John West: Stockholm Syndrome Christianity

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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John West: Stockholm Syndrome Christianity

February 8, 2025

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome Vice President of the Discovery Institute Dr. John West to discuss his new book "Stockholm Syndrome Christianity". He discusses how Christians are influenced by non-Christian ideas, key figures in the Stockholm Syndrome movement, how Christian institutions are captured by secular left, and strategies to combat the spread of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity.

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Show notes and transcript: https://winteryknight.com/2025/02/08/knight-and-rose-show-58-john-west-stockholm-syndrome-christianity

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome Rose. So today we're delighted to welcome a guest onto the show, Dr. John West. Dr. John West is Vice President of the Discovery Institute and Managing Director of the Institute's Center for Science and Culture, which he co-founded with Dr. Stephen Meyer in 1996.

Dr. West was previously an Associate Professor of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University, where he chaired the Department of Political Science and Geography. He earned his Ph.D. in Government from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. in Communications from the University of Washington. Dr. West has written or edited 12 books, including Darwin Day in America, How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.

His newest book is Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, Why America's Christian Leaders Are Failing and What We Can Do About It. Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, Dr. West. It's great to be here, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose, and I'm just looking forward to the discussion.

Thank you so much. Yeah, so are we. We both have absolutely loved this book.

We've been talking about it for a few weeks now and sharing it, talking about it with our friends, telling them they need to order it. So let me start with just asking you, if you would, to share kind of what's the central claim of the book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity? Yeah, thank you. Well, I think sort of the central point I'm trying to get across is that those of us who are, say, evangelical Christians in particular, often like to blame secularists as the big bad guys of causing everything that's bad.

And of course, I think many of them are. But what I have increasingly realized after a lifetime spent, both partly as a college professor at a Christian college, in my work at Discovery now in the science and faith field, and as a sort of local church leader and elder, what I've increasingly recognized is that it's many Christian leaders at all levels who are at least equally responsible for this. And if we had better Christian leaders at all levels, that our culture probably wouldn't be in quite the same mess as it is.

And so that we can rail against the secularists all we like, and that's appropriate to criticize their ideas. But if we really want to have reform things, we actually need to look internally to our own churches and own leadership to make sure that they are really following, I would say, what the Bible says, what the Christian tradition says, and really emulating that in their lives and in their policies. Because if we don't, things are going to go worse.

Let me just say that, like at the Christian college that I was at, Seattle Pacific University, it sort of now, I'd say, is not really quite a Christian university, although they're struggling to sort of get things back. But when I reflect on what happened, as I tell in the book, my biggest concern over that really was not the liberals on campus, because they were doing theologically what they thought they should do. It was the board members and other leaders who personally were theologically orthodox, but who enabled, turned a blind eye and ended up authorizing and enabling.

And I think if we look at a lot of things in society, I mean, let's think about the imposition of same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court, you know, making up a constitutional right that doesn't exist. Well, who decided that? The deciding vote was an observant Catholic Christian, Anthony Kennedy, who was described as a goody-goody who apparently attended Mass each week. And so that was the deciding vote that imposed gay marriage against the constitutional requirements on the United States.

And so it wasn't a big-bag atheist. It wasn't even a Democrat for the people who rail against Democrats. It was a Republican believer in God-committed Catholic Christian.

And you can go right down the line, and I talk about a lot of cases in the book. Now, so I think that's really what I'm trying to get people to realize, but I think we might also want to talk about what Stockholm Syndrome Christianity actually is. But the big point is that Christians need to look to their own leaders and their own churches and their own families and get a better quality of leadership if we want things to change in society.

Yeah, that's a great answer. So I do think it's important for you to define Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, especially if you have a good illustration, because that's really going to stick in the minds of our listeners and they're going to go, oh, I see what's going on here when they encounter it. So would you be able to do that? Yeah, so let's talk about that.

So Stockholm Syndrome goes back to, just really briefly, this bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in the 1970s, where something strange happened, where the hostages, by the end of it, some of them seemed to identify more with the hostage takers than they did with the police or others. Now, a lot of controversy over that. In fact, already online, there are some people who really hate the Stockholm Syndrome idea and were sort of reaming on me.

But I'm not really wanting to get into that debate. I'm not claiming it's a valid psychiatric diagnosis, but it is a cultural shorthand, really, for when people who are victims, in a way, are identifying more with their victimizers than the other people around them. And I think that really stuck with me when I started to think of the people who I knew as college professors, my colleagues, or other people I've encountered in my life and career, who are dedicated Christians, but who increasingly seem to morph into the rest of the culture.

And I think it's easy to just say, well, they're sell-outs, or they're doing it because of fear, or they're doing it to get ahead. And I think there is some of that, and I do write about that in the book. But a lot of these people, I found, are very sincere.

They think what they're doing is right. And so I was sort of thinking, well, why is that? And I thought that the Stockholm Syndrome was an interesting way of understanding that at home. So if you are a Christian who is going into a culture-forming career in politics, in public policy, in medicine, in entertainment, in journalism, even a pastor, you end up spending a lot of time in graduate school and then with secular peers who are really hostile, fundamentally, to the beliefs of traditional Christianity.

