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Lululemon's new drop of daily essentials feels like a deep breath of fresh air. Breezily is a collection of drapey pants, shorts and tanks designed to mix and match with your wardrobe as the weather warms up. It's all made in our lightweight, stretchy, swift fabric. Throw on these everyday staples after practice and bring an airy feel to your daily moves. Shop the Breezily collection now@lululemon.com A pastor stands on a stage in 2026 and tells thousands of people we're living in the last days. The signs are everywhere. The enemy is godless. They're coming for your children. And real Christians are running out of time to take the country back before the end so we can usher in the coming of Christ. He thinks he's quoting the Bible. He's actually quoting a retired 19th century lawyer, Con man and cult leader with a forged resume. In part one, we traced how white Christian nationalism was built. The founding myth, the cross on fire, the segregation academies, the Wyrick machine, the opposition to women's rights. At return, we followed the money and the power and the strategy. Today, we're going to follow the mythology first, the rapture, the belief that Jesus will snatch true believers up into the sky before a final tribulation. Most American evangelicals treat it as ancient, obviously biblical and church historical belief. It's none of those things. It was assembled in the 1830s by a British preacher named John Nelson Darby, a system called dispensationalism. And for 18 centuries before him, the church had simply never taught it. It was not part of church doctrine. Then, the book that smuggled it into America, the Scofield Reference Bible, published by Oxford in 1909. It did something so clever, it printed Darby's interpretations as study notes on the same page as the scripture, so that millions of readers absorb one man's 19th century theology as though it were the word of God itself. Divinely inspired, infallible, univocal. It is, I would argue, one of the most influential books in American history, of course, and almost nobody outside of the church has ever heard of it. And we'll fix that today. And then we'll watch the whole thing get weaponized. Because in the 1950s, white Christian nationalism found the perfect enemy. Godless communism, the ussr, the Cold War. Let this MO movement rebrand raw power seeking his patriotism to fuse the cross and the flag so tightly together that questioning one became treason against the other. Under God in God we trust. God's America against the atheist hordes. The fusion that was a Choice made by specific people for specific reasons in a specific decade. And here's the part that should make us concerned. They've never stopped using the language. I'm going to be reading things today that you'll be like. I hear that all the time. I hear that from conservative pulpits. I hear it from the church. I hear it because that language never stopped. It has been a enormous wealth of political propaganda. The godless enemy within, the Marxists coming for your family. Anyone who opposes a decision by the United States is a communist. The apocalyptic clock, the end times, urgency that justifies anything. The end always justifies the means. Because if the world is ending, the rules don't apply. And if what I'm doing politically is because of God's will, well, then you're not just my political rival, you're my enemy and the enemy of my God. And the script from 1944 reads like a press release from this morning. It's going to sound familiar. It's the same sermon. They just changed the name of the devil, the name of the enemies. And we're going to talk all about it today on Flipping Tables. Hello and welcome back, everybody. First big thanks to the new Patreon supporters. Thank you so much for signing up for supporting my work. You get these episodes ad free. You're getting to vote on topics. I'm doing my yesterday's news on Patreon as well, my morning news recaps during the week and also going to do some breakdowns where I get to see sit with the news headline or a historical moment a little bit more and really hash out why it's so important. Some good news today. As of today, we now have guaranteed birthright citizenship thanks to the Supreme Court actually issuing a good ruling. The Constitution as it is written, will stand and protect those of us who have birthright citizenship, which is all of us, by the way. So it was nice to actually see a news headline that was a little bit more positive. If you listen to the last episode, we covered a lot of history right up until the Rapture industrial complex. We talked about the organized, organized triggers against religious opposition, women's suffrage. We talked about the fight for the era, the abortion debate, the mortgage equality fight, how all of these wedge issues were created in order to fight for segregation and the religious liberty to be racist and discriminate against black people. Today we're going to get more into the mythology behind the movement, the Rapture, and how that has played such a critical role in our foreign relations and in what the language we used around the Cold War and the language that we use now. And because this is a little bit on the longer side, I'm just going to dive in. So there's a theological framework that tens of millions of American evangelicals have absorbed so completely. They think that it's actually doctrine the church has always believed in, even though it was invented in the 1830s. They think it is found throughout the Bible. When it was developed by one Irish British preacher who had a vision, so he said, built a system around it and then sold it. Because of course, and when America bought annotated Bibles financed by oil money, popular novels and 100 years of Bible college curriculum, it is essential to understand how Christian nationalism got its apocalyptic energy and how it fused with American political power and foreign policy. The framework is called pre millennial dispensationalism. And almost everything you think you know about the Rapture, the Tribulation, you've heard me talk about this before, we've covered it really fully. We're going to revisit it here in the context of Christian nationalism and its language of the end times Apocalypse. The end is near. And the urgency that they use also just a warning. I'm on the beginning of a three day fast. That is something I do for spiritual work for myself. I do plan on doing an episode on some spiritual practices that I've adopted for myself, my internal health, my mental health. So if that's something you would like to hear, please comment on Patreon or comment on these episodes and I would be happy to do that. But if I seem a little different, it's because I'm in the middle of that fast. John Nelson Darby was an Irish British barrister turned Plymouth Brethren minister who in the 1830s developed a theological framework for reading Bible prophecy that has essentially no precedent in Christian history at all. The core innovation that he created was the system of dispensations, discrete periods of history in which God relates to humanity according to different rules. So it almost creates this dialogue that God changes based on the moment in history, based on the people, which kind of refutes the idea that that God is constant, God is unchanging, God is always love, God is always just. Well, he acts differently with humanity, with different rules according to this belief system. The Rapture as Darby understood it, is a secret pre tribulation event in which true believers are caught up to heaven suddenly, without warning, before a seven year period of judgment called the Tribulation. After the Tribulation, Christ returns physically and visibly defeats the forces of the Antichrist at the Battle of Armageddon establishes a literal thousand year kingdom on earth the millennium after which comes the final judgment, heaven and the new earth. This doctrinal system does not appear in Christian theology before Darby at all. The church fathers don't teach it, origin doesn't teach it, Augustine doesn't have it, Aquinas doesn't have it, Calvin, Luther, John Wesley, all of them. There is a broad Christian tradition of expectation of Christ's return. That's the ancient doctrine, the specific sequence, this pre tribulation rapture, the dispensational reading is a 19th century invention. Darby made repeated tours in North America in the 1860s and 70s where he found extraordinarily receptive audiences in the post civil war American evangelical world. American Christianity had always had strong millennial streak, the expectation that America had this special role in God's plan, even though the Bible wasn't written in English and America didn't exist and that the end of history was approaching, that current events were fulfillments of biblical prophecy. This is why many of you, I mean if you're above the age of 25, you have, you have survived, you know, maybe 18 rapture prophecies at this point, maybe more. Darby's systematic approach channeled this energy into a specific detailed framework that felt biblical, felt authoritative and it felt comprehensive. And then we have Dwight L. Moody, who lived from 1837 to 1899, was the most influential American evangelist of the 19th century. He preached to an estimated 100 million people over his career. He founded Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in 1886, which became a major dispensationalist training center. And if you again, if you grew up in evangelicalism or any kind of Christian fundamentalism, you've heard of Moody Bible Institute. Moody himself was not a systematic dispensationalist, but he was deeply influenced by Darby's thinking and he platformed dispensationalist teachers through Moody Bible Institute. Dispensationalism became the standard framework for training evangelical ministers, teachers, missionaries for the next century. The Niagara Bible Conference from 1876 to 1897 assembled dispensationalist ministers from across North America annually and formally established, quote, the five fundamentals of biblical faith, including biblical inerrancy, Christ's