The Christian Left – With Lucas Miles: How do Christians slide into Progressive Christianity? Where has the Progressive Christian viewpoint hijacked traditional (and Biblical) Christian beliefs? How do we counter dangerous heresy?How is our faith being used as a political weapon? How did Hitler use “Positive Christianity”?  What is TRUE Christian unity? Historically, what has happened when Biblical beliefs are applied to a society? Tune in to hear this timely interview with Lucas Miles discussing his new book The Christian Left.

Air Date: 08/11/2021

Guest: Lucas Miles

On-air Personalities: David Barton, Rick Green, and Tim Barton

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Transcription note:  As a courtesy for our listeners’ enjoyment, we are providing a transcription of this podcast. Transcription will be released shortly. However, as this is transcribed from a live talk show, words and sentence structure were not altered to fit grammatical, written norms in order to preserve the integrity of the actual dialogue between the speakers. Additionally, names may be misspelled or we might use an asterisk to indicate a missing word because of the difficulty in understanding the speaker at times. We apologize in advance.

Faith and the Culture

Rick:

Welcome to the intersection of faith and the culture. This is WallBuilders Live, where we’re talking about today’s hottest topics, and looking at those topics from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. We’re here with David Barton, America’s premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders.

Tim Barton is a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders, and I’m Rick Green, former Texas legislator and America’s Constitution coach. You can find out more about us and the program, get into archives, make a donation, all of that at wallbuilderslive.com. That’s wallbuilderslive.com.

David, Tim, later in the program, Lucas Miles will be with us, new book out called “The Christian Left”. Now, I don’t know if there should be a Christian Left, can a Christian be a leftist and still be lined up with the Bible?

Tim:

Well, it might be worth also asking, what do we mean by left and what do we mean by Christian? Because certainly, you can identify as any of the above and actually, currently, my dad is to the left of me; so he is Christian, and he has left of me. But what does that actually mean? You know, we…

David:

And by the way, that’s only because I’m physically to the left, not philosophically to the left of him.

Tim:

I mean, yes, we haven’t taken a survey of all of our beliefs; presumably, we line up very close on all of the issues. But guys, it is one of the things that it’s almost like oxymoronic title that you’re going to be Christian left. And I don’t mean that even in a political sense. 

But right now, we know, theologically, there’s a lot of people that identify as Christian who don’t believe the basic truths of the Bible; so they don’t consider themselves theologically conservative or theologically to the right.

The Right and Left

And it’s interesting that even when you talk about conservative or liberal in a modern context, that your conservatives tend to be right and your liberals tend to be left. Because it seems like Solomon said something about that.

David:

Yeah, there’s this really interesting verse in Ecclesiastes 10:2 and it says, the heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left. Ouch.

Tim:

I’m not sure if he was talking about political parties back then. But I think we can make that application today.

Rick:

I like it.

Tim:

Although we’ve had some Rabbi friends that say no, actually, that the right was things that you were trying to conserve, and the left was things that they were trying to change all of the existing things. And so actually, it does kind of fall in that category, if you actually study the context and meaning.

And guys, one of the things that we have certainly seen in a modern context is how far some people in the Christian circle, the Christian camp, the Christian community have gotten away from basic biblical truth, and even contorting and distorting things from the Bible to try to bend their current behavior and make it seem like the Bible defends things that clearly the Bible is not an offensive. We certainly have just lost a basic biblical perspective. 

And instead of where we read in Scripture that we should be conformed to the image of Christ, you have people that may be closer to Romans 1, they’re trying to form God in the image they want of God, instead of studying the Bible and taking the whole council of the Bible and applying it, they’ve really have kind of given up on some basic biblical truth.

Believing the Bible

David:

And I think one of the things that really distinguishes whether you’re Christian right or left, Tim, is the term you’re using biblical. If you actually read the Bible, if everybody’s reading the same Bible, you’ve got the same conclusions on most of the same theological issues. So when you’re coming up with a completely different theology than what the Bible says forth, you’re wrapping your beliefs around the term Christian and replacing biblical beliefs with your personal beliefs and still calling a Christian, you really can’t call a Christian at that point.