And after you spend years studying with these people and then being influenced by them as your peers at work and everything else, I think it ends up rubbing off, in that you have many Christians, especially among the elites, who have spent their lifetimes, what I would say, being held hostage by all these sort of anti-Christian views around them, that they end up identifying with those anti-Christian elites far more than they do with their fellow believers. And I certainly experience this at Seattle Pacific University, where many of my colleagues had a very condescending attitude toward the people and the pews, because they weren't as smart or as sophisticated as they were. And it was usually on issues like biblical authority.

They think that the Bible is really historically true, or they think that what the Yocles believe about abortion is true. In other words, it was very demeaning. And again, well, actually in the area of science and things like evolution, in the biology department, their peers were trying to get— that they were looking to were faculty at this University of Washington across town, not their fellow Christians.

And so that was their peer group. Those were the people they looked to for sustenance and approval. And so, you know, there are various ways to describe this, but I think Stockholm Syndrome Christianity gets at it in a way that suggests it's not just about craving approval.

It's not just about fear. It's that when you're in that environment for so long, you ended up adopting the views of the people who are actually fundamentally hostile to what you say you identify with. Right, exactly.

Yeah, you talk in the book about some of the specific causes of adopting this type of thinking, and then you go ahead and talk about several excellent, excellent solutions after that. Would you be willing to maybe give a few more specifics about how Christians are influenced by non-Christian ideas that kind of dominate the culture, even though they may—you mentioned spending lots and lots of time with people in graduate school, but I think it could be helpful to think through some of the ways— I mean, of course, the ideas of the secular left or of the culture, they're not contagious like the flu is. So what are Christians doing or not doing that causes them to kind of adopt these perspectives just from spending time with people? Yeah, a great, great question.

I think that the really number one thing period is that—I have a chapter on this—that we listen to the wrong voices. And many Christians get their information about the world, about current events, about what's happening from the same sources as secularists. And, you know, whether it be traditional media, search engines, social media, entertainment, experts like scientists and college professors.

If you get garbage in, garbage out, if you're listening to the same people that the secularists are listening to, and that's where you're getting your information about the world. And I understand, well, you read the Bible, and so that you believe that, but when you're trying to apply the insights of the Bible, and if what you're looking at and getting information about what the impact of, say, certain sexual behaviors are or what the impact of family breakdown is or how you view that or how you view, you know, the ID evolution debate, and you're getting those from the same bad sources, that is going to influence you. At the very least, there's going to be a disconnect.

Say you're learning one thing from your faith, and then you're studying the real world, and you think there's this big disconnect. I mean, if you listen to sources that tell you that it's impossible to, say, change your sexual behavior to be consistent with the Bible, well, that's going to pull at you. I mean, you may say that you believe the Bible, but when you learn about the real world and you think that it says something different, something's going to give.

And so I can't tell you the number of people that I've known, including pastors, including just fellow Christians in the pews, or college professors who are imbibing the same media and other sources thinking that they're somehow neutral and whose then worldview really gets fundamentally reshaped. I mean, I remember one person who, you know, oh, they read the Atlantic, or they read this thinking that it was a thoughtful thing and not realizing just what garbage they're getting. And so what I try to do in my chapter on listening to the wrong voices is go through each of these sort of voices that many Christians listen to or allow their kids to listen to and show how you're being manipulated.

And why you shouldn't just trust it. I mean, let's take scientists. Scientists, I think we have this idea, and I think science is great, but scientists as a class in America are not this neutral class of people in the white lab coat that just are objective and impartial on everything.

And we know this because we have overwhelming surveys that most scientists, especially at the elites, don't believe in God or certainly not the biblical God, are left-wing on political topics, left-wing on social-cultural issues. And so, you know, when they approach things, you can't just assume that what they're saying is an impartial read on reality. I mean, it's the same things with the people who go, I mean, when I was teaching in college, even then something like Wikipedia was a big thing and people thinking they're getting this objective information about the world.

Well, as I spent a lot of time quoting Larry Sanger who co-founded Wikipedia, who just basically is one of its biggest critics now because especially when you get to culturally consequential things, including the veracity of the Bible, the articles in Wikipedia are anything but unbiased or impartial. And so, if you're going to these places, so I think, you know, this actually points to a solution, which I do recommend, and actually in the, even if people don't buy the book, they can go to the website of the book and get some of these sources, is that the good news is, in this information rich environment we are now that's sort of almost information overload, there are lots of great alternatives to get better information. But if, especially if parents, if you don't want to wake up one morning when your kids are teens or even pre-teens and you don't recognize them anymore, you have to start getting them and yourself reading and imbibing, watching, you know, sources of information about the world where you're going to get a more accurate assessment.

Because if you go with the standard suspects, you are inviting, creating for your church, for your family, for your school, Stockholm Syndrome Christians. Absolutely, yeah. That's something we talk about a lot.

We have to be proactive. One of my favorite passages from the Scriptures is Romans 12 too, that don't be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And the, you know, being transformed and even being conformed are kind of passive verbs there.