literal second coming, that would define American fundamentalism. This, these are kind of unique beliefs and characteristics to American Christianity. The conferences were enormously influential in spreading dispensationalist ideas through the evangelical world. And then we get to the Schofield Reference Bible, Cyrus Ingerson Schofield who lived from 1843 to 1921, was a Kansas lawyer and minister whose personal biography is a little complex. He had been convicted of forgery. He'd abandoned his wife and children and had a series of ethical problems that would normally disqualify someone from ministry. But if you've been watching things recently, there are moments in history, especially when it comes to Christian nationalism and fundamentalism, where men who cheat on their wives, abuse their wives, abuse their children, do drugs, commit fraud, assaults. Part of the Epstein files. It doesn't disqualify them from office or the pulpit. And Scofield was the same way. He became a congregationalist minister, became a dispensationalist, and produced a study Bible that placed his own interpretive notes. Remember, these are his notes, not God's notes, not scholars notes. He's. He's a lawyer. He's not even a biblical scholar. He placed these notes in this Bible. He notes presenting Darby's dispensationalist system as the obvious authoritative reading of scripture Directly in the margins, along the king, alongside the King James text. So he just decided that this was true, put it in this Bible, and this Bible took off. The Scofield reference Bible was published in 1909 by Oxford University Press. That's. And that's just Oxford University Press. The association with a prestigious academic publisher gave Scofield this novel theological annotations he put in here. It gave the appearance of scholarly authority that had they had not earned on their own merits. For generations of American evangelicals, the margin notes in Scofield's Bible were as authoritative as the text itself. It might as well have been scripture. And then it comes from this very prestigious publisher. Of course, people are going to assume that a scholar wrote it or that it's been verified, but it wasn't. Students of the Bible were taught to read the notes. The notes became part of the doctrine. Scofield invented the rapture sequence, and Oxford stamped it with credibility of an ancient university. Dallas Theological Seminary, which was founded in 1924, became the most important academic center for dispensationalist thought in America. It trained ministers who spread the framework through thousands of churches. By the mid 20th century, dispensationalism was just a theological position. It was the water they swam in. It is actually very unusual to find evangelicals who don't believe this specific sequence of the end times because of a Bible. A lawyer who was a scoundrel put together, deciding he would imprint his own beliefs into the margins. And then they. Those margins became part of the text itself. And it really was kind of this, this forerunner of study Bibles, the study Bibles that we have now that you can see the notes. If you do want to study Bible and you want to know history and you want to know that scholars put it together, get the new revised Standard Version, the updated edition, the SBL study Bible that is actually built and written by the Society of Biblical Literature. These are thousands of scholars with different specialties. Language, history, anthropology, art. And they can give the best most. It's first of all, it's the most accurate English translation we have. And then second of all, you get historical breakdowns before each book and before each section of books that gives you the context that those books existed in. Then we move forward into the Cold War. So now we have, from John Nelson Darby and the Scofield Reference Bible, we have recreated this end times language that didn't exist before. And then the Cold War comes in. The Cold War gave American dispensationalism something it needed. They needed a global villain. They needed a symbol of the end times. The Soviet Union, officially atheist, militarily powerful, ideologically opposed to everything American Christianity claimed to stand for, fit perfectly into the dispensationalist scheme as the Antichrist Empire or the King of the north or the forces of Gog and Magog. Heard that recently. The forces of Gog and Magog. Bush used that in the Iraq War. That language gets recycled over and over and over. Eisenhower's editions of In God We Trust to currency and Under God to the Pledge of allegiance in the 1950s, remember, they did not exist there. This, this is not something that America has always had. People will use that as an argument that we're a Christian in nation. It's not. We were. It was added in the 50s as propaganda against the Soviet Union. It was explicitly anti communist messaging. Godless communism versus Christian America. This fused American national identity with the Christian identity in the pledge children recited every morning in school. By the time they grew up. The fusion is invisible. You, even if you're not someone who's religious or you don't declare being a Christian, you have this now connection between patriotism and American Christianity. The dispensationalist reading of the Cold War gave American military and foreign policy a theological justification. We're not just defending democracy, we're defending God's chosen nation against the forces of spiritual darkness. Again, Bible not written in English, not written for Americans. America didn't exist. But now there's this rhetoric that we are God's chosen nation. And also that if you defy the nation in some way or don't agree with the decision or call out against a genocide or the murder of school children, then you're not just a sinful, godless communist. You're also a traitor to your nation by holding it accountable. This is Christian nationalism's apocalyptic version. The stakes are not just national, they're cosmic. You're not just a citizen. You are a soldier in the Lord's army. I was at an event this weekend visiting my brother before he deploys, which I'm really bummed about. But someone started singing the I am a C. I am a ch. And I nearly panicked. I was like the. The flashbacks that immediately hit. But think about that song in that language of training children. You're a soldier in the Lord's Army. It not only dehumanizes children into weapons, but it also plays into this language of you're not just a citizen. This is the end times. You're a warrior. You need to be willing to die for your faith. And then we get to the Six Day War. On June 5th of 1967, Israel launched preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian forces beginning the Six Day War. On June 10, Israel had captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the west bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Most significantly for American evangelicals, Israel captured and took control of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, for the first time since the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and in 70 CE. For dispensationalists, this was not just a military victory, it was a biblical prophecy unfolding in real time. They also believed that the re establishment of Israel in 1948 was also the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Luke 21:24 says Jerusalem, quote, will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles are fulfilled, end quote. The return of Jerusalem to Jewish control in dispensationalist reading meant that the times of the Gentiles were ending. The end times clock was running, the Rapture was closer than ever. American evangelical interest in Israel was transformed overnight height from academic to passionate Christian Zionism. The belief and support for the state of Israel is a theological obligation because Israel's existence and expansion is necessary for the fulfillment of the end times. Prophecy became one of the defining features of the American evangelical political identity. Hal Lindsay's the Late Great Planet Earth, published by Zondervan in 1970, brought this theology to a mass popular audience. Lindsay decoded current events. The Soviet Union, Israel, China, Arab nations and the European Common Market as fulfillment of biblical prophecy laid out the rapture tribulation second coming season sequence in language anyone could follow P S. None of that's in the Bible and it's not true. But when you can dress it up and you can sound like you know what you're talking about. The book was the best selling non fiction work in the United States for the entire decade of the 1970s. It sold 35 million copies over its lifetime. It was adapted into a film narrated by Orson Welles. An entire generation of American Christians absorbed its framework as truth of how the world would end. Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins Left behind series. You remember these, right? Everybody, if you are a mid to young millennial, you remember this, right? The rapture nightmares that came from this nonsense. I will say this is one of the unique things about my upbringing growing up in such extreme Christian nationalism is that my dad was not a dispensationalist, which was fascinating. So he was very opposed to this line of thought because he was like, this is not scriptural, it's not in the Bible, I'm not going to participate in it. I don't know that he knew the whole history of it at least he never talked to me about it. But he was very clear that he did not believe this. He didn't think it was biblical. And he actually, at first, and I wish he. I wish I wouldn't have begged him, he wouldn't let me read the Left behind series because he kind of thought it was heresy. He thought it was biblical abuse and that it was lying to people. He eventually caved and let me read it, but with a very clear understanding, like he sat down with me and was like, you need to understand this is fiction. And it did not change my fear. But also it was very difficult for me at the time because so many of my friends believed it, the church believed it, the pastors, the deacons. But this is something to my dad's credit he refused to participate in because he didn't. He didn't think that it was actually biblical. So Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins left behind series beginning in 1995 took this further. Sixteen novels depicting the post rapture world with this novelistic detail, emotional urgency. Sold 80 million copies total. The books were consumed by evangelical readers, especially youth who process their theology through this fictional narrative. Their understanding of Israel, of current events, of foreign policy, of who is an enemy and who is an ally, was shaped by what they absorbed from these novels. John Hagee founded the Christian United for Israel in 2006, which now claims over 10 million members, making it the largest pro Israel organization in America, larger than any Jewish organization. Cufi Support for Israel is not rooted in solidarity with Jewish people as autonomous human beings with their own history and story. It's rooted in in the dispensationalist belief that Israel's existence, expansion and ultimately rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem are necessary prerequisites for the second coming of Christ in the Christian faith. Faith. So in most dispensationalists, end times theology. What happens to the Jewish people at the end? Do you know? Can you think about it? In the tribulation, 2/3 of the world's Jews are killed according to this theology, and one third who survived are preserved to convert to Christianity at Christ's return. In Tim LaHaye's eschatology, Jewish people who do not accept Jesus are left behind at the Rapture and face the tribulation. The Christian Zionists who most loudly proclaim their love for Israel and their support for Jewish people do so within a theological framework where Jewish people are ultimately props in story whose conclusion is their mass death or conversion. Their quote support for Israel is eschatological utility dressed up as solidarity. And that's so important for what's going on right now. There's obviously so much animosity and pushback. If you do not support a genocide in Gaza because it is not a war. If you are in conflict with a region that does not have a standing army, it is not a war. If you are creating mass graves of children, it is not a war. If you are targeting residences, hospitals, schools, because they're doing the exact same thing in Lebanon right now and Lebanon didn't strike them, that's not a war. That's an ideological genocide that Netanyahu has been very, very good at capitalizing on. Christian Zionists, you can absolutely believe in Israel's right to exist and also believe that the United States should not be so aligned with any nation that we support them no matter what they do, no matter what war crimes they commit, no matter how many people they kill. That's insane. I don't care who the country is, we should not have that level of support. We certainly should not be trying to pass bills to merge our militaries. That's insane. And the nation state of Israel, the military of Israel needs to be held accountable for the violent abuse of prisoners of war, including serial gang violent rape. The video that came out of the soldiers gang raping a Palestinian prisoner was released by an Israeli Official who could not defend it. And there was a mob who ran into that prison in defense of those soldiers. Those soldiers ended up walking, by the way it is on video. It was released, the world saw it, they walked and everybody over there celebrated. That's crazy. We should never align with any nation who is doing things like that. But if you're wondering and if you're someone who didn't grow up in this movement and you're like, how are Christians supporting this? How do they not see? How do they not. I don't understand. It's because of this. Because they believe that the blind support for the nation state of Israel directly relates to the physical returning of the of Christ. But also what they don't talk about is that in this belief system all of the Jews are either killed or convert or forced to convert. It's an insane ideology that neither supports Jewish people and their right to choose Judaism or any other faith, nor does it protect people who are being victimized right now. It has nothing to do with any of that. It has everything to do with the belief that America is like the feature point of Christianity, which is not true. Christianity, especially the early church and Paul's writings, is explicitly global. It's explicitly welcoming. It's explicitly for all. It is not for one group of people or one language or one faith. Now this has shaped this belief system which as I read it, and you're probably like, wow, when you say it out loud, that does sound pretty insane. This has shaped American foreign policy in the Middle east for 50 years. Evangelical Christian support for Israeli settlements, for rejecting a two state solution, for moving the u. S. Embassy to Jerusalem. These are policy positions derived from strategic interest. They are positions derived from the dispensationalist theology to get Christians on board. When Donald trump moved the u. S. Embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, evangelical Christians were among his most enthusiastic supporters of the decision. Not because of diplomacy, but because of what it meant prophetically. The fusion of Christian nationalism, dispensationalist end times theology and American political power is now so complete that they can barely be separated. You're not just running for office, you're fighting God's timeline. You're the apocalyptic urgency this generates in Christian nationalist movements. The sense that we are in a final battle, that compromise is impossible, that the stakes are eternal, comes directly from this theological framework invented by one man in the 1830s. And I do want to say this as well. I truly believe that many, many Christians believe this to be true from a good heart, from this is what they were told since they were children. I do not believe that the politicians and the leaders parroting these talking points believe it. I think they are using it to keep the Christian voting block on their side, on their team. They're lining their pockets with money. They know, especially the ultra wealthy. They know they can escape if they need to. We can. Can't. We'll get stuck here. But they know they can. But I, I do want to say that there are many people who are still indoctrinated in evangelicalism who think that the senator that parrots this or Pete Hegseth that parrots this believe the same things they do. I do not for a second believe that those leaders believe any of this. And before I move on to the Moral Majority's dirty secret and how this ties into kind of what we talked about in part one, I'm going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks. If you want these episodes ad free, you can sign up on Patreon, support my work, get bonus content, get the pop up meetings with me@patreon.com montemater all right, now we touched on this very lightly in part one, but I want to talk about the real origin story of the religious right, the one that actually happened, not the one that you're told because it's directly relevant to this theme that we have of using theology for political gain, but also using theology to maintain gender roles and have this pushback to women's rights. So the standard narrative that you'll be told about the religious right is Roe v. Wade was decided on January 22, 1973. Evangelical Christians were so horrified by the legalization of abortion that they organized to stop it. Jerry Falwell Senior and Paul Weyrich founded the moral majority in 1979. And the religious right was born as a movement defined by its opposition to abortion. That is not true at all. The Southern Baptist Convention currently again one of the most anti abortion denominations in the United States. Super misogynistic as well. Also having a really big sex abuse problem they won't deal with because of course, because God gave them an authority to abuse people without being questioned. Instead of actually dealing with the sex abuse, they're moving women out of leadership because it's women that are bringing these cases forward, of course, seems totally Christian response. They the Southern Baptist Convention passed formal resolutions in 1971, 1974 and 1976 supporting abortion access under a range of circumstances. The 1971 SBC resolution called on Southern Baptist to, quote, work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage of the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother. Boy, doesn't that sound different from what you hear now? The sbc explicitly supported what they were later to call murder when it became politically relevant, politically advantageous to use abortion. Evangelical Christians were not as a block horrified by Roe. Most of them supported it. Many saw a total abortion ban as a Catholic concern. The overwhelming majority of evangelicals absolutely believed in exceptions for rape and incest. They believed that a doctor should get to decide when there's a fetal fatal abnormality or risk to the mother, and that. But pro life meant caring about the emotional and mental health of the mother as well as her physical body and life. WA Criswell, one of the most prominent southern baptist pastors of the 20th century, very staunch conservative, said about Roe, quote, I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person. And it has always therefore seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed. Is your mind exploding right now as you're like running errands, driving to work? That's like an ultra conservative pastor who said that. James Dobson said that the Bible doesn't talk about, doesn't have an opinion on abortion. So therefore neither do I. So what changed? What made this the flagship issue of the religious right? In 1976, the IRS moved to revoke Bob Jones university's tax exempt status. Bob Jones university in Greenville, south Carolina, was a segregated institution. Black students were not admitted until 1971, when they were finally admitted. Interracial dating and marriage