Navigating Cultural Storms: Restoring Values and Confronting Woke Ideology

Rick Green

This is the intersection of faith and the culture. It’s WallBuilders. We're taking on the hot topics of the day for me Biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. Thanks for coming along for the ride. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach and a former Texas legislator, With the honor of serving here with David Barton he's America's premier historian and our founder at WallBuilders and Tim Barton, national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders. You can learn more today at WallBuilders.com. That's WallBuilders.com, of course, coming from the scripture in Nehemiah that says Arise and Rebuild the Walls that we may no longer be able to reproach Today in the American culture.

We're entering those tough times, folks. It could get a whole lot worse and we can short-circuit the tough times, get back to the good times, if we return to the principles that gave us the good times in the first place. You've all seen the memes, you've heard the cycle tough times make for tough men, tough men make for good times, good times make for soft men or weak men, and then that makes for, of course, tough times. Well, we're in tough times, but not as bad as it certainly could be, and the way to turn it around is get back to the principles, Change the inputs so that we can get the good outputs. Once again, we've allowed the cultural marches to change the inputs into the bad stuff. How about we turn it around and start putting in the good stuff? That's what we mean when we say rebuilding the walls. The American culture is crumbling, but we're not going to curl up in the fetal position and give up. We're looking at all that rubble and we're going to pick up the pieces and rebuild the walls, just like they did in the MI. We're thankful that you're helping us. Do that. Be sure and be a force multiplier. Share the program. Make a donation there at WallBuilders.com. Easy to do. You can make it a one-time or monthly donation. That spreads the word and helps increase our voice and reach more people, which means we restore this thing faster. So we're glad you're a part of it.

Later in the program, Dr Everett Piper back with us. It's been a little while we used to have him on so much it felt like the Piper program, but it'll be good to get him back and catch up with Dr Piper. And of course, we're seeing more and more of the woke nonsense finally having some consequence on the woke people. And of course we saw that with the whole Google AI thing and the crazy stuff that came back when people typed in and wanted a picture of George Washington. He came back, let's just say, with darker skin than he actually had. And what were the other ones? There were some really crazy ones.

David Barton

Yeah, here's what they had. When you ask AI to give you certain images and you said, hey, show me, show me Vikings, you know, like, like, not the football Vikings, necessarily, but the historical Vikings that came from Europe. You had black Vikings. When you said, show me NHL players, they were female NHL players that asked for an Asian woman. She was dressed on a Nazi era German uniform.

I mean, all this stuff was absolutely crazy and it was so crazy that what happened? Google, their AI area. They lost 70 billion dollars in just one day as a result of all these false generated. You're trying to find truth and now you're getting all these images that clearly are not truth. They're all woke and they're made up and so it was a big, huge loss for Google. And it's kind of back to a lot of people up on AI that maybe this is not the, the panacea we thought it might be, that the help maybe this is politically Flexible if we should say, or, you know, can be taken over by somebody moved in the wrong direction. So there's a lot of concern out there now.

Tim Barton

Well, and there should be concern for lots of reasons if people have never seen Terminator or iRobot or Eagle eye, or shall I continue? I mean like as nobody watched any movies and you know that's a little tongue-in-cheek. But when you're looking at AI, when you're talking about a some kind of artificial intelligence, it is a programmed artificial intelligence. So it always comes back to who is doing the programming, what is their worldview, what is their belief system, what's their ideology, because that programming is going to be reflected when you, when you're teaching someone how to think and what to think, you are inserting your belief and what they should be thinking and how they should be thinking. And so we're seeing some of this wokeness and you know, Rick, when you were, when you're teasing the idea, we're having Evertt Piper coming on the program.

It's interesting that today, you know, last couple of years, there's been this huge growth and movement of Jordan Peterson and really Evert Piper Was kind of making those same statements before Jordan Peterson was, didn't have the same level platform, but it's the same idea, challenging the nonsense. Now, Jordan Peterson, also don't have the same level of biblical worldview that Evertt Piper does, but the, the, the rise we have seen from some of these really strong voices. They've been challenging the woke ism and if it wasn't for some of the major leaders of these organizations and corporations that are getting funding from this really ideological spectrum, the vast majority of Americans are not buying into this nonsense. And yet we are being inundated with nonsense as we are seeing people try to shape culture into the image of woke ism, and it it's. It's not being embraced by the American people, even though it's being shoved down our throats.

Rick Green

Well, we're gonna get some detail from dr Everett Piper. Stay with us, we'll be right back on the wall builder show.