But the renewing of your mind is something that we can actively do. What we put into our minds is so critical. And of course we can't pass on to others what we don't have ourselves.

So it's so critical for our kids, for our family, for anybody in our circle of influence to be putting truth into our minds. And you give several other causes and solutions. I love how practical this book is.

But people can look more at that. I want to ask you another question. In the book you talk about how Christian pastors like, for example, Andy Stanley and Tim Keller use their platforms to introduce non-Christian ideas to Christians.

So could you maybe give a summary of that? Sure. So Andy Stanley is a Baptist pastor, a megachurch pastor out of Georgia. And he's really one of the most influential, you know, Protestant evangelical pastors.

I know when I was an elder at a Presbyterian church we actually were assigned to read his things. So it's not just, you know, he doesn't just teach to Baptists and if you go to his website he talks about he's going to tell you how to be a Christian leader. And so that's sort of his shtick.

Where to begin with him? Let me begin with something that did get a little notoriety at the time but I think has been passed over. He wrote a book in 2018 called Irresistible where he basically blames everything that Christians have done that are bad on their beliefs in the Old Testament, which he actually calls the Obsolete Testament. He even suggests that anti-Semitism is the result of believing in the Old Testament.

Imagine that. The Jewish Scriptures, he's basically saying that the Jews provoked their own persecution. He doesn't quite say that but that's the logic there.

This has been incredibly destructive and I'm not going to name out names, but if you go read that book, go look at the endorsements. There are some shocking people who endorse the book, who are otherwise identified as conservative Christians, theologically conservative. Maybe they didn't even read the book.

It's a heretical book. It's a destructive book. And yes, he bobs and weaves, but at one point he actually says we should move the Old Testament to the back of the Bible.

So we should reorder the Bible and stop and move Matthew out. He doesn't like the idea that I guess Christianity was rooted in Judaism or with the Jews. It's a really strange book in that.

But it's also just the whole approach. And the thing is, yes, there's a kernel of things. As Christians, we have a different understanding of how things were fulfilled.

But there's a way of doing that. Whether you're Protestant or Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, Christians have always understood that obviously the ceremonial law doesn't apply to us anymore, the sacrificial law, that was fulfilled in Christ. So insofar as he says things like that, that's not new.

What was new and destructive was the way he speaks very dismissively about the Old Testament. It was really the font of all of our evils and we shouldn't really be paying attention to it. And certainly Jesus and his apostles and disciples treated the Old Testament as still authoritative.

Yes, we may understand things a different way. But that whole approach, sort of almost a shock jock approach of saying these outrageous things against the Bible, I think, is destructive. But also, I will share here, I was not going to share this, but this book is not being published by a Christian publisher.

That's not because there weren't some that were interested. But one conservative Christian publisher or known as that was nixed. They were interested in it.

They nixed this book because I criticized Andy Stanley. So one of the biggest problems here that I'm also trying to address is this conspiracy of silence. Now, unfortunately, online it's not so, but among the big players of the big Christian publishers, the big Christian media outfits, there are efforts to protect their own and to not allow open discussion of this.

So Andy Stanley has gone on from his attacks on the Bible to be really waffling on LGBTQ issues, and publicly he hasn't quite yet denied, you know, redefined marriage. Although privately, as I go into the book, he's had meetings with pastors where he basically has. But publicly what he does is basically criticize, criticize, criticize anyone who really upholds a strong view of marriage and upholds the devoutness of LGBTQ Christians.

But he actually also, I don't want to just focus on him, but he's a great case because you have to ask, it's not just Andy Stanley. He has elders who he's supposed to be responsible to his church. Are they all as heterodox as he is? I doubt it.

But then why are they giving him a pass? Frankly, he should be fired in my view. I mean, if you're a biblical Christian, he's out, you know, out to lunch on that. But he has a leadership structure who are ignoring it.

And so I would say, you know, if you're at a church, if you're going to a church like, if you're a genuine evangelical Christian and you're going to a church like Andy Stanley's church, just because of social things or because of historically it was good or because in this case Andy Stanley was the son of another famous pastor. You're part of the problem. You know, Andy Stanley is who he is.

He's doing one thing, but you're enabling it by your contributions. And if you are in the leadership structure and turning a blind eye, you're enabling it. You're worse, in a way, in my view, than Andy Stanley is.

Andy Stanley presumably believes what he's saying. I think he's wrong. And I also think he's quite arrogant.

I mean, this is the other thing. Often people talk about winsomeness. Andy Stanley is not at all winsome to the people he disagrees with.

Right. He criticizes other Christians, but let's just, he's not. Read his book Irresistible.

It reeks of arrogance. And arrogance against people who believe in the Bible. Right.

Exactly. Exactly. The book is like filled with examples of pastors pushing things like theistic evolution and concern with systemic racism, promotion of LGBT, which I think the public is really turning against at least transgenderism right now.

So it's like totally tone deaf. And then, of course, the COVID restrictions that caused even, you know, church closings and stuff like that. But I wanted to go on to another question here.

