Lucas Miles: Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to Pastor Lucas Miles about what is means for Christians to uphold the faith, why Pastor Lucas wrote Woke Jesus, what does woke mean, was Jesus woke, why Pastor Lucas pushes back against Christian nationalism, the difference between the Christian left vs the Christian right, should Christians be involved in politics, why some Christians change God’s word, who is the false Messiah destroying Christianity, how Marxism has infiltrated the Christian left, how Pastor Lucas became a Christian. Plus so much more!

Episode Summary

• Why Pastor Lucas wrote Woke Jesus
• What does woke mean
• Was Jesus woke
• Why Pastor Lucas pushes back against Christian nationalism
• The differences between the Christian Left vs the Christian Right
• Should Christians be involved in politics
• Why some Christians have changed God’s word
• Who is the false Messiah destroying Christianity today
• How Marxism has infiltrated the Christian Left
• How Pastor Lucas became Christian

Lucas Miles: Episode Transcript

Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student wellbeing, character development, and academic improvement.

Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project, where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. Here’s your host, Brendan Corr.

Brendan Corr
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast where we get a chance to talk with people who have been able to make exceptional career choices and become a success, but also incorporate their Christian faith into that. Today, we’re talking with Pastor Lucas Miles. Lucas is recognised as a trusted voice in the broad American church who has consistently addressed some of the most challenging topics of culture, theology, politics, mass media. He hosts The Epoch Times, Church and State with Lucas Miles, which in 2023 was named Programme of the Year by the National Religious Broadcasters Organisations. His writings have been syndicated in several different media outlets including Newsmax, Blaze, Flashpoint, Fox News, The Washington Times, CBN. In addition to that, he’s written several books, the most recent of which was Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity. Pastor Miles, Lucas, it’s so good of you to give us some time. I know you’re a busy man. We were talking a bit about that before we hit the record button and revisited our conversation. Thank you for carving out a bit of space in your day.

Lucas Miles
Happy to do it and happy to join your audience here. So thank you.

Brendan Corr
So Lucas, clearly, you have an interest in understanding what’s going on around us, all around us. As a Christian, maybe we could start off that conversation by exploring what is the responsibility that Christians have to not just just hold their faith independently, individually, but to shine a light.

Lucas Miles
Yeah, so when you look at I think the gospel account and what you see is that there’s a couple of things that stand out to me very vividly. So first off, Jesus spent a lot of his time talking to Pharisees and Sadducees and these individuals were not just the religious leaders in the Jewish framework, they were also, really, political leaders of their day. They were making a lot of decisions for public policy and the way things were going to be governed. And they were ultimately underneath this authority of Rome as really submissive to them. But they had some jurisdiction to be able to make their own framework. And Jesus spent time with these religious/political leaders. And I think that for any pastor today to say that the church shouldn’t have anything to do with speaking into political topics, I think it really fails to take into account a lot of what Jesus’ ministry was about. I also think that when you look at the Great Commission, part of the Great Commission is to go out and make disciples of all nations. It doesn’t actually say of all people, it’s of all nations, that there is an aspect to the gospel that we are to impact the world, nations, countries, people groups. And look, I am not for, I actually push back against some of this topic of Christian nationalism. I’m not for the state running the church or the church running the state, but I am for the church being the conscience of the state of this upward pressure that is revival happens as people’s lives get changed and transformed, that the impact the gospel would make would rise up to the highest level of politics and that it would start to affect how people vote, how they think, how they make decisions, and that the Judeo-Christian ethos, for lack of a better term, would really be accounted for within that public sphere, not to rule it, but that it is just the representation of the people are. They understand that Christian morality and they have embraced it and they recognise that it is the best thing for the world. Paganism was originally defeated by Christianity for good reason, because paganism was bad for society and Christianity was good for society. The same is true today, but we are having to do a little bit more work to remind people of that. And so I’m a big advocate that pastors should take that job seriously. They should preach the full counsel, the Word of God. They should address these issues with grace and truth head on, their people need to hear from them on these kinds of hot button cultural issues. I’m not saying we should tell people who to vote for, but we should teach them how to vote really with kingdom values and mindset involved.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. I’ll circle back and ask you some questions around how you think Christians should vote and that sort of notion. But what I think I’m hearing is you’re suggesting the gospel, the good news of Christ being a follower of Jesus has to make a difference personally. It’s got to make a difference in the way we treat our families and the way we treat our friends. And to extrapolate that, it must also make a difference to the sort of society that we’re living in. What are the standards we want to live by? What are the things we agree together are good? Is that sort of the heart of what you’re saying?

Lucas Miles
Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, if the gospel is true, it should affect every single area of your life. And so to segment certain areas and say, “Well, I’m a Christian, but I don’t allow the gospel to affect this portion of my life.” I don’t understand that. Either Jesus is Lord or he’s not. And again, I think that there are abuses in this. There are people that try to use their faith for control, manipulation, and all these other things. I’m not suggesting that. I am for actually a pluralist society. I think that it’s okay to have different viewpoints. I value the freedom of religion that we’ve had in this nation for so long. I don’t want people to be forced to accept the gospel. I want them to have an invitation to accept the gospel. But I do recognise that some ideas are better than other ideas and not every idea should be given the same prevalence or prominence in society to be able to be heard. There are certain ideas that are better than others, and those ideas produce the best things for society. And I believe that Christianity is one of those. And so I do believe that there should be a recognition of the value. I mean, even you have people like Richard Dawkins, famous atheist, saying, “I couldn’t imagine a world or I don’t want to live in a world where Christianity isn’t present.” Even atheists understand the value that Christianity brings to this world. And I think that as Christians, we do a disservice when we keep that to ourselves or we don’t allow our faith to reach those other aspects of society.

