The Daily Signal - Rooting Out 'Woke': One Church Leader's Mission

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

An Indiana pastor has launched an effort to connect Christian leaders across the country and root out the influence of a "woke" Christianity that undermines the biblical and traditional doctrines of the faith. "We've got 500 pastors that have signed this statement across all sorts of denominational lines, committing themselves to really sound biblical teaching as a primary doctrine and to help eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit," Lucas Miles, pastor of the Nfluence Church in Granger, Indiana, and leader of the Nfluence network, tells "The Daily Signal Podcast." Enjoy the show! 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 Friday, March 1st. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down with Lucas Miles. He is the pastor at Influence Church. He is also the director of the influence network. And he is a one-man force focused on rooting out the wokeism, as he calls it, from Christianity. And he's trying to save the Christian churches across America from cultural Marxism. And he spoke with me about his efforts to do this. And the main thing he has right now is, you know, he described it almost as a modern-day Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed,

the statement with the American Pastor Project, where a pastor can dedicate himself to standing for Christianity, the basic Christian doctrines and the traditional teachings of the Bible and the church. And these are the main things that differentiate us from the world when it comes to issues of, you know, marriage, family, and just the belief really in Jesus centrally. Talking about Jesus' resurrection from the dead and differentiating traditional Christianity from the, as he calls it, the Jesus minus the miracles, Jesus minus divinity, Jesus minus walking on water, the Jesus, the great social justice warrior Jesus, that so many churches across the country are pushing.

And it's this subtle undermining of Christianity itself that he really wants to fight back against with this American pastor project. And so I sat down with him. He's also partnering with someone I know well and I think our audience probably knows well. This is Walt Hire. He leads the website Sex Change Regret. He is one of the most important voices in the detransition movement. He was transgender before it was cool and he went through his detransition and has been speaking about it and helping others to understand what life is like after detransition, helping them through just the horror of realizing what they've

done to their bodies. And so he's now working with Lucas Miles. And I thought it was really inspiring some of the things that Lucas Miles is doing, urging the church to stay true to traditional Christianity in the face of a very hostile culture and working with people like Walt Hire to help the marginalized. You know, those who are the most vulnerable in our society, not only in terms of, you know, there are people who identify as transgender and they're, you know, somewhat marginalized, but then you get, they have the LGBT movement that comes around them.

And then if they realize that they weren't really transgender, you know, that they, they revert to the understanding that their biological sex is primary, then they become detransitioners and they become demonized by their own former community. And so I think it's really important that people like Lucas Miles are leading on these issues and bringing people into the fold who are really struggling with the horrible process of detransition. So listen to my interview with Lucas Miles right after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice?

These are the questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geine, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains brought to you by all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation. Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. This is Tyler O'Neill.

I'm managing editor at The Daily Signal. I'm honored to be joined by Pastor Lucas Miles, who is president of the Influence Network and author of Woke Jesus. It's great to have you with me. Thank you very much. Good to be with you again. So, Lucas, you've been describing to me just briefly the growth of the influence movement,

not just the church. You're still the senior pastor of influence. Church, but describe a little bit of this network and why it's so important to bring pastors together to combat this woke infiltration we've been seeing. Yeah, absolutely. So the influence network was really birthed out of this desire to bring more connectivity to local churches. You know, when you read in scripture, you know, we talk a lot about local churches,

but what we miss sometimes, Paul references this figure that's, you know, only mentioned a few times in the New Testament. His name was Ticichus. and Paul used to send this individual back and forth between churches to kind of see how they were doing and to report how things were going with him. And he kind of provided these tendons between these local churches, you know, connecting them together. And so that really birthed kind of this idea that we needed to be more than just a local church, but we need to provide sort of a supportive web structure to really, you know,

help ensure that we are connecting, you know, churches for, you know, and allowing them to thrive, honestly. And so the influence network has sort of more. into and grown into oftentimes what I like to call sort of this church-centric mutual fund of different ministry initiatives. And so we have underneath this, we have, of course, our own local churches. My main campus is in Granger, Indiana, outside of South Bend. We have a satellite campus in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A lot of kind of different churches. We've been a part of planting and sister churches and these things as well. We also have what we call the American Pastor