So the kinds of people that we have on our show and we consider to be excellent, you know, Christians, are people like Guillermo Gonzalez, who have really dedicated their careers to pursuing truth, you know, in the sciences, and then they've been willing to take, you know, hits for it whenever they're going for jobs. But what I found by reading Stockholm Syndrome Christianity is that a lot of our pastors and leaders of Christian organizations, they don't promote Christians who are kind of walking the walk in terms of being truth-focused and then suffering for it. They're promoting people like Francis Collins.

So I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about examples of that and what we should be looking out for. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. And I think it is probably there are different answers or different pastors.

So Francis Collins, of course, he was the head of the National Institutes of Health, probably the most powerful scientist in the United States for more than a decade. Now he's retired from that. And sort of a rock star among evangelicals for his, he does have an undeniably powerful testimony of when he didn't believe in God and he read C.S. Lewis and went out in nature and he found Christ.

And I don't want to take away from that and I certainly can't judge the state of his heart. Having said that, he's a pretty poor example of integrating faith and Christianity. And we can get into that in a moment.

But the question you raised is, well, why are so many Christians, you know, pastors promoting him? So I think there is one class, and I actually saw this at a conference, of a pastor of a megachurch who was citing him as an example. And that pastor was actually pretty theologically conservative and he was upholding his... Francis Collins is this great, you know, who could show how you can be such an outstanding scientist and a devout Christian. It was clear to me that that pastor hadn't read, hadn't read anything by Francis Collins.

He just was enamored, but he saw that, you know, he was on the cover of Time magazine. He was toasted. And so he was just using a quick, you know, illustration from someone he didn't know.

Because if he did know, that particular pastor wouldn't have cited him. So I do think there are some who are just, who are very careless and slipshod, looking for cultural examples and taking their cues from the wrong people. But then there are people who do know.

And Tim Keller is one of those. So Tim Keller, the late Tim Keller, was probably one of the most beloved, more theologically conservative, historically Presbyterian pastors. And I talk a lot about him in my book.

And like Andy Stanley, Tim Keller's influence goes way beyond, you know, Presbyterian circles. And, you know, he did a lot of good things. My wife and I once, you know, had occasion to go to his church, Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City.

It was sort of inspiring to be there in the midst of Manhattan with thousands of people worshipping Christ. But, you know, let me get to Tim Keller. He was not ever publicly heterodox in the way that, say, Andy Stanley is.

But let's talk about theistic Darwinism, this effort to baptize unguided Darwinian evolution. Keller himself was part of his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, that actually has a statement against what I would call theistic Darwinism. But he then joined forces with Francis Collins to help promote these private meetings to bring evangelical theologians and pastors together with people like Collins to, I would say, bamboozle them with theistic Darwinism.

Well, why would you do that? I mean, and, you know, when pressed, I think, you know, Tim Keller privately would tell people, I mean, I've heard this from someone who talked to him, I believe the story is true, that, well, you know, Francis was my friend and so I felt I needed to do that. Well, as I reveal in my book, that wasn't quite true, because when Tim Keller was asked to do something similar to bring together theologians with scientists, like of the caliber of, you know, Michael Behe or Guillermo Gazzal or Stephen Meyer, he declined to do that. Right.

And so in his case, he clearly knew what he was doing and he said at some level that he disagreed with it, yet he was facilitating. And why was that? Well, I think he was, from what we know, he was really enamored with the powers that be. And I have to think that he, and so that had more of a pull.

Now, he explained it as being relevant, you know, and trying to reach out and being winsome. But it wasn't very winsome to the people they were criticizing, say, the scientists who had a different view. It wasn't very really, it wasn't really engaging in dialogue or treating people who disagreed with respect.

And it really was adopting the point of view of these Stockholm Syndrome Christianity where you're really being overly influenced by the secular culture. And I think Tim Keller sadly was an example of that. And I will say, someone else, a long time, someone who I know who wouldn't endorse this book largely because I was critical of Tim Keller.

And so again, there's a concerted effort. There are people that you're not allowed to criticize. Now, there is criticism, but I'm just saying among the evangelical elites, among the establishment figures, you're not supposed to say boo about some of these people.

But so let me just say one more thing. So someone like Keller was enabling Collins. Well, why was that bad? Again, Collins was a terrible example, is a terrible example of faith science integration from a Christian.

And it's not just on his promotion of theistic Darwinism. When he was the head of the NIH, he funded millions of dollars to go towards fetal harvesting tissue banks that harvested baby parts from aborted babies as old as 42 weeks. 42 weeks is you could be born.

I mean, these are babies that would live outside the womb. And so Francis Collins spent millions to create a fetal tissue research bank harvesting baby parts for research. And he must have known in his heart that something was wrong because when people tried to get the documents on it, again, this is taxpayer funded materials.

Taxpayers have the right to know what our government was doing. They refused to divulge it. And so they had to go to court.

I write about this and sue before. And the only reason why we know that what I just told you is true is because a lawsuit was filed and they were able to get the documents. But Francis Collins tried to hide it on multiple levels, even if he sincerely thinks that harvesting 40 week babies and they're using their body parts for research is a good thing, hiding it and trying to hide it from the public certainly can't be defended on any grounds.

And then that's not all. There were also research of these, creating these humanized rodents where they actually, I mean, this is gruesome to talk about, but you sort of have to. And again, this is not speculation.

