Episode 243
MARY WELLER - Combating Cultural Gnosticism: Yoga in Schools, Gender Ideology, and Biblical Worldview Training
Mary Weller is a researcher and writer for truthXchange, specializing in contemporary cultural issues including yoga, the Enneagram, and transgender ideologies from a Christian worldview. She discovered firsthand how yoga infiltrated her son's public school in California, leading to a major legal battle. Her work helps Christians understand how Eastern mysticism has penetrated American education and culture, while her ministry supports families navigating gender confusion with biblical truth and practical wisdom.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Yoga in schools teaches children to worship the sun and embrace divine spark theology
- "Secular" yoga still maintains its Hindu religious foundation and evangelistic purpose
- Rapid onset gender dysphoria spreads through social contagion in friend groups
- Truth Exchange equips everyday Christians to recognize and counter gnostic worldviews
- Christians defending biblical truth often face intense backlash even from church members
- Pronoun hospitality actually enables medical harm rather than preventing suicide
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
"American Veda" - Philip Goldberg
"Irreversible Damage" - Abigail Shrier
"When Harry Became Sally" - Ryan T. Anderson
"Embodied" - Preston Sprinkle
"Cracking Da Vinci's Code" - Peter Jones & Jim Garlow
CONNECT WITH MARY WELLER
Intensives: office@truthexchange.com
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Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker B:Hello, and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Speaker B:This is a weekly interview show where I sit down and talk with authors, thought leaders, and influencers who help us understand our changing world.
Speaker B:New episodes release every week.
Speaker B:My guest this week is Mary Weller.
Speaker B: ked with truth exchange since: Speaker B:She has authored three booklets in the Letter to a Friend series addressing difficult topics with truth and compassion.
Speaker B:Mary speaks to churches and organizations about how transgender ideologies impact education policy and faith communities.
Speaker B:She works with families navigating gender confusion, and encourages Christians to engage thoughtfully with challenging cultural topics while remaining grounded in biblical authority.
Speaker B:Mary believes everyday Christians can engage with the world, speaking truth while loving others practically.
Speaker B:She credits her training at Truth Exchange with equipping her to share resources with rising generations of believers facing complex cultural pressures.
Speaker B:Mary and her husband Bob have a blended family of four children aged 15 to 22, and Bob serves as president of the Board of Trustees for six public high schools in Escondido, California.
Speaker B:Mary Weller, welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Speaker A:Thank you so much, Will.
Speaker A:I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker A:I've been looking forward to this.
Speaker B:Excellent.
Speaker B:Well, I've really enjoyed our conversations, whether it be on the Truth Exchange podcast last week or our private conversations.
Speaker B:I've been so blessed by Dr. Peter Jones's ministry, Truth Exchange ministry, especially coming out of the new age myself.
Speaker B:So there is.
Speaker B:Just from that introduction alone, there's a wealth of stuff for us to talk about today.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B:So maybe you could.
Speaker B:Oh, sorry, go ahead, please.
Speaker A:No, no, I just was going to say let me know where you'd like me to start.
Speaker B:Yeah, I think the best place to start is probably just introducing Truth Exchange briefly, its history, the work that it does today, and some of its background as well.
Speaker B:And then we'll go from there.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:So Truth Exchange was founded by Dr. Peter Jones and Dr. Jones and his wife Rebecca, prior to founding Truth Exchange, were some of the original missionaries who were sent by Mission to the World, which is our denomination, the church that we belong to, New Life Presbyterian Church, as part of the Presbyterian Church in America.
Speaker A:And Presbyterian Church in America, as a denomination, has an organization called Mission to the world.
Speaker A:And about 53 years ago now, Peter and Rebecca were sent by Mission to the World as the first cohort of missionaries that were ever sent by the denomination.
Speaker A:And they went to Aix en Provence in France.
Speaker A:And Dr. Jones helped to found a reformed Christian seminary there in France.
Speaker A:France.
Speaker A:And they were there for 18 years.
Speaker A:And I think it's important to understand with Dr. Jones, he grew up in Liverpool, and he was raised in a Christian family, I think more of a charismatic bent, not reformed at that time.
Speaker A:But he grew up in what was an England that had a state church.
Speaker A:But it was godless in his mind.
Speaker A:It was a godless place.
Speaker A:And he jokes around, he and John Lennon actually shared a desk for five years when they.
Speaker A:In grade school.
Speaker A:They played music together and different things.
Speaker A:But because Peter's parents were Pentecostal, he was not allowed to go to nightclubs.
Speaker A:And so he jokes that when.
Speaker A:When the Beatles came over, he came over the same year to America, just with less fanfare, but he was coming out actually to complete seminary.
Speaker A:And he was amazed at that time by what a Christian country the United States was.
Speaker A:He loved America, and he was aware that there was.
Speaker A:There was a vocabulary and a common understanding, even for people who were not necessarily believers.
Speaker A:There was a cultural Christianity that made talking about the faith or just talking about any kind of issue made it kind of easy in a way that he had not experienced in England, because we still had this Christian cultural covering.
Speaker A:And the reason that's important is that after 18 or 19 years in France, they came back to the United States in the early 90s.
Speaker A:Their time with mission to the world had ended.
Speaker A:He came out, and they ended up coming to Escondido so that he could be a professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary, California.
Speaker A:But he started going through culture shock.
Speaker A:And his culture shock was related to the fact that what had been a Christian culture was no longer a Christian culture.
Speaker A:And he started to recognize it as being a very gnostic culture.
Speaker A:He saw the increase of New Age vocabularies, Eastern mysticism, these gnostic ideas come in.
Speaker A:And he's an expert in Gnosticism.
Speaker A:And so as he was surveying the culture, that was just very shocking to him.
Speaker A:And so he was trying to understand what had happened.
Speaker A:And he actually ended up going to one of the Parliament of World religions in Chicago.
Speaker A:Sort of unexpectedly, he kind of snuck in and was watching all of the syncretism that was happening, watching people sing hymns where they had changed the words of the hymns to have kind of like a more New Age understanding.
Speaker A:And this just created a lot of dissonance for him.
Speaker A:And he was trying very much to kind of get his.
Speaker A:His hands around that so he could talk about it.
Speaker A:So though he was a professor of New Testament theology, he started being asked to go out and speak all over the country to churches who were struggling with.
Speaker A:Not just people who were coming out of new age or had been drawn into new age, but they were finding that the new age was sort of starting to infiltrate into practices in the church.
Speaker A:And I mean, you can see this through Christian yoga.
Speaker A:Heavy, heavy emphasis on like the air quotes that I put around that, you know, people walking the labyrinth, people getting into the Enneagram.
Speaker A:Later on, around that time, I don't know if you read this book, but the book.
Speaker A:Oh, Dan Brown, Da Vinci Code.
Speaker A:Yes, Da Vinci Code came out and I remember reading that book.
Speaker A:I was working in medical education at the time and everyone in the office was reading that book and I was a Christian and I remember reading it and just kind of being like, I know this is off, but I don't know how to talk about it.
Speaker A:Like I just, I didn't know how to engage what was happening and what claims were being made in that book about the true origins of Christianity.
Speaker A:And so Dr. Jones was dealing with all of that.
Speaker A:And out of that came a ministry that is now Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:Originally it was called the Christian Witness in a Pagan Planet.
Speaker A:And it was to speak to all of these things.
Speaker A:And one of the places where he really kind of, I guess launched to some notoriety was when he co wrote a book with Jim Garlow here in San Diego where they tackled the claims of the Da Vinci Code and they called it Cracking Da Vinci's Code.
Speaker A:And that's actually the very first book that I ever read by Dr. Jones.
Speaker A:And I had known him, I was a teenager when he and his family moved to Escondido.
Speaker A:I was friends with his kids, we spent a lot of time together, they have seven kids.
Speaker A:But I had not really understood what he was working on.
Speaker A:I have this vague memory of buying a present for one of his daughters for her birthday and literally standing in target.
Speaker A:And I was choosing between Zen garden lotion set and Georgia peach.
Speaker A:And I was like, I don't think I'm supposed to buy a zen Garden for Dr. Jones.
Speaker A:And if you had asked me why, I wouldn't have known why.
Speaker A:Yeah, so good call.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I was super deep, but I remember being blown away by that book.
Speaker A:And no, no disrespect to Dr. Garlow, but Dr. Jones's chapters where he really dug into like the Gnostic claims and what the Gnostic gospels actually said and the history of all of that, I was amazed, I was absolutely amazed at what I was reading.
Speaker A:And it, it helped me in such a deep and profound way.
Speaker A: ink that that was around like: Speaker A:And so I did a little bit of volunteer work for the ministry.
Speaker A:And that is just.
Speaker A:That's the progression, honestly.
Speaker A:That's the progression of where truth exchange came from and what we continue to do.
Speaker A:One of my original jobs as a volunteer was to take his books that he was reading and to transcribe all of his notes and just transcribe these huge sections of the books that he was reading.
Speaker A:And forgive me, you know, this book, you made reference to it actually, I think, when you were talking to Carl Chicreb.
Speaker A:But he was reading a book about like the spiral of, like each of the levels of enlightenment that one achieves.
Speaker A:And he was.
Speaker A:I'm sad that I'm blanking on the name of the book right now, because Spiral Dynamics.
Speaker B:Ken Wilber.
Speaker A:Ken Wilbur.
Speaker A:Yeah, so he was analyzing Ken Wilber, and here I'm transcribing these notes and he's talking about a biblical perspective on things versus, you know, this, this false gospel, like this false path to salvation that Ken Wilber was describing.
Speaker A:And just in reading his notes, I was man alive.
Speaker A:This is amazing, you know, and it.
Speaker A:And I was connecting it to things that were going on in my own life and things that I had heard in the culture that I didn't know how to speak to.
Speaker A:So that's where truth exchange came from.
Speaker A:And that was kind of my very small entry to it.
Speaker A:But I was convinced right away, even as someone who had grown up as a Christian, that Dr. Jones was really onto something important.
Speaker B:He really was.
Speaker B:And just to go back to something you said early on, that he was gone for just 20 years.
Speaker B:And when he was gone from, I guess it would be the early.
Speaker B: ame to America would be what,: Speaker B:62, something like that.
Speaker A:1962.
Speaker A:63.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And then he came back, which would have been in the early 80s.
Speaker B:And over the course of the second half of the 60s, the entire 70s and the early 80s, it had become a godless, not quite anti Christian, but certainly not a pro Christian nation anymore.
Speaker B:And just how.
Speaker B:What an incredibly short time that.
Speaker B:Excuse me, that is just, just 20 years, like you would have thought it would take 60 years, like.
Speaker B:No, it was.
Speaker B:It was a hard.
Speaker B:A hard left turn.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, truly.
Speaker A:And when he came to the States, he lived here for a number of years because he was finishing his degrees at like, Princeton Theological Seminary, and I believe he was at Gordon Conwell as well.
Speaker A:So he was here for a while, but it was just that 18 year period that he was in France when, when this had taken, this had taken place where it was so disconcerting to him when he came back.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: ld Parliament of religions in: Speaker B:That was the first entry point.
Speaker B:In fact, the man who started that, not the man who started, but that really started that shift, was Swami Vivekananda.
Speaker B:And I've been to his ashram in India and so I could talk about all that.
Speaker B: that it accelerated after the: Speaker B:But then it's entrenchment.
Speaker B:And that's the thing is when you talk about new aged people today, like, wasn't that something that happened in the 80s?
Speaker B:Well, it was as a formal movement, but now New age gnostic mystical culture is American culture in the main.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:I would agree with you.
Speaker A:There's a really interesting book called American Veda.
Speaker A:Have you read American Veda?
Speaker B:I would know, but I was just thinking about it today.
Speaker B:Philip Goldberg.
Speaker A:Philip Goldberg, yeah.
Speaker A:And that's a book that Dr. Jones gave me to read when I was first starting to look at yoga actually.
Speaker A:And I think he really put his finger on a lot of this.
Speaker A:And I mean you can say Gnostic and you can say Hindu and I mean no disrespect, but ultimately what you find is that the vocabulary might be different and some of like the cultural origins are a little bit different, but the ideas underneath those and the ideas that we're embracing are exactly the same.
Speaker A:You know, it's the not two ness of the whole deal.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And I think it's really funny and I'm a little bit jealous, but like Dr. Jones has a license plate that says all is too.
Speaker A:I've been for a long time trying to think of some way, you know, to like rework that so I can have that license plate too.
Speaker A:But when you find out that you know these terms, it's not just all is one, but it's that all is not two.
Speaker A:And when you start to understand what that means and what sort of like, you know, when, when you're say, going through enlightenment from a yogic perspective or when you're talking about the non dualism of Gnosticism, you're like, wait a second, like these are just different Vocabulary terms to describe the exact same ideas.
Speaker A:And that's just what it's, it's jarring to recognize.
Speaker A:But it's really helpful to recognize too because it helps you categorize things as a Christian and really understand them better.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:And to see, to see the way that this non, dual idea tries to work its way into Christian circles and such.
Speaker B:The point that, you know, Dr. Jones's ministry is not just needed to evangelize the world, but also within, within Christianity itself.
Speaker B:So Christians can come to recognize the way that the language, like you said, walking the labyrinth.
Speaker B:What is, like what is, why is that so bad?
Speaker B:Well, walking the labyrinth, the purpose of that, of that meditative practice.
Speaker B:Maybe I'll let you speak to it.
Speaker B:What is the purpose of walking the labyrinth?
Speaker A:Well, I have never, I've never walked a labyrinth, so I've only ever heard about it second hand.
Speaker A:And I live really close to a place called Encinitas, which is something of a Mecca in California for all of this New age stuff.
Speaker A:And there are labyrinths, labyrinths, labyrinths even in people's backyards.
Speaker A:But like you are trying to approach like the inner spark at your interior, that inner divine spark, and to become one sort of with the universe, to open up your mind by walking that, that labyrinth, to do away with distinctions and to be, to, to open your mind then to like the divine forces within you as united with the universe.
Speaker A:And it strikes me very similarly to like the idea of Samadhi, like this absorption into the universe and this, this doing away with all distinction.
Speaker A:And of course this is radically anti biblical because how did God create?
Speaker A:He separated the waters from the earth, the light from the dark.
Speaker A:You know, like it's an ordering of creation as he creates, setting it into order and making things distinct.
Speaker A:And the labyrinth seems to me like a thinly veneered Christian practice of trying to undo those distinctions.
Speaker A:And so that then makes it oneist or monist or gnostic, not twoist or Christian according to the Bible's terms.
Speaker B:So yeah, yeah, it's the general American, I'll say, Western cultural thrust of some sort of union with God instead of being made in his image, like all of the languages, we are one.
Speaker B:You know, breathing meditation practices, all of this is meant to sort of strip away your own consciousness so you recognize the, the unity, the oneness behind everything.
Speaker B:And Christianity absorbs this and abandons the twoness.
Speaker B:Please, go ahead.
Speaker A:Well, yeah, I was thinking even with the term meditation, Christian meditation as a wildly different thing, and I've talked to a lot of typically women who are involved in what they call Christian yoga.
Speaker A:And they talk about how they won't say the Om or they won't say the mantras, but they'll just repeat a verse or a holy word over and over and over again.
Speaker A:But the point is to repeat it to the point that it loses all meaning.
Speaker A:So no longer is it a distinct word that carries meaning that we consider.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It still is seeking to kind of zone yourself out so that you can become one with something else.
Speaker A:And frankly, you're opening yourself up to spiritual influence.
Speaker A:And it's not the Holy Spirit that's influencing you.
Speaker A:It is the powers that war against us in the spiritual realm.
Speaker A:And that I think it's sad that that can feel embarrassing to say as a Christian because people will make accus that you are being fundamentalist or that you are being like a scaremonger or you're, you know, I mean, I've gotten those claims from.
Speaker A:Let me make it clear.
Speaker A:I'm not embarrassed, of course, but I think that there are Christians who feel embarrassed to say things like that because it sounds like you're being a fundy and yet all you're doing is acknowledging the truth of the world around us as described by the Bible.
Speaker A:And so it.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's just very strange to me, the resistance, especially within the church, that we have to talking clearly about these practices.
Speaker A:People cling to these practices in very interesting ways, even within the church.
Speaker B:Yes, they do.
Speaker B:So let's, let's do a deep dive then.
Speaker B:Let's get started.
Speaker B:Let's go deep diving into Christian yoga, which I think is an oxymoron.
Speaker B:It's a contradiction in terms.
Speaker B:It doesn't exist.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:You're either gonna, you're gonna be.
Speaker B:They're gonna choose Christianity or you're gonna do yoga, but you can't, you know, maybe you stretches at the local YMCA and it's not a huge deal.
Speaker B:But as long as you continue walking that path, you know, like you're going to find that your yoga practice comes into immediate conflict with your Christian beliefs.
Speaker B:And most people will choose.
Speaker B:Choose yoga.
Speaker B:So let's, let's dive into this.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Do you want to know how I got started looking at yoga or how do you start?
Speaker A:Okay, let's.
Speaker B:Let's start there.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:It was the most fun story of my life.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:So my son, when he was in kindergarten, was going to a school in Encinitas and I made reference to this.
Speaker A:So Encinitas is the home of the Self Realization Fellowship, Yogananda.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:I could talk for.
Speaker B:I could talk for a long time about Yogananda and the Kumbh Mela Festival.
Speaker B:I stayed at the Yogananda Self Realization Fellowship Camp at the Kumbh Mela Festival because of Babaji and that whole scene.
Speaker B:That's a whole other thing.
Speaker B:But of course I did, obviously.
Speaker B:Well, let's continue.
Speaker B:Let's not lose the thread yet.
Speaker A:Yes, okay, let's continue.
Speaker A:So many places to go.
Speaker A:So I lived in Encinitas and for like, the surfing world.
Speaker A:Encinitas is huge.
Speaker A:One of our famous beaches for longboarders is called Swami's, and that is because it sits right at the foot.
Speaker A:I actually took my daughter there the other day.
Speaker A:It sits right outside of the set self realization domes.
Speaker A:And so there are self realization domes, which is a retreat, and then there's like this garden that the public can go through so that they can meditate and everything.
Speaker A:So that amongst other things, I mean, Encinitas is a place where, you know, they don't have garden clay garden gnomes.
Speaker A:They have like Buddhist prayer flags in their.
Speaker A:In their yards.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And there are different various forms of yoga studios on every street corner.
Speaker A:It really is kind of one of the most pagan places that I've ever been.
Speaker A:And so my son was going to school.
Speaker A:I grew up going to public school.
Speaker A:My dad was a public school librarian.
Speaker A:He had stepped out of a Christian pulpit and was in the public schools.
Speaker A:I had a very good experience in them.
Speaker A:And so my son had started kindergarten and he had a Christian kindergarten teacher.