Project, which is another one of our pillars. And this is a non-denominational kind of initiative and essentially what it is is that when pastors go to Americanpastorproject.org, they have an opportunity to sign a statement committing themselves to historic biblical Christianity. And so I see it as almost a modern day Nicene Creed, Apostles Creed, where they can come to this and say, I'm committing to this. I'm pledging my pulpit to these teachings. Watch out. That's a tall order.

It is. Look. But here's the thing. We don't do that anymore. And because of the way denominations are in so many different churches, we have all. oftentimes elevated secondary doctrines over primary issues. And that's what I think we got to where we are today. You know, we're fighting over once saved, always save versus lose your salvation. And meanwhile, the progressive left is rolling a whole other Jesus in

for people to bow down to, you know. And so we've asked pastors, we've said, look, set aside secondary issues in terms of working together. You talk about those things over coffee, preach them in your own pulpit, but don't allow them to break fellowship. Don't allow those issues to cause you to break fellowship with another, you know, another pastor who is sound on primary issues. Primary issues. What are we talking about? Lordship of Jesus, the Trinity, Heaven and Hell, the Pravity of man, you know, of salvation by grace through faith.

You know, we could talk about, you know, repentance. All of these different things are primary doctrines, primary Christian Orthodox teachings. And we can, you know, debate things like spiritual gifts, are they for today or not, miracles, are they for today or not, women in ministry. We can debate, you know, styles of worship and these things. It's not that those things aren't important. I have very strong opinions about each of those teachings. But what we're saying is they shouldn't cause us to break fellowship with one another.

So we've got 500 pastors that have signed this statement across all sorts of denominational lines, committing themselves to really sound biblical teaching as a primary doctrine and to stand, really to help eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit. We do regular conference calls with these pastors. And we tell people, if you're not a pastor, we want you to go to this website too, because we want you to, first of all, see if your pastor signed the statement. And if he hasn't, take him the statement and say, hey, pastor, what do you think about signing this? Have you heard of this yet?

If they won't sign it, you know, follow up with them, make sure that they did. If they won't, you might be at a woke church and not know it. And it puts that kind of upward positive pressure on pastors. We also have a church locator there where if you're looking for a church near you, we have all sort of churches that are listed on this map that you might be able to find a church in your area that has committed themselves to these things to ensure that you're in a solid place for your family. So, and let's do Matt, you know, we've been talking about woke church. You have a book, woke Jesus.

We talked about it last year, but remind our listeners what you're talking about. why this is a different Christianity. I think a perfect illustration of this we just saw here at the start of 2024 was that He Gets Us campaign. And, you know, during the Super Bowl, we see this ad of these various, you know, figures that are washing, you know, people's feet. And this led to a lot of confusion and led to uproar, you know, and I think rightly so. And although I think that there are some, some, probably some well-intentioned people

who are behind some of the financial, you know, there were financial benefactors of that campaign, I feel like they've been bamboozled. And what's being presented is really an alternative Jesus. When you look at theology, and we could talk about several different Jesuses, if you will, that are presented. The Aryan Jesus of Nazi Germany. We could talk about the black Jesus of Black Liberation theology. But really, if we would put these all in categories, what we have is the biblical Christ and what is known as the historical Jesus. And the historical Jesus is Jesus minus the miracles, Jesus minus divinity, Jesus minus Jesus minus.