It's documented, it's irrefutable where they scalped, you know, aborted babies and took their scalps to graft onto mice for some really gruesome research. And so, and then on the LGBTQIA, Francis Collins declared him and his words an ally and an advocate of that movement and issued directives internally that basically put pressure on a fewer and employing, including a Christian employee of the NIH, you were expected to get with it on that. And so, and under his watch, they funded puberty blocker research and transgender surgeries on young people.

And you're exactly right to note that there has been a revulsion against that and we're going back to sanity. No thanks to Francis Collins or his enablers. Exactly.

No thanks to them. It's thanks to the people that they helped demonize. Right.

And if Tim Keller really were a biblical friend to Francis Collins, the appropriate thing to do would have been to go and confront him on those things, not to promote him and refuse to allow a voice to anybody who dissented. I mean, that is one of the things that stood out to me over and over and over was these leaders who silence anybody who disagrees with them. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great point. And they don't because they want the friendship. They wanted to rub shoulders with someone who was toasted by the secular culture.

And again, we need to ask, I write about this in the book, why did Francis Collins get to the top of the food chain? And it's really interesting because the secular media and other people will tell you how glad they were. They even said, we were afraid because he was Christian but we shouldn't have been because if he can defang the pro-life movement and these other things, that's great. I mean, he was praised for that.

I mean, if I were him, I'd be horrified. Exactly. But that should lead you to sackcloth and ashes to be praised for that by these people.

But yeah, it's really kind of sad, actually. But you're right. Now, I didn't write about it in my book because it wasn't my story to tell, but I'll just say there was one really prominent Christian leader who did try to witness the truth to Francis Collins.

And in a book later this year by a discovery institute colleague, that story may well come out. But you're right, most of them, many of the usual suspects were like Tim Keller, sadly. So how should we confront or challenge or respond to Stockholm Syndrome Christians about the harm that's being caused by these false ideologies, these bad policies? Like, for example, children who are harmed by the policies that were brought on by the sexual revolution or the policies that have harmed children when it comes to trying to transition them to make their bodies align with their mental malady, for example.

Or the implications of Darwinism, right? No free will, no morality, no life after death. Right. This is causing a lot of trouble for us.

Yeah. So I will say, without getting into this, is that if people are interested in what they can do, I have chapters, one chapter that gives over 20 concrete things they can do, whether they're a parent, a church elder, or even a young person. And so I do, you did note this earlier, and I do want to say, part of my book is an expose, but that really, for me, the central part was, what do we do about it? What are the roots? And how could, because, you know, that's where the rubber meets the road, and that's where I think that this, I hope, my book fills a sort of unique place.

But on the broader question, I think part of it is an attitude change. You need to, don't be embarrassed by traditional Christian teaching, and don't concede the assumptions of the Stockholm Syndrome Christians. You know, Stockholm Syndrome Christians want you to believe that it's unloving to uphold biblical standards, or that somehow, you know, go along with reality, because reality is much more complex, so we can't really believe what the Bible says.

But really, don't give into that assumption. Don't be defensive on it. The truly unloving thing is to sacrifice your kids or loved ones to behaviors or ideologies that are going to destroy them.

Real mercy means being willing to be embarrassed for the sake of saving others. So I think the number one thing is an attitude adjustment that you don't have to buy into. You know, people say, oh, well, that's unloving.

And let me, I make this clear, I'm not about being unloving. And there are some fringes among conservative evangelicals that I think are very unhelpful and destructive, and they've been consumed by anger and bitterness. So I'm not talking about that.

That's not, I mean, if that's your thing, you need an attitude adjustment yourself. But in the environment that I've grown up, certainly in the Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest where I spent most of my life other than grad school, which is in Southern California, that's not the biggest problem, I see. It's people feeling embarrassed and being told that they should be really embarrassed by their traditional Christian convictions.

And so stop being embarrassed and realizing don't concede that you're being unloving by lovingly telling the truth or trying to train and give people the truth because the truth will set them free. I mean, it's not these compromises with the world. Exactly.

And you know, a lot of the people I have talked to about this and said, hey, listen, you know, I've noticed you're not, you're not speaking the whole truth. You're avoiding the difficult questions. You're emphasizing the things that everybody, literally everybody agrees on.

What's going on here? And they will sometimes respond with, well, you are erecting barriers to people liking Jesus because of, you know, bringing up anything besides just the gospel itself, just the very basic, like not even the full gospel, but just Jesus loves you. Yeah, that's a great point. And I just want to say that that is, you know, again, with most every untruth, in fact, with every untruth, there's a kernel of truth.

So of course, we don't want to place obstacles for people coming to the gospel. But I think you need to ask, well, what is the obstacle? If you're, we should not be pretending to be God's press agent. If it's something that God said.

Exactly. We don't need to tell them, oh no, you know, like probably some of Trump's advice, oh no, don't say that. God knows what he's saying, and we should defer to him.