Speaker A:And I was thinking everything was fine.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And about six weeks after he started school, he came home with this little flyer in his backpack saying, yay.
Speaker A:We just want to let you know that your students every day have been doing school yoga.
Speaker A:And we have this new program that's come in and it's.
Speaker A:At that time, it was just at our school.
Speaker A:It's replacing pe and this is an.
Speaker A:A secular form of yoga.
Speaker A:And so I'd been working for Truth Exchange for a while, and my prayer partner who prayed with me every single day at that time is Pamela Frost.
Speaker A:She's one of our head researchers and she sits on our board.
Speaker A:And she had been, as we were praying for like the last year and a half prior to that, she had been researching yoga for Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:And so I had been having this side conversation with her this entire time about what yoga actually was.
Speaker A:So I got that piece of paper, and being the bold Krishna witness that I am, I was like, it's probably stretching.
Speaker A:Like, I just really wanted to like shove that piece of paper back in his backpack and like pretend it hadn't happened.
Speaker A:But I thought about it for a while and I thought, you know, I, I should probably look into this.
Speaker A:Like, before I say anything, I should go and observe a class at the very least.
Speaker A:Because if what Pam is saying is true, is true, then I wonder how sanitized this yoga really is.
Speaker A:And I still was operating with the idea that there was sanitized yoga.
Speaker A:So I contacted the school and I asked them to pull him from the yoga classes.
Speaker A:And I asked if I could go in, if I could observe a class myself.
Speaker A:And they were like, sure, absolutely, we understand why you have concern, but you know, this is public school yoga and you know, it's, it's been developed to be completely non religious.
Speaker A:And I was like, okay, thank you, I believe you, but I'd still like to go see it.
Speaker A:So I went with the principal to a third grade yoga class and right off the bat they were doing an Ashtanga sequence of yoga, which for your listeners at the time, anyway, and I think it's still the same.
Speaker A:Like Ashtanga yoga is the most commonly practiced form of physical yoga in the West.
Speaker A:So you can go to the YMCA, you can go to 24 Hour Fitness, you can go anywhere, and you're probably doing Ashtanga yoga, which it was developed, kind of brought to the west and popularized by Sri K. Pattabhi Joyce and Shri K. Pattabhi.
Speaker A:Joyce had had a dream to have all of the schoolchildren in India do yoga for the purification.
Speaker A:So just the asana practice for the purification of the country.
Speaker A:He believed that if he could just get everyone to do the physical poses that the country would be purified.
Speaker A:And he was unable to do that.
Speaker A:He was brought over to the United States and he had as his disciples some billionaires who formed the Joyce Foundation.
Speaker A:And the Joyce foundation were the ones who were paying in Encinitas to put this yoga into the schools.
Speaker A:So I didn't know any of that yet, but I went into the class and they were doing Ashtanga yoga.
Speaker A:And the yoga instructor, lovely young woman, was leading these eight year olds in the yoga sequence and they got to doing sun salutation.
Speaker A:And Ashtanga yoga always carries the sequence of sun salutation.
Speaker B:Yes, it does.
Speaker A:And so the kids are going through and they're doing the sun salutation poses, some of which just look like normal stretches.
Speaker A:And she's saying to them, as we do the sun salutation, let's talk about the sun and what the sun does.
Speaker A:And so she was asking the kids, you know, what benefit does the sun offer us?
Speaker A:And they were saying, like, the sun helps food to grow.
Speaker A:You're right.
Speaker A:So you would be thankful to the sun for your food.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:You know, and they're doing sun salutation, and the sun makes me feel warm and good, and da, da, da.
Speaker A:And eventually, the conclusion was that we should be thankful to the sun for everything in our lives, because without the sun, there would be no life.
Speaker A:So at least literally was not just physical obeisance to the son, but she was also training the kids to speak their thanks to the sun as they were doing this.
Speaker B:Yep.
Speaker A:So I'm kind of standing there, and I was like, this is sort of religious feeling.
Speaker A:And I was trying to think about what to say to the principal when we came out.
Speaker A:And they got to the very end, and the yoga instructor had all of the kids get into this big circle, and she had them all get into lotus position, and they called it the namaste circle.
Speaker A:And so she had the kids put their hands up as they're in.
Speaker A:In lotus position, and they turn to each other.
Speaker A:I bow to the light in you.
Speaker A:I bow to the light in me.
Speaker A:The light in all of us makes us one.
Speaker A:Namaste.
Speaker A:And she said, and remember, kids, namaste means respect, goodbye, you know, and, like, launches them back out into their school days.
Speaker B:Sure it does.
Speaker A:Wow, this is super religious.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And so as I was walking out with the principal, he was like, see?
Speaker A:So, you know, this is totally sanitized, and we'll go ahead and get your son re enrolled into the yoga program.
Speaker A:And I was like, no, no, no.
Speaker A:I think his name was Dr. Baird.
Speaker A:Dr. Baird.
Speaker A:That was really religious.
Speaker A:Like, my son cannot participate in that.
Speaker A:And it was really interesting because I'm six foot tall.
Speaker A:He was like six foot four.
Speaker A:And he kind of wheeled around and, like, looked right down into my face, and he was like, what do you mean?
Speaker A:Like, what do you mean that, like, a Christian can't be involved in this?
Speaker A:Like, you saw what we did in there.
Speaker A:We're teaching kids to respect each other.
Speaker A:Like, don't Christians believe that kids should respect each other?
Speaker A:And this is where I think for the first time, for me, truth exchange really came into play for what to say in a situation like that, Because I don't think I would have had the vocabulary for it before.
Speaker A:But I was able to say to him, well, actually, you're teaching kids to respect each other because they all contain A divine spark that makes them one.
Speaker A:I don't believe that I teach my son to respect other people because God, who's outside of us, made us image bearers.
Speaker A:We're all created in his image, and that's why we show respect, and that's why we.
Speaker A:Those are two radically different worldviews.
Speaker A:And I was just kind of standing there, like, looking at him, and he just stared at me like he just didn't know what to say.
Speaker A:And he was like, fine, you know, and he just.
Speaker A:He was gone.
Speaker A:And so they kept my son out.
Speaker A:Like, they sent him to a fifth grade class.
Speaker A:He was a kindergartner.
Speaker A:They were sending him to a fifth grade class during yoga, and he was sitting through, like, a math lesson.
Speaker A:He's studying to be a math teacher now, so I guess it worked out.
Speaker A:But, I mean, they kind of started, like, punishing the kids who slowly but surely were getting pulled.
Speaker A:And I wrote some articles about it, and I was just kind of.
Speaker A:I was really scared because his response had been so strong.
Speaker A:But I was kind of like, contacting other Christians and saying, like, hey, could you read this?
Speaker A:I think people need to understand what's happening in these yoga classes.
Speaker A:And so they pulled.
Speaker A:I think there were, like, 18 kids by the end of the year who got pulled out of.
Speaker A:Out of that particular class.
Speaker A:But at that point, the Joyce foundation had come to the entire school district of Encinitas, and they offered, like, over half a million dollars to have access to all of the kids in K through 8.
Speaker A:I think it was three or four days a week to do yoga.
Speaker A:And it was graded.
Speaker A:It was required.
Speaker A:It was during the school day.
Speaker A:And so eventually that.
Speaker A:That ended up having to go to court.
Speaker A:But that was sort of my first introduction to what yoga was.
Speaker A:And I kept asking myself, and I had a lot of Christians who were angry at me.
Speaker A:You know, I had a lot of people who.
Speaker A:Joshua, like, answered the phone for probably six months at the office because there were people who were calling and saying that, you know, I should be fired.
Speaker A:I received threats.
Speaker A:I was told that I should no longer feel safe showing my face or my children's faces in the community of Encinitas.
Speaker A:I mean, people.
Speaker B:Very namaste of them.
Speaker A:Yeah, very, very namaste of them.
Speaker A:People got really up in arms.
Speaker A:And so then I was starting to just really look at all of the different claims of, like, well, there's Holy.
Speaker A:Holy Yoga by Brooke Boone.
Speaker A:Well, you read Brooke Boone, and she has, like, a statement of faith on the yoga page.
Speaker A:But when you go in.
Speaker A:And you read what she.
Speaker A:By the vocabulary of some of her statements of faith, you find that it's very Hindu still.
Speaker A:She's an Ashtangi.
Speaker A:When she talks about, like God as the creator, she believes that he emanated like a, an own vibration and that it's out of the ohm.
Speaker A:Vibration that God created.
Speaker A:And so that when we're doing yoga, we're connecting ourselves to that.
Speaker B:Very question of.
Speaker A:And so I, I have yet to find a version of yoga that is, that is, that.
Speaker A:Could any, any realm be called Christian?
Speaker A:At the most you can say is that it's sanitized.
Speaker A:I have a lot of people who have brought up like First Corinthians where Paul says that you can eat meat, sacrifice to idols, you know, and they.
Speaker B:Say that was the first verse.
Speaker A:Yeah, but I think that that's a miscategorization.
Speaker A:Like, yoga is not the meat.
Speaker A:Your body's the meat.
Speaker A:Yoga is the sacrificial system by which you are sacrificing yourself by, like, literally, when you do asana, you are forming your body into images that represent Hindu deities and stories.
Speaker A:Correct.
Speaker A:It's a religion of embodiment.
Speaker A:And so Paul never would have said that you could pick up the sacrificial knife and slaughter the meat and then eat it.
Speaker A:Like, this is just a miscategorization.
Speaker A:And even if you're an open Christian and sanitized yoga, your witnesses compromise too, because people who go into yoga, they tend to want to go deeper.
Speaker A:So say you have a non Christian and a Christian friend who are doing yoga together.
Speaker A:You're kind of, by your participation, saying, like, I'm in no conflict with these, these ideas.
Speaker A:And so by your participation, you are giving affirmation to the non believer that these ideas, at the very least, are not in conflict with Christian ideas, which they are.
Speaker A:But quite possibly you're saying, and you benefit from them too, so why would they not pursue it further?
Speaker A:So First Corinthians is a, a great book to go to regarding yoga, but it doesn't result in the answers that I think a lot of Christians think it does.
Speaker B:Yeah, I always say, okay, we want to go to First Corinthians and be hyper legalistic about that.
Speaker B:Can we be hyper legalistic about some other verses in Corinthians?
Speaker B:Like, there's some verses about head coverings that I might like to talk about with you.
Speaker B:You know, what about Ephesians 5?
Speaker B:There are some verses in there I'd like to be pretty legalistic about.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But yeah, so, right.
Speaker B:That's always the first.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:Well, those, those aren't as inspired.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And then, and then the whole thing cracks instantly.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:No, I, I, I appreciate you sharing that deep background of, of having encountered this firsthand because, you know, I was, I was surprised when I first started talking about yoga on X, right.
Speaker B:From having, again, having traveled in India.
Speaker B:India.
Speaker B:The blowback that I got from saying that, like, yeah, no, yoga is demonic and it's Hindu.
Speaker B:The blowback that I got from Christians around the first cor.
Speaker B:Sometimes they'll get creative and bring out some other ones.
Speaker B:I was shocked.
Speaker B:And I've since discovered that if you want to provoke a firestorm on X for a couple days, you talk about yoga not being Christian.
Speaker B:I was interviewed by One America News Network for half an hour about that.
Speaker A:Because something I, that does not surprise me.
Speaker A:That does not surprise me.
Speaker A:I actually, during the lawsuit, I did not participate in the lawsuit.
Speaker A:I was not in a position in life where that would have been remotely appropriate for me.
Speaker A:But because I was able to speak about these things maybe from a perspective that people hadn't heard of before, and that certainly was because of Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:The lawyer who actually sued the school district on behalf of some of the parents in the district used me as sort of like the media mouthpiece, you know, and it was amazing, the interviews I had.
Speaker A:Like, I remember talking to a reporter from New York Times who we had this really long, involved discussion.
Speaker A:And again, he, so he was trying to call yoga, like, it's like the blank pages of a book.
Speaker A:And so as Christians.
Speaker A:Yeah, I know.
Speaker A:But what he was trying to say is that, like, we could overlay meaning onto movement in any way that we wanted to.
Speaker A:So yoga was like the blank pages of a book.
Speaker A:And I was trying to say to him, no, this is more like saying that, like the sign language, like, if you, if you use sign language to say Christian things, that, because it's just movement, like, anyone else could just, like, overlay like, whatever language they wanted to on it.
Speaker A:But you're communicating things by.
Speaker A:Or it'd be like baptizing people for swim class.
Speaker A:You know, like, there's, there's a symbolism in baptism.
Speaker A:It's death and resurrection.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:That is being communicated.
Speaker A:And I don't think that yogis would appreciate us, like, baptizing for swim class so that kids could get used to water.
Speaker A:Because you're communicating a message.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:So it's not a blank page.
Speaker A:And none of that made it into the article.
Speaker A:You know, I remember having A really long conversation with a guy who was a reporter for Al Jazeera who came out to Escondido.
Speaker A:They were doing a documentary on the whole yoga conflict that.
Speaker A:That came out of California, you know, and he was like, yeah, you know, I'm an sbnr.
Speaker A:And I said, sbnr.
Speaker A:And he's spiritual, but not religious.
Speaker A:And he said.
Speaker A:So I was reading all about truth exchange, and I'm totally a oneist, you know, like, he really was excited by the ideas of oneism and twoism, and he identified with one ism.
Speaker A:He didn't have a problem with it, but he just never heard that vocabulary before.
Speaker A:But none of that made it into the documentary.
Speaker A:So it's really interesting.
Speaker A:Like, you can have these extensive and meaningful conversations with people, but what gets communicated.
Speaker A:I mean, if you.
Speaker A:If you went and looked at the grand conspiracy theories that were written about me and Dean Broyles, the.
Speaker A:The lawyer, and how we had, like, cooked all of this up as, like, a scheme of truth exchange to, like, I don't know, it was just kind of crazy.
Speaker A:And Christians believed a lot of that, too.
Speaker A:So it was amazing the kind of stuff that happened around that.
Speaker A:I never expected it, but it was the weirdest two years.
Speaker A:Not the weirdest, but two of the weirder years of my life.
Speaker B:Now I'm curious, but before I go there, one of the things that I'm kind of curious about what the weirdest two years are, but just I want to point.
Speaker B:Just point out a contradiction in what they say.
Speaker B:You can make yoga whatever you want it.
Speaker B:It means whatever you want it to mean.
Speaker B:So I would.
Speaker B:What I always want them to know is, please explain to me the history of when yoga became a decidedly Hindu practice, when it stopped being that.
Speaker B: e United States in, like, the: Speaker B: So it arrived in the: Speaker B:There's a wonderful documentary called Gods of the New Age.
Speaker B:And I think that was made in the early 80s, when it seems like the evangelical church was way more up on the New Age stuff.
Speaker B:And in that documentary, there's a speaker who talks about how the gurus, the Indian gurus, recognized that they could uniquely appeal to the American mind and by positioning things in terms of health and science, that those were the two things that penetrate the American mind.
Speaker B: , in the: Speaker B:When did it stop being Hindu?
Speaker B:And is that not cultural appropriation, to say, well, we can take this religious practice, explicitly religious practice, with explicitly religious origins and explicitly religious intentions, and guess what?
Speaker B:Well, it's not Hindu anymore.
Speaker B:When did that happen?
Speaker B:Just simply because you say so.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And so they can use their own arguments against them.
Speaker B:Please go ahead.
Speaker A:Well, and just to key back in what you said about how yogis recognized that they could bring the physical practices and that Christians would be resistant to the spiritual ideas behind practice.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So Sri K. Patabi Joyce.
Speaker A:There's a famous quote of his, and it's actually painted on one of the ashrams that they have in Encinitas called, like, the Sonima Foundation.
Speaker A:After the lawsuit, they changed the name from Joyce to, like, Sonima Foundation.
Speaker A:But he would say 99% practice, 1% philosophy.
Speaker A:And his point was.
Speaker A:And I have these quotes written out somewhere, and I know that I referred to them in some, some presentations that I did about this at the time.
Speaker A:But what he was saying is that.
Speaker A:But because Hinduism is a religion of embodiment, if you do the physical exercises, your mind and your spirit will be affected and changed.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Oh, wow.
Speaker B:Patabi Joyce said this?
Speaker A:Sri K. Patabi Joyce said that?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And then his sons and other people, he died.
Speaker A:And actually it was one of his deathbed wishes that yoga would be brought to the American public school system.
Speaker A:And that's what these billionaires that were his disciples, I can't remember their name now because it's too long ago, but they had tried to do it in India, and the Indian Supreme Court threw it out.
Speaker A:They were like, of course, we can't have every public school child in India do Ashtanga yoga.
Speaker A:Like, that's Hindu.
Speaker A:And what are we going to say to the Muslims and the Christians?
Speaker A:So in India, they were like, absolutely not.
Speaker A:It's religious.
Speaker A:And in the United States, we're like, well, we don't know, is it religious?
Speaker A:But his point was, if you could get people to do.
Speaker A:Do the practice, you could affect their minds.
Speaker A:And this, this goes back to American Veda.
Speaker A:Philip Goldberg is basically saying that the Christian canopy of religion was removed.
Speaker A:And by practice we took on this Vedic canopy, you should totally read the book.
Speaker A:It's older, but it's every bit as relevant today as it was then.
Speaker A:And so if they're on record saying, we intend this as an evangelistic tool, we intend the physical practice as an evangelistic tool, and we look around and see the way that the culture has changed.
Speaker A:And even non Christians like Philip Goldberg acknowledge the culture has completely changed.
Speaker A:Why?
Speaker A:As Christians, then do we think that there's no truth in those claims as we sit there insisting to wear our Lululemons and go to yoga?
Speaker A:I, you know, so who are we.
Speaker B:To say that they're wrong?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I get, I run into this all the time, especially with psychedelics.
Speaker B:Like, well, you know, that doesn't mean that the people in the, in, in these communities know what's actually going on.
Speaker B:Like, who are you to say that you know better?
Speaker A:Like, they know perfectly well.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, well.
Speaker B:And it's really frightening.
Speaker B:And I think that's the right word.
Speaker B:I can understand if people in secular culture have a particular attachment to yoga.
Speaker B:I get that because it's part of the secular world.
Speaker B:It's the blowback from Christians that surprises me.
Speaker B:The force, the intensity of it, the anger that comes out.
Speaker B:And being called a fundy or a fundamentalist is probably one of the nicer terms that people use.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And there's no scriptural warrant.
Speaker B:Like if you're going to use one verse out of Corinthians to try and cover something and a verse that's quite easy to tear through, frankly, in this context, it's shocking to me, and you said it earlier, how attached that they get.
Speaker B:It's like, how can you say that's anything other than spiritual?
Speaker B:That the level of attachment, the grip that it has on people's minds and their hearts and their spirits, that they just won't let it go.
Speaker B:They won't even examine evidence to the contrary to say, like, yeah, no, you have to stop doing this.