Brendan Corr
You started off that response, Lucas, by saying if the gospel is true, then there’s consequences. When did you realise the gospel was true?

Lucas Miles
I kind of had what I call a Samuel upbringing. I spent a lot of time in the church growing up, got really involved in youth ministry at a young age, junior high, and high school. We lived close to the church. I used to break into the church to play basketball with my friends. I eventually did it so much they got mad at me. They eventually gave me a key because it was just easier to give me a key to the building so I stopped messing with the locks so that I could get in. So I was around here all the time hanging out. And it’s interesting, great Christian parents, they’re still married to this day, really have demonstrated faith throughout their lifetimes to us. And so I kind of grew up with this sort of just in a faith household, but about the age, about 13, 12, 13 years old. It really hit me. And I was probably struck initially by this idea of eternity. I’ve always sort of had this awareness that there is a forever. And it used to frighten me a lot. I mean, we’d get to the third stanza of Amazing Grace in church. And when we’ve been there 10,000 years, I mean, I’d run out of the sanctuary in a cold sweat thinking about how long 10,000 years is and how much longer you still have to go so that it doesn’t stop. But as I got to know the Lord better, I realised that his intentions for us are good. That if he made this place and I like it and I enjoy being here and he’s promised that the next place will be that much better. And so all of those things really just started affecting me. I kind of officially gave my life to the Lord about 13, was baptised. But I would say it took probably about seven years after that into my early 20s where the gospel really changed my life. I mean, I was living a Christian life prior to that, but I think I was caught in legalism in a lot of ways. And there was a moment in time, I can remember I was stopped at a stoplight, driving my car, I just got done reading the book of Romans and I was working at a church as a youth pastor, was leaving to head home. And I remember just having this revelation of my depravity and of the extent that God’s grace has really blessed my life. And it transformed me. And I always tell people it took me from being a human doing to a human being and really set me free of that performance mindset, that roller coaster Christianity of when I do good, I feel like God loves me, when I do bad, I feel like God’s mad at me, to understanding that God has made a covenant with me through Christ and that I’m receiving the benefits of that faith righteousness every single day. And it planted a gratitude in my heart that I’ve never shaken. And I’m just thankful every single day that I get to do what I do, that I’m alive, that he loves me, that he’s given grace to me and a recognition. I don’t have it all together, but I’m just happy to be on the journey with the Lord.

Brendan Corr
So that’s a beautiful account of… Because when we’re talking about Christianity, there’s the part of what I want to talk with you about Woke Jesus, the false understanding of Jesus that’s being constructed. There is this capacity for Christianity to be abstracted ideals, right? It’s conduct, it’s morality, it’s a system of thinking, a worldview. Some would even describe it as it’s that, but it’s not that. It is this following of a person, the man Christ Jesus that has all that you described. Grace, favour, connection, communion. That’s one of the profound things of our faith of Christianity, that it does have all the projections, the code, but it is embodied in a relationship.

Lucas Miles
Yeah. I think that that relational aspect is missed for a lot of people. I think that there is a religious fundamentalism. There’s sort of a religion, almost like just ritual and format and that people adopt. And we see this with people that they would say that they’re Christians or that they’re believers, and I’m not here to question their salvation, but that they don’t really have a personal relationship with Christ. And this is a core component to Christianity. I don’t think we can ever make it only a personal relationship with Christ because I do think it’s a corporate relationship with one another, with that ecclesia, that body of Christ as well. But it is something that we have a personal connection as well as that universal connection as believers with the Lord and with each other that really makes this such a powerful, beautiful thing. I can’t imagine just participating in a ritualistic Christianity, that you’re going through the motions and not actually knowing him, hearing from him, walking with him. And I’m not going to claim that I do any of those things perfectly, but I know that there’s a tangibility to that personal connection with the Lord and I think when people truly experience that, they don’t want anything else. They know at that moment it’s real.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. And as we’re unpacking the relational aspect, but also the imperative that comes with that, what manner of men ought we to be, it does affect the decisions that we make about how we do life.

Lucas Miles
Yeah, great point.

Brendan Corr
If we take our faith or if the person of Jesus is who he claims to be in our lives. Yeah. You’ve written all the books that you are known for, I don’t know whether these are the only ones, but the ones that I’ve come across with you are quite political in their aspect. The Woke Jesus: The False Messiah Destroying Christianity, The Christian Left, is the call for faith to engage with politics, is that an attempt to try and redeem politics or is it just a recognition that society is political, we make rules, we have to have things that govern us and faith has to impact those?

