The Daily Signal - A Pastor’s Prescription for Overcoming Victim Mentality

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Last August, as Americans watched the fallout from a police shooting in Kenosha, Wis., pastor James E. Ward Jr. found himself in a position to help. The victim, Jacob Blake, had been shot seven times in the back. Violence erupted in Kenosha. Ward, pastor and founder of INSIGHT Church in the north Chicago suburb of Skokie, Ill., turned to prayer. “I get this phone call on my cellphone from Julia Jackson,” Ward tells The Daily Signal. “Julia Jackson is one of our faithful intercessory-prayer team members in our church. Julia happens to be the mother of Jacob Blake Jr. … And we prayed that Jacob would live and not die. And we’re thankful that he’s alive today, and he’s doing well.” The shooting left Blake paralyzed below the waist. Yet both Jackson, Blake’s mother, and Ward, her pastor, decided “to speak a different narrative. We weren’t calling for a hatred. We weren’t calling for destruction. We’re calling for peace and speaking the love of God over the city. And it really went viral.” Ward rejects “victim mentality” and ideologies like critical race theory. He purposefully took a different approach from Black Lives Matter and found himself working with President Donald Trump last year. Now, he’s preaching this “new attitude” in a book called “Zero Victim.” Ward visited The Daily Signal to discuss “Zero Victim: Overcoming Injustice With a New Attitude” and his experience in Kenosha last year.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, June 21st. I'm Robert Blewe. And I'm Doug Blair. On today's show, we feature Rob's interview with Pastor James Ward, Jr. He talks about his new book, Zero Victim, and how he's helping the family of Jacob Blake in the aftermath of last year's police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We also read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a Seattle woman who beat her drug addiction and turned her life around. Before we get to today's show, Rob and I want to talk to you about a new resource on the Heritage Foundation website. to combat critical race theory. Critical race theory, or CRT, makes race the centerpiece of all aspects of American life. It categorizes individuals into groups of oppressors and victims.

The idea is infiltrating everything from politics and education to the workplace and even our military. Heritage has pulled together the resources that you need to identify CRT in your community and the ways to fight it. We also have a legislation tracker so you can see what's happening in your state. go ahead and visit heritage.org slash CRT to learn more. Now stay tuned for today's show coming up next. We are joined on the Daily Signal podcast today by Pastor James Ward Jr.

He's the author of the book Zero Victim Overcoming Injustice with a new attitude. Pastor, thanks so much for being with us on the show today. Hey, Rob, it's really an honor, sir. Thanks for the opportunity. I'm so grateful to you and Charles and Kaye, everybody here at the Daily Signal and the Heritage Foundation. and really an honor to be with you. So thank you so much for having me. We're grateful you could be with us in studio here

and our Washington, D.C., headquarters from North Chicago, where you normally are. Before we get into the book, you have an amazing story growing up in Alabama, and you said those experiences in the time you were in elementary school really shaped your thinking about a whole host of issues. Can you take us back to then and what it meant to you? Sure. Sure. So the way that I got to the book, this title of Zero Victim of what that means, Rob, I grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the tail end of segregation. Growing up on the all,

you know, all black side of town, the white side of town, you literally did not cross the river into the white side of town. Third grade, they integrate the school system. And so I remember the day I first took that bus ride to the white side of town. And going through that experience and seeing that, wait a minute, it looks different here. It feels different. The homes are nice. The landscaping is nice. There's no cars jacked up on cinder blocks and things like that. I said, you know what? I belong here.

There's something in me that connected. Went to this new school, nice chalk boards, the playground equipment works, all these kinds of things. But I went into it with a mindset that this is going to be hostile because I'm a black kid in a predominantly white school. The interesting thing is that the teacher of my third grade class, which I didn't know was a friend of my grandmother's, a black lady, Mrs. Spitz, she would put students' names on the board for doing. well. If you did well on a spelling test, she'd write your name on the board. She didn't write your name up for behavioral issues, but to celebrate you. And Rob, I began to notice, like, week after week, my name was on the board. And it clicked with me that I'm as smart as the white kids. And when I, and when I discover that internally, it disarmed the hostilities of my perception, the perceived

hostilities in terms of my animosity toward them when I felt that I was doing well, that I can do well, they weren't holding me back. That built something in me that the trajectory from my life from that point until now is that I don't believe in white supremacy because I don't believe in black inferiority. And so there's a narrative that's going around right now that pits people against each other that's based upon victim mentality. Here's the basic idea of zero victim mentality from a faith perspective. Jesus Christ was the only innocent person that ever lived on the face of the planet.

