The Eric Metaxas Show - Owen Strachan

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Owen Strachan has his own ideas about the racist lunacy of Critical Race Theory and shares ideas from his new book, "Christianity and Wokeness: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel -- and the Way to Stop It."

to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. It's the Eric Mattaxas show. We're at the NRB, and I get to interview all kinds of people. For example, right now, I'm interviewing someone whose last name is pronounced differently than you would think. His last name is Strawn, but it looks like it would be Strachan. S-T-R-A-C-H-N. Owen Stran.

please make a note of it. He's a friend and he has a new book out called Christianity and Wokeness, how the social justice movement is hijacking the gospel and the way to stop it, yada, yada, yada. Owen Strawn, welcome to my program. Thank you, Eric. We have a long history with my last name. The last time you tried to pronounce it, it became a video on Twitter. Oh, stop it.

I didn't see that. Did I see that? No, you said Strachan. Stratken. And then I tried to correct you. you and yeah I know I'm sorry about that but listen I really do think I go out of my way not just to pronounce things correctly but to spell them correctly because I want my audience to look you up thank you the book is Christianity and Wokeness now let's

start I'm a writer and I care about words the word wokeness is a hideous neologism but we're at a point where we have to use these hideous words so when you talk about Christianity and Wokeness and the social justice movement we all know what you mean. But why did you write this book? A lot of people are talking about these kinds of things. And before you answer that question, tell my audience who you are, what you're doing right now. Yeah, so I'm a provost and research professor of theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary in Conway, Arkansas. So that's what I do for a living. So I train pastors, Baptist pastors, in Arkansas. Love doing that. And as part of the overflow of that work, I wanted to try to respond

to this ideology we call wokeness because wokeness is advancing. It's imperial in our public square. It's imperial in the church. And it takes no prisoners. Basically, wokeness is the idea that you and I, all people need to wake up to the nature of racial injustice in America.

And then we need to wake up furthermore and advance social justice in America. And so these terms, as you said, they're playing with their own set of scrabble tiles and they know the meaning, but few people out there in the church in America more broadly know the meaning. And so Christianity Wokeness is an attempt to distinguish the truth from the counterfeit.

And this morning, I did a panel that you moderated. That was you, wasn't it? There's not another Owen Strach. With Charlie Kirk and Vody Balcom. And I didn't say it then, but I'll say it now. Social justice, if people want to be clear, what is social justice? Here's the short version of it. And remember this, because it's important.

social justice is in justice. People need to understand that. Social justice is injustice. It's a guaranteed outcome. We know that doesn't work. If it did work, I'd be all for it. It doesn't work. It is unjust.

And people need to understand when you hear social justice, be 99.9% suspicious. Some good people get confused, but don't be one of them. That's exactly right. Social justice is the idea that if you see, inequality out there that you are seeing evil. So if you see disparities between different racial groups, you're seeing automatic evidence of injustice. And so social justice says, oh, there's inequality. So what we need to do is we need to level society because white supremacy is really

that which is causing this injustice. And if we just take away white supremacy in all its forms, white privilege, then we're going to make the world a just and fair place. And everybody will have a quality of outcome. If you white people with your Christianity and your heteronormativity, your patriarchalism, and your support of the free market would just stop being who you are, then everything would be equal. And everybody would have the same household income, education, level of flourishing. And honestly, Eric, it's just nuts. That's the technical term. Well, I mean, it is nuts. It's preposterous. It's silly. But young people are getting dramatically sucked in by this because it sounds good all their friends are into it and I think that it's kind of

well it's incredibly dangerous and so we need to be on the march to tell people you need to wake up to the fact that a wokeness is based on lies it'll it'll mess you up it'll mess up the culture if you care about the urban poor wokeness and everything that goes along with that is going to harm those people and you need to understand it is going to harm them just because people say, no, this is good, doesn't make it good. That's exactly right. Actually, what Wokeness is going to do is it's not going to tear down racist structures. It's going to advance them.

