Scott Klusendorf: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Case for Life podcast, where we equip you to defend life in the public square and do so persuasively, recognizing good arguments and bad arguments. We want you to visit our social media sites, not because we just want to do unashamed promotion, but we want to equip you to better think on these issues. And there’s resources there for you. So please do visit us. On our social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, and it’s got klusendorf. com. Today, I am very glad to welcome a guest that I have long admired, Dr. Groteis from Denver Seminary. Dr. Douglas Groteis has been an apologetic warrior hero for many of us for decades. In fact, I first came across his book, uh, Truth Decay in the 1980s when I was a youth pastor. Didn’t know squat about apologetics, but somebody gave me this book by a guy whose name I couldn’t pronounce, but I read three or four pages and said, boy, this is going to shake up my world. And not long after. The students in my youth group started getting a lot of apologetic material on truth related to what Dr. Groteis had put out there. And he has written a new book entitled Fire in the Streets. And I’m going to recommend it highly to you and it will be the topic of my interview with him today. It is the single best volume I’ve read. On the phenomena known as critical race theory, or what is known on the street as wokeness. And it’s something that Christians need to know how to engage. They first need to understand it. And I couldn’t think of anybody better equipped and qualified to talk about this topic than our guest today. Doug, it is great to have you. Thanks for joining us. Dr. Douglas Groothuis: Well, thank you, Scott. I’ve certainly appreciated your work over the years, and I have the new bigger copy of your book, which I just started to read, so thank you for that. Scott Klusendorf: Well, you’re welcome, sir. Uh, one of the things you have done that I don’t know how many of my viewers know, you have written the definitive book on Christian apologetics. Talk about a big, thick book. My book pales in comparison to this baby right here. And I got to tell you, your way of systematically thinking through issues, but not only that, making them understandable to lay people is a true gift. And I want to start by talking about Fire in the Streets today. Um, what drove you to want to write this book? What were you observing that put that fire in your belly Dr. Douglas Groothuis: to write this book? Well, it was really the summer of 2020, you know, the George Floyd riots summer. And I think of, uh, an event that happened, I was in rural Alaska with my wife Kathleen. She has a homestead property there in Willow, Alaska. I bet you never heard of Willow, Alaska. So we were a bit away from the riots and all the upheaval in the rest of the country. But I kept, uh, seeing this go on and on, and the Denver capital had been besieged by rioters. And, uh, two things happened. One, people kept asking me, what’s behind this? What’s the philosophy that’s impelling this? And I knew. So I was starting to give interviews and write articles about it. And secondly, as the summer went on, I really wondered if Kathleen and I should go back home. We live in suburban Denver. I didn’t know if even the suburbs would be safe. And I thought, you know, what’s happened to my country? I’m not even sure if I’m safe to go home. I’m safe in this, uh, big log cabin in Willow, Alaska, off, not quite off the grid, but certainly far away from any, any rioting or any danger that was going on in the U. S. related to the George Floyd death. So, as what typically happens when I really get exercised about something I know about, I, I write a book about it. So that’s, that’s the genesis of the book, basically. Scott Klusendorf: You know, one of the things that happens, Dr. Groteis, the minute you use the word woke or critical race theory, People will accuse you of not understanding what the term is, and they’ll say it’s not definable, you don’t know what it is. I beg to differ, how would you define wokeness or critical race Dr. Douglas Groothuis: theory? Right, well, it’s an ideology that I explain in the book. It has its roots in Marxism, but it’s not classical or orthodox Marxism. You could call it neo Marxism or cultural Marxism. It’s the idea that history is divided up into the oppressors and the oppressed. And that takes somewhat different forms through the ages. You see this laid out in the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. But the way it works out for critical race theory as it developed through, uh, Herbert Marcuse and people like, uh, Derrick Bell and so on, is that the white race is the oppressor and people of color are the oppressed. But that doesn’t quite work because Asians don’t fit into this because Asians in the United States, most all Asians are very high achieving. So it’s pretty strange to, uh, claim that they are oppressed according to this kind of, uh, Manichean dichotomy. So, it oversimplifies everything. It says the most important thing about you is your race and Added to that is also your sexual orientation. So, uh, the way this really differs from, from Marxism to some extent is that Marxism was always concerned and primarily concerned about economic relationships, about the owners and the workers, and the owners oppress the workers, and eventually