remained officially banned, A ban that remained in full effect until 2000. In the mid-1970s, the IRS concluded that an institution with discriminatory admissions and conduct policies did not qualify for tax exempt status under the law. Now, many of these schools and colleges were created in the wake of both the Scopes trial in the 20s and Brown versus the Board of education. When that passed, they opened segregation academies so that rich, wealthy families could send their white students to these segregation academies and not be forced to allow their child to go to school with black students. This is so the, the last week the religious liberty commission just. And this is last week, like right now, this is the 30th that I'm recording this. Last week, the religious liberty Commission released a 224 page report saying that the separation of church and state is not valid because it doesn't exist by that phrase in the Constitution. It absolutely exists in the Constitution, by the way. The principle exists. Thomas Jefferson named it as he was explaining the First Amendment to Baptist to guarantee that they would be protected, that there would never a national religion, that there would never be favoritism of one religion or the other, or that they wouldn't embrace one religion over the other. That's what he was explaining. And then they just use that phrase for the name of the concept moving forward. But what they just released was that separation of church and state doesn't exist. But it says explicitly in that document that religious institutions will not have to honor civil rights laws and be able to maintain their tax exempt status. It goes back to this. They are so angry that they were not allowed to keep their segregation academies. They considered it a violation of religious liberty to be forced to go to school with black people. That's what this is about. And they just released that document. I believe it came out Saturday or Sunday, saying that institutions that not only get government funds, government tax breaks that are tax exempt should not have to follow civil rights laws. Think of the implications of that. Not only can they segregate, they can refuse black people service, they can refuse queer people service, they can violate all of those laws, they can fire women for getting pregnant, they can force women to get married and they would still maintain their tax exempt status. That same document also says that churches, they want to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, that churches should be able to endorse and campaign for a candidate and still maintain their tax exempt status. Absolutely not. If the churches are going to start having an opinion in elections, they can pay their taxes. But this was the match. They didn't care about abortion, they cared about feminism, but only enough to try to like keep their hierarchy in order. They didn't care about gay rights, didn't give a. This was what they cared about. Paul Weirich, the conservative political strategist who co founded the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell Sr. Who also co founded the Heritage foundation with the money from Joseph Coors of the Coors Brewing family. Yes, Beer Money said this on record. He said that this was the match in 1990 interview that has been documented by historian Randall Ballmer and and you have heard me interview Randall on a previous episode. He is an expert in the separation of church and state. But this comes from his book Bad Faith. Wyrick stated that the issue that actually galvanized evangelical political organizing was not abortion. It was the IRS's attempt to take away tax exempt status of segregated Christian schools that were called segregation academies. Private schools established by wealthy white parents who did not want their children attending integrated public schools. He said that to a historian. He said this was what got people going. My grandfather founded a segregation academy. That is how serious and relevant this is. Segregation academies were found across the south and in parts of the Midwest and Rocky Mountain region in the late 1950s and 60s, specifically as a response to desegregation. They were typically organized by churches. I went to Liberty University, lca. The. The grade school attached to Liberty is a segregation academy. That's why it was founded. Founded. They were schools built to keep black and white children separate. By the mid-1970s, the IRS was coming for their tax exemptions, as they should. If you're not going to honor civil rights, you shouldn't have a tax exempt status. Full stop, period, end of sentence. Abortion became the public face of the movement because, as Wyrick himself explained, it was more palatable as an organizing principle to be opposed to abortion than as a religious group to openly defend the right to maintain racial segregation in religious schools. Again, they considered it a violation of religious liberty to force their children to have to go to school with black kids. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for 15amonth is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or $180 for 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy see terms. No, this country wasn't racist until Obama. Oh, so a black man became president and everyone suddenly got racist. Okay, you could not build a national political movement on the government should not make us integrate our schools, but you could build one on the government is murdering babies. The Moral Majority was built on a foundation of protecting racial segregation. Abortion was the rebrand. And there was. I want to insert something in here that I actually didn't cover in the script. There was this hybrid of things that happened at the same time. And I want to talk about something briefly that I actually didn't include in the script because there was kind of this hybrid of perfect moments of opportunity that led to the creation of the religious right in 1979. So Bob Jones did lose its tax exempt status. They actually didn't get it back until 2017. They just got it back. And they're still, as you would imagine, pretty racist. But another thing that happened at the time, if you've heard of a man named Francis Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer was one of the top theological and philosophical minds of the 20th century. He had a spiritual retreat in Labri in the Swiss Alps, where young evangelicals would come sit at his feet and learn from him. And if, like you're conjuring like a rabbi in your mind, it was very much that energy. So he created a five part film series with Everett Koop, C. Everett Coop, who would become the surgeon general under Reag, and with his son Frank Schaeffer, who directed and produced it called what Happened to the Children. And they went to the Dead Sea and they bought a bunch of baby dolls, like a thousand baby dolls, which is a wild thing to transport out there. And they put the baby dolls in the Dead Sea. So they're floating and then Francis Schaeffer comes out and preaches a sermon, standing among what looks like infant bodies about a country that discards its children. And it was this powerful image of like all these dead bodies around abortion that came out in 1979. Right. As the Moral Majority is trying, is wheeling and dealing to bring abortion into the vernacular as the new issue. Because they can't win on segregation anymore. And it makes them look bad. Yeah, because you're not a Christian. You can't be a Christian and be a racist. Sorry. Like you can't. Sorry. You're not a Christian. You're something else. You're something else. You're not a Christian. But because of that imagery, that message with Frank Schaeffer, that Frank Schaeffer directed this, his son Francis Schaeffer, and Wyrick and Jerry Falwell. Jerry Falwell started preaching against abortion in 1978, really started pushing it in 1979. And then Paul Weyrich would coin the Moral Majority. Frank Schaeffer eventually left the faith, recanted all of this, and openly confessed that his father and a small group of other people made abortion an issue. They manufactured it. He's like, he's basically said, we lied through our teeth faith and look at the harm that we've caused. Frank Schaefer walked away. So important context, because Jerry Falwell Sr. Had preached against the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling in 1958. His sermon, Segregation or integration, which explicitly argued that desegregation was destroying the relationship between the races, that God had intended separation. Oof. He used the curse of ham from Genesis, the same hermeneutical tradition that Southern preachers had used to justify slavery before the Civil War to argue for racial segregation as divinely ordained. He was not a defender of human dignity. He was a defender of white Southern power dressed in the language of Christian morality. And if you're unfamiliar with the curse of ham from Genesis, Ham is one of the sons of Noah. And in the story, Noah drinks too much, he passes out, he's nude in his tent. Ham comes in, sees the nakedness of his father. He goes and tells his brothers what going is what happened. And so his brothers walk in backwards with a blanket to cover their father's nakedness and not shame him. When Noah wakes up, instead of acknowledging that he drank too much and was belligerent. Belligerent, he curses his son for viewing his nakedness. And what they would teach was that the curse of ham was black skin. That's not biblical at all because in the region that all this takes place, most people have similar complexions. But it was literally manufactured to justify racism. And it was one of the hermeneutical traditions. And hermeneutics is just kind of a, a system of belief, a system of interpretation that Southern preachers use to justify slavery that because of the curse of Ham, them black people deserve to be enslaved. Reagan gave the moral majority what they wanted. Supreme Court nominees, abortion restrictions, hostility to the era, school prayer debates, rhetoric about Christian America. They gave him the votes. Reagan was divorced. He didn't attend