you know, walking on water and being raised from the dead. It is sort of Jesus, the great social justice warrior rather than Jesus, the savior of the world. And so really what my book, Woke Jesus, it goes in the history of Wokism. I really tried to write a definitive guide to understanding Wokism and how it intersects and integrates into the modern church and what we need to know about it and what we can ultimately do about it in order to avoid falling into deception. So what are the key tenets of Wokism and the key. key tenets of Christianity that it denies or twists. Yeah, I think in many ways, wokeism is sort of this placeholder, you know, moniker for cultural Marxism in many ways. But, you know, as far as how it's

evolving in Christianity, you know, if you look today, there's virtually no difference between what we call the Progressive Church or the Christian Left and the current administration in the White House. They have the same views about immigration, open borders, same view about socialism, same view about marriage, sexuality, gender. I mean, they are essentially, so we either have, the most, the largest revival in American history that at a governmental level, the government is teaching the exact same thing as the true church, that this has never happened before at this level, maybe since the founders, right? And or what we have is deception and we have a propaganda center called the progressive church that is literally just become an arm of the leftist movement in this nation. And I think that's a lot more likely. And so when you look at how this lines up to scripture, you know, what we see is that, Scripture and Christian teaching for the last 2,000 years has been an agreement about what marriage is, about what sexuality is, about what gender is. It's been about even the inerrancy of Scripture. This has clearly been taught and held to. And so what we're seeing today is a departure from

Orthodox Christian teaching and what that's led, it's not only just led to schisms, it's led to heretical beliefs. And that word's not used very often, but I think it needs to make a comeback. Yeah, well, it's interesting talking about, I love what you're, movement is doing. But some of the gaps are interesting. Do you have inroads with Catholic priests as well as, you know, because I think of the Catholics and the Orthodox as other aspects of Christianity that on the majors, we agree with them usually. But sometimes, you know, it is a major if you believe that the Pope is infallible. So like there are. Yeah. So look, I am, I'm, I'm, fairly generous with how I define orthodoxy.

And so, you know, the way I describe this, I actually wrote this in my previous book, The Christian Left, which was sort of the precursor to woke Jesus. You can read them as standalone books, but in my mind, they're kind of creating the trilogy. I have one more that's coming. We can't announce the title yet, but it's in the works. But when you look at orthodoxy, I like to think of it as sort of a buoy that floats on the surface of a lake or the ocean. It has some sort of a stone, you know, this millstone at the bottom, you know, tied into the bedrock.

It's got a chain or a cable that goes up. And then it has a float that kind of circles around at the surface of the water. And, you know, I see orthodoxia like this. Basically, we are all sort of circling this connection point being tied to this cornerstone, you know, that is Christ himself. And so although we might have some differences, the question, we might be somewhere in that circle sort of going around, as long as we're still connected to that source, we're good. Well, the problem is when you disconnect from that and you start drifting out in these dark waters of progressive ideology. And so the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, evangelical church, Protestants, we're going to see

some things differently on some issues. I don't expect us to fully define everything the same. I think that there's room for, you know, orthodoxy within all of those movements. I know some Catholics that have a passionate relationship with the Lord. They love Jesus. They're crazy about their faith. They're just as much an advocate for truth in the marketplace in the nation as I am. And I don't have any, I'm not questioning their salvation or anything like that. It's not my job to decide that. But I think we do need to look at when we start departing from some of these primary beliefs or start introducing other ideas.

We have Catholics that have signed the statement. We have people from really, we need to do a denomination map on this to kind of see where everybody falls. But with 500 pastors, you know, we have certainly most of them are Protestants. But, you know, there are some Catholics that have signed this. I just saw Father Frank Pavone here recently, you know, who's at this event, and it was good to see him and shake his hand. And I have another, you know, good friend of mine who recently left his Catholic parish. He was known for conservative teaching, and he actually enlisted in the Navy. He's now in, I think, Japan right now with the U.S. Navy and serving there, and this is another brother in Christ.

And so, you know, look, although I might have some, you know, difference of opinions with some items there, and I'm not going to back down for my issues, I'm not going to say that I don't think they matter. I would not be so bold as to say that these individuals are not brothers and sisters in Christ. Yeah. So a friend of mine, somebody I really admire Walt Hire, a detransitioner who leads this group, sex change regret. He has a website. He tries to advise all sorts of people. He's joined with the influence movement, with influence church.