the workers will revolt against the owners, but through something called critical theory, and then Into critical race theory, the idea was that oppression is more layered than that, and it can be more subtle than simply property ownership and the exploitation of the workers by the owners. So now, through thinkers like Derrick Bell and others, and more recently people like Kimberly Crenshaw and Abraham X. Kendi, the idea is that your race really indicates your social, So, we could have people who are extremely successful in their careers and very well off financially who are African American, uh, who supposedly are still victims of this systemically racist system. That’s a big term in critical race theory or wokeness is that we live in a systemically racist system. Uh, racism is baked into the system. We’ve never really overcome the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining. So, the answer to this Is really not to affirm historic American principles of, uh, all people are created equal and given certain inalienable rights by their creators, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and not to affirm the five freedoms of the First Amendment, but rather to affirm Have a revolution. And we really saw that sort of revolutionary mentality striking hard in 2020. I start out the book with an interview that was done on National Public Radio with a writer who wrote a book called In Defense of Looting. And her thesis was that, uh, looting is legitimate because if you have a lot of property, Then you’ve stolen it from people that don’t have that benefit. So that’s a classic Marxist dichotomy, the oppressor versus the oppressed and the oppressed, uh, really don’t have to abide by any set morality or code of conduct because, uh, the, the end justifies the means. And, you know, to cite an old saying from. The sixties, by any means necessary, we will overthrow the entire system. So, I mean, a short version of this is that the sixties, a radicalism of the new left basically went silent in some ways. It wasn’t as vocal or as obvious, uh, in the, let’s say, later seventies and eighties as it was in the sixties and early seventies. There’s been what has been called a long march through the institution. So, someone like, uh, Bill Ayers, for example, was part of the Weather Underground with his wife. Bernadette Dorn and they were blowing up buildings and, and, uh, Bill Ayers became, uh, a professor of education. I think he’s retired now. So he joined the system, you know, he became a tenured radical at a secular university. So this ideology has been brewing and has been influencing people for a long time. And the triggering event, or you might say the inflection point. For the riots, of course, was the, uh, the sad death of George Floyd. And people viewed this as emblematic of American culture in general. American culture is the white man with his knee on the black man’s neck killing him. Yep. Scott Klusendorf: Is it fair to say that under critical race theory or wokeness, what makes you a racist is not your acts, not that you behave in a racist way, but your group identity. You are white. You are part of the Dr. Douglas Groothuis: oppressor class. Exactly. It is. So it’s not a matter of character evaluation, which would be classic moral sense and a biblical sense. You look at your own loves and hates, you look at your own viewpoint on people, you know, red and yellow, black and white, to use the old children’s song. And a biblical view is that all people are made in the image and likeness of God, Genesis 1. Uh, we’re all fallen into sin, Genesis 3. And we all need to be redeemed through the work of Jesus Christ. So many passages on that, but certainly John chapter 3, Romans chapter 5, Ephesians chapter 2. Actually, the whole Bible tells us that. The whole storyline of scripture. That’s the storyline. Creation, fall, redemption. And uh, no race is intrinsically better or worse than any other race. But that’s not how critical race theory works. So, uh, for example. If you are white, then supposedly you are the beneficiary of white privilege, and some people have gone so far as to publicly confess their, this is a big word, complicity in white privilege simply because they are white. So, this is a good time, I think, for all of us, and I say this in the book, uh, whatever color you are, whatever your ethnicity, to say, do I prejudge people based on their skin color unfairly? Do I do that? And if I do that, I should repent of that and I should love my neighbor as myself. But the idea that somehow we have group guilt, I think is wrong. Now, groups have unfairly been advantaged in American society, obviously, whites have through slavery, Jim Crow and so on, uh, that was wrong. And one thing I really try to emphasize in my book. is that the American system is fundamentally sound in terms of our moral and political principles. And it’s self reforming. That’s why we have amendments to the Constitution. But the critical race theory people, the woke people, say, No, America is racist from the beginning, it’s baked into the system, and the only way to change it is not to reform it according to its original and best principles, but actually to bring it down, to destroy it. And that’s what I am absolutely against. Uh, we have one of the things Scott Klusendorf: you go. One of the things you point out in the book is that when you look at people