Gender Confusion, the Woke Right, & the Search for Salvation | Dr. Jeff Myers

Episode Summary: 

Gender ideology, anti-Semitism, the Woke Right, and conspiracy thinking may seem like separate issues, but according to Dr. Jeff Myers, they all flow from a deeper worldview crisis: Where do people look for identity, meaning, and salvation?

This week, we sit down with the president of Summit Ministries and author of Raising Gender-Confident Kids to discuss the growing confusion surrounding gender and identity, the cultural pressure facing parents and students, and why redefining language reshapes how young people understand reality. Myers explains why gender confusion is often downstream from a deeper identity crisis and offers a hopeful vision of male and female differences as purposeful design rather than stereotypes.

We also explore the continuous rise in anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitic narratives among younger generations, unpacking how ideas about oppression, victimhood, and political “salvation” are shaping both the left and the right. Along the way, we discuss the “woke right,” conspiracy thinking, and how Christians can move from confusion to responding with wisdom. 

Who is Disciple Nations Alliance (DNA)? Since 1997, DNA’s mission has been to equip followers of Jesus around the globe with a biblical worldview, empowering them to build flourishing families, communities, and nations. 👉 https://disciplenations.org/

🎙️Featured Speaker: 

Dr. Jeff Myers is president of Summit Ministries. As an educator and entrepreneur, Dr. Myers has become one of America’s most respected authorities on youth leadership development and worldview formation. Focus on the Family founder, Dr. James Dobson, referred to him as “a very gifted and inspirational leader.” Evangelist Josh McDowell called him “a man who is 100% sold out to preparing the next generation to reflect the character of Christ in the culture.” 

📌 Resources:

     👉 Recommended Episode: Antisemitism & Political Turmoil: A Biblical Response w/ Kasey Leander 

     👉 Recommended Book: Raising Gender-Confident Kids 

     👉 Recommended Book: Should Christians Support Israel? 

     👉 Impact Research from DIA: Impact - Disciple Nations Alliance 

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📩 Ask us anything: info@disciplenations.org 

Episode Webpage

Transcript

Opening

Jeff Myers 0:02

Every cultural confusion is an opportunity to teach the truth. And one persistent distinction is the difference between male and female. This isn't just something that's random or socialized in us. There are 6,500 cataloged biological differences between male and female humans. The biblical idea of salvation is transformation from the inside out. What we're talking about here with Wokeness is that salvation is from the outside in. Unless those systems, those structures of society change, we personally cannot be saved. That's the idea of collective salvation. Why are they so angry and vile about all of this? It's because if you believe that your salvation can only come from the outside, and the ones in power are not doing anything to secure your salvation, then they're actually killing you. They're actually committing violence against you. Right. They're sentencing you to hell, essentially. Right. And so you're going to be really angry about it. I need to feel special here, and the only way I can feel special is to claim some kind of knowledge that other people don't possess. I know, in fact, that it was the Bilderbergers or these other Jewish families or whatever, literally controlling the world behind the scenes. And the reason we know they're controlling the world behind the scenes is because they don't leave any fingerprints, right? That's that's kind of the conspiracy thinking. The evidence is that there is no evidence. So if you're on the left, you hate Israel because you think it's colonialist. If you're on the right, you hate Israel because you have a conspiracy mindset. If you're a Christian, you're supposed to now hate Israel because the church replaced Israel and Jews are irrelevant to God's plan. Every cultural confusion is an opportunity to teach the truth.

Episode Set Up

Luke Allen 1:51

Hi friends, welcome back to another episode of Ideas Have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. As Christians, we all know that our mission is to spread the gospel around the world to all the nations. However, our mission, the Great Co-mission, also involves working to transform our cultures so that they increasingly reflect the truth, goodness, and beauty of God's kingdom. Tragically, the church has largely neglected this second part of her mission, and today most Christians are having little influence on their surrounding cultures. Join us on this podcast as we rediscover what it means for each of us to disciple the nations and to create Christ-honoring cultures that reflect the character of the living God. Hi guys, my name is Luke Allen. I am one of the co-hosts here on the podcast, and I am joined, as usual, by my dad and host, Scott Allen. Hi, Dad. Hey, Luke. Hey. And we just hopped off a fun discussion with one of our favorite guests here on the show, Dr. Jeff Myers from Summit Ministries. But before we introduce him and the topic, as you know, this podcast is a resource of the Disciple Nations Alliance. And if you'd like to learn more about our ministry, you can find us over at disciplenations.org. We're really excited right now to share with you guys something that's been really encouraging to us over the last few years. We've taken a deep dive into one important question to us, which is is the Disciple Nations Alliance actually making an impact in transforming hearts and minds and then lives of Christians around the world as we seek to disciple the nations? That's the name of our ministry, and that is our mission to seek to transform nations through the lives of Christians. So we asked that question, and we wanted to do some research to find out the answer of how much impact the DNA is actually having. So I reached out to a third-party research group, Dialogues in Action, led by researcher Dr. Steve Patty, to do this research project. It took a while, but we're really excited to let you guys know that the uh results are in. You can see those over on our website, disciplenations.org, again. And uh right up there on the menu of our website, there's a little button that says impact. And that impact study from Dialogues in Action is right there for you to explore for yourself. So we'd uh highly recommend that you do that if you're interested in our ministry. And obviously, this isn't this isn't our work, this is God's work and what he's doing around the world. Uh, but he's using us as a tool to do that, and we're just really encouraged to see the ways that he has been moving over the last few years uh through our ministry. So again, just head over to disciple nations.org and find that impact section to learn more about that. Uh back to the podcast for today. We had Dr. Jeff Myers on the show. Uh Deb, would you mind introducing him and then uh the topic topics, I should say, we talked

Introducing Dr. Jeff Myers

Luke Allen 4:30

about today?

Scott Allen 4:30

Yeah, Dr. Myers is um he's uh most well known as the president of Summit Ministries, one of the premier biblical worldview discipleship ministries in the world, in the United States and in the world. Uh he is an educator, he's an entrepreneur, um, and really one of America's most respected authorities on youth leadership development and worldview formation. Um, in fact, Focus on the Family founder, Dr. James Dobson, referred to Dr. Meyer as a very gifted and inspirational leader, and Josh McDowell called him a man who is 100% sold out to preparing the next generation to reflect the character of Christ in culture. Um, it's been a privilege for us to get to know Dr. Myers over the years. He's prolific. He's uh written uh he well, today he's gonna explain. He tries to write a book every year. We're gonna talk today about uh his most recent book, Raising Gender Confident Kids. But uh Luke and I, because um we're like everyone else, just kind of inundated with this discussion on Israel, we wanted to backtrack a little bit and uh talk about his previous book called Should Christians Support Israel? We wanted to talk about uh how he is taking in all uh you know all that's gone on uh with this subject, Judaism, Israel, in the church, outside the church, since he wrote that book. So that's a really fascinating part of the discussion. Both were were fantastic.