Speaker B:It doesn't mean that you have to stop stretching.
Speaker B:I can provide you huge stacks of books about just stretching.
Speaker B:When it comes to yoga, I talk about postures, sequences and context.
Speaker B:The postures have meaning.
Speaker B:They are dedicated to Hindu deities.
Speaker B:And you can go to yogabasics.com and you can see the names of the deities.
Speaker B:Every yoga teacher learns these sequences, like the sun salutation that you said.
Speaker B:And then there's the context, which is, you know, are you doing Also, not to mention corpse pose.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Which you conclude yoga classes with, and the chanting of ohms.
Speaker B:And then there's the context.
Speaker B:Is there a Shiva statue?
Speaker B:Is there an Om painted on the wall?
Speaker B:Not even mentioning Kundalini, the long term path of what yoga leads to.
Speaker B:I don't know that there's a Christian case for any of this, but it doesn't seem to matter.
Speaker A:It doesn't seem to matter.
Speaker A:And that I think was the tragic thing to see.
Speaker A:I mean, there were a lot of tragic things to see.
Speaker A:Go on in Encinitas during that time.
Speaker A:But one of the sadder things to me was the Christian parents who were like, well, we're Christians, but we're not like those Christians.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Namely, what kind of Christian are you?
Speaker A:Like, yeah, like, we're not overreactionary.
Speaker A:We're not fear mongers.
Speaker A:And so they, they let their kids participate and there were different.
Speaker A:Okay, let me just back up a little bit.
Speaker A:I have not thought about this whole story for such a long time, but I like to dig.
Speaker A:I love the Internet because you can go in and you can find out about people.
Speaker A:You can look at all kinds of stuff.
Speaker A:And so one of the things that I had been able to find when the lawsuit first started was dropped and people were saying, like, the intention of this is non religious.
Speaker A:I was like, well, I wonder what the curriculum looks like, you know?
Speaker A:So I found one of the original curriculum documents on the district website that teachers were being.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:That the yoga teachers at each.
Speaker A:Oh, and they were building separate buildings, ashram, like little yoga studios on each campus that could, could.
Speaker A:That were supposed to be.
Speaker A:And I don't know that this actually ever happened, but it was in the plans.
Speaker A:It was supposed to be like a set apart place for the yoga to be done, which I just think is appropriate.
Speaker A:You know, like they're.
Speaker A:They're holding to their Hindu priors.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's fine.
Speaker B:No big deal.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:But the.
Speaker A:The curriculum said in the very first lesson, and they changed this after I called it out.
Speaker A:And after Dean Broyles called it out in the very first lesson, there was a reminder to the yoga teachers that the purpose of performing the asana was to draw the spirit of the child to the surface so that it could be accessed and affected by the teacher.
Speaker A:Okay, just straight out, that might not be an exact quote because we're talking like 12 years ago now, but I'm very close, very close to the language that was being used.
Speaker A:And we were like, hello?
Speaker A:And they were like, well, but we changed that.
Speaker A:And we're like, but that was the original intent.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And so then we started having stories.
Speaker A:Like, there was one mother that I knew.
Speaker A:I was actually in a prayer group with her, and her son had started having like these wild stomach aches.
Speaker A:And he was like in third grade.
Speaker A:And he.
Speaker A:It turned out that he was very aware that when he was in yoga class and it was a big deal that they were saying things about God that were different from the things he was learning at home and at church.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And yet his parents were telling him to be respectful of his teachers and to, like, be a good student in class.
Speaker A:And so he started to have this conflict, like, where, which place do I land?
Speaker A:Which thing is true?
Speaker A:And so, like, he was coming home sick to his stomach with, like, ulcer, like, symptoms of stress here in, like, the third and fourth grade until they finally pulled him.
Speaker A:There was another family who left their daughter, she was kindergarten, left their daughter in the yoga program.
Speaker A:And yet the dad was a worship leader at their church and taught for one of the community groups that they had at this particular church.
Speaker A:And a couple of weeks after the yoga program started, they got together for community group and he was going to lead worship before they started the discussion for the night.
Speaker A:And their little daughter went and got into lotus pose right in the middle of the floor, like, put her hand in the proper, you know, like, forms of obeisance.
Speaker A:And they were like, what are you doing?
Speaker A:And she was like, I'm getting ready to worship.
Speaker A:Like, she understood that what she was doing was worship, right?
Speaker A:So that was their wake up moment.
Speaker A:There was an instance where a baseball team in Encinitas Little League was losing.
Speaker A:And so some of the kids, including some of the Christian.
Speaker A:The Christian kids on the team decided they weren't going to pray for help.
Speaker A:They decided to get together and do sun salutation out on the field during a break because they were trying to, like, turn things around, right?
Speaker B:They'll sacrifice a goat next.
Speaker A:It just goes on and on and on.
Speaker A:And I think finally I ended up moving my kids and I came back to Escondido.
Speaker A:I.
Speaker A:My son never went back to that school.
Speaker A:And praise God, I was able to put him in Christian school when I came back to Escondido.
Speaker A:But I have talked to parents over the years and the whole yoga thing has kind of fallen.
Speaker A:Fallen apart out there.
Speaker A:But they have since tried.
Speaker A:They were trying to get yoga into a thousand school districts across the country.
Speaker A:And one of the songbooks that they were using, for instance, had all this poetry and one of the songs that they were teaching because it was supposed to tell touch, like nutrition.
Speaker A:And so.
Speaker A:And I don't know that a lot of people recognize that, like, within yoga, like, there are ways that you're supposed to eat.
Speaker A:Well, within Hinduism, like, there are ways that you're supposed to eat there.
Speaker A:I mean, everything is connected, right?
Speaker A:So they were growing Ayurveda.
Speaker B:Sorry, Ayurveda.
Speaker A:Ayurveda.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker A:I cannot remember the name.
Speaker B:So I've been to an Ayurveda retreat in India as well, of course.
Speaker A:You have?
Speaker B:Of course I have.
Speaker B:Of course I have.
Speaker A:So they were teaching all of this, you know, and, and so there was this songbook that they were using in the Cajon Valley school district, which was the next school district that this went to.
Speaker A:And in one of those songs, they were teaching kids that your mind and your heart don't always have to be in conflict, but sometimes they will be.
Speaker A:And it was called the Heart Is Smart songbook.
Speaker A:And so when your mind and your heart are in conflict, you need to let your heart lead.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So it just.
Speaker A:I could go on and on.
Speaker A:I have gone on and on.
Speaker A:But it took a lot for Christian parents to start to recognize what was going on and their kids were affected by it, unfortunately.
Speaker B:It's really scary to think about how.
Speaker B:I think I heard you say $500,000 was donated in order to bring yoga into the public schools.
Speaker B:And you said this was 12 years ago, something like that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A: think it would have been like: Speaker B:And how old were the kids?
Speaker A:This school district was K through 8.
Speaker B:So it was supposed to be yoga classes for all grades at that level.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Oh my goodness.
Speaker A:So you think about a little kid who they're taught to deal with stress through yoga.
Speaker A:They're taught to think through yoga, they're taught to, you know, like, calm their minds through yoga.
Speaker A:Like anything mental health wise, anything, you know, that they're dealing with, they're supposed to use yoga to, to deal with it.
Speaker A:So you think about a Kid, K through 8, who's been trained in that when they get into high school, they're going to go find yoga.
Speaker A:Like if that is what they've been trained in, that's what they're going to go find.
Speaker A:And you better believe, especially in Encinitas, but elsewhere also, it's not just Encinitas that when they go to find more yoga, it's not going to be the sanitized public school version.
Speaker A:It's just not.
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:And it's going to be a lifelong practice for the them.
Speaker B:Meaning like yoga will be their religious.
Speaker B:Religious core.
Speaker B:And by I say, but when I say religious core, I don't mean that they're necessarily thinking in theological terms.
Speaker B:And that I think is the really tough part is that the religion that's actually being practiced doesn't really have a book of theology, but the religion is ultimately about your inner wellness, your inner happiness, your will, your well being.
Speaker B:And that is ultimately the highest God that is worshiped by people who get attached to yoga, who get attached to meditation.
Speaker B:They're worshiping their own wellness as God.
Speaker B:And so when I say that becomes their religion, that's ultimately what they place as their highest priority, their inner state of well being.
Speaker B:And so trying to put them into a mindset where your inner state of well being, like meaning your subjective experience, is not the highest priority of a Christian.
Speaker B:There are moments in a Christian's life where you are supposed to get very uncomfortable up to and including the point of death.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That's Christ.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And so that's, that's the religion that they end up practicing.
Speaker B:There's a lot more to explore there.
Speaker A:Yeah, well, and I think, I mean, you've keyed on in on something where they don't think about it in religious terms.
Speaker A:And I think going back to that conversation with the school principal that I had is that who could argue against having good mental health?
Speaker A:Who could argue against kids respecting each other, who could argue against all of these good things?
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:But it's the idea underneath that Christians especially, I think need to recognize is there are no non religious things.
Speaker A:I think that's really my contention.
Speaker A:I think there is very little in life.
Speaker A:I would struggle to think of something that is ultimately not religious.
Speaker A:So when you say we're teaching kids to respect each other, okay, what do we mean by respect?
Speaker A:Well, they have a divine spark in each other or they bear the image of God.
Speaker A:Those are religious things.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So the respect sits on a foundation of a religious belief.
Speaker A:And we need to understand what that foundation is.
Speaker A:Because if we're building on a foundation that is not biblical, it's going to collapse.
Speaker A:It's going to lead people astray.
Speaker A:Another one like, like love.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:We need to love people.
Speaker A:Well, what's your definition of love?
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker A:So Christ says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and you love your neighbor as yourself.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:So that means that first I love God and that defines how I love neighborhood.
Speaker A:So then we go and we look at, say, 1 Corinthians 13, speak the truth in love.
Speaker A:It doesn't say, only say things that make people feel good and otherwise be quiet.
Speaker A:And I think that that is what a lot of Christians feel speak the truth in love means.
Speaker A:Well, we read further on that.
Speaker A:Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing.
Speaker A:Love rejoices in the truth.
Speaker A:So truth has to be spoken when we're being loving.
Speaker A:And then that takes you to like Proverbs 27:6.
Speaker A:I think that's the correct reference.
Speaker A:Faithful Are the wounds of a friend profuse?
Speaker A:Are the kisses of an enemy, meaning sometimes love really hurts.
Speaker A:Sometimes the best forms of love really hurt when we're in sin.
Speaker A:And so if a Christian thinks that love is not a religious term, a Christian can get love wrong.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So can the world.
Speaker A:But we have an objective standard to hold things up to.
Speaker A:And so, I mean, give me the thing that's not religious.
Speaker A:We have to be thinking always like every square inch of reality is under the lordship of Christ.
Speaker A:And we need to understand what that means.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:Including the public school district, including all these things that were sort of taught that are outside of God's sovereignty.
Speaker B:And we're.
Speaker B:And we're speaking primarily in a Western sense.
Speaker B:We're speaking in psychological language.
Speaker B:Love, respect, well being, you know, inner harmony, inner peace.
Speaker B:Another one that comes up and is going to come up a lot more soon is trauma.
Speaker B:This idea that our inner reality, our inner psychology is somehow off limits to God's influence or God's law.
Speaker B:Like somehow.
Speaker B:Like this is a separate thing.
Speaker B:You don't want to.
Speaker B:God doesn't deal with any of that.
Speaker B:Well, no, he absolutely does deal with all of that.
Speaker B:That and that I'm sure this will be.
Speaker B:This was in Dr. Peter Jones's book the Other Worldview, particularly where he hangs a lot of it around Carl Jung's neck.
Speaker B:And I was essentially a Jungian for many years.
Speaker B:This idea about how our minds, hearts, spirits, our inner experience is off limits to God.
Speaker B:If something makes me feel bad, if something makes me feel uncomfortable, if something disrupts my equilibrium or my oneness or whatever, well, that's bad.
Speaker B:Well, no, that could actually be something very good that's going on and necessary for you.
Speaker B:And I think all of this is.
Speaker B: se that was a big part of the: Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:I don't remember the trauma because I was specifically reading during that yoga period.
Speaker A:So I actually have thought recently I need to go back and read American Veda again because I think that there are other things that I would pull out of it now that I didn't necessarily see then.
Speaker A:Um, but that.
Speaker A:That.
Speaker A:Yeah, the psychologizing.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Because sometimes we feel bad about things because they are bad.
Speaker A:And either they're bad things being done to us or they're bad things that we're doing.
Speaker A:Sometimes both, you know, because we can.
Speaker A:We're told not to be.
Speaker A:We're not told that we can't be angry, but we're told that we can't sin in our anger.
Speaker A:And I think that, like the victimhood mentality that we have.
Speaker A:So, like trauma brings up for me the fact that we think that there are victims and victims somehow are held to a different moral standard.
Speaker A:So if you do something because you're a victim, that makes it righteous.
Speaker A:Well, that's not true.
Speaker A:Like if a man is abused by his father and that makes him angry, so he lashes out later at his wife and kids, he's sinning in anger and was he traumatized?
Speaker A:Yeah, but now there are other, you know, like, so you just have this whole chain.
Speaker B:If a woman does it, though, if a woman is abused by.
Speaker B:If a woman is abused by her father and she lashes out of people, she's a victim.
Speaker B:If a man is abused by his father and he lashes out, he's a perpetrator.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker A:Distinction.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, no, that's a great distinction.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:And we talked about ayurvedic medicine and food.
Speaker A:So even the food you eat.
Speaker A:I'm just, I'm being silly, but it's just, just.
Speaker A:There are just a lot of things that we don't think are religious that are.
Speaker B:No, that's real.
Speaker B:That is.
Speaker B:That is definitely real.
Speaker B:Like, this is the whole spirit behind veganism.
Speaker B:This is a lot of.
Speaker B:Look, I'm like, I'm all like.
Speaker B:The factory farming system, the way that it has evolved over time, there's.
Speaker B:There are many aspects of it that are a travesty.
Speaker B:Now there's an element of factory farming that has provided food abundance that thousands of years of human history would consider massively enviable.
Speaker B:And the exploitations of the factory farm system, the factory food system, has led to very, very serious problems.
Speaker B:So there is a moral component to this.
Speaker B:But behind veganism, they're making moral claims.
Speaker B:They're making moral claims about the treatment of the land, the treatment of Gaia or Mother Earth.
Speaker B:And so everything has to be sustainable.
Speaker B:And all these different things, not just for the potential health benefits, but also because we're abusing the planet which has consciousness.
Speaker B:We're abusing our Mother, Mother Earth, we're abusing the planet.
Speaker B:And so these farming techniques are less abusive to the planet, which fuels pain.
Speaker B:And civilization is patriarchal and all this different stuff.
Speaker B:So in a very real sense it sounds comical, but the beliefs, also, to reinforce your point, it is actually religious and it does take on religious dimensions.
Speaker B:Just not Christian religious dimensions.
Speaker A:Well, I could not create.
Speaker B:It is Christian religious in that they do make moral claims, but they don't explain where they get Their sense of morality from.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And I do think that Christians have a lot to answer for.
Speaker A:This may be more of like a Western conservatism thing, but I do think that we have a lot to answer for because we are called to be stewards.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker A:But stewardship, again.
Speaker A:So here comes oneism and twoism.
Speaker A:Stewardship means that we created in the image of God.
Speaker A:We're given a mandate.
Speaker A:So we're given the blessing of carrying his image, and we're given a mandate, part of which is stewardship.
Speaker A:And we're given a gift which is the earth.
Speaker A:And that doesn't mean that we worship the earth, but it does mean that we seek to take good care of the things that we're given.
Speaker A:And I think that that's.
Speaker A:You know, you mentioned factory farming.
Speaker A:I actually really do struggle with a lot of the factory farming issues that we see.
Speaker A:Like, I.
Speaker A:This is a whole tangent, but, like, I keep chickens.
Speaker A:We try to eat meat that.
Speaker A:And vegetarian.
Speaker A:This can be really, really difficult, but we try to eat meat that has been raised.
Speaker A:Well, there have been some laws that have been passed here in California, and while there is very little that I like that we do legally in California, but that has kind of constrained some of the, the abuses of animals that, that we do see.
Speaker A:And I, I do think that's a good thing.
Speaker A:But I'm always aware that I think that the people who did that are doing it because they are probably Earth worshipers.
Speaker A:They probably.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker A:I mean, there are even conversations about whether animals and rivers and trees should have human rights.
Speaker A:And they shouldn't, because they're not image bearers.
Speaker A:But so I like the result.
Speaker A:But again, what is the worldview underneath that?
Speaker A:I think we need to talk about that, but I do.
Speaker A:Like, we sit on about half an acre and I'm trying more and more to grow a lot more of our own food.
Speaker A:And I try to do that organically because God's creation is intricate and it's amazing.
Speaker A:There's so much detail in it that causes me to praise him because he's an amazing artist.
Speaker A:So I think that those things are important and that we should pay attention to them.
Speaker A:But again, they are not objects of our worship.
Speaker A:And yeah, so there is that whole worldview underneath, but it's very hard to buy, like, a sustainable gardening book without being introduced to Gaia.
Speaker A:And, you know, these whole ideas about, you know, fertilizers that can only be used on certain moons because of the spiritual entity.
Speaker A:You know, I mean, there are literally like, like spell casting recipes that get put into these books about.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker A:It's just everywhere.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Makes me wonder.
Speaker B:Again, American Veda has been on my list for a long time.
Speaker B: ldberg talks about how in the: Speaker B:And that makes me wonder.
Speaker B:So if you pull back the Christian canopy from civilization, from American society, on one hand, you get a bunch of people who are.
Speaker B:They're now liberated from the Christian worldview, the Judeo Christian worldview, and they go flooding into Eastern mysticism.
Speaker B:And that's the story of the Beatles, right?
Speaker B:Oh, sure.
Speaker B:And why they brought back.
Speaker B:But I wonder if also there's a component of that where a lot of people are like, well, Christian morality is out right now, so I don't have to be a steward of the land.
Speaker B:I can now, like, now I can just, you know, I can essentially abuse the earth, you know, meaning the soil, for as much as I can get out of it.
Speaker B:And so it creates, like, the problem of this devastating factory farming was created by the removal of Christian values, not the propagation of them.
Speaker B:And so I think that there's this lie that.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:That's told that's like, oh, it's Christian morality that did this.
Speaker B: istian moral nation since the: Speaker B:Of any of these environmental devastations on Christianity.
Speaker B:And because perhaps if we had kept the Christian moral canopy and believed in stewardship in the way that.
Speaker B:In the way that the Bible talks about, maybe none of this would have happened in the first place.
Speaker B:So maybe Christianity is being tarred with accusations that it is not guilty of.
Speaker A:That's a great point.
Speaker A:And that makes me regret the wording that I used earlier when I said conservatism.