Wokeness works hand-and-glove with leftism. And if we've seen anything of a track record in leftism in this country and other countries as well, we've seen that it does not advance human flourishing and it squelches it. And so what we want to do, I argue in this book, Christianity and Wokeness, is we want to promote biblical justice. We want to promote the biblical gospel. We want to promote the Christian worldview because that is actually how people are going to recover human dignity,

knowing that you're an image bearer, a doctrine that you've done a lot of work on in your writing, I've done some work on. Knowing that you're an image bearer absolutely changes your conception of the world and of society because now every single person has dignity. And you're not looking at humanity as a widget. You're not looking at all white people

as if there's an average white person, as if they belong to this collective borg, called whiteness. There's no such thing as whiteness. But see, that's the key. There is no such thing as whiteness. And so when people talk about this, everybody gives them a pass. And I just want to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You have no idea what you're

talking about. What does it even mean to be white or black? These are utterly arbitrary. You know, my father is Greek. So does that make me slightly less white? Right. Right. Are the Swedes more white? What in the world

are we talking about? And it's almost like we are people who insist on these narratives or on these ideas. They are almost trying to force everyone to go back to before the Civil War when in America these things were kind of clear, right? There were people that were enslaved. Now, obviously, not all black people in America were enslaved. But the point is that we understand if you want to go back there, at least we could have a conversation about this. And it's an historical conversation and it's ugly when we think about Jim Crow.

But in this day and age, when we've had a black president for two terms, what in the world are we talking about? And I want to ask you, if we're talking about black and white, does black, I mean, we all know that people are inherently racist. We're sinful, right? So we always kind of draw these lines like there's us and them or whatever. But that's within the black community. I mean, you talk to black people of a certain age, and they will tell you that there's racism within the black community. You know, light-skinned people are looked at a certain way and whatever. Nobody talks about that today.

So the point is this is not something that only belongs to white people. All of this kind of thinking belongs to every human being who's a sinner. That's right. Critical race theory says it's against racism, but what it actually foments is racism. And it's based upon, I talked about the 19th century a minute ago, the Marxist construct that all of America is divided, or all of society, really, is divided into either being an oppressor or being an oppressed person. And that's based on your belonging to an aggregate group. So in this era, in the 21st century, CRT and Wokeness argue that if you have white skin, you're part of that aggregate group. Again, you're part of the white borg, if you will.

Which is inherently racist. You're reducing me to some kind of group. I mean, really, it's like saying you're a Jew, we're the Yellow Star, and shut up. I mean, it's really essentially reductive. And it's anti-biblical, at least because it's reductive, because God doesn't see us that way. God doesn't see us that way.

God cares about the individual. God cares about an individual person's status and well-being. God has set up the world so that even if you're not a believer, frankly, there is what we call common grace in the world. It's not a second grace. It's God showing grace to those who are not believers. And so we deal with a God who treats us as individuals, and we as Christians need to treat people as individuals.

Now, every person needs the gospel of Jesus Christ. Every person needs to be born again, remade, regenerated through the gospel of God's grace. But that foundation shows us that Christianity does not start from this foundation that I know you. I can stereotype you by how you look. No, instead I should know you in terms of the influence. image of God, every person bearing it. It's an amazing thing. I mean, to sum up, before we go to the break, folks,

wokeness is essentially cultural Marxism. It is, by definition, atheistic and anti-biblical. There is no squaring the circle. You need to get that, folks. There's no way to do it. So they may say some things you like, but at its core, it is not workable. And you need to understand why that is, We'll continue the conversation with Owen Strawn.

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E.com slash metaxus. Bambi.com slash metaxus. Hey there, folks. How many years have I been telling you about relief factor? What, like four? The truth is, I know there are millions of people. In fact, some say over 100 million people struggling with some kind of pain, maybe from exercise, just getting older.