church. We, we've, you've heard my two part series on him. His own daughter Patty Davis published a memoir about their difficult relationship. None of this mattered as long as he said the right things. It didn't matter if he did the right things. And how familiar does that feel right now? And before I get into the ramping up of the moral Majority, the Heritage foundation, how we got here. I'm going to take my second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. You can get these ad free by subscribing@patreon.com Monty Mater so again Paul Weyrich co founds the Heritage foundation in 1973 with 250000 from Joseph Coors. The Heritage foundation is now one of the most influential conservative think tanks in the United States with an annual budget of hundreds of millions. That's actually one of the difficult things right now about the political movements. And if you're like how do they get so much done? How are they influencing so much? They are outspending the left by impossible margins because the ultra wealthy and corporations are supporting this movement. Not because they believe in Christianity or any of that, but because Republicans and conservative policies always make them more money at our expense. This the Heritage foundation produced, obviously Project 2025. They produce policy papers, train conservative politicians, maintain relationships with a network of Christian nationalist organizations and funders. And it's the same thing we, you heard the conversation around Turning Point USA say things like Turning Point Inheritage are doing these conferences, paying people tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars to propagate these myths. I make good money working my butt off on social media like I was able to buy a home this last year. I make a fraction of what these people are making, pedaling these lies. These people are multi millionaires, the biggest conservative talking heads. These organizations, these donors. We're talking about multi, multi, multi millionaires and billionaires. After the Moral majority dissolved in 1989, at least in theory, Falwell declared victory, shut it down. They'd achieved sufficient judicial and political alignment. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition became the dominant organizing vehicle of the religious right through the 1990s. They still use the phrase Moral Majority, though. Ralph Reed as its director, took the lessons of the Moral Majority. Use churches as organizing infrastructure, frame every political issue as a moral issue, mobilize single issue religious voters on abortion, and systematize them on a national scale. Again, the churches have been involved in these campaigns and in this forever. Like, they may not be outwardly endorsing candidates, but they're endorsing issues. And therefore I believe firmly that the churches need to be taxed because, oh boy, would the language change if we started taxing churches fairly so that they are actually obligated to give money to care for the community and the infrastructure they exist in. And two, they should be audited did every single year to make sure they know where that money's going. Because I'm, I'm done with this interference in politics while you claim tax exempt status and religion. And then of course, James Dobson founded Focus on The Family in 1977 and the Family Research Council in 1983. These organizations produced radio programs, books, curriculum and political advocacy that have reached hundreds of millions of Americans. They campaign against abortion, contraception, gay rights, comprehensive sex education. And here's the thing is, you're like, wait a minute, don't they want, want people to like, only have kids when they're ready? The reason they're fighting contraception and comprehensive sex education is because they know that those are the two things that decrease unwanted pregnancy. And if that sounds hypocritical, it is. But their goal is to force white women to have as many babies as possible before they're ready. Remember the talking points from Turning Point usa. Have more kids than you can afford before you're ready. If they remove contraception and comprehensive sex education, which are proven to lower, lower unwanted pregnancies, they can force women to get pregnant not only to have more kids, but they can naturally push women out of education in the workforce without having to pass a law. And they can make sure women are dependent on men and they can take away a woman's choice and ability to plan her own family. Any pol, they're really opposed to any policy that treats women as equal, autonomous citizens rather than as primarily wives and mothers. They frame every one of these positions as a Christian position. This is a Christian nationalist move. Paul says there is no male or female. Christ elevated women to equality, to parity. Women were always in leadership. Women were part of Jesus. This is not a Christian belief system. It is a Christian nationalist one. So if you've been someone of faith and you've really struggled with that, understand you've struggled with it for good reason, because God did not create half the human race to subjugate them. When you're reading the scripture or you're listening to a teaching, that that sounds wrong, right? It's just like, I don't know about that. Always ask the question, does that sound like God wrote it or does that sound like a dude wrote it? Tony Perkins runs the Family Research Council today and is a regular advisor to the Republican presidents and members of Congress. The FRC's policies, positions on women, the queer community, on immigration, on church, state separation, are Christian nationalism fully, fully operationalized like they have. They have made this a science. And that is one of the things I'm hoping to build, is to help progress, sane people be more organized and, and operate on this scale. And then we see the SBC conservative resurgence from 1979 to 1990, the Southern Baptist Convention's journey to where it is today. Voting to ban women from pastoral ministry for the fourth consecutive year was engineered. Okay? These are created. None of this is by accident. This is not God's will. This is evil people doing evil things. And it was orchestrated by Paige Patterson and Paul Presley pressler. Beginning in 1979, Patterson, a seminary president, and Pressler, a Texas judge, executed a deliberate coordinated campaign to take over the SBC from the inside. Out the SBC structure meant the president had the power to appoint trustees to SBC institutions, including its six seminaries. If you could elect conservative presidents year after year, you could pack the seminary trustee boards. If you could pack the trustee boards, you could fire moderate or liberal faculty and hire only those committed to biblical inerrancy and the subordination of women. Women. And over a decade, they did exactly that. And think about this is what's happening with the presidents, right? If you can get a conservative president or at least one that'll do your bidding for money and power, you can stack the court. If you can stack the court, you can stack America with conservative anti women legislation for an entire generation. Term limits for everyone. By 1990, every moderate and progressive voice in the SBC leadership had been purged. And this we're seeing happen recently. What they did in the SBC is now going to happen in our government. With a terrible decision from the supreme court. They gutted 91 years of precedent. Last week, a 6, 3 ruling on Sunday, or I guess not Last week, this week, six three ruling on Sunday, the court overturned Humphrey's Executor vs United States and upheld Trump's firing of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter without cause. Prior to this, they had to have cause to fire people from these independent agencies. Now they can fire anyone from the ftc, the eeoc, the CPSC with no reason at all. All you tell them to break the law, bend the rules and they won't do it. You can fire them. What they are going to do is they are going to stack our government agencies with loyalists the same way they did with the Southern Baptist Convention. The president can install and fire partisan loyalists at agencies built specifically to prevent political interference. These agencies are supposed to be nonpartisan. They will now be full of loyalists that can be fired at any time time for any reason. We are about to witness what happened in the SBC happen at our independent government agencies. They're going to get rid of anyone who is not a yes man. Can you imagine the Federal Trade Commission being governed by yes men? For the people that are shorting the stocks? For the people that are doing insider trading now controlled by a yes man. Patterson for 30 years was one of the most powerful men in American evangelical Christianity. He shaped the theological training of tens of thousands of pastors through his leadership of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and then Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Seminary. So southeast southwest. In 2018, Patterson was fired from Southwestern Seminary and you're never gonna guess why. He had instructed a rape victim to not report her assault to law enforcement. He had told her to pray for her rapist and try to win him back. Back what? The actual flying squirrel. He had minimized credible abuse allegations against a seminary student, alleging, allegedly saying he wanted to, quote, break him down through rebuke rather than report the allegations. Men are not protectors. They protect each other. I don't want to hear it. Especially in this religious institution, there are a lot of really stellar good men out there, but our systems as a whole pole serve to protect men by men. He had reportedly made comments to students about female students physical attractiveness that were described as sexualizing and inappropriate because, of course, he was a pervert. His personal office contained a painting of a nude woman that he reportedly showed to visitors as a kind of test of what they would tolerate. Because when you create a system that gives God's divine power to you, just