Speaker A:I think what I really was thinking about was crony capitalism.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:And that's an important distinction.
Speaker A:And I was sloppy with my wording there, and I'm grateful that you drew that point out.
Speaker A:Do you know who Dr. Cal Beisner is?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Cornwall Alliance.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think I would highly recommend.
Speaker A:He's our Truth Exchange fellow.
Speaker A:Actually.
Speaker A:He's done a lot of work with Truth exchange.
Speaker A:He and Dr. Jones are very good friends.
Speaker A:He's absolutely dear and just absolutely brilliant.
Speaker A:So there are a number of talks that he's done for Truth Exchange that are available on our website, truthexchange.com that people can look up, and I think they're on our YouTube channel.
Speaker A:As well.
Speaker A:And there are several essays and some compendium volumes that we have.
Speaker A:I think there's one on global wizardry And I believe Dr. Beisner has an article that he wrote or an essay that he wrote for that compendium volume.
Speaker A:But then, yeah, the Cornwall alliance is just a fantastic organization.
Speaker A:I cannot highly recommend it enough.
Speaker A:If that's something that people are interested in and they are interested in stewardship and really understanding sort of the narrative that's been presented as far as, like, we have to save the planet and therefore like the Green Movement is like this very spiritual thing and we must do it because it's an existential crisis.
Speaker A:Like, Cal digs through all of that with such clear eyes and expertise.
Speaker A:I love it when he speaks for us.
Speaker A:He's just.
Speaker A:He's amazing.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I think I've seen one of the lectures that he gave for you.
Speaker B:I've probably watched more truth Exchange lectures on YouTube than I.
Speaker B:Than I realize, so.
Speaker B:Because that's definitely one of the ones.
Speaker B:And you're absolutely right, man.
Speaker B:I don't know that people I mentioned earlier that New Age Gnostic, these values embedded themselves as part of the American cultural language.
Speaker B:Such to the point that many people think in these terms.
Speaker B:They don't even realize that's the case.
Speaker B:Yoga being a good example, but just one of many.
Speaker B:The environmental movement as a whole.
Speaker B:There's a way that it's framed as we have to care for Mother Earth as a sentient being.
Speaker B:The existential crisis is what it will do to Mother Earth and us as her children.
Speaker B:That's the language that's used.
Speaker B:In fact, I was talking with someone about the book the Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Speaker B:And so like, yeah, so that was a movie with Viggo Mortensen, I think, and it was a post apocalypse.
Speaker B:So the premise of that book is like, we have killed the Earth, we've murdered the Earth.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And then the horrors that come as a result.
Speaker B:So that's not a huge.
Speaker B:That's not a big thing that they draw in red letters on the plot.
Speaker B:But this whole sort of like, what if we kill the Earth?
Speaker B:What if we kill Mother Earth?
Speaker B:What's going to happen to us?
Speaker B:And this is the framing that people understand, like, we're not capable of killing the Earth, like God could.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:But we think in these New Age kind of Earth worshiping terms.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:You know, that's so interesting because you do hear like when you dig into their literature and I'm a huge proponent of this and this is something I learned from Dr. Jones.
Speaker A:Jones is that Dr. Jones didn't become an expert in Gnosticism by reading about Gnosticism.
Speaker A:He went and read the Gnostics.
Speaker A:Like, he didn't read about Carl Jung.
Speaker A:He went and read Carl Jung.
Speaker A:We actually, I can't remember what year the Red Book came out, but recently it was probably like, I want to say, like 10 years ago that it came out and it was like this huge, expensive thing and someone bought it for him because he'd been reading and talking about Carl Jung for a long time.
Speaker A:So we have this awesome picture of my colleague, Joshua Gilo.
Speaker A:The Joneses were traveling and Joshua was like in Peter's office, and he's got the big Red Book and he's reading it, but he read them for themselves.
Speaker A:And so all of that is to say, when you go and you listen to the conversations that they have, like at these huge forums, and when you read the things that they say, you will actively see them question and the answer is implicit.
Speaker A:Do humans really need to be on the Earth?
Speaker A:Like, maybe if we do away with humans, then the Earth will survive.
Speaker A:And if Earth is goddess and sentient, then it's not so bad because there's a consciousness idea here, right?
Speaker A:And I can't go too much further into this because I've just.
Speaker A:I haven't had the time to dig into it.
Speaker A:But here, Elon Musk Musk talking about.
Speaker A:And I'm thankful for Doge, right?
Speaker A:But I hear him talking about the, the push he feels to go to Mars is to preserve consciousness on another planet.
Speaker A:And there's a lot to that, right?
Speaker A:Like, there's a lot to that.
Speaker A:And so we're.
Speaker A:We're not necessarily like, what consciousness?
Speaker A:And he would say human consciousness, but then we see others who are sort of in this green movement who are saying, well, it doesn't matter if humans cease to exist, because Earth consciousness then will survive.
Speaker A:And we need to preserve that over humans.
Speaker A:It always has something.
Speaker A:It always seems to, like, go back to human sacrifice somehow.
Speaker A:You know, you read through the Old Testament and, and the rage that God has over pagan practices, and it's not.
Speaker A:It's a rage because they're passing their children through the fire, they're sacrificing their sons and daughters, you know, and.
Speaker A:And we abort our sons and daughters, you know, we do.
Speaker A:We're not all that different.
Speaker A:So, yeah, there are lots of places we could go.
Speaker A:Welcome to my brain.
Speaker B:No, I mean, this is.
Speaker B:No, I appreciate it because once you start looking, you being the royal You, Once you start looking into these subjects, it becomes really apparent just how wide, just how far these ideas have traveled.
Speaker B:People don't believe it.
Speaker B:I feel like sometimes I sound like a crazy person trying to tell people whatever's going on right now.
Speaker B:And we talked about this on the Truth Exchange podcast about the sort of rising neo Nazi right wing kind of stuff that's going on.
Speaker B:Whatever's happening with that is absolutely small potatoes compared to what we're talking about right now.
Speaker B:Once the lights actually come on and you see how far these new age Gnostic, Hindu, Vedic, whatever you call them, once you see how far these ideas have traveled and how much they have a grip on everything and the way that we frame everything in public dialogue.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:Your head explodes once you see that.
Speaker B:For example, the Large Hadron Collide in Switzerland, right?
Speaker B:There's a giant Shiva statue at the Large Hadron Collider.
Speaker B:Of course there is.
Speaker B:Of course there is.
Speaker A:Of course there is.
Speaker B:But if you're going to set up a religious icon at a multi hundred million, multi billion dollar science facility to discover the innate nature of matter, why are you going to set up Shiva the Destroyer?
Speaker B:I can't believe that these scientists aren't aware of the meaning of this.
Speaker B:It's like, well, it's the Destroyer.
Speaker B:We're smashing atoms and there's a big circle.
Speaker B:Give me a right.
Speaker B:But this is how we think.
Speaker B:And Elon, like, well, you know, human consciousness, we're going to destroy Earth.
Speaker B:And so human consciousness needs to spread out.
Speaker B:It's like, well, hold on just a moment.
Speaker B:But that's the way that people think.
Speaker B:And it's got a grip on.
Speaker B:Please, go ahead.
Speaker A:Well, there's an idea in what Elon says too, that is utterly Gnostic, because it's as though we could remove consciousness from human body.
Speaker A:You know, like, so we have this transhumanism between body and soul that's a Gnostic separation.
Speaker A:Like God created us male and female in his image.
Speaker A:Image.
Speaker A:And that is both body and soul.
Speaker A:And I think that we make, I think we read even some scripture incorrectly because we've allowed like this Gnostic, like we're not meat envelopes with the true self on the inside and that.
Speaker A:I mean, transgenderism, right.
Speaker A:But there's this idea, like, take cryogenics where you can freeze a person.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to think.
Speaker A:Some of these things I've only thought about and I've never tried to verbalize, but I think too of like the neuralink factor and what Elon's doing.
Speaker A:Yeah, and, and the robotics, like we're not the creator God, so we cannot take spirit and put it into machine and have it still be human.
Speaker A:Like it might pretend, but it will only ever be a semblance of because we do not have.
Speaker A:Have creative power.
Speaker A:And so it seems like it's all going in these strange directions.
Speaker A:But again, like that Gnostic, and I say Gnostic, Hindu idea of reality is the coherent piece underneath all of it.
Speaker A:So it might take different looking forms, but the ideas seem to be the same.
Speaker A:And, and that really, that really concerns me.
Speaker A:And I, and I think that, you know, we hear, okay, so you take like the idea that little kids are joined by the divine spark that they carry on the inside.
Speaker A:Well, if you have a divine spark on the inside of you, or your true self is on the inside, then your body ceases to matter.
Speaker A:But God finds our body very important because they are part of who we are.
Speaker A:Like, I just.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I think that there's a false separation that happens.
Speaker A:And again, this is because we get our categories mixed up.
Speaker B:Well, we're thinking, we're no longer thinking in a one versus two, a oneist versus two ist way of mode of being.
Speaker B:All is one to varying degrees, whether people realize it or not.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And that's the thing is.
Speaker B:So I have a Facebook account with all of my old friends from my before life.
Speaker B:And so I need to run a call, my Facebook crusade to take back my Facebook page and sort of tell people, well, we haven't really talked in about 10 years and here's what's been going on with me.
Speaker B:So I'll get around to that, I'm sure.
Speaker B:But one of the things that I'm looking forward to sharing with them, by the way, way a lot of people in my new Christian life have now found me on Facebook and they're adding me on Facebook.
Speaker B:So it's great.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So it's like the.
Speaker B:My Facebook population is changing.
Speaker B:So when I do actually tell people what's up with me, I'm going to get a lot more support than I would have in the past, which is praise God for that.
Speaker B:But one of the things I'm looking forward to telling them is like, hey, I know that you all knew me as this kind of new age guy and that I was like the, you know, had a priest like role, I guess, in some circles.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:You sound like you were super into it.
Speaker A:Like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, I was, I was the guy who, who like, like my, in my con conversation with Carl Tyre.
Speaker B:I wish I had Game of Gods here in the, in the studio.
Speaker B:But in Game of Gods, he describes Perennial man, this fictional character that he conjured on.
Speaker B:It's one of the later pages of the book.
Speaker B:And I read that book and it's in our interview, and I'm like, yeah, hey, guess what?
Speaker B:I was Perennial Man.
Speaker B:Like, I didn't do all of those things, but you're basically describing me.
Speaker B:And he.
Speaker B:And I had a good laugh about that.
Speaker B:So I was the guy who laughs.
Speaker A:When I listened to it.
Speaker B:Okay, so you heard that bit?
Speaker B:Yeah, so I was reading that.
Speaker B:Like, yeah, he's like, I wrote it for you.
Speaker B:Like you literally did.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:But explain to them that the all is one worldview mindset, whatever you want to call it, is morally incoherent.
Speaker B:But trying to explain to people who just kind of think casually, as I did, all is one.
Speaker B:They just kind of have this idea, but when you point them to first, that there are all these deeply troubling moral consequences as a result of that, of the results of monism and karma, those two things in particular have some panentheism as well, but in a different, slightly different way.
Speaker B:But there's all these troubling moral consequences.
Speaker B:Okay, you set that aside.
Speaker B:But then having to get down to the bottom of that, get underneath it and say instead, all is two and that there is a creator God who has creatures and he's the moral lawgiver to them, that immediately sparks a visceral response in people.
Speaker B:And that's where we have to get to.
Speaker B:That's the sharp point that I think needs to be driven home.
Speaker B:Home.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I couldn't agree with you more.
Speaker A:I think there's, there's some hope in there though, because the further we pursue in this modern age, some of the ideas of oneism and, and transgenderism is a really good example of this.
Speaker A:The more real damage we do.
Speaker A:And so I'm finding that there are more and more people who I never would have been able to approach with a Christian worldview or the idea of a creator, say 10 years ago, who are willing to hear about it now.
Speaker A:And so what I mean by that is, okay, so here's just an example from yesterday.
Speaker A:This doesn't have to do with transgenderism, but I was standing in line at the store and there was a young mother standing in front of me checking out, and she had an 18 month old and a 3 week old in the grocery cart with her and she's kind of like trying to do everything one handed and the little boy is, like, getting more and more kind of, like, boisterous as they've been sitting there for a while because she's trying to buy her groceries, and then she's trying to fit everything in around the car seat.
Speaker A:And I just asked her at some point, like, how old is your baby?
Speaker A:And she turned around and she was like, oh, he's.
Speaker A:She's three weeks old, and this one's 18 months old.
Speaker A:And I'm a little.
Speaker A:Like, you could just tell, like, she's just tired, you know.
Speaker A:And I said to her, I know you must be exhausted right now.
Speaker A:Like, I had two little ones at one point.
Speaker A:And I said, but, you know, I just want to encourage you.
Speaker A:You are doing what you were made to do as a woman.
Speaker A:You were made to mother.
Speaker A:You were made in such a way that, like, you could deal with this chaos and still love and be gentle.
Speaker A:And, like, the.
Speaker A:The value of what you're doing now is so huge.
Speaker A:And I could just see her kind of like, no one had talked to her in those terms about motherhood, right?
Speaker A:And she was like, thank you so much.
Speaker A:And then the cashier just kind of jumped in and was encouraging her, too.
Speaker A:But I think that there are places where.
Speaker A:So it's not like I shared the gospel with her.
Speaker A:It's not like I got her phone number, but she had this piece of information in her head that clearly resonated.
Speaker A:She has been created to do this very hard thing, and there's value to it.
Speaker A:I have had other conversations with people along those same lines where I have gotten to get to the part of.
Speaker A:And there is a Creator.
Speaker A:And by the way, that creator is someone who, because of Christ, we can speak to and we can ask for help in the situation that you're finding so difficult, right?
Speaker A:So there are all of these different places where that can come into play.
Speaker A:And I am finding that people are more open to those ideas than I've ever seen before.
Speaker A:And one of the places I see that is with D transitioners.
Speaker A:Because, man, you run full force with the entirety of your will, right?
Speaker A:Your self, creative will to define who you say that you are and should be, with the power of the entire medical establishment, the entire culture that's kind of been brainwashed, and even some Christians behind you saying, yeah, be your true self.
Speaker A:And when being your true self and taking medication and doing surgery to make your meat envelope match your sense of who you should be on the inside, because your words don't have creative power, so you have to use physical things to do it right and you, you smash into the damage of that.
Speaker A:I am finding that some of them, a surprising larger majority of them that I have interacted with, whether in person or online, want to know who that creator is.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker A:Because they realize that there is a beauty that they ignored, there is a value that they ignored in who they were, body and soul.
Speaker A:And if the things that he made are beautiful and they regret doing damage to them, then who is he?
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Who is he?
Speaker A:And where can they find that peace and reconciliation?
Speaker A:And I've heard that story from a number of different detransitioners and also men and women who might be like they previously would have considered themselves, like lgb before the T became so prominent and so in, in some same sex relationships who, they were utterly convinced that their same sex relationships were as sanctified as heterosexual relationships.
Speaker A:But something about this trans movement and the importance of, of distinction has caused them to wonder what are the other distinctions that are important that we have ignored?
Speaker A:And so I find that to be a very interesting thing that's going on as well.
Speaker A:But in the meantime, of course, you know, our public schools and so many of our institutions are still teaching these things to little kids.
Speaker A:So the damage is going to go on.
Speaker A:I don't mean that by any sense of the imagination.
Speaker A:Is it over?
Speaker A:Even with the wonderful things that the current administration is doing as far as gender confusion is concerned.
Speaker A:But there are certainly opportunities to talk about the Creator in a way that I, I'd never had until this got really, really big.
Speaker B:That's actually, that's really encouraging because even with transgenderism, we're dealing with a lot the downstream moral consequences of believing that all is one.
Speaker B:And this is the point that this is why it's morally incoherent.
Speaker B:Because if you believe that all is one, then there is no essential inherent differ mean anything.
Speaker B:And like.
Speaker A:And why do you need to change yourself then?
Speaker B:That's exactly, that's exactly right.
Speaker B:Where you just need to.
Speaker B:Well, ultimately it could lead to nihilism.
Speaker B:They're all different directions that it leads.
Speaker B:It leads to nihilism.
Speaker B:I've, I've met a very smart young man.
Speaker B:I was, I spent a lot of time with him at the Kumbh Mello Festival.
Speaker B:His name was Jensen.
Speaker B:He and I spent a lot of time together and very smart, enjoyable guy.
Speaker B:We spent like several days together and I watched him chase down enlightenment in India, just progressively stripping off layers of his own consciousness until he became just very numb to life.
Speaker B:You know, in this, in this pursuit like this white whale pursuit of his own self, annihilation.
Speaker B:Like escaping the body prison.
Speaker B:So you see it there.
Speaker B:You see it with transgenderism.
Speaker B:There's no difference between men and women.
Speaker B:We can go back and forth between the two.
Speaker B:So why is all this surgery and medicine, why is it not making me feel better?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:But when you propose, you'll try alternative.
Speaker B:One of the themes that I met, that I read a couple times in your bio was your work with the transgender community and through resources.
Speaker B:Do you want to talk about a little bit about this?
Speaker B:Because I think it's important, because you said that the administration, current administration, is doing a lot of work with this, but it's not necessarily reaching all the way onto the ground the way that it needs to.
Speaker A:No, it's not.
Speaker A:No, it's not.
Speaker A:And, I mean, I live in California.
Speaker A:You lived in California, so you kind of understand what it's like to be here.
Speaker A:But, yeah, so I.
Speaker A:My sweet dad, he's with the Lord.
Speaker A:He's been with the Lord for the last eight years, which is nine years, which is hard to imagine.
Speaker A:But I mentioned to you that he had been a public school teacher.
Speaker A:He actually was the librarian at the high school that I went to, and he was a librarian and English teacher in our school district for 27 years.
Speaker A:And I remember as a teenager, him talking about the efforts that he was going through to make sure that he did not let in, like, ideologically questionable materials into his library.
Speaker A:And he was working with the other librarians in our school district at the time to keep it out.
Speaker A:And I remember him talking about the gay agenda.
Speaker A:And I was like, sure, dad.
Speaker A:It just really, like, had the typical teenager response to that.
Speaker A:And man was my dad, right?
Speaker A:You know, like, he had his finger on something even then that.
Speaker A:That I just was not willing or able to acknowledge.
Speaker A:And I think back to experiences that I even had at that school where I'm like, oh, wow.
Speaker A:Like, that particular teacher really was like, you know, it was during the time of the AIDS quilt and the AIDS crisis and everything.
Speaker A:And she really was using that as a means to kind of, like, open up conversations with the students about, well, like, humanizing rather than otherizing homosexuality, homosexual people, gay people.
Speaker A:But I'm stumbling all over my words, but.
Speaker A:And I think, again, we're all image bearers, right?