Rick:

Yeah. And just like Tim said, it’s used to justify actions, right, to take whatever we’re doing in our sin nature, and say, oh, no, the Bible says, this is okay and we’ve done it with slavery, we’ve done it with sexual things. I mean, it’s the nature of man to do that. 

And if we stay in God’s word, and we speak truth about God’s word and stop being afraid to say, excuse me, I think you’re misusing that scripture, then we can come back to those trees and it’ll actually be better for everybody up and down the line. But man, the Christian Left is growing like crazy in the country. Lucas Miles has a new book on it. 

We’re going to have him when we come back from the break and talk about it. Stay with us, you’re listening to WallBuilders Live.

A Moment from AMERICAN HISTORY

This is Tim Barton from WallBuilders with another moment from American history. Alexis de Tocqueville, a political official from France, traveled to the United States in 1831 and penned his observations in the now famous book “Democracy in America”. Being from France, what he found in America was completely unexpected to him.

He reported “Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention. And the longer I stayed there, the more I perceived the great political consequences resulting from this. In France, I’d almost always seen the spirit of religion in the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America, I found that they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.”

De Tocqueville recognized that it was biblical Christianity and the morals that produced that made America great. For more information about Alexia Tocqueville and the positive influence of Christianity in early America, go to wallbuilders.com.

Welcome Lucas Miles

Rick:

Welcome back to WallBuilders Live. Thanks for staying with us today. Excited to have Lucas Miles with us. 

You can hear him on the Lucas Miles show on Faith Wire, and he’s got a new book out that I had the privilege of talking to him about just a few weeks back at NRB. Lucas, thanks for coming on, man.

Lucas:

Hey, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Rick:

“The Christian Left”, so wait a minute, I thought leftism was typically atheist, you know, Marxist, those kind of folks. You mean, Christians are buying into this too?

Lucas:

Unfortunately, that is the case. And you know, it’s always important I think to point out here that the Christian Left is not a moniker that conservatives have labeled certain Christians with; this is a label that Christians are very proudly using themselves. And you’ll hear other terms like progressive Christianity, liberal Christianity, but they’re trying to set themselves apart from other traditional biblically minded Christians.

Rick:

Is at the heart of it this whole selfish desire to be loved and liked and be seen as being compassionate? I mean, what causes them to want to embrace these new terms and this new ideology?

The Infallible Word of God

Lucas:

So obviously, there’s a spectrum and you have some that are just starting to maybe dabble with certain beliefs or current cultural trends. Others are very militant about some of these ideas. And I’ve traced this back all the way to the 1700s, to some early sort of Christian socialists is what they would be known as today, who had begun to embrace sort of a downgraded view of Scripture. And that’s really the tipping point.

Once you start looking at the Bible, and you view it as something less than infallible or less than the Word of God, you know, Christian beliefs begin to deteriorate. And that’s where a lot of these individuals has gone, as it’s going through this deconstructionist work on scripture and that begins to lead them into embracing a lot of progressive ideology.

Rick:

What would be some practical examples where the progressive Christian viewpoint has hijacked some of the traditional Christian beliefs?

Lucas:

So, one thing that we hear a lot is the use of language and sort of this double talk that the Left tends to do. And not everybody who is Left theologically votes for the Democratic Party or puts their vote on the Left side of the equation. You have some individuals that have conservative voting patterns, but they have a leftist view, or a very progressive view of God, those are less so.

But what we see here, for instance, I think that there’s a lot of conversation today of would Jesus stand in the way of a love between two people, and Jesus becomes sort of this propaganda figure to support things like same sex marriage or transgenderism, even in extreme cases? We also see the same sort of language of wasn’t Jesus a refugee, or wasn’t Jesus an immigrant in order to support say, something like open borders?

And so we have sort of this, like, almost a soft totalitarianism that’s happening in the state where the state is trying to assert the power over the church. And they’re using Jesus in many cases, as sort of this propaganda to convince people that their methodology is in fact the true methodology that any true Christian should follow.