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One is an atheistic or anti-theistic Marxist view, and the other one is a biblical view. So what do you say to some young hip pastor? He's got his tattoos. He's got the soul patch, and he shaved his head because his hair was starting to go, and he's got funky glasses. And he's just trying to reach out to the young people, and they're into this junk. What do you say to that? guy. Yeah, I want to say that fundamentally we're not trying to make Christianity cool. We're not trying to make it culturally acceptable. We're not trying to be

accepted by the world. That's a huge part of what I say in this book, Christianity and Wokenness. I say that there's an antithesis. There's an old-fashioned word for you. You don't hear that every day. No, you don't. But I like to keep it that way, please. No, go ahead. Go ahead. I like my word. Go ahead. I like it. Go ahead. I like it better than hegemon. Yeah, I don't like that No, me either. Okay, well, we're agreed on that. There's an antithesis between Christianity and the world. We're not the same. Jesus, when he comes, is not the same as the world. Jesus and the devil are not the same. And so we start from that foundation. We recognize that as Christians, we're not trying to do this makeover of Christianity where we put makeup on it and make it palatable to the outside

world. That's been a common way to try to attract people into the church. The secret sensitive movement has promoted that kind of thinking. That's not sound biblical Christianity. If only Jesus had been at Willow Creek, he might have had, who knows, maybe 16, 18 disciples. Instead of just 12. You know, it could have happened, man. Yeah. He needed to be more seeker friendly. He was always, you know, doing this divisive stuff.

You got to eat my flesh. And it's like, come on, man. You've got to reach the young people. That turns them off, that cannibalistic stuff. Yeah. And as our friend Vodi Bakum has said, this whole movement dovetails with the idea that Christianity is about niceness. It's about acceptance. It's about cultural palatibility.

Look, we're not going out of our way to be an idiot as a Christian. We're trying to bear the fruits of the spirit, Galatians 522 to 23, but we recognize that as Christians, Jesus has already told us that it is blessed for us to be persecuted and hated for righteousness sake in Matthew 5. So what I want to say to that pastor is, bro, preach the gospel boldly, preach the whole counsel of God, preach the despised doctrines of God's word, the ones that people love inherently and the ones that they don't love. The justice of God is as important as the love of God is, but you don't often hear. Well, you know, I was going to say, there's a, again, it's an irony here, the truth is attractive. And in other words, we always say like, well, the truth will drive people away.

Well, as much as it might drive some people away, it will attract other people. When you say, because I'm a Christian, I will not buy products from a company that is doing business with communist China and that is turning a blind eye toward the torture and murder and suffering of Uyghur Muslims. So I'm not a Muslim, and I'm not planning to be a Muslim, but they are human beings made in the image of God. And as a Christian, I'm commanded by the God who died for me to care about those weaker Muslims. And therefore, for me, this is an issue. It's an issue of human rights, of conscience.

I would say, if we try to sell that idea, a lot of young people can say, you know, I'd not heard that. So there are people suffering around the world, and because of a Christian, you care about that you're a Christian, you care about them, even though they're not Christians, and you're saying that we should do something about that. I think a lot of people would say, wow, I didn't realize that that's where Christianity leads you. I just thought it was, you know, kind of dull and theological. I couldn't agree more. I think people are starved for conviction. I think we've all been on a conviction-free diet, like these weird diets you hear about, and many, many pulpits have

been. And actually, sometimes pastors who do draw a crowd, think that they're drawing the crowd, because, you know, I don't know, they're attractive or they're really funny or they have this great personality or these other things. In a good number of cases, those pastors are drawing a crowd, so to speak, as crass language. People are flocking to their ministry because they're standing on truth and they're proclaiming things clearly. And then those pastors who are worldly often end up stopping that. But what we need to understand in our day is that people are starved for conviction. And so we've just gone through this weird year, last year. I don't know if you heard about it, the pandemic slash lockdown.