And so, so it's one thing if our own sins or going beyond, you know, well beyond what the Bible actually says or Christian tradition says, if we're posing obstacles and through our hypocrisy and other things, yes, obviously, we should be concerned about that. But if what you're calling an obstacle to the gospel is basically, well, God said these things and is traditional Christian teaching, but that's going to turn off some people. And so we need to save God from himself.

God doesn't realize that he's turning people off. And that is, I have to without, I don't want to be critical of a church that I was involved in in leadership for like 18 years, which I intentionally don't name because I think people are very sincere. I still love the people there and have good relationships.

But I write in the book how too often the concern that you're talking about really wasn't about us being, you know, biblically loving and things. It was that, like we were God's press agent, that we had to convince people that God wasn't as mean and nasty as people think he is because of what the Bible says, which of course, I think it's a caricature of what the Bible says. But that was the idea.

And so I think we do need to get away from that. And that really is arrogant and hubris on our part. It's often sold as humility.

But if you're actually saying that God needs us, that we have to water down or massage things to make them more acceptable to the secular culture and we know better than God, that's arrogant. That's humorous. Exactly.

That's prideful. Yeah. And I've done a lot of ministry to Muslims.

And one of the things that I've noticed is that what a lot of, I guess, Stockholm Syndrome Christians would say are erecting barriers. Muslims are actually turned off by the acceptance of at least the Muslims I've largely ministered to all over the world are turned off by Christians not speaking out against abortion and not speaking out against homosexual marriage and not speaking out against trying to trans the kids by mutilating their bodies and things like that. So a lot of these things that we may think, oh, we're going to make Christianity more palatable for people by not saying anything about controversial issues.

There are also other groups of people who are looking at that, going, why don't the Christians say anything about that? They must be okay with it. That's interesting. So I think, like you make clear throughout the book, we need to be dedicated to speaking the truth and leaving the results to God, actually, because if we're trying to manipulate everything so that we can make the gospel more palatable, make God look better to people, a lot of times we're actually having the opposite impact.

That is so, so profound. And let me just add, if I can, something on that, which is, I think there are a lot of sincere Christian pastors and leaders who have that idea, and they are personally orthodox, and they don't realize that, and so they think, that by watering things down and not talking about the hard topics that are talked about in the Bible, because they don't want to offend a certain class of people, that they are responsible, in large part, for alienating other people. Right.

And so right now, among in the conservative Christian sphere, there is a group of people that I would consider actual hardcore racists and things, and they were, you know, they've always been around there, sort of going back to the American South of, you know, and the Ku Klux Klan, other groups that actually wrapped themselves around Christianity, which was nothing but, but it's always been a fringe and certainly during my lifetime, but in the last two or three years, there are these very hard edge that I almost, I compare them for people who like C.S. Lewis, you know that in the last battle, in one of the Narnian Chronicles, he had a group of black dwarves. They weren't black. I mean, that's what they were called, rather than red dwarves, I guess maybe their hair or something.

And they, on the one hand, they agreed in throwing off the yoke of the oppressor, but it basically turned out by the end that they were so into, they basically were nihilists. It was all, you know, the dwarves were the dwarves and everything else was wrong. And Lewis, in his own lifetime, was a very interesting character because he was one of the few major Christian intellectuals in England and other places that basically rejected both Nazism and communism.

There tended to be a lot of people who were anti-communists, who were coddled the Nazis or the fascists and vice versa. And Lewis was really particular because he basically said, no, those are both wrong. And I'd say that today, although the woke are wrong, there is this disturbing core, if you go certainly on Twitter and elsewhere, of people who are just out now.

They elevate Hitler. They demonize the Jews. They basically talk about the offals of crossbreeding.

They actually use evolutionary arguments, even though they claim to be Christians to promote evolutionary racism. But some of the people attracted to those people, they have to be responsible for their own ideas. But some of them, I think, are because there was such a vacuum of leadership that you have people who really wanted to believe something was true and see people standing up.

And when they went to their churches, they saw just Pablum. And so it opened them up to hearing these bad actors. And so I am concerned about these bad actors.

The problem is that I think many of the Stockholm Syndrome pastors ended up helping create it because of vacuum. They were so concerned about being perceived as unloving, they didn't exercise any leadership. And so they turned off a whole class of largely male.

Yes, exactly. And many of, again, there are some bad actors who you're not going to redeem. It's their own fault.

But there's a lot of people who are being influenced by these people. But again, that's because there's a leadership vacuum of orthodox, biblical people with backbone who are also grace-filled and loving. It's a difficult combination.

But they helped create it. I'd say that people like the Tim Keller's of the world and Andy Stanley have helped create that vacuum. Yeah, definitely.

Okay, I have a perfect question that leads into all the things that we've been discussing. But I have to say one quick thing. So I would say one of the reasons why Christians today are so concerned about things like tone and winsomeness is because they're not understanding that what the Bible is offering to people is a set of accurate statements about reality and including our own situation.

And so they're thinking, this is talking about spiritual things as a way to get you to like me. But it's not. And when you go to your car mechanic, you don't go to the car mechanic and he says, I'm afraid you're going to have to fix this and fix this.

You don't go, well, I don't like the tone of how you said that. It's not very winsome because you recognize that that person, your stockbroker, your car mechanic, these are problem solvers. They're educated and they're paid to know.