like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Mamie Till, and even Frederick Douglass a century earlier, they called America back to its founding principles. They didn’t try to tear them down through revolution. Their charge against the American people was you’re not living up to your stated ideals. That’s not what critical theory Dr. Douglas Groothuis: is saying, though. No, not at all. And when you read people like, uh, Derrick Bell, he says the Civil Rights Movement really didn’t accomplish much of anything for African Americans. And whites only gave blacks rights when it was in the whites own self interest. And I, I take that to be a very, uh, jaded I mean, you think about, um, all the white soldiers killed in the civil war. I think of the freedom writers, uh, whites siding with blacks during the civil rights era and all the rest of it. Uh, Derek Bell is really a pivotal figure here and he was an influence on Barack Obama, who was actually a professor of Barack Obama’s in law school. And he, I don’t think I understood the American system very well. Uh, he himself, uh, benefited from the advocacy of equal rights for blacks in his career and even benefited, I think, uh, from certain affirmative action ideas, which, which I actually am critical of. Um, many, many years ago, I, uh, began to read economics more seriously when I was a young man in my twenties. And I kind of have my own conversion story. I was, uh, kind of an aspiring leftist as a young man in the seventies before I became a Christian. And then. When I became a Christian, I gravitated to the left wing ideas of people like, uh, Ron Sider and Jim Wallace and Sojourner’s Magazine and so on. And then I started reading more broadly, and I realized that the left wing view of economics in the state was just fundamentally wrong in many ways. So I began to read people like, uh, Thomas Sowell. Yeah. And, uh, Thomas Sowell is an African American economist and historian. He’s 93. He just came out with a new book this year. Just remarkable. His book, Scott Klusendorf: Vision of the Anointed, changed my whole view of economics and the world. Right. Dr. Douglas Groothuis: Well, I read several of his books back in the early 80s and And he said affirmative action, uh, is really not all that beneficial overall for African Americans because it can, it wasn’t supposed to originally, and I say this in the book, but it can promote people beyond their competence. on the basis of their race. Yep. And Sewell says that’s not good for anyone because you need to occupy positions on the basis of your competence and according to merit. And if you corrupt that kind of a system, then you can get people in positions where they don’t belong and they don’t do a good job. And moreover, uh, Sewell said this himself as an African American, he said, it can create suspicion. Is that person there because, uh, he or she is black, he or she is Hispanic, or is that person there? Uh, in the academy or in medicine or in flying a plane or whatever because they’re the best person for that job. So the critical race theory approach disavows The whole civil rights vision of someone like Martin Luther King or someone like John Lewis, who I mentioned in the book. Also, John Lewis was a, a colleague of Martin Luther King. He just passed away a few years ago. He served in, I believe was the Congress for many, many years. And John Lewis was a man of the left. I would disagree with him on many things, but he was one of the most vocal critics of the riots of 2020. Yeah, he was dying. I remember he went on, uh, did a video that was widely shared and he said, look, I, I marched with Martin Luther King and I know how to change things and it’s peaceful and it’s through legislation, it’s through voting, it’s through getting the right candidates, it’s not by tearing down the cities. And I quote him in the book to that effect. Yeah, you sure Scott Klusendorf: do. In fact, one of the things you say in the book that I find very helpful, again, for our viewers, we’re discussing this book, Fire in the Streets, by Dr. Douglas Groteis. I consider this the single best book on critical race theory that’s out there right now. One of the things you talk about that I find particularly dangerous, and I wonder if you share my concern, is the whole idea of standpoint epistemology, the idea that truth is not objective, but rather is determined solely from the viewpoint of the so called oppressed person. Um, this is a very dangerous view, and you point out why in the book. Say a little more about the danger that lurks with this whole view of Dr. Douglas Groothuis: knowledge. Right. Well, I, I so often come back to Francis Schaeffer, and he said, if your epistemology is wrong, everything else is wrong. So, we’ve always got to ask, how do we know what we claim that we know? And standpoint epistemology came through, uh, secular feminism. And it’s the idea, and there’s a germ of truth here. It’s like a half truth that becomes a whole lie. The half truth is, We need to talk to people who have had particular experiences to know what it’s like to have those experiences. That’s pretty much axiomatic. So, of course, uh, you and I, Scott, have no experience of what it’s like to be a black American. Because we’re not black. And we have no experience of what it’s like to be a Hispanic American. Because we’re not, we’re not Hispanic. I take it you’re not Hispanic, Scott, with that