Luke Allen 5:51

Yeah, I really enjoyed today's podcast. Those topics do seem unrelated, the whole question of gender identity uh today in the United States, and then the question of should Christians support Israel? And we even got into the topic of the woke right. But it was interesting to see how Dr. Myers actually drew a through line through all of those, connecting the dots to all those. So keep listening to today's episode and you will uh hear him explain that as well. So, anyways, let's hop into the discussion today with Dr. Jeff Myers.

Scott Allen 6:22

It's great to have Dr. Jeff Meyer on once again. Jeff, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It's great to see you. You look great.

Speaker 4 6:30

Scott, it's great to see you as well. And Luke, great to see you. I always enjoy these conversations. Just an hour of brainstorming is what it feels like. I always look forward to it.

Scott Allen 6:38

Well, Luke and I feel the same. We've been brainstorming together uh questions, and we always love it when you come on because we've like, man, I can't wait to ask what Jeff thinks about this or that. So it's it's a total blessing for us.

Why Gender Confusion Spiked

Scott Allen 6:54

Um I wanted to start with your newest book, Raising Gender Confident Kids. Uh, first of all, I am just amazed at how prolific you are. You you have you put out a book almost every year, don't you? It seems like, or is it not that frequent?

Speaker 4 7:08

No, it is it is every year at this point. We set a goal some time ago that we'd try to do a book a year and a video course a year. And I'm I'm not sure how long we can sustain that pace because there's also a company to run and just a whole lot going on. But this one was much easier than others because my co-author is an incredible person, educational psychologist named Dr. Kathy Cook. And she wrote, well, essentially wrote half, and I wrote half, and then we gave intense feedback to each other on the parts that we had written. So it was it was something where it it really felt like things came out of us that really weren't there before, or that just it just took that dialogue to really make it happen. And we've been really blessed to see the book take off and get a lot of traction because parents are really struggling with their kids' gender identity among a whole lot of other identity issues.

Scott Allen 8:09

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you for serving so many people by tackling this topic topic. Um, the title again is Raising Gender Confident Kids. Uh, could you uh tell us a little bit about why you felt like now's the time. I really want to get this, I want to write on this topic, I want to get this out. Obviously, this has been a hot button issue for a few years now. I mean, I I feel like the whole transgender, gender dysphoria, it just came hot on the heels of the same-sex marriage, you know, argument, Obergapel. Uh it was almost like it was teed up and ready to go, you know. Um, but uh still tell tell us about your thoughts on on the timing here for this book.

Speaker 4 8:50

You know, I hadn't really thought uh, believe it or not, about the timing related to Obergefell, but there is a relationship. The some whatever it is in our culture that allows or encourages same-sex marriage essentially encourages the redefining of terms to meet our own preferences. So marriage doesn't mean what it means theologically or legally, it means whatever it means to us. And so if we can get the courts or the legislatures to change the definition of the term, then it actually changes. And that idea has now extended to the very idea of male and female. Some of it was a social media contagion, some of it was an educational issue, and we can get into all of that. But I will say right off the bat, young adults today are 1,600% more likely to identify as transgender as people who are over the age of 50. So this is clearly something that is a generational issue, however else we intend to define it. Why did it happen? Uh, there are a number of things. First of all, there has been an agenda behind it, not a conspiracy, just an organized effort to try to uh make uh the the sexual revolution um a weapon in tearing down meaning altogether. So think of it as if if you if you really want to control how people think, you have to change the way they define all of the key terms in their life. And if you if you want to do that and you're a moral relativist, you're kind of an anarchist who wants society as it's currently structured to fall for whatever reason, then you have to tear down all distinctions. And one persistent distinction is the difference between male and female. This isn't just something that's random or socialized in us. There are 6,500 cataloged biological differences between male and female humans. So it's a very persistent distinction. If, however, you want all morals to be relative to your personal situation so that individual autonomy is the only truth, then you have to tear it down somehow. And that is that's really where a lot of this came from in the world of academia. Um, you can go back and check that all out for yourself if you're interested in reading some of the books that were published on that, but I was reading them uh starting as early as 1988. 1988. So this is not new. It just sort of popped onto the scene because all of these people who had written all of these academic documents finally got their students into positions of influence. I don't know if it was Abraham Lincoln who actually said this. He's always credited with it, but what's taught in the classroom in one generation becomes believed and practiced in society in the next generation. So that's at the heart of it. And then the education system just glommed onto this, like you wouldn't believe. I mean, gender identity theory is is is taught or practiced in half of the public schools in the United States of America. So young adults who are in school are essentially uh um influenced by this every single day. The teacher is told you must ask every student what their pronouns are today and and things like that. And most teachers hate this, by the way. A teacher union survey said that only I think it was only like four percent of teachers said they thought it was a good idea to teach gender ideology to elementary students. And two-thirds of them said they did not think it was an appropriate use of classroom time, and they're correct about that, of course. But the, you know, the greatest growth in in education funding is not in the classroom. It's not providing assistance to teachers so that there are two adults in the classroom helping kids learn. It's the growth of uh an administrative level of uh what they think of as support, but it's essentially oversight. It's it's very doctrinaire telling the teachers what they're going to do in the classroom every day. So yeah, everybody's upset. Everybody's sad about this. Parents are terrified, teachers are frustrated, society uh is all in in an uproar about this. Young adults are it's actually starting to fade a little bit from their thinking. Yeah, right now because they're just they're it they're just they're just sort of tired of it. It's it ran its course. Yeah, maybe that was interesting for a while, but you know, we're moving on. And it's just like that song that you really loved the first time you heard it, but then you listened to it a hundred a hundred times and you started to not like it anymore. That's kind of where a lot of young adults are on this. But the underlying confusion that led to it is still there. And I think that's why parents particularly should care.

Scott Allen 13:47

Yeah, I've uh your your point is well taken. I feel like it it goes beyond the sexual revolution to yeah, the the ideology of postmodernism, you know, it's like uh applied postmodernism. You know, it's it's the it's example A of what this looks like in practice when you become uh the or the individual becomes the one who determines what is reality for them. And um, you know, uh apart from anything, biology or whatever, you know, they are the ones who d determine what is true. Um but I do feel like it in some ways it's it was Orwellian in that respect, right? You know, in the sense that you had powerful groups and powerful people telling us that one plus one equals four, and you had to, you know, you had to affirm that. But it seemed like to me, anyways, that it was a bridge too far, if you will, in the sense that uh not only were Christians and conservatives upset, but uh a lot of people across the political spectrum became upset with that. I often think of the story of the um you may know her name, I just can't think of it right now, but she was the um brand manager for Levi Strauss in San Francisco. And she, you know, was a left person on the left, not a Christian. And she became so upset about this, mainly around the issue of sports, she just felt like it was wrong that she became one of the greatest advocates against uh this gender confusion, gender ideology in the United States. I wish I could think of her name right now, but uh I I felt like she was kind of emblematic of the fact that this is now um, you know, the the the the push back against it is is is quite broad. Any thoughts on that or reactions to that, Jeff?