So I think if Christians believe themselves to be that in the sense of being stewards of the mysteries of God, then they wouldn't have this desperate desire to be liked. But the example I want to give you of this is me. So people who know me in person know that I'm a colored person.

I grew up pretty poor, and then I immigrated to the USA legally on my own by employer sponsor. And when I got here, I found out that a lot of people were looking at people like me and they were saying, your problems are you're having run-ins with the police. Your problems are that there's an unfair distribution of wealth.

And meanwhile, I'm reading people like Thomas Sowell and understanding that the Bible is correct on things like private property and hard work. So basically, you know, what I wanted to ask you is, on this issue of race, it seems like the Stockholm Syndrome Christians are listening to race activists and saying the problems that they're bringing up, those are the real problems. You know, the problems of the police, you know, white police officers shooting unarmed, you know, blacks.

This is a huge problem, they're saying. And it's a huge problem that you have less money because it's not your faults that you have less money. It's out of your control.

So you have something about this, you know, in the book. And I was just wondering, what, you know, what does the Bible have to offer on this topic and especially in terms of evidence, you know, that we can bring to bear on this question to address it? Yeah, this is a really big issue. This is, for me personally, probably the most challenging chapter to write because it is so fraught with various things.

Let me just say two quick things before getting into the meat of my answer. I definitely think how we should not respond to some of these questions involving race and class is by, you know, buying into racist views. And again, we talked about that there are these some people on the fringe who are among evangelical Christians, some males in particular, who are almost a mirror image of the left-wing race activists in that they accept that everything goes to race and ethnicity and that that divides all of us.

But they actually say that's a good thing and that that's why whites should be supreme. So we definitely don't. I think that really needs to be called out.

Also, I do find there are a lot of conservative whites, and I would count myself among them, who don't know the real wrongs of the past that took place in the United States, especially in the South, but also in the North. And I think they do, you know, they do need to understand because history does have an impact. Now, having said that, I think the biggest problem is so this is one of a number of reasons why I left my wife and I left a church that we've been involved in leadership for, you know, like 18 years.

And this was in 2020. And obviously lots of things were happening in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter. And we were predominantly white church, but boy, then, and most of whom, the people really didn't think anything about race relations.

But when this came, it was, you know, they set up a racial justice task force, not against that, but who did they go to seek advice from? That's the thing is, whether it be Jerome Tisby or Ibram Kendi or, you know, the white Robin D'Angelo, who is white, the white fragility, I mean, the sorts of people that they were looking to for advice were the people that the secularists were dictating as, these are the authoritative voices for minorities in this country. Well, I knew enough by then, partly because of my work on this documentary on scientific racism, human zoos, and other things that, and a wide circle of friends, including some from Africa, but also black Americans here, like my friends Eric and Jennifer Wallace in Chicago that have a nonprofit, that there are a lot of other voices, a lot of voices among theologically orthodox Christians. And so I think the number one thing, if you end up being in a church where they're gravitating toward that and they're only pointing towards these certain people who are the voices for, say, blacks in America, you really don't accept that.

You need to say, well, why aren't we, you know, reading, well, Thomas Sowell for one, or John McWhorter at Columbia, or, but yes, I'm on Christians. So, Vody Baucom, Carol Swain. Yes, she's a treasure.

So there are lots of these voices now, and so you need to force them because they'll say, well, we need to listen to minorities, but what they really mean is, no, we need to listen to certain hand-picked, not only minorities or white people like Robin D'Angelo, she's not a minority, but that spout a certain line. And you call that bluff. It then becomes a lot harder to, once you force them to include these other voices that are out there, that have grown, I mean, over the last decade, you know, they have grown, there are all sorts of really authentic voices that have a lot to say that just force them to open the conversation.

Now, the other thing I found out, and part of this was through my own interactions in the African-American community, but then I started to look at survey results. Turns out, I mean, if you look at the surveys, most blacks in America don't want to defund the police. Most, the majority, have themselves have good interactions with their local police.

And most don't even support some of the controversial affirmative action programs in going to colleges and things. Now, there's significant minorities that do, but I guess what I'm saying is that the people who are held up as the authoritative spokespeople don't even match what we know from survey research that they can't really even claim on many of these things to speak for it. But number one thing, don't allow your white, liberal, progressive, even though they call themselves Evangelicals, to censor the black and Hispanic and Asian voices that are out there that just don't fit the project.

I'll give one other example of the church that I was at. Many people may remember there was this Blackout Tuesday thing where people were going to stand up against racism and it was to help promote Black Lives Matter and other things. It was tragic.

The Blackout Tuesday day was the day that David Dorn was actually murdered, African-American policemen in some of the riots. But at our church, someone posted, so we posted, our church staff posted something in honor of that day. It was a Bible verse.

It wasn't inherently offensive, but then one church member posted a meme from an African-American Christian about valuing Black Lives Babies from abortion. Except the white church staff removed it. They were offended.

I was no longer serving as an elder, but I had been an elder, so I pushed back but didn't get anywhere. I write about this in the book. It was, again, in the name of promoting racial justice and hearing racial voices, they actually censored a meme from an African-American Christian who, anyway, it's just that happened with Carol Swain, I think at the at the Southern Baptist.