Not ringing any bells, but go ahead. Yeah, it's weird. But we just went through this whole thing where a good number of pastors in America and Canada and beyond did not even dare to open their church if the government or their local government was opposing them. And what is happening with pastors who did obey Christ in gathering together to worship him, even where the government said not to, you know, being careful in certain ways, of course. But what happened is those ministries actually, in many cases, skyrocketed because it's not just that the doors were open.

People were starved for the word of God. People are starved for truth. We're in this weird postmodern power game, all of us now. And so when you see a preacher up there who says, you know what, I'm going to put my life and my ministry on the line, and I'm going to open this church and preach the word of God, that has a powerful effect for people. And it's not just that this star for truth, although obviously that's a big piece of it. But there's starved for courage. There's starve for people who live as though this stuff is truth. Because if you say it's truth but you don't live like it's truth, people get the secret message.

You don't really believe it's truth. Come on. And, I mean, I learned that really from Bonhofer is that, you know, you can't say, I believe this or this or this or this. You have to live it. The devil is not fooled by the statement of faith on your church's website. If you don't live it out, then your neighbors, your friends, your enemies, everybody knows, you don't really believe it. So God is not grading us on where do you go to church or what you claim to believe. He's grading us on what you actually believe as demonstrated by how you live.

And so when people see other people living heroically and saying, I don't care what the consequences are, I'm more worried about disobeying God, I'm more worried about disappointing God who loves me and died from me. me, and I'm going to live this way. It is contagious. And so when you see those pastors, and we all know them, Rob McCoy, Jack Hibbs, Greg Denham, we can go down the line. I've met so many of them, Greg Locke in Nashville area. There's so many pastors that have had an opportunity because of the weirdness of COVID

to do something that they couldn't have done three years ago. And so many people, you're saying it, the numbers have exploded. People are dying for that kind of leadership, that kind of. of, you know, we say truth. Of course it's truth, but it's also, like, truth demonstrated. It's like we just haven't been seeing it. Yeah, and we can connect this politically. There's a lot of ways we could go here, but you and I, you know, both would have said

there were some hard edges to Donald Trump. But part of what... Oh, come on. Part of what was... He's a pussy cat. Part of what people were drawn to in terms of the evangelical movement was actually not the rather uncouth parts of his personality. Right. It was actually that he would call a spade a spade. We're so unused to that politically now. We're so unused to someone putting their reputation on the line in public that when someone does that and dares to speak up, it stands out. It draws a crowd. It's not actually that there's this thing called this massive specter called white Christian nationalism looming over America. It's actually that there are beleaguered Christians, speaking of our tribe, who have very few people who will champion at least aspects of our worldview.

agree with, but man, they're willing to take a stand. It has a powerful effect. It's a beautiful thing, and as you say, people are hungry for that. Listen, there's a reason that radical Islam is growing in prisons. Young men are hungry for something that's difficult, something that challenges them. So the idea that I can reach people by preaching softness, that certainly doesn't appeal to young men. And I can say that when you challenge most men, I'm speaking obviously about men in particular, but when you challenge them, they're like, they're up for a challenge.

And so when you say, you don't have to do anything, it's all about grace, just like hang out and Jesus loves you and whatever. It can be this almost like feminized, soft gospel that's unappealing to them. It totally can. I think of Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell. You think of a figure like that. He wins Olympic glory, an Olympic gold medal, and then what does he do? He gives it all up, and he goes and becomes a missionary in China.

And he ends up dying in a Japanese war camp of a tumor. In human terms, his life is a tragedy because he had so much talent and potential and ability and he squandered it. In Christian terms, in heavenly terms, his life is a triumph. Because he counted the cost and he went all in on Jesus Christ and his cause, his church, the gospel. And even though he died at a young age, and even though he died in a war camp and hardly anyone even knew he died, His life mattered. That, Eric, is what appeals to so many men. Well, that's why I put him in my book, Seven Men, because these stories are inspiring. We cannot fail to be inspired by this kind of behavior, these kinds of actions that demonstrate character.