How The Gender Spectrum Persuades

Speaker 4 15:27

I I think so. You know, and it it's not that gender ideologists look at you and say, you think there is a difference between males and females, you're not, you know, you're what you think you're seeing, you're not actually seeing. It's not it's not how it's usually communicated. It's usually communicated as a the gender is a spectrum. So on one end you have extreme masculinity, and on the other hand, you have extreme femininity. So think G.I. Joe versus Barbie. And we all look in the mirror and we realize none of us are G.I. Joe, none of us are Barbie, so we're all kind of somewhere in the middle. And in the middle, according to this gender spectrum, is transgender or non-binary. And that most of us are there. And sometimes, you know, guys, if we're a little more emotional, then maybe our feminine side is coming out. If you if women are a little more competitive, then maybe their masculine side is coming out, but it's all seen as a sliding scale rather than a distinction. That's usually how it's presented. And it it's very subtle because, you know, I do feel like I could be more emotional at times. I should be a little more sensitive. And I think a lot of young women see themselves as tomboys and they aren't sure exactly what to do with that. I would say, oh, of all the young women we work with at Summit Ministry, 75% of them see themselves as tomboys. So if you if you if you just if you start getting people to think, well, you know, if you're a tomboy, maybe you're actually a boy in a girl's body. If you use that to plant seeds of confusion, then it it's going to have a devastating uh effect. And and it does, in fact, have an effect. One of our speakers, in fact, it was, I think it was Dr. Kathy Cook, to said to our group, Tom, tom boys are girls. And all of the boys in the room applauded, and then the girls applauded because they they just needed somebody to say it's okay. Uh, but the confusion is unreal. I had a student who, a female student, who announced to her classmates she's going to be an engineer, and they immediately told her, Well, then you're a boy trapped in a girl's body. And it threw her into confusion for quite some time. Think of the cruelty of that. It's not,

Medicine Money And Irreversible Harm

Speaker 4 17:45

it's not somebody saying to you there's something wrong with your body. It's somebody saying that your body itself as an existential thing is wrong. Okay, it can't be fixed.

Scott Allen 17:56

No, and then the stakes are so high because you know, you had medicine in cahoots with this, right? So I mean, we were talking about surgeries that become become do irreversible damage. Uh it's it was just so evil, right? You know, and so much behind that.

Speaker 4 18:15

I think the the medical organizations realized it was a way to make um a lot of money. The people who used who developed drugs that can be used for puberty blocking saw a whole new market. Those drugs have a very good use in men, it's usually to stave off the effects of uh prostate cancer. For women, it's designed to treat endometeosis, which is extraordinarily painful, and those drugs are very good for that purpose. But if there's also another purpose that can be used and you're developing a customer whose whose therapy is going to cost potentially $30,000 a year, and you make that drug, would you go ahead and produce it? And in a culture that says if it's possible, it's therefore ethical, um, yeah, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you? You can make a gazillion dollars and letting people pretend to be whatever they want. But it's it's it's created an enormous amount of havoc. And essentially uh the way we see it and working with young people is we now have young women who are in their early 20s who are essentially old ladies in their bodies. Their level of osteoporosis and other related diseases is so extraordinary. They're 20-year-old women in 70-year-old bodies.

Scott Allen 19:36

It's just so evil. It's just it's just so evil. You know, and it I was just yesterday looking at our local newspaper, the Portland, Oregonian, and uh you know, the the federal funds have been cut back now to hospitals that perform these treatments um through Medicaid, Medicare. I'm not exactly sure all the mechanisms for that, but there's been a shift in federal funding. But now the state of Oregon, you know, is just saying, well, we're gonna keep the funding in place and make it even greater through our you know state taxes. So honestly, it feels like a gut punch when I read an article like that, because I'm paying into it. You know, I I I feel dirty and complicit. Um and at the same time, you know, I I feel upset because so many of my fellow Christians, you know, they don't want to get dirty in politics and things like that. And I'm like, boy, yeah. But the what's the what's the alternative? The alternative is you know, we end up having to pay for this, right? You know, against our will. So, anyways, that's just I'm sorry, I'm just sharing a little bit of what's on my heart today, you know, with that. It just it to me it's it's intolerable. I I just feel like I've got to do something, you know. I you know, and I I don't, you know, I don't want to leave the state. I I don't want to make this a state's matter, but anyways, I I'd like to ask another question, if you don't mind. Why why do you feel like this is a book that every Christian parent needs, not just those with children maybe who are uh questioning their uh gender identity? Why is this for every Christian parent, uh Dr. Meyer?

Speaker 4 21:05

Well, I I'll I'll answer that in two ways. I think, first of all, the gender identity or gender confusion issue is something that every parent deals with. And I'll give you a couple of examples. I was visiting with a grandmother, she said, I have 13 grandchildren, five of them now identify as transgender. They were all raised in Christian households, they went off to young life camp when they were kids. Uh but they five I now identify as transgender. I was visiting with a middle school girl. She said I had to switch schools, and I asked her why. She said, Because I was the only girl left in my class. What do you mean? Oh, it was the only girl left in my class because all of the other girls decided they were boys. So this is something you can't get around it. And and I would say 40% of young adults say they have questioned their gender at one point in time or another. But here's why parents, I think parents should keep. And I took I know we could really turn this quite negative, and we'll all come away feeling much worse than we did when we started. But let me kind of turn the corner a little bit.

Teaching Truth Through Confusion

Speaker 4 22:10

Every cultural confusion is an opportunity to teach the truth. Every cultural confusion is an opportunity to teach the truth. We go back to the Apostle Paul, Acts chapter 17, verses 16 and forward, where he was in Athens, and it said that he was deeply distressed because the city was full of idols. So, what did he do? So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with those who worship God as well as in the marketplace every day. Some of the Epicurean Stoic philosophers also debated with him. Did they all agree with him? Nope. Some of them said, What is this ignorant show off trying to say? They didn't all agree with him, but he was there and he was prepared to engage. So if we can see confusion in culture as a platform from which to teach the truth, then I think it's something that every parent can care about. And because I know you guys, when you give me a question, said it like it goes so so deep and it goes in so many different directions, and there's so much we want to talk about. But let me just say this I think one of the reasons, and this emerged as Dr.

Designed Differences Create Human Harmony

Speaker 4 23:18

Kathy Cook and I were writing this book, Raising Gender Confident Kids, we realized that God created differences between males and females on purpose. And I mean, we knew that from scripture, but then as we started looking at the science of it, we were blown away by how the differences between males and females actually do enable us to harmonize in a way that so that we can better grapple with reality. So I'll just give you two examples if if I can take probably three or four minutes to do this. Number one is how we see the world. We all have rods and cones in our eyes. Have we talked about this on your show before?