Lucas Miles
Yeah. No, great question. So a couple things on this. I’ve written several books. I’m actually currently working on my fourth book right now. I can’t say a whole lot about it yet. And then I’ve been part of several compilation books. So there’s probably six, seven different things that I’ve been involved in as far as different literary projects. My first book was called Good God: The One We Want to Believe In But Are Afraid to Embrace. And it’s interesting because that book, it was kind of my break into the market, it wasn’t massively received or recognised. For me, as a first time author doing a national publishing deal, I felt pretty good about it and it got me to where I am today. Certainly opened up some doors. But it wasn’t one of these books that shook the country and everybody heard about it. But the cool thing is that people are rediscovering that book. As they’re reading Woke Jesus or The Christian Left, they’re going back to my first book, Good God. And I always tell people, although I don’t necessarily reference that book and everything else that I write, it really provides sort of a substructure for everything else I do write, is this gospel of the goodness of God. Because I don’t think unless you understand the goodness of God, it’s very easy to miss the message in the Christian Left or Woke Jesus or any of my future things. I just finished a project this last year with Dr. George Barna and a handful of other authors, and we all did a compilation together called Helping Millennials Thrive. And same thing, if we’re going to talk about these cultural issues, it’s very easy to become dogmatic and make this about kind of a holiness movement or make this about that the Christian morality is better than everybody else and to lose the heart of this. I wrote about this in my recent books that I am somewhat concerned about people taking my work and weaponizing it, meaning that they just kind of go on this witch hunt for wokeness. And that every time they see somebody, oh, there’s a female pastor there. Oh, there’s somebody that said something about race. And it’s like that you’re just on this kind of witch hunt for trying to sniff out and snuff out anything that’s woke. And I think it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the grace aspect as we are elevating truth. I don’t talk about this on a lot of shows. So without trying, you kind of pulled this out of me. But it’s interesting when you look at my book, The Christian Left or Woke, Jesus. I don’t believe that my main audience, by any means, is those that think contrary to me. I don’t believe that these books are getting picked up by massive amounts of leftists and Marxist and that they’re reading these. Now, I hope that they do. I hope that they get it in their hands. I hope that they read it to try to debunk me, and they end up getting their life transformed. But I knew writing these books that most of my audience were going to be Christian conservatives. And so although the books are focused on identifying the problems with some of this progressive leftist ideology that’s crept into Christianity and our politics as well, my goal for both of the books secretly has always been to get conservatives to these books to help address issues also simultaneously among Christian conservatives. Because I think that some of what has been shaped and some of what has been birthed in our culture through this wokeism, I think that we hold some of the blame and some of the fault in the more orthodox framework of the church, whether it was out of apathy, wrong beliefs, getting enamoured by different ideas or methodologies or teachings. And I’ve always wanted to reset us back to centre. So I really see my job as not about, and my writing, not about necessarily speaking to politics or not, but helping the conversation about Christianity avoid the ditches and the heretical ideas that exist on both sides of the spectrum. Leftism and rightism, or we could say it this way, between progressive thought and maybe a more legalistic, dogmatic form of fundamentalist Christianity. And so my desire is to kind of help people bring grace and truth. And just so happens that right now, that licentiousness, that progressive idea, I think, is the greater problem. But who knows, in five years, I might write a book called The Christian Right and address all the issues on the other side. We’ll see. But I think it’s more about finding that balance in the gospel and making sure that we’re not getting off track than it is of just having an obsession with politics or something like that.

Brendan Corr
I think that’s beautiful, Lucas, because I echo or share your observation that at times, that the conflagration of what is faith, what is politics? It gets a bit murky and there can be, for good motive, I think, and over emphasis at times, not on the goodness of God, but on the correctness of God, a judicial approach to this is the right way to think, the right way to see the world, and that’s a wonderful thing to keep coming back. It is the goodness of God that leads us to repent and it is the goodness.

Lucas Miles
Absolutely. I started the book Woke Jesus, at the front of the book, the very first thing I said is, “To my woke brothers and sisters, it’s not too late to come home.” And I really meant that. That wasn’t just for a nice little pithy statement. That was truly how I felt. I mean, I want to see people that have fallen into this deception. I don’t want to see them fail. I don’t want to see them lose. I don’t want to see them miss out on the salvation that we have in Christ. I want to see them come to their senses to find their way back home and to walk away from this heretical false gospel of wokeism. And fortunately, we’re starting to see that happen. I mean, we’re seeing some people’s lives really get transformed and as they’re coming to understand these things. And so I want to see more and more of that, but that’s truly my heart.

Brendan Corr
I think that’s beautiful because that is the notion, isn’t it, if we don’t want to win the argument, we want to win the soul is the issue.

Lucas Miles
Yep, 100%. That’s a great way to say it.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. I don’t want to necessarily misrepresent or misunderstand you as an expert in culture, but clearly, you must have done a lot of thinking about where do these ideas come from? How do these particular examples of ideas live out in our society, where do they come from? Have you thought about where woke comes from? What is the motivation for it?