Tim Barton

Hey guys, it's Tim Barton and I want to let you know about an opportunity coming up for pastors and ministry leaders. We are doing our annual pastors briefing in Washington DC and we do this every year. We do one in the spring, we do one in the fall. This spring it's April 16th and 17th. This fall it is September 10th and 11th. This is one of the most significant things we do to encourage and challenge pastors in this culture we live in.

It's in Washington DC and Tuesday night we do an after hours tour of the US Capitol where we introduce pastors and ministry leaders to the history of the nation. The following day we have congressmen come and and they give a briefing on what they're doing and how God is Challenging and motivating and using them. And, frankly, most pastors, most ministry leaders, they don't know the rich spiritual hairs of the nation or what God is still doing moving in the hearts and lives of Leaders in this nation. I would encourage you if you're a pastor, ministry leader, you need to come to this. It's one of the best things we do at wall builders to find out more. Go to wallbuilders.com and look for the pastors briefing.

Rick Green

Welcome back. Thanks for staying with us here on WallBuilders. Great to have Dr. Everett Piper back on. Been too long, Dr. Piper. God bless you, man. Thanks for coming back on the program. 

Dr. Everett Piper

Thanks for having me on. 

Rick Green

Well, we love getting to spend time with you and appreciate all that you're doing out there and just continuing to influence the culture in a positive way. Just bring truth and you you're like the truth bomb king, I mean other than David and Tim Barton. I think you drop more truth bombs than anybody I know and I love the way that you do it as well, so had to get you on. David said man, let's, let's find out what, what Dr. Piper thinks about just the Maybe, just the response that to the wokeness. You know you've been speaking out against it forever. But this whole Google thing and how quickly people you know we're fed up with this AI thing and it just seems like people are awake now and they're not falling for this stuff. Are you kind of getting that same sense?

Dr. Everett Piper

Well, I think some of the extreme consequences of the woke religion are starting to become evident today. I mean, you and I and Tim David, we've been warning of this stuff for a decade or more. In fact, I was warning of this when I wrote my dissertation at Michigan State University back in the 1990s, so I'm not surprised to see where this has gone, because it's inevitable. The subtitle to my book Not a Daycare is the devastating consequences of abandoning truth. When you abandon truth as the measuring rod, to quote CS Lewis, the measuring rod outside of those things being measured, Lewis told us you can do no measuring unless you have a measuring rod outside of those things being measured. In other words, you have to have a standard of truth to decide what's true and what's false. And that standard, that measurement, can't be yourself. But in a postmodern culture, we abandoned truth as the measuring rod of everything and we declared ourselves to be the ultimate standard that would be used to measure everything. When you abandon truth and you replace it with your personal emotions and your personal opinion feelings, then the facts don't matter anymore. Whether, George Washington was black or white doesn't matter anymore. Whether, the pope is male or female doesn't matter anymore. Whether a woman is real or just the fabrication of some dysphoric man Doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore other than what you as an individual decide. It's the original sin You've declared yourself to be as God. It's radical narcissism. You decide what's good or evil, you decide what's right or wrong, you decide what's bitter or sweet. And they prophesied they had. Tells us.

Whoa, into any culture, any person, any man, any woman who starts Calling things by their opposite, and the only way you get there is what happened at the Tower of Babel. The ivory tower has crumbled. Excuse me, the ivory tower has become the Tower of Babel. It essentially has crumbled. It makes no sense any longer and people are saying well, they're gonna correct it. AI is gonna go back and fix the mistakes that led to the a black George Washington and Elon Musk being equated with Hitler and the pedophilia not being objectively right or wrong. They're gonna correct those things. Well, correct them with what? We're gonna correct them? With the same young, 25, 30 year old person that's sitting in some back room feeding this data into AI and it's only gonna be as good or as bad as the data that's been inputted. And what garbage in, garbage out.

That’s where we are right now. It's not a surprise that it all goes back to abandoning truth as an objective standard of right and wrong, good and evil, and using ourselves, our opinions, our political ambitions and our quest for power to replace that standard.

Rick Green

Amen, amen. I would have thought that you know when you do that when there is no Iron, sharpening iron, there's no civil discourse, there's no. You know you make mistakes, you get something wrong, somebody corrects you, you get better and better. When there isn't any of that give and take to find truth and to be able to sharpen each other, and you and you are wrong and you and you live in ignorance and you say things that are ignorant. You get embarrassed at some point and say, okay, you know what, maybe I shouldn't have run off by myself and thought I was the end, all be all and have all the answers. 