Scott Allen 23:58

No, I just I think it's a fascinating area to look at. The actual biological differences, I mean, they're God designed, you know, way back in Genesis chapter one at the very beginning, you know. So yeah, continue.

Speaker 4 24:09

Yeah, that's the yeah, right. The very the very first thing we know about humans is that we bear God's image. The second thing we know about humans from Genesis chapter one is that we're male and female. Why would God create differences on purpose? Because there are some worldviews that say, no, we don't want differences. We want to recognize the oneness of all things. There are no differences. If there are any differences, they flow on a spectrum. But a biblical worldview says, no, God, you know, you have the night and the day, the land and the sea, the animals that are in the air, the animals that are in the ocean. You have all of these differences. These distinctions are somehow meaningful and they create harmony. So just think of how we see the world. We have rods and cones in our eyes. Boys have a preponderance of rods. These are the kinds of cells in your eye that focus in on contrast and motion. Those are those are rods. And they're more technical terms. We don't need to get into the medical stuff, but the uh females have a preponderance of cones, which are the kinds of cells that focuses on focus on color and texture. This is an enormous difference. Uh, and it's not just a little bit. When I say a preponderance, males have 30% more rods than females have 30% more cones in their eyes. So God literally designed men to focus in on contrast and motion and women to focus in on color and texture. Why, why the difference? I mean, what why does it matter? If you want to accurately see the world, you have to see contrast and motion, color and texture all together, which means that God literally designed males and females to need each other to accurately see the world.

Speaker 1 25:48

Yeah.

Speaker 4 25:48

This was a huge breakthrough for me as a dad. I thought, you know, when I took my kids to church and gave them paper and colored pencils, and my girls were drawing flowers and geometric designs and animals, and my boys were drawing tanks and blood squirting out. You know, I always thought I was raising little sociopaths.

Scott Allen 26:07

Just a boy.

Speaker 4 26:08

The truth is girls draw nouns, boys draw verbs. It's not always true. Both, you know, both can draw verbs or nouns, but it's just often the way things uh are. It's just it's a it's a harmony that enables us to better see the world. Stress is another example that we gave in the book. There now, this research on stress is not done on humans. I will go ahead and say that because in order to identify the hormonal reaction to stress, you have to dissect somebody's brain, which we don't do with humans. We do it with rats. They probably don't like it either, but nobody ever asks them. So they they found in these studies that when males or when females experience stress, their bodies produce a hormone called norepinephrine, which causes them to focus more, even to ruminate. Male bodies, when they were put in stress conditions, their bodies produced a hormone called dopamine, which causes them to move into action. I think we can all agree that if you're under stress and you think about it and ruminate on it but never act, it doesn't get better. If you act, however, without thinking about it, it doesn't get better either. It probably gets worse. God literally designed males and females to need each other to properly respond to stressful situations. And those are just some examples.

Scott Allen 27:38

But you take it there's so many more like that. There's you're just scratching the surface on that.

Speaker 4 27:44

There are six thousand four hundred and ninety-eight more at wood.

Scott Allen 27:49

Well, let's get going. Well, what's neat about it is we're just now, I mean, you know, science is just now uncovering this. This isn't this is relatively new information. And I like what you said. It's diversity, it's difference, but it's not just difference, it's complementary difference, you know. I remember Nancy Pearcy once said something that really struck me. She said that understanding the Trinity is kind of the Rosetta Stone, if you will, of Christian social thought. And that, you know, going all the way back to God in whose image we're made, you have a unity and a diversity and a complementary nature. And that gets carried over into the images that He created, uh, the beings that He created in His image. Um it's one of the most beautiful things about Christianity that we can affirm unity, we can affirm diversity, and a complementary diversity. There's something so powerful and beautiful about that, isn't there?

Speaker 4 28:43

It's it's incredible. You know, I was visiting with someone from Europe, and and she was a very thoughtful uh Christian and and in a position of power. And I was a little surprised when I first met, oh well, yeah, you're actually in a position of influence in your country as a thoughtful Christian. But she said to me, you know, we think a lot about ecology when it comes to creatures around us. Here in Manitou Springs, we have a pollinators club because we we realized if we plant certain kinds of plants, the bees really like them. And when the bees like the plants, then they do all of their work and the whole ecosystem benefits. We think about ecology a lot when it comes to animals, but what's a human ecology? Why don't we think, why do we think in terms of transcending our ecology as being of value rather than recognizing what it actually is? So we struggled for a way to put that in the book, Raising Gender Confident Kids. We ended up using the word harmony. I I agree with you, the word compliment or complementary is good, but that trips into a theological debate that a lot of people have been having over the last 30 years or so about egalitarianism versus complementarianism. So we didn't feel like we needed to engage that debate. We want, we're trying to overcome stereotypes by what we call imagotypes. Who are we as image bearers of God? What types flow from that rather than our simple recognition of one another in our cultural circumstances? So that the idea that we harmonize is so critical. And anybody who's ever studied nature knows that this is true, but it's also true for us and human as human beings. And while we have a lot to learn, I mean, uh, think sociologically how much better we could make our societies if we just recognize that simple truth rather than try to orient everything about the around the most extreme examples of um individual autonomy.

Scott Allen 30:42

Absolutely. Again, to quote Nancy Pearce, it's not enough to just critique a false worldview. We have to offer a better one. And the Christian one is is definitely better on this issue of sex, male, female. It's just it's beautiful. And so thank you. Thank you for writing raising gender-confident kids. I want to urge all of our listeners to go out uh and uh take advantage of this uh this incredible resource that you put out. Thank you for doing

Hard Shift To Israel Questions

Scott Allen 31:07

that. We wanted to talk almost the entire hour with you about this, but as Luke and I were uh chatting, we thought, man, we we we're gonna do a hard shift here because we we we really wanted to get your thoughts on the previous book you wrote, which is Should Christians Support Israel? You wrote that I don't know how what was that three, four years ago? It was right after the events there in Israel in October. I uh it just seems like things have changed dramatically even in the last year on this subject. And we haven't had a chance to really talk with you about this subject for a while. So we thought it would be so fun to kind of catch up with you about what you're seeing, what you're observing, uh the shifts that you're noticing and how young people in particular are thinking about Israel and the Jews even over the last years. So if you don't mind uh just a hard shift here.

Speaker 4 31:59

No, I it is it is a hard shift, but it it's related.