Twisting Truth

Rick:

Yeah, dangerous, dangerous, you point out in the book it’s basically a political weapon, is how you describe it. They take our faith, they use it as a political weapon. And because we don’t know truth as a church, and we’re not in God’s word, we don’t recognize how they’ve twisted it. They’ve got this little kernel of truth each time and then they wrap it with all these falsehoods, but yet it becomes so powerful because of our own lack of knowledge.

Lucas:

I think it was G. K. Chesterton that said essentially, nobody wakes up and says I want to be a heretic, right? There’s always a little bit of truth in all heresy, which is why it becomes attractive. And so it there’s that kernel there, as you mentioned. 

Our friend Eric Metaxas talks about this a little bit which I recapped to some degree in my book, within the Third Reich, you had an effort to use Christianity, the Germans called it Positivist Christian Tomb. And it, basically, was positive Christianity was the name that they gave this. And it was Christianity where they kind of stripped out all the divinity, all the talk of heaven and hell, all the talk of forgiveness of sins and miracles, and they were left with sort of Jesus the champion of the state.

And this is really the effort by a lot of secular philosophers in the last several 100 years is they’ve looked at Jesus knowing that this is an important thing. They cannot discount scripture completely so they have to deal with it. And they’ve dealt with it by essentially converting Jesus into, you know, as Mikhail Gorbachev once said, the first great socialists, and they sort of use him as this champion of the state, and they’re pushing people further into a sort of powerless gospel that promotes a socialist agenda.

Rick:

What is the counter? How do we get the church to wake up, and I guess, specifically pastors to teach on this kind of thing? What’s the counter to their movement, because they are aggressive, and frankly, gaining ground?

Use Questions

Lucas:

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, these doctrines on the left have really found a home within a lot of our academic centers. And so I’ve been tracing this. I’m working on some future things that’s really looking at how a lot of our Christian institutions, higher ed, large national organizations have been hijacked by leftist and agnostics and atheists that are pushing the agenda, those organizations further and further left.

I think, as individual believers, a couple things, first of all, we have to establish ourselves on biblical orthodoxy. We have to get a Christian worldview really solidified in our hearts and our mind. And we have to hold our churches and our institutions accountable. We can do that through our dollars. 

We can do that through a relationship. We can do that through asking questions, and actually provide at the end of my book, “The Christian Left”, sort of a whole slew of questions that you can ask of yourself, as well as your pastor or any ministry that you want to support to make sure that the things that you’re supporting still stand on the side of biblical orthodoxy.

Rick:

Ooh, man, that’s so needed, so powerful. In fact, that’s really one of the main questions. How do you figure out if your church is starting to head that way, starting to drift that direction, and then what can you do about it? 

And I get this question all the time is, you know, look, I feel like my church is going work and doing these things. Do I just leave? Do I go to the pastor and try to at least have some influence there? What do you recommend to folks when they do see that, they can tell, man, our church is being coopted by this stuff?

It Depends on the Relationship

Lucas:

I mean, to some degree it partly depends upon your relationship there. You know, if you’ve just started going to a church you’ve been there two weeks, and they’re bringing in these various speakers and I name names in the book, so I will overly do that on the interview here. 

But if you go through my book, and you go, okay, here’s some of these active players that are pushing Christian leftism, they’re bringing these guys in, you’ve probably just time to go find another church, probably not the right place to make it home for you.

But if you’ve been going there for a while, and you felt like the church used to be really rooted in biblical teaching, and it’s drifted, and you have a relationship with the staff and the pastors, I’d encourage you to sit down, have a civil conversation: don’t just make it a Twitter war or bad mouth them. 

Ask them tough questions and do it with a heart of love, but do it with an expectation that you’re going to really get to the bottom of where do they stand and where they’re at.

And sometimes you might find that somebody’s not aware of these things, or not every pastor knows about this stuff. And so I think that it’s important to at least give them the benefit of the doubt if you’ve been attending for a while, but do so with really open eyes and open ears to make sure that this is a place that you do want to continue to worship in the long run.

Rick:

That’s really good. If you want to be prepared for that meeting, then read this book, “The Christian Left” by Lucas Miles. And it has the right questions to ask, that sort of thing as well. 