last name. No. Okay. Just, just want to be sure about that. Irish. No. Well, the Irish have been discriminated against in the past, obviously. And, uh, of course, I’m actually half Italian. My mother’s maiden name was Cominetto. And when the Italians came to the U. S. around the, uh, the end of the 19th and early 20th century, they were very discriminated against. Uh, in fact, the Italian Americans, especially the southern Italian, who are very dark skinned, were not even considered white for a long time. But anyway, the half truth becomes a whole lie when you say That if you’re one of the oppressed, you’re a person of color, you’re a sexual minority, then your view is the final word on whatever you talk about. So I’d say, I need to listen to my African American, Hispanic brothers and sisters about how they have been treated. Right? And in fact, after the George Floyd riot started breaking out, I started talking to some of my African American friends and just asked them a general question. How have you experienced or not experienced racism in your life? But simply being African American or being Hispanic American, It doesn’t make you an expert on the constitution or what the three fifths clause really means, which I talk about in the book. It doesn’t make Scott Klusendorf: you an expert. In fact, could you talk about that because a lot of people push back and say, America is intrinsically racist. Look at the three fifths compromise and you do a great job explaining what that really Dr. Douglas Groothuis: was. Oh, goodness. I even find some conservatives advancing that as evidence that in the constitution African Americans are considered three fifths human. I have about four or five pages on it, and I read an article many years ago, I’m so grateful I did, in Commentary Magazine about this. So I’ve known about this for a very long time, since about 1987. But basically, Uh, the North and the South were arguing about what should be in the Constitution. And of course, the North wanted rights for, for black folks and in the South, they really did not want that. So the Northerners said, okay, you want to count the slaves as part of your population for representation in the government. We don’t want you to do that because they don’t vote and they’re not free and so on. So, uh, there was a compromise. And so what ends up happening is that African Americans are considered three fifths account for representation in the Congress. There’s no ontological statement or implication that African Americans are three fifths human. It was a compromise between the North and the South. It was basically compromise or have no constitution. Compromise or have two nations. You know, one free and one enslaved, which Scott Klusendorf: means slavery would have never been eradicated. So we had to keep union to get it eradicated. And this actually weakened the South’s position, not strengthened it. Dr. Douglas Groothuis: Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, just being an African American doesn’t make you an expert on that issue, nor does being white or anything else. You’ve got to go to the facts. You’ve got to try to get to the objective truth. about the subject you are addressing. And if you want to talk about what it feels like to be an African American man in the United States, then you talk to African American males. But that doesn’t give you the epistemic privilege to tell us what the Constitution means. Or what the best social policy should be for African Americans or for any Scott Klusendorf: you are so right about this. And, you know, not long ago, maybe a month and a half ago, I foolishly perhaps waded into an online social media discussion about the whole problem with wokeness. And I pointed out what you write in the book about the three fifths compromise. And even after factually pointing that out. The comeback was not a refutation. The comeback to me, the pylon from a whole bunch of people was, you’re just using reason and facts as a tool of oppression. In other words, what made me an oppressor was that I used reason and logic and evidence. Oh my. Dr. Douglas Groothuis: Well, I do discuss that briefly in the book. And we are very far down the road when people start saying that because that means we have no common ground and we have no shared principles for evaluation. Everything reduces to skin color and this oppressor. Oppressed matrix and so much for any kind of dialogue or argumentation, if that’s what you come down to, it’s very bad. Scott Klusendorf: Yeah, and along these same lines of factual history and logic and evidence, you point out in your book that the 1619 project is absolutely shot full of fallacies, misstatement of facts. What are some of the things that are problematic with this? Because I think some of our viewers have heard that it’s problematic, but may not know why. Dr. Douglas Groothuis: Right. Well, that first came out as a supplement to the New York Times, and the person who was in charge of it was not even an academic. She was a journalist, and there was no documentation at all given. The idea was that America really began when the first slaves came. So, we are racist and pro slavery from the beginning, uh, that America would not be America. Without slavery and that the effects of slavery continue to this day, they’ve really not been, um, treated properly. Now, uh, to these folks credit, they did come out with a book a few years