Moral Relativism And Victim Salvation

Speaker 4 32:03

If I could just give a bridge to it real quick, and then you guys can ask whatever questions you like. If you start with the and we talked about this earlier in the show, if you start with moral relativism, that which essentially says I am the center of my reality, I define myself. I'm not oriented in a rule-based universe to things that are outside of me. I define myself. And and sure, well, maybe I define myself in terms of natural laws when it comes to things like gravity. I don't go around jumping off of rooftops, rooftops thinking thoughts of upness and expect to actually go up. But when it comes to my mental state or who I am as a person, I define myself. That's what moral relativism essentially says. Well, if you begin with that, you very quickly realize your self-definition is pathetic. It's pathetic. Essentially, if you are the center of reality, everything that happens in the world is your fault because you are the center of reality. It leads to extraordinarily high levels of anxiety, which we've seen in our culture, and it leads to kind of a neurosis that essentially forfeits agency. And what I mean by that is uh people give up the idea that their personal presence in the world can meaningfully improve things, because we have no idea what improvement would be like. If you're stuck in a vacuum, what is up or down? So you wouldn't really be able to sense that. But the sense that there is, there ought to be some kind of grounding that makes it possible for me to grapple with reality as that actually is, that idea goes away under moral relativism. Okay, so you end up if you want to re-ground yourself, the way you do it is by thinking of yourself up against the world. So I am a victim, and the people who control me and prevent me from obtaining salvation are evil. They are the victimizers, they are the oppressors. Then I can develop a mindset that grounds me in the midst of moral relativism by seeing myself as the oppressed and the people who are around me who have uh what I define as control or power, I define them as the oppressors. It's a perverse way of getting meaning in the world, but it's one that a lot of people do. And I think they do it, and this is the bridge. I think they do it because it promises that your salvation was going to come from outside of you. Now, when I was a kid, I mean, I mean, I went to church and I understood that my salvation uh came from Jesus Christ. I think I understood that as a child, even though I didn't embrace it until I was in college. But the but the idea of salvation being outside of you is pretty much the heart of what we call a secular or a secular humanist worldview. It says that we human beings are just material. And it uh you remember the Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You you you have your basic food needs met, then you have your needs for shelter met, but and then eventually you get to self-actualization. The whole theory was the only way you can proceed towards salvation is if forces that are outside of you are meeting the needs that are inside of you. Okay. If they're not, then you can't be saved. So if they're not, if people around you are not meeting your needs in the way you want them to be met, then you are a victim. If you're not getting a big enough check from the government, then you're a victim. If people around you are telling you your math teacher says, show your work, then you're a victim. If your math teacher, you know, if your teacher says you didn't turn in your paper, you're going to get a lower grade. Well, then you're a victim because those people around you are artificially creating scarcity so that you will be marginalized and they can pursue power without competition from you. That's how you begin to see the world. All right. So that basic worldview became uh I wouldn't say that Israel or anti-Semitism sparked it, but it revealed it. It revealed that the vast majority of people think that way about the world around them. They think in terms of the oppressor versus oppressed mindset. So anti-Semitism very naturally flowed right back into the conversation as it has every hundred or two hundred years for at least the last 2000.

Luke Allen 37:14

Yeah, I that was that was deep. I'm gonna re-listen to that like ten times to fully understand what you're getting at there. But I mean, it makes a lot of sense because back in 2020, when the word woke became a big word, and everyone starts using it everywhere and starts talking about critical theory and Frankfurt School and applied Marxism and cultural Marxism and all those things, most people would agree with you that our education system has been heavily influenced by Marxist thought and applied postmodernism and you know all the woke stuff. There's a lot of woke stuff in the in the school systems. And then we come out of that time period and we just kind of pretend like, well, that was all those guys who believed that stuff. Not me, because you know, I'm not woke, you know. But it's like, well, that's not really how worldviews work. Like it's it's if you were raised in that and everyone around you thought that way and talked that way, and the books you read thought that, you know, taught you that, then it's it's affected you at a deeper level than you probably realized. I see it even in myself, the effects of uh Marxist thought, you know. And uh so we all just come away from that thinking we're unscathed. It's like, no, you're probably uh you've been affected by this oppressor versus oppressed mindset, and you're gonna see the world that way. And even if you don't think the oppressor is the straight white man, you might think it's someone else. So it it uh I I still am not comfortable really. I I haven't fully wrapped my head around the term woke right, but I get what they're trying to explain that term. It's still this oppressor-oppressed mindset, but applied to the Jews as the oppressor now instead of the straight white man. And it's similar in its framework there. I'm still I'm still wrestling with that. That's why I wanted to hear your thoughts on that today. But am I tracking with you?

Speaker 4 39:03

Yeah, I I I am I am tracking. Uh, I will say if uh you're watching or listening to this and you want to know my thoughts in an extended format about this. One of my employees here, one of my colleagues, Casey Leander, Casey with a K, he and I did a show about the woke right and anti-Semitism on my show called Truth Changes Everything. And you can Google it if you just put Jeff Myers, Casey Leander, woke right, or whatever, it'll it'll pop up. And you can you can watch that. Yeah. But w so what is the woke right? Well, I think you've defined wokeness uh really well, actually, Luke, because it it essentially says that the problems that we face are systemic. In other words, they're woven into the way life is in a way that is outside of our control. So we are victims. The biblical idea of salvation is transformation from the inside out. What we're talking about here with wokenness is that salvation is from the outside in. Unless those systems, those structures of society change, we personally cannot be saved.

Scott Allen 40:15

Can I can I pause you on the other side? I just want to I want to clarify that because I, you know, I uh wrote a book on this as you know, why social justice is not biblical justice, took a deep dive into this mindset of oppressor oppressed, you know, that that is rooted in Marxism. And it makes sense if there is no God, there is no transcendent truth, all that, you know, and there's just human beings kind of jockeying for power and position, this worldview makes complete sense. No truth, all you're left with is power and people jockeying for power. But on on in terms of salvation or um justification, I've often thought of it in terms of justification, I've thought maybe a little bit differently, maybe you can clarify that that to be classified as a victim is to be justified, you know, in the sense that the evil that exists uh doesn't start with me, it's somebody else. It's out there with that powerful group that's uh rigging things to you know to advantage them at my expense. And so they're the problem with the world. It draws that line between good and evil, not not through the human heart, but between groups, right? And if you're on the if you're on the victim side, you're on the good side, right? And the good is just another way of saying righteous, holy, justified, whatever it is. And so it's it's a it's a way, it's a cheap way of of feeling. This is where some people call it a false gospel, because it's a sense that, you know, I can be saved apart from Christ. I just have to classify myself as a victim. Then I'm good. You know, I'm not the problem with the world. The problem is out there with that other group, you know, whoever it is, white people or Jews or whatever it is. So that that's the way I've tended to think about it. Is that what you're saying? I I I'm not sure I'm tracking with you, or is it similar to that?