So Eric Little, I mean, think about it. Eric Little, you know, he died earlier than he might have. And yet, you know, once you're dead, you don't think like, man, I just wished I had another. 45 years or I wish. Like once you're in heaven, all you care about is, did I live the way God wanted me to live? It's not about how much time you get. It's like, did you use that time for God's purposes? And we are all inspired by that.

We're going to go to a break. I'm talking to Owen Strawn. The book is Christianity and Wokeness. Prescription dispensing labs is a national licensed pharmacy specializing in personalized prescription and natural medicine. The pharmacists at PD labs are credited with formulations. unique nasal sprays for the dreaded brain fog and a leader in uncovering new compounds to improve your health. PD Labs is one of the first pharmacies to now offer a telemedicine group

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If you take any kind of supplements or vitamins and you go any place to get them besides nutrometics.com and use the code Eric, you could be disobeying God. I'm just saying you could. I want you to think about it. Neutrametics.com. I'm talking Owen Strachan. The book is Christianity and Wokeness. We were just talking about how the, the appearance.

of wokeness. I mean, this is, there's complex philosophical stuff behind this, theological stuff, but in a weird way, it's a kind of counterfeit religion, isn't it? It really is, and it is occurring and advancing at a time when a lot of American religion is collapsing. I mean, you think about liberal Protestantism. What has happened? Well, it's collapsed in the last several decades. And so what I think wokeness taps into is that natural religious instinct in humanity to have a bigger cause than yourself and that desire to have justice in the world. That's part of why so many young people are susceptible to this. They would have been in a church youth group or a college group in years past and decades past.

And now what is filling that void and driving them on is this call to become part of the movement of anti-racism and take down the structures of white supremacy that are everywhere in our society. So what Wokeness does is it really seeks a kind of conversion, a secular conversion of the individual, that then means that they get militarized against the white people in many cases around them. So you'll have some college kid who goes to a school, gets exposed to wokeness, and then goes back home to, let's say, normal white parents, and then goes on the aggressive against them and teaches dad and mom that this kind father and mother who raised them, not perfectly, maybe not even perfect on racial matters.

But this kind father and mother actually are part of the white, heteronormative, supremacist, capitalist order that is oppressing everybody in America. And that's the kind of evil ideology that is not just political. It's spiritual. Is there an uglier word than heteronormative? I'm just curious. Does anybody have anything out there that can compete with the ugliness of that heteronormative? Hetero means different. Normative.

So when you say heteronormative, this is, again, it's one of these made-up woke words. So let's define it for the people who actually have a life and aren't into this stuff. What does heteronormative mean? It means that you're basically straight. So you're heterosexual, and you see that as the ordinary working of humanity. We would say, as Christians, that's God's creation order, that those who are called to marriage, marriage, get married, you know, a man to a woman, a woman to a man, one man, one woman for life. So that is all classed as heteronormativity.

Right. Gays used to call them breeders. Yeah, it's another form of that. But, I mean, it's just fascinating how people, like, we're going to put you down because, you know, you think men and women, you know, were made to be together and get married and have kids. We're going to put that down because that's bourgeois. Right. That's, you know, it's just, I mean, the older you get, the more you realize there's nothing. new under the sun. This is just a new version

of the same stuff that we've been hearing over and over with different words and stuff. Now it's heteronormative. And people just jump on that new bandwagon. It's like we've discovered the meaning of life five minutes ago. It's exactly like that. And it's really Marxist because

Karl Marx, if you study him, even if you just read his communist manifesto or related documents, you'll see that he hates God's creation order. He hates God. He's an atheist. And so Marx wanted to dismantle the family. Marks wanted to tear down creation order. He hated it. And by the way, he was a wretched father. He was an awful father. And so many of these times, yeah. Rousseau, I mean,

you could just go down the list of these figures who have helped to dismantle the family in the public square. And in reality, what they're doing is they're taking their inner darkness and they're pushing it out on other people and they're training people. to hate the order, the creation order that God has made. It's an evil project, and we need to push against it, recognizing in that body of ideology, the hiss of a serpent, an ancient serpent in the garden. That's about it. Now, when you talk again about wokeness, this has infected many churches across America.