But that just hasn't happened is like even as foolish as it's been. There's not yet that that correct is. You know the, the correction of the course. I think what you're saying is what they're saying they're gonna do to correct the course by still being truth. You know from themselves or there is no truth, it's not gonna correct the course, that they it's just gonna. We're just gonna keep getting more of the same nonsense.

Dr. Everett Piper

I there's no way to correct direction unless you believe there's a true north, and I said way back in my not in daycare commentary. I said what's taught today in the classroom is going to be practiced tomorrow in our culture. The chickens will come home to Roots. And when you're teaching a bunch of snowflakes back in 2015 or earlier to whine and complain every time they feel uncomfortable with the reality the George Washington was white, not black with the reality that pedophilia is objectively wrong there's no moral neutrality here, with the reality that biology matters when it comes to defining a man or a woman. And when these Snowflakes get all offended and cry and demand that they have their play dough and puppies while they're going to college back in 2015, you fast forward nearly 10 years and where are we?

Those people that were whining and playing and asking for their blankie back when they were at Berkeley in 2015 are now running these organizations and we're suffering the consequences the predictable consequences as the result that they're not going to correct anything, because they themselves are the only correction that they will recognize and they want George Washington to be remembered as a different race. They want to dumb down the definition of sex between adult and child. They want to dumb down the definition of what a male and a female is. They want to subjectively define everything, because there is no true north, there's no compass and there's no way to decide for them. In their hearts, minds and soul, there's no other direction than that they can go, other than toward their feelings. Facts don't matter.

Rick Green

You know, Dr, you know how I am. I'm always like, okay, then what's the solution? On my mind immediately goes there, and before I even ask you what it is, I got to tell you what the words that came back to me as you were saying that is. You know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, Rush Limbaugh saying you, sometimes you just have to defeat them. There's not a coming together and a meeting of the mind. Sometimes you just have to defeat them and win and take back that ground. And that's all I can think of. As you're saying. This is like they are so far out there, we have to defeat them. We're not going to there. There aren't many Naomi Wolfson, Bill Mars out there that will actually start coming to reason on the left and I don't know, do you agree with that or do you think there is more of a of a chance to woo them back to truth?

Dr. Everett Piper

I. There is no way you can compromise with somebody who believes a male is a female. Yeah, there's no compromise here. You have to defeat that idea. You have to crush that idea because it is a lie. There's no way you can compromise with somebody who thinks that adolescence, or even younger 10, 12 year old children should have the right to make sexual decisions for themselves, even if those decisions involve them getting involved, involved them engaging in an adult sexual world. I mean, that's where we are right now. You can't compromise with that. You have to defeat that idea. The only way you can defeat a lie is to shine the light of truth on it.

That's what people like Riley Gaines, for example, are being heard, because they're shining a light of truth on the lie of Transidentity, and that's why Rosaria Butterfield is being heard, because she's shining a light of truth on the subjective identity claims of sexual nihilism. We can't compromise with the lie, because if you compromise and debating with the lie, what do you have as the result? You have a niceer lie, but you don't have the truth.

Rick Green

Oh, that's good, so good. And that then makes me feel like, okay, is there, there's still enough of a base out there and a found, and maybe, that's just the laws of nature, nature, god written upon our hearts, but that when a Riley Gaines gets up and tells her story, people go, wow, okay, now I get it. I mean Joe Rogan, I mean all the rest, are you got to be kidding me? I didn't realize it was this bad. Does that mean that the ground is maybe more fertile than even you know, maybe a couple years ago? We're thinking, man, this just seems like they've just poisoned the well all over the place. I'm thinking that if a Riley Gaines is being heard right now and if we're gaining ground in those areas, that means, you know, we've still got enough people out there that will be persuaded by truth. What do you think about that?

Dr. Everett Piper

But I am an optimist too. I mean, when Joe Rogan comes out a couple weeks ago and his monologue says what we need is Jesus, I mean I was blown away. Now I'm not claiming that Joe Rogan made a born again confession at that point in time but he did acknowledge very explicitly that we need an objective standard of right and wrong.