Speaker 4 42:03

I I think it I think it might be a little bit similar. I'd have to think about that a little bit more, Scott. I think what I see happening is uh I'm trying to trace back why people get so mad. You know, what why are people so upset with an elected official not doing the things that they want? Why do they want to actually kill them? You know, why are they so angry and vile about all of this? It's because if you're if you believe that your salvation can only come from the outside, and the people who are the ones in power are not doing anything to secure your salvation, then they're actually killing you. They're actually committing violence against you. Right. They're sentencing you to hell, essentially. Right. And so you're gonna be really angry about it. Um so yes, on the on the surface.

Scott Allen 42:54

That gets rid of the agency, by the way. You know, yeah, you it's it's it's I I I saw this for many years in Christian relief and development, you know, that uh uh a Marxist view of poverty says, you know, we're poor because somebody else is rich, you know, and they've rigged the system in such a way that uh they have stolen from us. You know, there can be some truth to that for sure. But when you carry it to its ex it its extreme, what it does to the poor is it says, there's you're poor and there's nothing you can do to get yourself out of that poverty until those people that rig the system to their advantage do something for you. You know, it's just it's just such a hopeless kind of thing. So much of our teaching was no, you know, as long as you think that way, you will be trapped in poverty or whatever it is. Uh you know, they may or may not change, but you can change. You know, there's things you can do to change, right? And actually make a difference.

Speaker 4 43:45

Then you can't change everything.

Scott Allen 43:47

Right.

Speaker 4 43:47

But again, you're not you're not God. You're not going to try to change everything. Right. Can you change your circumstances so that they're better tomorrow than they were today? Right. And usually there are ways you can do that. Even uh the most impoverished people I've I've met, you you see a difference between those who are who orient their identity around their physical poverty, but you realize the core problem is that they're poor in spirit. Then you have people who are in physical poverty, but they are not poor in spirit. They have hopes and dreams and fears and disappointments, just like everybody else. But each day they're making different kinds of decisions. And their physical circumstances look similar, but they're dramatically different because they decided to have agency.

Speaker 1 44:34

Absolutely.

Speaker 4 44:36

You know, someday we're gonna have to do another show, talk about the influence of AI. One of the things I'm concerned with, young adults I work with today, is that they let AI uh rob them of agency. They essentially just ask their AI chatbot what they should or shouldn't do. And it gives them a word salad of good sounding ideas that make no sense if you were to think about them. But, you know, it it it enables you to not have to think or to do anything. And that I think is where the woke right has gone off the rails is they're essentially saying, well, yes, we're all victims, but we're victims of people who are on the left rather than victims of people who are on the right. The idea that we would just reject of that framing altogether, because nothing in the world is ever that simple, and there is no pure dialectic, you you have all these different shades of issues that are taking place. And if you focus on one thing at a time, you can generally make life a little better for yourself and for those around you, with setbacks obviously. Then all of a sudden you think, okay, wait a second, the biblical idea of salvation, starting from the inside out, that cultural engagement proceeds from who I am as a person, that the words are expressions of the heart. And that out of a deep well, um our words and actions come forth, then we have to take personal responsibility for it, even if there are many forces arrayed against us that make that difficult. But why would that be bad? See, that's the whole idea of resilience. When we're teaching this to our students at Summit Ministries, if you apply apply your mental thinking to the way you do physical exercise. I I ran yesterday, I'm hobbling around today. I ran on a trail. I probably, you know, I went farther than I should have. I'm sore. I'm not permanently damaged, but I am sore. And that soreness is telling me that my body is having to get busy, work overtime to strengthen. And my body is essentially saying, Oh my word, if he's gonna keep doing this, we have to be a different kind of body. You know, we have to grow and strengthen our, you know, have to repair repair these broken down muscles in a way that creates strength. That's what we do. That's the whole idea of training.

Scott Allen 47:08

Yeah, strong.

Speaker 4 47:09

Is that you push yourself into what is hard so that you get stronger. Why would we not apply that to our thinking about our mental world and our social world?

Scott Allen 47:23

Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of reasons. I understand people that want to claim this kind of permanent victim status. It it it's nice not to it it you're not responsible, you know. And again, I think one of the most diabolical, you know, reasons is that it puts the onus, it puts the evil in the world out there beyond you. You know, it it essentially, again, it justifies you. You know, somebody else is the the world is wrong, it's broken, and you're to blame. And boy, that's such a diabolically evil thought. Because once people are convinced of that, yeah, they'll go to they'll the next step is is murder. You know? Of course, yeah, it's uncurable. It's prison camps and you know everything that happened in all these Marxist experiments.

Speaker 4 48:06

French Revolution.

Scott Allen 48:07

Yep, exactly. And that's what we're seeing, isn't it? You know? But but but bring all this back to Israel because uh I I how why Israel? What what i I'm still just baffled by it. If anything you would have thought after you wrote your book, should Christians sh support Israel, there would have been sympathy for the Jews. And it turned out to be not the case in spades. What what just talk a little bit more about what you've seen and how you make sense of that?

Luke Allen 48:35

Yeah,

Gen Z Turns Israel Into Test

Luke Allen 48:36

and if I could expand on that, I just I'm I'm shocked by this. I'm I'm continuously shocked because five years ago, if you had asked my peers what are your thoughts on Israel, most of us wouldn't have cared. Right. I didn't I didn't really care. You know, it doesn't really affect us much. And if you read the Bible a lot, you know about Jews, so in biblical times. But that was about it. Uh but now we look at these this research coming out. I mean, this one from Gallup was this year, and it says, you know, who are you more sympathetic towards Gen Z, uh Palestine or Israel? And the graphs just plummet on Israel's side. The the sympathy from Gen Z towards Israel is twenty-three percent right now, whereas Palestine is fifty-three percent. So I just don't get what what the hyperfixation on this topic is.

Scott Allen 49:19

And it's slightly so hot. Any conversation you get in with people that are Luke's age or younger, they just immediately want to go there, right? And and and just like you said, a few years ago, nobody cared.

Speaker 4 49:31

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, it it it is a it's a it's a lightning rod. And you know, uh what we mean by that is it's the thing sticking up that is gonna make things hot. Right. That that's that's how people see it. And for some, it is a you know, it's a winnowing tool. Are you a human being worthy of conversation? Should I even dignify your existence by talking with you? And I'm I'm, you know, I might, if I'm really, really interested in Israel or anti-Semitism or you know, Palestine or whatever, I might use that as my winnowing tool to decide whether or not you're even of value enough to engage. Um, so why why is that? What's