He suffered the greatest injustice that anyone has ever suffered. And while still in the process of being victimized, while the nails are still being driven in his hand, Jesus is already praying, Father, forgive them because of their ignorance. They don't know what they're doing. And that is the standard for forgiveness in dealing with injustice. And so I call the subtitle of the book, Overcoming Injustice with a New Attitude. Zero Victim mentality is the mind of Christ. And we've got to get that out to our nation right now, especially dealing with the

contentions that we see, the divisions, the hatred, we've got to get this zero-victim mindset communicated throughout society. That is the soil even from which victim mentality is, the critical race theory, all of these ideologies that are divisive. It grows from the soil of victim mentality. And so we go right to the root of that with this new book. Well, thank you for writing it. Again, it's called Zero Victim.

What was the catalyst to the moment that you decided that you needed to write this book and present these ideas to the American public more broadly? So the interesting thing, the title, Zero Victim is I was working for a relatively large church at the time before we planted the church that we're in right now. Working for a church and we brought in a guide to do what's called an attitudinal assessment. One of the categories on the attitudinal assessment is to measure the percentage to which you see yourself as a victim. I did the exam. My score comes back zero. The guy calls me up.

He says, you know what, I've never seen anything like this in the history of facilitating this. he says everyone has some degree of victim. I've never seen anyone score zero. I need to know your story. I need to know what's behind this. I went on to consult for his staff and do a number of other things. But that's where I got the term zero. Now, the interesting thing about zero, if you imagine a number line, the reset place is zero.

And I think if we can bring our society back to zero, I say it's the only way to push the reset button on race relations. I could go into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a zero victim thinker. It doesn't dismiss problems that need to be eradicated and things that need to be addressed. But what it is, victim mentality, it's like a set of lenses through which people see and you literally read victimization into your circumstances, whether that's in marriage or bankruptcy, it's being politicized and weaponized in terms of race to destroy a people group. We've got to get this zero-victor mindset. You can't control what happens around you, but you can't control what happens within you.

And by nature, that is God's design is for us to live life from the inside out, not from the outside in. If you live your life from the outside end, your life will be a constant yo-yo. You'll never have a night of peace. You'll never sleep well. Those things are something that will absolutely destroy your church. I tell our church, I love the grand dragon or the grand wizard of the KKK, whoever the guy is. I love him. Not because of him, but because of me, there's something.

me, I am not a victim. And so again, I don't see anything as such as, anything such as white supremacy because I don't believe in black inferiority. We got to get that mindset back into our nation right now. We certainly do. And you're absolutely right. It is out everywhere. Yeah. In the media and social media, we hear it from politicians. I mean, so it's hard, I think, on a day-to-day basis to escape it. So it's important to have people like you out there talking about alternatives and different ways to think about it. If for our listeners who might be struggling with it themselves, what are some of the first steps that you would recommend they take?

I mean, obviously one is reading your diagnosis in the book. But if they're thinking on a practical level, if they're a parent themselves, what should they be telling them to their kids about? Sure. I'll give you a short, a short, you know, expression of zero victim mentality and how to apply it practically is I simply tell folks to act and not react. simply act and not react. Before we engage and respond emotionally, when we respond even out of our own pain,

if we just sometimes take a moment to think about what we're doing and we act intelligently instead of reacting emotionally, then we have a much better shot of minimizing of expressions of victim thinking being operative in our life. We've got to get back to know that these are spiritual and moral issues. Very quickly, I teach that there are three laws that govern every society. No matter where you go, three laws. Spiritual law, moral law, and civil law. Civil law is the kind of law that we're only familiar with.

We pretty much dismissed spiritual and moral law. Here's the problem with dismissing spiritual and moral law and only dealing with civil law. The weakness of civil law is that you cannot legislate morality. So here's the deal. A righteous man with the launch codes to our nuclear arsenal, people will be safe because he's inherently righteous. But if you give an unrighteous, immoral guy, a paperclip, or a soup spoon, you've got to fear for your life.

The issue is not the weapon. We have many fights and debates about gun control and all these things. It's heart control. But we're not dealing with spiritual and moral law. So we've got to get back to the fundamentals of faith here in the United States of America. And we're just encouraging and calling on believers to stand up, not be intimidated. This is the time for us to express the true biblical principles, not social justice. We need biblical justice.