Lucas Miles
This was a major, major part of my study really the last several years. I’ve done countless interviews on the subject. I’ve spoken around the country and as well as in multiple countries about this. And I’m still learning. There’s certainly some voices out there in this space that I really appreciate and always learn from. But in the research that I’ve done, even Woke Jesus has over 500 footnotes. I mean, I’m not somebody that just writes a bunch of ideas. I do my homework. I really show the receipts, so to speak, of what I bring to the table. And a lot of the work that I did for Woke Jesus in research, and people always ask me, “Who does your research for you?” You’re looking at him. Nobody else does my research. I do it. Maybe you get a topic that’s so big, you need other people to research along with you, but for me, I’m researching to write and I’m researching because if I don’t, I don’t feel like there’s a genuineness to what I’m bringing to the table. I want to understand this and not just get a brief from somebody. I really want to make sense of these things. And so I did a deep dive into the history of wokeism and really what we might call the history of progressive ideology or progressive theology in the church. And I start in Woke Jesus in the 1700s with Kant and then Hegel and later to Marx and others and work through the birth of just seeing critical theory work its way into the church, liberation theology, Black liberation theology eventually. And it’s fairly easy to trace that. I think there’s fairly strongly connected solid lines from each of these things. But as you go further, it starts fanning out and kind of spider webbing out into different forms. And so wokeism is a spectrum. Not everybody is an aggressive Marxist sympathiser that is kind of involved in this. There’s some people that don’t even know that they are embracing certain progressive ideologies. In fact, one of the things I’ve identified, I haven’t even heard of a lot of other people saying this, is I have found a lot of people that have a conservative politic, but a progressive theology. And so their view of God is rather progressive. It’s been impacted greatly by progressive theological constructs, but their politics is rather conservative. And so I think that the birth of critical theory is by far the thing that has impacted this woke ideology the most. And essentially critical theory, we think of Marx most commonly, but it’s really about this oppressor versus oppressed framework. It’s about this idea that we need a revolution to break these systematic oppressions that exist in the world. It’s very gnostic and in nature. It sees this kind of binary choice between either stay as an oppressed individual or bring about a revolution through some means. There’s a lot of things that drive that, but that has really… And it’s got this critical spirit with it if we have to ask these questions. We have to deconstruct everything. We have to tear it down. If we think about it biblically, it would be when Jesus talks about that he’s going to tear down the temple, but then he says he’s going to rebuild it in three days. The difference between, I think, what I would call a biblical probably worldview or a biblical framework versus a critical theory framework or a critical theology framework, is that they would essentially say Jesus is going to tear down the temple, but they would never actually do any of the work of rebuilding. So they’re going to tear down your theology, they’re going to deconstruct the Bible, they’re going to deconstruct the belief systems, they’re going to deconstruct the denominations and all the beliefs, but they’re never going to actually rebuild it into anything. They leave it in rubble and just in chaos. Where I think a good exegesis, what it does is it will deconstruct the passage and look at it from every angle, but then it always makes sure to take into account that God is a God who is a rebuilder, that he did rebuild that temple and he did it through the resurrected Christ. And so we’re able to apply that sort of paradigm to our reading and understanding of scripture that doesn’t leave us in a state where we’re only asking questions and we never actually receive any answers from the Lord. And I think it protects us and insulates us against that kind of critical theory, critical theology, woke ideology gospel that’s there.

Brendan Corr
I’ll come back and we’ll talk a bit more about how those progressive ideas impact the church and theology and current religious understanding, Christian understanding. As somebody who studied the history of ideas and just the world of philosophy and ideology, do you see a natural arc from Marx to today? Is it a logical development of where we’ve ended up?

Lucas Miles
I would say one of the things that stands out to me probably the most, and I’ve written about this some, is this idea, whenever you have two opposing views that are very strongly opposed with one another, there tends to follow that time period with an age of scepticism. And I think in many ways, that’s where we’re at right now. Even in our modern context, you have this very strong Republican, Democrat thing in America that there’s a lot of tension between those two. So what do we see in the next generation? We see in the next generation kind of this third alternative, but it’s an alternative of scepticism. They’re doubting everything. They’re doubting science, they’re doubting… I mean, we see the rise of flat Earth beliefs. We see you can’t trust the medical community anymore because we had all the debacle through COVID and everything else. And a lot of it proved that it wasn’t trustworthy, but it’s led people to kind of disbelieve everything that has to do with anything that is kind of scientific or medical related. You can’t trust pastors anymore because there’s been a slew of scandals that have happened and abuses and cases from the Catholic Church to Southern Baptists and other movements that have seen different accusations against them. You can’t trust politicians, we know they’re dishonest. And so you get to the point where it’s like, who can you trust? You can’t trust anybody. You’re in a complete age of scepticism of this just jaded way of looking at the world. And what happens is sort of an imagined framework starts coming out of that. There’s a lot of myth and fables on the other side of that trying to make sense of the world. And so I’m not surprised by where we are based upon the tension that we’ve seen leading up to this moment. So I think there are some cyclical trends that we can follow, but I think there’s also some good news in that the church was quite effective and Christians were quite effective in impacting pagan Rome and seeing the gospel really kind of just really transform a society. And I think that those are the questions that we have to be asking now, is how can the church today impact a post-Christian America in such a way that we once again win over this nation with the gospel and see and really the world. And I think that people in other countries need to be asking this question as well because we are certainly in a post-Christian age, a postmodern age, a pagan age in many ways, and there’s a resurgence of these ideas that are truly antithetical to the gospel. And so there’s a lot of work for us to do in trying to develop a new apologetic, if you will, to defend the faith.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. I’m interested in you making that connection about scepticism being a driver to a new iteration of understanding. And I hadn’t thought of it like that, but I can see what you’re saying about the fact that that’s really one of the things that drives progressivism is dissatisfaction with the explanatory power of what is right now of either persuasion and that lack of trust in the explanations, the narrative that has been told by the contemporaries.