Are you surprised that pastors don't seem to have the guts to stand against this? or what do they have, they don't have the intellectual chops? I mean, if they read your book, Christianity and Wokeness, if they read Vody Backham's book, Falk Lines, they'll get a pretty quick primer on why this is genuinely of the devil. Like, do not play patty cake with the devil. This is nasty stuff. But a lot of pastors are getting sucked in.

They are, I think there's a few different causes. It does take some time to get up to speed on wokeness. You do need to read a few books. in the area. You want to know what the fundamental claims are. Vody's book and my book can be a one-two punch from Salem, hopefully, in helping pastors do some of that work and cut some of the corners, even if I can use that phrase. But yeah, that's one reality. That's one contributing factor. Another is that there is a lack of courage today. Honestly, there's just a lack of desire to take a stand for Jesus in cases where doing so is going to mean that you are disliked. You lose market share.

people may accuse you of being a racist. And Eric, that's another part of this. Americans, especially white, Americans fear nothing more than being called a racist. If you just throw that in someone's general direction across the room, they'll freak out. Think how funny that is. It shows you how racism is not a big issue when everybody's afraid of being called a racist. Because trust me, in the 1920s in Mississippi, white people were not afraid of

of being called racists. So the idea that people have internalized this stuff tells you that we're a society that does see it as an evil and that's being used as a cudgel by the Marxist left. We'll be right back talking to Owen Strawn. The book is Christianity and Wokeness. Folks, I'm talking Owen Strahan, S-T-R-A-C-H-N.

The book is Christianity and Wokeness. It's a weird thing, Owen, when we talk about this stuff because you said people in America fear being called racist. And it always makes me think of, you know, what did Martin Luther fear? Martin Luther feared disappointing God. He feared disobeying God. If you're any kind of a Christian, that should be your number one fear. And what people say about you or to you, how thin-skinned and spoiled and pampered are American Christians

that this is their big concern. if some young person with no life experience thinks they're racist? Yeah, you know, I think it's a failure to grapple with the biblical Jesus at base because the biblical Jesus is so often cited as this paragon of kumbaya tolerance, when in reality the biblical Jesus says that he has come to cast fire on the earth. He tells us that it is a good thing for father to separate from mother over the kingdom of God, for a child to separate from parents. He has come to set at odds those who would follow him from those who would not.

Now, we always are trying to speak the truth in love, be a movement of love as Christians, Ephesians 415. But the biblical Jesus came to throw down. The biblical Jesus came to do the will of the father. The biblical Jesus came to create a people for himself by his blood, Ephesians 2. We have been given an Americanized therapeutic Jesus who is this empathetic life coach who sits across you on the couch and only looks at you with adoring eyes when in reality the biblical Jesus has fire in his eyes.

The biblical Jesus and John 1 comes to these rough-hewn fishermen and some of your people, people you may be descended from even. And he says, follow me. And he doesn't elaborate. It's just fascinating. There's no instruction manual. There's no nuances and qualifications like we're all so used to give it. He doesn't say, follow me.

Let me explain in case I've offended you. He doesn't say that. He just says, follow me somehow trusting that they will, that the authority of his voice. Look, it's kind of funny because what we're talking about, it is love. In other words, if I care about my kid, I would say, brush your teeth. And they would say, well, I don't want to brush my teeth. and you'd say, hey, go brush your teeth or you're going to get it. What is that?