Three Stories Behind Modern Anti-Semitism

Speaker 4 50:18

actually going on? I think it is that oppressor versus oppressed mindset coming in spades, but it it forks into, I think, three different manifestations depending on what people's worldview is. So you've got some people who are on the left. In the academic terms, they call them egalitarian communitarians. They they they want to see every single person as equal in outcome, and the government is somehow as the most agentic aspect of life, the most powerful, most all-encompassing. Somehow the government is responsible for ensuring the equality of outcome. So you've got those people, um, those you'd say people on the left, progressives. Then you have people on the right who are more focused on uh maybe higher hierarchy. In the academic world, they call them hierarchical individualists because professors have to make up words to show that their jobs are important. But but the idea that, you know what, you got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Uh the reason this person is wealthy is not necessarily because they're a trust fund baby. It's because they worked really hard and they came up with smart ways to actually grow value in the economy. That's and if you want to do that too, you can do it. Now it's harder in some states. You're in Oregon, I'm in Colorado. I just found out yesterday we have 60,000 environmental regulations regulating business in the state of Colorado. So if you want to start a business, is that all you should not start it here. You should start it in Alabama or Tennessee. Uh you should not start it here because you're, you know, you're gonna have all of these incredible regulatory hurdles that prevent you from actually growing value. But that's the idea. You're gonna you can actually grow value. Okay. So you've got the people on the right, more individual, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, people on the left know the government is powerful and the government can solve all of our problems. And then you have people who are Christians and they waver back and forth between these two viewpoints. And in your book, Scott, is is epic. I hope everybody's read your book about biblical justice versus social justice, and maybe that's why you're watching the show. But what you point out in there is that Christians fall for propaganda and they take scripture and they will use it to propagandize others, to force people into a position of shame. Uh, you know, and there, I'm not going to name any names right now of people who are out there, but man, Christians are right there. So your view on Israel is going to depend on whether you are from the right or the left and whether there's Christian salt on it. Okay. So here's how I here's how I would frame that. If you're a person on the left, your beef with Israel is that they are a colonialist. That they were a new country started in the 1940s, imposed on people who were already living there. Now, the people living there didn't have a country. They had been, you know, taken over by all these different groups, the Turks and then the British and so forth. But this new state plopped right down in the middle of uh the this in the Middle East. That was a colonialist enterprise. Britain was involved with it, the United States was involved in it. And we might not be able to attack the United States, even though we believe the United States is colonialist. This is the left speaking here, but we can attack Israel and that will give us some sense of righteousness. So that's where the left is coming from. That's the left's beef with Israel and with Jews. The right's beef with Israel and with Jews, it's not colonialism, it's conspiracy. That the the reason we aren't as successful as we want to be is because of the Jews. Okay, it can't possibly be that we have 60,000 environmental regulations in the state of Colorado that make it difficult for me to run a business. It has to be the fact that Governor Paulis is Jewish. That has to be the explanation. So this conspiracy thinking that people on the right embrace causes them to um do a you know, to to to stop thinking about the world uh from uh a standpoint of confidence or trust or uh a sense of hope, but instead to see the world from a paranoid standpoint and say, you know what, I I'm I'm I need to feel special here. And the only way I can feel special is to claim some kind of knowledge that other people don't possess. I know, in fact, that it was the Bilderbergers or these other Jewish families or whatever, literally controlling the world behind the scenes. And the reason we know they're controlling the world behind the scenes is because they don't leave any fingerprints, right? That's that's kind of the conspiracy thinking. The evidence is that there is no evidence.

Luke Allen 55:31

That's an impossible argument to diffuse as well. I know it's nothing to attack.

Speaker 4 55:37

There's nothing exactly, exactly. Yeah, see, see, that's how they're that's why you know they're so good, because there's no evidence. Um all right. There are ways to counteract this, but then how do Christians look at this? So they're kind of thinking, you know, colonialist on the left, conspiracy on the right. How do Christians think of it? So some Christians have begun to reach back into the early times in the Reformation, back to Luther and to Calvin, and take the idea of the church and say the church replaces the Jews in God's plan. So people sometimes call this replacement theology, or you know, there are all other kinds of terms rather than replacement theology that people use, but that is the basic idea. So if you're on the left, you hate Israel because you think it's colonialist. If you're on the right, you hate Israel because you are have a conspiracy mindset. If you're a Christian, you hate it, you're supposed to now hate Israel because the church replaced Israel and Jews are irrelevant to God's plan. In fact, I was at a Christian college and uh I ended up in a conversation, 14 professors and me in the room. And all of them were against me, some of them more vociferously than others, but they all insisted God had divorced Israel. That the Jews have been divorced by God. They are a spurned ex-spouse that committed adultery and should be shamed forever and gone, out of our thinking, not relevant to anything that is happening in the world. Not everybody in that room hates Israel as a political unit because they see that Israel is a force multiplier for the power of the United States, but they don't think Jews are relevant in God's plan. And they had, you know, some of them had some quite nasty terms for the way they were describing, you know, Jews.

Scott Allen 57:39

Um, did you say historically, just focusing on church and theology for a second in that particular view, that replacement view? Uh historically, has that been that hasn't been a mainstream view, has it? That's been kind of a fringe view, hasn't it? Do you are you have to have a lot of people who have Luther Luther reported that, didn't he?

Luke Allen 57:56

I mean, he's one of the more well-known people who are.

Speaker 4 57:57

He's part of the problem, yes. Uh yeah, I did a I did a show um on stories of anti-Semitism, and we did talk about Luther a lot, especially in his latter years. He said some really horrific things about Jewish people. And uh the kinds of things that I'm I know my Lutheran friends will be screaming right now about this, but a reasonable person looking at those statements would see them as an incitement to violence against Jews. That's what I'm gonna go with. I appreciate very many things about Luther, but I you have to grapple with the reality that he did write these things, and some people used them as a justification for violence against Jews. And when you look at them, you have to say, you know, to be fair, some of these statements look like an incitement to violence. That I I just I don't know what to do with that. I'm just saying that that is the way it is. So, yes, I think it did arise maybe uh through the Reformation, but you can't say that alone because the Catholic Church has had in you know fits and starts many anti-Jewish times. It was probably not among in the papacy uh maybe until John Paul II, until maybe a little bit earlier than that, where finally Catholic leaders started saying the Jews are our brothers. But that was an enormous breakthrough uh in in Catholic thinking. So, yes, so we have a broken track record as Christians in protecting Jews. I think you can see some anti-Semitism even going back to some of the church fathers. But the it would not have been the Apostle Paul. I don't see how you can look at Romans 10, 11, I don't see how you can look at Galatians 5, I don't see how you can look at Ephesians 2, especially.

Scott Allen 1:00:04

Well, and even back in Genesis, you know, when God makes his promises that found that begin the nation of Israel through Abraham, you know, those are promises that God makes that the word is used, the word that's used is irrevocable. You know, and uh to me that's pretty clear, you know, and it's also who I know God to be. God is a God of promises, and he's faithful to his word. That's the cup the whole idea of covenant, even if we are unfaithful, and the Jews have been unfaithful over and over again, so have we Christians very often. So it's not just a Jewish thing, but God has been faithful, he's faithful to his word. So yeah, I I I it to me it's the certainly the the the theology I grew up with since I was a you know teenager, and um it wasn't this replacement idea. You know, it it was yeah, God, you know, the the the nation, the ethnicity, the the Jewish people, he's still God still has a place in his heart, in his word for them. The story is not finished yet. And so we need to be uh viewing them with great respect and um and and hope, you know, that God is going to, you know, he's going to be redemptive to them, you know, in the future as well. So um yeah, I I it it distresses me when I hear this kind of new replacement kind of theology. And y it seems to you uh don't don't you think it's become quite prevalent right now? I don't know about mainstream, but it seems like it's quite prevalent, uh at least I think it's very prevalent.