What does your relationship with him look like and how are you helping him? How is he helping you? Yeah, Walt is just an incredible individual. And most people, if they don't know his name when they see his face, they go, oh, that guy, you know, he's been on Tucker and he's been on, you know, Candace and a whole bunch of other shows. And, you know, his videos have been viewed by millions of people. And Walt is just an incredible, incredible guy. He's down to earth. He's just, you know, very approachable. Walt and I first connected probably about two years ago. We both spoke at the same event, and I actually opened for him. And I knew that he was going to be speaking. And honestly, at that point, like, I was aware of the issue. I had, you know, I had some friends that I knew were struggling with some of the stuff, you know, from my past, an extended family in these things. So it was all my heart, but I wasn't, I hadn't done the deep dive into this issue of gender and sexuality, the way that probably I have since then.

And in preparation for doing this event with Walt, I, you know, I knew he was going to share his story, and I could imagine, and I talked to him on the phone about what somebody was going to talk about. And I decided to do a, to cover a sort of, sort of, you know, I knew. of the other side. I dove into Alfred Kinsey's research and the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. I looked at John Money's work at Johns Hopkins University and

sort of this early, you know, sex change operation that was performed on one of the twins that kind of made him famous and really started a lot of this. Just some horrific stuff. And I'll tell you what, my passion for this in helping people just exploded. It infuriated me so much

of the evils that have been done in the name of science. that I wanted to get involved more. So Walton, I stayed in touch, and he ended up coming, we brought him back up to our church at Influence and in the South Bend market, and he did a session there. And we just started exploring. I said, talking about his legacy plan and what's next and everything else. I mean, he's in his 80s. Now, he's probably in better shape and more active than I am, you know, at this.

I mean, he just got back from Japan and Costa Rica. I mean, he's been all over the world, you know, sharing this. And God's just using incredible ways. But I said, what's the plan here? Where's this going? And we just started praying about it and talking. and just seem right to both of us. And so he's actually,

he's actually, you know, really, I could say it this way, that we've acquired his website, sex change, regret, that he's donated that as intellectual property to us. And he's stayed on us as faculty, training mentors and future mentors to be able to really help people

that are, you know, experiencing this. I believe that there's a wave of trauma that is going to be coming to the doors of the church in the next three, five, ten years like we've never seen, before. And right now the church isn't equipped to do this. I mean, you know, we hear the church, you know, is a hospital, you know, kind of for the sick. And I don't think that's a good analogy. I think really we should be a city on a hill. If the whole church is a hospital, then that's a

problem, you know, but we need to, a good city has a good hospital system. And so we need to be that city on a hill with a good hospital system, but we're going to need a strong triage unit to be able to really minister to the trauma that's coming through the doors of people that have experienced, you know, medical manipulation and malpractice and been, you know, deceived. And, or even some of their, I don't want to discount people's personal choices. Some people just made bad decisions in life and given into some of this sin and, you know, a really depravity that we're seeing so prevalent today. But Walt has joined the team. He's with us.

We right now, a big thing I want people to know, we're trying to put billboards around this country with the website sex change regret on them, with a really nice, bold message. And we want to really shake the country. As far as I know, we're one of the only websites that's doing this. And Walt has helped thousands of people. We're hoping that we can help, you know, tens and thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people. And so if somebody's out there, they want to sponsor a billboard, they want to get involved.

They can go to sex change regret.com or dot org, and they can give. There's a donate button. You can make a donation, help us put billboards around this country to help people. So one of the things I've been seeing, and I think woke Jesus really kind of hits a nail on this, there's a big sort that's happening. And it's not just in Protestant circles, Catholic circles. It's in Jewish circles. It's in Muslim circles.

It seems every single church is having this, you know, the left, the woke side and the conservative side. And, you know, naturally, I think the conservative side tends to be more orthodox and following the truth. And there's always room to grow, I think. Like, often conservatives console ourselves by thinking that we have the truth and therefore we don't need to be as empathetic. And it's like, well, you still need the empathy side. But don't follow empathy. so it throws everything else out. How do you see this?