Lucas Miles
Yeah, if I could interject, I mean, if you think of it like this, so when you understand kind of that dialectic, and I’m certainly not the first to talk about this, there’s been other guys that are certainly smarter than I am that have addressed this in the past, but the dialectic really provides that machine for progressive thought and for critical theory. And basically, it is this idea of a thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis. Maybe you look at we have this idea of free market or capitalism, and that is the thesis and that was the framework, the zeitgeist of America for a long time. And now, we bring in the antithesis of that, and that is Marxism, socialism, communism, and those things come together. What kicks out on the other side. If you’re a critical theorist, what you take out on the other side is you take out this thing called democratic socialism. And so that becomes kind of that new synthesis that is really still vastly different from the thesis that you began with. And we see this in all other thoughts too. I think the important thing to recognise is that critical theory has a tendency to cannibalise itself in the same way that Marx looked at Hegel and said, “I want to flip him on his head. I think he got it all wrong. I want to do it like this.” Although he gained from Hegel in his reading of him, he put him into Hegel’s own dialectic and kind of spit out a new thing on the… So you had the New Hegelians on the other side of that, or the Young Hegelians on the other side of that. Then what happens with Marx? Marx has all these ideas that are prevalent, and then you have a group of people come in and say, “Oh, we like Marx, but he got it wrong here.” And the next thing that comes out is the Neo-Marxist. And this keeps evolving. And so right now, what we’re seeing is, I mean, 10 years ago, when you started seeing this very strong push for same-sex marriage and all of these things here in the States, which I’m sure was already either going on around the world or quickly after trickling around the world, is that there were people that were saying, “I never thought it would get this bad.” And then here, 10 years later, you look back and you go, “Man, I would do anything to go back 10 years. I never thought it’d get as bad as it is now.” Well, why is that? It’s because progressivism progresses for progress’ sake. It is on a journey to progress for the sake of progressing. There’s no destination in mind. It’s just going to keep going further and further and further. We’re going to see transhumanism. We’re going to see all these weird hybrids. We’re going to see all these things in our lifetime if the Lord doesn’t come back while we’re here. And because it’s just progressing for progress’ sake. Christianity is different. It doesn’t resist progress. We are for progress, but we are for progress in a particular direction, and that is to be conformed into the image of Christ, that’s our destination. We want to progress to that. We don’t want to stop short of it and we don’t want to move past it. We want to be progressive to Christ and not progressive just for progress’ sake. And that’s a major difference, and I really believe that if more progressives could get a hold of that and see the value in it, that that is at least one convincing apology that might be helpful for conservatives to speak to this because they see us as not wanting progress. But it’s simply not the case.

Brendan Corr
That is so good, Lucas. The notion that… Because I was going to ask you, when does progressivism become the norm? When it’s not progress any longer, it is status quo. And you’ve unpacked that so beautifully that this is why it doesn’t stop because there is no end point to the progress.

Lucas Miles
It’s like a fire hose just kind of flapping in the wind. I mean, it’s just blowing around. It’s going to just have this kind of mind of its own developing. And this is why we have kids that think they’re animals and why we have 120 some genders and why we can’t celebrate Easter anymore because it’s a trans visibility day. I mean, we have all these things that just come in and it really… There’s no… And I don’t believe that the radical left even believes most of these things. But when you understand… And one of the things I wrote about was Herbert Marcuse, he wrote a paper called, Repressive Tolerance was the name of the paper. And you can find this online, you can search it out. It’s not very long, maybe 15 pages or so. And this paper, kind a rock star Marxist figure in the ’60s and ’70s in America, and he wrote this about this idea that we have to, we, meaning the radical left from his vantage point, that the only way forward for society was to repress any idea that came from the right among conservatives because the conservative framework had its time in the sun for as long as it did, that now, if we want to find balance in the world, we have to completely shut that down and silence it and we have to give voice to every idea that comes from the left. And without any sort of filtering them, just let that all flow. And so that’s what you’re seeing right now. And the left, it won’t edit itself. It knows there’s bad ideas out there, but the machine that is the leftist agenda, it will never look at an idea from the left and say, “Well, guys, that’s a little too far.” They’re never going to do that. Why? Because they believe in just repressing, silencing. This is where cancel culture comes from. It’s why we have it. This is Herbert Marcuse, that this was silencing every idea on the right and giving full voice to every idea on the left, and that has produced us being where we are right now in this time.

Brendan Corr
So with that, we are here as a society and living with pluralism and wokeism and the progressive left and radical individualization, expressive individualism, I think, somewhere I read that idea. Was it an inevitable thing that it would touch the church? Was it just because of the nature of our engagement with the world, what we bring to our faith? Or have we gone astray? Was there an error?

Lucas Miles
I mean, I’d like to think it wasn’t inevitable. I mean, I think to a large degree, there are strong, solid churches, I’d like to think mine is one of them, that has not bowed the knee to this, that has not… The leftist state really around the world, the progressive state, as much as they might chime in and say, we want the separation of church and state, they don’t really mean it. What they actually want is they want a church that will bow down to the state. And I think that they have found that in the Christian left, in the progressive state or the progressive church rather. And I think that that progressive church is doing their bidding. I mean, there’s no difference between, say, the current Biden administration’s view on borders, socialism, Marxism, sexuality, gender, marriage, et cetera, and the progressive church’s view on those things. They go in lockstep because it’s really become, that arm of the church has become a propaganda centre for the radical left. And I think that’s true around the world. I would say though that technology and just the state of the world today, the modernity of our age has allowed this to maybe happen faster. For instance, really for the first time, churches, what pastors say on a Sunday morning is instantly available to everybody. If you go back not that long, you would have to show up to church to know what was said or wait to read maybe a newspaper article or something. If it was a big enough church, they wrote about what Charles Finney said or what George Whitefield said or something like that here in America. It would’ve been slow, it would’ve been not public knowledge, and you would’ve had to show up to participate in that. Now, there is a critical eye on the church that is not attending as part of the church, but is simply watching or reading or listening through live streams or publishing books or sermons and these things. And for the first time, really, ever on any large scale, the non-Christian world has the opportunity to speak into the Christian world and to know what happens. Now, what used to happen behind closed doors are now open doors. I mean, the early church didn’t let unbelievers into the room when they were taking communion. This is why the rumour went out that the early church were cannibalistic, that they were eating the body and blood of somebody and because nobody actually knew what was happening behind the closed doors because you had to be a believer to be inside of there. We know, because of just media, et cetera, everybody sees what happens and it allows for this critical eye and critical voice, and I think that many are buckling to that and giving into the pressure of social concerns and watering down their faith to try to please culture. I think that’s contributed to a good portion of where we are.