Redefining Sin

Look, if I could take it back to what you were saying about kind of the redefinition of Jesus in the same way they’ve redefined sin. So from a practical perspective, in our daily lives, there’s almost this attitude of really almost like, not that there is no sin, but that they’re almost that bad.

I mean, like anything you feel like doing, God created you that way, so just go ahead and do that. I mean, that has significant cultural consequences.

Lucas:

Yeah, it’s interesting, because this is an early heresy that the church in first century and second century, and really up until the time of Augustine phase is there were individuals that came in and basically said, there’s no such thing as sin, and there’s no such thing as original sin. Augustine famous sort of theological debate with a guy named Palladius really dealt with this as well. And Augustine some kind of put the nail in the coffin at that time, but we’ve seen it rise back up in sort of a new way.

And the Christian Left or progressives, in general, they don’t tend to believe in the doctrine of the depravity of man or of original sin. And this is really what’s behind a lot of the thought about CRT, Critical Race Theory or other critical theories, and even liberation theology, is that it’s the idea that man is good or mostly good, and that the system or the world is bad. And that’s actually a gnostic belief. This is something that is anti-Christian. 

Christianity teaches that the world is good. In fact, Genesis one tells us after God made it, he said, this is good, but that we have fallen, we’ve become depraved, we’ve become sinful. And so the solution is not trying to fix the system, it’s that we need our hearts regenerated, we need to be born again. And ourselves, we need to go through a transformation which is available to us by grace through faith.

And so what we’re seeing here, it’s not new, the church has dealt with this before. It’s better funded now. It’s better marketed now. But it’s not a new heresy. 

But we need to identify it as heresy and I think recognize that ideas such as original sin and depravity of man is a core Christian belief. And once we start deviating from that, we’re really entering into something that can really be called Christianity.

A Book Every Christian Should Read

Rick:

I guess is, Lucas Miles, the book is called “The Christian Left: How Liberal Thought Has Hijacked the Church”. Lucas, where do you prefer to send people to get the book?

Lucas:

Yeah, so of course, it’s available wherever books can be sold, was a number one bestseller on Amazon in three different categories. But if they want to help support me the best, they can head over to Lucasmiles.org, and all copies purchase there will be autographed and sent straight to you.

Rick:

And best way to listen to your show?

Lucas:

So they can check that out on iTunes, you know, Stitcher radio, but you can get all the link there at Lucasmiles.org as well and sign up for my mailing list and see kind of where I’m going to be speaking across the country this year.

Rick:

Love it, love it. Okay, I need to let you go. I know, I kept you longer than I said I would. But you’re really good on this too. 

So the people that are listening and going, man, I know this is happening, but not only my pastor do I need to talk to, I got family members, I got my own kids coming home from college talking about this stuff, how do you recommend Christians approach this with their friends and family and be able to be honest, be truthful, right, be firm and courageous, but also be loving and try not to destroy the relationship? Where do we find that balance right now in this really heated divisive culture we find ourselves in?

True Unity

Lucas:

So two things. First off, is I hear a lot of people say we need unity in the church. And what they tend to mean is that we need to get those that are oftentimes referred to as the Christian right, which I believe is sort of just a straw man argument, and those who are on this progressive Christianity, Christian left side that we just need to find common ground. In actuality, that’s not unity.

The only true Christian unity is when we as believers all together submit to the Lordship of Jesus and to the truth of God’s word, I can’t just come to terms with some other thought, if it doesn’t line up with Scripture and call that unity, is a false sense of unity. The second thing is that there’s a cycle, and I talked about this in my book, “The Christian Left”, that believers tend to get into, and I call it worry, anger, apathy. 

And there’s sort of a progression of those things that when you somebody, you know, let’s say it’s a child they start drifting off while they’re in college, parents get worried, and so they start trying to use guilt manipulation, all these tactics that when people get worried that they fall into, it hardly ever works. 

And then when that doesn’t work, they start getting angry. And so conflict arises, relationships get severed. And basically, that we’re seeing that across our culture is a whole angry tweets and meme wars and all this sort of stuff.