And this is the time for us to return to our foundation of God's word if we're ever going to see our way out of darkness. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more on that. In fact, I do a weekly radio segment with a station called Faith Radio. And one of the reasons I'm so passionate about doing that is because I truly believe that religion and faith play such an important role in restoring some of the cultural challenges that we find ourselves in. Absolutely. What is the – talk to us about the message that you have for your church. for the people who are coming there, particularly in a time when, in many cases, all across our country, where we're recovering from a really tough year of COVID.

Maybe people have lost family members or of others who suffered. You know, they may be looking for jobs. They're out of work. How can we remain hopeful? And how can faith play a role in that? Yeah, I have an amazing story to share about that. Again, we pastor a church. We've been teaching this zero-victim message in our church.

We've been praying about this in prayer meetings. And this is, you know, public information on August 23rd of 2020. You remember the George Floyd situation that happened? There's COVID. We're getting into the contention of the election and things were just streets were burning, Portland, Minneapolis, St. Louis. Things were on fire in our nation. And on August 23rd, I get this phone call on my cell phone from Julia Jackson. Julia Jackson is one of our faithful intercessory prayer team members in our church.

Julia happens to be the mother of Jacob Blake Jr. Jacob Blake Jr. was a young man that everybody saw in Kenosha was shot seven times in the back by a white police officer. And we prayed that Jacob would live and not die. And we're thankful that he's alive today and he's doing well. He's a tremendous young man that the nation does not know. But as Julia and I began to engage and we spoke in the press conference, we began to speak a different narrative. We weren't calling for hatred. We weren't calling for destruction.

We're calling for peace and speaking the love of God over the city. And it really kind of went viral. And the folks started saying, wait a minute, these folks are different. You don't hear black people speaking that way in the height of black lives matter and all this contention. They're saying something different. And I'm so proud of Julia as well. That led to us being involved in the presidential roundtable and really, really working on some things with President Trump and his staff. But here's the thing.

When you apply that message in terms of Julia being in this crisis, she was. responded the way that she did because we've been teaching and praying into the zero victim message for many, many, many years before this crisis happened to her and to her son. Jacob has that same mindset. And so it's something that by returning to the truth of God's word, I think that pastors in particular have a strong responsibility and obligation to teach believers to have the mind of Christ. For example, you know, we'll preach scriptures and say, no weapon formed against you will prosper, and people just kind of shout and clap and say, hey, that's wonderful. But at the same time, we have to tell them that racism is a weapon.

So if no weapon formed against you, problems, racism is a weapon. And then we teach scriptures and say, hey, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me except get over injustice. No, I can do all things. And so as pastors and faith leaders, Bible teachers, we just got to start bringing people back to the truth and the veracity of God's word to apply it to the things that are happening in society, to act and not react. Pastor Ward, we thank you for sharing that story about Jacob and Kenosha. The Daily Signal Center team last year to that city. Really? Spoke to a lot of the business owners and others whose lives were uprooted because of some of the destruction that took place there.

How is Jacob doing? How is the city recovering? Can you give us an update on how things are there today, almost a year later? Sure. Yep. Haven't been to Kenosha recently, but I can say of Jacob, he's an incredible young man. He's a great dad. And one of the passions of my life and my wife is to actually communicate a better narrative to our nation about who people really are, a narrative of empathy and compassion.

There was a moment when I was on the phone with President Trump and then I'd hang up and I'd be on the phone with Julia telling me about Jacob and then I'd be back on the phone with President Trump. People that America says it's impossible that these people can't get along and they would never talk. And I really felt the Lord Rob speaking to my heart. what are you going to do about it? So that launched us really into this space that we'd already been speaking into that we really want to see reconciliation and renewal happen in America.

We want to see folks coming together around the Word of God. I'm in partnership with Museum of the Bible. We lead prayer meetings at Museum of the Bible, and we're seeing this groundswell of folks coming together around faith, not some of the cultural, sociopolitical issues, you know,

the things that we're dealing with there, but around our faith. And we're seeing people come together. from all walks of life. And so we're really encouraged about that. I encourage your folks, just, you know, go to my website at jamesywardjr.com. You can pick up the book there and get some YouTube videos and hear some of the messaging that we put out there. We're seeing some really amazing things happen. And we're honored to be here to join forces with you and others to get the narrative out there. That's correct. That's great. Well, Pastor Ward, thank you so much for

joining us on the Daily Signal podcast. We appreciate you bringing your message here to Washington, D.C. My pleasure. And for all the work you're doing back home. It's so critically important. Again, we'll leave a link to the book in our show notes. Again, it's called Zero Victim Overcoming Injustice with a New Attitude by James E. Ward, Jr. Thanks so much. My pleasure. Thank you. I'm Zach Smith.