Brendan Corr
I agree with that and the whole notion of seeker-sensitive evangelism. We’ve got to find that right balance, right? We need to be welcoming, but how do we do that in a way that doesn’t diminish or dilute our convictions? But I wonder, Lucas, whether it’s… You were talking earlier about the philosophy of the progressive element to intentionally shut down conservative voices. Is there an element of that also in this space, that there is a greater militancy from those opposing Christianity to explicitly deconstruct it, eliminate it, deform it?

Lucas Miles
Yeah, I think that that’s certainly happening. I think that there is a major effort. I mean, we’re seeing that even at some of our Christian institutions and nonprofits in the States where these used to be really strong places that have… They’ve taken money from progressive billionaires and millionaires or organisations or foundations in these things, and you start seeing a morphing of their ideology based upon that, that coincides with it at least. I think that we’re still seeing this to a degree on social media. Cancel culture is very much alive. It might’ve gotten better. I think Musk buying Twitter was a help in that. It was a little bit of a reprieve where certain, there used to be a much stronger silencing on platforms like that. It’s interesting. This is not a very popular take probably for a Christian conservative, but my largest platform right now is on TikTok and I spend a fair amount of time on there making videos, answering questions about Christianity. And I always joke that I’m sure China has all my information and frankly, they probably had it already. And I think that I would strongly encourage parents, this is not an endorsement of TikTok, it’s a dark place like a lot of social media platforms are. But if there’s people there, I want our ministry to be there speaking to them. And the younger generation is there. And it’s very interesting to watch TikTok Live. I think if you want to know what’s happening in culture, TikTok Live is a place to really go and see it. And it is frightening what is taking place, and there are a lot of Christians that are starting to stand up there and teach regularly and get the message out, everything else, but there’s opposition. If you say certain things, you will get shut down, your Live will get cancelled. This is something that I’ve certainly seen. And so cancel culture is very much happening. It’s real. I think we have… This is where we have to be kind of innocent as doves and shrewd as serpents in the space to think of creative ways to be able to get our message out without getting shut down, but also with now watering down our faith or holding back on that full counsel of the Word of God.

Brendan Corr
Mm-hmm. Coming from a slightly different perspective, Lucas, how do you make sure that in the stands that you were taking and the views you’re holding, you’re not missing something important, that Jesus was a progressive at his time, he was seen as disruptive, deconstructing the religious systems of the day, the reformation was progressive, deconstructed. How do you make sure that you personally, but how should the church also make sure that we’re not missing something really significant that we should embrace and should reconsider?

Lucas Miles
Yeah, no, great question. So when you look at theology, and I’m going to speak to this theologically to start with, let me preface it by saying that I think a personal relationship with Jesus is the number one way to have peace in the direction in which you’re going. But I’ll frame it theologically first because I think it gives a more principle based answer for this that is not as easy because the heart is deceitful above all things. You can be very sincere, but also very sincerely wrong. We all know that. And so how do we put some parameters around that? I think first off, there’s a thing in theology called sources and norms. And different traditions handle this a little bit differently than others, but it’s sort of generally held maybe outside of the Catholic Church that the Bible is what theologians would call the norming norms, meaning we have these different ways that we learn about God. You had thinkers like Kant that would say that it’s kind of Kant’s ceiling or wall that God’s out there. We’re confident of that, but we can’t really know him because there’s this blockade there and we can’t really transcend that to be able to access him in any sort of way. And so Hegel kind of takes Kant and says, “Well, no, I think maybe we can somehow.” And kind gives his take on this. They were trying to solve a problem. But I think that the theological work here is that first of all, we have the scriptures that show us a, not just a glimpse, but they show us the full counsel of the Word of God. We have church history, we have creeds and councils, we have the personal witness of the Holy Spirit on the inside of us and other believers. To some degree, Romans 1 would talk about how we can see God in nature, in the created world in these things. Those all become kind of these sources that we have for information about the divine, for information about who God is, his nature, his genetic makeup in that way. But at the end of the day, scripture is the normal norm. If we come to a conclusion about God, but it violates or does not line up with scripture, then we have to go back to the whiteboard on this because we have lost our way somehow. And people like James Cone and Black liberation theology, he kind of threw that away and he says, the sources and norms are Black experience, Black theology, Black suffering and these things. And he kind of totally reworked the rubric for this to happen. But really, for about 2,000 years, the church has been sort of unmoved on this idea, although that language of sources and norms came later, it was generally held to, even though they didn’t have the nomenclature around it yet to kind of identify it with that sort of language. And so I think that this is the framework that we come back to today. Does it line up with the Word? Does it line up with the historical witness of the church? Does it line up with the inward witness of the Holy Spirit? And the answer to all, I think that wokeism violates every single one of those across the board. You have to cross out scriptures to believe in woke ideology. You have to disregard the historical stance of the church on so many issues if you’re going to embrace any sort of world view. And it’s based on these half-truths. You’ll hear things like, “Well, Jesus was an immigrant.” Well, no, he wasn’t. Well, didn’t he go down to Egypt and they have to escape to Egypt? Yeah, that was still a Roman providence. He was inside of Rome as somebody who was underneath the authority of Rome. Their family could have travelled freely in any of those places. He did not cross borders illegally. And so we have to get rid of these falsehoods and these kinds of half-truths that deceive people that don’t have a strong biblical worldview or biblical literacy. And they sound convincing when you hear them this way. Jesus would never get in the way of a love between two people. And that’s going to be used and extrapolated to try to support same-sex marriage or something like that. Even the current administration here in the US, we hear the Easter message was, “You’re made in the image of God.” But yet the other simultaneous message on Easter was trans day of visibility where we support people that mutilate their bodies that were made in the image of God to become something else. So which is it? There is this dichotomy that exists, there’s this clashing of ideas that you have to be intellectually dishonest to embrace them both simultaneously. And so I would say that wokeism fails the test of sources and norms, and there is no thought in my mind. I’m sure I’m wrong about some of my theological beliefs, but I don’t believe I’m wrong about this one at all. And so I think that there’s a high degree of confidence that I have in regards to does wokeism fit into the biblical worldview? And I would say 100% no, it does not.