because you have a penis and questioning you is questioning God himself, you have built a system of abuse. When you have a system that does not allow for questions or defiance, doesn't have women in leadership to protect other women and children, this is what you get. The architect of the doctrine of women's submission in the Southern Baptist Convention was fired for protecting a rapist and for sexualizing women, many of whom were minors. Again, I wish I was surprised. I'm not. The man who built the theological infrastructure to remove women from church leadership was fired for failing to protect women from sexual violence and for treating women's bodies as objects. What a pattern. What a pattern. Again, the hypocrisy is not an embarrassing coincidence. None of them actually believe in the faith. They need power. And what a better way to say that God told you you deserve that power, to say that it's God's will to say these issues are against God. They're not. Power doesn't need to be consistent. It only needs to be loud enough to drown out the contradiction. And the louder the proclamation of moral authority, the more aggressively it tends to be protecting something that cannot withstand scrutiny. Let's talk about the televangelists. Jim Baker and his then wife Tammy Faye ran ptl, Praise the Lord, one of the most watched evangelical television networks in the United states. In the 1980 Daily show had an estimated 12 million viewers. In 1987, Baker's Church paid $279,000 in hush money to Jessica Han, the church secretary who alleged Baker had drugged and raped her. In 1980, when the payment became public, Baker resigned. In 1989, he was convicted on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He had been selling thousands of, quote, vacation time shares at Heritage usa, a Christian resort, to donors who could never actually use them because the resort had nowhere near the capacity to accommodate them. He raised $158 million in fraudulent timeshare sales. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison, ultimately served five before his sentence was reduced. Jimmy Swaggart was Baker's most prominent critic. He called Baker a cancer on the body of Christ. Agreed. In 1988, Swaggart was photographed with a prostitute at a motel. You guys notice a pattern? I just, I. I could do a whole episode on just, just the sex scandals of the male leaders of Christian nationalism. He delivered a tearful public confession. I have sinned against you, my Lord. Before his congregation on television and was briefly, briefly removed from ministry. Was restored and continued preaching. In 1991, he was stopped by police while driving with a different prostitute. When his Assemblies of God assembly told him he needed to step down again, he reportedly refused, saying the Lord had told him it was quote, quote, flat none of your business. End quote. Are you noticing a pattern that this is. None of this is about God. This male leadership thing is about avoiding accountability. Peter Popoff was a faith healer who sold miracle spring water on television. Divine water that would cure illness for and bring financial blessings in exchange for donations. He was exposed in 1986 by James Randy, who demonstrated on the Tonight show that Popoff was receiving information about audience members through a hidden earpiece fed by his wife, who read prayer requests cards collected before the services pop off. Declared bankruptcy in 1987, he returned to television in the 1990s. He's still operating, by the way. He still sells miracle spring water. He has earned $23 million per year from it in recent years. Do you know how much money I would make if I had no internal moral compass, if I had zero integrity like Jesus? He targets elderly people and people in financial desperation because, of course, he does all of this as a grip. Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Erica Kirk, Russell Vaught. Stephen Miller. It is a grift in the name of God. Kenneth Copeland runs the World of Faith Fellowship Network, a prosperity gospel operation that teaches that wealth and health are signs of God's favor. Right. Well, I mean, you know, this guy can't be bad. Even though he was convicted of rape, God allowed him to be rich. He allowed him to be rich. That must mean God has favor for him. Him. In a 2019 interview on the Australian television program 60 Minutes, Copeland said he could not fly commercial airlines because he would be sitting in a Long tube with, quote, a bunch of demons, end quote. And that exposure to the atmosphere of a commercial flight would disrupt his anointing and connection to God. And he said this to justify his owning of a $7 million private jet while not helping the community or feeding the poor, housing the homeless, or doing any of the things the Bible says to do. He operates out of a compound in Newark, Texas, that is tax exempt. As a religious organization, he is worth $300 million. Jesus said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Kenneth Copeland has decided that the needle is the problem. Obviously, I don't believe in wealthy spiritual leaders. I just flat out don't. I do not believe that if you are a claim to be a spiritual leader and you have millions and millions of dollars in a compound, in a vacation house and two private jets and 47 cars, while there are people in your congregation who are food insecure, you are a liar and a grifter, and you're evil, and you need to step down. Let's talk about the purity culture movement that arose in the wake of all these sex scandals of the leading evangelical leaders. Starting in the late 1980s and exploding through the 1990s and 2000s, American evangelical culture produced what became known as purity culture movement. Josh Harris's I kiss Dating Goodbye, 1997, was the flagship text. I mean, people would literally carry this around with their Bibles. A book arguing that dating itself was spiritually dangerous and that Christians should pursue courtship guided by parents and community, saving any and all physical contact, including holding hands and kissing in some cases. Cases. It sold nearly a million copies. Okay, so also, Harris wrote this at 21, and he had never attended seminary or received any pastoral training. He had never created a curriculum. He. He literally knew nothing, wrote this book, and it became gospel. It became literally like the youth groups. I mean, if you grew up in youth group in the 90s or the early 2000s. I was in the early 2000s, and you couldn't escape from this. Purity movement told young women specifically that their worth was tied to their sexual purity, that they were like chewing gum that someone else had already chewed, like tape that lost its stick, like roses from which the petals have been removed. The metaphors were explicit and sustained. You also get the used car. 1. Women who had experienced sexual contact, whether consensually or by assault, were told they were damaged, diminished, and less valuable. The burden of purity was placed almost entirely on women. Boys were told their sexual urges were Natural. But girls were not. Not girls were told it was their job to prevent those urges from being activated by dressing modestly and not being alone with boys. Because if a boy attacked her because she was alone with him, it was her fault, not his. The consequences of course have been so incredibly severe. Research has consistently shown that comprehensive sex education is more effective at reducing teen pregnancy. The same teen pregnancy their panic we don't have now, which I thought was the point and STI transmission than abstinence only education. Which is why why these people are pushing it. They push abstinence only education because they know it doesn't work and they want to trap women. True love weights the SBC affiliated abstinence pledge program launched in 1993 produced studies showing that pledge takers were no less likely to have premarital sex than non pledgers. Because of course it's like it's such a natural thing. They were less likely to use contraception when they did because they didn't know how to use it it and it increased the risk of pregnancy and disease while providing no statistical benefit. The purity pledges didn't prevent sex, they prevented safe sex. More significantly, purity culture created an environment in which the sexual abuse of women and girls was systematically under reported and disbelieved because a woman who had been assaulted had, quote, lost her purity and that and might be seen as complicit in what happened to her. Victims were were cowed into Staling silent. Of course they were protect predators were protected, yes, including the youth pastors and the preachers and the deacons and the dads. This is documented in study after study after study in survivor testimony from evangelical communities across the country. This is not a few bad apples in the batch. It is a systematic belief system and hierarchy that protects predators and creates systems of sexual abuse while telling the victim that you just raped raped that she's worth less. Josh Harris eventually retracted his book. I wish these men would just shut your mouth before you cause so many problems and say sorry. I'm really appreciative that Josh Harris is now trying to undo the damage he did. He's on book tours, he's apologizing, he's talking about like everything. He later announced that he had left Christianity entirely. And I appreciate that, but I am so sick of like the Frank Schaefers and the Josh Harris's throwing all women under the bus for momentary monetary gain only to come back later and say sorry when you've already done the harm. Intent does not negate harm. None of that gives Back the years of harm done by a curriculum wrote by a 21 year old. None of it fixes it. Let's get to Mark Driscoll. Mark Driscoll founded Mars Hill Church in Seattle in 1996. By the mid 2000s, it had grown to a multi campus mega church with approximately 12,000 members. And Driscoll was one of the most prominent voices in the American evangelical Christian movement movement. He was known for what he called, quote, masculine Christianity translation. He's a