later about this. They tried to document their claims. It’s all about what we call the narrative. It’s all about, uh, what kind of Viewpoint do you have, when you look at the facts, and we should try at least to be fair and accurate at looking at the facts of history and say, well, of course, America. Uh, had slaves and brought many slaves from Africa, but just how thorough or how rigorous was slavery in the whole system? Now, of course, in the North, you didn’t have the kind of slavery you had in the South. In fact, there were free states in the North, uh, for, for a very long time. But you, you tell this story of original and systemic oppression. Now, when the book came out, I was just dealing with the original document, the The larger book trying to defend the 1619 thesis had, had actually just come out when I was finishing the book, so I wasn’t able to address all those sorts of things. Uh, it’s deeply flawed. Uh, even the event of slaves coming over in 1619 is contentious. Were they really slaves? Were they more like indentured servants? So, it just was able to present a viewpoint that America was wrong and racist from the beginning. Therefore, It has to be overturned. So this is essential to this neo Marxist, cultural Marxist project of critical race theory. You have to discredit the present order. Not try to reform it, but try to discredit it. And one thing, uh, the 1619 project says is, well, of course the Declaration of Independence is a fraud because Jefferson, who was the primary writer, owned slaves. So, it’s illegitimate, it’s not authentic, and there’s really nothing, uh, fundamentally good or worth preserving in the American project. And what I say is, wait a minute, people can write better than they live. And Scott Klusendorf: Jefferson was Bad guys Dr. Douglas Groothuis: can have good ideas. Yes, exactly. Right. And so, you’ve got Martin Luther King appealing to what he called the magnificent, I think that was the word, the magnificent documents of the Declaration and the Constitution when he gives his I Have a Dream speech. Magnificent. Now, was Jefferson a slaveholder? Yes. Uh, was he conflicted about it? Yes. And, you know, it wasn’t simple back in the day for people to just free their slaves and they could just go get a job, have their families, everything would be great. That is no justification for slavery, slavery, please. No one get me wrong. But we look at today back at that time, we said, Oh, they had slaves. They’re horrible. They hated black people. It’s just systemically horrible. Well, it was wrong, but you’ve got to situate it at the time. And then I think in terms of the American project or the American vision, you have to say, was there a deep principle of freedom in our founding documents for all people? And the answer is yes. Women couldn’t vote, obviously, at the time of the Declaration or when the Constitution came out. America has been able to reform. According to its principles over time, there are ups and downs. But there’s no reason to damn the entire system and then call for a total cultural and political revolution, which is, which is exactly what critical race theory wants to do, or what we call it Scott Klusendorf: seems to me, Dr. Groteis, that critical race theory or wokeness. Denies wholesale the correspondence view of truth if Stalin says it’s raining outside and it’s raining outside The statement is true. Even if he’s a bad dude That’s right and yet what we see happening here is all truth being reduced to the standpoint of the oppressed person Who has dictatorial control to determine the talking points, what we are going to be allowed to say. And one of the things you point out in the book is that this worldview of CRT is very hostile to free speech. Why is that? Well, it is Dr. Douglas Groothuis: because you don’t want to give everyone the opportunity to present their views fairly and openly. Because the idea is that if you are a member of the oppressor class, Then you don’t have the right to express yourself. In fact, a lot of this goes back to an essay by Herbert Marcuse, who was probably the most influential thinker of what’s called critical theory, which was a neo Marxist theory and critical theory is the precursor to critical race theory. So Marcuse said that the conservative oppressors. Uh, the whites, the property owners, the Christians really should not be given the microphone because no matter what they say, it will contribute to the systemic oppression of society. So, they do not deserve tolerance and free speech. Now, this essay was back at least 45 years ago. I don’t have the exact date on it. It might have been over 50 years ago. And we’re seeing that played out with cancel culture. So, the old liberals, let’s say like an Alan Dershowitz, who I have a lot of respect for, he’s still out there swinging. Right. You know, he voted for Joe Biden, but thought that Donald Trump had been unfairly treated by the law. So And my book, by the way, is not really a political book. My book is a book on It’s not a partisan book. It’s a book about political theory and the Christian worldview and exposing false worldviews. My point is that an old line liberal, and there aren’t very many left, like Alan Dershowitz, will say basically, I disagree with you, but I’ll defend your right to say what you think is correct. And I want you to have your day in court. And I want the American system to play out properly