Speaker A:We all carry inherent value, and our concern and our compassion should be with these people.
Speaker A:But again, if you define love in a biblical way, love and concern does not mean affirmation.
Speaker B:Correct?
Speaker A:So all of that is to say, I still live in Escondido where dad was a teacher.
Speaker A:And so I'm very familiar with this community.
Speaker A: metime around, I think it was: Speaker A:She published a study through Brown University about rabid onset gender dysphoria.
Speaker A:Do you, do you remember when that happened at all?
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:No, I've never heard of rapid onset gender dysphoria, but it's a very accurate term.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And she is the one who coined that.
Speaker A:And Brown University very quickly, like, retracted the study because of the outcry of the trans community.
Speaker A:But this kind of came into my newsfeed as this was going on.
Speaker A:But basically what she had done is she had gone and done surveys.
Speaker A: rong, but let's just say like: Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Prior to that, transgenderism was in the realm of males who believed that they were female.
Speaker A:And this confusion typically showed itself in toddlerhood.
Speaker A:And it was like 0.01% of the population.
Speaker A:Like, it was really, really rare, but it was like this persistent confusion that prepubescent males would show.
Speaker A:And so that's what the majority of the trans community was.
Speaker A:What Lisa Lipman was looking at was that there had started to be this surge in trans identified females, which they hadn't even really registered as a statistic prior to this.
Speaker A:It was typically pre pubescent and pubescent age females who were starting to identify as men at like these crazy rates that were higher than what you would have anticipated in the percentages, like all through history before that then.
Speaker A:And there were certain communities where there would be like four or five kids in one friend group who all would start to identify as trans together.
Speaker A:And the other thing that was strange is that that the majority of these girls, and Lisa Litman, I think she had done like a parent survey too, of, of gender confused adolescents.
Speaker A:And what the, the common denominator was that these girls had hadn't even necessarily been tomboys.
Speaker A:Like, they were very feminine, they were very girly, they had loved girl things.
Speaker A:It's not like they were like, fighting against their femaleness up until this point.
Speaker A:And then it seemed to spread within friend groups.
Speaker A:And this is really similar with things like eating disorders or even Suicidal ideation, Right.
Speaker A:Like, if you have people who have eating disorders, you don't sit them in a room together to talk about their, you know, their body dysmorphia because it's contagious.
Speaker A:There's a contagion element to it.
Speaker A:And that is also the fact with suicidal ideation, like, you don't put two people with suicidal ideation in a room together.
Speaker A:You separate them so that they're not able to, like, conspire and, like, build each other up in their misunderstandings of reality.
Speaker A:So, too, gender dysphoria.
Speaker A:So it.
Speaker A:There's a contagion element.
Speaker A:And so that's what Lisa Lippman was looking at, was rapid onset gender dysphoria, which was this category of these mostly girls who were starting to suddenly identify as trans, and the social contagion aspect of it.
Speaker A:And that just.
Speaker A:That caught my attention.
Speaker A: ism, like, you know, maybe in: Speaker A:And I was kind of like, Dr. Jones, I think you're probably right.
Speaker A:Like, there are.
Speaker A:There.
Speaker A:This is an issue.
Speaker A:And he was talking about, like, the spiritual aspects of androgyny.
Speaker A:And I'm sure that there's a religious aspect to this, but that's very, very fringe.
Speaker A:And we have these other things to pay attention to right now.
Speaker A:Little did I know.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker A:As I saw that study come out, I really started thinking about transgender ideation.
Speaker A:Thinking, okay, this is getting more common.
Speaker A:Like, I'm seeing this talked about in the culture a little bit more, and like, like the idea of pronoun hospitality.
Speaker A:And like, if you ever do meet a trans person, like, it's really important to, like, honor their chosen pronouns and just.
Speaker A:Just these little things that were happening in the culture.
Speaker A:And I thought, you know, this is maybe something that.
Speaker A:That we should pay attention to.
Speaker A:And then Abigail Schreier came out with the book Irreversible Damage.
Speaker A:And I don't know if you've ever re read the book Irreversible Damage.
Speaker B:I know of it.
Speaker A:It's a phenomenal book.
Speaker A:I mean, that really I had read When Harry Became Sally by Anderson.
Speaker A:And it's funny because all of these books get banned various places.
Speaker A:So, like, when Harry Became Sally, like, you couldn't buy it on Amazon for the longest time.
Speaker A:And it's a very, very well researched, very, very good book.
Speaker A:And then Abigail Schreier came out with Irreversible Damage, and I think it was banned on Amazon For a while, but then, like, Target refused to carry it longest time.
Speaker A:But it was just a journalistic dig into these transgender ideas and specifically the damage that was being done to girls.
Speaker A:So she dug into, from a.
Speaker A:From a narrative perspective, the personal stories of rapid onset gender dysphoria among scrolls and really did a deep dive into that.
Speaker A:And it was at that point that I was like, okay, you know, like, we really, we need to start talking about this.
Speaker A:And I wonder if there's anything like this going on in our communities.
Speaker A:Little did I know, like, even just at our church, which is a conservative Bible teaching, very clear church, there were multiple families who were starting to have people in their families who were dealing with gender confusion.
Speaker A:Like, I had no idea about that, that.
Speaker A:But I started wondering, like, what do we do when this comes here?
Speaker A:And that's why I made reference to my dad.
Speaker A:Like, it was already here.
Speaker A:It had already been operating here.
Speaker A:It was.
Speaker A:It was not something that we would contend with when it got here.
Speaker A:We just hadn't recognized it.
Speaker A:And by.
Speaker A:And I mean, we on a number of different levels, like, we in our church, we in our community, and we as a country, like, really had hadn't started to recognize that.
Speaker A:This was already being pushed through the National Education Association.
Speaker A:This is already being pushed through the Trevor Project.
Speaker A:This was already being pushed in curriculum in schools.
Speaker A:This is already.
Speaker A: ransgenderism, I think it was: Speaker A: But I think it was in: Speaker A:And already at that point, like they were, there were national documents through the.
Speaker A:The National Education association that were being pushed down through the teachers unions into school districts that were providing examples of double record keeping for schools to use.
Speaker A:So that when a student came in and said, I'd like to be known by a different name and pronouns, please, or, you know, however they put it, the teachers could ask the student, well, do your parents know?
Speaker A:And if the parents didn't know, then the teachers were supposed to start using these double records where internally and all throughout the school administration, the student would be known by their chosen name and pronouns.
Speaker A:But in communication to the parents, or even they even discuss, like keeping secrets from siblings on campus, the student would be referred to by birth, name and pronouns so that they could socially transition safely at school without being made unsafe by outing them to their families.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:So as I was writing that, and as I was writing that first lecture, gender and the Gospel, I Remember, it was like the day before I was supposed to give my presentation.
Speaker A:And I was just like, lord, I don't know how to wrap this up.
Speaker A:Like, I'm only thinking about this in theory, but I think it's really important.
Speaker A:And I started getting a flood of text messages from our oldest daughter.
Speaker A:She's 22 now, but she was, I think, a junior, a sophomore or a junior in high school at the time.
Speaker A:And she was like, mary, I don't know what to do.
Speaker A:My teacher pulled me aside in class today and one of my.
Speaker A:One of my study group mates, she has started on testosterone and now they're changing her name.
Speaker A:And the teacher asked, like, the nicest kids in the class to make this easier on the student by.
Speaker A:And I'm supposed to start calling her this name and these new male pronouns.
Speaker A:And I don't know what to say.
Speaker A:I just don't know what to say.
Speaker A:And I was like, oh, well, here it is.
Speaker A:You know, so it's exactly.
Speaker A:And our kids go to a classically based charter school.
Speaker A:So this is kind of like a more conservative, for the most part, subset of the community.
Speaker A: trict that had been passed in: Speaker A:But that required that when teachers encountered these gender confused students that they would honor.
Speaker A:They would honor the social transition of the student unquestioningly on campus, and they would keep it from the parents.
Speaker A:And there were two Christian teachers who were being.
Speaker A: ho finally filed a lawsuit in: Speaker A:And in the lawsuit, there are a number of exhibits that were included as evidence.
Speaker A:And there is an email thread that I have a copy of.
Speaker A:It's heavily redacted, but where one of the school counselors for seventh graders on one.
Speaker A:So statistically, this goes back to Lisa Lippman's study.
Speaker A:On one junior high campus, in one grade, there were seven kids who were being socially transitioned and five of them were being socially transitioned while it was being hid from the parents.
Speaker A:And so you would see, yeah, so you would see, like, here's the current cohort.
Speaker A:There are more.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:But so.
Speaker A:And so would like to be known by this name and he, him pronouns.
Speaker A:Parents at home do not know.
Speaker A:This student would like to be known by this name.
Speaker A:And, and one of the students, they were transitioning to an it.
Speaker A:So like, keep that in mind, like the dehumanizing nature of what's going on.
Speaker A:And in, in that instance, it was.
Speaker A:And mom is aware and supportive, but dad and stepmom don't know.
Speaker A:In other words, you can talk about it to the mom, but keep it from the dad.
Speaker A:And there's just this list.
Speaker A:So it was already happening in Escondido.
Speaker A:And a lot of the board members who were very conservative for the most part, both boards are majority conservative in Escondido had no idea that this was going on when they passed those policies.
Speaker A:It was pushed down by the state.
Speaker A:They were told that they had to do it.
Speaker A:And a lot of them didn't understand the implications because it was presented as protecting vulnerable kids from potential abuse by parents as opposed to, you know, we partner with parents to help them in the education and upbringing of their children.
Speaker A:So this was going on and it had been going on in Escondido.
Speaker A:And so that's sort of the launching pad that I started from there.
Speaker A:So the first year I did Gender and the Gospel.
Speaker A:The next year I did a lecture.
Speaker A:I think It's Stealing, Stealing from Babies, where I looked at the Pre K through 8th grade curriculums in different districts here in California, but also elsewhere.
Speaker A:This is not just in California.
Speaker A:About the.
Speaker A:About National Coming Out Week, where they read trans literature to kids.
Speaker A:LA Unified, which has over 600 schools in it, has a calendar on their district website called Queer All School Year.
Speaker A:Oh, kids are.
Speaker A:Read books like It Feels Good to Be Yourself.
Speaker A:That's a, that's a hot one.
Speaker A:Like that's all over the place.
Speaker A:It's in schools here.
Speaker A:I've seen it in the children's library.
Speaker A:But it Feels Good to Be Yourself.
Speaker A:Basically says like mommy and daddy and doctors.
Speaker A:When you were born, they tried to be able to tell who you were on the inside.
Speaker A:And sometimes they got it right and sometimes they got it wrong.
Speaker A:Like it's kind of presented like a, A, a random guess.
Speaker A:And, and kids are basically told that they just go with like their best guess until you have the words to be able to tell them who you really are on the inside.
Speaker A:And what a loving set of parents does is immediately accept that confusion from their child and, and honor it.
Speaker A:What I found is that so, so we're told a lot of times as Christians that we need to honor.
Speaker A:They call it pronoun hospitality.
Speaker A:And there is an author named Preston Sprinkle who Wrote a book Embodied.
Speaker A:And he basically goes through like the different reasons that people do or do not practice pro town pronoun hospitality.
Speaker A:But he concludes that section of his book by saying that he practices pronoun hospitality.
Speaker A:And I just think about that.
Speaker A:So a Christian comes to this book and they view him as a scholar and a theological leader.
Speaker A:And he says, here are all the reasons that people don't use new name and pronouns.
Speaker A:People do use new name and pronouns.
Speaker A:And oh, by the way, I've chosen to use pronoun hospitality.
Speaker A:And this is the quote.
Speaker A:He says there are hurting people who live in our neighborhoods and sit in our pews trapped in patterns of self harm and suicidal ideation because they've been shunned and shamed so badly by the church that they genuinely believe God hates them.
Speaker A:As trivial as pronouns may seem to you, they do not seem trivial to me.
Speaker A:But as trivial as pronouns may seem to you, something as simple as using a person's chosen name and pronouns might be the small whisper of grace that nudges them to put the gun down and give this Christian thing one more chance.
Speaker A:So Preston, Dr. Sprinkle is saying in his book to Christians that we honor the chosen identity, not the God given identity of a person in order to protect them from suicide.
Speaker A:So that's now the weight that's placed on a Christian's shoulders too, and everyone's shoulders.
Speaker A:So if you dead name a person, if you use the wrong pronouns, you might cause them to commit suicide.
Speaker A:Well, when you actually look into suicide statistics, the highest rates of suicide for trans identified people is seven to 10 years after they've had gender affirming.
Speaker A:So sex trait modification surgery.
Speaker A:When you have a child statistically who is gender confused, if you treat them with watchful waiting, meaning you don't affirm them in their confusion, you speak to them in truth, conservatively, 85% of the time, and it's sometimes listed as higher, that gender confusion resolves itself by the time they get through puberty.
Speaker A:Because there's something concretizing about puberty that helps them resolve the fact that no, my body is a real part of myself and this is who I am AM.
Speaker A:And nearly 100% of the time, if you socially affirm a child in their confusion, if you socially transition them by using their chosen name and pronouns, it concretizes actually the gender dysphoria.
Speaker A:And 99% of the time they medicalize.
Speaker A:The first step of medicalization is taking puberty blockers.
Speaker A:Puberty blockers are chemical castration and they also also slowed down the very process puberty that allows children to reconcile their sense of self with their bodies.
Speaker A:It also delays mental maturation.
Speaker A:Like, you see this in the case of Jazz Jennings, the boy who was trans in the series called I Am Jazz.
Speaker A:And you, you can see the mental health disorders operating there even now, now.
Speaker A:So your prefrontal cortex is delayed.
Speaker A:There's even documentation that's starting to come out more and more now of drastic IQ loss in kids who are put on puberty blockers and kids who are put on puberty blockers.
Speaker A:It's not a hold button.
Speaker A:I think it's something like 95 to 98% of the time that then they go on to cross sex hormones.
Speaker A:If you go on to cross sex hormones, usually, then you're going to go towards surgery.
Speaker A:Right, so.
Speaker A:So it.
Speaker A:Rather than.
Speaker A:So Preston's idea is that if Christians will honor the inner sense of self, which we've talked about, how that's a gnostic idea.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Rather than honoring the truth of who creator God has made male and female, rather than causing them to reconsider suicide and consider the gospel gospel, instead, you're helping to affirm them in a confusion where every step of that confusion leads them towards greater and greater medical damage, up to and including suicide.
Speaker A:That's right.
Speaker A:So Christian pronoun hospitality is based on a lie.
Speaker A:And I go Back to like 20 Proverbs 27, 6.
Speaker A:Faithful are the wounds of a friend, profuse are the kisses of an enemy.
Speaker A:An enemy is going to tell you, you're doing great.
Speaker A:Everything that you know, you're living your best life now.
Speaker A:You are being your true self, rah, rah.
Speaker A:And they are doing that as your enemy.
Speaker A:They are doing it to harm you.
Speaker A:And a friend is the one who says, stop, wait a second.
Speaker A:You may have believed some lies.
Speaker A:I need to talk to you about the sin that you're in.
Speaker A:I need to talk to you about this confusion.
Speaker A:And that hurts.
Speaker A:But that's real friendship in that instance.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:So sorry that.
Speaker A:That was a super long explanation, but, like, there's just so much that we could dig into with all of this.
Speaker A:And I think it's a.
Speaker A:It's a growing need in the church.
Speaker A:I think it's an ignored need in the church.
Speaker A:I've never met families in so much isolation and conflict and loss and chaos as the families who are dealing with this, and they are like ships passing in the night because no one wants to talk about it.
Speaker A:No one wants to deal with it.
Speaker A:The ones who will Speak out are typically the ones who are going to hand over embodied.
Speaker A:They're going to encourage them to affirm, and not so that they can preserve a relationship.
Speaker A:But it's not biblical what's being encouraged a lot of times.
Speaker A:And I think that that's something that we need to address as Christians.
Speaker A:I think we need a better theology of friendship, quite frankly, especially to the gender confused.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:I really appreciate you sharing all that, because it's such.
Speaker B:It's an important issue for all the reasons that we've talked about.
Speaker B:There is a theological underpinning beneath this.
Speaker B:It's gnostic in nature.
Speaker B:The notion.
Speaker B:Was it Carl Truman's book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, where that book came from?
Speaker B:And he talks about it probably in the introduction, earlier chapters.
Speaker B:For sure, that book came from him wondering, how did we get here as a society where the statement.
Speaker B:I think he said, I'm a man on the inside, but on the inside, I'm a woman.
Speaker B:Woman.
Speaker B:Like, how do we get to the place in society where a statement like that makes any sort of sense at all?
Speaker B:Because if you were to say that to someone 150 years ago, they'd be like, I'm sorry, what?
Speaker A:You know, it's like, literally a Monty Python skit.
Speaker A:I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's literally a Monty Python skit.
Speaker A:That's how ridiculous it was.
Speaker A:Oh, my gosh.
Speaker A:I will send it to you.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:Like, there's a whole skit where they're sitting, like, outside on the steps in Rome, and they're, like, dressed in, like, Hebrew garb.
Speaker A:And one of the guys, one of the main Monty Python guys is like.
Speaker A:Like, I'd like you to start calling me Loretta.
Speaker A:You know?
Speaker A:And at first they're like, yes, you're being emancipated.
Speaker A:And then they start running into, like, the problems.
Speaker A:Oh, it's so fantastic.
Speaker A:Have you not seen that?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:I'd like you.
Speaker B:And they're like.
Speaker B:They're, congratulations, you're liberated.
Speaker B:They're.
Speaker B:They're applauding this.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:They start that.
Speaker A:And then he's like, I want to be.
Speaker A:I want to.
Speaker A:I don't.
Speaker A:I know I can't have children, but I'd like people to want me to be able to have children.
Speaker A:If I. I mean, they go through all of it, and then they start kind of getting into conflict.
Speaker A:Conflict.
Speaker A:Because one of them is like, what does this even mean?
Speaker A:Like, why do you.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's so absurd, and it's so funny.
Speaker A:And it's.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:Don't recommend all Monty Python but that skit.
Speaker A:I will send it to you.
Speaker A:I will find it when we're done recording.
Speaker A:It is.
Speaker A:I don't even know if you can embed it in something.
Speaker A:I have no idea, Will.
Speaker A:But it is.
Speaker A:It's worth seeing because it's that funny.
Speaker A:I mean, it just.
Speaker A:And it's so on the nose.
Speaker A:So, yeah, even.
Speaker A:What would that have been 40 years ago?
Speaker A:45 years ago?
Speaker B:70S, late 60s, early 70s?
Speaker B:Something like that was Monty Python.
Speaker B:Well, like I think of the TV show mash, which I grew up with.
Speaker B: s in the Korean war, like the: Speaker B:That's the whole joke of the character.