misogynist. Explicitly aggressively framing Christianity as a muscular faith for men with women in subordinate domestic roles, he preached with deliberate offensiveness about women's bodies and women's sexuality about gender roles. He said women who were not sexually available to their husbands when their husbands wanted sex were lazy and selfish. He described stay at home mothers as unemployment employed. Right, because here's the thing, ladies, being a stay at home mom is beautiful. Having children is beautiful. Having a family is beautiful. The men and the in the manosphere or in Christianity that are parroting these beliefs, they'll tell you that your highest calling is wife and mother and then they will disrespect and hate you for it. They will call you lazy, unemployed, a leech, a mooch, while you save the family hundreds of thousands of dollars in the work you do do. Raise the children basically by yourself and birth those children by putting your life and body on the line. Understand that they do not respect your submission because they never saw you as a person in the first place, which is why they took that stand in the first place. He asked women who had been sexually assaulted whether they were bitter about what had happened to them. Yeah, I'm bitter about the man that assaulted me. He exercised control over staff and elders that multiple former members and staff described as bullying and spiritual abuse. In 2014, Mars Hill began to collapse. Former staff and members came forward in large numbers with accounts of his authoritarian abuse of leadership, spiritual manipulation, and a culture of fear. The church officially closed in January 2015. Mark Driscoll, still preaching, started a new church in Arizona where he operates today. Bill Hybels founded the Willow Creek community church in 1975 in South Barrington, Illinois. Illinois. It became one of the most influential megachurches in America. A model for the, quote, seeker sensitive church growth that was studied and emulated by churches worldwide. Hybels was a mentor to leaders across denominations and was considered one of the most even respected evangelical ministers in the country. In 2018, multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment, inappropriate touching and unwanted kissing spanning decades of his ministry. The church initially defended him. The elders conducted an investigation and cleared him. Women who came forward were reportedly told that their stories were being evaluated. Evaluated, evaluated against their history of mental health issues or relationship problems. I am disgusted. Hybels resigned in April of 2018. A subsequent independent investigation conducted after his resignation and the failure of the initial inquiry concluded that his conduct had been inappropriate on multiple levels and the church's response to the allegations had been deeply flawed. And that's putting it nicely. The senior pastor and other top staff resigned. The church's attendance collapsed. Hybels has not apologized to the women of not God gave him divine authority to do whatever he want to. Whatever woman. Because women aren't people. They're accessories for men. Their bodies are for men. Their service is holy. That's where this all leads to. Johnny Hunt was president of the Southern Baptist convention from 2008 to 2010. Was one of the most beloved figures in these circles. He was widely respected as a preacher and pastor at First Baptist Church, Woodstock in Georgia. The LAR one of the largest SPC churches in the country. Country. The Guidepost Solutions investigation in 2022 found credible allegations that in 2010, Hunted sexually assaulted the wife of a fellow SBC pastor during a vacation in Florida. The woman reported what happened to SBC leadership who did not act on it. Hunt denied the allegations. He briefly stepped back from public ministry and then was reinstated into a ministry role by the North American Mission Board, which is an SBC entity. The decision to re the decision to reinstate him caused significant controversy. He ultimately left that position as well. Do you see why the SBC wants women out of leadership? Because this is the culture. This is what they're doing. This is what these men in leadership are doing. And women sound the alarm. This is an effort to silent women in all of the churches from the top to the bottom. Let's talk about the Catholic Church because Lord knows the Catholic Church has spent decades and continues to spend significant resources publicly lobbying against abortion, contraception, gay women's ordination on the same grounds of protecting human dignity, the sanctity of life and natural moral law. If we're going to talk about natural law, right. People who say, well, you know, you gay rights can't exist because it's not natural. First of all, there are over a thousand species that participate in. In homo homosexual behavior. Also the natural law. If you're going with that, then you should also be moving to pass laws to ban oral sex, which I think the men would be pretty upset about. Right? It's not natural. Natural you shouldn't do it. Also, if we're going by natural law, most species are led by a matriarch and that's what keeps the system going. Lionesses are the leaders of the pride. Queen bees, queen ants, female leadership. Female whales are the ones that keep migration patterns in memory. They teach the babies. Elephants, same thing. So if we're going by natural law, that's going to be. You're going to want to backpedal that real quick. But that's what they use. And that was something Paul really had a fixation on, was the natural law. But he had a very limited view of a very small part of the world of what the natural law looks like. He also wasn't a scientist. He didn't study animals or insects. He didn't know any of that. He simply saw, well, this is the system I grew up in. So this seems natural because it produces babies. So therefore it's the right thing to. To do. Again, we can look at things and say, do we know better now? Do we know better? During those same decades, the institutional Catholic Church was systematically protecting priests who were sexually abusing children, moving credibly accused abusers between parishes to avoid accountability. The same thing the SBC did. They would just shuffle the abusers around, threatening victims and their families with church discipline if they spoke out. And lobbying against civil statutes of limitations that would allow adult servants survivors to sue their abusers. They also fought against making priests mandatory reporters for child abuse. The John Jay Report, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and published in 2004, estimated that over 4,000 priests in the United States had been credibly accused of sexually abusing minors between 1950 and 2002, over 10,000 victims. Those are the cases that were reported reported. Researchers estimate that the actual number is significantly higher because of documented culture of silence and institutional pressure on victims at least twice as high. And if we look at reporting in the U. S around sexual crimes in General, it's at 30%. So that means that may only be 30% or less of the actual crimes. The grand jury report from Philadelphia, the Ryan report from Ireland, the Royal Commission in Australia, the Pennsylvania grand ju report. The same pattern documented across country after country, culture after culture. Priests abused children. Bishops protected the priests. The institution protected itself. The children were expendable. This also happens in every single massive denomination across the world. In Christianity, all of them. This. The pattern with the SBC is not relegated to the SBC in America. It's everywhere. They have their hands, hands, the Mormon Church. All of them. The people invoking Christian morality to restrict the rights of women, LGBTQ people and religious minorities are the same people whose institutions have the most documented, most investigated, most extensive records of sexual abuse of children. And the institutional response of that documentation has consistently been protect the institution, manage the liability and minimize the survivors. If you want to protect children, start in your own house. House. February 2019. The Houston Chronicle published an investigative series called Abuse of Faith that documented over 700 Baptist Southern Baptist Church leaders and volunteers who have been accused of sexual misconduct against more than 700 victims over a 20 year period and that documented the SBC systematic failure to address the crisis. They demonized and attacked the victims, not the perpetrators. The SBC's initial response was defensive individual church autonomy. They said we can't control the churches. The executive committee resisted calls for independent investigation. Investigations. The Guidepost Solution report released in May of 2022 after sustained pressure from survivors and reform minded SBC members. Because Christians, if you are part of these organizations, you have to be a part of the voice pushing for reform, otherwise you are liable, otherwise you are complicit. They found that the SBC executive committee leaders had for years stonewalled gaslit and worked to protect the institution against abuse survivors. Rather than working to protect the survivors, they had maintained an internal list of abusers. They knew exactly who they were and never shared it with the churches that were employing them. They had lobbied against mandatory reporting legislation in states where such legislation would have required churches to report abuse. They disparaged and re traumatized survivors that came forward. The COVID up was documented and massive. The men who voted in Orlando to ban women from preaching preaching are the men who created that system. They are the active current right now participants. The institution that spent decades demonstrating it cannot be trusted to protect children in its own buildings wants to write into its constitution that women who feel called to the gospel must be expelled because those women will hold them accountable and they know it. The same theology that