according to constitutional values. That is not critical race theory, not even close. Yeah. Scott Klusendorf: One of the things I have been talking to Christian pro lifers about for a number of years, and even more so recently, is that they’ve got to look beyond the abortion issue itself and look at some of the underlying worldviews that are informing the debate. And of course, the big, or the new kid on the block is woke theory, critical race theory. As you look at an issue like abortion, for our viewers, how does critical theory, uh, impact the debate over the right to life? Dr. Douglas Groothuis: I thought you might ask me that. And, uh, I don’t know that I directly addressed it in the book, but I, I did come up with something yesterday. It was something from It looks like it’s a peer review article. It’s called Perceiving and Addressing the Pervasive Racial Disparity in Abortion. It’s by three different authors and here’s the abstract. I think this cuts to the chase. Black women have been experiencing induced abortions at a rate nearly four times that of white women for at least three decades and likely much longer. The impact in years of potential life lost given abortions high incidence. And racially skewed distribution indicates that it is the most demographically consequential occurrence for the minority population. The science community has refused to engage on the subject and the popular media has essentially ignored it. Now, I just read the abstract because I wanted to get some facts about the incidence of abortion in the black community. If people are really Staggering numbers. Yeah, it is and it’s tragic and it’s horrible. If people are really concerned about, uh, the status and about the possibilities for black Americans. They should be pro life, obviously. You should be pro life because of all the reasons we know, Scott, because we’re made in the image and likeness of God from conception. We’ve got the arguments from science, from scripture, and all the rest of it. But if you are really concerned about the idea that African Americans have been marginalized, uh, that they need opportunities and so on, you should look at something like that. And say, what is wrong with American culture and American law if something like that is happening? However, the critical race theory perspective is a far leftist perspective. So it emphasizes, uh, the rights of individuals, uh, to control their bodies. Now the general approach is group oriented. That is, we think about the oppressor and the oppressed within that understanding of things, a misunderstanding of things in many ways. Is this left wing view? Uh, that people need bodily autonomy and they need to make choices. Women make choices about their own bodies with respect to abortion. Of course, it’s not, uh, their body. There’s the body of another human being within the woman. But I wonder what, what do you think about that, Scott? Well, Scott Klusendorf: I think you’re spot on. And I would add this, that unless you assume the unborn are not human. Basically, the mother who aborts her child is acting as an oppressor against her own offspring. In fact, even Kendi says that all human beings are equal in nature, a statement I found rather surprising, giving his larger worldview. But, if he truly believes that, then if it can be shown that the unborn are human, Then they are in the oppressed cast or category, not the oppressor category, and critical theory seems to put the unborn in the category of oppressing on the mother’s bodily autonomy or bodily integrity. But that argument only works if you’re assuming the unborn are not human because otherwise the aborting mother is oppressing her own born her unborn offspring. I also think there’s a big epistemology issue here that has been used to silence pro lifers because they don’t have enough intersectionality points. I’m not, and I’m going to ask you to define that term in just a minute, but because they don’t have enough points as victims. They are shut up and told you don’t get to speak. So a white male, even if he has a better argument than a black female on abortion, or any other subject for that matter, would not be allowed to speak. Not because his argument is bad, but because of his status as an oppressor. So leading into that, can you give us some insight on how we should understand this term? Intersectionality? Dr. Douglas Groothuis: Yes. That was a term invented by Kimberly Crenshaw, and she said, when we’re thinking about oppression, and she’s working in the basic Marxist or neo, Neo Marxist perspective, you don’t wanna simply emphasize race, but also gender and whether or not you’re part of a sexual minority. So you can rack up intersectional points. Let’s say if you’re. A black woman, lesbian. So there are three items of intersectional oppression. Even if you’re a tenured professor in Ivy League school, you know, you’re still oppressed because you’re black, you’re a woman, and you’re a lesbian. And then the standpoint epistemology kicks in. So you are triply privileged epistemically if you are triply oppressed. And of course, this just does not follow. Again, as I said earlier. If you want to know what it’s like to be a black lesbian, then you talk and you ask black lesbians, but that doesn’t make the black lesbian an expert on epistemology or the American founding or economics or political theory. Or anything else. It just does not