He went into a paragraph or two of the saying why and then he concluded by saying what we need right now is Jesus, and I thought good for you. Bill Maher is understanding that there is a brokenness out there that is getting crazy. I've told you before, when I went on the Dave Rubens show and the Adam Corolla show, neither of whom are conservative Christians by any stretch of the imagination but when I talk to them about a measuring rod outside of those things being measured, when I talk to them about Chesterton's thing, when you get rid of the big laws of God you don't get liberty, but thousands of little laws, down to the point where they're going to tell you how to use the bathroom and what pronouns to use. When I said those things on Rubens show as well as Adam Corolla show, they both concluded by saying thank you, we need more of this, we need more of this wisdom. To quote Corolla and Dave Rubens said if more guys said what you just said on this show, we'd be a freer, braver and wiser nation.

So yes, the truth of God is written on every human heart and maybe the crazier it gets, the more of an opportunity we have to step forward and say told you. So this is getting that, and the reason it's getting that is because we've abandoned the truth as an objective measurement of this discussion. 

Rick Green

Amen. Oh yeah, I can't help but think. Last thing I'll ask you it's almost like the French Revolution versus American Revolution thing and kind of this libertarian mindset of libertoss, but no God in the equation. Those people are the ones, like a Joe Rogan, that are just making the observation of wow, freedom doesn't continue if anything goes and everything's okay. If there is no objective standard, like you just said, then eventually we get to the tyranny of all of those little laws and they're starting to realize that and team up with those who are saying listen, you've got to have truth and the only way you get truth is from faith and religion and you've got to have that objective standard and that's what will produce liberty. So, bb, ben Franklin, you may not agree with us on the deity of Christ, but you can certainly agree with us that the teachings of the Bible produce good neighbors and man that is. I'm seeing that in a lot of that libertarian mindset A lot of people are coming over and saying, hey, we get it now we'll fight with you for that objective standard.

Dr. Everett Piper

Yes, and we need to remember that if Jesus makes a promise, it won't be broken. But the second person of the triune, God, does not break his promises and he promised us. The gates of hell Will not prevail against his church. Yeah, the triumphant church, a church that believes in engaging culture doing its job, the Great Commission, the teaching all nations to obey. Teaching, it's not just this, you know, evangelism, it's teaching all nations to obey, as well as being salt and light in a culture that's, you know, rotting in dark. That's our obligation. And they can throw labels at us, they can malign us, they can construct these straw man arguments of Christian nationalism and all this nonsense. The bottom line is, the human spirit wants what's right and true and we have the opportunity to bring that to the plate.

Rick Green

Hey man, hey man, Dr. Everett Piper, always a pleasure man, thanks, and people can follow your columns over to Washington Times. Let's get you back sooner. That was too long I missed you, man. Thanks for coming on, brother. All right, what things about stay with us folks? We right back with David and Tim Barton.

Tim Barton

Hey guys, it's Tim Barton and I want to tell you about our new book, the American story building the Republic. We start with George Washington's president and we've already become a nation. So really now it's how do we function as a nation? And if we look back in American history, the stability, the prosperity, success we enjoyed as Americans is because of the foundation that our early presidents laid, because the examples they set. How do we live in America under the Constitution? What is the role of federal government and really what part did each one of these early Presidents play? We go to the first seven presidents and a lot of people probably know the names Washington, Adams, Jefferson in Madison. Very few people know about Monroe or John Quincy Adams or Andrew Jackson. Now we might know some of their names, we really don't know their stories. We want you to relearn, rediscover American history and see how it applies to today. Go to wallbuilders.com and get your copy of the American story building the Republic.

Rick Green

We're back our WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us and thanks to Dr Everett Piper great to having back and wow guys, what a clear description of what happens when you have truth versus moral relativism.

Tim Barton

Yeah, right, it's so. It's so clear when Someone who understands truth and the foundation for truth Explains why moral relativism doesn't work and why, right, as he pointed out, the founding fathers, they, they believe truth existed. And you know, you point it out, right, apart from, like Benjamin Franklin, who maybe that their Disagreement is if Jesus was truly divine or maybe he's a prophet. There's, yeah, there's probably a couple founding fathers that question the divinity of Jesus, but none of them question the existence of God. None of them questioned Revelation from God, the, the idea that truth comes from God, when they said we all these truths to be self-evident. This is what they understood from the laws of nature and the laws of nature's God, that guys reveal themselves in two ways. God revealed himself through creation, God revealed himself through his word, and together they give us a picture of the way life should work. And they said we owe those truths to be self-evident. All right, these truths are obvious because God gave them to us in two ways.