That is love because you do not want your child's teeth to rot out of their head. We have a culture, really, where a lot of the adults have internalized the bad Russoian ideas of the 60s and said, I don't want to be harsh. I don't want to be authoritative. That's the worst thing in the world. So I'm going to let you do whatever you want. And if your teeth rot out of your head, hey, that's on you. Like, that'll be your issue because I will be.

you know, watching the ballgame. I don't care. So it's really a lack of love, ultimately. So, you know, we say it's cowardice, but it's a cowardice is also a lack of love. Yes. It's a lack of love. Jesus has a command presence to him that I think a lot of pastors and Christian leaders today fear having. So in that analogy you just gave, I think the parent thinks that they're actually doing something really good by not giving their child moral instruction. They don't want to scar their child by forcing him to brush his teeth. But they're not loving their child, as you pointed out. They're hating their child.

In the same way in the church, if we don't call out worldly ideologies that are taking people captive, Colossians 2-8, these ideologies are imperial, as I said earlier. They're coming for you. And if you have high schoolers or college-age kids, these ideologies want your children. They want your church. So we have to have the command presence of Jesus. We have to stand up in the temple, and we have to throw down for the truth of God. We have to call a lie, a lie, and the truth, the truth.

We have to take a stand, and we're not doing so because we hate flesh and blood. We're doing so out of love because we want people rescued from captivity. It really is something that, you know, it takes us back at least to the 60s, but something happened where youth were exalted, and they were presented as somehow flawless, sinless, which is antithetical to Scripture. Scripture says we are all sinners, and therefore it is the job of a parent to raise a kid in the right way. If you let them go their own way, they're just going to get worse in their sin.

But we really bought that. And so the authorities, since I was a kid, have been less willing to take a stand against. I mean, I always think of in 68 when the students took over the Columbia University president's office, they didn't have the guts to say, better get out of here like you're going to get expelled yesterday like you better do what you're told this is not about you this is not about what you want they didn't have the guts because the society had bought this idea that the young people are beautiful flower power whatever that's an idea that goes back to rousseau it goes but it's it's a fundamental mistake but the culture has

been moving that way so that adults they want to be hip like their kids used to be the kids wanted to be i want to dress like my dad i want to dress like my mom i want to dress like my mom i I want to grow up. That has been reversed. It's a dramatic reversal. It is. And we saw last summer, for example, with the riots that torched America, caused billions of dollars of damage, robbed numerous American citizens of their very lives.

We saw a total failure of courage, of virtue, of manhood in so many areas. There were so few people who were willing to stand up in the public square against evil. and in so many places the strategy was one of containment of evil. Well, we'll just try to be on the outer edges of the perimeter and hope that this doesn't get out of hand. Meanwhile, America was

burning and it was out of hand. And that is an indictment upon us. That is a judgment of God upon us. People think, oh, no, we're risking the judgment of God. You have the judgment of God when you don't have strong leaders. You have the judgment of God when you don't have strong men. It's already there. Well, think about it.

it is not I was saying earlier in our panel this morning but you know the people who burned and looted I can't really blame them I blame for the people who didn't stop them in other words you have mayors you have cops you have it is their job to stop that and they effectively said no we're not going to stop here go ahead if somebody says go ahead why wouldn't you do that like if you you know are just sort of a messed up person you're angry and you act out and they say well go ahead and act out. We understand. So it is a failure of leadership. And so it's the failure of parents. It's the failure of mayors and elected officials. They've all lost the courage of these basic cultural convictions, that there's such a thing as truth and that we need to stand for it.

And there's a price to be paid. And so we really are reaping the whirlwind in this culture. Folks, I'm talking to Owen Strachan. The book is Christianity and Wokeness. I hope you'll get a copy. It's published by Salem Books. Salem, it seems, publishes all the good books. They certainly publish all of my books, Salem books, Christianity and Wokeness Owen Strz. We'll be right back. I'm told to know that he saved my soul, but I still like to listen to the radio. They say, rock and roll is wrong.