follow. Scott Klusendorf: Yeah. You know, I saw an unbelievable video put out by the Acts 29 Church Planning Network that was just stunning to behold. They had a panel of black pastors up on the stage that were talking about ministry. To black individuals and what it was like to be oppressed as a black man as a pastor and it was interesting They’re talking to a group of whites by and large and the whites in the crowd were told you’re not allowed to speak and challenge This you need to just be quiet and listen now think about it who controlled the whole agenda the guys on the stage Telling the alleged oppressors, you have no say, you get no, nothing to add to this conversation. You are coming from a position of privilege. You need to just shut up and listen. I mean, talk about heads I win, tails you lose. This is just unbelievable to me. Dr. Douglas Groothuis: Right, and another adage I’d invoke here is two wrongs don’t make a right. If black folks have been stifled and they have been limited in their power to express themselves in free speech and so on, that’s wrong. So the answer to that is to open up the dialogue and open up the discourse. And I’m an old philosopher. May the best argument win. And in my book, Truth Decay, that you mentioned before, I said truth is not pigmented. There’s not a black truth, a white truth, a yellow truth, a brown truth, a blue truth. Truth is correspondence to reality and neither is rationality a matter of ethnic participation. If you have a good argument, then it works and it doesn’t matter whether you’re white or black or red or yellow or whatever you are, it just doesn’t matter. Now, people’s experience matters and we want to honor and love people for who they are and the histories that they have, but the only way to communicate rationally with people. is to say, let’s look at the facts and evidence and come up with the best conclusion and let’s listen. I say, yeah, be quick to listen and slow to speak, as James tells us, and be slow to anger. But if you set up a situation where one group of people get to talk and nobody else does, Well, does that really engender a lot of understanding? Does that promote mutual trust? I don’t think it does at all. No, Scott Klusendorf: I agree completely. Well, we’re wrapping up here, but I want to take a minute again to say thank you for writing this excellent book. I think it’s the finest treatment of the subject I’ve seen. I’ve read most of what’s out there on it, and I hope this book gets widely Distributed again. If you have not gotten this, it’s called Fire in the Streets by my guest, Dr. Douglas Groteis at Denver Seminary. And by the way, you’re, you’re, you’re taking on a new position soon at Cornerstone University. Tell us about Dr. Douglas Groothuis: that. Uh, yes, I am. I’m starting next fall at Cornerstone University in Grad Rapids, Michigan. And they gave me this, uh, very long title. I think I need two business cards for it. It’s something like, uh, Distinguished University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian worldview. So, uh, it fits me, it fits my career, and I’m very excited to be involved with that institution starting next fall. Where can our viewers Scott Klusendorf: find you online? Yes, I have a Dr. Douglas Groothuis: webpage, simply called douglasgrodeheist. com, and I write a semi regular blog. You can find links there to articles, to videos. Uh, you can also sign up for a newsletter that I send out about my ministry and in that newsletter I usually write up a little feature about one of the 19 books I’ve written over the years. That is fantastic. Scott Klusendorf: By the way, our viewers should know you are an avid dog lover. How many do you currently have? Dr. Douglas Groothuis: One, because I’m married. I saw Scott Klusendorf: a picture the other day that looked like that pooch had eaten some of your books. Was that what he depicted? No, Dr. Douglas Groothuis: he had just eaten a tissue. Oh, okay. Years ago, though, when he was a puppy, he started chewing on a book. And it was a, I won’t mention the book, but it was written by an author I really don’t like very much, so I let him just keep chewing up the book. Yeah. Scott Klusendorf: That’s great. Well, thank you for your time, Dr. Groteis, and thank you for what you’ve written to equip Christians. I appreciate you and am thankful for how the Lord has used you. We’ll have you Dr. Douglas Groothuis: back again soon. Well, the feeling is mutual, Scott. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Scott Klusendorf: Well, God bless you. Everybody, thank you for joining us today. Again, visit us on our social media sites and please pick up Doug’s excellent book, Fire in the Streets. It will equip you to confidently respond. To the cultural topics that are quite incendiary at the moment. Please pick the book up wherever good books are sold and devour this book. You know, some books you should just scan. Others you should really study and devour. I put this in that latter category. You want to study this book. Mine is marked up pretty bad. I may have to buy another copy just so I can read it. Because I put so many notes in there. And, uh, I tend to do that with books I devour. They become unreadable. But this is one you should read. Please do pick it up again. It’s called fire in the streets. I highly commend it Until next time everybody Go out there as greg cockle says and give them heaven