I mean, I almost wonder if we're headed toward some sort of reckoning like a civil war. I hope not. I mean, I pray not. But what are you seeing on the ground? You know, look, I mean, I don't think that any of us fully understood 10 years ago what it was going to be like today. I think that it's hard to predict the future, you know, on these things. I mean, there's certainly trends that we can look at when you're a student history. You can follow some of those things, I think, better than others.

know, and learn how to recognize some of the patterns that we're seeing today. You know, I can't speak as much about, you know, Judaism or Islam, but I think in regards to Christianity, that divide is certainly there. And I know I have enough proximity, especially to, you know, probably Judaism of different people I'm in relationship to, that you see that divide that's happening. You know, Islam is an interesting one because the, you know, some of those that are on the more, you know,

would might be classified more as the conservative side, you know, you see a highly radicalized. version of that as well, you know, that it feels that they're very true to the beliefs. And the more progressive within Islam, you know, tend to be a little bit more laid back about some of those issues, you know, and so, so that's a, that's kind of a, that's kind of a whole different, you know, equation there. But, but I think within Christianity especially, it is, it's definitely coming to a head. And I tell people all the time, look, woke church isn't church. And the church has had heresies before. We've had false teachings before. We've had some of those have been very

prevalence of them almost, you know, come to the point where they almost took over. But I think that, you know, people who are grounded in biblical truth, they are easily able to recognize these things. Now, scripture does tell us that there's going to come a day where some of even what it calls the elect could be deceived. And I think we're seeing that today where churches that were once, you know, previously very strong entities have been swayed by culture. They've been swayed by progressive politics and popularism and all of this to where they have, really, you know, to where they have really started giving in on certain topics, and they've started changing their tune away from the biblical, you know, a narrative and biblical truth to, to more popular ideas to kind of please

people. I lost half my church in 2015 when I did a series, eight-week series called What Does the Bible Say? And then each week we had a different topic, socialism, you know, a marriage, sexuality, gender, you know, et cetera. And in about an eight-week period, half our church left. I didn't endorse a candidate. I didn't have a red hat. I didn't anything like that. that they left over the issues because they disagreed. They were offended by the truth of scripture. And I'm not a fire and brimstone preacher. This is how I'm talking to you right now. I don't pronounce God's name differently when I'm on stage, you know, or anything like this is about, you know, I'm real. This is what it is. But it really shook a lot of people. And, you know,

what, our church, I had a decision at that point. Do we go back to maybe being a little bit quieter about these things or do we double down? And since then we've doubled down. Our church has grown probably five times since that happened. People that are coming in, you know, they're looking for this. They're hungry for truth. They want to know what the Bible says. We do a lot of expository teaching through the Word of God. And we believe in protecting ourselves from extremes. You know, it's possible to have extremes on the left and the right when it comes to Christianity. And we need to be aware of what those look like on each side. But if the goal is following Jesus and really, you know, proclaiming biblical truth and walking in love, you know, we could say it this way,

grace and truth, then I think we can avoid a lot of errors. Yeah, I think that's well said. what sort of errors do you see on the right side that you're trying to avoid? Yeah, it's interesting. I think that, you know, look, there are, the media loves these things because, you know, anytime that you talk about God and country, you get labeled a Christian nationalist. And I've pushed back on that term in my book, Woke Jesus. I address the fact that I think the true Christian nationalists are the Christian left, as I said earlier, that have the exact same platform as the Democratic Party.

Right now, Christians and Republicans don't have the same platform. although we might believe that conservatism is a better solution for the nation than Marxism, certainly. That's not a hard, you know, thing to decipher. I don't believe that everything that is Republican is necessarily Christian. And so, but I do believe that Christian principles lead to a free market. Christian principles lead to freedom of speeches, freedom of speech and liberty. And the constitutional values that we have in this nation, I believe, are based in and rooted in that Judeo-Christian

framework that we have. And so, you know, this is something that is very often misunderstood. You know, if you pray, a pastor goes and prays in Congress, Pastor Jack Hibbs, I was just hanging out with him here before this. You know, he prayed in Congress here recently, and there was a big uproar about it and people that were, you know, accusing him of all sorts of things as a result of it. And I think that there are errors that exist. There are people that have gone too far.