The third phase is the worst phase of all, and that’s apathy. After worry hasn’t worked, after anger hasn’t worked, we enter into apathy. And this is the worst phase of all. 

This is where I believe a lot of high percentage of the church is caught in right now. Basically, where thrown our hands up in the air and say, we can’t do it, there’s no change in them, we’re done. And I think that this is something that we have to fight against. The only way to fight against it is to walk in, I believe, a biblical form of love.

I outlined that in the book, is really great practical steps for people follow. So I’d encourage them if they’re stuck in that position, you got people you’re worried about, you’re mad at the world, or you’ve just given up hope, check out that chapter, and I think it’s really going to help them.

LucasMiles.Org

Rick:

That’s such good practical advice. Governor Mike Huckabee says every Christian needs to read this book. It’s called “The Christian Left: How Liberal Thought Has Hijacked the Church”. Go to Lucasmiles.org to find out more. Lucas, appreciate it, man, let’s do it again soon.

Lucas:

Thanks, Rick.

Rick:

Stay with us, folks, we’ll be right back with David and Tim Barton.

The AMERICAN STORY

Hey, guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have here at WallBuilders called The American Story. For years, people have been asking us to do a history book, and we finally done it. We start with Christopher Columbus and go roughly through Abraham Lincoln. And one of the things that that so often we hear today are about the imperfections of America, or how so many people in America that used to be celebrated or honored really aren’t good or honorable people.

One of the things we acknowledge quickly in the book is that the entire world is full of people who are sinful and need a savior, because the Bible even tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And yet what we see through history, and certainly is evident in America is how a perfect God uses imperfect people and does great things through them. 

The story of America is not the story of perfect people. But you see time and time again how God got involved in the process and use these imperfect people to do great things that impacted the entire world from America. To find out more, go to wallbuilders.com and check out The American Story.

Rick:

We’re back here on WallBuilders Live Thanks for staying with us and thanks to Lucas Miles for joining us. Back with David and Tim now, guys, this may be the fight of our lives. I mean, if we lose the church and the church goes left, then we’ve lost salt and light and we lose the entire culture. I mean, this is the battle of our lives.

David:

Well, there’s no question it’s the Battle of our lives and it’s over biblical beliefs. Anywhere we have applied biblical beliefs in society, society has prospered, the culture has prospered, people have been more civilized, they move forward. Now, we have a lot of Christian times, like back in the dark ages, back in the crusades, etc, where we didn’t apply biblical beliefs. We just said this is what’s Christian.

Bad Theology

And there’s a big difference between what’s professed to be Christian, and what’s biblical, and that’s what we’re seeing now. These are people that are taking their beliefs, they’re wrapping Christianity around it which is what we saw for all those dark ages. When you get back to Biblical stuff, it’s a completely different culture, and that’s where we need to be.

Tim:

Well, that was interesting too that Lucas pointed out, I think, was G. K. Chesterton that he was quoting, when Chesterton said that no Christian wakes up thinking to themselves I want to be a heretic. But the more you are outside of God’s word, the more you are listening to the voice of man instead of the voice of God, the easier it is to embrace bad ideology or bad theology in this case. Another was also interesting, Lucas said, look, you can actually vote conservative and still have bad theology.

And so you have some people in the conservative movement who are maybe voting on a conservative perspective, a conservative spectrum, but they have bad theology again, because instead of reading the Bible and letting the Bible shape their theology, they are forming their own opinions or their own ideology. 

And then the little time they might spend on the Bible, if any time at all, maybe it’s a Google search, looking for a verse to back up their ideology or worldview, their ideology, and worldview is not being shaped by the word of God, therefore they don’t have a biblical worldview.

And this is why we see so many Christians right now that really have bad theology that really as he described they are Christian leftists, because they’re left of center, they’re left of what the Bible actually teaches. They’re abandoning biblical truth and basic biblical theology. We’re seeing Christians on the issue of gender say, well, we believe they’re spectrums, instead of recognizing no, God says he made male and female, right?