Brendan Corr
So based on that, which is a beautifully articulated apology for how we understand the truth and live Christian truth, thank you for doing such a good job of that. Why do you think it is then that the left or any section of the church has sought to amalgamate these things if there are such stark differences and distinctions? What is attractive? Why make a Woke Jesus?

Lucas Miles
The birth of what we would call maybe this Woke Jesus, one of the places that I go is what was called the quest for the historical Jesus. And after the enlightenment, there was a major push, especially among German theologians, to sort of deconstruct the New Testament specifically, it was post enlightenment. There was a focus on reason, logic, and understanding. You started having people starting to really embrace more scientific methods in these things, in their understanding of the universe and the world and reality. And so as they began to read the New Testament, much of the New Testament did not fit into that new enlightened worldview. It was miracles and Jesus walking on water and feeding the 5,000 and opening up the blind eyes and rising from the dead. This was an offence to the message of the enlightenment. And although some good things came out of the enlightenment, it did not leave room for some the miraculous power of God. And so they began kind of fabricating, supposed biographies, what they called a quest for a historical Jesus, meaning that we have to do the work of pushing past the myth and the fables and the half-truths of the New Testament in order to find the real Jesus. Because we know he couldn’t have done all these miracles. He was simply a man. So let’s find the true Jesus, the Jesus of the Beatitudes, the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount, and that’s the Jesus we want to uncover. And so it was that Jesus, the great social justice warrior, rather than Jesus the saviour of the world. After the 1800s, really at the end of the 1800s, gave birth to the social gospel, which became very prevalent in the United States. That kind of killed the Christian aspect to the Harvards and Yales and the Princetons of the world that used to be these great theological training institutes. It really stamped out the faith of that because they fully embrace that historical Jesus message. I think in the modern sense, that Marxists and progressives have recognised that the church is one of the best distribution models in the world. I mean, the church has a distribution model that makes Walmart envious. I mean, they see this and they go, “Man, you guys can disseminate information.” And if you have an idea that you want to disseminate and you’re looking for a place to get it out, you need a club to put it in. And that they found that in the church. And I think that there was a major push to infiltrate that. Back on my bookshelf here behind me, I think I have the book, The Naked Communist, which was written by an intelligence officer in, I believe in the ’40s, who had interviewed and interrogated a bunch of different Marxists and communists in his career. And he puts together what he calls the 45 rules of communism. What he saw as sort of these initiatives. And some of these things were to infiltrate both parties in the United States, infiltrate the schools, infiltrate the church. And there’s been an intentionality to this. There truly has been a long march of Marxism, and they knew and recognised that they had to work their way into the church. And if you can win over the educational centres of the church, those theological training centres, the Harvards or the Yales, et cetera, and then the second generation schools that have come after that that are now being threatened by the same thing, if you can win those over, then you can start training up new pastors with a progressive worldview and those pastors will land in pulpits around the country and they will begin to produce progressive parishioners through repetition and really mind washing of these ideas over time every single Sunday. And so it’s a great vehicle and they’ve embraced that, and I think that that’s the attractiveness to the church, and I think it also stands against their worldview, and so they had to silence it and stamp it out. It was harder to do that from on the outside, so they chose to come on the inside and try to really hijack it from within.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. And leveraging what is the psychological power of religious truth, if it comes with the guise of these are actually transcendental beyond the scope of anything that is just social, these claiming eternal providence, which is the same. So my last question for you, Lucas, we now are living where wokeism as a progressive element is becoming normalised in a generation of young people. They don’t know anything else. That’s the story that they’ve heard. It’s the water they’re swimming in. As a Christian with an understanding of what’s going on, how have you had to change your gospel message, your evangelising to reach those hearts?