requires women to be silent requires women not to report court. The same biblical framework that says women must submit to their husband's authority tells women who are being abused that God ordained that submission. So we're back to where we started. Orlando, Florida. The SBC meeting. Albert Moer's Truth and Unity amendment that would disfellowship automatically. Any church that allows for a woman to have a pastoral title whatsoever can't have children's pastor, can't have women's pastor. You cannot have the word pastor in it. And if they pass it Again next year. It will become part of the SBC constitution and will for forever push women out of church leadership and it will protect the abusers in that church. Churches are already being expelled. The Crossing Church in Tampa, Florida was disfellowshipped in February of this year. Zion Temple Baptist Church in Illinois was disfellowshipped also in February, both for appointing women in pastoral roles. First Baptist Church of Gainesville, Florida withdrew in April of this year after the Florida Baptist association removed them for ordaining women. They walked out and good for them. Way to stand on your feet. Faith and the equality of your faith. Way to stand for women and victims. Near the convention center in Orlando, a billboard paid for by Baptist Women in Ministry reads, God calls women to pastor, preach and minister. Yes, it is there. They put it up. They did not go quietly and I'm very proud of those women. Women have been preaching, teaching and church planning since the movement of the Pentecost. The Samaritan woman preached before the 12 understood who Jesus was. Mary Magdalene carried the resurrection news before any of the men went to the tomb. Mary was the first apostle of the resurrection direction. Phoebe carried out the most, carried the most important letter in Christian history to Rome. She was a deacon of a church. Junia was named an apostle. Priscilla corrected the theology of a male preacher. Lydia planted the first church in Europe. Philip's daughters preached. The women at Pentecost prophesied they were there at the very founding moment, at every moment of institutionalization and consolidation. Men reorganized the record to minimize and erase them. And they're doing it now, and they're doing it politically, and they're doing it religiously under a lie. The pastoral epistles written after Paul's death in his name by a liar who wanted his hierarchies to be part of the church, were kept in canon because they were useful, not because they were true. Junia's name was changed to eliminate a female apostle to junius. Until the 1980s, Phoebe's office was retranslated to a servant. Mary Magdalene was slandered as a prostitute. She was not a prostitute. 1 Corinthians 14:34 was inserted by a scribe to override what Paul had already said, that women could lead and they could prophesy, the wives submit. Passages were not written by Paul, but by Pauline communities trying to make the Church palatable to Rome and where this theology had full power. Hypatia and Alexandria the cath. Perfect day in France. The women mystics investigated by the inquisitors, the women accused of witchcraft across Europe paid for their lives because of this theology. The church that killed Aatia was not the church of Phoebe the deacon. The Church of Christ is not the church pushing women out of leadership. Now the SBC is the church of Constantine and Cyril. They are not doing this because the Bible demands it. The biblical text they are using to demand it were not written by the people they claim wrote it. They were written by liars that the church has chosen to keep so that men can have more power and say that it's God's will. They are doing this because women with authority in church are a threat to the hierarchy built on the premise that women cannot have that authority. They are a threat to the men who seek to defraud and bribe and rape and assault, assault. God calls women to pastor, preach and minister and the women who put that billboard there are not wrong. Jesus's rage was never directed at the foreigner, the outcast, the sick, the prostitute, the tax collector, the sinner or the rejected. It was channeled at the so called religious who sought money and power under the guise of faith. The ones who turned his father's house into a market and profited off of religion the same way ministers who are buying jets are profiting off religious religion now. The ones who laid heavy burdens on others that would not lift a finger to help them. The one who saw the people hungry and didn't feed them. The ones who shut the door of the kingdom in people's faces and would not enter themselves or let anyone else enter. That's where Jesus's rage went. And I think he would recognize exactly where to direct it today. Let's get our top five takeaways. 1. Christian nationalism is empire. Christianity. Know the difference. It is not not Christianity. If you are a person of faith, take Jesus back. Do not allow this movement of corruption and cruelty and abuse to steal him. The eight characteristics of Christian nationalism, from sacred fusion of national and religious identity to compliance over conversion, do not describe Christianity. They describe the use of Christian language and imagery for political domination. When someone tells you that your opposition to their policy is opposition to God, you know what the mechanism is? Is now call them out. Say that's not Christianity. You're a fake Christian. Say it. We're way past playing nice right now. Number two, the women were always there. They were erased on purpose again. Phoebe was a deacon. Junia the apostle. Nympha was a church leader. Phillip's four prophesying daughters. They are in the text. They're there. They were erased by deliberate precision, changed Translations, invented masculine names, papal slander campaigns, scribal interpolations, keeping books that were rare written they knew weren't written by Paul because they were convenient. This is manuscript record. Say it out loud when someone tries to push women out of the church. Number three, the Moral Majority was built on segregation, not scripture. Paul Wick admitted this on the record in 1990. The galvanizing issue for the religious right was not abortion. It was the IRS attempt to remove tax exempt status of segregated Christian schools. Abortion was the rebrand chosen because it was more palatable as a public organizing principle for religious people than defending racism. Falwell Sr. Preached for segregation in 1958 as a divine religious right. The SBC supported access to abortion in 1971. It was never about protecting babies or human life or being pro life or respecting anyone. It was protecting their right to maintain racial hierarchy in their schools, claiming it was part of their faith. Faith number four, Fundamentalism always rises when women rise. This is a pattern that we have to know. Senica falls to clergy opposition. Women's suffrage to the 1920s, KKK and fundamentalist wave, second wave feminism and the Moral Majority. The ERA and Phyllis Schlafly, the SBC vote to ban women pastors. Happening simultaneously as women's institutional authority grows, every significant advance in women's legal, economic and institutional standing has triggered a corresponding organized religious counter movement. Knowing the pattern means you can recognize it and again, call it out with your voice. If you are in a church right now, call this out. I've had people message me and I understand the emotion behind it. Well, I can't speak up because my church speak up. Things are only going to get worse if we don't speak up. We have to speak up. Number five, hypocrisy is the point. Expose it every time you see it. The institutions claiming moral authority over women's bodies and roles are the same institutions that harbored over 4,000 credibly accused child abusers, over 700 credibly accused religious leaders. The architect of the SBC's doctrine of women's submission was fired for protecting a rapist. The men who built the prosperity gospel are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Remember, power doesn't need to be consistent. It needs to be believed. When you expose specific, documented, sourced hypocrisy, it's not cynicism, it's the withdrawal of your consent to be decent, deceived that matters. When a survivor speaks up every time an investigative report is published, every time someone pulls up the actual source material, the machine loses one person who blindly believes it. Your voices matter. Your voices matter. And I paint all this history because we are at a critical point right now. If we don't start speaking, if we don't take Jesus back from these people, if we don't start acknowledging the truth of what this is and what this isn't, these movements, especially with the Supreme Court ruling, are set to take over every institution we have and use the law to impose their beliefs on us. And ladies, that arrow, that barrel of a gun is pointed right at our faces. Not because we're less than, not because we're a help meet, but because we get in the way of their power. And we are more powerful than they are. And they know it. And I don't mean menace as a whole. I mean the people who build these systems, they know that when women get free, everyone gets free. When the hierarchy crumbles, they can no longer capitalize and line their pockets with the free labor of women. Churches cease to exist when women start stop doing free labor. They know that they can't afford women to get free. They know that this has nothing to do with religion, no matter how many times they put God on it. This is a racist, sexist, hateful movement that is so far out of alignment with Christ, it is a disgrace to use his name. And I hope that this angered you. I hope it inspired you. I hope it rallied you. I hope it gave you ideas how they changed the system. They pushed people out. They got people elected. Run for school board, get on a board of trustees, school, participate in your college as an alumni. Get involved. That's how they did it. And that's how we can do it, too. And I'll see you next week on Flipping Tables.