for her involvement in the sex education movement. And she was a major figure in that and with various organizations. She says the Emba, quote, mistakenly presents consent as the only agreed upon foundation for assessing a sexual relationship. She says about herself more than 30 years ago, I developed and began teaching a framework for a moral and ethical sexual relationship. Okay, let's just pause for a moment. Well, just in terms of the words, that sounds pretty good.

She's saying that we do understand that sexual issues are related to deep moral questions. And so she's calling for a moral approach. So good, so far. Just I'm warning you, it's not going to be good as we continue. Here's what she says. She says, such a relationship is consensual, non-exploitative, honest, mutually pleasurable, and protected against disease and pregnancy. Those criteria, she says, apply whether the participants are single or married straight or queer in colleges or nursing homes.

End quote. Okay, so we were talking about the fact that secular ideas take on a religious shape and that those who claim that they're not religious, they nonetheless, they really betray the fact that their arguments come with a religious shape and with a religious intensity. The same thing is true here when it comes to the sex education movement, which has always been about sex, but a lot more than. sex. It's about a total moral revolution. And with Deborah Hafner, it really shows up in this way because she criticizes Christine Nimbab for not going far enough. Okay, where is she going? Well, again, she creates this entire false morality, which is based, again, as a framework, quote, for a moral and ethical, sexual relationship that would be consensual, not exploitative, honest, mutually pleasurable, and protected against disease and pregnancy. And then she goes on to say,

this basically applies to any kind of sexual relationship you can imagine. Okay, so that's the problem, of course. So she's really trying to come up with some kind of list of sexual and moral concerns on the other side of a sexual revolution in which you take sex out of its context, its moral context, its biblical context, within the context of marriage, which, by the way, is resolutely heterosexual, a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage, you take it out of that and say, no, it's basically about anything, anywhere, whatever anyone wants, so long as it meets the secular criteria.

It's also interesting that in this letter to the editor published in the New York Times, Haferner goes on and says, what is most distressing about the Cornell rape investigation is that in the 50 years that it passed since I was, well, she mentions an assault at a prestigious university, quote, so little has changed. And as for the future, little will change until all young people get the comprehensive sexuality education they deserve. End quote, I want you to hear that. I want you to know that Deborah Haferner has been about this for a very long time. I fully believe that she believes what she's saying. And that is that the great moral need is what's called comprehensive sexuality education, C-S-E.

I just want to warn you that in many school systems, that's exactly what they've been committed to. On many college and university campuses, that's exactly what they have been committed to. I want you to understand that it is a moral disaster because it is exactly like the false morality that she's so ardently argues for here, reducing sex from any kind of stable moral context saying that it just needs to be consensual, non-exploitative, honest, mutually pleasurable, and protected against disease.

And then notice the other word, protected against disease and pregnancy. The moment you put disease and pregnancy in the same phrase, you betray a really deadly philosophy or ideology. Okay, one final issue here. USA Today, just yesterday ran a piece in the print edition. It's by Mickey Lopez. The title is, I didn't expect to advocate for trans people.

And it's about the fact that he says he was very supportive of the LGBTQ array, but not so much of T until his son decided to assume a transgender identity and to claim to be a woman. And so this father is writing about the fact that he has been transformed into a transgender activist because he has seen the quest for personal identity and personal autonomy and sexual identity in his own family. It's also interesting given what we just talked about with the Deborah Hefner reference. In this piece, this father writes, quote, as a parent, I want only to keep my kids safe. Okay, very interesting. And this is where we also need to understand that the word safe is being used in different context to mean different things.

And in the transgender ideology, safe means safe even from being told, no, you're not a girl, you're a boy, you're biologically male. But the big issue here is that if you're going to change your mind on something as basic as, say, gender identity, if you're going to assume the transgender ideology, in this case, this father is very open. He did so because of his own child. If you're going to do that, you have to redefine just about everything else around him. and that is because when you look at the T as in LGBTQ, you're looking at something that is such a rejection of creation order that it destabilizes everything, literally everything. I think it's also important for us to recognize that this father's writing about his child, now adult child, now identified as transgender, in terms of his love for the child. Let me just state, biblically, it is a good and necessary and wonderful God-honoring thing for a parent to love a child.

but that does not mean that it's God honoring for a parent to love a child in this kind of identity, which is the rejection of creation order, which is the rejection of God's identity for this child. I would never underestimate the pain and the complexity that would come into families where you have a child struggling with this kind of identity. But the whole point here is that this father is not writing about his struggle with this. He's writing about the fact that he has now seen the light and he has now become an advocate for trans people. That's how so much moral change takes place in our society. You rarely see it expressed so honestly as in this piece. And so I think one of the ways we show respect for this

writer is to respect that he means what he says. And so as we look at these words, we recognize we as Christians, we thank God for the love of a parent for a child. But we also thank God for the fact that that love of a parent for a child is set within a creation order context. And that, too, is absolutely essential to our understanding. So you look at this and you recognize USA Today says, we should all be like this. Father, this is where Christians have to understand. Yep, there's a lot more to this story. And there are places that Christian parents just can't go.

That doesn't mean not loving children. it does mean loving them in such a way as you cannot deny the truth. Or to be clear, this might be helpful to a lot of Christians to think about. We cannot separate love from truth. That's why we truly love our children. But we can't separate love from truth and say, in the name of love, I'm going to deny truth. Fundamentally, that's not only wrong. It also doesn't work.

Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmuller.com. follow me on X or Twitter, but going to X.com forward slash Albert Moeller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbtsk.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to voicecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.