Lucas Miles
Yeah, great question. I think that the methodologies have probably changed even more than the message. Digital spaces have become so much more important, live streaming. A lot of people show up to our church after first watching our livestream, some of them for months before they’ll come into the building. Before, all effort was put on trying just to get somebody in the doors. Now, we’re trying to get them into the digital doors first. I mean, I have staff members that showed up here because they first saw me on TikTok and they started following me there, and then they started coming to the church and then eventually they joined our staff. We have really embraced that sort of digital realm, that technological aspect to our society. I think that it’s what I would call the new Roman road. I mean the reason why the gospel was able to flourish in the first century is because Rome had just really finished building roads all over the known world. That’s what allowed Paul to be able to travel so much and so far and others after him. I think that we have a road that’s been built for us and it’s been paved with digital pathways, with fibre optics and cable and these things. And I think that we have to take advantage of that. And so the message is timeless. The methodologies do adjust. Now, there’s aspects of the message that I think we recognise what we’re up against. If I’m going to talk to a group of young people, I don’t think they need me to act like I’m 20, but I think that it’s helpful for me to be aware of some of the things that they might face so that I am able to kind of craft my message in a way that is relevant to them, not in style or look or feel, but in understanding what they’re up against as young people in this nation. In the book Helping Millennials Thrive, that compilation with Dr. George Barna that I mentioned earlier, it’s probably one of my favourite things I’ve ever written was the chapter that I did in that book. I just really enjoyed that process. And one of the things that I point out there is that there’s a tendency to see the progressive or maybe the millennial or now Gen Z worldview that’s big on sustainability and big on safe spaces and some of these things and just kind of automatically poo poo these ideas as sort of the older generation and confront it with how ridiculous this is. But I think it is worth it to hear the whys behind why those things are attractive to them and to help redirect that back to biblical truths. Sustainability, you know what? Really, I think that what you’re after is not this worship of the environment and this kind of Green New Deal that we see from AOC. I think really what you’re saying is it’s important that we’re a good steward. And in fact, I agree with you. The Bible teaches that we’re to be stewards, that we’re to have dominion of this earth and let’s look at what that looks like biblically speaking, to be a good steward over the things the Lord has given us. And what would that look like in our environment or in the space that we’re in? And I think there’s ways to take the drives that they have as a younger generation and show them that those yearnings are actually a biblical framework, but they’re being hijacked by progressive and Marxist thoughts that are deconstructive in nature. But the reason the wise search for a utopia that Marxism is after is actually a holy pursuit. It’s just been hijacked by earthly tendencies and thoughts and ideologies and we need to lead it back to that. There is an eternal utopia that we are looking to that we’re never going to have a utopia here on Earth, but let me show you where we will have a utopia at. And that is one where King Jesus is on the throne and that we will be in his presence and worship him and be under his rule and dominion for eternity. And that is a blessing because he’s a benevolent dictator in that sense. And I say that a little bit tongue in cheek, but you understand the point here hopefully, that I think that we need to work to redirect some of these yearnings of the next generation and lead them back to biblical ideas regarding those things rather than just quickly dismissing them and discounting them.

Brendan Corr
I think that’s really a fantastic bit of insight, Lucas. It’s not an Amish view of shun the world and shun progress and stay resident in the trappings of a yesteryear, but to really, you mentioned one of the Eastern messages that came from your government about the image of God to really deeply understand that aspiration and purpose and meaning. That’s part of the eternity that God has put in the hearts of humanity and not to diss the aspirations of this generation, but to understand that they’re looking for something because God made them want to look for purpose and meaning and sense, and that can only be found in the person of Jesus. Amen. Lucas, thank you so much. I’ve so much enjoyed our conversation and I was going to ask you about how you get so much done in your day. We were talking off air about how busy your life is and how you manage all of that. Didn’t get to that in our interview. But I do so appreciate the gift that God has given you of capacity, interest, and time management to do the work that you have done that is blessing so many people through your writings and through your leadership of your church. If people-

Lucas Miles
I appreciate that a lot. I really do. And happy to come back another time and we can dive into that. I always like talking efficiently and how we really… My attitude is Paul says he works harder than them all. And that’s something that I really try to embrace, not from a legalistic standpoint of trying to earn anything, but recognising we get one life to live. And yes, we have to take care of our body. It is our temple in that sense, but we have one opportunity to really make a difference and I don’t want to have a lot of wasted time with that. I don’t want to miss out on that. And so my wife and I have really dedicated our lives to this mission. We have some businesses as well that we manage in addition to our ministry. And it’s kind of our tent making aspect. It funds our ministry habit in many ways, but God’s given us so many blessings in this life, and if I can help anybody in the process, happy to. So would love to come back on maybe another time and dive into that.

Brendan Corr
Well, let’s book that in again. I was just asking if any of our listeners wanted to get in touch or follow a bit more of your writings, your thinking, how might they do that?

Lucas Miles
Well, first off, I’ve never preached in Australia before, so we probably need to make that happen at some point. But look, really, everything for me can be found at lucasmiles.org, or our main ministry page is nfluencenetwork.com and there’s no I, it’s just capital N-F-L-U-E-N-C-E network.com. They can find us there as well and some of our other initiatives that we’re working on. And a lot of exciting stuff happening right now where we’ve been just kind of all a buzz in the hustle this year. But it’s been just amazing. It’s a very important year for this nation. It’s a very important year for the world, and I’m excited just to be part of it.

Brendan Corr
Well, God bless you, Lucas. Thank you for your time. We’ll be praying for you.

Lucas Miles
Thank you.