Jon Harris is the director of “The 1607 Project Documentary” and the host of the influential Conversations That Matter podcast.
In this episode, he lays bare the woke ideologies underlying much of modern evangelicalism, and discusses the cultural issues behind the American founding.
Topics include:
The Origins of Conversations That Matter
How Social Justice Spread Through the Church
Why Architecture Won’t Give You Orthodoxy
Why Feminism IS the Church
Getting the Baby Boomers to Let Go
For more about Jon, please visit:
Mentioned in this episode:
Listen to the full episode ad-free
Monologue:
I gotta tell you guys, it has been a TRIP watching the American evangelical church wake up to wokeness. Because before becoming a Christian, I’d been living it in for decades.
Even as far back as my senior year in high school in 1996, my classmates and I were joking that there was no way a white guy from Phoenix would get into Stanford, which is one of the reasons it was a surprise to me most of all when I did.
My freshman year, everyone began segregating into their various ethnic groups, which is how I ended up the social chair of the Jewish Students’ Association. I didn’t think much about my family’s religion at the time, but everyone had to identify with SOMETHING, right? I didn’t want to be left out.
As many of you know I also lived in Stanford’s African American theme dorm, Ujaama, for two years. The African American, Asian America, Native American, and Latino American theme dorms were all a product of the same critical racial consciousness we see around us everywhere today, being beta tested on an elite university campus.
Fast forward to 2013, and that’s when I heard a man say “Check your privilege!” for the first time, in a men’s group of all places! The words felt like a whip crack. I had no idea what they meant, just that they were supposed to hurt me somehow.
They didn’t, but they did stick with me as a moment when a man was attempting to use a very specific linguistic device to control me. It wasn’t about the meaning of the words but the feeling they were supposed to impart. He clearly expected my response to be an apology, perhaps because he’d tried that strategy before with success. And I believe around that time is when what we call “wokeness” fully began to enter public consciousness, though no one called it that.
All of this is also what I began to deprogram myself from, while traveling overseas. Nothing will scourge feminist beliefs from you faster than traveling to a Latin American nation like Colombia, where traditional sex roles between men and women are as fundamental as gravity, and just as widespread, not to mention celebrated on salsa dance floors.
So I’ve been living and breathing wokeness for almost 30 years. Which again is why it’s been such an awakening to me to realize that Christians by and large didn’t really begin identifying it formally until 2020, when COVID happened. How could a faith that is so clear about the nature of men and women, guilt and shame; sin, salvation, justice, mercy, grace, confession, and redemption fall pray to such an obviously counterfeit version of those transcendent principles?
Many are trying to unpack that fall even today, but for those who have been in the church for a long time, there have certainly been signs.
Which brings me to my guest this week. His name is Jon Harris, and you may know him best from the Conversations That Matter podcast, where he hosts daily live streams and interviews with Christian leaders, influencers, and newsmakers about the headlines of the day.
But what I didn’t know is that Jon is also a documentary filmmaker, having recently produced the excellent 1607 project which is about the clash of collectivist and individualist principles during the American founding. These manifested as cultural divisions between North and South and crystallized in the unique culture of the state of Virginia, which existed long before the arrival of slaves in 1619. So think of the 1607 Project as a Christian rebuttal to the 1619 Project, which I think is pretty cool.
And Jon is also an author, having penned two books on the influence of social justice on the Christian church. These followed his experience in seminary where he experienced the slide of wokeness firsthand, which we talk about in this episode and which literally catapulted him into the public eye.
Put all of this together, and it becomes clear why Jon is the influential voice he is, having amassed almost 50,000 subscribers on YouTube, which is no small feat, especially for a podcast that describes itself exclusively with three words:
“Christian, Traditional, Masculine”
A needed voice, which is why I’m grateful to have had him on.
In our conversation Jon and I discussed:
The Origins of Conversations That Matter
How He Caught Wokeness Infiltrating His Seminary
How Social Justice Spread Through the Church
Why Architecture Won’t Give You Orthodoxy
Revealing the Fall of Christendom
Why Feminism IS the Church
Getting the Baby Boomers to Let Go
If you enjoy the Renaissance of Men Podcast, thank you. Please leave us a 5-star rating on Spotify, and a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
If this is your first time here, welcome. I release new episodes about the Christian counterculture, masculine virtue, and the family every week.
[…]
And please welcome this week’s guest on the podcast: the director of the 1607 Project documentary, and host of the Conversations that Matter Podcast, Jon Harris.