Folks, I'm talking Owen Strawn on the Erkmataxis show. Our sponsors are Nutrametics.com and MyPillow.com. You can also buy most of my books at my store.com. Use the code. Owen, how do we find unity amidst this tremendous division? Is there a path? Yeah, I want to say as a Christian unapologetically that the way we ultimately are going to find unity in this world is only through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

It's only through recognizing that Jesus died so that he could make one new man. He could take, in Ephesians 2, for example, Jew and Gentile, people who have nothing in common. and he could, by washing their sins clean, make them a family, make them the household of God. So if Jesus can do that by dying and can unite Jew and Gentile together, then whatever differences and boundaries we have erected today, Jesus can overcome those. Jesus has already overcome those. And when we trust in Christ by faith, then we are united to every Christian, Every person who confesses Jesus Christ, we are united to them.

It's not that racial reconciliation is then something that is in our hands, Eric. It's not something, oh, let's figure out a 29-step plan for this. Look, there are sins and our past in America and the church. There are. And we can recognize those and have honest conversations. We can recognize that we come from different backgrounds. We can recognize the skin color is going to mean probably some different experiences. And yet, we don't come to the church.

We don't join local churches and start. from a place of alienation and hostility to one another. We start from a position of brotherhood in Jesus Christ. That's our starting point. Well, it's interesting because there are some churches and denominations struggle with these things more than others. But when you see the genuine love of Jesus in somebody and they want to pray for you and they want to pray for your family

and they care about you, I think a lot of people, if they really see that, they don't just see doctrine or ideas, but when they see that, it kind of changes them. And so I think that is a way forward. We don't have to talk about this stuff all the time. But when we do have to talk about it, let's talk about it. And I even think that when I ask the question about unity, part of me thinks, who cares about unity? We care about what's true.

And truth is truth. And so if there's some people that refuse to agree with it, how can I be unified with them? What am I supposed to do? I'm not supposed to cast proles before swine. I'm supposed to speak the truth in love, live out my faith, and ultimately trust. people in God's hands, but I can't do anything or say anything or agree with anything. I'm bound by the truth, by the word of God. So in a way, I think that's part of where we get to this problem, is that there are a lot of pastors. They act like, well, I don't want to be political. I don't want to be

left. I don't want to be right. Well, sometimes you have no choice. If you're anti-slavery, that's a political thing. And if you're anti-Hitler, that's a political thing. And if you want these things, what is your gospel worth? I mean, what do you even, what do you do? What do you do Why are you even talking about God if you're not willing to pay that price and to demonstrate it? Yeah, we have a gospel worth living for, and now we need to show the world, as Christians have in centuries past, that we have a gospel worth dying for, and we're willing to pay that price. I mean, it's an interesting thing because right now there are many people, they don't feel like they don't want to die for anything, they don't really care, and I think you're not living. That's not life. It's just existence.

and to know that I live for the truth. How many people have gone to their deaths with joy, thinking that this is, I would never have it any other way. I think about it. And if you're a parent and you'd say, well, I die for my kids, you wouldn't even hesitate. And I think what kind of a father or mother would you be if you would say, no, if it's between me and them,

I just, I want to live so they can die. You think that that'd be the sickest parent, like what kind of a human being are you? And a lot of people are living in half-beenact. measures. And if you want to live your life in bright colors and really live, you have to know what is true and be willing to live for it. And it will give you joy. It's a beautiful thing. We're basically at a time. Owen, just great to see you. Great to be with you. Folks, the book is Christianity and Wokeness, how the social justice movement is hijacking the gospel in the way to stop it.

Christianity and Wokeness. And do you have a website? Just Twitter, probably, at O-T-R-A-C-H-A-N. Twitter. All right. O-Stra. Thank you, my friend. Thanks for having me.