Speaker B:He's wearing all these outlandish women's costumes that he manages to get in the jungle and Korean.
Speaker B:But now it's like, oh, no, we have to affirm you in your pronouns because of all these different reasons.
Speaker B:And so how do we get.
Speaker B:So Carl Truman's book is, how do we get to a place where something that would have been nonsensical or a joke or comedic fodder has become just widely accepted as a way of being?
Speaker B:And that's one thing again, how did we get here as a society?
Speaker B:How did the church get here to a place where we'll know.
Speaker B:We need to accept this.
Speaker B:And so I think you say very accurately, we need a better theology of friendship.
Speaker B:What does it mean to be a friend to somebody?
Speaker B:Can we really step into the place as Christians where we confront.
Speaker B:Speak the truth lovingly, speak the truth in love.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That is a very real thing.
Speaker B:And if someone has an internal reaction to it, anger or whatever, it's like, no, it's okay that you feel that way, but that doesn't say anything about me as a person.
Speaker B:And this is this feeling centric world that we're in.
Speaker B:However you make me feel is what your intention is.
Speaker B:Attention are is.
Speaker B:That's not necessarily true.
Speaker B:But Christians don't understand that today.
Speaker B:Because I think I can make a case.
Speaker B:It all goes back to this always one that if you're feeling uncomfortable, then I should be feeling uncomfortable.
Speaker B:And we all have to identify the same.
Speaker B:No, we all have to be able to exist in the space of discomfort.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I've seen even in some Christian circles, especially on X, where people are making fun now of this idea of like, toxic empathy.
Speaker A:But I think that toxic empathy is a very real thing.
Speaker A:And I think that it's something that we absolutely have to address, address.
Speaker A:And I'm grateful that that's in the conversation.
Speaker A:And, and there are so many people that need to be loved in this situation.
Speaker A:You know, there's so many aspects of this where it's, it's, it is certainly the gender confused person, but it is also their family members who, many of whom are, are sitting in broken relationships because they have spoken the truth in love.
Speaker A:And I, I can't help but think of the prodigal son in this, where that father who clearly loved both his sons, but who loved that wandering son, he let that relationship break, Right.
Speaker A:And then he stood in hope, scanning the horizon because he loved him, but he knew that his son had to come back to him.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And so I think in a lot of instances there's this idea with the gender confused person that you must preserve relationship at all costs.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And there are a lot of aspects of oneism in this idea of preserving the relationship at all costs because one relationship can become an idol.
Speaker A:Two, the thought that you have to be the one to share the gospel with this person if they reject it with you, so you've got to preserve that relationship because you're the only one who can speak the truth to them eventually, when they're willing to hear, it does away with the idea of the sovereignty of God.
Speaker A:If that person goes out and they refuse to speak to you, God still hears your prayers.
Speaker A:In fact, he remembers your prayers and is ministering in our lives even when we're not even thinking about the person that we're praying for.
Speaker A:So it does away with the sovereignty of God.
Speaker A:It makes you like the one minister of grace in this person's life.
Speaker A:And that's inappropriate.
Speaker A:And it assumes that the relationship has been broken because you've done something wrong.
Speaker A:And that is also not true when we, certainly we can do it the wrong way.
Speaker A:But when we speak the truth in love and a person breaks relationship with us, that doesn't mean that it's done and gone.
Speaker A:I think of Laura Perry Smaltz, who is a detransitioner.
Speaker A:She lived in as a trans man for nine years, and her mom and her dad and their congregation in Oklahoma never once used her false name or pronouns.
Speaker A:And while she was gone, like, she thought they were bigots, she thought they were transphobes, she thought all kinds of things.
Speaker A:But in that intervening nine years, God was dealing with Laura's mom.
Speaker A:They had a very difficult broken relationship.
Speaker A:And they both acknowledged that there was a lot of sin on both their parents parts.
Speaker A:And in the meantime, God was using everyone in Laura's life to bring her closer to the truth, including the trans identified man that she was partnered with at the time.
Speaker A:He was living as a woman, she was living as a man.
Speaker A:But he was like fiscally conservative.
Speaker A:So she was hearing kind of these conservative ideas that were getting to her.
Speaker A:And in the meantime at some point when she was in contact with her, her mom, her mom asked her to build a website for a Bible study she was doing.
Speaker A:So Laura's just doing this to earn money and ends up seeing scripture that begins to minister to her heart because the Holy Spirit is sovereign and powerful.
Speaker A:And she came to a place where she had to recognize, I have made a terrible mistake, I have done something terrible.
Speaker A:And I mean she had gone all the way through hysterectomy and double mastectomy and, and she said that she remembered a moment where she stopped and asked herself one.
Speaker A:She acknowledged everyone who's been approving of this life of mine has been lying to me and I need somebody to tell me the truth.
Speaker A:And then her next question was who do I know who will tell me the truth?
Speaker A:And it was the gray headed Bible thumping, you know, like all of the things that she, it was them back at her little church in Oklahoma, they had never lied to her, they had never made her comfortable in her lies.
Speaker A:And so everything that had seemed hateful turned into points of light that led her home.
Speaker A:And she um, she is now married.
Speaker A:She had to regrieve her her attempts at transition because once she got married she recognized a desire to have her husband's child.
Speaker A:And she will never be able to do that because she's, she had a hysterectomy that, that's never going to be an option for her.
Speaker A:So there are layers of grief.
Speaker A:But you know there are a lot of us like and we say too, I don't want to make that person uncomfortable.
Speaker A:But there's also an idol of self.
Speaker A:Like I don't want people to dislike me.
Speaker A:I'm saying that I'm, I just only want to speak the truth in love.
Speaker A:But I'm really just going to be silent so that I don't look bad, I don't look embarrassing, I don't look like a transphobe and all, you know, all of these various things.
Speaker A:So there's the family, there's the gender confused person.
Speaker A:There's also a lot to be said and I'm seeing This especially happening in school settings.
Speaker A:Settings for kids who are being told that when they look at their bodies, they can discern no truth for themselves from the observed reality around them.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Like your body doesn't necessarily mean anything about you.
Speaker A:So we unmoor kids from like the.
Speaker A:So like little kids categorize things like I have a mommy and a daddy with a girl body and a boy body and oh, I have a boy body, so I'm a boy too.
Speaker A:And black from white and brother from sister and all of these different things.
Speaker A:Like kids learn first by categorizing.
Speaker A:But if you tell kids that the physical reality around them cannot in a trustworthy manner communicate any form of truth to them, you interrupt their ability to rationally think through and critically think through the witness of creation.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So there's that aspect of, of it.
Speaker A:And then there's an interesting.
Speaker A:There's a book called Lost in Transnation that I first discovered.
Speaker A:This idea of the Stroop effect.
Speaker A:The Stroop effect they studied in adults where they would just take adults and they would, they would have them read words like the names of colors and so they'd put up the word black and it would be black and then they would put up the word red and it would be in red font, right.
Speaker A:And they would just have them read through it as fast as they could, could.
Speaker A:And then they monitored the stress response of adults brains when they would put up like the word black, but it would be in green font and they would put up the word red but it would be in yellow font, right.
Speaker A:And they're just like read through it as fast as you can.
Speaker A:And the adults would stumble, they would stress out like there, there was actually a discernible, you know, traceable stress response to this.
Speaker A:So now you take little kids and you tell them, them, this kid who you've known since kindergarten as Susie, now you're in fifth grade, and she would be like to know, he would like to be known as Johnny.
Speaker A:And if you slip up and say the wrong name, that's dead naming.
Speaker A:And they might kill themselves.
Speaker B:Yikes.
Speaker A:What's that going to do to a kid's brain?
Speaker A:We haven't studied it.
Speaker A:So we need to protect kids.
Speaker A:We need to teach them to be truthful.
Speaker A:We need to teach them the value of like taking the heat for being untruthful.
Speaker A:I mean all four of my kids, especially my youngest daughter, she has taken some serious heat for not being a cheerleader with trans identified friends.
Speaker A:Some serious heat.
Speaker A:But the thing is she's a really Loving kid.
Speaker A:She's really sweet, she's very artistic.
Speaker A:And the accusations of like transphobe and, and what, like Bible Christian or like one of those Christians.
Speaker A:I don't know, like all the different things that she's been called on, like text group chats and stuff with her friend groups, those fall off because she's genuinely loving her trans identified friends, genuinely know that she cares.
Speaker A:And so they might apply those labels to her, but they're not true.
Speaker A:And God does promise to be the lifter of our heads.
Speaker A:And so like I do, I just think we have to totally reorient as Christians on the way that we talk about and deal with this.
Speaker A:And that's kind of my passion project right now, if you hadn't noticed.
Speaker A:But that's spent a lot of my time.
Speaker B:Yeah, I'm very grateful for that because I think it feels a little bit like since the Trump election.
Speaker B:How long ago is that?
Speaker B:Six months ago?
Speaker B:Something like that.
Speaker B:Or more now since inauguration, certainly right in Dodgers.
Speaker A:It's amazing because everything's changing all the time.
Speaker B:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B:That, that the trans issue particularly, I think also since Pride month in June didn't really have much of an impact.
Speaker B:It wasn't like it was the year before.
Speaker B:It was very muted.
Speaker B:And so I think it'd be very easy for a lot of these issues to slip out of people's minds, minds without paying attention to the fact like, no, this is still going on.
Speaker B:It's, it's probably not going to go away anytime soon.
Speaker B:It's affecting people's lives, it's affecting children's lives.
Speaker B:And, and it's going to show up, even if it's not showing up in the highest level in the US government.
Speaker B:That doesn't mean that school boards or the school system or whatever are giving up on these things because these ideologies, as I said, are entrenched.
Speaker B:And maybe it's not yoga like it was 12 years ago, maybe it's not meditation like it was 15 years ago or whatever.
Speaker B:You know, it's.
Speaker B:The trans thing is still happening.
Speaker B:The LGBT LGB agenda is still happening and it's showing up in people's lives.
Speaker A:And they're doubling down.
Speaker A:It's really interesting to see like communication through the teachers unions and when you look at like activist teachers that you find online.
Speaker A:But I mean, they're everywhere.
Speaker A:Like, you can't think.
Speaker A:You can't think.
Speaker A:Like, well, I'm in a little town in Kentucky and this isn't happening here.
Speaker A:Like I spoke in Southern Illinois in March, May Like I said, I feel like everything is sped up since the election.
Speaker A:I can't keep track of anything but little conservative town, conservative community.
Speaker A:The public schools are really, really good, but they have a super active GSA club, Gay Straight alliance club.
Speaker B:I was going to ask what that was.
Speaker A:It presents itself as an art club.
Speaker A:We have this going on in Escondido too.
Speaker A:It presents itself as an art club, but it's really an activist club teaching these ideologies.
Speaker A:And in our schools you typically have to have a teacher who sponsors a club on campus.
Speaker A:So they've got activist teachers who are, you know, promoting this ideology.
Speaker A:And I know, I know multiple families, multiple families who've had their kids get really messed up.
Speaker A:Christian kids get really messed up in this.
Speaker A:These GSAs, you know, they're told things like as girls, like if you're uncomfortable in your body, it might be because you're a boy on the inside.
Speaker A:Well, what 12 year old girl doesn't feel uncomfortable in her body, you know?
Speaker A:And um.
Speaker A:Or if you, if you find your girlfriends attractive, which, that's like a very.
Speaker A:Everything is so sexualized now and pornified and so like I remember as a teenage girl like loving my friends and thinking they were beautiful and wanting to be like them and wanting to be around them.
Speaker A:And it was just shy of like if someone had told me, oh, you're attracted to them.
Speaker A:And I had.
Speaker A:Hadn't.
Speaker A:Well one, I never was told that, but I could easily see where I would start to think like, well, oh, is that what attraction is?
Speaker A:Because I just hadn't experienced like real attraction to a male yet.
Speaker A:Like I didn't know.
Speaker A:So if someone had redefined those very natural feelings for me, that would have been very confusing.
Speaker A:And that's happening in these clubs all the time and it's not going away.
Speaker A:And it's getting more back to your point about the election because that is their moral good, that is their religious crusade.
Speaker A:When it gets attacked the way that they feel it's being attacked by the administration, they're going to double down and do it even harder.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:So we now have reporting mechanisms that we didn't have before.
Speaker A:There's some great things like the Federal Trade Commission just came out, they did a huge think tank and I was so sad to miss it in D.C. where they were actually looking at false advertising claims because doctors and pharmaceutical companies and different groups have been advertising like that you can't, A male can become a female.
Speaker A:That these, you know, these surgeries and medications will resolve dysphoria when they don't.
Speaker A:Parents have been told, would you rather have a dead son or a live trans daughter?
Speaker A:You know, like those kinds of.
Speaker A:I know parents who've been had those things said to them.
Speaker A:Um, so that is.
Speaker A:So the Federal Trade Commission is looking at false advertising lawsuits.
Speaker A:And there are places that you can go to report that.
Speaker A:There are places where you can go to report Title 9 violations according to the original definitions of Title IX.
Speaker A:So men not being allowed to compete in female sports.
Speaker A:So you can report these things.
Speaker A:But all of that is being viewed as an attack and something that they need to defend against.
Speaker A:And you can see that in California.
Speaker A:You can see it with the legislation that we have coming out.
Speaker A:So it's not going to go away anytime soon because it's.
Speaker A:Because it's religious.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Because it's spiritual.
Speaker A:It's not just something that you can legislate out of the atmosphere.
Speaker B:You know, I'm thinking back to the podcast that.
Speaker B:That I recorded on your show a few days ago, which I'll link in the show notes.
Speaker B:And, you know, as we're talking through all of this, whether it be Christian yoga or the.
Speaker B:Or the outrage of the transgender movement, all of that.
Speaker B:You know, on that episode we talked about the sort of rising anti Semitism, neo Nazism woke.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Alt, right.
Speaker B:Dissident.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Whatever term you want to use, just pick one.
Speaker B:And you know, talking about all this stuff, it's really not hard to understand where the outrage comes from that's fueling this.
Speaker B:And so I've spoke briefly on that episode again about, like, I used to think that this was just some small thing on the right that was going on that would pass, and I think I even said it earlier today.
Speaker B:And then we would see the real big boss of this entrenched New Age mindset that.
Speaker B:But I. I think that picture is being portrayed.
Speaker B:But at the same time, you have this, like, convergence of pagan ideologies that are squeezing the church from both the left and from the right.
Speaker B:And maybe we can talk a little bit about that as well.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I don't know that my take on it will be.
Speaker A:Because I.
Speaker A:This is something that I haven't discussed kind of outright.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:But I think you're right.
Speaker A:And I think I had mentioned to.
Speaker B:You.
Speaker A:You know, I've seen there's like, Bronze Age pervert.
Speaker A:There are the Andrew Tates of the world, like this radical hyper masculinity that I think that Christian men are far too tolerant of.
Speaker B:Agree.
Speaker A:I find that really troubling.
Speaker A:But you also See, it kind of like in the, like, the trad wife movement too.
Speaker A:And I think those go a little bit hand in hand where, like, we don't have good, readily accessible definitions of what biblical womanhood looks like.
Speaker A:And so what we end up with are the.
Speaker A:These false cultural, like, representations from the past that are not necessarily any more biblical than, like, the.
Speaker A:The feminist.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:And I can see where, like.
Speaker A:And it's interesting because they do feed off of each other.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So I, and I am tempted by.
Speaker A:I joke around about this, but it's totally true.
Speaker A:My husband and I, it's hard to believe we had an argument one time, but no, we kind of like, were disagreeing about something and he said, you know what?
Speaker A:I think you're a feminist.
Speaker A:And I was like, what?
Speaker A:Like, it was like the most insulting thing I had ever.
Speaker A:You know, like, we joke about it now, but, like, I just had this wild response to him, like, saying that, because I think that feminism has done a lot of damage image.
Speaker A:But at the same time, I have been in places where I've been presented as biblical womanhood.
Speaker A:These representations of.
Speaker A:These representations of what biblical femininity are that are more based in, like, the 50s housewife.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:They're based in these cultural ideals that don't apply to all of womanhood, like, worldwide.
Speaker A:So if, If a principle is biblical, then a woman in Zambia who's a Christian and a woman in Southern California who's a Christian should be able to understand, like, how to apply that in their lives.
Speaker A:And if the.
Speaker A:You know what I.
Speaker A:You know what I'm saying?
Speaker A:Like, obviously it's going to be culturally colored, but there is a commonality in that and that calling.
Speaker A:And, and when we're presented with these kind of, like, unattainable, like, I make, you know, artisan sourdough and I, I never speak in church at all, like, let alone from the pulpit, but I just don't speak in church.
Speaker A:And I never pursue biblical truth for myself without the filter of my husband.
Speaker A:Like, I'm not going to read scripture and believe anything that I see without the filter of my husband because I'm a daughter of Eve, and therefore, or I'm not.
Speaker A:I don't have the intellect that he does.
Speaker A:I don't, you know, like, if that is the picture of what biblical femininity is supposed to be, feminism starts to look a lot more attractive.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Like, we have to have that true center of biblical truth that we look to, those examples that we look to, and we've got to be.
Speaker A:Be Willing to hold just to scripture and not to these other things, because otherwise, like, it does.
Speaker A:It seems like there's this weird pendulum.
Speaker A:I don't know if that's where you wanted to go with that, Will, but that's kind of like what I think of on.
Speaker A:On the female side of this.
Speaker A:I also see women who, like, with that hypersexualized, like, let's take Andrew Tate, my 15 year old again.
Speaker A:So she's in this charter school.
Speaker A:She's sitting in pickup line and she's waiting for me to pick her up.
Speaker A:And she's listening to these two boys next to her, one of whom she thought was a Christian.
Speaker A:These two boys next to her talking.
Speaker A:And at some point in the conversation, the boy was telling the.
Speaker A:The Christian boy was telling the other boy.
Speaker A:Yeah, I have like, this new way that I realized that I can like, get girls to like me.
Speaker A:And it ended up being Andrew Tate based.
Speaker A:And he was like.
Speaker A:Like, what I do is I, like, say something that's just like super insulting and like off the hook to them.
Speaker A:Like, really hurt their feelings super bad.
Speaker A:And then I wait a couple of days and just like, let them be hurt.
Speaker A:And then I come back and I apologize and I'm like, hey, what I said was really wrong and I never should have said that.
Speaker A:And then they think that I'm a really sensitive guy.
Speaker A:And then.
Speaker A:And when they think I'm sensitive, like, I don't, you know, like, I'm not super physically attractive.
Speaker A:But, you know, if like, girls think you're a really sensitive guy, then they're gonna think that you're attract.
Speaker A:And she gets in the car and she's like, mom, you know, but like, yeah, and.
Speaker A:And there.