And when we live in a culture that is rejecting the, the basic reality of truth, when truth becomes subjective again, as Dr. Piper was pointing out, when truth becomes subjective, you cannot function in society. When some people think well, it's, the truth, is whatever I want think or feel. And then there's another set that says, well, no, there's objective standard, that this is where you, we're having a conflict, that there's an irreconcilable difference when someone believes that truth is subjective versus objective. Now I, one of the things that I will tell students quite often is nobody believes entirely in subjective truth or subjective morality, meaning that when someone says, well, truth is up, the individual and each individual should do what they think is right, nobody believes that in that blatant statement its entirety.

Because if you ask anybody, is it okay for a Person to take a gun going to elementary school and start killing kids. Of course it's not okay. But what if that person determined it was okay? What if they? What if they believe that was their truth? That doesn't matter. We objectively know that is wrong and evil. Why Dr Piper pointed out right, this is something that God wrote truth on the hearts of men. And you can reject it, right, you, you can become so callous that you are ignoring it, you're putting it down. But we all know at some level that there is objective morality, objective standards, and, as we are seeing a culture reject those, that is why we are having more and more problems. We're rejecting God standards, which explains you, us, the way the world operates.

David Barton

You know echo what some of that too. Rick, back to beginning. You asked every said, hey, our folks no longer falling for this nonsense, and I thought his answer was really interesting. He said, well, not for the extreme. And so it's like, yeah, we're still falling for part of it, but not for the extreme, and you know part of it he mentioned. He said and you were talking about it there's no way to compromise with many of their views. You know that the children should have sexual relations or biological trans male athletes should be allowed to compete. With that there's, there's just areas you can't compromise with.

But I think one of the interesting things that we've all got to watch out for is the thing where that the scripture talks about a little leaven, leavens  a whole loaf. I mean it's like if you get in a pot of boiling water 212 degrees, you're gonna get out really quick. But if you get out of that 212 degrees and you're jumping something's maybe 180, you say, oh, this is so much better than that 212. Well, you're used to 80 and 90 degree water or ocean water or whatever, and so I think the woke ism has really moved a lot of people in a wrong direction, little by little and we've accepted things we would never have considered even 20 years ago. And so I think it's a good kind of wake up call. First you kind of back up and say, hey, regardless of what the culture is saying right now, what was believed by my parents or what was believed ten years ago, or what is the Bible say about this stuff? And I think that it's really easy for wokeness to get into some degree where we end up tolerating things we really shouldn't tolerate, because we just don't want to get in a controversy with somebody. You've got to be able to put your foot down to say, no, there's certain things that are rights and wrongs and absolutes, and I'm just not moving on that. And so what happens is a lot of people end up kind of tolerating some things they really shouldn't tolerate.

And I think in the Republican Party a lot of this happened, maybe 15, 16, 18 years ago, maybe 12 years ago. But there was a move for for libertarians to come into the party. Republicans wanted voters and the libertarians came in and they were working to the Republican Party but they didn't really hold to that religion, morality kind of stuff and and so Republicans kind of tolerated that because they wanted to win elections. And I think that it's just slowly, gradually, we keep tolerating just a little bit more, working little more toward, as the axiom is the frog boiling in the pot doesn't realize it's there until it's boiling, it gets used to a little hotter temperatures time. We just can't do that on moral issues and we can't make those kind of compromises with wokeness, and so I think a lot of conservatives have been affected by that libertarian thing of well, if that's your view, that's not my view, but that's your view, and you just can't give up moral ground like that.

Tim Barton

And dad, I would say too that I think a lot of it to a secularism and relativism.

I think there's right that there's the people that are really citing libertarian. They might not all identify as Republican were really as Republican, and maybe not even as conservative, because they want to be separate from that, because they see a problem with that. But I think I mean to your point. We're seeing even Republicans embrace a moral relativism, embrace a secularism, right? This idea will know. We need others. We don't really have to follow God's standards. We can all do our own thing. That's just not the way our nation was built. That's not the way a free society will function. Well, that's not the way America can stand, or last.

Rick Green

Well, folks, thanks for joining us today. I hope that you've enjoyed this time with us and with Dr. Piper. Certainly appreciate his efforts to help restore the culture as well. Take all these programs to share them with your friends and family. Make sure you go to wall builders calm today. Make that contribution that grabs more of our programming. Maybe get the biblical citizenship in modern America course and start hosting that in your home or your church. But find a way to be a force multiplier, be a part of the solution by being the catalyst for a restoration of biblical values and constitutional principles. Thanks again for listening. You've been listening to welcome