There's people that are just prophesying to get close to certain political figures, you know, and trying to, you know, just kind of stroke people's, ego with this. There's also true prophecy, I believe, and scripture talks about that as well. And so, you know, we have to learn how to decipher these things and sort through this. Oftentimes, you know, what it really comes down to is the condition of the heart. Two people can do the exact same things at times, and one is wrong and the other one is right because of where the position of their heart is in. One is doing it for nefarious purposes. The other one's doing it because, you know, they're being obedient to the Lord. And so this is, this is time for Christians

be very vigilant to listen to the, the, the, the sermon of the Holy Spirit on the inside of us, to study the words so you're not deceived and to make sure that we're not falling into those extremes. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add that you don't think we got to? You know, I think that, you know, what we're at right now is we are looking for people that are really excited about this message. They're looking for biblical truth. We have an online campus as well. You know, people can find us. We stream, you know, influence church, you know, online. We have an app that can download under the influence network. And I'll also say this, we're growing. We're looking for people that, you know, go, man, if somebody hears a, you know,

and goes, I wish that guy was my pastor. Guess what? We're hiring. Give us a call. Let us know. We're building a team to really help save this country and safeguard the church. And we want to meet people that are really serious about that as well. So where do people follow you? Yeah, so they can go to Lucasmiles.org to find all

things about me. Also, influencenetwork dot com. And it's important to note, there's no I in influence. It is just a capital in at the start there for influence. So we spell it like that. And so influencenetwork.com. You can find out more. And of course, I'm on all the social media platforms.

TikTok is actually my biggest platform. Maybe China's taking all my money. I don't know. But there wasn't that much to begin with. But I'm at Mr. Lucas Miles, MR. Lucas Miles on most platforms, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. Great. Well, thank you.

I mean, I feel like I'd be remiss. Heritage is very focused on warning about China and TikTok. And we tweet every day, you know, delete this is your daily reminder to delete TikTok. But let me. So here's my comment. And I know people feel that way. And look, my personal feeling is that probably most of these social media platforms have been compromised to some degree, right? But we have a generation right now that is predominantly on TikTok.

I know that there's all sorts of evils that are there. If I was a parent, I would not let my younger child on TikTok. I wouldn't let my teenage child probably on TikTok. If I was a politician, I would not have TikTok on my phone. Or at least have a separate phone that never gets anywhere near any of the rest of the places. Right? But I think that, look, we need a mission field. I want to know that there's ladies going out to, you know, a minister to, you know, strip clubs at the end of the night, you know, to be able to serve some of those girls. That shouldn't be guys. It should be gals that are going out there doing that. I want to know that there's evangelists on platforms like TikTok and other social media platforms. And, you know, it's actually one of my largest platforms. We've had people all the time that are hungry for the word. And we're reaching really next generation, you know, individuals because that's where they are right now. It's the watering hole where they are. So I know. all the arguments, and I'm not saying I disagree with them. I would probably agree with everything that you're saying about the platform. The problem is as long as there's people there, as a pastor,

I have to be there because that's where they are and I want to reach them. That's a very strong position. Thanks again so much, Lucas Miles. Thank you for having me. I appreciate Tyler. And that was Pastor Lucas Miles, and this is Tyler O'Neill. If you like what you heard here, please feel free to leave us a five-star rating and review. We read all of your feedback. And don't forget to tune in to this very podcast feed at 5 p.m. Eastern today. We're going to go through the top news of the day to keep you informed for your evening commute home. So again, this is Tyler O'Neill with The Daily Signal. Signing off, please tune back into the Daily Signal podcast for our top news edition. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

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