This is something that’s also in the law of nature. It’s natural law. You look around, and there are male and female animals, right? There’s not animals on a spectrum. 

Holiness

And this is not something that we see universally in all the species that oh, man, in every species there’s all this fluidity and there’s all these different spectrums of gender. No. If you look through all these species, the common consistent theme you will find is there is male and female. 

If you look at the mammals, if you look at, right, whenever the different animals and insects like male and female is the common thing that God made. You don’t see life on a spectrum. You see human life, especially male and female. And this is something that as Christians should not be confusing.

And yet far too many Christians are confused on something that’s not confusing in nature and it’s certainly not confusing in the Bible. And this is happening in multiple issues that Christians are buying in into bad leftist ideology.

David:

And I thought it’s interesting too that yes, we have to be worried about wolves, no question, but it’s the wolves in sheep’s clothing you really have to worry about. I mean, there’s going to be opponents out there, there’s going to be bad stuff. But when the bad stuff gets inside the church, and it looks like one of the sheep, that’s when it really does even more damage than before. And that’s kind of where we are now.

And I’ve kind of decided that there’s a really a dividing line in some ways and that dividing line is something that I have not heard many churches talk about in a long time. And it is the word holiness. You know, the scripture says, without holiness, no men will see God. 

And holiness is putting aside what you want, what you want to do, conforming your life to his standard. And so, as Jesus said, you have to deny yourself, as Paul said, you crucify the flesh. And we put aside all sorts of stuff. And yet in much of the church today were encouraged you to take your beliefs and move forward to them. 

And holiness is a huge, huge thing and it means denying yourself, and we just don’t do that as much as we should in the church today.

Tim:

And this is something too, dad, as we’re talking about even looking at holiness, one of the things about holiness is you recognize your own brokenness, you recognize who God is. And certainly we could argue that through Christ Jesus, we can be made holy, right, through the power of the Holy Spirit. That’s something that we read in the Scripture.

The Christian Left – With Lucas Miles

And one of the things you find in one of the letters from Peter as he’s quoting scripture, he says, in Scripture, it says, be holy, for I am holy, is one of things that God told the Israelites, we’re supposed to be like God: God is holy, we are supposed to be holy. 

And holiness is being set apart. It’s being different. It’s not doing what everybody else is doing. And so when culture says, this is what the answer is, this is what the world looks like, when culture says socialism, and you have Christians who are somehow going through the Bible, going through the Gospels, and contorting it to say Jesus was a socialist, okay, that’s not being transformed by the renewing of your mind, that’s being conformed to the pattern of this world.

When you have Christian pastors who are coming out now saying that this critical race theory is in fact correct because white people are systemically racist, you have totally misunderstood what it says in Galatians 3, where in Christ, there’s not a Jew, there’s not a Greek, there’s not a male, there’s not a female, there’s not Scythian, slave or free, for we are all one in Christ. 

Where you are doing is looking and saying, wait a second, because someone is white, they’re evil, because someone has dark skin, they’ve been oppressed. That’s a Marxist ideology that is clearly not what the Bible says.

And this is not to say that we have to ignore moments of national sin in American history. We certainly can look back and say, you know what, there were definitely moments in American history where some sinful, evil, wicked things happened. There definitely were moments where there were wicked, sinful, evil people who were leaders of this nation who promoted those very things. 

We can be honest about history. However, one thing is also true in Scripture is the Bible is very clear that in God’s kingdom, the son is not guilty for the sins of the father. And if you’re saying that it doesn’t matter what these white students did today, you’re telling kindergarten kids that they’re bad and evil because their skin is white, and that maybe black or brown kids that they are oppressed and that they’ve been oppressed by these white kids around them, it’s utter nonsense, and it’s certainly not what the Bible teaches, is not biblical truth. 

And yet you have pastors buying into this. Why? Because they’re not being transformed by the renewing of their mind, they’re not going back and letting their theology be shaped by the Bible. They instead are, unfortunately, we would put them in the category of wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Rick:

So, the book is “The Christian Left by Lucas Miles. Get it, get informed, get equipped, and get in the fight to help save the church and save truth. You’ve been listening to WallBuilders Live.