And I'm John Carl O'Connaparo. And if you want to understand what's happening at the Supreme Court, be sure to check out SCOTUS 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast. We take a look at the cases, the personalities, and the gossip at the highest court in the land. Be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you find your podcasts. It's SCOTUS 101. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each Monday we feature our favorites on this show. Doug, who's up first?

In response to Kelsey Bowler's article, after competing against transgender athletes, mom and daughter fight for fairness in women's sports, Brenda from Colbrook, Connecticut writes, I'm a lifelong Connecticut resident and have been following the transgender athlete issue in this state. The article was Xxendor. The absolute travesty is women's sports had become irrelevant since, as stated in the article, there are now men's sports and co-ed sports.

Where are the so-called feminists on this? They are silent. Anyone who thinks transgender athletes should be allowed to compete as they identify is, in my opinion, either woefully ignorant or malicious. It's one or the other. And listener Lee McKenna writes, Hi, Daily Signal. I loved your interview with Kevin McGarry. Would love to see more interviews with him and see follow-up videos of him.

talking to people and hear more ideas expanded. What an inspirational leader. Your letter could be featured on next week's show. So send an email to Letters at DailySignal.com. Virginia Allen here, I want to tell you all about a great way you can stay in the know on all the news the Daily Signal covers. Social media. The Daily Signal has an active presence on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. We are constantly posting news stories, clips from interviews, videos, and more across all our social platforms. Follow the Daily Signal on social media so you can get all the latest content from Reels on Instagram to video clips on Facebook and political commentary on Twitter.

Doug, you have a good news story to share with us today. Over to you. Yeah, thank you, Rob. Breaking the cycle of drug addiction is an incredibly difficult process. Many addicts relapse over and over and staying clean can sometimes seem impossible. But Ginny Burton from Seattle, Washington, proves that it can be done. The 48-year-old had a troubled upbringing. Her mom introduced her to drugs at a very young age.

She was six years old when she first started smoking marijuana and just 12 when she started using meth. By 23 years old, she was a heroin addict. In Burton's words, her addiction made her hopeless. When you're stuck on the street and you smell like feces and you haven't showered in forever and you can't make it into a social service agency during working hours because you're too busy trying to feed your addiction

and your addiction is bigger than you, you're hopeless. You can't stand your life. You would rather be dead than alive. I spent most of my addiction wishing that somebody would just blow me away. But Burton's life changed for the better on December 5, 2012, when she was arrested and sent to a drug treatment facility. I knew when he put the handcuffs on me and put me in his car, I knew that I was going to be okay.

I knew that my life was going to change. And it was then in that moment that I made the decision to try, turn it around no matter what it took. And she stayed clean. Burton took her life back and started working in social services. She spent seven years helping numerous addicts who were going through the same thing that she'd been through. Before long, Burton had decided to go back to school.

She studied political science at the University of Washington and thrived in her studies. And last year, Burton earned the prestigious Truman scholarship. Burton has since graduated from college and moved out of the city to the small town of Rochester. She lives there with her husband Chris, who's also a recovering addict. Though the road to get there was hard and sometimes she just wants to rest on her laurels, Burton says she has a job to do, helping others escape the vicious cycle of addiction. So many times I wanted to quit.

So many times it felt like it was too much. And there are some days that I wish that I could just slip away out here with a garden and open up a little cafe. But in reality, I know it's my job. I know that it's my job to continue to create hope. Rob, I think what we can all take from this story is that no matter how hard you fall, you can always come back from it. Redemption is possible. You just have to go for it.

That's right, Doug. Thank you for finding that story and sharing the good news with us. I think that, you know, it's so important that individuals look to examples like this if they themselves are in a situation where they might be hopeless and need a sense of hope. So our prayers go out to them and we hope that they are on the road to really. recovery. 100% agree. Well, we're going to leave it there for today. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on the Rurkishay Audio Network. All of our shows are available at daily signal.com slash podcasts. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. And be sure to

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