Speaker A:And it's all about kind of like trying to get the girl, not trying to love the girl as your sister in Christ, not trying to honor her as a fellow image bearer, not trying to see her gifts and her beauty as she honors, like, your masculine strength and the things that God has given you so that you can come together in this place of nurture that then would like, you know, for children, but for other people that you bring into your home, that they have this balanced view of these aspects of God that we carry.
Speaker A:It just becomes, like, sexualized.
Speaker A:I can see girls, like, wanting to get from that and away from that.
Speaker A:So either they want to kind of completely give in to it into this like, pornified version of femaleness, or they want to resist it into this.
Speaker A:No, I'm going to be more like a man feminist version of It.
Speaker A:And there's like nowhere peaceful to land.
Speaker A:Like, that's just, that's what I see happening all around with our, our kids.
Speaker B:This topic is way more interesting than the direction that I wanted to go.
Speaker B:So I think it was.
Speaker B:Great choice.
Speaker B:No, I think that's perfect.
Speaker B:No, I think that's a, that's a really great, that's a great observation.
Speaker B:I've actually, I've seen, and I didn't realize that this is what I was looking, looking at.
Speaker B:I've seen some of that first example that like, oh, I don't speak in church at all and I don't read scripture without my husband's help and I defer to him.
Speaker B:And you know, there's a way to read scripture and arrive at that conclusion.
Speaker B:Like you can get there, but there's a character, a feeling to it where it's like there's something that you're trying to be that you aren't really perhaps out of fear of the feminism inside yourself.
Speaker B:Like, it's like, okay, okay.
Speaker B:So rather than being this, which maybe she may have been at some point in time, she jumps all the way over into the other ditch.
Speaker B:And, and, and I, I've talked, I've spoken about the ditch that men are jumping into, the ditch that women are jumping into is all very way more interesting and something that I hadn't really considered the same way, but there it is.
Speaker B:You articulated it right there where it's like, no, I'm going to jump into this biblical caricature of what it means to be.
Speaker B:What it means to be a biblical woman, not the actual full picture of what it means in this way that like, well, maybe there are some contradictions inherent in it.
Speaker B:Like how, how is a woman to be both submissive to male authority but also continue being herself in a way that isn't, I don't want to say self sacrificing.
Speaker B:That isn't self negating, you know, that is that she can still be herself because you look at the picture of the Proverbs 31, Woman, which I always like to remind people, like no one has to do all of that stuff.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker B:That's lady, that's a reference.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker B:Yeah, right.
Speaker B:But like, that's a very capable woman who operates under her husband's authority on behalf of her household, but she operates independently and she's very much herself.
Speaker B:And so there isn't a moment where you see a picture and you all throughout the New Testament as well, you see Christ interacting directly with women.
Speaker B:All throughout acts, you see lots of significant women who are making contributions to Paul's ministry in the early church.
Speaker B:So you see women who are themselves, they don't become this caricature of a puritanical.
Speaker B:It's not even the word.
Speaker B:This mindset where they become somehow less than human.
Speaker B:They objectify them.
Speaker B:That's what it is.
Speaker B:They objectify themselves in another way.
Speaker B:And so now I see that.
Speaker B:Now that you've pointed it out.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, I'm glad.
Speaker A:And I didn't even realize what I was pointing out.
Speaker A:I was just sort of riffing on that.
Speaker A:Again, welcome to my brain.
Speaker A:But I think it's important.
Speaker A:I think there's something to it.
Speaker A:I think it ties to transgenderism in a way.
Speaker A:Because, yeah, if you have a woman who like comes in, she's got a male voice.
Speaker A:And I actually saw my husband deal with this really beautifully this January.
Speaker A:So Bob went with me.
Speaker A:There was an event in Washington, D.C. dealing with transgender ideologies.
Speaker A:That.
Speaker A:And there were a bunch of detransitioners there.
Speaker A:And I'm more familiar with that group of people because I deal.
Speaker A:I interact with them online.
Speaker A:I have gotten to know some of them a little bit personally.
Speaker A:So I knew who these people were when I laid eyes on them and Bob didn't.
Speaker A:And so there's this very lovely detransitioner who was at the event.
Speaker A:And while Bob was out in the lobby, he heard her speaking, or she might have even turned around and said something to him.
Speaker A:And so he's looking at this very feminine looking person and she said something to him and.
Speaker A:And like this very deep masculine voice.
Speaker A:Cause she had been on testosterone and he didn't.
Speaker A:He wasn't sure quite like how to.
Speaker A:He couldn't even assess what was going on.
Speaker A:Like, he wasn't sure if it was a.
Speaker A:A guy dressed as a woman, which in hindsight he understood.
Speaker A:But he was just so surprised.
Speaker A:So he came and talked to me and he was like, Mary.
Speaker A:And this was like a highly secure event too.
Speaker A:Like, you had to have id.
Speaker A:Like, they're.
Speaker A:They were very careful.
Speaker A:Cause like, antifa and different really awful groups show, there's also tran Tifa.
Speaker A:But like, they show up to these events and so it's important and they infiltrate them.
Speaker A:It's important to be very secure.
Speaker A:So Bob came to me and he was like, I think someone might be here who shouldn't be here.
Speaker A:And I was like, what do you.
Speaker A:You know, what do you mean?
Speaker A:And then he told me what had happened.
Speaker A:And I was like, oh, babe, that's so.
Speaker A:And so, you know, and she, um, she happened to be the same age as our oldest daughter who's going to be 22.
Speaker A:And I could see my husband just sort of like trying to sort of like reconcile the dissonance of, of like her voice not matching her, her presentation.
Speaker A:Like, it just was like a little bit jarring.
Speaker A:And I think that this is what detransitioners walking into our churches are going to encounter.
Speaker A:And he, I remember him saying to me, oh, she's our daughter's age.
Speaker A:And I said, yeah, she is.
Speaker A:And he was like, and all of that stuff was done to her.
Speaker A:And I was like, yeah, that's, that's her story.
Speaker A:Because I was aware of her already.
Speaker A:I had, I had met her previously.
Speaker A:And he said, so she's like our daughter.
Speaker A:Like, he just kept saying that.
Speaker A:And I was like, yes.
Speaker A:And he goes, okay, I know what to do.
Speaker A:And that man, like goes out, he introduces himself, finds out what her favorite drink is.
Speaker A:He starts treating her like he just pushed past the things that were kind of like awkward because he wanted to love her the way that he would have loved our daughter.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Like, so he found out what her favorite soda was.
Speaker A:He saved her a seat if she was late to a session so that, you know, so that she would like.
Speaker A:He just pushed past and loved her the way that he knew a dad would love a daughter.
Speaker A:And I think that we've got to be able to tell men and women who come in who like might look feminized.
Speaker A:I think for women it's a little harder because their voices do change and they don't change back.
Speaker A:Although they can do voice training, but like to look past those peripheral things that for good reason we tend to think of as more male and female.
Speaker A:But when they don't add up, when they can't have kids, when they, when their voices are different, different, when they look different, there still is a picture of biblical femininity or biblical masculinity that we can give to them.
Speaker A:And I don't know all of what that is.
Speaker A:That's a lot of what I'm thinking about right now.
Speaker A:But they need to be brought into the family.
Speaker A:They need to be treated as sons and daughters, they need to be loved and they need to be taught how to honor God in the circumstances that they have been given.
Speaker A:We can't shove them out, we can't be awkward, we can't help have false definitions of these things because all of those are going to let them down.
Speaker A:All of those are man made and, and they're going to let them down.
Speaker A:We have to look at what scripture says and encourage them that way.
Speaker A:And, and I think we have to remember too that this is not self salvific.
Speaker A:That's the other impression that I get, especially in the trad wife, like the trad femme movement, is that it becomes very legalistic.
Speaker A:So it's like I do these things and therefore I am good and I'm in God's graces.
Speaker A:Well, that's a one, a system of morality.
Speaker A:That's a system of morality that thinks that you can be savior and makes you in charge and makes you God.
Speaker A:There has to be.
Speaker A:I'll use the head covering example.
Speaker A:So we were talking about that earlier.
Speaker A:Head coverings are a really uncomfortable topic for me.
Speaker A:I have read lots of books.
Speaker A:I like Sally Can't Preach.
Speaker A:I've read, you know, Men and Women, the church by Kevin DeYoung.
Speaker A:I read, I've read a lot of stuff about it.
Speaker A:And I still, I come to that passage and I usually come away from it being like, man, I wish I could cover my head in church.
Speaker A:I honestly just do.
Speaker A:And I'm sure there I'm, I'm not a theologian, right?
Speaker A:Like, I've worked for this ministry for years, but I'm.
Speaker A:So, I'm, I'm making no claims, but when I encounter that passage, I come away wondering if I should cover my head and church, church at the same time.
Speaker A:I go to a PC church in Southern California and if I suddenly started going in with like a lace scarf over my head or whatever, you know, or even a hat, I would start making that aspect of things about me.
Speaker A:Like I would draw attention away from some of the very important things that are happening in a worship service.
Speaker A:And I would start making it so, so in a certain way it would be a distraction.
Speaker A:And so I've had to take that one before the Lord and really say to the Lord, like, lord, I don't want to sin in this.
Speaker A:Like, I take this.
Speaker A:Really, I do, I take it seriously.
Speaker A:Being a woman.
Speaker A:Like, I, I don't want to preach.
Speaker A:I, I am more comfortable.
Speaker A:Like, I've been in situations where, where even as a speaker, like they, they have not felt at certain churches that it would be right to have a woman stand in the pulpit to speak, even in an apologetic way.
Speaker A:I, I am glad that they safeguard that way.
Speaker A:Like, I don't want, I don't want to change those things, right?
Speaker A:So I, I have to go before the Lord because he's my Savior and he covers my Sin.
Speaker A:And you see all of these sacrifices that are laid out in the Old Testament that cover even the unintentional and unknown sins of the people.
Speaker A:People.
Speaker A:And I have to say, like Christ, you're my covering.
Speaker A:I don't want to sin against you here.
Speaker A:I think that if I followed this, like, legalistic reading of the Word in my heart and did that thing, because I think that might be worse than going with my head uncovered so that we can all worship corporately together in this particular context before you.
Speaker A:And please forgive me if I'm wrong, and please show me if I'm wrong.
Speaker A:But for that right now, that's where I land.
Speaker A:And if I were coming at it from a works righteousness standpoint, I think I said legalistic before, but what I'm trying to say is a works righteousness standpoint where I think some of these trad femme people are.
Speaker A:I would not be right before God.
Speaker A:God in that stance, but I am right before God.
Speaker A:I can come to him because of Christ's covering for all my sins, even the ones of misunderstanding.
Speaker A:And I just.
Speaker A:I just have to rest there.
Speaker A:Like, I don't know what else to do with it.
Speaker A:And I think that we have to.
Speaker A:I think that we have to remember that Christ is our Savior.
Speaker A:Our works are not our Savior.
Speaker A:When we contend with these things and try to decide.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And you know, we talked about.
Speaker A:I'm in a Jen Wilkins study on Hebrews right now, so I come back to Hebrews a lot.
Speaker A:But we talked in the podcast that we recorded with you and Joshua about, like, that warning not to go back to the old things.
Speaker A:And I think that you're right.
Speaker A:There was a pagan as a pagan sacrifice aspect of that.
Speaker A:But we can't even go back to the old, the old law.
Speaker A:That's an old covenant.
Speaker A:Like the writer of Hebrews says, we have a better covenant now.
Speaker A:We can't go to those old things for our righteousness.
Speaker A:And I think there are a lot of aspects of this trad movement that do that, and I think that's why they're so damaging.
Speaker B:Wow, I appreciate you so much, Mary.
Speaker B:I hope, really, I've so enjoyed the conversations that you and I have had through text message.
Speaker B:And this is just a perfect example of why.
Speaker B:What a.
Speaker B:What a moving way to discuss all of this, to acknowledge the balance between personal conviction and also, like, what scripture says.
Speaker B:And also like, if I were to actually do this, it might cause more harm than good.
Speaker B:And I never would have thought about that before.
Speaker B:I think I probably had thought about it in some parallel kind of way?
Speaker B:Well, no.
Speaker B:If I suddenly show up doing this, like, even if I don't want it to be about me, it can very quickly become about me in a, in a situation, in a context where, where it's like this touches on very sensitive issues.
Speaker B:So it's more than about this.
Speaker B:I think it's fundamentally a pretty minor thing.
Speaker B:It says what it says.
Speaker B:It's pretty minor.
Speaker B:And is it worth disrupting potentially an entire church by putting your finger on something?
Speaker B:Are you the person to fight that battle or not?
Speaker B:Is that the hill worthy of dying on in this particular moment?
Speaker B:And ultimately, I can't answer that question for you.
Speaker B:I don't go to your church, nor am I you.
Speaker B:Things are not all one, as it out turns turns out, because I'm not you.
Speaker B:So to bring that before the Lord and say, you know, God, there's a bunch of different ways you could frame a question like that, like, is this a worthy fight, am I the person for this fight, is this the right time, etc.
Speaker B:Etc.
Speaker B:And I think that's the only way to handle that.
Speaker B:And the way that I've always thought about head coverings for myself was based on my own experience.
Speaker B:Like, there came a moment in my own life where I was so deeply grateful to have the covering of a path pastor to be under his covering.
Speaker B:And I could feel that, like, wow, if I could find some way to signify that I was under the covering of a man that I respected, yeah, I would do that.
Speaker B:And so I was like, oh, maybe this ties to if a woman could get to a place inside herself.
Speaker B:Like, I'm so grateful to be under the covering of a man that she would signify that in a particular way.
Speaker B:And there's a lot to that question, more so than just the political anti feminist calculation.
Speaker B:And I think you say something very wise, which is that if you start looking closely at the trad wife, trad femme or whatever, even within Christianity, the performance of this righteousness is not what actually saves you.
Speaker B:And it's so easy for that to happen for both men and women that if we do all the trad things, you know, the sourdough and all the kids and the head coverings and, you know, and all the, we do all these different, different things, it doesn't necessarily mean that your household has the aroma of the Lord in it, right?
Speaker B:And so, and there is a lot of that happening in Christianity right now on the right, particularly the performance of traditional Christianity as a statement against these leftist gnostic Hermetic, whatever values, we're not going to be that.
Speaker B:So we're going to adopt this costume and we're going to do all the things as a stand statement and it's not necessarily out of some form of heart regeneration.
Speaker B:It's making a political statement, it's making a cultural statement, not embodying the best traditions of the gospel.
Speaker B:And so I think you put your finger on some very important things right there in a very, in a very honest and vulnerable and transparent way.
Speaker B:And I really appreciate that.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker A:Praise God.
Speaker A:Praise God for that.
Speaker A:I mean, I really, I have sinned egregiously in so many places in my life.
Speaker A:You know, like, the fact that I'm even considering like head coverings is sort of ridiculous on the one hand, you know, because, you know, we are, we are washed in Christ's blood.
Speaker A:There is a process of sanctification that has to happen.
Speaker A:And so, you know, if you were to tell me at certain points in my life that I'd be concerned about head coverings, I'd be like, really?
Speaker A:Okay, but sure about that.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:It speaks to a whole lot more though.
Speaker A:I think you said something interesting because you took it from individual salvation.
Speaker A:So like, if I do these things, I can be my own savior.
Speaker A:And then you were talking also about like culture, the changing the culture.
Speaker A:Like I think we think like if enough of us were trapped, dad, we'd save the culture.
Speaker A:Well, we are not.
Speaker A:We are as incapable of saving the culture as we are of saving ourselves.
Speaker A:Right, Amen.
Speaker A:But by, but through the Lord and his movement and his revival of the church and his movement of the Holy Spirit and his saving of people.
Speaker A:And yeah, there are little touches of both those things that I see.
Speaker A:I mean, there are people that I like and people that I listen to, to because they've got some good things to say.
Speaker A:But I'm just aware that like they, they air over into that idea that if, if enough people did it like me, then boy, we'd all be okay.
Speaker A:And that's just, boy, is that dangerous territory as like the tweet chief self justifier and like the chief discerner of my own self righteousness in, in poor directions.
Speaker A:Like, man, if we choose just one person, person who's going to be the determiner of what's going to save the culture based on us doing certain things, man, we are in trouble, you know, just in trouble.
Speaker B:I super appreciate that because I think that there are a lot of men, they're like, we're going to save the West.
Speaker B:It's like, you're going to save the west by sacrificing your moral character.
Speaker B:I don't think you know what saving the west really means.
Speaker B:And then they get really mad at me.
Speaker A:Well, and, like, what do they mean by that?
Speaker A:The west, too?
Speaker A:Like, I.
Speaker B:What do you mean by save?
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:You know, it's.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:There are so many places to go here, but it's just, like, I love and value the West.
Speaker A:I have not traveled internationally at the rates that you have by any stretch of the imagination.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:I've been to three countries in my life, but, um, I live right above Mexico, and I did a lot of work in orphanages as a teenager down in, in Mexico, in the poorer parts, and, and actually literally on the trash heaps in Tijuana, um, at certain points.
Speaker A:And so I love and value, from that perspective, like, the prosperity.
Speaker A:I'm so thankful for the things that, like, my kids have that I don't worry about meal, where meals are gonna come from, you know, things like that.
Speaker A:So I value that.
Speaker A:And then the other traveling that I did was as a teenager, and this, this probably will have to be a conversation for another day, but I went with a charismatic movement, missions movement, when I was 17.
Speaker A: In: Speaker A:So it was just a couple years after Ceausescu and his wife had been executed.
Speaker A:It was still in total chaos.
Speaker A:It was during the orphan AIDS crisis in Romania, and we had gone there to work in the orphanages, to go do, like, evangelistic stuff in the prisons.
Speaker A:And that was sort of like, my first taste of a country.
Speaker A:Well, I just remember, like, getting into Frankfurt and, like, as we were getting ready to get on our flight to go to Romania, like, being frisked by, like, this very gruff guard who also had, like, a machine gun strapped across his back, like, before we could, like.
Speaker A:And I was like, you know, I'm a seven.
Speaker A:I had just turned 17, and I was suddenly very aware that I was not in America anymore, you know, and so I am.
Speaker A:I am grateful for the West.
Speaker A:I am thankful to be of the West.
Speaker A:Most specifically, I am so thankful to be from America.
Speaker A:I think there's so much beautiful and good and kind of like, biblical in our structures, and I probably feel that more as a Presbyterian, but.
Speaker A:But we're not called to save the West.
Speaker A:I, I.
Speaker A:My hope for America is, like, we have been a place that has sent the gospel out to many nations.
Speaker A:Like, that's what we're called as a church, to do Right.
Speaker A:To send out disciples on our own street.
Speaker A:Send out disciples to the nations.
Speaker A:That's what we're called to.
Speaker A:And we're not called to save.
Speaker A:Christ saves.
Speaker A:We're called to take the message and to trust in the Holy Spirit to do that.
Speaker A:And so while I'm.
Speaker A:Yeah, I.