Speaker 4 1:01:35

Yeah, the uh and most people don't like that term replacement theology. They use the term supersessionism.

Scott Allen 1:01:41

But it amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?

Speaker 4 1:01:44

It it does. There is a soft version and a hard version, maybe. I think you can identify that people approach supersessionism differently. The soft supersessionism says uh we don't know exactly what God's plans for the Jews are, but we believe the power of Christ is so extraordinary that he's calling people to himself, even people who are can identifiably be seen as part of a group that had largely rejected Christ. And then you have hard supersessionists who are saying, Nah, yeah, we're God's done with the Jews. There's nothing, there's nothing, there's no point in trying to save them at this point. Yeah, there's no. The hard supersessionists are the ones I have the hardest time with because they're essentially proclaiming a collective form of salvation. They're there they are the woke right because they're saying, you know, salvation has to come from outside of you. The only way you can ever change is if all of the systems of the world around you change. And if they get better, then you can get better. And they sort of they sort of camp out on that from this really harsh uh perspective of, oh, well, are the Jews going to be saved? I what do I say to that? You know, well, my response usually is, well, I I wonder if the Baptists are going to be saved. I mean, honestly, where do you find in scripture the idea that either the whole group is saved or the whole group is condemned? I I don't find that. I I certainly don't find that in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It's certainly not the gospel of Jesus that the Apostle Paul or the Apostle Peter preached. So where would you find that exactly in Scripture? The idea that everybody's saved or nobody's saved, or that salvation is somehow collective. But when people talk about Jewish people, that's how they act. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 1:03:43

Yeah.

Scott Allen 1:03:45

You probably need to wrap up here. Luke, go ahead with your question there. Yeah.

Luke Allen 1:03:48

Well, not to mention that just because a group seemingly is oppressing the world, a Christian response to that isn't, oh, I should hate them. You know, where do we see that in the gospel? But back to my question, or uh, we were talking about a little bit ago when I was saying it's an impossible argument to refute. I have a real hard time with that, Dr. Mars, when someone says it's all a conspiracy, Luke, you don't see it yet, and you've been very heavily influenced by all the uh Israeli propaganda, and therefore you can't, you're not enlightened yet to what's going on with the big conspiracy that the Jews are running the world. I don't have a response to that. I don't know what to say. I'm just I uh my only response is prove it. But they're like, oh, just give me some time, we'll figure it out, and then we'll know.

Beating Conspiracy Thinking With Inoculation

unknown 1:04:32

Yeah.

Speaker 4 1:04:33

Well, so when you have an idea that is so all-encompassing that it's essentially irrefutable, the opposite idea is equally irrefutable. So if you were to say to them, let me give you my theory of this, it's all a grand conspiracy, and you are unenlightened to the fact that Palestinian propaganda is ruling the entire world. And soon you will come to understand it if you study it enough. I don't need to prove this, it's just true. How would you refute me?

unknown 1:05:07

Yeah.

Speaker 4 1:05:08

Yes.

Scott Allen 1:05:09

So it's good to do that.

Speaker 4 1:05:12

Here's how we approach this at Summit Ministries, we have to think about this a lot because a lot of our students are coming in, all kinds of things they've learned and picked up over the years. We think about inoculation theory. You you try to uh you try to really do three things. First of all, you want to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. We study, is there a Christian worldview? Tomorrow night I'll be spending two hours with our students asking that question and demonstrated there is there is a coherent pattern of ideas, starting in scripture, and you know, maybe uh deuced along by Christian tradition and thoughtfulness of people who believed it through time. But there is a there is a Christian worldview. The second thing is to not be taken captive, to identify the hollow and deceptive philosophies that would take us captive. Uh then and then finally is to set the captives free. You recognize that there it's a similar process that takes place in your body, you have to be exposed to some of these bad ideas in order to really be strengthened against them.

Speaker 1 1:06:14

Right. Absolutely.

Speaker 4 1:06:15

Is is part is part of it. And that scares a lot of people. They don't want to do it. But the truth is, you know, if if you if you go off to college and you think that your physical body is going to be inoculated against all of the novel viruses you're going to encounter because your parents breastfed you, you're that's only going to last, you know, and the study, there are studies on this, it lasts literally six weeks. And then you're sick. Well, the same thing is true mentally. If you only go off with that passive immunity to college, it lasts about six weeks, in my experience. And active immunity, on the other hand, where you've intentionally examined and developed a resilience or resistance to bad ideas, that kind of immunity, active immunity, lasts for years, if not for an entire lifetime. So just as it's true in our physical bodies, it's also true in our minds. So we take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. And when you do that, then conspiracy thinking begins to lose its hold on you because you realize I'm not really all that special. I don't really have any special knowledge. I'm trying to develop a sense of a hope-based worldview rather than a paranoid one. I've decided I can't control everything, but the things I can control, I will act on. Then you begin to reverse the process.

Luke Allen 1:07:38

Well, that was a great response.

Final Takeaways And Next Steps

Scott Allen 1:07:40

Thanks. Well, and just it's a good reminder for us to say thank you, Dr. Meyer, for Summit Ministries and encourage all of our listeners who have uh college age, high school age kids to check it out because uh uh that's exactly what you're doing. You're you're helping with that process of mental inoculation, and that's what we need. So uh thank you for that. Thank you for your books, raising gender confident kids. Should Christians support Israel? Are you gonna come out with a 2.0 version of should Christians support Israel? I think you should.

Speaker 4 1:08:11

I know, you know, you're not the first person to say that. I it's it's been it's kind of been on my mind. I I've moved on. I I'm super concerned, you know, we were concerned about gender right now. What my students are dealing with is kind of a post-Christian conservatism if they're on the right, or even a post-human liberalism if they're on the left. So I'm thinking a lot about issues like democratic socialism and things like that. So yeah, just pray for discernment about what are the most important things. We can't address every single issue, but whatever we do address, we want to address it in a way that equips people to address more than just the one issue discussed in the book.

Scott Allen 1:08:50

Amen. Amen. Well, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Meyer. It's so great to be with you again. Thanks for your great work. And uh, we're just so grateful your voice is out there and your your clarity of of thought, biblical thought. So keep up the good work, and we look forward to having you on again soon.

Speaker 4 1:09:05

Yeah, thank you, Scott. Thanks, Luke.