They had whites, so whites who wanted to defend critical race theory, but the most distinguished Black women, she had been at Vanderbilt University a political science professor, that's my old profession. I mean, she was really distinguished, and she wasn't allowed to say anything because she didn't fit. Exactly.

I would say the Bible has a lot to say to people who are experiencing problems because they think it's because of race in terms of things like chastity and valuing education and stewarding your money properly, working with your hands, and focusing on being charitable to other people. There's a lot that the Bible has to offer that would be beneficial to minorities, and we shouldn't be ashamed of offering those ideas to people who are complaining about these things. You're exactly right on that, especially when it comes to poverty, and I do have a section on that, is that people are intimidated to saying, oh, well, you know, that you're blaming the victim and saying, no, you're not.

We know. I mean, it's categorically known that family breakdown or, you know, is one of, the United States at least, is one of the biggest predictions of long-term intergenerational poverty. So if you want to actually reduce poverty, whether it's black, white, Asian, I mean, this is across all races, we know the factors that lead to it, and you've mentioned some of those, and yet the Christian's inability to articulate, let me just give you an example, Tim Keller again, he wrote a book about generous giving, or can't remember the title of it now, but it was on the poverty issue, Generous Justice.

And through the entire book that deals with poverty, the biblical exegesis wasn't bad, but when it got to public policy, it was basically, well, if you're, I'm caricaturing it in a way, but it really was the argument, that if you're a conservative, you just believe that put people in the gutter, but if you're a liberal you understand, you understand that there are these structural evils. And again, I do think institutions can embed various things, but he was really giving a neo-Marxian analysis. But the really interesting thing is, through that whole book, there's basically virtually nothing about the most serious cause of long-term intergenerational poverty in the United States, and that's lack of intact family structures.

And we're led to, well, it's racist to talk about that. It's actually racist to say that because we know that it is true, that unfortunately among, this isn't so true among black immigrants, but among blacks grown up and born in America, you know, going back historically, that they have a real problem with intact family structures. But just going out of, even during segregation, black families were a lot more intact.

So that, there's nothing inevitable about that. There's nothing inevitable, and in fact, the rise of illegitimacy and these other things have skyrocketed among whites and among Hispanics. And so, this is another thing, is framing these problems not to pit races against each other.

But these are human problems, regardless of race. And the data show that. And just because, and I think it's a tragedy that we have allowed and use the I think the fake view that it's racist to talk about this.

It's actually so cruel because there's nothing racist about pointing out that we need to try to build intact families. And in fact, the fact that right now, black Americans are the hardest hit with the lack of intact family structure is a tragedy. It has nothing to do with their race.

It's a tragedy, and you're actually you're demeaning them by implying that somehow the liberals are actually implying that, well, this is all, blacks can't have intact family structures, which is ludicrous. And they're the ones who are being racist by saying that. But you're also, you're dooming them.

So this is where actually it all ties together. I have a chapter on sexuality. The same people who aren't willing to talk about biblical standards of chastity or other things, oh, that's too hard-nosed, is they don't recognize it.

Well, that plays into these social distinctions like poverty. And so you're being doubly cruel. Groups that take that seriously chastity and marriage are like Asians, West Indians, East Indians, I'm West Indian, and continental Africans, they come to America.

They take these things seriously and they do great. They have higher levels of income, household income than whites. So whatever the problem is, it cannot be the racism of whites, because it's not holding back these groups.

No, that's true. I give some of the stats that I dealt with myself on Nigerian blacks, head of households, and they outstrip, or at least equal if not outstrip, white heads of households. So it's not, this idea, it's a lie that this is tied to race or ethnicity.

Yeah, exactly. Well, I want to say we're just about out of time, but again, we have loved this book. We have identified with it so much, you know, every chapter, wintery night night, we'll send a message, hey, did you read this chapter yet? Oh, so good.

That reminds me of what I've experienced here and there. And he'll say, yes, same thing. Yeah.

And remember when we talked about this? Yeah, he's totally hitting on that. Anyway, it's very you identify some very serious problems. You offer the causes, you offer solutions, and it's inspiring.

It's made me want to get more involved with debate and see how I can host even, not only debate myself, but host debates and open the conversations and get different views to the table and let people be heard when at all possible. So we just really appreciate you and your work and the Discovery Institute. And we'd love for you to just tell people where they can find your work, how they can follow you, and your excellent colleagues as well.

Oh, yeah, great. Thank you. So the easiest way for my stuff would be johngwest.com and you can also follow me on Twitter, but if you go to my website, johngwest.com and then for all my discovery colleagues, discovery.org and thank you for all your wonderful comments.

I'm really gratified by that. This was a labor of love. It was also kind of tough revisiting some parts of my own life, but I hope it is helpful, and I'm trying to be constructive.

That was my goal here, and so I hope it is. I think that anybody who reads it with any sort of open mind will see that. I think you very clearly accomplished that goal.

So thank you very much. And the name of the book is Stockholm and I'll see you in the next one.