Speaker A:That's just so distracting from who and what we are supposed to be as Christians now.
Speaker A:I do think that we're supposed to, to be for the good of our communities.
Speaker A:You know, I think I was just reading through in Jeremiah where he's, he's saying like those false prophets are telling you to like resist the government and not stay in this place.
Speaker A:And I'm telling you, get married, do good for the government, do good for your community, build your homes and have your families because the Lord is going to keep you here for a while.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And you, you can't do a one to one parallel.
Speaker A:But I was just thinking about how like, okay, here I am.
Speaker A:God has placed me in the United States of America and Southern California, like in Escondido where all these lawsuits are happening and all this stuff with transgenderism.
Speaker A:I am a Christian and so I need to make good choices.
Speaker A:I need to use my vote as a Christian to try to make the best choices for my culture and for my country that I possibly can because God put me here.
Speaker A:And so I'm thankful to be here and I am patriotic as a result.
Speaker A:That doesn't mean that, that I think everything my country does is perfect, but boy am I thankful for the Christian influence in it.
Speaker A:And I want to be a Christian voice there with my vote and my presence.
Speaker A:But I can't save this country.
Speaker A:God will do what he wants in this country.
Speaker A:I pray it's glorifying to him.
Speaker A:And what is my role as a Christian who is longing for my true hope home?
Speaker A:Like, what's my role as a Christian here?
Speaker A:But I'm not going to save the country.
Speaker A:No movement is going to save the country, you know, So I want to.
Speaker B:Read a scripture passage from my daily reading just today, but I have to reach over and get my Bible.
Speaker B:Give me just a second.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:One second.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:Sorry.
Speaker B:We're back.
Speaker B:All right.
Speaker B:So to that point, I think it was Psalm 108 that I was reading to today, and it speaks to that exact point.
Speaker B:Here we go.
Speaker B:Psalm 108.
Speaker B:12.
Speaker B:Oh, give us help against the adversary, for deliverance by man is in vain.
Speaker B:Through God we will do valiantly.
Speaker B:And it is he who shall tread down our adversaries.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker B:Right Right.
Speaker B:There it is.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker B:And there it is where it's like, what are we doing as men, as women, as Christians, thinking that we're going to do anything inside, in and of ourselves to tread down our adversaries?
Speaker B:We're not.
Speaker B:It's God who's going to tread down our adversaries and our faithfulness, our holiness, our sanctification is first and foremost.
Speaker B:What does it profit a man to save the west and yet lose his soul?
Speaker B:Is the phrase that I'm thinking, and people are losing sight of that Christians are very rapidly.
Speaker A:Seems absolutely.
Speaker A:It's amazing.
Speaker A:But, you know, there are points of hope and points of light that I see all over the place.
Speaker A:Again, you know, I'm operating mostly in trans stuff right now, but I just think about these sweet teenagers that I met when I was in southern Illinois.
Speaker A:I was like, right outside St. Louis in Monroe, Monroe County.
Speaker A:And I had given kind of like the first.
Speaker A:I guess it was the second iteration of a lecture that really is where I'm coming from with this, this biblical friendship idea.
Speaker A:And like, two est friendship versus one est friendship.
Speaker A:And so I think I had, like, jokingly, I. I might have not.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:I think I've chose a more mature topic or title for my talk, but I originally wanted to call it how not to Be a Bad Friend.
Speaker A:And I think I called it like Faithful Friendship or something.
Speaker A:But I had, I had explained a lot of the things that I did to you just now now about transgenderism, the trajectory of the transgender path, if we affirm people and all of these different things.
Speaker A:And there were a lot of high schoolers there.
Speaker A:I think it was like an audience of like 450 people.
Speaker A:And I think at least 50 of them were under the age of 20, which I thought was really cool.
Speaker A:And I had three different teenagers and then one college age person in the line for Q and A afterwards, like the more private Q and A.
Speaker A:And each one of them had a person on their heart.
Speaker A:And in every single one of those instances, it was someone that they knew at school and a different person in each instance, but they were thinking through now.
Speaker A:So they, like, they had stopped resisting.
Speaker A:They had finally heard the truth, like, truth that they had not been told about, like, the statistics that have to do with all of this gender confusion.
Speaker A:And they had started to understand that they had been lied to.
Speaker A:And they also had each acknowledged, like, yeah, I really do want to be comfortable, but I don't think that that's good for my friend.
Speaker A:Or like, I really.
Speaker A:I'm scared because One of the boys said to me, like, I could use, I could lose my whole friend group over this.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:But he had decided that he had this friend who was a girl who had been presenting as a boy and he had been calling her by her boy name and pronouns for like the last two years.
Speaker A:And he was like, but I've known her since kindergarten and I really love her.
Speaker A:Like, I don't want to do anything to hurt her, but I think I have been.
Speaker A:And could you help me think about ways that I could talk to her to explain to her why I'm not going to call her boy name anymore?
Speaker A:Like, I might lose my whole friendship and my friend group, but I think I need to do that.
Speaker A:And I was so touched by like, the tenderness of this young man towards his friend and so touched by like, just, that's a, you know, think about when you're like 14 or 15, like how important your social status at school is and how important like your people are that you gather around you.
Speaker A:And his willingness as a young evangelical, you know, it was a multi denominational gathering that I was at.
Speaker A:It's a group of pastors, they're wonderful called, it's gone now.
Speaker A:But anyways, I think it's like seven different denominations represented.
Speaker A:But for him to just be standing there and just say, I'm like, I'm willing to sacrifice these things because of his love, love of his Savior, and he wanted to conform his love of his friend to the love of his Savior because he understood that that was the good thing.
Speaker A:Now that's a spark of light.
Speaker A:You know, that's a bright light in all of this.
Speaker A:And I do, I do think that we've gotten to a place where like, the, the lies are so dark and so damaging that the light is shot, shining brighter.
Speaker A:And so that's, you know, that's an important battle.
Speaker A:You know, we, that's, that's a battle worth embarking on.
Speaker A:And so it just was really sweet.
Speaker A:Like, I, I think of those people occasionally and, and just pray for them.
Speaker A:It just, I just think it's so important and so hopeful.
Speaker A:I, I really do see a lot of things like that happening that are.
Speaker A:But the church really has to wake up to the seriousness of this.
Speaker A:We've, we've just got to stop messing around with, you know, personality quizzes in the form of enneagram, physical fitness in the form of yoga, like all, all of these different things.
Speaker A:Like, we've got to get back to, to the gospel and what it calls us to.
Speaker A:You know, God is our creator and he is our redeemer.
Speaker A:And that people need to know that.
Speaker B:Maybe we can talk for a moment and close on this about the mission of Truth Exchange today that I think is probably more relevant now today than ever, as the church is coming around to recognizing a lot of these aspects that have been.
Speaker B:As I spoke about earlier, I think the evangelical church in all of its forms was more aware of these issues in the 70s and 80s than it is today.
Speaker B:And here's the mission and ministry of Truth Exchange that's set up to address these challenges.
Speaker B:Let's talk about Truth Exchange and we'll leave people with a ray of hope to think about how they can support you guys as well and get more informed about these issues.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Well, thank you for the opportunity to do that.
Speaker A:So Truth Exchange, our presence is mostly online right now, and we have a vast archive of resources from our Truth Exchange Family Fellows.
Speaker A:Dr. Cal Beisner, who we spoke about earlier, who deals with green movements from the Cornwall Alliance.
Speaker A:Dr. Jeffrey Ventrella, who is also the chairman of our board.
Speaker A:We have Pastor Ted Hamilton here in Escondido.
Speaker A:He is my pastor.
Speaker A:He also teaches at this seminary.
Speaker A:All of these men, Pamela Frost, who is my prayer partner and one of my dearest friends.
Speaker A:She was actually the matron of honor in my wedding, who has done more work on yoga and Enneagram and Jesus Calling and the God Calling books.
Speaker A:And I mean, just all of the stuff, the heavy lifting that no one in their right mind would ever want to do.
Speaker A:Like Pam does that.
Speaker A:She's also one of our Truth Exchange fellows.
Speaker A:We have a vast free archive of all of those resources@truthexchange.com and so it's the word truth, the letter X and the word change.com.
Speaker A:you can also access our video archive at YouTube.
Speaker A:I think we're @truthexchangel exchange on YouTube.
Speaker A:We're Ruth Exchange on X.
Speaker A:And so we're a really small ministry.
Speaker A:And so right now, a lot of our presence is online because that is where we can steward our funds the most responsibly.
Speaker A:But we make everything available for free.
Speaker A:You can also go and sign up for our mailing list on the website.
Speaker A:And if you're on the mailing list, we never use that for anything other than to communicate directly from the ministry.
Speaker A:So my colleague and our director of operations, Joshua Gillo, who I hope you get a chance to talk to him at some point because he's an absolute kick and he's great and so interesting.
Speaker A:But Joshua is releasing Truth Exchange Classics constantly.
Speaker A:So we have a piece right now that's going out in four parts and it's about the sacraments of androgyny that Dr. Peter Jones wrote.
Speaker A:It's a fantastic article in it's.
Speaker A:We split it into four parts because it's so long and it's so deep.
Speaker A:We have on occasion a podcast that Dr. Jeff Ventrella does with Joshua where people can write in questions.
Speaker A:They can write about the things that we've been releasing and ask those questions.
Speaker A:We use our mailing list to do that, to send out all of our resources.
Speaker A:We also have.
Speaker A:We're unable to do it this year, but we do an annual live symposium where people can come in person and they can from our Truth Exchange fellows and from speakers that we bring in, really trying to equip Christians.
Speaker A:Like this ministry is for everyday Christians.
Speaker A:Like, I didn't go to college.
Speaker A:I was too busy.
Speaker A:And another part of that was my life that was weird and interesting and where I wasn't making great decisions.
Speaker A:But like I.
Speaker B:To the weirder years.
Speaker A:Yeah, my weird years, I didn't go to college.
Speaker A:So, like, if anyone has heard this conversation today and found that I was able to explain something to them in a way that they found useful, that is because of Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:Truth Exchange is about equipping people who are sitting in the pews, everyday Christians to be able to think through topics and issues and speak about them rationally and helpfully in order to share the gospel and to combat the lie.
Speaker A:And so if you've had any benefit from anything that I've said, said, that's what we're offering to you, is all of that education.
Speaker A:And you can access all of that on the website.
Speaker A:We have all of our symposia recorded and online for free.
Speaker A:And then another opportunity that we have is called our Truth Exchange Intensives.
Speaker A:And that is an in person event where a church or an organization can come to Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:They can contact us through the website or@officeruthexchange.com and they can ask about hosting an intensive.
Speaker A:And these are tailored to what particular churches need and want.
Speaker A:So there might be a church who has no, they don't give a flip about the enneagram because no one in their church has heard about it.
Speaker A:But there are other churches where like their entire counseling department has been taken over by it.
Speaker A:And they have people who are getting divorced because their types don't match.
Speaker A:And, you know, they've been drawn into, you know, thinking that this is the way that they should order their lives instead of according to scripture.
Speaker A:And for them, Enneagram is a really big deal.
Speaker A:Well, Truth Exchange is one of those unique places where we can reach into our archive of speakers and say, okay, we have these people who can come out, they can talk to you about the history of Enneagram.
Speaker A:They can talk to you about the Christian versions of Enneagram.
Speaker A:They can talk to you about how to speak to your friends who really love the Enneagram from a gospel perspective.
Speaker A:We can do that for transgenderism.
Speaker A:We can do it for all kinds, any plethora of issues you've mentioned.
Speaker A:And we talked on our podcast a number of times about the resurgence of antisemitism combined with this radical neo masculinism that is pagan in its nature.
Speaker A:There are churches that are actively dealing with that.
Speaker A:And that is something that we can tailor for your congregations and organizations.
Speaker A:And I really hope that people will contact us and look at bringing us out to do things like that too.
Speaker A:I think those are some of the most powerful things that we do.
Speaker A:And like I said, I think you said this in the intro.
Speaker A:Like I had praying parents and a praying grandma.
Speaker A:I have had the privilege of, for the majority of my life going to a bible clear teaching church that has put me under the common means of grace, like the, the administration of the word, the administration of the sacraments.
Speaker A:Those have formed me deeply.
Speaker A:There is nothing else besides Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:And those things that have shaped me as deeply as, as they have.
Speaker A:I would not be the person that I am today.
Speaker A:I wouldn't even be married to the man that I'm married to today if not for Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:And that's not just because Dr. Peter Jones performed my wedding ceremony, which he did.
Speaker B:That helps.
Speaker A:Yeah, but Truth Exchange is like, we are focused on equipping the saints to do that day to day gospel evangelism and apologetic work that we are called to do.
Speaker A:And I struggle to find a place that does it better.
Speaker A:And that is all to God's grace and the excellence of our fellows and to Peter Jones and everyone on staff.
Speaker A:I really, I can't recommend it highly enough.
Speaker A:So thank you.
Speaker A:That's a bit of a commercial, but that's who we are.
Speaker B:No, that's great.
Speaker B:And I think, to put a point on it, like, maybe I finally figured out what the name means.
Speaker B:So I had to think about that for a while.
Speaker B:Maybe you could explain what the name Truth Exchange means, because I've been seeing it since I discovered Dr. Peter Jones.
Speaker B:I was like, what is that?
Speaker B:I finally put the piece together.
Speaker B:I'll let you do it.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:So truth exchange is based on a singular verse.
Speaker A:We're based on the whole of scripture.
Speaker A:Please.
Speaker A:But we're focused on a singular single verse.
Speaker A:Romans 1:25, where Paul says they exchanged the truth about God for the lie and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator who is blessed forever.
Speaker A:Amen.
Speaker A:There is an article in front of each of those words.
Speaker A:It's the truth and the lie.
Speaker A:What we say at Truth Exchange is that our culture has exchanged the truth for the lie, and we would like to.
Speaker A:We would like to exchange it back.
Speaker A:So you come them and you exchange those lies that you have believed, the lies that the culture has held onto.
Speaker A:You exchange them for the truth.
Speaker A:And that's powerful witness.
Speaker A:That is a way that we can honor God.
Speaker A:And that's what we're all about, is telling the difference and then choosing the truth for ourselves and for the people around us.
Speaker B:That's what we've been speaking about today, is the various.
Speaker B:The various truths that have been exchanged for the lie in all the ways that it shows up, whether it be yoga or the sort of trad wife lie or transgenderism lie, lie.
Speaker B:And touching on transhumanism as well.
Speaker B: hange going back again to the: Speaker B:The lie, the singular article.
Speaker B:There is a particular lie that we're all, in a sense, living within, but even that's a lie because we're still living within the truth.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:We might choose it, but we can't escape the truth.
Speaker A:We are living in God's reality.
Speaker A:He is great Creator.
Speaker A:Thank God.
Speaker B:Thank God.
Speaker B:Amen.
Speaker B:Literally.
Speaker B:So this again, this has been wonderful.
Speaker B:Mary, again, I appreciate you so much.
Speaker B:I appreciate getting to know you.
Speaker B:I appreciate our friendship and your passion for these issues.
Speaker B:These aren't academic subjects, whether it be yoga or transgenderism.
Speaker B:They're very different on a particular spectrum of perhaps intensity.
Speaker B:And yet there are real people that are involved with these issues.
Speaker B:This does affect.
Speaker B:And the enneagram, which I suppose would be a conversation for another time.
Speaker B:This is impacting people's lives.
Speaker B:These aren't just theories.
Speaker B:These are things that are landing in people's lives in a way to cause pain and separation and death and in many cases, like eternal consequences.
Speaker B:And so these subjects, they warrant a degree of passion from the people who are invested in them.
Speaker A:Yes, absolutely, they are.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for the opportunity to have this conversation.
Speaker A:I always get a little jittery before recordings or lectures.
Speaker A:And things like that.
Speaker A:And I have just found.
Speaker A:Well, we were talking about this before the recording, but it was.
Speaker A:Makes sense to me now.
Speaker A:Like, you and I had very different paths, but we're passionate about the same things and we've experienced some of the same things from different perspectives, but we really, like.
Speaker A:It's so rare to be able to talk to someone about the breadth of things that we've talked about.
Speaker A:And so I just.
Speaker A:I just find that every time that we engage, it's.
Speaker A:It's wonderful.
Speaker A:And I'm so.
Speaker A:I'm thankful for this developing friendship and I'm.
Speaker A:I'm just looking forward to more of it.
Speaker A:It's just.
Speaker A:I'm genuinely thankful that we've come across each other and that our ministries have come across each other as well.
Speaker B:Me too.
Speaker B:Me too.
Speaker B:And you're on X as well.
Speaker B:Would you like to send people to some of the things that you've written, some of the places where people can learn more about you and what you do if they want to explore more beyond this conversation?
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker A:I don't have a huge online presence.
Speaker A:I just don't have time to.
Speaker A:But I tend to.
Speaker A:So there.
Speaker A:Anything that I have done will be on the Truth Exchange channel.
Speaker A:But I am available on X at.
Speaker A:Excuse me.
Speaker A:I'm Wellertxc, so you can find me there.
Speaker A:Anytime that I do a new lecture, I have something that I've done, I'll release that and then the rest of the way that you can see any of, like the video archives or the things that I have done, you can find those at Truth Exchange.
Speaker A:And I did write and speak for a time under the name Mary Edie E, A D Y.
Speaker A:And if you want a real fun conspiracy rabbit, I know that name.
Speaker A:You do?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:Why do I know?
Speaker B:I don't know why I know that name, but I know that name.
Speaker A:Well, it depends on whether you ask the yogis or you ask me for that story, because I have been written up on some yoga blogs under the name Mary E. And they took many pieces of truth and combined them into a very interesting but false narrative.
Speaker A:And of course.
Speaker A:So, yeah, so you.
Speaker A:You can search Mary Edie and yoga, and I think that you'll find some other various things that you wouldn't find under Weller.
Speaker B:So the truth comes out.
Speaker A:I teased my husband that I married him so that I could change my name, so.
Speaker A:So that nobody from the yoga world can find me anymore.
Speaker A:And now I just outed myself on your podcast.
Speaker A:Great.
Speaker B:Well, don't worry.
Speaker B:We'll keep it just a secret between the two of us.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:Mary, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation, for your friendship, and for your openness and honesty.
Speaker B:This has been truly a joy.
Speaker A:Thank you so much.
Speaker A:Well, every blessing on your new marriage and your growing family.
Speaker A:I'm so happy for.
Speaker A:For you and just excited to see it all unfold.
Speaker B:Thank you so much.
Speaker B:I hear there's a little pitter patter, little feet running around outside as well.
Speaker A:I just had a door open and closed, so.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:The natives are restless.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker A:All right.
Speaker B:God bless you, Mary.
Speaker B:Thank you so much.
Speaker A:God bless you as well.
Speaker A:Bye.
Speaker A:Bye.
